Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600 (Global Chinese Histories, 250-1650) 9789463720038, 9789048551002, 9463720030

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G L O B A L C H I N E S E H I S T O R I E S , 2 5 0 -165 0

Edited by Hilde De Weerdt and Franz-Julius Morche

Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600

Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800–1600

Global Chinese Histories, 250-1650 Global Chinese Histories, 250-1650 focuses on new research that locates Chinese histories within their wider regional contexts including cross-border and/or comparative perspectives. We are interested in manuscripts in a broad range of fields including humanities and social-science based approaches to politics and society, art and architecture, literature and intellectual developments, gender and family, religious text and practice, landscape and environment, war and peace, trade and exchange, and urban and rural life. We encourage innovative approaches and welcome work all along the theoretical-evidential spectrum. Our interest also extends to books that analyze historical changes to the meaning and geography of sovereignty in the Chinese territories, the complexity of interchange on the cultural and political peripheries in Chinese history, and the ways in which Chinese polities have historically been situated in a wider Afro-Eurasian world. The editorial board of Global Chinese Histories 250–1650 welcomes submission of manuscripts on Chinese history in the 1400 years from the early medieval period through the Ming Dynasty. We invite scholars at any stage of their careers to share their book proposals and draft manuscripts with us. Series Editor Hilde De Weerdt, Leiden University, Netherlands Editorial Board Ruth Mostern, University of California, Merced Sarah Schneewind, University of California, San Diego Naomi Standen, University of Birmingham, UK Ping Yao, California State University, Los Angeles

Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800–1600

Edited by Hilde De Weerdt and Franz-Julius Morche

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Adapted from (clockwise from top left): Letter from Mi Fu 米芾 (1051–1107) to the prefect of Chuzhou, in Song Yuan chidu 宋元尺牘 (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2000), p. 239; Map of Europe, from Liber Floridus (early twelfth century), Ghent University Library, Ms. 92, f. 241r; Map of the Chinese and Non-Chinese Territories (c.1130s), in Song ben Lidai dili zhizhang tu 宋本歷代地理指掌圖 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989); Letter from Polo Foscari to Lorenzo Dolfin (23 April 1422), Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Procuratori di San Marco, Misti, b. 282, fasc. 3. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 003 8 e-isbn 978 90 4855 100 2 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463720038 nur 684 © Hilde De Weerdt & Franz-Julius Morche / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

In memoriam Glen Dudbridge (1938–2017) Mark Whittow (1957–2017)



Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

11

Introduction

13

Hilde De Weerdt and Franz-Julius Morche

Part I  Communication and the Formation of Polities 1 Towards a Comparative History of Political Communication, c.1000-1500 Hilde De Weerdt and John Watts

35

2 Administrative Elites and Political Change

101

2.1 Fragmentation and Financial Recentralization

105

2.2 Administrative Elites and the ‘First Phase of Byzantine Humanism’

143

3 Language and Political Communication in France and England (Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries)

173

Christian Lamouroux and Filippo Ronconi

The Emergence of the Four General Commands (1127-1165) Christian Lamouroux

The Adoption of the Minuscule in Book Production and the Role of the Stoudios Monastery Filippo Ronconi

Jean-Philippe Genet

Part II  Letters and Political Languages 4 Political Communications, Networks, and Textual Evidence

A Cross-Cultural Comparative Approach to Written Sources using Letter Collections Julian Haseldine

205

5 Latin and Classical Chinese Epistolographic Communicationin Comparative Perspective

239

6 Yao Mian’s Letters

287

Beverly Bossler and Benoît Grévin

The Epistolary Networks of a Late Song Literatus Beverly Bossler

Part III  Communication and Political Authority 7 Communication and Empire

315

8 Giving the Public Due Notice in Song China and Renaissance Rome

345

9 The Printers’ Networks of Chen Qi (1186–1256) and Robert Estienne (1503–1559)

383

Byzantium in Perspective Mark Whittow (†)

Patricia Ebrey and Margaret Meserve

A Micro-Comparative Approach to Political Dependence and Censorship Chu Ming Kin and Franz-Julius Morche

Part IV  Memory and Political Imaginaries 10 Letters and Parting Valedictions

441

11 Yue Fei and Thomas Becket

481

Zhang Yu and Political Communication in Mid-Eleventh-Century Sichuan Chen Song

Elite Masculinities in Comparison Bernard Gowers and Tsui Lik Hang

12 Imaginaries of Empire and Memories of Collapse Parallel Narratives in Southern Song and Byzantine Commemorations of Conquered Capitals Ari Daniel Levine

523

Epilogues 1 Communication Breakthroughs

573

2 Thoughts on the Problem of Historical Comparison between Europe and China

597

List of Contributors

615

Index

619

Conditions and Consequences Wim Blockmans

Robert Hymes

List of Figures and Tables by Chapter Figure 2.2.1 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, PSI XII 1266. Official letter of Helladios to the pagarch, in the name of the topotērētēs (seventh century).164 Figure 2.2.2 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, PSI XII 1267. Letter of Theodoros to the pagarch (seventh century).165 Figure 2.2.3 Examples of the linking of subsequent letters and words. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, PSI XII 1266 (see Figure 2.2.1).165 Table 4.1 Some possible transactions and groupings of transactions which might be developed for the crosscultural comparative analysis of letter collections.229 Figure 4.1 Peter the Venerable.230 Figure 4.2 Bernard of Clairvaux, all letters.230 Figure 4.3 Bernard of Clairvaux, corpus epistolarum.231 Figure 4.4 Bernard of Clairvaux, epistolae extra corpus.231 Figure 4.5 Peter of Celle, all letters.231

Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7 Figure 4.8 Figure 4.9 Figure 4.10 Figure 4.11 Figure 4.12 Figure 4.13 Figure 4.14 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Figure 9.1 Table E1.1

Peter of Celle, early letters.232 Peter of Celle, late letters.232 Anselm, Prior of Bec.232 Anselm, Abbot of Bec.233 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury.233 Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury.233 Gilbert Foliot, Abbot of Gloucester.234 Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of Hereford.234 Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London.234 An example of the influence of the summae dictaminis.266 Formulaic composition and rhythmical ornament in the letters of the papal chancery during the thirteenth century.267 Networks of the five primary victims of the Poetry Case.400 Number of people per newly produced manuscript book.590

Acknowledgments This volume results from the sustained collaboration facilitated by the European Research Council project ‘Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspectives’ based first at King’s College London (2012–2013) and later at Leiden University (2013–2017).1 It grew out of an international workshop ‘Political Communication in the Medieval World, 800–1600’ organised by the Communication and Empire research group and held at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome on 27–29 May 2015. We are grateful to the Royal Netherlands Institute, and especially to Harald Hendrix, Agnieszka Konkol, Corine Tetteroo, and Arthur Weststeijn, for hosting the event. The Rome workshop was preceded by a smaller event focused on collaboration and method in comparative history (‘New Perspectives on Comparative Medieval History: China and Europe, 800–1600’) held at Pembroke College, Oxford on 30 September–1 October 2013. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Pembroke College and its dedicated staff.2 The King’s College Department of History and the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) provided conducive environments for this experimental work. During our time at King’s, we benefitted greatly from stimulating discussions with colleagues and students. We are especially grateful to Stephen Baxter, Julia Crick, Serena Ferente, Bernard Gowers, Peter Heather, Dame Janet Nelson, Tassos Papacostas, Andrew Prescott, Alice Rio, Dionysios Stathakopoulos, Alice Taylor, and participants of our fortnightly reading seminar ‘Comparative Approaches to Medieval History: Europe and China’ (ac. year 2012/ 2013). At Leiden, numerous colleagues and students from LIAS and the Institute of History supported our work by providing critical input as well as practical help during workshops, seminars, and personal conversations. In particular, we wish to thank Maghiel van Crevel (LIAS Academic Director, 2009–2016), Jeroen Duindam, Jos Gommans, and members of the NWO-Horizon programme ‘Eurasian Empires’.

1 European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/ 2007-2013)/ ERC grant agreement no. 283525. Hilde De Weerdt (PI), Chu Ming Kin, Brent Ho, Franz-Julius Morche, et al. 2 For full descriptions, programs, and reports on both workshops see Hilde De Weerdt, Chu Ming Kin, Franz-Julius Morche, Brent Ho et al., ‘Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective’, 2012–, http://chinese-empires.eu/events/conferences/internationalworkshop-new-perspectives-on-comparative-medieval-history-china-and-europe-800-1600/ and http://chinese-empires.eu/events/conferences/international-conference-politicalcommunication-in-the-medieval-world-800-1600/ (both accessed 21 May 2020).

12 Acknowledgments

We are also grateful to numerous external collaborators. In addition to the participants of the aforementioned workshops, particular thanks are due to Georg Christ, Filippo de Vivo, Jean-Philippe Genet, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, and members of the AHRC Research Network ‘Defining the Global Middle Ages’, especially Glen Dudbridge (†), Ian Forrest, Catherine Holmes, Conrad Leyser, R.I. Moore, Jonathan Shepard, Naomi Standen, Alan Strathern, John Watts, Mark Whittow (†), Chris Wickham, and Simon Yarrow. We fondly remember Glen and Mark, who did not live to see the completion of this book; may it be a small tribute to their scholarship, kindness, and wit, which we will continue to cherish. Leiden/London, February 2020 Hilde De Weerdt Franz-Julius Morche

Introduction Hilde De Weerdt and Franz-Julius Morche In this collection of essays, we examine the significance of political communication in the comparative study of medieval polities. The workshop out of which this collection grew was initially intended to work towards an explanation of the divergent courses that Chinese and European history have taken in the second millennium through extended conversations about the role of political communication in the formation, maintenance, or fragmentation of empires and other kinds of polities. We abandoned the paradigm of Sino-European divergence in favour of a more open-ended investigation of the significance of communication processes and the politics of mediators and communicators in the histories of medieval Chinese and European polities. In the introduction we outline the analytical benefits of and the historiographical need for the micro- or meso-historical comparative case studies included in this volume. We first turn to the question of why and how historians have turned to political communication. Then we discuss the questions of why and how the authors employed comparative approaches. Lastly, we will also underscore the need for comparative histories of medieval polities, those included in this volume as well as those that are not.

Political Communication Two factors in particular motivated the focus on political communication, which we broadly define as ‘the circulation of information and ideas concerning political institutions and events’1 or ‘the exchange of political knowledge and values among both state- and non-state actors’ (De Weerdt and Watts, Chapter 1).

1 F. de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 2.

De Weerdt, Hilde, and Franz-Julius Morche (eds), Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463720038_intro

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First, twentieth-century literatures on the comparative history of empires and state formation tend to focus on state institutions, social organization, and ideologies which are typically understood as well-defined traditions with fixed characteristics (texts, rituals, and values whose meanings remain constant over time). In this literature, political communication appears irrelevant; ideological or cultural factors are reduced to broad cultural orientations that are more or less automatically shared by ruling elites and the governed. In his seminal macro-sociological study, The Political Systems of Empires (1963), Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, for example, sees the cultural orientations of imperial elites as the primary reason for successive Chinese regimes’ ability to accommodate change within pre-established political frameworks. The key historical question that this and similar work leave unanswered is how literate Chinese interacted with the court, what communication practices allowed them to play an intermediary role that ensured that ‘the rulers and the bureaucracy never exerted pressure on the country’s supply of resources strong enough to demolish the bases of the limited free-floating resources necessary for maintaining the centralized bureaucratic polity’.2 In the mind of Song Dynasty (960–1279) scholar-officials, history had shown that regimes fell time and again because ruling elites exerted too much pressure. Here we do not take the impact of the goals of ruling elites or classical traditions for granted, but ask how and to what extent the literate and illiterate had access to political information; how administrative elites, intermediaries, and subjects reproduced, avoided, redirected, or generated it; and how political communication in formal institutions as well as informal social networks shaped political imaginaries and generated formal political power. Second, including political communication in comparative political history has become more feasible than ever before. Historians working on various parts of the late medieval and early modern world have recently begun to explore state formation, imperial integration, and the formation and transformation of political imaginaries from the perspective of social and political communication. East Asian and European historians have examined how not only state structures but also social alliances and political imaginaries at various levels and scales were built through the production, dissemination, and control of political information. As Filippo de Vivo’s work shows in the case of early modern Venice, communication was politics in the very concrete sense that it was an arena in which the government’s attempts 2 S.N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1993 [1963]), p. 331.

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to preserve secrecy clashed with various social actors’ need for information and alliance-building. Moments of crisis in particular, such as military and diplomatic defeat, led to an outpouring of publications about current affairs with implications for domestic politics as well as external relations.3 Hilde De Weerdt similarly demonstrated that in the wake of military defeat a structural transformation took place in the production and dissemination of information relating to the polity in twelfth-century Song China; political communication then expressed a new and broad involvement on the part of cultural elites in the Song imperial project.4 As shown in Levine’s chapter, in twelfth-century Song China and in Byzantium, military crises inspired the production of memoirs of the capital that reconstructed and thus preserved political imaginaries (Levine, Chapter 12). In earlier work Jean-Philippe Genet, Wim Blockmans, and others have shown that medieval European secular governments began to adopt the communicative practices of the Catholic Church in order to strengthen their hold over their populations.5 Despite and perhaps as a consequence of efforts to centralize administration, the very genres and channels of official communication became sites of negotiation with different outcomes, as shown in Genet’s comparison of the vernacularization of political culture in medieval England and France (Genet, Chapter 3). Some of this work links communication and publishing to the formation of nationhood. Mary Berry, for example, argued that early modern Japanese print archives created ‘a sense of nationhood: an integral conception of territory, an assumption of political union under a paramount state, and a prevailing agreement about the cultural knowledge and social intercourse that bound “our people”’.6 This connection between print technology and nationalism is controversial but such work raises important questions about the effects of enduring transformations in political communication on social and political identities in pre-modern times. In the workshops that led to the present work, we discussed methodological questions on comparison and collaboration; theoretical and conceptual questions regarding divergence, institutions, and networks; and historical

3 de Vivo, Information and Communication. 4 H. De Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015). 5 W. Blockmans and J.-P. Genet, eds., The Origins of the Modern State in Europe: 13th to 18th Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995–1998). See also Chapter 3 in this volume. 6 M. Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 248.

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questions on the sources and historiographies of political communication. The resulting essays, half of which were co-authored following the workshop, focus on processes of political communication such as the inclusion and exclusion of intermediaries in official communication and decision making (De Weerdt/ Watts, Lamouroux/ Ronconi, Chapters 1 and 2); the tensions between and long-term impact of the use of classicizing and vernacular languages in political communication (Genet, Bossler/ Grévin, Chapters 3 and 5); networking and alliance building through the sharing of political information in private communication genres such as letters (Haseldine, Chen, Bossler, Chapters 4, 6, and 10); the bonding and fragmentation of empires through political communication and its social and spatial limits in pre-industrial empires (Whittow, Chapter 7); the posting of public notices (Ebrey/ Meserve, Chapter 8); the commemoration of major political and military events (Gowers/ Tsui, Levine, Chapters 11 and 12); and ex-ante and post-facto control over political communication (Chu/ Morche, Chapter 9). The authors have paid special attention to the mediators and communicators in such processes, taking into account the institutional contexts within which they were operating (church organizations, regional polities, or large imperial formations) without letting such contexts determine the interpretation of communicative actions and their outcomes. The micro-historical approach taken by several authors is particularly effective in uncovering parallels in the agency and reach of individual mediators and communicators in different institutional contexts. This ‘bottom-up’ perspective frames the language and inter-personal relations of individual actors as fundamental components of the body politic. This is vividly shown, for example, in Chen’s analysis of Zhang Yu’s political alliance-building inside and outside the Song capital Kaifeng. Similarly, Bossler’s account of Yao Mian’s epistolary networks illustrates the political weight of individuals who, despite operating outside the bureaucratic mainstream, succeeded in creating politically significant networks that eventually became institutionally relevant because they challenged and altered established modes of political discourse and action. Haseldine’s transaction approach in turn proposes a concrete method for identifying and measuring such politically relevant interactions even for contexts where the remaining body of epistolary evidence is thinner than for Song China. Intermediaries connecting courts, councils, and bureaucracies to larger populations were particularly important in the different kinds of political communication processes discussed here. The commercialization and urbanization of the early centuries of the first millennium produced a wider variety and growing number of mediators in European and Chinese polities

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including legal, religious, secretarial, and accounting experts and teachers (De Weerdt/ Watts, Chapter 1). These intermediaries were critical nodes linking, or in some instances breaking, the connections between horizontal and vertical communication channels. The printers Chen Qi (1186–1256) and Robert Estienne (1503–1559), the protagonists of the chapter by Chu and Morche, were political outsiders who succeeded in establishing selfbeneficial power relations through the effective use of their communication capital. Through the pioneering of a new societal role, that of the independent scholar–publisher, they also contributed to a more general political development and challenged established structures of power. Whittow posits a direct link between an effective, comprehensive communication system and the stability of the polity: the late Roman Empire needed to be politically narrated, its authority transported from the centre to the utmost periphery through a long chain of jurists, tax collectors, office-buyers, civil servants, and letter-writers. Such communication strengthened the polity socially, and hence also politically and institutionally through the gradual formalization of relationships, social norms, and communicative practices. As Grévin and Bossler demonstrate, the search for, and development of, standardized forms of written communication is independently observable in different linguistic cultures. In their account, the formalization of informal communication networks and their modes of exchange strengthened political rule. Levine’s chapter identifies a collective experience of loss as a source for new political ideals. The fallen imperial capitals of Kaifeng and Constantinople re-emerge as idealized political bodies, which the disgraced political elite are called upon to recreate despite having shown themselves individually unworthy of their idealized community. State actors interacted dynamically with growing bodies of intermediaries, co-opting them, adapting communication strategies and media, and diffusing statist modes of communication; repression and indoctrination were also part of the repertoire but certainly not the sole means to confront challenges. State institutions and bureaucratic structures in medieval times were not static legacies of the early imperial past; the state regularly acted as an innovator in communication, shaping the formation of political or civic identities and related norms. As shown, for example, by Ebrey and Meserve in their comparison of public notices in Renaissance Rome and Song China, a public arena raising individual or collective awareness developed in city states and large territorial polities alike. Lamouroux argues that the Southern Song court increased fiscal efficiency through the introduction of the General Commands, which helped muster local knowledge obtained through informal networks on behalf of the state. Ronconi’s and Genet’s

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contributions also portray different types of states as innovators in political communication. The introduction of the bureaucratic minuscule script in the production of literary and scientific works represents a downward movement of a communication technology from the governmental level to intellectual and artistic circles. The increasing use of French in late medieval Western European bureaucracies opened the political sphere to participants beyond the traditional elites. The promotion of the vernacular not only strengthened the political loyalties of lower-rank public servants, but also helped strengthen political identification with the polity. This in turn emboldened developing state structures to synchronize political with cultural frontiers. In sum, our joint research has led us away from the divergence paradigm. We abandoned the premises about shared points of departure in divergence theories and the teleological endpoints from which divergence was to be measured. Neither did we look for single variables to explain the long-term development (or stagnation) of entire polities and societies across a trajectory spanning centuries all the way to the present. We could not reconcile such an approach with initial differences in scale and socio-economic conditions, the different kinds of structural transformations in political communication that punctuated the histories of Chinese and European polities throughout time, nor, most importantly, with the historical insights we were gaining through different types of comparison.7

Comparing Histories We opted for a comparative approach for two reasons.8 First, as Charles Tilly and others reflecting on the analytical affordances of comparison have explained in detail, the benefits of historical comparison are various and depend on the kind of comparison undertaken.9 Instead of reaching for 7 For a more detailed critique of divergence theories, see H. De Weerdt, ‘Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and the Comparative Political History of Pre-Eighteenth-Century Empires’, The Asian Review of World Histories 4, no. 1 (2016): pp. 156–163. 8 The following observations are based on a brief discussion of these chapters in H. De Weerdt, ‘The Future of Medieval Studies: A Chinese Historian’s Perspective’ [keynote lecture], 6th European Congress of Medieval Studies — Past and Future: Medieval Studies Today, University of Basel, 3 September 2018 (to be included in the forthcoming conference proceedings). 9 C. Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984); J. Mahoney and D. Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); D. Cohen and M. O’Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004).

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universalizing types of comparison, which attempt to derive universal rules and patterns for all of human history, we have sought to connect histories separated by national and regional historiographies and the structural boundaries imposed by modern academia. Such work is experimental and open-ended, and requires collaboration, even though this kind of collaboration is not what our jobs and our training were designed for. Despite the discomfort that comes with stepping outside the assumptions and expectations of one’s area of expertise, the benefits are tangible. We will discuss these here in both general and typological terms; in his epilogue Robert Hymes discusses the comparative strategies and assumptions of the individual chapters. First, juxtaposing and comparing the histories of different places is the best antidote for the kinds of large-scale universalizing comparisons that still dominate the field and public discourse. Comparisons that are built up from regional historiographies help us to question and un-learn the macro-scale comparative assumptions about civilizational differences and divergences on which the organization of professional history is based. It is also these kinds of universalizing comparisons that have given comparative history a bad reputation. Second, a more inclusive medieval history, or the co-existence of a plurality of medieval histories, may also help undo the blind spots of regional fields and national(ist) historiographies. By crossing the divide between area studies and (European) medieval history, or, in the case of East Asian universities, between Chinese history and world history (understood as the history of world civilizations or societies surveyed sequentially), one hopes that unfounded assumptions such as the notion that ‘China did not have Mirrors for Princes as such but only commentaries on the classic works of Confucius and Mencius’10 or, a commonplace observation among Chinese historians that ‘China did not have empires, it was unique in having dynasties’, will be readily identified; an inclusive approach should lead us to a better understanding of imperial polities, dynasties, or political advice literature in human history, and highlight the areas of research that deserve more sustained attention.11 10 L.T. Darling, ‘Mirrors for Princes in Europe and the Middle East: A Case of Historiographical Incommensurability’, in East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern World, ed. by A. Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 223–242, here p. 234. 11 One excellent example is J. Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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Third, comparison helps us to identify and understand the significance of distinctive aspects of regional historical developments. These kinds of individualizing comparisons are perhaps those in which we are most often, and often implicitly, engaged. Most historians think comparatively, but due to the national frameworks within which history is often taught and written, few engage explicitly with the comparators with which they implicitly work.12 Rendering them more explicit is then only an effort to critically reflect on and test unspoken assumptions. Fourth, as the comparative history of processes of mediation and communication illustrates, these tentative explorations have broader methodological implications. We started out from processes and cases, sought out how intermediaries faced common challenges in order to better understand parallel developments, shared responses, differences, and the impact of such differences. Such explorations thus also move in the direction of generalizing comparisons that can narrate and explain variation in both short-term social action and longer-term social organization.13 Fifth, several contributors use an encompassing model of comparison, attributing differences in processes and outcomes to broader structural differences between the cultures or polities under examination. Gowers and Tsui place the commemoration of Yue Fei (1103–1142) and Thomas Becket (1120–1170) within a context of cultural difference regarding the valuation of civil and martial qualities and the balance of power between civil and military authority. Chu and Morche similarly interpret the contrasting processes of censorship affecting the businesses of Chen Qi and Robert Estienne as elements within distinct ‘aspects of political development in China and Europe’, with repressive censorship fitting within the late imperial Chinese unitary state and preventive censorship within a polycentric European world of rival powers. Besides the methodological affordances, cross-regional comparative history is also of critical importance for the discipline of history. Our educational and research institutions are not set up to facilitate research and teaching across the globe. The administrative and financial structures of our universities often obstruct a more global dimension to student learning. History departments in most European universities where area studies (or 12 R. Grew, ‘The Case for Comparing Histories’, The American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (Oct. 1980): pp. 763–778. 13 One example is R.I. Moore, ‘The Eleventh Century in Eurasian History: Comparative Approach to the Convergence and Divergence of Medieval Civilizations’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): pp. 1–21. On universalizing, individualizing, generalizing, and encompassing comparisons, see Tilly, Big Structures.

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what used to be called Oriental studies in the case of Asian or East Asian Studies) has been taught for some time are mostly focused on European history or the history of European expansion. This holds especially true for pre-nineteenth-century history. This means that the pre-modern histories of Asia, Africa, or the Americas are treated as negligible parts of the history curriculum, if at all. We propose to go further and argue that the institutionalization of area studies has over time perpetuated structural inequalities in the academy that have had mostly negative repercussions for the development of the teaching and research of (non-European) history. Chinese historians do not teach history students and Chinese Studies students do not benefit from sitting in the same classrooms as students in history. This means that Chinese historians get far fewer opportunities to develop their disciplinary profiles in history and that the potential of their contribution to historical debates often remains unacknowledged. Even though Chinese history has grown tremendously over the past fifty years, most of this growth has taken place in the United States; the authorship of the chapters included and the scholarship cited in the present volume, mostly coming out of American universities, reflects this state of affairs.

Comparing Medieval Histories Why read the histories of Song and Yuan (1279–1368) China next to histories of medieval Byzantium, Rome, or the English and French kingdoms? Does the difference in scale and organization not immediately render this a futile operation? The modes of comparison that we propose and adopt do not take entire polities, civilizations, or fixed institutions as their object. In his epilogue, Hymes illustrates that comparability, or better, similarity, at this level is not necessary for illuminating comparisons to go ahead. As outlined above, we find that much is to be gained by analyzing processes, responses to shared challenges, and the actions of those in structurally equivalent positions within distinct communities. In this respect, the research reflected in these pages shares much in common with the goals of those globalizing ‘the Middle Ages’, especially as articulated by Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen,14 as well as with recent efforts to establish microhistory 14 C. Holmes and N. Standen, ‘Introduction: Towards a Global Middle Ages’, in The Global Middle Ages, ed. by eaed., Past & Present 238, supplement 13 (2018): pp. 1–44; eaed., ‘Defining the Global Middle Ages’, Medieval Worlds 1 (2015): pp. 106–117.

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within global frameworks.15 Before turning to the place of this volume within a globalizing medieval history, let’s first discuss another reason to engage in comparative historical analysis of medieval polities, namely, the substantial gap within the chronological coverage of the broader subfield of Sino-European comparative history.16 Comparative analyses of Chinese and European history have become commonplace. The similarities and differences between the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and Roman Empires have been debated in a series of comparative studies, and early modern Chinese and European historians have mainly sought to explain the different paths taken by Chinese and West European economies.17 From a political historical point of view, Sino-European comparative history has most frequently been explored with respect to the early empires that dominated the opposite ends of Eurasia at the beginning of the first millennium.18 In this literature the Qin (221–206 BCE) and Han Empires and the Roman Empire represent successful attempts to subject large territories to a common political, legal, and military framework. In both cases, the ensuing political theology of universal rulership, claiming principality over the cosmos, added a transcendental component to their legitimization of imperial authority.19 Han-Rome comparisons have proven useful in explaining political development from the perspective of state 15 J.-P. Ghobrial, ed., Global History and Microhistory, Past & Present 242, supplement 14 (2019). 16 There are exceptions to this rule, especially J.P. Arnason and B. Wittrock, eds., Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004); also M. Borgolte, ed., Das europäische Mittelalter im Spannungsbogen des Vergleichs (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001); more recently, J. Preiser-Kapeller, Jenseits von Rom und Karl dem Großen: Aspekte der globalen Verflechtung in der langen Spätantike, 300–800 n. Chr. (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2018). 17 For the early empires, see especially F.-H. Mutschler and A. Mittag, eds., Conceiving the Empire: China and Rome Compared (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); W. Scheidel, ed., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); id., ed., State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Key works on the large comparative early modern economic history include K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); J.-L. Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); P. Vries, State, Economy and the Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s–1850s (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 18 In addition to the literature mentioned above, see also V. Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 19 A. Mittag and F.-H. Mutschler, ‘Empire and Humankind: Historical Universalism in Ancient China and Rome’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 37, no. 4 (December 2010): pp. 527–555; P. Fibiger Bang and D. Kolodziejczyk, ‘“Elephant of India”: Universal Empire through Time and across Cultures’, in Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and

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formation, that is, the attempt to understand the emergence and structural evolution of polities largely in terms of formal institutions — such as legal and monetary systems, means of military organization, courtly cultures — and the related means of justifying political rule. Seen as a means to enlarge and objectify area-specific research, comparison has here revived the quest to explain historical developments in terms of universal patterns.20 Yet, the focus on the macro-parameters of state structures also carries the risk of alienating political histories from their social and cultural contexts.21 These appear ever more relevant the further we move away from the early world empires. Middle-period Chinese and medieval European history are characterized by multi-state rule and political and territorial fragmentation. As dynastic turns and the emergence of different, competing centres of power created a need to negotiate or renegotiate political and social hierarchies, the development of the political space became a multi-directional process involving a wider variety of official and non-state actors. In both Chinese and European history, the increasing significance of communication as a key element of all political activity — from basic forms of social interaction on a local level to the creation of large-scale, pan-regional political imaginaries — is evidenced by expanding archives of written sources from the seventh century onwards. Their survival — which includes official pronouncements as well as the unofficial exchange of news and developments between lower-rank elites and political outsiders — is a defining feature of the medieval world as well as a tangible indicator of political dynamics both within state structures and in wider society. These diverse and expanding archives allow historians of Chinese and European political history beyond the first empires to adopt a bottom-up perspective in which political cultures emerge from the written interaction between individuals and networks at both the core and the periphery of political power. Departing from comparative historiographies of empire and state formation whose principal aim is ‘to recognise broad patterns obscured by a preoccupation with “local” details’,22 this volume therefore sets out to trace Representation in Eurasian History, ed. by id. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1–42. 20 Beginning with Eisenstadt, Political Systems. More recently, A. Monson and W. Scheidel, eds., Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); I. Morris and W. Scheidel, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 21 Also see De Weerdt, ‘Eisenstadt and Comparative Political History’. 22 W. Scheidel, ‘Introduction’, in State Power, ed. by id., pp. 3–10, here p. 7.

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forms and scopes of political communication in middle-period Chinese history and the European ‘long’ Middle Ages by placing local and regional observations in a framework of cross-regional comparison. Many of the contributions in this collection engage with seldom-used source materials including announcements, posters, letters, and memoirs, and zoom into small-scale, micro-historical circumstances and interactions. The resulting micro-comparative approach accounts for the experiences of specific individuals from a variety of social backgrounds (officials, clerics, soldiers, scholars, merchants), while addressing the interplay between individuals, their networks, and emerging political structures and imaginaries over time. In this way this volume partakes in the global turn in medieval history. This turn towards global medieval history is in our view not about the geographic extent of one’s investigations or about a new kind of universal periodization, it is first and foremost about method. The points of departure for global medieval history can therefore be summarized as follows: first, we can make medieval history more global by bringing in regions typically excluded from study and by drawing on perspectives from other regions to think about cross-regional processes. Second, we can make medieval history more global by building on regional expertise, and by identifying themes, questions, and sources from regional historiographies. Third, the practice of the ‘Global Middle Ages’ as outlined in the above points also brings with it a focus on processes such as mediation, communication, mobility, or building trust rather than on fixed and immutable institutions or canonical traditions, on informal networks and connections rather than on economic or political centres, on interventions in global history by scaling up from the bottom, and on a critical engagement with modern global history as well as with subfields that are still prone to Eurocentrism as well as Sinocentrism.23 Fourth, global medieval historians should welcome radical critiques of the field itself and those critiques should become more inclusive of the practice of history beyond the Western world or Anglophone academia. Fifth, and not included in this volume, we can make medieval history more global by

23 For a more elaborate statement of these goals and an explanation of the Global Middle Ages as method, see Holmes and Standen, ‘Introduction: Towards a Global Middle Ages’, and eaed., ‘Def ining the Global Middle Ages’. We have some reservations about presenting the Global Middle Ages as a period rather than as a plurality of different periods. Other areas for improvement include 1) the inclusion of non-anglophone scholarly literatures; 2) the elaboration of the proposed conceptual building blocks and critical vocabularies; 3) a critical reflection on the metanarratives embedded in methodologies that claim to approach sources on their own terms.

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analysing the global as it was experienced.24 This means engaging local, regional, and non-elite perspectives on cross-regional flows and exchanges, perspectives other than those privileged in the global histories that celebrate the positive effects of globalization. This reorientation towards a more global outlook in medieval studies will certainly remain a challenge for some time to come.

Chapter Overview We have structured the essays into four parts. Part I outlines the contours of a comparative historiography of political communication in polity formation. In the opening chapter, Hilde De Weerdt and John Watts explain how communication and mediation have become central concerns in both Chinese and European political historiographies. In both cases, the centralizing growth of state power had to be translated and consented to on both a regional and local level, with mediating elites communicating political narratives between the centre and the peripheries. Chinese and European political history can thus be understood as a negotiation between centralized power and local and regional mediators, with the boundaries of the mediating class less clearly defined in Europe. In the following chapter Christian Lamouroux and Filippo Ronconi illustrate the role of mediators in the development of bureaucratic language and writing. Through the juxtaposition of case studies from ninth-century Byzantium and Song China they find that significant boosts to state growth did not result from top-down institutional designs, but from the communicative practices of learned elites and their extension to governmental, ecclesiastical, and educational systems. Lamouroux investigates the establishment of the so-called General Command in four strategically significant Song circuits in the first half of the twelfth century, and assesses their role in improving fiscal efficiency through the application of new accounting methods and the institutionalization of informational flows between the periphery and the political centre. Ronconi highlights the role of learned ecclesiastical elites in the imperial administration of the Byzantine empress, Irene (r. 797–802). The eventual adoption of the bureaucratic cursive script — the minuscule — for the production of scientific and literary works allowed for a much swifter production and dispersion of learned insights during 24 For an excellent example, see G. Dudbridge, ‘Reworking the World System Paradigm’, in The Global Middle Ages, ed. by Holmes and Standen, pp. 297–316.

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the so-called first Byzantine humanism. The tensions between traditional administrative and ecclesiastical elites also highlight the potential for political conflict between different authorities in this case. The third chapter offers a further illustration of how changing means of communication affected the composition and identities of mediating elites. Jean-Philippe Genet explores the use of languages including vernaculars and linguae francae in shaping political narratives and articulating distinct ways of belonging, showing how the adoption of French as an administrative language by the French royal bureaucracy from the fourteenth century onwards led to a faster territorial and institutional integration of the French state, as opposed to England, where Latin remained the primary language of the royal chanceries. The ever more extensive use of the vernacular as a written means of communication across the whole of the French territories allowed for the inclusion of the lesser-learned into officialdom and helped sustain a specific kind of French identity by fostering loyalty to the French Crown. In Part II, we examine the micro-dimensions of political communication on the basis of letter collections. The three chapters address questions about the mobilizing effects of language and political networks in medieval letters and provide methodological guidelines for and concrete illustrations of how the analysis of political languages can illuminate the social and political positioning of mediators within peer networks and their larger political environments. Julian Haseldine proposes a new method for extracting the nature and strength of social relationships from epistolary collections. With his ‘transaction approach’ he analyses different types of exchanges in letters — business and monetary transactions, exchanges of gifts, expressions of friendship and caritative love, intentions of prayer — to uncover broad expressions of political and spiritual community as opposed to merely temporary and context-specific interests. The transaction approach originates in Haseldine’s own study of eleventh-century monastic letter collections in Western Europe, but can easily be applied to other contexts. Benoît Grévin and Beverly Bossler cast doubt on the traditional view of a strict separation between literary and non-literary writing in Chinese and Latin epistolary cultures and argue that official letters as well as unofficial elite communication contain highly structured, standardized forms of rhetoric and style. They propose that the formation of politically significant norms and etiquette was the result of innovations in communication among the literati, who then transported these to the political realm through their involvement in the administration of the state.

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Beverly Bossler’s analysis of a Song-era epistolary collection, the letters of Yao Mian (1216–1262), further confirms that communicative and rhetorical skills carried substantial political weight in their own right. Yao Mian did not enjoy a distinguished career in officialdom, but, nevertheless, succeeded in spinning an extensive web of politically relevant connections, comprising his own students as well as acquaintances among high-ranking officials. He was able to influence real political decisions from the appointment of officials to the formulation of policy. The chapters in Part III examine the impact of political communication on political authority. They cover both the need for communication in the exercise of political control and state representation, as well as the deliberate restriction of communication. Mark Whittow (†) shows that the territorial decline of the Byzantine Empire strongly correlates with a decline in long-distance communication and argues that functioning communicative channels were critical in the maintenance of the Byzantine state. He proposes that despite significant differences between the Byzantine and Song Empires — most visibly in terms of territory and population size — it is possible to identify a number of domains in which communication was critical in enabling institutional development and political cohesion in both ‘empires of communication’. These include the fiscal bureaucracies, the legal system, the administrative and socio-cultural links between core and periphery, as well as a thriving epistolary tradition (of which, in the case of Byzantium, only indirect evidence survives). Patricia Ebrey and Margaret Meserve investigate the public communication of political news, legal amendments, and bureaucratic or judicial announcements in Song China and sixteenth-century Rome. They uncover several commonalities regarding the enforcement of the law and the creation of a communal polity, regardless of the significant political differences between a city-state and a large territorial empire. Conversely, the need to maintain political control could also lead to restrictions on communication. Censorship was practiced in both Song China and medieval Europe, but there are notable differences in the legal and political processes through which restrictions were imposed. Chu Ming Kin and Franz-Julius Morche explore such differences by juxtaposing the careers of the Song printer Chen Qi and the Parisian Renaissance printer Robert Estienne. Their fall from favour, their exile from the capitals of Hangzhou and Paris respectively, and the circumstances through which both succeeded in eventually re-establishing themselves as leading scholar–publishers, highlight the crucial role of informal networks and personal relationships in alleviating the negative ramifications of state censorship. On the other

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hand, the abrupt and seemingly arbitrary accusation and banishment of Chen Qi stands in stark contrast to the decade-long legal process that resulted in Robert Estienne’s self-exile. Chu and Morche thus contrast pre-publication censorship in early modern France and elsewhere in Europe with post-publication censorship in the Chinese case. Finally, the authors of the chapters in Part IV examine the communication of individual and collective memory in the creation of communal ties of belonging. Chen Song uses the oeuvre of the Sichuanese literatus Zhang Yu (1001–1064) — letters, valedictions, and commemorations — as a window into the communication practices of a Song-era scholar without official rank seeking to weigh in on local policies. The emerging picture of a system of state power that critically depended on the cooperation of, and successful negotiation with, local literati within empire-wide social networks, questions a common historical narrative of Chinese centralism (as opposed to the largely decentralized nature of European feudalism and the medieval notion of empire). In addition, Zhang Yu exemplifies the adoption of regional elite identities, in which political loyalties were based on geographical proximity. The communication of memory and its effects in shaping identities and communal belonging were, however, not limited to peer networks. Memory also operated on a larger scale and at a trans-historical level. Bernard Gowers and Tsui Lik Hang discuss two prominent cases of stylized commemorations of exemplary individuals that came to be used for political ends. Their comparative investigation into the violent deaths and subsequent portrayals of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, and the Southern Song warlord Yue Fei centres around rival conceptions of elite masculinities, which challenged the balance between rulers and subordinate elites. The comparison frames the plight of both individuals as the result of a politicized antagonism of wu and wen (that is, of military and scholarly masculinities), and reveals how the memorial cults of Becket and Yue Fei were adapted over time to fit the changing political theologies of posterity. In the final chapter, Ari Levine explores the role of mediating elites in the creation of political imaginaries around an idealized past. His principal witnesses, the Southern Song literatus Ye Mengde (1077–1148) and the Byzantine chronicler Niketas (c.1155–1217), appear as more than merely skilled weavers of political and cultural belonging. Levine’s comparative reading of their accounts of the fall of Kaifeng and Constantinople unravels a political critique of the elites who had failed in their duty towards the polity, and charts an alternative history in which the memory of the lost becomes encoded with a blueprint for the state’s future reform.

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In the following pages, we rethink the historical role of political communication between the early empires and the early modern period. In middle-period Chinese and medieval European history, old and new forms of communication served as means to manage new forms of political organization and to compose and disseminate political narratives, shaping the formation of polities on both practical and ideal-transcendental or imaginary levels. Old and new forms of political communication such as assemblies, the court gazette, the public announcement, or letters and letter collections drew in broader and more socially variegated constituencies, evincing to some extent the effects of the centralizing tendencies of polities at various scales, but also revealing, in different ways and with different effects, the fractures within centralizing polities. We have not dealt with the question of how non-verbal forms of political communication seen in custom, ritual, and material and visual cultures articulated with the written word. By limiting the geographical scope of the volume, we also left open the question of whether the dynamics identif ied here apply in contexts beyond Chinese and European medieval history. We hope, nevertheless, that the present discussion will provide a fertile basis for a global historiography of political culture that gives due attention to the medieval world.

References Arnason, Johann P., and Björn Wittrock, eds. Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004). Bang, Peter Fibiger, and Dariusz Kolodziejczyk. ‘“Elephant of India”: Universal Empire through Time and across Cultures’. In Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History, edited by id. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1–42. Berry, Mary Elizabeth. Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Blockmans, Wim, and Jean-Philippe Genet, eds. The Origins of the Modern State in Europe: 13th to 18th Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995–1998). Borgolte, Michael, ed. Das europäische Mittelalter im Spannungsbogen des Vergleichs (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001). Cohen, Deborah, and Maura O’Connor, eds. Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004).

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Darling, Linda T. ‘Mirrors for Princes in Europe and the Middle East: A Case of Historiographical Incommensurability’. In East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experiences in the Premodern World, edited by Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 223–242. de Vivo, Filippo. Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). De Weerdt, Hilde. Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015). De Weerdt, Hilde. ‘Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and the Comparative Political History of Pre-Eighteenth-Century Empires’. The Asian Review of World Histories 4, no. 1 (2016): pp. 156–163. De Weerdt, Hilde. ‘The Future of Medieval Studies: A Chinese Historian’s Perspective’ [keynote lecture], 6th European Congress of Medieval Studies — Past and Future: Medieval Studies Today, University of Basel, 3 September 2018 (to be included in the forthcoming conference proceedings). Dudbridge, Glen. ‘Reworking the World System Paradigm’. In The Global Middle Ages, edited by Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen. Past & Present 238, supplement 13 (2018): pp. 297–316. Duindam, Jeroen. Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. The Political Systems of Empires (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1993 [1963]). Ghobrial, John-Paul A., ed. Global History and Microhistory. Past & Present 242, supplement 14 (2019). Grew, Raymond. ‘The Case for Comparing Histories’. The American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (Oct. 1980): pp. 763–778. Holmes, Catherine, and Naomi Standen. ‘Introduction: Towards a Global Middle Ages’. In The Global Middle Ages, edited by eaed. Past & Present 238, supplement 13 (2018): pp. 1–44. Holmes, Catherine, and Naomi Standen. ‘Defining the Global Middle Ages’. Medieval Worlds 1 (2015): pp. 106–117. Hui, Victoria Tin-bor. War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Mahoney, James, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Mittag, Achim, and Fritz-Heiner Mutschler. ‘Empire and Humankind: Historical Universalism in Ancient China and Rome’. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 37, no. 4 (December 2010): pp. 527–555. Monson, Andrew, and Walter Scheidel, eds. Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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Moore, R.I. ‘The Eleventh Century in Eurasian History: Comparative Approach to the Convergence and Divergence of Medieval Civilizations’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): pp. 1–21. Morris, Ian, and Walter Scheidel, eds. The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Mutschler, Fritz-Heiner, and Achim Mittag, eds. Conceiving the Empire: China and Rome Compared (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Preiser-Kapeller, Johannes. Jenseits von Rom und Karl dem Großen: Aspekte der globalen Verflechtung in der langen Spätantike, 300–800 n. Chr. (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2018). Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, and R. Bin Wong. Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Scheidel, Walter. ‘Introduction’. In State Power in Ancient China and Rome, edited by id. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 3–10. Scheidel, Walter, ed. Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Scheidel, Walter, ed. State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Tilly, Charles. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984). Vries, Peer. State, Economy and the Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s–1850s (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Part I Communication and the Formation of Polities

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Towards a Comparative History of Political Communication, c.1000-1500 Hilde De Weerdt and John Watts

Abstract This chapter discusses the overlapping interest in political communication and mediation in recent Chinese and European historiographies. It explores a shared trend towards the social appropriation and reproduction of central (or ‘state’) authority by various kinds of intermediaries in the late Middle Ages, and underscores the use of a comparative historical inquiry in analyzing the different modalities and effects of the social appropriation of state authority in Chinese and European history. Keywords: political communication, mediation, literati, Catholic Church, clergy, political community

Comparisons between European and Chinese history are in danger of becoming the cliché of the global turn. Whether it is a case of comparative studies of empire, the exploration of ‘Great Divergence’, or the study of ‘Eurasian Transformations’, the choice of ‘Europe’ and ‘China’ as comparators seems inescapable.1 While there is some comparative work that deliberately We would like to thank various anonymous readers for their comments and criticisms and also Patrick Lantschner for a very stimulating and encouraging reading which helped us to make improvements. 1 F.H. Mutschler and A. Mittag, eds., Conceiving the Empire: China and Rome Compared (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); W. Scheidel, ed., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); W. Scheidel, ed., State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); P.K. O’Brien, ‘Ten Years of Debate on the Origin of the Great Divergence’, 2010, http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1008 (accessed 21 May 2020); M. Elvin, Another History: Essays on China from a European Perspective (Sydney: University of Hawaii Press, 1996);

De Weerdt, Hilde, and Franz-Julius Morche (eds), Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463720038_ch01

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takes a different line — Victor Lieberman’s ‘Strange Parallels’ between Eurasian ‘rimlands’ would be one obvious example — it is not hard to see why discussion so often focuses on these two major centres of culture and power: there are rich Anglophone historiographies; there are equalities of scale; there is topicality; and there is a pre-existing comparative literature which inevitably raises questions for further examination.2 We make no apology for adding yet another layer of Chinese-European comparison in this volume. Although we shall draw on some established approaches — above all, the ground-breaking work of Shmuel Eisenstadt in the 1960s — we shall also seek to strike out in new directions.3 As a starting point, we will build our comparison upwards, starting from themes that are more prominent in the regional literatures of European and Chinese history than in the comparative literature. We hope that this might help us to break free from some of the familiar repertoires of analysis — particularly the comparison of ‘states’ — and to do justice to the specificity of social experience, capturing something of the micro- and meso-levels of political life as well as the macro-level. 4 Second, we aim to explore process more than structure or development. Like Eisenstadt, but resisting the pressure to create taxonomies, we want to get at patterns of interaction rather than grand narratives. Third, as the Introduction indicates, we want to extend our examination into periods less frequently compared. While we are struck by obvious differences in the European and Chinese situations, and also by practices that seem on the face of it to be universal, we have also found “strange parallels” in the parts played by intermediaries in consolidating the cultural grip of the polities that emerged during this period. J.P. Arnason and B. Wittrock, eds., Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), essays by R.I. Moore and P.J. Smith, and note comment on p. 3: ‘The strongest arguments for interpreting the period in question as a formative phase, and the most structured discussions about this issue, have emerged in f ields of medieval European and Chinese history’. 2 V. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003–2010). 3 S.N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires: The Rise and Fall of the Historical Bureaucratic Societies, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1969). 4 For these terms, see W. Reinhardt, ‘Introduction: Power Elites, State Servants, Ruling Classes and the Growth of State Power’, in Power Elites and State Building, ed. by id. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). The ‘micro-level’ concerns individuals and small groups, pursuing their own interests (pp. 5–6); the ‘meso-level’ features collective processes, structures, and institutions existing within political society (pp. 4, 9ff.); the ‘macro-level’ indicates the whole of that society (pp. 4, 14ff.).

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While it is logistically necessary to discuss our Chinese and European examples separately, our aim is to maintain a focus on structurally equivalent entities and processes, and to compare responses to crises or major transformations. Following an outline of our methodological framework (in the first section below) and two brief historiographical reviews (sections 2 and 3), we look at processes of centralization and the ways in which local intermediaries responded to these, as well as countervailing processes of marketization in, mainly Song, Chinese society (sections 4, 5 and 6), before drawing comparisons with the role of communication in European political history (section 7) and offering some initial conclusions (section 8).

Methodology: Communication and Mediation in Chinese and European History We chose ‘communication’ and ‘mediation’ because these are fertile areas of research in both Chinese and European historiographies.5 By ‘political mediation’ we mean the activity of powers and interest-groups that operated in a ‘middle space’ between state agencies and populations. By ‘political communication’ we mean the exchange of political knowledge and values, among both state- and non-state actors, whether these were officers, intermediaries, or subjects (recognizing that these may be overlapping categories). Even though scholarship on political communication and mediation has rejuvenated political history in the regional historiographies discussed here, the study of these phenomena has developed very differently in them. We therefore had to negotiate some fundamental differences in the historiographies in order to calibrate our findings and allow for meaningful comparisons. Broadly speaking, mediation and communication are new topics in Chinese historical work, and they have been treated together (see Section 2, below). In Europe, on the other hand, the study of mediation has been going on for a long time, while the study of communication is much newer, and is, for the most part, conducted separately (see Section 3, below). Moreover, while the Chinese territories were about the size of Europe (even the attenuated territory of the Southern Song (1127–1279) covered an area roughly comparable to the Carolingian Empire), Chinese historians 5 We have recently addressed these issues from a slightly different perspective in H. De Weerdt, C. Holmes, and J. Watts, ‘Politics, c.1000–1500: Mediation and Communication’, in The Global Middle Ages, ed. by C. Holmes and N. Standen, Past & Present 238, Supplement 13 (2018): pp. 261–296.

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typically locate their specialized work within a notion of China as a whole or scale up to the entirety of the territories ruled by a given dynasty, whereas European historians often write within the boundaries of nation-states, each of them a sixth or less the size, and distinct from its neighbours in political — and, increasingly, in cultural — terms. To talk of ‘Europe’ is thus to synthesize a sprawling and kaleidoscopic historiography, and this means a more generalizing tone in the European sections of the chapter.6 There are important differences in the source material available to Chinese and European historians. Chinese primary sources are plentiful and cover all areas of governmental concern. As Charles Hartman has noted, this is not simply due to better survival rates.7 From the eleventh century onwards the central government insisted on documentation in the conduct of government business (‘graphomania’ is the term Hartman uses) and the literate elite followed suit, compiling and printing a wide range of genres concerning politics and current affairs. Due to the quantity of the documents produced and their relevance to growing numbers of scholars and officials, much of what has survived are archival, historical, and literary compilations, both officially and privately published, in which original documents have been transcribed, edited, and rearranged. The literati also commented on politics and government in secondary genres including notebooks, letters, poetry, treatises, drama, histories, and other shorter prose genres which were gathered in the collected oeuvre. Such collections became an emblem of literati status throughout the Chinese territories, but there are significant temporal and geographic differences with areas in economic and cultural centres such as the southeast producing more than others and the Yuan (1271–1368) and early Ming period witnessing a decline in source material. European sources, on the other hand, are dominated by fiscal and judicial records, especially those of the major political, religious, and demographic centres, which had adopted literate modes of government in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and produced ever-increasing volumes 6 It is worth adding that, by ‘Europe’, historians of the west and centre of the continent typically mean ‘Latin Europe’, that is, the cultures and peoples focused, in some sense, on the church of Rome, and they pay less attention to the Orthodox world, which is focused on Constantinople. This familiar bias is reflected in the present chapter, not because it is how we should think, but as a way of managing the range of variables that would otherwise need to be brought into play. The chapters by Lamouroux and Ronconi, Whittow, and Levine link Chinese and Byzantine history. 7 C. Hartman, ‘Sung Government and Politics’, in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 5, Part 2: Sung China, 960–1279 AD, ed. by J. Chaffee and D. Twitchett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 19–138, here p. 43.

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of records thereafter. There are also significant numbers of major literary texts, albeit with a marked tendency towards the preservation of works of scholarship and of books that came to be regarded as classics of ancient or national culture. In short, in the Chinese case there are comparatively few original archival materials but lots of texts processed by and for the much-enlarged political elite, whereas in medieval Europe the material is more focused on the concerns of political authorities at various levels. Equally, in Europe surviving literary material has often been considered separately, as evidence for ‘culture’, not politics. It is true that European writers produced large numbers of chronicles and histories, and that these dealt with the affairs of the great; they also created formularies of high-class letters and made collections of statutes and other public documents. In this respect, they somewhat resembled Chinese literati, and historians have begun to place more emphasis on the role of these writings in constructing identities and building solidarities.8 Even so, the volume of surviving record generated by administrative process dwarfs that of chronicles and histories. In view of the methodological challenges of comparative history in general, as well as the issues already raised above, we have made two further methodological decisions.9 First, our agenda is principally drawn from Chinese history. We start out from what Chinese historians are saying about political communication, and consider how these approaches might work in a European and comparative context. The primary theme of this chapter, the social appropriation and reproduction of central (or ‘state’) authority, is a matter of roughly equal prominence for Chinese and European historians, even if the modalities of appropriation and reproduction were rather different. Second, with regard to the political units to be explored in the course of the comparison, we have decided to consider multiple levels of organization in the European case: Europe itself; the Latin Church; and the regional states. Europe was plausibly consolidated as a single cultural and religious space between c.900 and c.1200, but while political technologies were 8 See, for example, C.F. Briggs, ‘History, Story and Community: Representing the Past in Latin Christendom, 1050–1400’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Vol. 2: 400–1400, ed. by S. Foot and C.F. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 392–414. 9 Among recent discussions, note M. Werner and B. Zimmerman, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory 45 (2006): pp. 30–50; J. Mahoney and D. Rueschmeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. chapter 1; D. Cohen and M. O’Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); P. Levine, ‘Is Comparative History Possible?’, History and Theory 53 (2014): pp. 331–347.

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widely shared across its territory (monasticism, chivalry, castles, Roman and Canon Law, dependent tenure, trading practices, chancery practice, and so on), it was neither a coherent political unit with a single centre nor a single coordinated network of centres.10 Meanwhile, the Latin Church bears some resemblance to the Chinese imperial power-structure: it was a supranational, partly co-ordinated, and imperial network of learned officials under a single ruler (the pope). But although it had some state-like characteristics — above all, jurisdiction and fiscality — its identity as a state was continually problematized by Christian ideology, and its institutional coherence fluctuated.11 We can also compare processes of mediation and communication in medieval Chinese states to those taking place in European regional states and statelets — kingdoms like France, principalities like the duchy of Burgundy, city-republics like Venice. These were more or less autonomous units, each with its own structure of authority, but some of them were comparatively tiny, as well as subject to internal and external contestation until very late in the period. The approach adopted here is to avoid making a choice, and instead to acknowledge that all three of these forms of political/cultural co-ordination existed (and continued to exist) in Europe between 1100 and 1500. The extreme plurality of the European political situation is an important part of our story, though we suggest that, in spite of it, one can discern developments paralleling the Chinese case at each of these levels.

Review of Chinese Historiography The historiography in East Asian and European languages on Chinese political history between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries (early Song to early Ming dynasties) has for over three decades been mainly shaped by two grand narratives. The first, the rise of imperial absolutism ( junzhu zhuanzhi 君主專制) and totalitarian rule ( jiquan zhuyi 極權主義) has been considered a dominant trend going back to the centralization efforts of the early Song rulers and leading up to the curtailing of ministerial power and the consolidation of local-level social control in the early Ming period. 10 R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe (London: Allen Lane/ Penguin Press, 1993); R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c.970–1215 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and see his ‘The Birth of Europe as a Eurasian Phenomenon’, Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): pp. 583–601, for an early comparison between the reforms of the Song era and the changes in Europe, 900–1200. 11 For example, R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1970), which begins with an argument that the Church should be considered as a state.

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Imperial autocracy and the centralization of decision making about all aspects of political, social, religious, intellectual, and economic life have been key themes not only in the Chinese historiography on political history throughout the twentieth century but also in comparative historiography.12 The second grand narrative, the turn towards local concerns and localist strategies amongst elite families from the twelfth century onwards, emerged within the field of social history and retains a somewhat ambivalent relationship to the first. For some political and intellectual historians, the localist turn is the flip side of the rise of imperial autocracy and signifies a ‘turn inward’,13 a collective reorientation away from court and empire-wide politics towards personal, familial, and local affairs unrelated to grand politics. For others the greater visibility of elites in local affairs implied that local, regional, and court bureaucrats had to find ways to contend with and respond to local powerholders.14 Moreover, centralization efforts such as the implementation of the civil service examinations, the proliferation of official schools, and the use of mutual responsibility in various areas including personnel administration fuelled the formation and operation of informal networks and structures through which one group amongst the local elite, the literati or cultured elite, participated in politics beyond the local level in ever greater numbers.15 Taking into account these and other critiques 12 For an overview of the Chinese and Japanese historiography see Bao Weimin 包伟民, ed., Songdai zhidu shi yanjiu bainian, 1900–2000 宋代制度史研究百年, 1900–2000 (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2004). The most extensive work dealing with Chinese political history between 1000 and 1500 in the comparative historiography remains Eisenstadt, Political Systems. 13 J. Liu 劉子健, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 14 This hypothesis is most lucidly and most authoritatively articulated in R. Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-Chou, Chiang-Hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For an insightful review of the first wave of the local turn scholarship, see R. Bin Wong, ‘Social Order and State Activism in Sung China: Implications for Later Centuries’, Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 26 (1996): pp. 229–250. 15 H. De Weerdt, Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127–1279) (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Huang Kuanchong 黄寬重, ‘Cong zhongyang yu difang guanxi hudong kan Songdai jiceng shehui yanbian’ 从中央与地方关系互动看宋代基层社会演变, Lishui yanjiu 历史研究 4 (2005): pp. 100–109; id., ‘Kaituo yiti yu shiliao: Fengfu Songdai zhengzhi shi yanjiu de neihan’ 開拓議題與史料: 豐 富宋代政治史研究的內涵, in Songdai zhengzhi shi yanjiu de xin shiye guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwen ji 宋代政治史研究的新视野国际学术研讨会论文集, ed. by Deng Xiaonan 邓小南 (Beijing: Peking University Center for Research on Ancient Chinese History 北京大学中国古 代史研究中心, 2013), pp. 5–16; Hu Kun胡坤, ‘Xuanguan yu zhiguo: “chushen”, “kaoren” beihou de Songdai guojia yishi — yi jinshike he jianju gaiguan wei zhongxin’ 选官与治国: “出身”, “考 任” 背后的宋代国家意图 — 以进士科和荐举改官为中心, in ibid., pp. 475–91; Gao Keli 高柯 立, ‘Songdai de difangguan, shiren he shehui yulun — dui Suzhou defang shiwu de kaocha’ 宋

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that emphasized both the importance of localist strategies amongst elite families before the twelfth century and the continuing interest in official careers at court and attachments to the centre of political life afterwards, Robert Hymes has recently modified his articulation of the local turn in Chinese history. Hymes proposes that Song elites participated in both a ‘court-oriented’ and a ‘shih-oriented culture’. The gentlemanly networks and behaviours associated with the latter were gaining more importance by the twelfth and thirteenth century. Due to growing status anxiety and competition at the local level, the activities and concerns of these gentlemen (or literati) were also concentrated locally and remained so, though some allowance is made for the possibility that this is a southern model of literati culture that does not necessarily apply to the north.16 Due to increasing specialization in the subdisciplines of history and to divergent concerns within Chinese social and political history, the relationship between centralization (which lasted well beyond the foundation of the Song Dynasty and the heydays of centralizing reforms in the second half of the eleventh century) and the politics of local communities has received little attention. This is particularly true in the area of communication. During the last ten years two major developments have occurred that may lead to a reconfiguring of imperial Chinese political history and a reconsideration of its place in comparative and global approaches to the history of polities. First, scholars from the People’s Republic of China in particular have turned their scholarly attention towards the flow of official documents, the communication of government orders, and the gathering and exchange of information locally and centrally.17 The publication of 代的地方官, 士人和社会舆论 — 对苏州地方事务的考察, Zhongguo shehui lishi pinglun 中国 社会历史评论 10 (2009): pp. 188–204; Wang Ruilai 王瑞來, ‘“Neiju bu bi qin”: yi Yang Wanli wei ge’an de Song Yuan biange lun shizheng yanjiu’ 内举不避亲: 以杨万里为个案的宋元变革论 实证研究, Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 北京大学学报（哲学 社会科学版） 49, no. 2 (2012): pp. 117–128; id., ‘Shiren liuxiang yu shehui zhuanxing — Song Yuan biange lun shizheng yanjiu juyu zhi si’ 士人流向與社會轉型 — 宋元變革論實證研究 舉隅之四, in Songdai zhengzhi shi yanjiu de xin shiye guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwen ji, ed. by Deng Xiaonan, pp. 461–474. 16 R. Hymes, ‘Sung Society and Social Change’, in Cambridge History of China 5.2, ed. by Chaffee and Twitchett, pp. 526–664, here esp. pp. 627–664. 17 Deng Xiaonan et al., eds., Zhengji kaochao yu xinxi qudao: Yi Songdai wei zhongxin 政绩 考察与信息渠道：以宋代为重心 (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2008); Deng Xiaonan, ed., Wenshu, zhenglin, xinxi goutong: Yi Tang Song shiqi wei zhu 文书 政令 信息沟通: 以唐宋时期 为主 (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2012); ead., ed., Songdai zhengzhi shi yanjiu de xin shiye guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwen ji; Deng Xiaonan and Huang Kuanchong, eds., Songdai de xunxi chuandi yu zhengling yunxing 宋代的訊息傳遞與政令運行, theme issue in Hanxue yanjiu 漢 學研究 (Chinese Studies) 27, no. 2 (2009): pp. 1–200.

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successive edited volumes on these topics has brought about a major shift in the historiography on Chinese political history. As most clearly and provocatively articulated in the work of Deng Xiaonan, this new political history is a self-conscious move away from earlier scholarship that had been mainly focused on institutional history (yielding well-documented research on general central and regional administrative bodies, as well as legal, fiscal, military, investigative, archival, and sub-bureaucratic institutions), emperors and ministers, and the narration of major events. The new ‘dynamic’ political history focuses on social, political, and institutional processes (dynastic and cross-dynastic); on relationships and tensions between individuals, collectives, and institutions; on the networks within which and the places where politics were made; and on the impact of a broad range of factors on institutional development and political decision-making including rituals, discourses, and political theoretical writing as well as the will and word of individual politicians. The disclosure and control of information and the channels through which particular actors obtained access and made use of it have become the points of analytical departure; individual documents have been turned into questions and cases allowing for the analysis of multiple agencies rather than self-explanatory pieces of evidence in longue-durée characterizations of institutions and their place in the development of imperial absolutism. This scholarship was in the first instance focused on communication within the bureaucracy but has also led to ground-breaking work on the communication of imperial orders and local governmental decisions in local constituencies and the rise of various kinds of local intermediaries from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards.18 Second, apart from intra-bureaucratic information flows and communication between government and local communities, a growing number of 18 Deng Xiaonan, ‘Xuyan’, in Zhengji kaochao yu xinxi qudao, and ‘Zouxiang huo de zhidu shi — Yi Songdai guanliao zhengzhi zhidu shi yanjiu wei li de diandi sikao’ 走向活的制度史 — 以 宋代官僚政治制度史研究為例的點滴思考, in Songdai zhidu shi yanjiu bainian, ed. by Bao Weimin, pp. 10–19. The first work that includes a chapter dedicated to political communication is Zhu Ruixi 朱瑞熙, Zhongguo zhengzhi zhidu tongshi, Songdai 中國政治制度通史 — 宋代 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1996). On communication with local communities, see esp. Gao Keli, ‘Songdai zhouxian guanfu de bangyu’ 宋代州縣官府的榜諭, Guoxue yanjiu 國學研究 17 (2006): pp. 77–108; id., ‘Songdai fenbi kaoshu — Yi guanfu zhaoling de chuanbu wei zhongxin’ 宋代粉壁考述 — 以官府詔令的傳布為中心, Wenshi 文史 66 (2004): pp. 126–135; Dai Jianguo 戴建国, ‘Songdai de gongzheng jigou — shupu’ 宋代的公证机构 — 书铺, in Zhongguo shi yanjiu 中国史研究 4 (1988): pp. 4–137; Chen Jingliang 陈景良, ‘Songxue yu songshi: Songdai sifa chuantong de quanshi’ 讼学与讼师: 宋代司法传统的诠释, in Zhongxi falü chuantong 中 西法律传统 (2001): pp. 201–232.

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scholars have returned to the role of the literati or the scholar-official elite in politics. The importance of this group in the maintenance of Chinese polities has long been acknowledged in Chinese and comparative historiography. In the early 1960s, and on the basis of an earlier historiography on the Chinese gentry, Shmuel Eisenstadt wrote in The Political Systems of Empires that from the Tang Dynasty onwards ‘the constant interplay between them [the literati] and the rulers was a principal focus of internal Chinese history’.19 In this reading, the literati were primarily playing a legitimating and mediating role for autocratic rulers. Eisenstadt turned ruler and literati into roles with fixed attributes across time and translated all political conflict in imperial Chinese history into conflict between progressive rulers and literati whose roles were limited to performing constraints on the goals and ambitions of emperors. Elites were weak because of ‘limited free interrelations’ between social groups, because of limited military and communication technology, and due to broad cultural orientations, which included an inclination towards familial self-rule and a disinterest in the open discussion of policy. Eisenstadt constructed these arguments deductively and on the basis of a Eurocentric model of modernization but they largely reflect assumptions in past historiography. Collectively, these arguments point to the importance of an actual comparative investigation of communication. To what extent and across what distances were economic, religious, and literati elites interrelated? What has been the impact of water transport, paper and print technology, and urbanization rates, all of which changed significantly in both medieval Europe and Song-Yuan China, on political participation? How and why did the dissemination of military technology, which judging from the production of military manuals reached increasing numbers of literati audiences, have a differential impact in European and Chinese polities and local communities? These and related questions have become pertinent once again as social and intellectual historians have begun to ask how local elites conceptualized the polity and the relationship between state and society following the local turn. This has led to new work on the languages of politics, the intellectual history of the examinations, the literati production and reception of information about court politics and

19 Eisenstadt, Political Systems, p. 193, and esp. chapter 12. For a fuller assessment of the relevance of Eisenstadt’s work for comparative political history, see H. De Weerdt, ‘Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and the Comparative Political History of Pre-Eighteenth-Century Empires’, Asian Review of World Histories 4, no. 1 (January 2016): pp. 133–163.

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the polity, the nature and transformations of literati networks of patronage, and factional alliances at court and in the provinces.20 As in the case of recent scholarship on bureaucratic communication, this work is based on new sources and new uses of old sources. Political historians interested in literati political networking and participation have turned to those sources that best capture individual responses to political information and that best document political networking and the processes by which court and local politics took shape — letters, notebooks, administrative manuals and textbooks, treatises presented to senior literati, and collected writings have opened up new perspectives on the ways in which literati government operated in imperial Chinese history from the eleventh century onwards.21

Review of European Historiography In certain respects, the historiography of European political life has followed similar paths to its Chinese counterpart. The growth of centralized and organized power has been a central theme of historical writing since at least the nineteenth century. While the rise of kingdoms or nation-states has enjoyed a certain primacy in this tradition, there are parallel accounts focusing on the consolidation of urban and princely power, notably in Italy, the Low Countries, and Germany, or treating the Roman Church as a kind 20 Besides De Weerdt (Competition over Content), Wang Ruilai (‘“Neiju bu bi qin”’ and ‘Shiren liuxiang yu shehui zhuanxing’) and Huang Kuanchong (‘Kaituo yiti yu shiliao’), see R. Hymes and C. Schirokauer, eds., Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Sōdaishi kenkyūkai 宋代史研究会, ed., Sōdai shakai no nettowaaku 宋代社会のネットワーク (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1998). Some of this early work is reviewed in H. De Weerdt, ‘Recent Trends in American Research in Song Dynasty History: Local Religion and Political Culture’, in Taiwan Song shi yanjiu wang 臺灣宋史研究 網, February 1, 2006, http://www.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/~twsung/breview/subpage/02/files/Recent_Trends_in_American_Research_in_Song_Dynasty_History.pdf (accessed 22 May 2020). 21 In addition to the works already cited above, see also R. Egan, ‘Authorial Intent in Song Period biji: The Case of Zhou Hui’s 周煇 Qing Bo Za Zhi 清波雜志 (Miscellaneous Notes by One Who Lives Near the Gate of Clear Wave)’, paper presented at ‘Letters and Notebooks as Sources for Literati Communication in Chinese History, 900–1300’, Pembroke College, Oxford, 9 January, 2014; Zhang Cong, ‘Communication, Collaboration, and Community: Inn-wall Writing during the Song (960–1279)’, Journal of Sung Yuan Studies 35 (2005): pp. 1–27; W. Lo, The Life and Thought of Yeh Shih (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1974); H. Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Ch’en Liang’s Challenge to Chu Hsi (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1982).

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of state and narrating its growth between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.22 A second theme has partly supported and partly contradicted this narrative of state formation — an account of the ‘making’ of medieval civilization, which is also a ‘making’ of Europe.23 Work in this tradition tends to emphasize the shared culture of high medieval Europe, which is seen as being held together in the loose embrace of the Latin Church through common patterns of learning and textuality, religion, warfare, and governance, and supported by networks of exchange and movement of people. Both themes have traditionally adopted a similar chronology — ‘growth’ between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, followed by ‘crisis’ and ‘decline’ in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and then ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Reformation’ in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — but the rise of states has sometimes been considered part of the downfall of medieval Christendom and its ‘papal monarchy’, introducing patterns of national autonomy and international conflict which were sharpened by the confessional divisions and stronger states of the sixteenth century. So it is that European history is founded on a certain ambivalence about the political diversity of the continent, partly celebrating and partly regretting a heritage which spread political technologies far and wide only to see them used to advance local powers. Forms of mediation have played a significant part in these narratives. This was first of all because of the role of representative assemblies, which developed in most kingdoms between the late twelfth century and the mid-fourteenth century and typically facilitated legislation, taxation, dialogue, and the creation of a secular national consciousness (these have been studied more or less continuously, and often from a constitutionalist perspective, since at least the early modern period).24 The recognition of more localized sources of power — lords and knights, towns and merchants, churches, even peasant communities — is, as in Chinese history, partly the product of a social turn in historical writing. In older literature, it was the 22 Among older examples, see for example J.R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Southern, Western Society; B. Guenée, L’Occident aux XIVe et XVe siècles: Les États (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1971), trans. by J. Vale as States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 23 For example, R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson, 1953); Bartlett, Making of Europe; Moore, First European Revolution. 24 There is a huge literature on this subject. An excellent recent discussion is M. Hébert, Parlementer: Assemblées représentatives et échange politique en Europe occidentale à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: de Boccard, 2014).

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task of the state to suppress and absorb these social interests. However, since about the second half of the twentieth century, it has been more common to acknowledge the way in which states cooperated with leading aristocrats, prelates, oligarchs, and village/ parish representatives to govern territory and share resources to their mutual advantage (a process involving copious conflict, notwithstanding an emphasis in much of the literature on cooperation).25 Equally, there is now more acknowledgement that powerholders below kings had significant claims to autonomy and legitimacy, at least within the spheres of justice, military service, and even revenue-raising (spheres that were often contested, extensible, or undefined). In the situation of multiple and overlapping jurisdiction that developed from the spread of legal and governmental resources in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, these smaller powers could often appeal to other authorities, or assert their own forms of polity (communes, lordships, principalities, leagues, and so on). As a result, their capacity to act as intermediaries (or challengers) was considerable, and this contributed a great deal to the ferment of European politics in the later Middle Ages.26 Over the long term, however, processes of political conflict and dialogue seem to have assisted the development of more elaborate and effective states; and against this background a more positive picture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has come to prevail, in which the part played in the consolidation of polities by political conflicts and upward pressure (subjects’ initiatives, consumer demand) alongside the initiatives of rulers during this period is appreciated.27 In these ways, then, a parallel to the Chinese ‘new political history’ is present in European writing. At the same time, accounts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries often stress the advancing control of central authority over networks of mediators — more influence for kings, courtiers, and councillors (including a ‘service nobility’), and less 25 Among early works of importance in this tradition, K.B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); O. Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, ed. and trans. by H. Kaminsky and J. Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); J. Heers, Parties and Political Life in the Medieval West, trans. by D. Nicholas (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1977). For a summation, see J.-P. Genet, ‘L’État moderne: un modèle opératoire’, in L’État moderne, ed. by id. (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1990), pp. 261–281, here esp. pp. 265–269. 26 These are central themes of W. Blockmans, A History of Power in Europe: Peoples, Markets, States (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1997) and J. Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 27 For example, see Guenée, Les États; Genet, ‘État moderne’; Watts, Making of Polities; W. Blockmans et al., eds., Empowering Interactions: Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe, 1300–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

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local autonomy; state authority continued to exist in dialogue with social power, but the forms of state and society had both changed.28 The study of communication in Europe came much later than the study of politics, effectively beginning in the 1960s. Until the 1990s, it was often more concerned with frameworks and media, or with examining supposed shifts from orality to literacy and from script to print than with exploring the impact of communication on power, though earlier work on documentary culture and the ceremonial activities of towns and princely courts, in both cases inspired by cultural anthropology, took the study of communication in political directions.29 Since then, and partly under the influence of literary scholars (especially in the Anglophone world where the influence of ‘new historicism’ has been profound) there has been much more interest in ‘political communication’. A major focus of attention has been on ‘the public’, the ‘public sphere/ espace public/ Öffentlichkeit’ or ‘public opinion’; there has also been a lot of work on propaganda and symbolic projection and also on the rise of written vernaculars in the later Middle Ages.30 Where first the tendency was to assume the success of top-down attempts to persuade, more attention is now paid to the dialogic aspects of communication: the bottom-up assertions made by audiences; their readiness to challenge, or to enlarge, the rules of the game — the Spielregeln as Gerd Althoff has 28 See, for example, R. Stein, Powerbrokers in the Late Middle Ages: The Burgundian Low countries in a European Context (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); C. Michon, ‘Conseils et conseillers sous François Ier’, in Les conseillers de François Ier, ed. by id. (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012), pp. 11–84; H. Zmora, Monarchy, Aristocracy and the State, 1300–1800 (London: Routledge, 2001). 29 For an overview, see M. Mostert, ‘New Approaches to Medieval Communication?’, in New Approaches to Medieval Communication, ed. by id. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 15–37. For examples of early work heading in a political direction, see for example, M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979); R.C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980); D.R. Starkey, ‘Representation through Intimacy’, in Symbols and Sentiments, ed. by L. Lewis (London: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 187–224; C. Morris, Medieval Media: Mass Communication in the Making of Europe — An Inaugural Lecture (Southampton: University of Southampton, 1972). A turning-point work, covering the Church, states, and society, is S. Menache, The Vox Dei: Communication in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 30 J. Dumolyn, ‘Political Communication and Political Power in the Middle Ages: A Conceptual Journey’, La Edad Media 13 (2012): pp. 33–55. For recent work on these topics at a European level, see, for example, P. Boucheron and N. Offenstadt, eds., L’espace public au Moyen Âge (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011); J. Dumolyn et al., eds., The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014); F. Somerset and N. Watson, eds., The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Discussion of Habermas’s idea goes back rather further in German and French scholarship — at least to the early 1960s. For a good overview, see A. Koller, ‘The Public Sphere and Comparative Historical Research: An Introduction’, Social Science History 34, no. 3 (Fall 2010): pp. 261–290.

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called them.31 Even so, with one or two exceptions — Jean-Philippe Genet is a trail-blazing example, Althoff another — it is only very recently that political historians have begun to incorporate the sphere of communication in their analyses of the means by which political authority was transacted and reproduced, and statist imaginaries were enabled to spread.32 Let us pause here to consider a feature of European historiography, which will be important later on. Eisenstadt usefully distinguished between states with a ‘cultural-particularistic’ emphasis — of which the Chinese Empire was his paradigmatic example — and those devoted to ‘collective-executive goals’, namely, the material interests of the political community — defence, justice, economic wellbeing — and the maintenance of the ruling authority through which that community was held together.33 The former kind of state prioritized a ‘culturally-oriented politics’, whereas the latter sought legitimation from its stewardship of the political community. It is clear that European secular states were primarily of the second type, and they have largely been treated as such in the literature. While they certainly engaged in symbolic and persuasive activity, this was generally incidental to the provision of political services, effected through vertical networks and, increasingly, through institutional mechanisms. But the Roman Church, on the other hand, could certainly be seen as a ‘culturally-oriented polity’, and the many studies of its interactions with society, its concern with the communication of spiritual knowledge and approved ritual, and its anxieties about potentially dissenting forms of publication — lay preaching, translation, printing and so on — offer many resonances with the literature on the Chinese history of political communication. While older historiography posits a rise-and-fall narrative for the medieval papacy, newer writing is more likely to emphasize the impetus of lay Christians behind clerical initiatives and to tell a story of ever-proliferating and deepening Christian activity;

31 For example, P. Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1996); G. Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1997); J. Watts, ‘The Pressure of the Public on Later Medieval Politics’, in The Fifteenth Century, 4: Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain, ed. by L. Clark and C. Carpenter (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), pp. 159–180. 32 Genet, ‘État moderne’, pp. 269ff.; id., ‘Culture et communication politique dans l’État européen de la fin du Moyen Âge’, in Axes et méthodes de l’histoire politique, ed. by S. Berstein and P. Milza (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), pp. 273–290; id., La genèse de l’État moderne: culture et société en Angleterre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003); and see his chapter below for further references. 33 Eisenstadt, Political Systems, pp. 225ff., 236, 238–240, 240ff.

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the health of the Roman church-state and the health of Christendom, even of Catholic Christendom, have come to represent very different things.34

Centralization and Communication in Song China In the course of the late tenth and eleventh century Song emperors and court off icials implemented a series of policies which increased court control over the military, the bureaucracy, and local powerholders.35 The Song court adopted the organizational structure of earlier empires with a dual civil and military bureaucracy, and a hierarchical administrative subdivision headed by the main executive body, the Six Ministries. Next to the main policy-making and advisory bodies, the Council of State and the Academy, Song emperors relied on two other agencies to keep the bureaucracy in check. They strengthened the authority of the Censorate and the Bureau of Policy Review, agencies that were charged with investigating administrative personnel and reviewing policy independently. They and their councillors also created new commissions such as the Fiscal Planning Commission to circumvent regular bureaucratic channels; regional commissions were set up to supervise the work of local officialdom. Provincial military governors lost their military and f iscal autonomy and a novel two-tiered examination system was put in place to recruit large numbers of administrators. The series of examinations started at the prefectural level and culminated in the palace examinations theoretically overseen by the emperor. Such recruits would be loyal to emperor and dynasty and would be versed in classical, historical, and contemporary texts and able to respond to policy questions. These policies had both an immediate impact and unforeseen lasting repercussions on communication processes at court and at regional and local levels. The court devised an integrated communication system which theoretically allowed for the controlled downward transmission of court orders from the emperor, to the transmission office and its courier stations, to the regional and local magistrates, and from there to ‘the masses who listen’ 34 Contrast W. Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (London: Egmont, 1972) with S. Hamilton, Church and People in the Medieval West, 900–1200 (London: Routledge, 2013), R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215–c.1515 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and J. Van Engen, ‘Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church’, Church History 77 (2008): pp. 257–284. 35 D. Twitchett and P. Jakov Smith, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 5, Part 1: The Sung Dynasty and Its Precursors, 907–1279 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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(zhongting 眾聽, literally ‘the listening of the masses’). The image of the benevolent emperor who headed a familial commonwealth was reinforced through the public reading of court orders, the rituals that attended the reception of orders and endorsements for temples and shrines, and the spread of a legal culture that allowed for a direct link between a commoner seeking justice and an appeal system that was, in theory, headed by the emperor himself.36 The processes of standardization, centralization, and regularization describe the official network and the official view of communication. The official network was based on a set of regulations structuring the flow of information which included a reformation of the way in which policy was discussed at the top and the role of the emperor therein. As Hirata Shigeki has shown, court discussions in which high off icials jointly discussed policy with the emperor were very influential at the Han, Six Dynasties, and early Tang courts.37 He argues further that from the late Tang onwards the direct submission of proposals to the emperor became more common, resulting in a decision-making process that was more directly focused on the emperor. During the Song period the place where policy was decided had moved from the outer court into the emperor’s quarters. There were still regular ministerial meetings and special meetings at which others with relevant expertise could be called but, by and large, joint meetings became less influential in the decision-making process. Personal meetings between emperor and officials at both higher and lower ranks became standard. This analysis of the transformation of communication processes and decision-making at the very top supports earlier Japanese and Chinese scholarship on institutional reorganization that similarly concluded that Song reform marked the establishment of imperial autocracy and the end of aristocratic power. During the eleventh century Song emperors and ministers also oversaw the establishment of organs and offices that would provide central control over the exchange of information and orders between the court and prefectures and counties. Emperor Taizong 太宗 (r. 976–997) established one central Memorials Office, officially housed under the Chancellery (Menxia sheng 門下省) and staffed by court officials. The Memorials Office 36 On the appeal system, see Huang Chunyan 黄纯艳, ‘Xiaqing shangda de Tang Song dengwengu zhidu’ 下情上达的唐宋登闻鼓制度, in Zhengji kaochao yu xinxi qudao, ed.by Deng Xiaonan, pp. 213–234. 37 Hirata Shigeki 平田茂樹, ‘Riben Songdai zhengzhi shi yanjiu shuping’ 日本宋代政治史 研究述评, in Songdai zhidu shi yanjiu bainian, ed. by Bao Weimin, pp. 40–63; also id., Songdai zhengzhi jiegou 宋代政治結構研究 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2010).

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was a central transfer point in the empire-wide communication network. Reports from local officials, as well as tax registers, accounting books, and legal dossiers were sent to the Office and then forwarded to the appropriate board or other central agency. It also played a crucial role in the downward transmission of official news and records. Imperial decrees were sent down through the Office, as were law codes and irregularly published administrative and penal regulations. The Memorials Office also circulated the court gazette (chaobao 朝報, dibao 邸報) to officials in the provinces on a regular basis, according to one report, every ten days.38 The gazette included excerpts of decrees and memorials, listings of assignments and dismissals, a schedule of court audiences, and other news items related to the imperial family and court activities. The centralization of the transmission of documents in the Office marked a significant change. Whereas the Tang Capital Liaison Offices (also called Jinzouyuan) had served as intelligence offices for regional commanders, in Song times the mission of the Office changed to servicing the court’s interest in the gathering, sorting, and selective dissemination of information.39 Court gazettes continued to be a feature of the Chinese information landscape until the fall of the Qing Dynasty and shaped the form of the first modern Chinese newspapers in the nineteenth century. 40 The Song court also left a visible imprint on the minds of local subjects. Decrees and regulations sent through the Memorials Office to local officials frequently came with instructions to share part of their contents with the local population. For example, imperial pardons, by which the emperor granted release or reduction of punishments, tax, or corvée obligations on special occasions, were to be shared widely.41 By the early eleventh century, pardons were first printed at the Ministry of Punishments and sent through the Memorials Office and courier system to all prefectures. There copies were made for distribution to each subordinate county or town. Magistrates were expected to come out and receive imperial decrees and read them aloud to 38 The gazette was published more frequently, with the interval being changed from every five days to every day. Papers were sent out in bundles to local governments every ten days. See Zhu Chuanyu 朱傳譽, Songdai xinwen shi 宋代新聞史 (Taibei: Zhongguo xueshu zhuzuo jiangzhuweiyuanhui, 1967), pp. 19, 42–45. 39 This paragraph is based on H. De Weerdt, ‘“Court Gazettes” and “Short Reports”: Official Views and Unofficial Readings of Court News’, Hanxue yanjiu 漢學研究 27, no. 2 (2009): pp. 167–200. 40 B. Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). 41 This paragraph is based on Kubota Kazuo 久保田和男, ‘Guanyu Songdai difang chishu de chuanda – Yi chuying he xuandu wei zhongxin’ 关于宋代地方敕书的传达 — 以出迎和宣读 为中心, in Wenshu, zhenglin, xinxi goutong, ed. by Deng Xiaonan et al., pp. 585–601.

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the local population, bringing together for the occasion local officials, clerks, soldiers, monks and priests, and commoners. Following this public ritual acknowledgement of the generosity of the emperor, lower level magistrates were asked to reproduce the text of the pardon and post copies on the walls that had been set up for the purpose of public announcements in central places and traffic nodes in town and village. Such announcements could be written on whitewashed walls in big characters; they were also reproduced as handwritten or woodblock printed paper notices and posted on walls and wooden placards. (That these were fairly widely distributed is suggested by the request of one prefect that 100 copies of his first notice be provided to every county for distribution across all villages.)42 The rituals and public texts celebrating the imperial pardons, which were issued with some regularity in the Song and on average every two to three years, may have conveyed to the different social groups constituting villages and towns not only an image of the emperor as a benevolent patriarch but also a sense of belonging to a community headed by him. The granting of plaques to local temples, an activity in which Song emperors also engaged with greater frequency than their predecessors, conveyed a similar message. The instruction of the legal code and imperial pronouncements in Ming schools and the public reading of them in village gatherings were thus not a radical innovation by the first Ming emperor, but a continuation of longstanding traditions of political communication. 43 The power of a unified law code in standardizing local practices, checking the power of the bureaucracy, and centralizing policy was well understood by Chinese courts since the early empires. More so than their predecessors, the Song and later courts faced a dilemma regarding the publication of their laws. Due to the increasing diversification of the population in general and the elite in particular the court faced pressures to relax prohibitions on the dissemination of the code and the regularly issued revisions and additions to it, but court and bureaucracy also took measures to prevent the loss of control over the use of the code when intermediaries emerged to help commoners interpret and use the law (see next section). The Song code, based on the Tang code, was printed several times and issued to local jurisdictions which were expected to make copies for the use of magistrates and clerks assisting 42 Gao Keli, ‘Songdai fenbi kaoshu’, p. 131; quoting the instructions Zhu Xi issued upon his arrival Nankang. 43 E. Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Jiang Yonglin, The Mandate of Heaven and The Great Ming Code (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015).

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them with jurisprudence.44 Regulations prohibiting the dissemination of the code beyond official circles were issued from time to time. The court and many officials remained uncomfortable with the notion that other parties could avail themselves of the code and become its interpretive authorities. The code was to remain available in the public domain, however. The Yuan code and supplements were circulated and commercially printed, 45 and the Ming code as well was distributed throughout the Ming Empire, initially as part of the first emperor’s desire to reform local custom and restructure local hierarchies. Local and central officialdom therefore regularly issued regulations to instruct commoners directly. Local officials’ posting of legal regulations to a larger audience usually aimed at compliance in circumscribed matters. These ranged from local administrative matters such as tax collection or famine relief to the communication process itself. With regards to legal process, local officials instructed commoners on the appropriate ways to bring cases and complaints or to appeal local decisions. Some local officials posted detailed instructions on how cases should be written up and presented to the local yamen.46 Occasionally, magistrates posted the outcome of lawsuits or endorsed their posting, hoping to ensure compliance in particular cases but thereby also disseminating more widely how and on the basis of what evidence cases could be brought and appealed and on the basis of what criteria official authorities might decide. 47 Court officials further required 44 On the role of printing in the dissemination of legal and ritual texts, see Kubota, ‘Guanyu Songdai difang chishu de chuanda’; id., ‘Sōchō ni yoru shomin e no jōhō dentatsu to insatsu bunka — Hō to rei o chūshin to shite’ 宋朝による庶民への情报伝达と印刷文化 － 法と礼を中心 として’, paper presented at ‘Guoji Songshi yantaohui ji Zhongguo Songshi yanjiuhui di shisan jie nianhui 国际宋史研讨会暨中国宋史研究会第十三届年会’, Kunming, China, July 29–August 1, 2008. 45 P. Ch’en, Chinese Legal Tradition Under the Mongols: The Code of 1291 as Reconstructed (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); B. Birge, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China, 960–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. p. 213. 46 Gao Keli, ‘Songdai zhouxian guanfu de bangyu’, pp. 82–83. 47 A particularly interesting case involves the posting of both the original decision and the decision upon appeal in a case led by the teacher of the Suzhou prefectural school and brought by a small number of their tenants against the alleged usurpation of school land by a local family. The school had both decisions engraved on a stone stele after the proceedings ended in their favour after more than a decade of unsuccessful attempts to sue for restitution and compensation for lost rent. The texts are transcribed in Miao Quansun 繆荃孫, Jiangsu tongzhi kao 江蘇通志稿, jinshi金石, 15.50a–56b (repr. Zhongguo fangzhi congshu 中國方志叢書, Taibei: Chengwen, 1966 (1927)). For an annotation and discussion, see Yang Yuxun 楊宇勛, ‘Song ji fu xuetian shengzha’ 宋給復學田省劄, parts 1 and 2, Songdai shiliao yandu hui 宋代史料研讀會 (2004),

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local officials to post procedures for how to present opinions, petitions, and appeals directly to the court, 48 a measure that may have been intended not only ‘to open wide the avenues of speech’ but also to control the channels through which dissent could be voiced and to supervise the performance of local functionaries. In sum, the early Song centralization policies led to the institutionalization of an information system focused on the person of the emperor, the transmission of court orders through a centrally controlled transmission office supported by an empire-wide courier system, and the articulation of court policy and the representation of the imperial person through local ceremonies and the reading and posting of announcements and legal regulations. This system was intended to transfer information from the centre to the public through the mediation of local officialdom. The public was imagined as a receptive audience, literally ‘the listening of the masses’. This construct captured the official view of communication. As we shall see below, its operation and effect on local communities were to a large extent determined by the intervention of local intermediaries and the informal networks they formed with local officialdom.

Local Intermediaries in Late Imperial Chinese History The institutions and channels devised in the tenth and eleventh centuries proved to be rather porous. They were susceptible to the intervention of intermediaries at all levels. The socio-economic transformations of the eleventh century brought with them an expansion of the political elite and the political crisis of the twelfth century led to a consolidation of the position of intermediaries in local administration and of literati networks in both local and imperial politics. Below we first discuss these socio-economic transformations and propose that local intermediaries helped disseminate bureaucratic modes of communication and strengthen the coherence of Chinese empires in the late imperial period. Clerks played such a role in the past but they as well as the local literati and new agents, such as notaries and litigation masters, became critical in negotiating the relationship between http://www.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/~twsung/song/93/50.pdf, and http://www.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/~twsung/song/93/51.pdf (both accessed 21 May 2020). This and similar cases are also discussed in Lee Ju-Chun 李如鈞, ‘Xuexiao, falü , difang shehui: Song Yuan de xuechan jiufen yu zhengsong’ 學校法律地方社會 — 宋元的學產糾紛與爭訟 (Ph.D. diss., National Taiwan University, 2012). 48 Gao Keli, ‘Songdai zhouxian guanfu de bangyu’, p. 77.

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a centralizing government and local subjects during the centuries of the first of commercial revolution. By 1100 the Song population had grown to about 100 million (as opposed to the 50–60 million that lived in the Chinese territories in earlier centuries) and large numbers lived in cities. Urbanization was the outcome of growing agricultural production and commercialization. Commercial growth transformed large parts of rural Song China as farmers were drawn into market networks and interregional trade in staple and artisanal products encouraged further specialization. Not only products but also farmland and real estate were traded and the state gave up on the ideal of an egalitarian tax system based on family size and equitable land distribution and instead aimed to raise revenue by taxing wealth. A growing population and the commercialization of large parts of the Song territories increased the business of the state but the size of the bureaucracy remained more or less unchanged at about 20,000 officials. The decision to keep government small opened up opportunities for various kinds of intermediaries. For many commoners, clerks, police chiefs (xunjian 巡檢), bowmen (gongshou 弓手), and local militia would have represented the face of official authority. Counties employed on average about 50 to 100 bowmen overseen by a county defender (xianwei 縣尉) to maintain public order in the county seat and in markets; police chiefs and local militia were responsible for maintaining the peace in the villages. Far more wide-ranging were the duties of clerks. They handled all direct contact between the population and local government, ranging from the collection of taxes, the keeping of household and tax registers, overseeing granaries, receiving lawsuits, overseeing prisons, and posting and taking down notices. According to some estimates, their number was around 440,000 in the late eleventh century and reached 200–300,000 for the southern territories alone a century or so later. 49 Each county employed dozens and the different appellations for them referred to their different tasks. Clerks were drafted from among the wealthier and thus higher ranked local households which had to supply clerical services as part of their corvée obligations. Many were also employed by the local yamen and received payments both in cash and in kind; there were some opportunities for upward mobility for them but clerks were not part of the regular bureaucracy. They were considered both a necessity and a threat by local officialdom: they spoke the local languages, specialized in particular tasks, and often inherited their positions from male ancestors. 49 Wang Zengyu 王曾瑜, Songchao jieji jiegou 宋朝阶级结构 (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), pp. 332–333.

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Officials lacked local connections and sufficient local knowledge, and rotated in and out of their assignments at great speed, ranging from a few months to just over two years. Clerks played a dual role in the communication between government and local subjects. On the one hand, they were important in enforcing government standards and routines such as the local application of legal codes and regulations, the keeping of ledgers and contracts, and the submission of lawsuits. This role has attracted less attention in large part due to the negative stereotypes in which clerks were depicted by the local governors who were dependent on them. Some contemporary political theorists, however, recognized the critical role of clerks to imperial government. Ye Shi 葉適 (1150–1223), for example, argued, ‘No doubt, the upholding of the standards of the court depends on the clerks’.50 Ye Shi believed that laws and precedents provided the foundation for imperial government and that only clerks had a firm grip of both the laws and the conditions to which they had to be applied. Clerks exercised the role of law provider and educator both directly and in collaboration with other intermediaries. Since they had an interest in attracting government business (their income depended on it), they could do so by charging fees in the operation of their duties at the yamen or by cooperating with litigation masters. Clerks were found to stimulate business by bringing potential clients to the attention of the litigation masters, thus earning a bonus for their referrals.51 Clerks could also become the victim of the very instruments that they had helped disseminate. The thirteenth-century legal handbook, Minggong shupan Qingming ji 名公 书判清明集 (The Enlightened Judgments), includes several cases in which commoners successfully sue clerks for malfeasance.52 On the other hand, clerks acted to defend their interests and those of other local intermediaries and residents against the demands of the court and local government. They typically did so through networking and direct action rather than through formal representative channels. Due to their position at the intersection of local and government power they were able to manipulate communication between officialdom and local communities. A particularly telling example of this was the manipulation of edicts. 50 Quoted in Huang Kuanchong, ‘Cong zhongyang yu defang guanxi hudong’, p. 107. 51 For an example of the collusion between litigation masters and clerks, see Chen Jingliang, ‘Songxue yu songshi’, p. 211. 52 For a translation of select cases, see B. McKnight and J. Liu, The Enlightened Judgments, Ch’ing-ming Chi-The Sung Dynasty Collection (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 400–413. For a discussion of the perception of clerks, see also Wu Chin-shan, ‘Subordinates and Evildoers: Song Scholar-Officials’ Perceptions of Clerks’ (Ph.D. diss., SUNY Binghamton, 2008).

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According to a letter Wang Shipeng 王十朋 (1112–1171) sent to a judicial intendant around the 1160s, clerks either did not post imperial edicts that appeared to be against their interests or took them down after having posted them for a very short time.53 Given their position at the nexus of local and government power we may wonder why clerks did not form supra-local networks and represent their interests against the voices of the literati and officialdom. Their dependence on local government service, the insecurity of their position, and the lack of opportunities for upward mobility may help account for this. Clerical power should therefore not be exaggerated.54 Clerks had been part of the machinery of imperial government since the early empires. More indicative of the transformation in political communication and mediation that took place in Song times is the emergence and breakthrough of legal experts and notaries. The ‘pettifoggers’ or ‘litigation masters’ (songshi 訟師) and ‘the writing shops’ (shupu 書鋪) that became permanent features of the social landscape in imperial times are unattested before Song times.55 Despite persistent claims about the lack of civil law in the Chinese legal tradition, it is obvious from the large number of cases and legal handbooks that have come down from the Song onwards that all manner of civil issues were brought to the attention of magistrates. The privatization of land contributed to this trend and resulted in large numbers of cases relating to property rights, rental arrangements, and inheritance claims. Legal experts responded to this trend. They promised to defend the interests of those who would pay for their services, offered legal advice and drew up forms for those who decided to present their case before 53 Kubota, ‘Guanyu Songdai difang chishu de chuanda’, p. 599. 54 Clerks could have substantial immediate impact in central and local government offices but they remained under the supervision of local and central officialdom through various kinds of control mechanisms. Hartman perceives an upward trend in clerical power over the course of the Song Dynasty, in sync with the rule of ‘autocratic councillors’. Overall, however, the reach of clerical power was far more constrained than that of the literati (which I define as the cultured elite and not, as in Hartman’s more unusual definition, upper officialdom. Hartman, ‘Sung Government and Politics’, pp. 133–138. 55 In addition to Chen Jingliang, ‘Songxue yu songshi’, and Dai Jianguo, ‘Songdai de gongzheng jigou — shupu’, see also Chen Zhichao 陳智超, ‘Songdai de shupu yu songshi’ 宋代的書鋪與訟 師, in Liu Zijian boshi song shou jinian songshu yanjiu lunji 劉子健博士頌壽紀念宋史研究論集 (Tokyo: Dohosha, 1989), pp. 113–119; Guo Dongxu 郭东旭, Songchao falü shilun 宋朝法律史論 (Baoding: Hebei daxue chubanshe, 2001); Mo Jiaqi 莫家齐, ‘Nan Song minshi susong zhengju zhidu guanjian’ 南宋民事诉讼证据制度管见, Xiandai faxue现代法学 2 (1985): pp. 63–67. On legal education, see He Qinhua 何勤华, Zhongguo faxue shi 中国法学史, rev. ed. (Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 2006), esp. vol. 2, chapter 5. On litigation masters in the Qing Dynasty, see M. Macauley, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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the magistrate, familiarized themselves with local government, and even provided lodgings in the vicinity of the yamen for those who had to travel from peripheral areas. Clerks as well as literati took on the profession. In some areas private schools were established that taught adults and children how to bring suits, and bookstores sold instructional literature as well as the code under an alternate title. Like the clerks discussed above, litigation masters and notaries contributed to the dissemination of bureaucratic routines and a statist framework for all sorts of transactions between private parties as well as between private parties and government agencies. This is most evident in the case of notaries who were gradually incorporated into the state apparatus. Officials permitted and relied on notaries (shupu, not to be confused with the commercial bookstores that went by the same name) to draft lawsuit forms for illiterate commoners, to write confessions for those accused of crimes, to validate contracts including those for sales and marriages, and to submit forms for examination candidates and officials up for promotion. They might be called upon to verify the identity or handwriting of parties and were held responsible in case any wrongdoing was detected in the cases with which they were entrusted. Notaries were certified and given seals which had to be returned to the government when they closed shop. They were registered so that officials could check on their qualifications and entered into a mutual responsibility scheme to strengthen adherence to professional and official norms. Unlike clerks they were not in the employ of the government but rather provided private certification of transactions that became over time officially recognized and regulated.56 Litigation masters occupied a more ambiguous position in the middle space between local and regional bureaucracy and commoners. Their presence had become inevitable wherever yamen existed. Their familiarity with local legal proceedings and their ability to debate cases persuasively were widely attested, but they did not officially represent customers before the magistrate’s court in late imperial Chinese polities. Like the other intermediaries, litigation masters became indispensable to the late imperial regime because they successfully negotiated tensions between government and local subjects; propagating the standardizing tools of government control on the one hand, and, informally shaping those tools, on the other. As noted by the legal historian Chen Jingliang, Song litigation masters contributed towards two significant innovations in jurisprudence. They ensured that

56 Dai Jianguo, ‘Songdai de gongzheng jigou’.

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magistrates were required to offer a rationale for their decisions. They also facilitated appeals higher up when their clients disagreed with the verdict.57 Literati played the most visible role among the social groups that negotiated government and local power from the mid-Song onwards. This constituted a significant change in Chinese history. The literati consisted of those literate and conversant in the cultural skills requisite of the scholarofficial. On the basis of a classical education and cultural resources they formed the pool from which off icials were selected, but most of them did not succeed in the examinations, did not obtain office, or only held bureaucratic positions intermittently. During the Tang the families that produced officials had been concentrated in the metropolitan areas of Chang’an and Luoyang. Those entering official service returned to their home base in the capitals following short tours of duty and thus played a less visible role in the provinces.58 During the eleventh century, the Song capital Kaifeng became the metropolis where families with an aspiration to play a role in imperial politics congregated. Following the exponential growth of the number of those preparing and sitting the civil service examinations and the fall of Kaifeng in 1127, families investing in preparation for official service settled down in counties across the south. Examination candidates, examination failures who took on new occupations in teaching, medicine, secretarial work, estate management, or trade, those awaiting assignments, and retired officials became the go-to persons for local government. They shared a similar language and outlook. To ensure local cooperation with central demands and to raise funding for local projects under conditions where local taxes were managed centrally rather than locally, magistrates and other local officials turned in the first place to literati families. Literati families similarly sought the approval and cooperation of local government for both clan and community projects.59 Negotiations between local government and literati took place through formal public and informal means. Public announcements, letters, and legal cases, as well as descriptions of local gatherings and personal visits to the yamen testify to the power of literati in deciding and implementing 57 Chen Jingliang, ‘Songxue yu songshi’, p. 227. 58 For a recent study of the nature and demise of the Tang metropolitan elites, see N. Tackett, The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014). 59 On the localist turn, see especially Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen; on local government involvement in local projects, see Lee Sukhee, Negotiated Power: The State, Elites, and Local Governance in Twelfth- to Fourteenth-Century China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014); Gao Keli, ‘Songdai de difangguan, shiren he shehui yulun’.

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local matters. In repeated public announcements dating to the early 1270s, Huang Zhen 黃震 (1212–1280) tried to persuade the wealthy office-holding households of Fuzhou to help with famine relief in the area by sharing the grain stored in their warehouses. In these and other matters local officials were used to pool the opinion of local families and collaborate with those powerful enough to broker deals with peers.60 These negotiations proved all the more necessary as literati were particularly well positioned to make or break the reputations of local officials. Successful collaborations in building local infrastructure were commemorated in stele inscriptions for bridges, schools, temples, or granaries. Local officials who proved to be too activist and unmindful of local interests ran the risk of being accused and called before prefects or route intendants, and, through the larger networks in which literati were involved, being impeached at court. In sum, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries distinct groups of local intermediaries began to take on the business of the imperial state in local communities. This has been interpreted as a move towards both the laicization and localization of power structures, with local elites concentrating on local rather than state resources. It has further been theorized as a challenge to prevailing models of modernization that focus on the intensification of state penetration.61 Laicization and localization need not be opposed to state interference (also in lay culture) and supralocal, polity-level networks and attachments, however. The ways in which the state was embedded in how intermediaries operated may provide an answer to the question of why processes of laicization and vernacularization resulted in different outcomes in Chinese and European history. In the Chinese case, the question of how localities continued to form part of a functioning larger polity becomes all the more important in the context of the empowerment and greater visibility of local elites. We propose that clerks, constables, bowmen, notaries, litigation masters, and literati extended the reach of the state even though they were not a formal part of it. They did so, in collaboration with the proportionally decreasing numbers of local officials, through the communication of imperial pronouncements, administrative regulations, legal standards and procedures, and rituals, and through the implementation of taxation, peacekeeping, jurisprudence, and the maintenance of local 60 On Huang Zhen’s efforts, see Gao Keli, ‘Songdai zhouxian guanfu de bangyu’; R. Hymes, ‘Moral Duty and Self-Regulating Process in Southern Sung Views of Famine Relief’, in Ordering the World, ed. by id. and Schirokauer, pp. 280–309. 61 Hymes, ‘Sung Society and Social Change’, esp. pp. 661–664. This is partly based on H. De Weerdt, ‘Review of The Cambridge History of China, Volume 5, Part 2: Sung China, 960–1279 AD’, Journal of Chinese History 1 no. 1 (2016): pp. 198–202.

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infrastructure. The informal negotiations between these groups and local governments resulted in a more stable foundation for centralizing polities that sought to penetrate more deeply into local communities than the aristocratic and metropolitan elites of medieval times.

The Literati and Political Community A major shift also took place in the relationship between court and elites in the production and the reception of information about the court and government affairs. The examinations had created a closer bond between the court and elites throughout the Song territories, but given the anonymity of examiners appointed ad hoc to set their own questions for every examination, and in the absence of a standard curriculum and suff icient numbers of off icial schools to absorb the tens and soon hundreds of thousands of students, examination preparation turned into an arena in which literati themselves became important players in setting standards of learning and good governance.62 The Memorials Off ice and the other institutions that had been set up to centralize communication in the early decades of the Song Dynasty became subject to the inf iltration of literati networks from the late eleventh century onwards. Literati invested in the acquisition and the publication of all sorts of genres that had heretofore been the prerogative of central bureaus and court commissions. The court continued to control information flows through publishing regulations and gradually retreated to the position of an arbiter rather than the major publisher of publications on current affairs. Below we briefly discuss how this shift came about and examine how the literati publication and reading of current affairs shaped political imaginaries and politics.63 Between the eleventh and mid-thirteenth centuries the Song government repeatedly issued bans on the leaking, transmission, and publishing of single-sheet documents, court gazettes, archival compilations, Song dynastic history drafts, and memorials and examination essays on border affairs. Changes in Song legislation on what were considered to be sensitive materials reflected both the widening scope of materials that circulated beyond their intended audiences and the increased use of the print medium 62 De Weerdt, Competition over Content. 63 This is adapted from H. De Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015).

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in their dissemination. Such infractions were prosecuted but they also went unnoticed. In addition, following the crisis of the 1120s, private scholars, many of them without examination degrees and official posts, set out to compile historical and military geographies, maps of the Chinese territories, archival compilations, administrative encyclopaedias, and local gazetteers, thus adopting and adapting the genres which had heretofore been monopolized by the court and the bureaucracy. Secondary discourse on Song affairs also proliferated in the twelfth century as the compilation and publication of notebooks (records of conversations and reading notes) and correspondence by lower-level elites became more common. The breakthrough of the print medium can similarly be dated to the twelfth century. It was only then that it began to be used for all manner of written texts and increasingly for the notebooks and collected writings of Song scholars and those whose works they most admired. These developments in the history of publishing were already gaining momentum in the late eleventh century, but it was the crisis initiated in the 1120s that allowed for a structural transformation to take hold. In the decades that followed, the readership for materials relating to the history and policies of the Song court kept expanding and elites who were resident in the provinces became more visible among the producers of the texts that then also began to def ine the standards for elite membership. In retrospect, the tacit acknowledgment of the circulation of prohibited state documents and the literati production of texts relating to current affairs had a significant effect on the maintenance of imperial structures and traditions. Secrecy and publicity can be seen as parallel processes that ensured the continued collaboration of growing numbers of literati. Access to current affairs had become important to literati for at least three reasons. First, familiarity with archival collections and Song dynastic history was necessary in political discourse and political practice. Second, beyond the state bureaucracy, familiarity with Song dynastic history and current affairs was needed to prepare for the policy essay session in the examinations and had also become standard in literati conversation. Third, literati depended upon the gazettes and their derivatives at various stages of their careers and used information about new appointments and recent policy decisions in networking behaviour. Even though the use of the gazettes as a networking tool posed a potential problem to a court keen on preserving a façade of unanimity in decision making, gazettes and related bureaucratic genres positioned the court at the centre of

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competing elite networks and thus affirmed its political authority. Literati engagement with the off icial record also strengthened identif ication with the dynasty. Two features of the shift in the production of texts relating to state affairs are particularly important to understanding its impact on the history of Chinese polities more broadly. First, in these texts, literati articulated a commitment to the imperial state. Second, these texts reflected and circulated through supralocal social and political networks. Elite commitment to the imperial state was most strikingly articulated in the maps and atlases that outlined the dimensions of the Chinese commonwealth as they should be, encompassing all former Song territories. Such maps, for which the earliest surviving examples date to the Southern Song period, were engraved on large stone steles or carved on woodblocks by private and commercial printers to facilitate wider transmission amongst the literate elite. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century inscriptions accompanying graphic representations of the Chinese territories as a unified political entity acknowledge the historical fact that times of divided rule have been dominant in the history spanning the disintegration of the early Zhou state in the eighth century BCE up until the time of writing. At the same time, these maps and the poems written about them express a resolve amongst the literati to keep the recovery of the north and the full restoration of Song imperial rule on the political agenda.64 The geographic scope of the networks within which texts were exchanged was a second significant feature of the surge in elite textual production about the affairs of the reigning dynasty. Prevalent models might lead us to accept that political communication in imperial China operated in two more or less disconnected realms. Within William Skinner’s macroregional model of Chinese geography, political decisions would be transmitted from the centre and move down a strictly hierarchical chain of administrative units. Within this chain each lower-level unit is made to fit within one and only one higher-level unit and is so effectively controlled by the centre. In Skinner’s model, politics also take place in standard and intermediate level marketing towns at a remove from the bureaucratic chain of command. Here local government and local elites intermingled and jointly led a variety of local 64 H. De Weerdt, ‘Maps and Memory: Readings of Cartography in Twelfth- and ThirteenthCentury Song China’, Imago Mundi: International Journal for the History of Cartography 61, no. 2 (2009): pp. 145–167; ead., ‘The Cultural Logics of Map Reading: Text, Time and Space in Printed Maps of the Song Empire’, in Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print — China, 900–1400, ed. by ead. and L. Chia (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 239–270.

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welfare operations.65 In such a model there is no room for communication and exchange among elites resident in standard, intermediate, or central market towns that were not adjacent within the central place model of marketing towns. Political communication outside of the bureaucratic hierarchy of administrative places is then limited to local marketing patterns, patterns that were restricted by environmental conditions which divided the Chinese territories up into discrete physiographic regions. The geography of elite communication remains a largely unexplored field. There is some indication, nevertheless, that elite communication networks stretched well beyond local market towns and their immediate neighbours.66 The geographic distribution of networks of information sharing as recorded in correspondence and in notebooks of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries suggests that cross-regional communication was a common phenomenon among literati. Others have suggested that inter- and supra-regional economic exchange has been neglected in Skinner’s work; we similarly propose that political communication and politics cut across the hierarchies of formal administrative organization. This may further imply that even if we grant that elite marriage patterns became geographically more restricted in the post-1127 period, and that elites therefore invested more heavily in local ties and local interests, this did not preclude an ongoing political engagement with the centre and even a strengthening of an attachment to the empire. In sum, the geopolitical crisis of 1126–1127 brought about a restructuring of the information order. Provincial elites became the main producers and consumers of all manner of texts relating to the history and current affairs of the Song Dynasty and increasingly turned to woodblock printing for the dissemination of these texts. In these texts the recovery of the north continued to be a dominant theme. The elite communication networks through which these texts were circulated and discussed ranged widely across the vast extent of the Southern Song Empire. Court and central government institutions thus lost ground in the field of cultural production. However, they continued to exercise control due to the demand for 65 W. Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), pp. 307–346. For a comprehensive critique of the macroregional paradigm, see C. Cartier, ‘Origins and Evolution of a Geographical Idea: The Macroregion in China’, Modern China 28, no. 1 (2002): pp. 79–142. 66 For interactive reconstructions of the geographic, social, and temporal distribution of informants in select common-place books, see H. De Weerdt, Hou Ieong Ho, Chen Yunju, Li Yun-Chung, Lik Hang Tsui, and You Zixi, ‘Notebooks’, in Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective, 2011, http://chinese-empires.eu/reference/informationterritory-and-networks/ (accessed 2 June 2020).

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primary texts emanating from the centre. Central government and court personnel played an important role in the dissemination of single-sheet state documents, archival materials, and gazettes. The dissemination of political information and the use of printing to this end need not be associated with a public sphere. The large-scale leaking of current affairs to office-holders and non-office holders alike can in the case of late imperial Chinese history be seen as crucial elements in the balancing of tensions between court, bureaucracy, and provincial elites and thus in the consolidation of empire. These negotiations took place informally. As an amalgam of cross-regional networks of men inside and outside government, the literati community ensured that actors outside the court and the bureaucracy could exert political influence at different levels. There were few formal channels through which literati opinion could be collected. The role of schools herein remained uncertain and, in any case, insufficient. In the eyes of Philip Kuhn, it is this lack of a constitutional agenda for the incorporation of the political elite that has remained a persistent tension in imperial and modern Chinese history.67

The European Trajectory: A Comparison The broad trajectory described in the preceding sections can also be traced in Europe: that is to say, processes of centralization accompanied by a long-term tendency, amid copious conflict, for coordinating authorities to be affirmed by socio-political and cultural action in the ‘middle space’. The model fits the secular states better, over the longer term, than the Roman Church, but the idea of a universal Christian community, and the reality of pan-European cultural networking, remained strong throughout the period — in both cases through unofficial as well as official action. That Europe, with its multiple centres and rather different culture of communication, should have followed a roughly similar path may be surprising, and we shall attempt to tease out some reasons for that parallelism. Centralization and Communication in Church and State As has been much remarked, European secular states engaged in a comparable process of centralization to that of Song China, mainly in the twelfth and

67 P. Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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thirteenth centuries.68 This development was driven partly by competition with the Church and other powers, and partly by new political and cultural technologies, notably the systematic study of Roman and Canon Law from c.1100, and the increased use of writing and record-keeping particularly from c.1200. From c.1150, states focused their energies on the elaboration and expansion of political services and governmental functions, claiming the highest level of authority in the spheres of justice, law-making, and military obligation and attempting to coordinate activity below and around them. By the middle of the thirteenth century, they had begun to establish effective systems of taxation, and — typically alongside them — institutions of representation, and/ or response to petitions (especially from the last quarter of the century). These services were usually offered to, or imposed upon, a wide cross-section of society from the start, and were conceptualized in public terms which were borrowed ultimately from Roman Law and from classical rhetoric. As in Song China, these expanded regimes depended on networks of officials, who were increasingly closely supervised — required to present accounts, overseen by superior officers, subject to enquiries and regulations, and moved around to stop them going local. Surprisingly, there must have been more officials per head of population in fifteenth-century France than there were in the Song territories before 1127, and the exclusiveness of their status was correspondingly less, but they were managed, at least nominally, in some procedurally similar ways.69 In other respects, however, there were significant differences from the Chinese situation, and not only in the far smaller size of European polities. For one thing, state formation was carried out by large numbers of different power-centres simultaneously and competitively: it was not just kings who expanded their political and governmental provision, princes and lords, knights and towns did so too. Smaller powers might agree to work with larger ones, but these agreements had to be negotiated and often re-negotiated — via assemblies, treaties, bribes, and conflicts — and this had two important consequences. One is the emphasis on representation, both formal and informal, in European states: only by recognizing at least some of the claims of smaller powers could greater ones hope to rule them, 68 For recent surveys of these developments, see for example, T.N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), chapter 5, and Watts, Making of Polities, chapter 2. 69 For the Chinese figures, see above, p. 56; for the French ones (7–8000 or perhaps 12,000 in an estimated population of 15 million), see C. Carpenter and O. Mattéoni, ‘Offices and Officers’, in Government and Political Life in England and France, c.1300–c.1500, ed. by C. Fletcher, J.-P. Genet, and J. Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chapter 4, p. 88.

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and practices of consultation and concession soon hardened into law and custom in societies where the capacity to make and keep records was widely distributed.70 The other is the tendency on the part of European rulers to bargain away or share the content of their rights, exchanging judicial supervision for money or service, farming taxes, and delegating jurisdiction.71 Both patterns had ambivalent consequences: while they can be represented as forms of decentralization, conferring rights and resources that could be used to challenge the ruler, they could also serve to co-opt potentially autonomous powers in the enterprises of larger states.72 This basic dynamic set the terms for the convulsive politics of later medieval Europe, in which political coherence was temporarily achieved over quite large spaces for periods of time, only to break apart again when rulers pressed too hard or not hard enough, when wars and internal conflict eroded their authority, or when subordinated powers grew too large to contain. In a more general sense, it created a culture in which power-sharing was normal and assertions of central sovereignty were typically accompanied by the recognition of bodies representing local and sectional interests. The role of information also differed in Chinese and European contexts. By and large, and especially before about the fourteenth century, the production, extraction, and retention of information on the part of European secular states was utilitarian — geared to the provision of governmental services, and confined to what was necessary to allow systems of justice, taxation, and military organization to operate effectively.73 Certainly there were ritual demonstrations of authority — coronations and investitures, processions and displays — and it is clear that prominent tools of power, such as coins, seals, writs, and liveries, possessed symbolic as well as practical meaning (see also Mark Whittow’s chapter in this volume); but it is hard to deny that ceremonial and persuasive programmes were dwarfed in volume and significance by institutional forms of rule, by official procedures, and by inter-personal networks of service and alliance.74 European governments issued laws and proclamations, but — particularly before the fourteenth century — they took little care to supervise their performance. Some regimes sponsored texts that advertised their claims to authority — the 70 For these points, see Blockmans, History of Power, p. 18 and chapter 5; A. Holenstein, ‘Introduction’, in Empowering Interactions, ed. by Blockmans et al., pp. 1–34. 71 This is well captured in the essays of E.A.R. Brown, Politics and Institutions in Capetian France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1991), and see also Genet, ‘État moderne’, pp. 265–269. 72 Watts, Making of Polities, pp. 122–129. 73 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 328–334 and passim. 74 Menache, Vox Dei, chapter 7.

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Siete Partidas of Alfonso X of Castile, for instance, a Roman-style law code and set of political prescriptions that made the ruler appear as emperor of Spain; or the Grandes Chroniques produced at the French royal abbey of St. Denis, linking the thirteenth-century French kings to Charlemagne, Clovis, and ancient Gaul — but there was very little attempt to enforce, officialize or even supervise this kind of knowledge.75 While possession of governmental expertise was a social asset, it was not an asset conferred in the first place by government itself — agents learned the routines of law, accounting, and public writing (dictamen, diplomatic) from essentially autonomous institutions, such as universities and business schools, or from one another (see also chapters by Grevin/ Bossler and Ronconi). Under these circumstances, the materials produced by government — orders and ordinances, letters, even knowledge of political affairs — quickly became public property. Regimes intervened to maintain the confidentiality of counsel to the ruler, to promote positive views of their activities, and to repress slander and public scandal, but otherwise they were not concerned to protect governmental information in the Song manner. The Roman Church was not so different from secular states, despite its greater concern with managing and mediating sacred knowledge. During the era of so-called papal reform, c.1050–1120, the centralization process focused on differentiating the clergy from the laity, linking them together, and placing them under papal control via a system of episcopal hierarchies, councils, legates, letter-writing and preaching campaigns. A second, but overlapping, strand, beginning in the 1070s, centred on the systematization of Church (canon) law, the articulation of papal jurisdiction, and, mainly after 1200, the development of a tax system and the extension of papal authority over appointments. A third strand attempted definition of the faith (notably at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215) and sought to coordinate pastoral activity and to police the beliefs of the laity. In certain respects, therefore, the focus of attention shifted from the governance of the clergy towards supervision of the spiritual and moral lives of the whole of society, though both concerns were present at all times. In these ways, the Church stands out as a plausible counterpart to late imperial Chinese regimes, wresting administration from the old aristocracy and centring it in networks of learned officers whose access to authority was supervised by other officers, 75 A. MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500 (London: Palgrave, 1977), pp. 99–100; M. Bull, ed., France in the Central Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 40. For general insights on law, see A. Padoa-Schioppa, Legislation and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997), especially the essay by A. Gouron.

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supported by authoritative texts, and subject to rules and standards (and even, in a much less elaborate way, governed by examinations).76 In some respects, indeed, the Latin Church went further than Chinese empires: it made fairly determined attempts to police belief and practice, and — in particular — to intervene against heresy, the open defiance of ecclesiastical authority. Heresy has been seen as the principal driver of efforts to def ine and propagate the faith in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The ecclesiastical hierarchy was most determined to shape the production and dissemination of Christian knowledge when it was directly under attack, or when debates among its members threatened to get out of hand.77 This draws attention to a second fundamental point: that spiritual authority and agency were very widely distributed within the Church. The papacy did not have straightforward control over religious belief and practice; rather, the faith was shaped, even invented, in multiple centres — in cathedrals and universities, in parishes and courts — and by a host of different people, including many who were only loosely under ecclesiastical supervision, such as leading theologians, rulers, and individual prophets or holy men (see also the chapter by Gowers/ Tsui). Ideas and texts gained authority from their collective acceptance by quite broad groups of intellectuals and professionals more than by processes of central authorization.78 Although the hierarchy could assemble significant forces against Christian activists who broke ranks, it was generally obliged to proceed consultatively and tolerantly, declaring principles of faith only occasionally at huge assemblies, such as Church Councils, seeking to absorb independent Christian movements where it was unnecessary or impossible to defeat them, and attempting to meet misinformation with programmes of preaching and publication, even though these programmes were difficult or impossible to manage. While coherence was sometimes possible — notably during the pontif icate of Innocent III, r. 1198–1216 — and while broadly agreed and teachable norms of Christianity were established in the course of the thirteenth century, the Roman Church was 76 Numerous surveys of these developments include, Southern, Western Society and the Church, pp. 34–44; C. Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). For a recent essay placing them alongside Chinese developments, R.I. Moore, ‘Medieval Christianity in a World Historical Perspective’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, ed. by J.H. Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 76–90, here esp. pp. 81–82. 77 R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 6–11, 23–27, and passim. 78 Moore, First European Revolution, pp. 112–126 and chapter 4 generally; Swanson, Religion and Devotion, pp. 42ff., 51–52.

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generally a weakly coordinated and multi-cellular structure, and attempts to strengthen central direction were typically unsuccessful, especially after about 1300.79 Like the other rulers of Europe, then, the popes had to manage their affairs in an environment where authority and agency were scattered; as a result, they typically fought shy of programmatic attempts at imperial control. Local Intermediaries in Medieval Europe Just as in the late imperial Chinese setting, the official networks of European states and churches merged with the rest of society. Intermediaries abounded, whether one looks from the perspective of power (the absorption of official authority for unofficial purposes), or from the perspective of skills (the possession of technologies of authority, such as the capacity to read and write appropriate forms of Latin), or from the perspective of knowledge (a grasp of the law, of ancient culture, or of Christian theology). Tacitly, but also often formally, states and churches acknowledged their dependence on social power, though — somewhat ambivalently — they also tried to protect the distinction between officers (or clergy) and private (or lay) interests. European secular states sought to provide, supervise or coordinate services that were usable by their would-be subjects. It is not surprising, then, that these services were extensively manipulated by consumers. State officers were usually linked to local networks, or were at least responsive to pressure from them. In most of Europe, independent notaries, lawyers, and judges provided legal services under licence; taxes were characteristically farmed, or — if they were centrally collected — were swiftly redistributed to leading aristocrats and oligarchs; armies were federations of aristocrats, operating — typically loosely — under the headship of royal or civic paymasters. 80 A great deal of state power was 79 For an excellent account of the history of the Church after c.1300, see F. Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), chapter 1, and for stimulating remarks, see Ian Forrest, ‘Continuity and Change in the Institutional Church’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, ed. by J.H. Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 185–200. 80 For legal services, see M. Bellomo, The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000–1800 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), pp. 44–46 and chapter 4 (and, for notaries specifically, L. Nussdorfer, Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); for tax, M. Bonney, ed., Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapters 2–5; and for armies, P. Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. by M. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chapters 2–4.

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openly shared with the leaders of society through systems of office and licence, through representative assemblies which dignified the great estates (nobles, prelates, oligarchs), through repeated deference to the interests of great lords and their families, and through a less open responsiveness to the interests of prominent commercial groups.81 This kind of sharing went further and deeper than was typical in Song China, and perhaps for three reasons. One is the recognition accorded by states to aristocracies and urban communities, acknowledging their social and political status in ways that allowed them a degree of autonomy and exemption. Although rulers insisted on the loyalty due to them from lords and found ways of making it clear that the liberties of cities were conditional, their actions and those of others tended to dignify these subordinate powers, granting them a legitimacy and independence that their Chinese counterparts did not have.82 As we have seen, these basic resources were enhanced in the period by processes of state formation which occurred as readily in lordships, principalities, provinces and towns as they did in the centres of kingdoms, so a second reason for extensive power-sharing was the multiplicity of jurisdictions and configurations continuously available to smaller powers: rulers were forced to allow extensive mediation of their authority, readily granting rights and powers to win allies across the highly contested territories they claimed to rule.83 A third reason relates to the main objectives of these states, which, as we have seen, were essentially utilitarian, especially in the earlier part of the period. Rulers wanted recognition of their authority in the provision of a series of secular political functions, and this made them readier to share, provided their right to grant and supervise was acknowledged. Even so, they took frequent action to protect the official character of their agents and possessions, policing corruption in occasional show trials (while condoning it most of the time), resuming assets on the grounds that they were ‘public’ or ‘imperial’ (and then re-granting them),

81 B. Weiler, ‘Politics’, in The Central Middle Ages, ed. by D. Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chapter 3; H. Zmora, Monarchy, Aristocracy, and the State in Europe, 1300–1800 (London: Routledge, 2001), chapters 1–3; Reinhardt, Power Elites, passim; Hébert, Parlementer, passim; Watts, Making of Polities, pp. 122ff., 244ff. 82 M. Bush, Noble Privilege (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chapter 6 and pp. 302–319. 83 Watts, Making of Polities, pp. 122–129, 205–254, 282–286.

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licensing infringements of their rights, so as to imply that they were in charge of the process of delegation.84 The position of the Church hierarchy in relation to intermediaries more closely resembles that of the Song and Ming regimes. As we have seen, the international church-state of the eleventh century onwards was founded on an insistence that clerical officers — clergy — were a separate estate, with unique power and knowledge. While, in reality, the Church was entangled with lay society in multiple ways and at every social level, and ‘the Church’ was taken to include the whole ‘congregation of the faithful’, its leaders generally insisted on the distinctiveness of the clergy and often moved to defend the ecclesiastical order from lay infiltration.85 To some extent, this position was underwritten by lay people themselves — they typically wanted a spiritual clergy, for a host of ideological and practical reasons — but it was also undermined by the close fit between ecclesiastical provision and the needs of society: friars and parish priests provided fundamental services to small communities and officialized their enthusiasms; friars and monasteries did the same for wealthier clienteles, supporting families, protecting wealth and title, providing spiritual and secretarial services.86 The skills and technologies required for the practice of religion — notably literacy in Latin — became more widely available within society from around the twelfth century. Almost everyone had access to someone who could read by 1200, it has been estimated, and it was possible for large numbers of people to live and earn as literate laymen — as clerks, notaries, merchants, estate administrators, financial officers and so on — by the same period.87 So it was that lay-clerical distinctions were eroded by the growth of literate practice, but these distinctions were also affected by the way spiritual leaders behaved. Reformers, drawing partly on the scriptural tension between apostles and pharisees, denounced wicked priests before lay audiences; they and others embraced holy persons — female mystics, hermits and others, whose exemplary lives seemed to make them living saints, regardless of 84 J. Sabapathy, Officers and Accountability in Medieval England, 1170–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. chapter 1; P.S. Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity (London: Macmillan, 1968), chapter 2; R. Kroeze, A. Vitória, and G. Geltner, eds., Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), chapters 5–7. 85 G. Macy, ‘Was there a “The Church” in the Middle Ages?’, Studies in Church History 32 (1996): pp. 107–116. 86 Hamilton, Church and People, chapters 2–4; B. Thompson, ‘Locality and Ecclesiastical Polity: The Late Medieval Church between Duality and Integration’, in Political Society in Later Medieval England, ed. by B. Thompson and J. Watts (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), chapter 6. 87 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 240–246.

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their lack of clerical status (see the chapter by Gowers/ Tsui). Equally, the evangelical instincts of many churchmen spread Christian and ecclesiastical knowledge far and wide, especially from the thirteenth century onwards. While it remained the case that only ordained clerics could perform key spiritual functions — the sacraments — later medieval lay people were well-equipped to pray and to live in ways likely to attract divine favour. Books and preaching taught them Christian morality, cosmology, and history; and, while they could not normally preach or teach on matters of theology, they could offer a form of Christian leadership. These religious lay people were analogous to those Chinese literati who had not passed the examinations and thus remained outside the official networks of the state, and the boundary between them and the clergy proper was blurred even further by large numbers of para-ecclesiastical figures — clerks in minor orders, officers of church courts, sellers of indulgences, university graduates, and so on. In all, there was a very extensive sharing of religious knowledge and agency across society; ‘Christendom’ thus had a certain practical reality, and — as the mass movements associated with the Crusades, with Cathar or Hussite heresy, and with the Reformation powerfully demonstrated — it had considerable political potential.88 Drawing these points together, it should be clear that, while churches and states sought to preserve a distinction between their officers and the rest of society, power, knowledge, and technical skills were shared across these boundaries by a large class of people who could be considered as intermediaries. But it is not clear that these ‘intermediaries’ were a distinct group — almost anyone of any consequence was likely to hold some kind of office attached to state or church, or at least to have some kind of influence over how that office was exercised. Given this, and recalling that there were so many competing authorities in both the secular and the ecclesiastical sphere, the atmosphere in which political communication took place was remarkably diffuse: there was no single, incontestable centre, as there was in imperial China. But, for all that, it would not do to over-emphasize the fragmentation of European political society. While the extensive mediation of central authority contributed to the political conflicts and spiritual debates of the period, it also played a part in the long-term trend towards 88 Edward Davis makes the argument that Chinese religious experts similarly included a range of types, from monks and priests who were registered by the monasteries, temples, and court, to shamans and local cult leaders — their power mimicking the layers of other kinds of intermediaries: examination degree and office holders versus local scholars, etc. Id., Society and the Supernatural in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).

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the consolidation of regional states over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Lords, knights, and towns acknowledged the rights of central authorities in order to enjoy the benefits of power-sharing. They became politically and financially dependent on these benefits, and they adopted habits of negotiation and representation that strengthened the political and constitutional fabric of emerging states.89 To some extent, the Church was in the same position — its outreach activities and its social utility embedded it deeply in lay society — but, partly because of its very size and complexity, it was vulnerable to tensions between its constituent parts — national churches and the papacy; cardinals and the papacy; monasteries, friars, and bishops — and also to head-on collisions with secular powers who not infrequently asserted spiritual rights, as well as authority over justice, finance, space and so on. Over the course of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, the trend was for the authority of secular rulers to advance over the churches in their territories, and so it was that states and intermediaries promoted one kind of solidarity at the expense of another.90 The Literati and Political Community For all its salience in work on Chinese history, where it reflects the notion of shi (cultured gentlemen), the term ‘literati’ is largely foreign to historical writing on Europe. While scholars have looked both at the audiences for literary texts and at the cultural interests of powerful (and other) classes, these approaches have not, until very recently, disturbed a tendency to think of the political activity of oligarchs and aristocrats in essentially material and institutional terms.91 Equally, while the links between ‘clergy’ and ‘literacy’, or between ‘literacy’ and Latinity, have been noted, the indeterminate nature of these things has been emphasized, and writing on literate culture tends to stress the variety of forms of literacy and their spread beyond 89 Watts, Making of Polities, pp. 94ff., 123–124, 250–254, 282–286; Genet ‘Etat moderne’, pp. 265–269. 90 J.A.F. Thomson, Popes and Princes, 1417–1517: Politics and Polity in the Late Medieval Church (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980). 91 Contrast, for instance, the series of ESF-funded studies on ‘The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th to 18th Centuries’, edited by J.-P. Genet and W. Blockmans in the 1990s (https:// global.oup.com/academic/content/series/o/the-origins-of-the-modern-state-in-europe-13th-to18th-centuries-omse/?cc=gb&lang=en&) with the series on ‘Le Pouvoir Symbolique en Occident’, edited by J.-P. Genet in the 2010s (http://www.laprocure.com/collections/pouvoir-symboliqueoccident-1300-1640-0-320523.html). Both accessed 25 May 2020.

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authoritative centres or particular class groups.92 So it is that writing on European history has typically avoided the fusion of literateness, status, and class that is central to writing on imperial Chinese history. But could there, even so, be European analogues for the Chinese literati? And, if so, how were they connected — to one another, to the state (or church), and to a wider European or Christian culture? We have seen that there were groups of people whose activities were particularly connected to the creation, exchange, and dissemination of authoritative knowledge, typically through a mixture of writing and speech. These people ranged from scholars, jurists, and theologians, through the ranks of the clergy — and notably the orders of friars, established in the decades around 1200 to spread Christian knowledge through preaching — to include secular professionals and cultivated citizens or aristocrats.93 These ‘communicators’ were the main producers of political information, creating and circulating a mixture of instructions, commentaries, and attempts at persuasion and entertainment.94 We have noted that they were only partly controlled and coordinated — monks in networked monasteries; scholars operating under fairly limited supervision in a growing number of schools and universities; clerks employed in royal or urban chanceries (but free to write for other patrons too); educated gentlemen, like Dante or Chaucer; friars with positions in cities, courts, and households, like the great Catalan political and ecclesiastical writer, Francesc Eiximenis (d. c.1409); fifteenth-century humanists (students of classical literature) and their twelfth-century equivalents; urban and monastic chroniclers; lawyers, notaries, and judges (the last of them reaching decisions on what good law was through processes of debate, rather than through deference to authority). A culture of letter-writing and copying, a common language and many shared rhetorical and grammatical assumptions enabled extensive communication between these people, both during their lives and — through text — after their deaths (see chapters 92 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 226–230, 331–332; L. Ross, ‘Communication in the Middle Ages’, in Handbook of Medieval Culture, vol. 1, ed. by A. Classen (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 203–231. 93 For overviews, see R.W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapters 4–5; Moore, First European Revolution, chapter 4; Morris, Medieval Media; J. Verger, Men of Learning in Europe at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. L. Neal and S. Rendall (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2000); Bellomo, Common Legal Past, pp. 44–46; D. Rundle, ed., Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2012); D.L. D’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); J.D. Cotts, Europe’s Long Twelfth Century (London: Macmillan, 2013), chapter 4. 94 The term used by Menache, Vox Dei, p. 4, where she notes their blurred boundaries.

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by Haseldine and Grevin/ Bossler). Inasmuch as they wrote in Latin, they participated in, and reproduced, a common European culture. Increasingly, from around the thirteenth century, they wrote in vernacular languages to reach national audiences, but that did not detach them from the field of panEuropean exchanges: vernacular cultures were continually informed by fresh material from the Latin world (and higher status, or more widely understood, vernaculars — like French — fed lower-status or more obscure ones, like English).95 So there was, to some extent, an internationally connected, but minimally controlled, learned class, which re-circulated ideas and opinions according to principles of demand and supply, and which shared perceptions of what was important and authoritative (see also chapter by Whittow). These people had a certain amount in common with the Chinese literati (see chapter by Chu/ Morche). Many of them were ‘scholar-officials’, and they typically enjoyed a close relationship with power-holders — usually as servants, but also, in a sense as counsellors. Many spoke to the laity on behalf of authorities (as translators, as public poets or chroniclers, as prophets and diviners). Others focused their attention on the clergy or other kinds of officers. They were also widely networked — Eiximenis, mentioned above, spent time in Oxford, Paris, and Toulouse, as well as Valencia and Catalonia; Chaucer travelled in France, Spain, Flanders, and Italy, and may have met Petrarch and Boccaccio.96 It is debatable, though, whether these communicators can be seen as an elite in quite the same way as their Chinese counterparts. They typically had access to powerful people, and they benefited from that — the clergy among them often acquired rich and important offices, while laymen attracted pensions, commissions, sinecures and so on — but relatively few of them were well born in their own right, and they seem to have been less closely connected to powerful landed/ commercial dynasties than their Chinese counterparts.97 Nor did they experience the same solidarity as their Chinese counterparts — where, in Song China, the formation of literati identities and networks ‘trumped state-building’, in Europe, communicators and other kinds of intermediaries 95 C.C. Smith, ‘The Vernacular’, in New Cambridge Medieval History, V, c.1198–c.1300, ed. by D. Abulafia (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chapter 3; N. Havely, ‘Literature in Italian, French and English: Uses and Muses of the Vernacular’, in New Cambridge Medieval History, VI, c.1300–1415, ed. by M. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 12. 96 ‘Vida y Obra de Francesc Eiximenis’, http://www.antiblavers.org/galeria/albums/userpics/10223/VIDAOBRAEIX-ESP.pdf (accessed 22 May 2020), pp. 1–19; D. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 97 Verger, Men of Learning, chapter 7.

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merged imperceptibly into other frameworks — regional states, families, clienteles — and their contribution to political and constitutional developments was neither uniform nor coordinated.98 Equally, the writings of European ‘literati’ fed into increasingly commercialized networks of copying, translation, and publication. There was a book trade well before the age of print, and ownership of books, both secular and religious, was a mark of status for lay elites — so our communicators spoke not just to one another, but to a wider European beau monde which was structured by other interests.99 Was there a single point at which they took over the production of authoritative information, as it seems to have occurred in the world of the Southern Song after the cataclysm of 1126–1127? Surely not, because there had never been the same kind of central control of information in either church or state in Europe; rather, essentially these same kinds of people had always been in charge of the production and circulation of authoritative knowledge, even if the precise modalities changed over time. The world of Stephen Jaeger’s ‘Scholar-Courtiers’ of 950–1150, or Julian Haseldine’s monastic ‘friendship networks’ of the twelfth century (see Haseldine’s chapter below), was not so very different from the thirteenth-century world of the friars, or the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century environments of Jacques Verger’s ‘gens de savoir’ or Peter Burke’s humanists.100 What did change, as we shall see, was the growth of publics; but while that major development must have helped to shape the activities of these ‘literati’, it also enveloped them in wider spheres of political communication, driven by multiple voices and beyond the capacity of any elite group fully to direct. What notions of political community were put across by these European ‘literati’?101 In contrast to those of their Song counterparts, their ideas 98 The quotation is from P.J. Smith, ‘Eurasian Transformations of the Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: The View from Song China, 960–1279’, in Eurasian Transformations, ed. by Arnason and Wittrock, pp. 279–308, here p. 308. See also Moore’s essay in the same volume, which argues for the separation of European literati from their families (via the church, but also for their embedding in state structures). He develops this argument in ‘The First Great Divergence?’, Medieval Worlds 1 (2015): pp. 16–24. 99 A. Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), chapter 1. 100 C.S. Jaeger, Scholars and Courtiers: Intellectuals and Society in the Medieval West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); A. Power, Roger Bacon and the Defence of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 2; P. Burke, ‘The Spread of Italian Humanism’, in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, ed. by A. Goodman and A. MacKay (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–22. 101 Among surveys of medieval political thought, see J. Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, c.300–1450 (London: Routledge, 1996) and A.J. Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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were overwhelmingly diverse. Thanks to the Greek and Roman roots of medieval culture, overlaid with Christian and Arabic influences, politics was a major theme of thought and writing, but — for the same reasons, and also because of the rich range of political formats present in Europe — political society was imagined in a wide variety of ways. It could be divided by function, as in estates models, or by hierarchies of wealth and status. It could be seen in organic terms as a body politic; or as a voluntarily created collectivity, a res publica or, more loosely, a communitas or as a congregation of the faithful. Churchmen approached political society from a cosmological point of view — as the scene of an earthly pilgrimage, in which dominion had become necessary on account of original sin; as the condition of humanity in its ‘third age’, in which the apocalypse was just around the corner; or as a perfectible civitas Dei, provided the authority of the spiritual order was duly recognized. Political society in Europe could be figured as a monarchy, or as a city, as a fellowship of Christians, threatened by pagans and heretics, or as a space of chivalrous quest and adventure. Its analogies to the household and the family were noted and explored. Many argued that humanity was governed by two swords, the lay power and the spiritual power, but there was little agreement on which was higher or on whether the clergy should enjoy any temporal authority at all. There were arguments that people should be ruled by kings, in the interests of unity; or ‘politically’, that is, collectively; or by laws; or perhaps by a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and ‘polity’. In most theories, authority came from God above, but in Roman Law it came in the f irst place from the populus, while in some Spanish political theories it derived from natural right. But for all this variety there were some important unities in the political writings of European communicators. For one thing, they wrote in a shared group of languages, genres, and formats. Many of their insights and approaches were compatible with one another; some could easily be occluded, and some variation or discrepancy between neighbouring views could be absorbed without diff iculty. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they consistently presented human society as organized and placed under forms of rule. This common ground helps to explain how the European ‘literati’ were able to contribute both to the consolidation of secular states and national churches, and even to the preservation of certain forms of international Christendom. They performed a role similar to Chinese literati in promoting the political and cultural solidarities of their time, but the way they did so reflects the multiple sources of authority and information to which they had access and the range of authorities and publics for whom they wrote.

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European Transformations We have chosen to resolve the challenges of comparison by considering European phenomena in the light of Chinese patterns, but what if we had approached the problem the other way around? What key turning points in the sphere of political communication might we have led with, in place of Song centralization and its various legacies in the cataclysms of the 1120s, 1270s, and 1360s? Three stand out: The first is the development of political dialogue, a facet of the process of centralization in secular states and the Roman Church, which, as we have seen, loosely paralleled developments in Song China. Part and parcel of the assertiveness of these regimes was their attachment to providing justice and other political services to the people they were trying to subordinate; equally, they found it necessary — especially the secular states — to consult the leading powers beneath them, and/ or to find ways of eliciting their consent. These practices meant the attraction of complaints and appeals towards political centres, and the creation of institutions to process them. Such developments, in turn, helped to establish the idea of the secular state as a mechanism for delivering public benefits to a large population, and to generate spaces and texts in which that idea was much ventilated — parliaments, proclamations, works of political comment and debate, and so on. The jurisdictional structures of the Roman Church, in their way just as responsive to upward pressure, conveyed rather different resonances — of an all-powerful ruler, providing satisfaction to individuals through a partly routinized hierarchical system — but, in its pastoral activity, the Church engaged in much the same kind of ‘outreach’ as secular states, ministering extensively and rather programmatically to the laity from at least the thirteenth century, and generating a similar sense of ‘Holy Church’ as the ark of salvation for human society. And so it was that thirteenth-century regimes expanded political dialogue and generated the sense of a reciprocal and collective relationship between people and ruler.102 A second development went hand in hand with the growth of political dialogue. This was the creation of written vernaculars and their increasing use by secular and spiritual authorities between the thirteenth and the 102 For a classic treatment of this development, see B. Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, trans. by J. Vale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), chapter 11. For an example of how a parallel could have been developed had we constructed the chapter along those lines, see H. De Weerdt, ‘Considering Citizenship in Imperial Chinese History’, Citizenship Studies 23, no. 3 (2019): pp. 256–276.

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fifteenth centuries, moves which — as Jean-Philippe Genet demonstrates in his chapter — reflected the deepening interaction between government and society. While governments continued to keep records in Latin, they increasingly produced or received written material in local languages, which themselves were increasingly adapted and standardized for the purposes of writing. This vernacularization of government and society arose from several different factors. One was the pastoral orientation of the post-1200 Church with its emphasis on ministry to the laity expressed in vernacular preaching and the associated production of sermon collections, devotional treatises, and scripture geared towards lay readers and listeners. Another factor lay in the responsiveness of governments to the spread of lay vernacular literacy, for example in the receipt of written vernacular petitions and wills, or in the production of letters and proclamations in vernacular languages. A third factor was independent action by creative writers wishing to appeal to non-Latinate groups, such as religious women, urban and aristocratic elites, or even, from the end of the fourteenth century, wider populations. In the early 1300s, Dante revived the classical role of ‘poeta’ — the poet/ prophet who speaks to the people in a volgare illustre — and his example was copied by others in Italy, France, England, and elsewhere, each of them conscious of creating a national literature, made up of fine writing and communitarian advice for whole peoples.103 Written vernaculars were an important stimulus for the translation and vulgarization of authoritative texts, a growing activity across the later Middle Ages, and one that underpinned the commercial production of books, ultimately, from the 1450s onwards, in printed form. The third development, also related, was the growth of self-conscious publics, defined by the acceptance (and use) of a common authority and its institutions, awareness of a common history and identity, and promotion of common values and customs.104 While these publics could be sectioned and stratified — specialized audiences for particular kinds of text — they could also be very extensive, often including the mass of the population in this first age of popular ferment and revolt. Wider publics had been brought into being by the kind of political dialogue discussed above, assisted by the growth of written vernaculars, preaching, and propaganda, expanding book production, and other integrating processes, such as taxation, mass protest, more standardized forms of justice and so on. The public communication of 103 Havely, ‘Literature in Italian’, pp. 262ff., and note John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1392), described by the author as ‘a bok for Engelondes sake’ (Prologue, line 24). 104 Menache, Vox Dei, chapter 7; Genet, ‘Etat moderne’, pp. 269ff.; Watts, Making of Polities, pp. 148–153, 270ff., 381ff.

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knowledge meant its re-appropriation — often for dissenting purposes.105 A common stock of authoritative opinion, derived from books and sermons which were mostly produced by clerics, was re-purposed by lay organizations and interests, in petitions, manifestoes, poems and ballads, gossip and the like. By the fourteenth century, European governments were becoming increasingly conscious of the ‘pressure of the public’ on their affairs.106 They increasingly sought to shape public opinion, with both states and churches making more systematic attempts to police deviant words and prosecute sedition; to def ine doctrine more precisely and ensure that everyone knew it; to censor offensive literature and to disseminate propaganda. By the fifteenth century, they were establishing spies, collecting diplomatic information, and sowing misinformation. By the sixteenth, they required mass oaths of obedience to articles of faith, such as the royal succession or the dogmas of the local church.107 In all of these developments, ‘literati’/ communicators were active players, advancing the claims of centres of authority, both secular and ecclesiastical, and helping to define — and, in certain ways, subordinate — the groups of people under the sway of these centres. Many of them promoted local versions of a broadly common culture — national and civic histories, national epics, collections of customs, vernacular materials for worship or spiritual reflection — even as others continued to write in universal terms, defending the rights of pope or emperor or Christendom, advancing common standards of Latinity, or a common curriculum of natural science or literae humaniores. In many ways, then, these people did the same work as their Chinese counterparts, but that raises a big question of why? Why did a diverse, distributed and largely uncontrolled group of communicators — living in a situation of competing organizations, each with a fairly relaxed approach to information management, against a background of considerable jurisdictional, political, and communicative plurality — help to affirm processes of political coordination? In part, they did so because of the long-term dynamics of political conflict and polity-formation, which meant the gradual emergence of power-structures (regnal states or polities) that had a competitive advantage 105 For a recent exploration of this phenomenon, see F. Titone, ‘The Concept of Disciplined Dissent and its Deployment: A Methodology’, in Disciplined Dissent, ed. by id. (Rome: Viella, 2016), introduction. 106 Watts, ‘Pressure of the Public’. 107 For example, P. Lake and S. Pincus, eds., The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); F. de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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over others (towns, churches, empires, lordships etc) and/ or found means of incorporating, subjecting, or excluding them. Communicators sought to mediate authority, in every sense of that word. They were accustomed to relations of service and they often sought prestigious locales from which to address publics — these vertical relations seem to have trumped any solidarities the literati felt among themselves, even as clergy (though that did not prevent them from continuing to communicate laterally and internationally). As ‘states’ gained in political capacity and dominance, so communicators gravitated towards their centres and affirmed their influence.108 Inevitably, they also expressed other allegiances and interests, and reflected tensions. They frequently sought to position and reform central authority, though in doing so they acknowledged its significance. But there were cultural factors too. One was the prominence of the new vernaculars as the perfect means of communication between poets/ teachers and peoples, which was the highest calling for both secular and spiritual writers; this attracted ‘literati’ to a form of address that, in itself, helped to def ine local and national communities. Another factor was the sharing of motifs, genres, forms of address, even institutions of communication between different power-structures — most notably between churches and states, but also between secular bodies of different size (so that cities, kingdoms, empires, lordships borrowed prerogatives, rituals, and images from one another). Works like the English poem Piers Plowman (1370s-1380s) or the contemporaneous French Songe du Vergier located universal moral and theological debates in clearly defined regnal and political settings. The f irst of these, for instance, mingles the widest moral and theological questions — how to do good, how to be saved — with a vividly-realized portrait of political corruption at Westminster, and a highly topical account of the English political classes — king, lords, commons and clergy — as they were in the 1370s: it thus unites the universal fruits of European culture with a localized and politicized setting (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Dante’s Inferno; Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue Invectif — exploring the sufferings of France in the Hundred Years War — do similar things).109 In a like way, works of 108 For these points, see Verger, Men of Learning, chapters 4, 5, and 9. 109 A book comparing these works, and others like them, across Europe would be a signal addition to the literature on political culture, but they are typically discussed in national settings. See, for instance, H. Barr, ed., The Piers Plowman Tradition (London: Guernsey, 1993); S. Rigby, ed., Historians on Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); R. Jacoff, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. chapters 14–15; J.-C. Mühlethaler, ‘Alain Chartier, Political Writer’, in A Companion to Alain

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vernacular Humanism transferred Roman republicanism to other locales, as Leonardo Bruni’s History of the Florentine People (1442) did for Florence or Hernando del Pulgar’s Claros Varones de Castilla (1486) did, with suitable modifications, for Castile. More activist material similarly linked the content of international culture to the specif ic circumstances of individual polities: the poems and manifestoes of popular and aristocratic rebels — often conjoined in the later Middle Ages — mingled techniques, ethics, and images drawn from contemporary sermons, national history, and folklore with recipes for reform of the kingdom. In this way, the writings and sermons of Jan Hus, for example, combined the ideas of dissenting scholastics from across Europe — notably the English Wyclif — with themes in Czech piety (which were themselves local variations on international norms) to create a Hussite repertoire which felt local to Bohemia.110 Sir John Fortescue and Claude de Seyssel mingled international juristic scholarship with Aristotelian ideas and local institutions and customs to produce foundational constitutional treatises for England and France respectively.111 Magnate rebels in the civil wars of f ifteenth-century kingdoms, used very similar formats and motifs in conflicts which were presented as national, and designed to advance the common weal of England, the bien public of France or the cosa publica of Castile.112 Meanwhile, a certain tendency in public writing to identify right and goodness with central and institutional authority, and to associate disorder, sin, and corruption with subordinate, or local, or dissenting powers may also have helped to aff irm centres. Even literature that directly subverted this tendency — outlaw literature, fabliaux, legal material protecting private or provincial rights, heretical writing — often tried to cite some form of central authority as cover for its claims. In all these ways, then, the ‘literati’ were part and parcel of the state-making, or polity-making, trend of the European later Middle Ages, even when individuals among them continued to promote more universal frameworks. Chartier (c.1385–1430): Father of French Eloquence, ed. by D. Delogu, J.E. McRae, and E. Cayley (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2015), pp. 163–180. 110 T.A. Fudge, Jan Hus: Religious Reform and the Social Revolution in Bohemia (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010). 111 J.H. Hexter, ‘Claude de Seyssel and Normal Politics in the Age of Machiavelli’, in Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance, ed. by C.S. Singleton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), pp. 389–415. 112 Watts, Making of Polities, pp. 3–6. For examples involving popular rebels, see J. Dumolyn et al., eds., The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).

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Conclusion As shown in our review of the recent literature on political communication and mediation in medieval Chinese and European history, in both the European and Chinese context the centralization of political power and the incorporation of local elite power were processes that went hand in hand and to some extent reinforced each other.113 We have discussed the roles of different kinds of intermediaries between state structures and local communities in these intertwined processes and have done so comparatively in order to better understand the different modalities and effects of the reproduction and appropriation of central or state authority in each context. In the Chinese case there was a clear difference between intermediaries who functioned mainly at the local level and those whose reach encompassed local and empire-wide networks. Clerks, constables, bowmen, notaries, and litigation masters grew in number and gained higher profiles locally as a result of the commercialization of large parts of the Song territories and the state’s attempt to steer commercial growth. Even though these intermediaries were not a formal part of the state bureaucracy, we argued that they played a significant role in extending the state’s reach. They did so through both the provision of administrative services and the dissemination of state values and practices locally. They communicated legal standards, administrative regulations and procedures, and state rituals to audiences throughout the Chinese territories. European intermediaries also circulated the values of states and churches and embedded their procedures across society, but — in a more multiplex political space — their record was more ambivalent, tending to absorb official frameworks into local networks. In societies where everyone of consequence held offices or influenced their exercise, and where states and churches frequently deferred to the holders of social power, intermediaries were not a recognizable group; they merged into the social order. Mediation between state and society was thus a less 113 For the early scholarship on the construction of a powerful modern state in Song times, see H. Miyakawa, ‘An Outline of the Naitō Hypothesis and Its Effects on Japanese Studies of China’, Far Eastern Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1955): pp. 533–552; J. Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (1866–1934) (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984). For a contrary view that portrayed the late imperial Chinese state as weak and incapable of securing a sound fiscal base and of shaping local politics, see esp. M. Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tale: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch’ing China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). For Song, see also R. Hymes, ‘Song China, 960–1279’, in Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching, ed. by A.T. Ambree and C. Gluck (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 336–351; H. De Weerdt and W. Blockmans, ‘The Diverging Legacies of Classical Empires in China and Europe’, European Review 24 (2016): pp. 306–324.

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freighted activity in Europe, though both states and churches could at times emphasize the boundaries between their officers and the people, subjects or laity. When compared to local intermediaries and their European equivalents, Chinese literati or scholar-officials were in a class of their own. They were unusual in that their networks allowed them to mediate at local, regional, and central levels. Compared to their European equivalents, they formed a single class, whose prerogative it was to mediate, reproduce, and, in some sense, own imperial knowledge; the business of political communication helped to define and affirm the social distinction of the literati, even as it propagated imperial authority. In Europe, on the other hand, where political mediation and political communication were different things, the production and exchange of authoritative knowledge was less centrally controlled, and the content of that knowledge was frequently transferred across social boundaries. Communicators were a diverse group — functionally similar, but drawn from a range of social backgrounds, typically mobile, and often attached to princely or urban courts or other institutions — and their communicative activity was correspondingly diffuse, tending to create and address large publics rather than to affirm the status of a bounded group of literati. It is not altogether surprising that the political attachments of the Chinese literati appear to have become very explicitly linked to the unified territorial empire.114 As local elites, their commitments ranged from personal and familial interests to informal local networks, but following the geopolitical crises faced by the Song state in the East Asian interstate system of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Song literati articulated political attachments to an empire that was imagined as a transhistorical unified territorial state. More unexpected, perhaps, is the tendency of European communicators also to promote what the anthropologist Mary Helms called ‘superordinate centres’. In the long run, the main beneficiaries of these processes were region-sized secular states, but the same dynamics also advanced panEuropean bodies, such as the Western church in its heyday between about 1100 and about 1400, and the Latin-based cultural formation that would come to be known as ‘the republic of letters’. Why did mediators and communicators operating in such a fragmented, unsupervised and contested political space generate areas of unity, at both regnal and international levels? The 114 Yu Ji justified collaboration with Mongol rulers on a similar basis, see J. Langlois, ‘Yu Chi and His Mongol Sovereign: The Scholar as Apologist’, The Journal of Asian Studies 38, no. 1 (1978): pp. 99–116.

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development is all the more remarkable in that European regimes seem to have been less interested in the promotion of symbolic authority than their Chinese counterparts. These patterns must relate partly to structural differences. The major mediating elites in Europe were, above all, aristocrats or plutocrats and their networks, while the closest equivalents to the Chinese literati, were a kind of floating service class. Communicators were certainly not powerless: they were often linked to one another; they possessed influence over rulers, mediators, and publics; and they sometimes gained the resources and connections that allowed their heirs either to retain their footing in official hierarchies or to enter the aristocracy themselves. But their lack of local roots and connections is surely important, not least in assuring their adherence to central authorities and perhaps in strengthening the antilocalist inclinations of these same authorities. It may also be important that these modestly born communicators were more dispensable to authorities than locally established mediators, whose power might have to be tolerated; once again, this helped to preserve an ever-blurred distinction between official authority and its institutions on the one hand, and social power, on the other. Ultimately, for quite different reasons and in quite different circumstances, Chinese literati and European communicators played parallel roles in the promotion of large-scale authorities in both Europe and the territories of Chinese empires. In both locations, their activity was distinctively important in the reproduction of central power and authority, underpinning the Chinese imperial imaginaire and helping to limit the appropriation of states and churches by the holders of social power in Europe.

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McFarlane, Kenneth Bruce. The Nobility of Later Medieval England: The Ford Lectures for 1953 and Related Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). McKnight, Brian E., and James T.C. Liu. The Enlightened Judgments, Ch’ing-ming Chi: The Sung Dynasty Collection (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). Menache, Sophia. The Vox Dei: Communication in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Miao, Quansun 繆荃孫. Jiangsu tongzhi kao 江蘇通志稿, jinshi金石, 15.50a–56b (reprint: Zhongguo fangzhi congshu 中國方志叢書，Taibei: Chengwen, 1966 (1927)). Michon, Cédric. ‘Conseils et conseillers sous François Ier’. In Les conseillers de François Ier, edited by id. (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012), pp. 11–84. Mittler, Barbara. A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). Miyakawa, Hisayuki. ‘An Outline of the Naitō Hypothesis and Its Effects on Japanese Studies of China’. Far Eastern Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1955): pp. 533–552. Mo, Jiaqi 莫家齐. ‘Nan Song minshi susong zhengju zhidu guanjian’ 南宋民事诉 讼证据制度管见, Xiandai faxue 现代法学 2 (1985): pp. 63–67. Moore, R.I. ‘Medieval Christianity in a World Historical Perspective’. In The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, edited by John H. Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 76–90. Moore, R.I. ‘The Birth of Europe as a Eurasian Phenomenon’. Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (July 1997): pp. 583–601. Moore, R.I. The First European Revolution, c.970–1215 (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). Moore, R.I. ‘The First Great Divergence?’. Medieval Worlds 1 (2015): pp. 16–24. Moore, R.I. The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1987). Morris, Colin. Medieval Media: Mass Communication in the Making of Europe — An Inaugural Lecture (Southampton: University of Southampton, 1972). Morris, Colin. The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). Mostert, Marco. ‘New Approaches to Medieval Communication?’. In New Approaches to Medieval Communication, edited by id. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 15–37. Mühlethaler, Jean-Claude. ‘Alain Chartier, Political Writer’. In A Companion to Alain Chartier (c.1385–1430): Father of French Eloquence, edited by Daisy Delogu, Joan E. McRae, and Emma Cayley (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2015), pp. 163–180. Mutschler, Fritz-Heiner, and Achim Mittag, eds. Conceiving the Empire: China and Rome Compared (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Nussdorfer, Laurie. Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Oakley, Francis. The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1979). O’Brien, Patrick K. ‘Ten Years of Debate on the Origin of the Great Divergence’. Review no. 1008. November 2010. http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1008, accessed 22 May 2020. Padoa-Schioppa, Antonio, ed. Legislation and Justice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2010). Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Power, Amanda. Roger Bacon and the Defence of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Reinhardt, Wolfgang. ‘Introduction: Power Elites, State Servants, Ruling Classes, and the Growth of State Power’. In Power Elites and State Building, edited by id. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–18. Reynolds, Susan. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). Rigby, Stephen, with Alastair Minnis, eds. Historians on Chaucer: The ‘General Prologue’ to the ‘Canterbury Tales’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Ross, Lia. ‘Communication in the Middle Ages’. In Handbook of Medieval Culture: Fundamental Aspects and Conditions of the European Middle Ages, vol. 1, edited by Albrecht Classen (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 203–231. Rundle, David, ed. Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2012). Sabapathy, John. Officers and Accountability in Medieval England, 1170–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Scheidel, Walter, ed. Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Scheidel, Walter, ed. State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Skinner, William G. The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977). Smith, Colin C. ‘The Vernacular’. In The New Cambridge Medieval History, V: c.1198– c.1300, edited by David Abulafia (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 71–83.

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2

Administrative Elites and Political Change Christian Lamouroux and Filippo Ronconi

The following studies focus on two distinct sets of events that led to changes in the administrative and political cultures of the Byzantine Empire during the eighth and ninth centuries, and in Song China (twelfth century). In both cases, these changes were initiated by an institutional repositioning of the tax administration. More specifically, our sources reveal groups of bureaucrats who, by mobilizing expert knowledge, contributed fundamentally to the reorientation of political and institutional frameworks. In Byzantium, at the end of the eighth century, Irene ascended the throne as the reigning empress (797–802), having already acted twice as co-regent to her son Constantine VI (780–790 and 792–797) before having him mutilated and probably killed. Faced with increasing opposition, she allied herself with the bureaucracy of the capital, appointing several former bureaucrats-turned-monks as heads of important monasteries. This followed the re-establishment of Iconodulism (787), brought about by a patriarch who was also appointed by Irene and who came from the same social group. This reform upset the ideological foundation of the dynasty (that is, Iconoclasm) of which Irene’s son was the last representative. The ensuing conflict between two composite factions — a legitimist and heavily militarized ‘nostalgic’ one, loyal to the deceased emperor, and one made up of administrative elites and monastic leaders supporting Irene — indirectly transformed the methods of knowledge transmission in the empire. The need for a rapid dissemination of propaganda texts aimed at the stabilization and legitimization of Irene’s rule led to a sudden and sharp increase in the circulation of writing. Some monasteries — particularly the monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople — became main centres for the production and diffusion of manuscripts. From that point on, the transmission of literary texts was based on the minuscule script (replacing the majuscule), which is still used today and which, according to many palaeographic studies, had been used almost exclusively in tax documents up to this point. As a result, influential figures in the finance offices were able to take advantage of a particular political situation in order to extend their influence through a new application of their professional know-how. On a wider scale, they

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thus also triggered a process of profound change in the means of knowledge transmission. In the Chinese territories, a peace treaty signed in 1142 temporarily ended the war between the Song and Jin Dynasties that had begun in 1125. In this context, four new financial administrations, known as the General Commands (zonglingsuo), were established in four border areas between 1141 and 1145. The goal of the Song court was to marshal more resources from these four strategic regions, and also to strengthen its control of the generals in charge of the empire’s defence. This new fiscal and financial organization, grounded in the fragmented monetary system and the territorial consequences of the war, led to an increased technical complexity of fiscal and financial procedures, and hence to changes in the form and content of accounting between the central administration and the offices that managed regional and local affairs. Responding to a new variety of increasingly complex challenges, they contributed substantially to the renewal of a normative discourse on, for instance, various means of tax collection and the issuing of paper money. Beyond this common theme of bureaucratic change, these two studies present several factors of convergence. First, the transformations in question resulted from unexpected and traumatic events: by concentrating on the consequences of these shocks, which led to long-term disturbances, we emphasize the crucial role played by events in political and institutional history. But, far from advocating a history of events (histoire événementielle), both studies underscore that specific events can trigger long-term forces that are powerful enough to disrupt previous political and institutional equilibria. The event — useful, above all, ‘to raise questions and formulate hypotheses’1 — is thus a moment of fracture, and hence, in both contexts, forms the starting point of a process through which the imperial centre reacted to unpredictable and constraining occurrences by way of a durable reorientation of the bureaucratic organization. Thus, these developments gave birth to new survival strategies. In this sense, imperial resilience seems to us more interesting a notion than the often-asserted continuity of imperial structures. In both studies, we observe this by approaching institutions in terms of culture or, more precisely, in terms of the information and knowledge that give structure and meaning to political action. The groups that possessed this knowledge, and shared a common interest in augmenting its political value, chose to organize themselves according to

1

L. Febvre, ‘Vivre l’histoire’, in id., Combats pour l’Histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953), p. 22.

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their specific capacities, resources, and respective positions within the government and administrative offices. In this framework of ruptures and reconfigurations of power in both China and Byzantium, the evolution of technical knowledge produced an administrative culture that turned out to be crucial for imperial governance. In the case of Byzantium, whose historical sources are particularly apt for the approach taken here, close attention is given to the graphical forms through which these political reorientations took shape — that is, the kind of script through which information and decisions were conveyed within a chain of command spreading through ever larger social groups. The formal aspects of the documents (in particular, the external characteristics defining their function) thus assumed a wider semantic significance in the context of political change. Specific and closely interrelated graphic typologies (which, in practice, served as identification marks for specific groups of bureaucrats) were thus transformed into means of propaganda through a process that, over a long period of time, was to change the forms of textual transmission in the whole empire. In China, by perpetuating many of the administrative peculiarities that specific regions had experimented with during times of war, the central government’s reassertion of its fiscal powers could not avoid some fragmentation of its fiscal, monetary, and financial power into different local branches. This eventually imposed a new mode of communication and negotiation between the regional and central administrations. In both cases, the resilience of imperial power cannot be separated from the permanent geographical and institutional reconfiguration of the relations between the centre and the periphery. In the face of the centrifugal tendencies resulting from the geopolitical reconfigurations imposed by events, the court and the sovereign had to voluntarily, and sometimes brutally, underline their capacity to transfer talent and wealth from the provinces to the capital. In both contexts, this resilience drew its strength from the elite’s ability to regain control of the imperial culture by modifying some of its contents. In the aftermath of the Arab invasion, Constantinople was the place where written culture was reorganized, thus reaffirming its central role after a long phase of ‘ruralization’ of the empire. This was done, in the longue durée, through the diffusion and standardization of writing, which originated in the financial-bureaucratic milieu. In China, the increasingly complex accounting culture of finance specialists ensured that the central government had the power to control a substantial part of the resources by which regional military commissions secured the unity of the empire and the survival of the reigning dynasty. Moreover, in both

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empires, the dialectics of centre/ periphery and innovation/ tradition refer to protean tensions between the administrative and military components of the elites. In both cases, these contrasts led to the use of certain structural elements of the state organization as tools of political control. For example, the management of taxation — in particular the granting of tax exemptions or reductions — was used in Byzantium to create and strengthen the fragile personal power of Empress Irene and, in China, to impose central rules over districts in Sichuan controlled by regional commissioners. Symmetrically, the revision or abolition of fiscal policies were aimed, during the particular historical moments under discussion, at dismantling the economic strength of political opponents. The geographical and cultural distance between these two empires, the typological and quantitative differences between the historical sources, the different scales of analysis, and the discrepancies between the cultural circumstances that we have chosen to focus on do not lend themselves readily to direct comparison. At present, the juxtaposition of two separate studies is intended rather to highlight common historiographical problems through the examination of two critical moments in the history of the Chinese and Byzantine Empires.

2.1 Fragmentation and Financial Recentralization The Emergence of the Four General Commands (1127-1165) Christian Lamouroux

Abstract In creating four General commands (zonglingsuo) between 1141 and 1145, at the end of the first Song-Jin war, the central government of the Song Empire hoped to marshal resources from the four areas along the new border while also controlling the military officials in charge of the armies. With the fragmentation of the monetary system, this financial organization resulted in a real autonomy of these strategic areas. Eventually, this reform induced the fragmentation of the fiscal and financial authority and, as accounting procedures became more complex, generated a new kind of technical communication between the regional and the central administrations. Lastly, it allowed high-ranking civil servants involved in this process to reinforce their institutional positions. Keywords: general commands (zonglingsuo), Song-Jin war, fiscal authority, monetary system

This study explores events that resulted in the recentralization of fiscal administration in Song China (960–1279) from the vantage point of the institutional dislocation emphasized in the sources. In 1141, thus even before the 1142 peace treaty between the Song and the Jin Empires temporarily ended the war that had begun in 1125, three General Commands (zonglingsuo) were I would like to thank Professor Charles Hartman, who helped me to write the preliminary draft of this contribution in English; in the process, he generously provided me valuable comments and suggestions. Dr. Franz-Julius Morche was also very helpful in the final editing of this chapter.

De Weerdt, Hilde, and Franz-Julius Morche (eds), Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463720038_ch02.1

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established in the Lower and Middle Yangzi areas, and a similar administration was also created in Sichuan in 1145. The goal of the Song court was to draw more resources from those four strategic regions and also to enforce its control on the generals in charge of defence. This new fiscal and financial organization, grounded in the fragmented monetary system and the territorial consequences of the war, led to an increased technical complexity of fiscal and financial procedures, and hence to changes in the form and content of accounting procedures between the central administrations and the offices that managed regional and local affairs. The wars the Song Dynasty fought for its survival against the Jin Empire are not simply taken as an historical context. The sources indeed suggest that the restoration of its dynastic power, which had lost all of Northern China, occurred through a series of hastily improvised decisions in reaction to the dysfunctional relationship between civil officials and increasingly autonomous military commanders. We shall attempt to reconstruct one of these processes by studying the circulation of quantitative data. We will see how the official memorials, which were often framed as action plans based on statistics, proposed to marshal resources in support of the war and thus reveal how the production of information became subjected to a power struggle between various groups of civil officials and military commanders. It was because of these tensions that new means of monitoring were established to better control the distribution of resources and to rebuild necessary hierarchies. As mentioned in the general introduction to this pair of studies, we take the stance that the changes in question were triggered by traumatic events, and these violent shocks caused long-term disturbances that further resulted in a durable reorientation of the power structure. Indeed, in the long time-span of this reorientation, decisions were made that gradually developed into consistent policies endorsed by groups with shared interests. Those groups needed to promote the technical knowledge on which their administrative influence was based. For that reason, we will devote particular attention to the technical skills that produced, through tensions and conflicts, a new bureaucratic culture. In brief, our study considers the historical process of bureaucratization as a result of conflicts and contradictions, not ‘rationalization’. In the first part, I will introduce the conditions in which information channels between the court and the civil or military offices were reorganized before the establishment of the Four General Commands. I will distinguish between two cases. The central administration followed two distinct paths in order to regain command over the expenses in two different strategic areas, namely the lower and middle Yangzi areas in 1141, and Sichuan in

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1145. In the second part, I will turn to the powers and organization of the General Commands, which have already been studied by several Japanese historians and more recently by the Taiwanese historian Lei Jiasheng.1 Through the Sichuanese case, we will elaborate on the fiscal and financial operations and accounting methods that linked these Commands to the central administration and other regional or local offices, civil and military. Finally, I will address the administrative adjustments and resulting tensions that appeared during the second Song-Jin War between 1162 and 1165. In the concluding remarks, I will evaluate to what extent the central government reached its goals, and discuss the role played by accounting records in the financial centralization during this crucial period.

Administrative, Fiscal, and Financial Fragmentation In the fall of 1129, after the military coup in Hangzhou led by Miao Fu and Liu Zhengyan, the itinerant court of Emperor Gaozong remained unable to contest the authority of generals, or even of local rebels who arrogated to themselves substantial civil and military powers. Between 1130 and 1131, the emperor finally resigned himself to appointing about thirty Defence Commissioners in the Jiang-Huai region. These commissioners were selected from among regional officials, military commanders, or influential warlords. All were endowed with large fiscal, administrative, and military powers, including the privilege to appoint their own subordinates, and the imperial court pledged to accept the eventual transfer of these powers from the initial holders to their descendants. One regulation introduced a clear distinction between the resources of the commissioners and the tax revenues of the court, including tributes paid to the emperor: In all these defence areas, except for profits drawn from tea and salt that involve the general accounts of the central state, since all those incomes which are to be reverted to the court are coming up to the Supervisors [of the monopolies] according to the old regulations, all other circuit commissions are abolished. All taxes, except for the tributes paid to the 1 See Kawakami Kyoji 川上恭司, ‘Nan-Sō no sōryōsho ni tsuite’ 南宋の総領所について, Machikane yama ronsō (shigakuhen) 待兼山論叢 (史学編) 10 (1978): pp. 1–29; Nagai Chiaki 長 井千秋, ‘Waitō sōryōsho no kino’ 淮東総領所の機能, Machikane yama ronsō (shigakuhen) 待兼 山論叢 (史学編) 22 (1988): pp. 41–64; Koiwai Hiromitsu 小岩井弘光, Sōdai heiseishi no kenkyū 宋代兵制史の研究 (Tokyo: Kyko shoin, 1998); Lei Jiasheng 雷家聖, Julian mouguo — Nan-Song zonglingsuo yanjiu 聚斂謀國 — 南宋總領所研究 (Taibei: Wanjuan lou tushu, 2013).

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emperor in money and silk (whose figures must naturally be acknowledged for all items to be shipped), all other regional commissions should transfer resources according to the orders of the military commander of the defence area, without further notification of the court.2

By abolishing the regional agencies that had managed circuit finances on behalf of the central administration, the court allowed the commissioners to decide on the transfer of resources, relinquished control over accounting information, and also acknowledged the limits of its power to meet the demands of regional and local administrations. This regulation also offered a fiscal compromise: hoping to reinforce the long-term allegiance of local powers, the court waived payment of tributes from land taxes for three years, a provision that actually lasted for five years in several places. The court’s resignation of these competences de facto acknowledged a situation that had already led the central authorities to establish the principle ‘to manage affairs according to circumstances’. This principle was simple: the commissioners were granted authority to enact their own decisions before notifying the court, which would endorse their implementation only afterwards. The consequence was that without information before any operation, the court was unable to plan or control any budget. This privilege had already been granted to the loyalist Zhang Jun in 1129 following his appointment as Plenipotentary, a move that combined, until January 1133, the positions of civil administrator and military commander over a huge territory, including Sichuan, Shaanxi, Jingxi, Hunan, and Hubei. Within this territory, Zhang was empowered to appoint, transfer, promote, or demote any official or military commander at his own discretion. He was even allowed to send emissaries to enemy lines, to organize examinations, or to change delineations between jurisdictions. Last but not least, he could issue financial instruments, like salt and tea vouchers or monk certificates, and give titles to local deities, thus incorporating them into the official cults.

2 諸鎮除茶鹽之利, 國家大計所繫, 所入並歸朝廷, 及依舊制提舉官外, 其餘監司並罢. 所 有財賦, 除供上錢帛等, 自合認數送納外, 其餘職並聽本鎮帥臣移用, 更不從朝廷應副。 Xu Mengxin 徐夢莘, Sanchao beimeng huibian 三朝北盟彙編 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987); Huang Kuanchong 黃寬重, ‘Song ting dui minjian ziwei wuli de liyong he kongzhi — yi zhenfushi wei li’ 宋廷對民間自衛武力的利用和控制 —— 以鎮撫使為例, in Nan-Song difang wuli — difang jun yu minjian ziwei wuli de tantao 南宋地方武力 — 地方軍與民間自衛武力的 探討 (Taibei: Dongda tushu gongsi, 2002), pp. 145–202, here p. 154. Huang gives many details on commissioners’ powers in this lengthy article.

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Such latitude, accorded to Zhang Jun at the regional level, occurred at the prefectural level as well.3 The war had resulted in significant difficulties due to the cutting of communications along the Yangzi River, and the prefects had to decide the allocations of fiscal tributes to the troops on their own authority. They acted according to a similar principle: ‘retaining resources according to circumstances’ (bianyi jieyong 便宜截用). For instance, prefects transferred resources from the Ever Normal Granaries attached to the Sealed Reserve Storehouse — a resource usually controlled by the court, which thus could no longer rely on this income. 4 In fact, the wandering court had to send officials from the Department of State Affairs to the various circuits to collect what they could find in the coffers of the regional administrations: from the summer of 1127 through to 1128, Yu Ruli recovered more than 7 million strings of copper coins, from Sichuan; in 1129, Ye Mengde5 was sent by Gaozong to seize fiscal revenues from the Hangzhou administrations, and when the emperor arrived in Mingzhou at the beginning of 1130, Li Chengzao went to Taizhou and to the Min region to seize substantial supplies.6 In the hope of stabilizing his fiscal revenue, Gaozong decided to grant the Ministry of Revenue authority over the entire financial administration, which subsequently depended upon the Department of State Affairs directly controlled by the grand councillor. Moreover, the emperor promoted officials equipped with financial expertise to head this ministry: Ye Mengde, and Meng Yu were the most famous among them. However, to supply his own imperial guard the emperor often had no option but to send his officials to appropriate the resources from the storehouses of those prefectures where the court was temporarily hosted. The budgetary autonomy of the prefectures was not new. Chen Fuliang retraced his understanding of its history during the first half of the eleventh century. Chen cited several examples of the poor quality of accounting reports and argued that the central administration lacked reliable data: ‘in spite of many ordinances regarding financial management’, ‘any auditing or reconciliation of accounts was impossible’. He concluded: ‘From the 3 He Yuhong 何玉紅, ‘Bianyi xingshi yu zhongyang jiquan — yi Nan-Song Chuan-Shaan xuanfu chuzhisi de yunxing wei zhongxin’ ‘便宜行事’ 與中央集權—以南宋川陝宣撫處置司 的運行為中心, Sichuan daxue xuebao 四川大學學報 4 (2007): pp. 26–36. 4 The following details are provided by Liu Yun 劉云, ‘Nan-Song Gaozong shiqi de caizheng zhidu bianqian’ 南宋高宗時期的財政制度變遷, Zhongguo shehui jingji shi yanjiu 中國社會經 濟史研究 1 (2008): pp. 41–49. 5 For other of Ye’s activities, see the chapters by Levine and Chu/ Morche in this volume. 6 Li Xinchuan 李心傳, Jianyan yilai xinian yaolu 建炎以來繫年要錄 [hereafter YL] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), 8.207, 14.298–299, 20.400, 30.593, 31.602.

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foundation of the dynasty until the Zhihe era (1054–1055), all financial resources within the empire remained stored in the prefectures’.7 This description suggests that the 1127 war returned to the prefectures a managerial flexibility lost 70 years earlier. For Chen, the lack of accurate accounting data had been an unsolved problem for a long time, resulting in serious political impasse. Reaching back to the Tang period, it had produced an inefficiently decentralized fiscal system necessitating constant and tedious negotiations between the central administration, its regional deputies, and the prefectures. Chen gives details of accounting controls and auditing as follows: The prefectures had to provide the central administration with registers detailing all the assets to be credited to their own accounts, reporting under the total amount of each product the original assets and the year, and also the prefecture’s payments. They had to wait for the proper day for examination [by the central offices]. If payments should not be made by the prefecture, and in case of huge expenditures, or when it was determined that over many years it had been impossible to cover the expenses, order would be sent to the circuit Fiscal Commission and the prefecture to consult with each other and to make the payment by reallocation [from the Commission]. The State Finance Commission, according to the capital’s expected expenses in gold, silver, money, silk, and various other kinds of goods, issued standard forms to all the prefectures on which they were to provide f igures for the three following columns: incomes, expenditures and cash on hand, in gold, silver, money, silk, grains, and fodder. Moreover, in the cash on hand column, they had to list the f inancial commitments with the exact date [of payment]. The central offices ordered the Fiscal Commissions of all circuits to make the payments by reallocation according to the remainder, and notif ied the prefectures of how much they should transfer to the capital city. 8

7 理財之令數下 […] 以致勘會勾銷了絕不得 […] 以此見得開國以來訖於至和, 天下財物皆 藏州郡. Ma Duanlin 馬端臨, ‘Guoyong 1 國用一’,Wenxian tongkao 文獻通考 [hereafter WXTK] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 23.229. 8 諸州應係錢物合供文帳, 並於逐色都數下, 具言元管年代, 合係本州支用申省, 候到省日, 或有不係本州支用及數目浩大, 本處約度年多支用不盡時, 下轉運司及本州相度, 移易支遣. 三司據在京要用金銀錢帛諸般物色, 即除式样遍下諸州府, 具金銀錢帛糧草收, 支, 見在三 項單數, 其見在項内開坐約支年月, 省司即據少剩數目下諸路轉運司移易支遣, 及牒本州般 送上京。 Ibid.

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One has to wonder if this very informative paragraph, frequently quoted in studies on Song accounting procedures, describes the real conditions or merely the general regulations of annual audits. In any case, given the chaos engendered by the war, it was seemingly impossible to maintain a viable middle-level regional administration between the ministry and the prefectures, which were in charge of collecting regular and extraordinary taxes, and hence to get any exact accounting information which made the centre able to evaluate the local situation. This point was made by Li Xinchuan, as quoted by Ma Duanlin: The annual payments by the financial storehouses in every prefecture pertained to accounts of the central administration. In the old system, there was a f iscal commissioner in every circuit who controlled the expenses. At the end of the year he synthesized payments and income of all his prefectures and sub-prefectures. If anywhere a surplus existed, he seized it, and if anywhere there was a deficit, he gave compensation so that no jurisdiction suffered a shortage. Since the start of the conflict [with the Jin Empire], the financial administration often faced shortages. In general, all the prefectures provided f ixed quotas according to the budget headings. Yet extra taxes were created or raised without much consideration of regional circumstances, and hence difficulties in prefectures and sub-prefectures arose.9

Evidently, Li Xinchuan saw these difficulties as resulting from the widespread imposition of extraordinary taxes from as early as 1128. The list is well known: for instance, in 1129, several extra fees inherited from the Northern Song were unified as taxes for regional fiscal administration (jingzhiqian); the silk commutation levy (zheboqian) first appeared at this time; and, in 1132, the ‘monthly reserve funds’ (yuezhuang) were established.10 Promoted by staff members of Cai Jing, these fiscal innovations made it possible to meet the needs of the armies and cover payments to rebel leaders, in spite of the dissatisfaction and disorder in various regions. In brief, this policy enabled the court to control the southern territories more firmly. It prompted Lü Yihao, who had once again been appointed grand councillor in October 1131, to seek 9 諸州軍資庫者, 歲用省計也. 舊制, 每道有計度轉運使, 歲終則會諸郡邑之出入, 盈者取 之, 虧者補之. 故郡邑無不足之患. 自軍興, 計司常患不給, 凡郡邑皆以定額窠名予之, 加賦增 員, 悉所不問, 由是州縣始困。 Li Xinchuan 李心傳, Jianyan yilai chaoye zaji 建炎以來朝野雜 記 [hereafter ZJ] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), jia 甲, 17.393; WXTK, 24.237. 10 C. Lamouroux, Fiscalité, comptes publics et politiques financières dans la Chine des Song (Paris: Institut des Hautes Études chinoises, 2003), pp. 210–233.

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to unify and take control of the military command in order to launch a great offensive towards the north in 1133. On 14 May 1132, the emperor appointed Lü as commander-in-chief of the Area Command (dudu), combining civil and military authority in the Jiang-Huai, Liang-Zhe and Jing-Hu circuits. Of course, the commander-in-chief could ‘manage affairs according to circumstances’, and he made several proposals that were adopted, including a budget and the means to f inance it. Most signif icantly, he was empowered to transfer funds and reallocate payments, and hence to control resources formerly administered by the fiscal intendants: Lü Yihao ‘was permitted to evaluate the f iscal resources of all circuits, to transfer them accordingly, and the allocation should meet the situation regardless of its required magnitude’.11 A war-supply commissioner (suijun zhuanyunshi), Yao Shunming, was appointed to control the expenses of the troops, which deprived the generals of any logistical and financial authority. Consequently, circuit-level officials were placed under the direct authority of the commander-in-chief. The requirements guiding the recruitment of the commander-in-chief’s counsels and staff are striking: they should be ‘a hierarchical group of civil servants equipped with solid knowledge’; these men ‘should be selected from among the civil servants and military officers within the three central departments, the Bureau of Military Affairs, the Six Ministries, and the capital or regional offices’. The text also sheds light on routine procedures relating to the circulation of written documents and the shipping of goods: Standard writing paper for official correspondence, red ink paste, boxes for shipping supplies to imperial postal stations or the reception of documents, packaging (?) for official goods shall be reported with detailed figures, and one shall instruct the Ministry of Revenue to supply them immediately. In the region, everything will be got where the administration is located.12

Seemingly, such procedures were considered an important means to check the substantial powers granted to regional agencies. However, they were also meant to reflect good governance by capable and prudent officials at 11 逐路財賦許酌度多寡, 隨事移那, 不以有無拘礙裁撥應副。 Xu Song 徐松, Song huiyao jigao 宋會要輯稿 [hereafter SHY] (Taibei: Xin wenfeng chuban gongsi, 1976), ‘Zhiguan’, 39.1–3. 12 諳練熟知次第人吏 […] 於三省, 樞密院, 六曹及內外官司內人吏及使臣內踏逐 […] 合用 行遣紙劄, 印色朱紅及發遞物色, 收盛文字籠仗、打角官物等，並具數下戶部日下支給， 在 外於所在官司關取。 Ibid.

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a time when generals and even rebels styled themselves as the guardians of the dynasty. On 14 February 1133, Yao Shunming, following his promotion to vice-minister of revenue, headed a distinct staff within the regional government that should submit all financial issues to the central administration: An edict ordered the Vice-Minister of Revenue, Yao Shunming, to proceed to the Jiankang Prefecture to take exclusive control of all resources in money, manufactured goods, and grain of the Area Command. Moreover, he was to select four off icials from among the personnel of the Area Command as his subordinates. They should have authority and be qualified in financial matters, in order to hold the posts of Supervisor of the Bureau of Military Food and Fodder Supply, and the Bureau of Financial Auditing. Officials and military officers appointed to the Area Command will assist this staff to check the salaries, the payment of which should be approved by the Ministry of Revenue and the Bureau of Military Food and Fodder Supply, in accordance with the regulations. The Monopoly Tax Commission and the Chief Tea Market in the prefecture will also be placed under Yao Shunming’s supervision.13

On 12 August 1133, an edict abolished the position of the war-supply commissioners.14 In October, Lü Yihao, who had been unable to unify the armies under his command, was demoted, and three Pacification Commissions (xuanfusi) were established in the Huaixi, Huaidong and Jing-Hu circuits, under the command of the generals Liu Guangshi, Han Shizhong, and Yue Fei. The court therefore was still forced to afford these generals financial autonomy. However, financial information remained a crucial issue. In March 1135, the censor Zhang Xuan proposed to the court that it control the revenues and expenses of the whole empire by compiling a general accounting record (kuaijilu). He introduced this compilation as a political priority to consolidate the administrative conditions for securing the validity of data after ten years of warfare: One should completely tally the yearly incomes and consequently calculate the exact amount of yearly expenditures, separate out goods and draw 13 詔差戶部侍郎姚舜明前往建康府，專一總領應干都督府錢物糧斛，仍於都督府選差有 風力、諳曉錢穀屬官四員，充糧（料）院、審計司監官。都督府管下官兵等幫勘請給等，並 經由戶部、糧審院，依條批（幫）勘支給。建康府榷貨務、都茶場，亦仰姚舜明提領。SHY, ‘Zhiguan’ 41.45; Zhou Yinghe周應合, Jingding Jiankang zhi 景定建康志 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 14.9a. 14 Ibid.

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up lists of items, so that a general synthesis and clear knowledge will be recorded in charts and registers and verification procedures, that will become as easy as a movement in our palm, can reduce wasteful spending and increase state resources […]. We hope that an enlightened edict will order high officials to select officials who are well trained in fiscal matters, and have them compile records in imitation of the documents of the Jingde and Huangyou eras. They should take the period between 1131 and 1134 as the standard to generate yearly figures of past income and spending before calculating the figures for the present year. Except for the advances and the expenditures already committed, they should count the total amount of actual income of the present year. Moreover, from now on and until the end of the year, all spending for administrative and military supply as well as all monies and goods to be spent, should be calculated in total.15

The emperor and his advisors who approved the memorial probably assumed that, from that time forward, the Ministry of Revenue would be able to ensure remote control over the public finances at least in some strategic areas. In March 1136, Zhang Jun, who had once again been appointed grand councillor after the court approved the compilation of the general accounts, requested an imperial edict to reconfirm the role of the Ministry: it should be the only agency to supervise the transfer of resources from one place to another, a power that had previously depended on the fiscal intendants’ decisions. The court decided to send the vice-president of the Ministry, Liu Ningzhi, to supervise all fiscal transfers managed by the three Pacification Commissions. Zhang had recommended that one high-ranking official be appointed ‘in rotation’ to serve in this capacity, emphasizing that ‘without an office exclusively in charge of exerting general control, it would be difficult to investigate fiscal and financial cash flows in all these places’.16 But in July, the censor Zhou Mi pointed out tensions between military and financial officials in Sichuan: The [Si]Chuan-Shaan[xi] Pacification Commission reported several times to the court that grain transports had been interrupted, while Zhao Kai, 15 正宜盡括歲入之厚薄，因計歲出之多寡，分其品目，列其名色，總貫旁通，載之圖册，揆 考之間，如運諸掌，斯可以載減浮費，增益邦財[…] 伏望明詔大臣，選委詳練財賦之官，俾 倣景德、皇祐等書，撰集成錄，且自紹興元年至四年為率，以每歲所出入之數，列之於前， 卻以今歲計之。除預借已支費外，總計見今歲入實有之數，合計若干，复自日下至歲終，凡 官吏之費，養兵之費，及應干合用錢物，通計若干。 YL, 86.1415. 16 輪那一員 […] 既無專一總領官司，諸處財賦出納難以稽考。SHY, ‘Zhiguan’ 41.45.

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who is in charge of the general control of public finances in Sichuan, maintained that all grain had been sent. Your servant does not know the truth of this affair […]. Insofar as any Pacification Commissioner wants to see rapid transport, he certainly prefers transport by land, but the officials in charge of the general control of public finances hope to save resources and certainly prefer transport by river.17

The divergent views of Zhao Kai and the Pacification Commissioner (xuanfu shi) Wu Jie prompted the court to appoint a Military Executive Commissioner (anfu zhizhishi), Xi Yi, to arbitrate their dispute, then replaced Zhao with Li Dai, who duly transferred from his position of general intendant of the Liang-Zhe circuit in 1137. Unsurprisingly, the difficulties Li confronted were similar to those that Zhao Kai had faced. Moreover, his differences with Wu Jie were coupled with tensions that developed between Li and Xi Yi. The latter maintained his concerns for the sufferings of the Sichuanese population and also disagreed with Wu Jie. But his interests also differed from those of the Fiscal Superintendency led by Zhao Kai and then by Li Dai. On the one hand, the Military Executive Commission was funded by fiscal surpluses, once Wu Jie’s troops had been paid and supplied according to annual quotas. On the other hand, Xi Yi tried to supply the troops from the markets, requesting the Fiscal Superintendency pay for public purchases of grain.18 Wu Jie argued that the savings enforced by the fiscal officers compromised his military priorities. In addition, Zhao Kai was critical of Xi Yi’s pressure as Li Dai tried to shed light on the financial difficulties of military logistics in Sichuan. The lengthy memorial Li Dai penned at the request of the central administration began with an inventory of all income and expenses. It revealed a constant increase in annual deficits and therefore a structural weakness in his superintendence. Li related in detail the difficulties facing the tax system: unlike direct forms of state income, such as profits drawn from the salt and alcohol monopolies, certain taxes were difficult to collect, especially the surtax on value (zheguqian). These funds, mainly generated from taxing salt and alcohol sold on public markets, were primarily intended to pay for the salary of the troops.19 While emphasizing the lack of resources for public 17 川陝宣撫司屢以糧運不繼聞於朝廷，而四川總制財用趙開亦稱所運糧斛，盡已起發 […] 宣撫司欲其速至，則必以陸運為便 總制官欲其省費, 則必以水運為便。 YL, 102.1675–1676. 18 Wang Huayu 王化雨, ‘Nan-Song Shaoxing qianqi de zhongyang qian Shu shuaichen’ 南宋 绍兴前期的中央遣蜀帅臣, Sichuan shifan daxue xuebao 四川師範大學學報 41, no. 1 (2014): pp. 22–29. 19 ZJ, jia 15.323–324.

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grain purchases or transport, Li Dai identified the principal methods used to overcome budget shortages: first, the transfer of expenditures to the following year, which increased the structural deficit; second, the issuing of monetary certificates, which were quickly debased given the huge quantities of paper money in circulation; third, and most crucially, the tapping of tax revenues that the court permitted to be retained locally before their transfer to the capital. In the final part of the memorial, Li Dai criticized the military commanders whom he accused of merely defending their own privileges, suggesting that generals routinely diverted army supplies into their own pockets.20 This dispute, which endured for some time, threatened to undermine Sichuan defence. Li Dai was demoted in March 1138 without replacement, and Xi Yi’s rivalry with Wu Jie, who commanded the troops, had grown so strong that the Military Executive Commissioner was endowed with powers to investigate and indict (usually reserved to censors, high-ranking finance officials, or appointing authorities). As several historians have recently emphasized, the court thus sought to create a balance between the two commissioners and secure its control over them.21 In spite of the difficulties in Sichuan, the government was still able to send its inspectors to other places. These were officials tasked with permanently supervising administrative activity on behalf of the court. The years 1136 and 1137 appear crucial in this respect. Several decisions suggest that a genuine policy was emerging. On 20 October 1136, an edict ordered the vice-president of the Ministry of Revenue, Huo Li, to establish an office in Ezhou to control Yue Fei’s military resources. On 2 November 1137, this organization extended its control over five administrative circuits, Guangnan and Guangxi (the two Guang circuits), Jing and Hu, and Jiangxi. Two high-ranking officials were appointed, who rotated as head of the bureau: Huo Li and Xue Bi. In the meantime, on 16 August 1137, the Department of State Affairs clarified the objective of these measures: The Department declared: ‘The fiscal resources of prefectures and subprefectures are often used rashly and sometimes insufficiently collected. Because of this, fiscal transfers to the court suffer loss, and the budget of 20 YL, 111.1796–1800; Zeng Zaozhuang 曾棗莊et al., Quan Song wen 全宋文 [hereafter QSW] (Shanghai-Hefei: Shanghai cishu chubanshe — Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 2006), 190.294–297. 21 Yu Wei 余蔚, ‘Lun Nan-Song xuanfushi he zhizhishi zhidu’ 論南宋宣撫使和制置使制 度, Zhonghua wen-shi luncong 中華文史論叢85, no. 1 (2007): pp. 129–179; Lei Jiasheng, Julian mouguo, pp. 137–161.

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fiscal intendancies is deficient’. An edict has been issued to the Ministry of Revenue that the minister and vice-minister should, in turns, visit the jurisdictions and investigate shortcomings in the implementation of edicts, ordinances, and other matters. They should report on the condition of the resources in these jurisdictions. Moreover, they should examine effective measures to be taken and report each specific detail in a memorial.22

In February 1141, Zhang Jun secured a promotion for Wu Yanzhang, who since 1139 had controlled supplies for imperial troops in western Huainan where Zhang himself was appointed Pacification Commissioner.23 In Sichuan, after Wu Jie’s death in the summer of 1139, Hu Shijiang, who had held the position of Military Executive Commissioner since 1138, became the first civil official to be named Pacification Commissioner. However, Hu soon came to be seen as a dissident voice, suspected of upholding narrow military interests during the difficult peace negotiations. Consequently, Hu was outflanked in 1142 by the appointment of another high-ranking civil official, Zheng Gangzhong. It can reasonably be assumed that, after ten years of war, the dynasty had succeeded in rebuilding a financial organization: specialists from the central administration were appointed in all regions to control public finances and the supplies of the troops, which were still under the authority of the Pacification Commissioners. Financial information was still a crucial issue since many resources to be transferred to the court were to remain at the regional level in order to fund military operations. In several cases, military specialists who directly reported to the regional Military Commissioner were in the position to challenge the civil regional channel, and even when they were members of the staff headed by civil officials they were able to inform the military regional authority as well. In other words, the decade of war had introduced new links between the court and the Middle and Lower Yangzi regions — the Jing-Hu and the Jiang-Huai — as well as the Upper Yangzi region — Sichuan. The southeast appeared more crucial to the government, since the court, which remained in transit until 1138, depended upon its supplies. In these regions, the central administration was therefore in direct competition with the Pacification Commissioners, who had become largely autonomous in Sichuan since the beginning of the war. 22 尚書省言:『州縣財賦，率多妄用，亦或失取。緣此上供虧欠，漕計不足。』詔戶部逐時輪 那長貳一員，出外巡按其奉行詔令違戾等事，按劾以聞州縣財賦利病，並考究以實措置，使 各條具聞奏。YL, 112.1821. 23 SHY, ‘Zhiguan’ 41.45–46.

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The General Commands: Towards a New Centralization? These regional differences became evident when the General Commands were established (zonglingsuo): on 9 June 1141, an edict appointed three distinguished financial officials from the central administration as generalcontrollers (zongling) in charge of the resources to be supplied to the imperial troops in Huaidong, Huaixi-Jiangdong, and Hubei-Jingxi.24 This edict stated that ‘every controller is specifically in charge of reports and the transmission of documents from the imperial armies, and no one from within the armies is allowed to have any control over such matters’. The expertise and specialization of these officers placed the military commanders in a subordinate position. Li Xinchuan clearly construed the creation of these three Commands as the result of Qin Gui’s policy to recover some control over the southeast armies.25 He therefore regarded their creation as part of the recentralization that was aimed towards eliminating opposition from the generals to Qin’s peace efforts, coming from Yue Fei especially.26 In this respect, the measure, which secured the court’s control over the troops, was simply another symptom of Qin Gui’s rise to power. Li clearly distinguished between two cases: In the three General Commands of the South-East, the authority over finances is always constrained by quotas. However, in the case of a famine within the military, they can make an official request to the court. Sichuan, for its part, is located very far away and its money does not circulate [elsewhere], so that in times of peace, the finance officers hold the authority to freely tax and spend. And if a military conflict should arise, the court will not make further inquiries.27

In this context, the authority of the central administration depended on the capabilities of the officials sent on a regional mission, but also and more subtly on the actual authority afforded to a particular official. The demarcation of different fields of expertise among various officials resulted 24 各專一報發禦前軍馬文字, 諸軍不聽節制. Ibid. Hu Fang 胡紡, Vice-President of the Court of National Granaries (司農少卿), was appointed in the Huaidong, Wu Yanzhang, Vice-President of the Imperial Treasury (太府少卿), in the Huaixi-Jiangdong, and Zeng Zao 曾慥, President of the Imperial Treasury (太府卿), in the Hubei-Jingxi. 25 ZJ, jia 11.224–225. 26 For the conflicts between Yue Fei and Qin Gui, see the chapter by Gowers and Tsui in this volume. 27 東南三總領所掌利權，皆有定數，然軍旅飢饉，則告乞於朝。惟四川在遠，錢幣又不通， 故無事之際，計臣得以擅取予之權。而一遇軍興，朝廷亦不問。ZJ, jia 16.393.

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in the fragmentation of the information gathered, so that, at least in the southeast, only the centre was meant to obtain an overall perspective. The famous stele inscription written by Hong Gua sheds light on the competencies of the general-controller. Hong describes the powers of the Huaidong controller, when he himself held that post with the title of vice-president of the Court of National Granaries between May 1162 and April 1164, during the second war with the Jin Empire.28 Based on an analysis of this inscription, several historians have listed the functions of the general-controller as follows29: first, the controller was allowed to marshal resources in money, grain, and fodder by withholding a portion of the annual tax tribute (zhengshui) collected by the prefectures. He also obtained the income from the tea, salt, and alcohol monopolies, and a part of the output of public lands, which usually were wastelands cultivated by frontier soldiers in line with the old model of land provision to military colonies. He drew benefits from the trade in the official markets that were established on the border after the signature of the peace treaty in 1142, and was hence in a position to combat smuggling and to monitor the performance of the officials in charge of supervising these markets.30 The General Command also maintained pawn shops in which the administration invested its capital, and which, for instance, granted personal loans to military families. Finally, the general-controller could issue banknotes that were to be exchanged regularly, so as to yield additional profits. Second, all these resources were to be used for the military, as the main duty of the general-controller was to oversee the logistics and supply of all the imperial troops stationed in the border areas of the circuit. He should select, purchase, and register the horses drawn from Sichuan, but also store and manage weapons, build military barracks and fortifications, and oversee shipbuilding and the maintenance of the regional fluvial navy. Lastly, he was in charge of recruiting soldiers locally to reinforce the imperial troops, and managing their official files.31 28 Hong Gua 洪适, ‘Huaidong zongling shiji xu’ 淮東總領石記序, QSW, 213.377; Lu Xian盧憲, Jiading Zhenjiang zhi 嘉定鎮江志 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 17.14a. 29 Kawakami, ‘Nan-Sō no sōryōsho ni tsuite’; Nagai, ‘Waitō sōryōsho no kino’; Lei Jiasheng, ‘Nan-Song si zonglingsuo yu gongjun caifu de shou-zhi’ 南宋四總領所與供軍財賦的收支, in Song shi yanjiu lunwenji, ed. by Deng Xiaonan 鄧小南 and Yang Guo 楊果 (Wuhan: Hubei changjiang-Hubei renmin chubanshe, 2010), pp. 208–227. 30 In case of a deficit, officials were punished and the sanction was an extension of the period within a same grade and therefore a belated promotion. 31 Nagai, ‘Waitō sōryōsho no kino’, also points to the censorial role played by the Controller, but since some of these elements are drawn from later texts, Lei Jiasheng questions this interpretation.

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The chapter devoted to the General Commands in the Song huiyao contains no memorial from one of the three southeast Commands before Qin Gui’s death. In the same way, except for Hong Gua and to a lesser extent Dong Ping, who was general-controller between 1157 and 1158, there is no documentation for the management of the Commands in the collected works of the twelve general-controllers who held the post in Huaidong between 1141 and 1165.32 In the Song huiyao, the earliest entries conf irming Li Xinchuan’s comment about the central administration’s constant interventions on the def icits in the southeast General Commands are dated 1159 to 1160. During the summer of 1159, Peng He, the general-controller in Hubei and Jingxi, explained in a memorial that ‘the figures of the tax allocations received from the circuits have not matched the f ixed quotas for some time’.33 Based on Emperor Gaozong’s decree seeking a long-term solution, an allocation to the Command of ‘300,000 strings per year, taken from the additional quota of tax transfers sent to the capital as taxes for regional fiscal administrations ( jing-zongzhi qian) from Sichuan’, and also ‘a subsidy of 500,000 strings taken from the silver bullion registered in the accounts of the Supply Storehouse for imperial armies ( jishangku)’ were made. Moreover, the Ministry of Revenue explained the permanent deficits by pointing out the ‘disobedience and negligence of the Regional Commissions and the prefectures in all circuits’.34 The following year, the general-controller of Huaixi-Huaidong, Du Xuan, also lamented that ‘the public officers divert funds and create delays, while the officials in regional Commissions, prefects, and sub-prefects remain idle and uncooperative’. Du requested investigations to punish those who ‘have been the most careless’.35 These texts thus reveal ongoing tensions between the Commands and both the prefectural tax authorities and the circuit Commissions in charge of fiscal transfers to the capital or other agencies chosen by the court. Another entry in Song huiyao, dated 17 September 1160, reveals the contents of a negotiation between the centre and the Hu-Guang General Command. It provides insight into the increasing complexity of fiscal management, including the circulation of several financial instruments and paper moneys: 32 The list of the general-controllers appears in Lu Xian, Jiading Zhenjiang zhi, 17.13a–15b. A quick search by author’s name in QSW reveals the absence of memorials on the present topic. 33 曆時之久, 科撥之數諸路不及元額. SHY, ‘Zhiguan’ 41.48–49. 34 每歲截撥四川合赴行在經總制無額錢三十萬貫 […] 樁管禦前激賞庫銀內計價支撥五 十萬貫[…] 逐路監司、州軍違慢。 Ibid. 35 官吏侵兌稽違，監司、守貳恬不加意 […] 弛慢尤甚者。 Ibid.

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The General Command of Hu-Guang declared: ‘We have progressively received a total amount of more than 300,000 strings in certif icates for contractual use limited to Lin’an Prefecture only. We have already sold 19,000 strings of these certificates, but nobody wants to buy the remainder. By contrast, we have received 800,000 strings in certificates for contractual use in three circuits, with the order to sell them and take the money into account. These certificates are much more attractive than the certificates for contractual use limited to just one circuit. Our bureaus request to be permitted to convert into 181,000 strings the silver and money drawn from the selling of the certificates for contractual use in three circuits in order to cover our expenses. We request to send back the certificates for contractual use limited to one circuit, which will be exchanged into a total of 281,000 strings in long-distance and short-distance vouchers for the sale of tea cakes, in order to cover our expenses. The money drawn from the sale will reimburse the amounts of the certificates for contractual use limited to three circuits, which we would have already borrowed and sold. As usual, we will raise 800,000 strings, which we will take into account according to the ordinance’. The proposal was adopted.36

This negotiation highlights the details of the financial information to be given by the General Command and the central administration’s substantial control over this regional bureau at the time. The Command could not assign assets according to its needs but had to defer to Lin’an, where the final decision was to be taken by the central administration. By 1160, the court was able to keep the assets of regional agencies up to date and monitor their accounts. The central administration kept track of the information 36 湖廣總領所言： 「節次降到臨安府一合同關子共三十萬貫餘，已賣到錢一萬九千貫外，其 餘並無客人請買，卻有降到三合同關子八十萬貫，令本所賣錢樁管，比之一合同，頗為快便。 乞許本所於三合同關子內已賣到銀錢，對換一十八萬一千貫，應副支用；乞繳還一合同關子， 卻行換給支末茶長短引共二十八萬一千貫，應副支遣。將賣到錢撥還所借支過三合同關子 錢，仍舊卻揍八十萬貫，依已降指揮樁管。」從之。SHY, ‘Zhiguan’ 41.50; Liang Gengyao 梁庚 堯, Nan-Song yanque — Shiyan chanxiao yu zhengfu kongzhi 南宋鹽榷—食鹽產銷與政府控 制 (Taibei: Guoli Taiwan daxue chuban zhongxin, 2010), p. 142, notes that the denominations yi hetong guanzi 一合同關子 and san hetong guanzi 三合同關子 appear for the first time in this text, but these certificates, which allowed merchants to sell in one or three circuits, are also known as gongju guanzi 公據關子, issued by the government for funding the regional administrations that had to purchase public grain (和糴, hedi). Liang also explains that the mocha chang-duan yin 末茶長短引 were two kinds of tea vouchers; the duanyin allowed merchants to sell tea in only one circuit for one season, and the changyin in several other circuits for one year, see Liang Gengyao, Zhongguo shehui shi 中國社會史 (Taibei: Taida chuban zhongxin, 2014), p. 224.

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concerning the circulation of resources from the prefectures to the circuit levels, and from the circuit levels to the General Commands, in other words, from one region to another. This accounting management of allocations was intended to provide the court with a clear idea of regional resources, and made the regional administrations dependent upon the court’s distribution of them. The restoration of a detailed information channel thus was a crucial tool for the court’s political control over the regions. A declaration made by the Ministry of Revenue on 12 September 1160 constitutes an illustrative example of this dependence. The Ministry proposed a new structure for the financial emergencies and long-term funding of the Jiangzhou garrison (present-day Jiujiang), one of the strongholds in the Jiangxi circuit overseen by the Hu-Guang General Command.37 The imperial troops in that area were funded with resources of various origins that the Ministry could assemble in one place: taxes could be transferred to Jiangxi from various regions, other places within Jiangxi itself, but also from Guangdong and Hunan, and eventually also from Sichuan (Lizhou) and Lin’an. The distribution of resources and control over those resources with accounting records reveals a government in possession of a kind of ‘fiscal remote control’. In Sichuan, the extant sources reveal another process, although we cannot assert that after 1142 no other process led once again to a centralization of information. A policy aimed at reducing and suspending taxes was implemented as early as 1147 by General-Controller Fu Xingzhong. Fu replaced General-Controller Zhao Buqi, whose relationship with Pacification Vice-Commissioner Zheng Gangzhong was severely affected after Zhao had tried to make his own financial offices more autonomous. Zheng, who was withdrawn by the court in 1147, accused Zhao of depriving him of resources: ‘Today, every item detained by the General Command was formerly in the stocks of the Pacification Commission in order to prepare the defence of our borders. Except for the budget for the supply of troops, the amount of the budget headings is 5,815,000 strings in paper money’.38 In the indictment that led to Zheng’s demotion, his misconduct is explained as follows: In Sichuan a Fiscal Superintendence was established: it controls the finances of the four circuits to meet the needs of the army. As a result, when [Zheng] took advantage of the occasion to report to his superiors that these bureaus were reintegrated into the Commission, the military 37 SHY, ‘Zhiguan’ 41.49–50. 38 今已並屬總領錢糧所拘收，舊係本司樁積備邊，在贍軍歲計之外，其逐項窠名，歲計 錢引五百八十一萬五千道。YL, 156.2536.

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command and the supply of troops were connected and unified. Even the Court of Military Affairs and the Ministry of Revenue were not allowed to do so! The arrangement made by the founding Ancestors to regulate the finance of all administrative circuits was then erased.39

Putting the tax exemptions and reductions in the context of the tensions between civil officials and the Sichuan military, it becomes obvious that this policy was probably implemented to dismantle at least parts of the financial organization established by successive Pacification Commissioners during the war. Fu Xingzhong, the general-controller of Sichuan between 1147 and 1148, who was in charge of the tea and horse trade managed by the Sichuanese Tea-Horse Superintendence from 1149 onwards and was once again made controller in 1152 before serving as Military Executive Commissioner between 1154 and 1155, was one of the main architects of this policy, which he described in August 1155 as follows: In accordance with the imperial edict, the military demobilization should exclusively serve the people. In the jurisdictions in Sichuan, in spite of orders sent several times for the reduction and suspension of taxes in money and goods to grant the people respite, I am still afraid to say that these measures have not yet been implemented. We can, however, coordinate measures to make sure that we will not deprive the army of supplies and still accommodate the people. 40

The decision taken by the Department of State Affairs in August 1155 to implement its policy of tax reduction and exemption originated in Fu’s report on the budgetary situation. Given that the cash balance in the General Command and the Tea-Horse Superintendence was more than 960,000 strings in notes at the end of the fiscal year, not including the 2,900,000 strings used as assets to back up the paper money (chengtiqian), the central administration decided to exempt the Sichuan population from several extraordinary taxes (kefu) amounting to 2,130,000 strings. In addition, more than 750,000 strings of extraordinary taxes for military supplies (shanjun wu keming qian) and tax on added quotas for salt and alcohol commercial installations (yan-jiu wu zeng’e qian) were cancelled. Moreover, the Department ordered 39 四川有都轉運司，蓋總四路財計以贍軍須也。俾乘間上書並歸宣司，則是制軍給食，通 而為一。雖密院、戶部不得如此，祖宗維持諸路之計於此掃地。YL., 156.2540. 40 奉聖旨，息兵專以為民。四川州縣雖屢降指揮減免錢物，以寬民力，尚恐措置未盡。可 共措置務在不妨軍食可以裕民事。SHY, ‘Shihuo’ 63.12.

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a funding increase of more than 570,000 strings for the purchase of public grain supplies in Lizhou to reduce the volume of grain tax to be paid by the population. Meanwhile, the central administration also proposed to cancel more than 2,920,000 strings representing, first, the cumulative amount of unpaid surtax on value (zheguqian) for the years between 1149 and 1153; second, the taxes levied for the purchase of public grain; and third, other taxes devoted to military salaries as well as transport. 41 Apparently, the Department chose to reduce troop funding in order to enforce its control over regional finances in the face of the relative autonomy of the Sichuan commissioners, since no Pacification Commissioner had been appointed since 1148. All these important exemptions were impossible without detailed fiscal information. In 1157, the emperor once again deplored a lack of precision in a petition that Wang Zhiwang, then controller of the fiscal intendency in Tongchuan潼川 circuit, had submitted to request a reduction of the Sichuan tribute by half. In a report sent two months later, at the request of the commissioner of the Court of the Military Affairs, Tang Situi, the Military Executive Commissioner in the two circuits of Kui-Lizhou and prefect of Chengdu, Xiao Zhen, proposed two exemptions after consulting with Wang and other officials. First, over 500,000 strings which had partly been spent by the Pacification Commissioner as allocations distributed to the military trading posts in various garrisons for business operations (huiyi) and partly held back for his own use, would be impossible to levy on a strained and wartorn population. The second exemption related to the cumulative account of unpaid fees from military colony households for buffaloes that had been distributed previously but were by now long dead. 42 Both proposals were made in response to military mismanagement, and hence suggested to the court that resources could be saved by changing the financial relationship between civil and military offices. In another memorial, Xiao shed light on this new division of power between the various regional administrations. Funding for the purchase of public grain devoted to the army supply was no longer to be based on taxes but on public purchases, which were under the control of two civil officials: ‘One ordered the Fiscal Intendancy to purchase grain, and the General Command to pay for it according to market prices’. 43 The proposed exemptions clearly resulted from political tensions between civil and military offices, and led to a technical restructuring 41 Ibid. 42 SHY, ‘Shihuo’ 63.13. 43 至是令漕司糴買，而總領所以其直償之。YL, 176.2912.

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of the fiscal accounting system with transfers between accounts and an extensive redistribution of resources across different locations and regions under the control of the civil administration. However, the policy of tax reduction and exemption was also met with opposition. When the war re-emerged on the court’s agenda, military funding was again put into the spotlight. Shortly after Xiaozong’s enthronement in July 1162, the palace censor Zhang Zhen compared a moment during the first war against the Jin Empire, when Zhao Kai was said to have protected the Sichuanese people from fiscal harassment, to the contemporary situation, which he described as follows: Afterwards, the fiscal intendancies in every circuit confirmed the annual quotas and the General Commands enacted special controls of their budgets. Thereupon, fixed taxes without a real basis piled up one after the other until now. The population is not yet entirely strained but the extra quotas remain. Even though the court sent envoys several times and ordered all the circuit intendants to grant tax exemptions and reductions to the population, we still cannot fully implement these orders… Many orders related to tax amnesty should have resulted in debt cancellation of cumulatively unpaid levies, but in these jurisdictions that have not benefited from this courtesy, in general new taxes counterbalance the old ones, and it is impossible to cancel what should be cancelled! What remains in place now is not eligible for exemption; hence actual harm is not eliminated since extra designations only remain. 44

Zhang Zhen’s memorial reveals another well-known aspect of the fiscal and f inancial reality. He denounces the arbitrary levying of taxes that flourished after the war, and even after the Sichuan General Command was established in 1145. He observed that in 1162 the population had not yet benefited from the cancellation of these ‘extra quotas’ (xu’e). As a result, these ‘extra quotas’ and long accumulated unpaid taxes combined formed a rather non-transparent fiscal system. In brief, while the establishment of the General Commands tried to recreate the conditions of a unified control of the military at the regional level, the fiscal activism of the prefectures and the circuit intendencies led to burgeoning and permanent levies. In 44 其後諸路漕司各認定歲額，而總領所特總其大計，於是有名無寔之錢遞相積壓，以至於 今。民力未竭而虛額不除，朝廷雖累遣使命，俾諸路計臣蠲減以裕民，而終未能盡去也。[…] 累經(舍)[赦]命放債積欠，而州縣並不霑被惠澤者，蓋緣新錢既已補舊，當放者不能免，而見 存者不當放，寔害不去，虛名徒存故也。SHY, ‘Shihuo’ 63.20.

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other words, the difficulties in implementing tax reduction policies after Fu Xingzhong’s tenure led to yet another consequence: the central administration hardly knew about, yet alone controlled, the budgets at the regional and local levels. This has already been pointed out by Bao Weimin: due to fiscal pressures and the growing demands of the central administration, the regional and local bureaus tried to marshal new resources by increasing existing levies and through the creation of new taxation. In this sense, the returning war engendered new fiscal and financial conditions that exacerbated contradictions and tensions, and eroded the information system.

The Southeast and Sichuan General Commands in Times of War The new conflict tested the structure of fiscal power in three ways. First, it increased tensions between the f inancial agencies and those military commanders who claimed priority in wartime and hence sought to assert their authority. Second, it forced the administration, which had no choice but to work under the pressures of time and uncertainty and to tighten its control over expenditures, especially regarding deadlines and volumes. Lastly, it caused the prefectures, the General Commands, and the capital to compete with one another, since each level of government had to deal with the challenges of war in the face of their own recurrent f iscal strains. For the sake of clarity and because of the limitations of the sources, we have chosen two places from which to observe these tensions. In the southeast, Hong Gua, the aforementioned author of an important stele inscription, held the post of general-controller in Huaidong between 1162 and 1164, before being recalled to the capital. Several memorials that he submitted to the throne are still extant in his collection of writings, Panzhou wenji. These texts provide details about the challenges he faced during the fiscal crisis caused by the war. The second place is located in Sichuan. Almost at the same time, Wang Zhiwang sent several memorials from Sichuan to the court in his capacity as general-controller. These texts are also extant in a collection of writings, his Hanbin ji, which was recomposed in sixteen chapters by the authors of the Siku. A reading of these texts reveals many details of the ways in which the war operations were funded, and the differences Li Xinchuan had pointed out between the Commands in the southeast and in Sichuan.

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The Southeast As soon as he was appointed and even before he left for Zhenjiang, Hong Gua raised two main concerns in his memorial of thanks: the great difficulty of guaranteeing long-term supplies and the tensions among military commanders. His memorial reads: On a quota of three hundred bushels only ten are delivered, and they come from afar on the swift waves of the Huai. In the East, people alienated by the Qi are moving, while in the North, all the races returning to us are welcomed. While the market taxes are sent to the headquarters, a fact which is not reported, for clothing and food these people rely on the sub-prefects, and their number is on the rise. 45

Hong extensively highlighted the perennial problem of insufficient means of identifying and extracting resources. Did he exaggerate the difficulty of the task? Perhaps. But the financial circuits through which the war effort had to be sustained were well known in 1162, and therefore he could forecast these difficulties when he discussed the narrow scope of his authority, that is, soon after having been appointed. Hong indeed emphasized the administrative deficiencies of his position, as he was aware that he would have to collect resources from beyond the limits of Huaidong. He asked the court to expand his mandate to include the Jiang-Zhe area: The official title of the position of Your Servant specifies Huaidong, and his offices are located in Zhenjiang Prefecture, but the resources in money and food grains he has to collect also stem from the prefectures of Jiang and Zhe. In the past, there was only the Zhenjiang army, and the allocations of money and grains were sufficient to cover the expenses. Since the war, the number of troops stationed in the Huai region has increased and Li Bao’s whole army was added, so that the supplies for all these troops now depend upon the Zhenjiang General Command. Even though we benefit from the court’s allocations, the prefectures and commanderies remain reluctant to play their due part, and they act slowly: officials claim not to be subordinate to others and consider the documents they receive to 45 率三十鍾而致一石，遠出淮濆。東遷齊附之遺黎，北受匈歸之雜種。市租輸入幕府，兹 事蔑聞，衣食仰給縣官，其人愈衆。Hong Gua, ‘Xie chu sinong shaoqing biao’ 謝除司農少卿 表, QSW, 212.437. The Qi 齊國 was a puppet kingdom supported by the Jin Empire in Shandong as a buffer zone between the two empires.

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be useless papers. Hence, they openly monopolize their own resources without any concerns for military operations. The court has sent orders many times and permitted me to investigate and reveal disobedient or negligent locals and to transfer and recommend officials in Zhexi. However, if the competence of the post remains inadequate, the orders will in the end not be implemented. 46

Lei Jiasheng, following Kawakami Kyoji, notes that, according to the sources that detail the fiscal resources of the Huaidong Command in 1165, several prefectures of the eastern circuit of Jiangnan and the western circuit of LiangZhe provided supplies, as Hong had requested some years earlier. Within this general context, the vigorous plea from the new general-controller is hardly surprising since we do know that the court itself could only safely rely on the tax payments from Fujian and Liang-Zhe east, where Lin’an was located. Zhexi was a particularly sensitive circuit, located precisely in the region where the court was able to collect taxes directly and muster fiscal support. Here we see the aforementioned competition very clearly at play: the need for fiscal resources engendered tensions between the prefectures, known for their inaction and neglect; the General Commands, which were forced to raise money and grain often on short notice; and the capital that acted as an overall judge and jury. If the prefects were responsible enough to protect their own resources and to worry about too heavy a burden on the people, any Command should then pay great attention to the regional differences within a strategic territory and must persuade the Ministry and the court to organize tax collections and allocations in consideration of these differences and military priorities. The Command could only appeal to the court using ledgers and budget proposals. Hong Gua pointed out this concrete and difficult task in a memorial in which he listed the origins of funds and proposed to share these resources in accordance with military goals: Your servant successfully collected the data concerning cash on hand credited to the prefectural accounts, and drew up the balance sheets. 46 臣所居官以淮東入銜而置司鎮江府，所拘催錢米並是江浙諸州。向來只有鎮江一軍，則 元科撥錢米足可支遣。自用兵以來，淮上增添宿衛軍馬及李寳一軍，並是鎮江總領所應副。 雖䝉朝廷科撥錢物，而州郡頑慢，官吏各以不相臨統藉口，視文移為故纸，公然占恡，不以 軍事為意。雖朝廷屢有指揮，許按發違慢去處及浙西官亦許通行薦舉，但官名未正，終是號 令不行。Hong Gua, ‘Qi tian zongling Jiang-Zhe caifu zi zhazi’ 乞添總領江浙財賦字劄子, QSW, 213.30. This memorial was presented on the very day of his appointment as general-controller of Huaidong.

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Until the 15th of the 9th month, Sizhou had stored 70,000 shi of rice, but the figures for expenditures are not yet included; and the 40,600 shi of rice in Haizhou can cover the expenses for troop rations for one year. With 50,000 strings in cash, silver, and banknotes, and 700 (?) shi of fodder, we can cover the expenses for one month. All the prefectures together are provided with 144,000 shi of rice, which cover the expenses until the end of the 12th month; with 270,000 strings in cash, silver and banknotes, they can cover the expenses until the middle of the 11th month, and with 77,000 (?) shi of fodder, they are able to cover the expenses for one year. In any case, Your Servant’s offices are in charge to transfer gradually the allocations from one place to another. Insofar as today cash and rice stored in Zhenjiang and coming from the prefectures are rare, it is difficult to credit by stock the Huai region in advance for the expenses of the 7th month. 47

The General Command offices had to take stock of all resources and forecast expenses often amidst unclear military and f iscal environments. This uncertainty required them to anticipate events and exert pressure on the prefectures. Hong reached this conclusion: ‘Even though the expenses at the front are exceptionally huge, spending on the imperial army is always right; it would be wrong to put limits on it, and then return to implementing the right allocations only when the moment seemed right’. 48 Furthermore, the geographic conditions were also uncertain, since transport depended on variable environments, such as the opening and closing of water-gates, as Hong Gua pointed out. Zhenjiang was at the end of the canal that linked Lin’an to the Yangzi River, past Piling (present-day Changzhou) and Danyang on the right bank. Guazhou, on the left bank of the Yangzi River, was at the mouth of the canal that linked the Yangzi to the Huai River. From the beginning of the Song Dynasty, the Zhenjiang-Guazhou passage was convenient because of the large islands on the river, and it became crucial when the military front was located on the Huai. The Zhenjiang gazetteer mentions several inscriptions that detail the hydraulic system under the Song. They mention the year of construction of the canal as well as specific maintenance 47 臣取㑹到諸州見管數目算計，至九月十五日終，泗州有樁積米七萬石，未係支遣之數， 海州有米四萬六百石，可給軍食一年，有錢、銀、㑹子五萬貫，料七百石，可支一月。諸州共 有米十四萬四千石，可支至十二月終；有錢、銀、㑹子二十七萬貫，可支至十一月中旬；有馬 料七萬七千石，可支一年。並係臣本所節次改撥前去。緣鎮江倉庫目今儲積及諸州未到錢 米並皆不多，難以預樁淮上七月之費。Hong Gua, ‘Kuaiji jun chu zhazi’ 㑹計軍儲劄子, QSW, 213.38–39. 77,000 shi of fodder should be the right figure. 48 但軍前非泛支用，並是就支大軍錢物，不可掯約，臨期旋行措置科撥。Ibid.

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works on its southern part, especially between Danyang and Zhenjiang, an area where low waters constituted the main problem for transport. One of these texts compares the Jingkou (Zhenjiang) land mass to a great tortoise whose shell would block the water in the canal. This problem was complicated by another hydraulic challenge: the tidal waters that could reach Zhenjiang from the silted mouth of the Yangzi. The flow of water had to be kept steady inside the canal, while the tides needed to be blocked to keep the canal secure, especially in the area of Guazhou. Hence Hong Gua had to consider at least two scenarios: when the water gates were opened, transport remained possible from the south to Zhenjiang, and thus the transfer of cargo to Guazhou and beyond to the front line was easy. In contrast, when the water gates were closed, the convoys traveling upstream from Jiankang could reach Guazhou to transfer the cargo. If there were no convoys from Jiangdong, the General Command could use the Zhe-Xi boats to transport cargo to as far as Guazhou. In other words, geographic uncertainty was a vital factor to be considered by the General Command, not a minor element that could be neglected in the planning of their operations. The problem of uncertainty also produced tensions among the military commanders. The army was quick to criticize the logistics and the services provided by the General Commands, and these tensions resulted in rivalries at court and power struggles on the ground. Another one of Hong’s memorials reflects this problem. Hong sent it after an edict ordered him to provide additional information on excessive controls that would have interrupted and disturbed payments to the soldiers. The bureau of the imperial army had denounced the General Command in a report to the court, and Hong’s memorial detailed the exact management of the soldiers’ allowances: Every time the soldiers leave for an operation, the offices of the headquarters determine the distances related to the total personnel of the operation, and send a document to the General Command which has to evaluate money and rice provisions for two or three months in advance. All the military commanders of each unit are listed by rank with their names, and additional vouchers are issued and sent to the Bureau of Grains and Fodder and the Bureau of Financial Auditing where they are immediately registered for delivery. If the period of an operation is extended, the provisions are to be evaluated once again. Except for the change of food rations from rice into wheat or cash and for additional allocations in cash and rice for the families who remain with the garrisons, all money and vouchers that have been approved after checking are delivered in one instalment on the day they go to Zhenjiang: the conversion into cash and

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goods is done, the travel costs are paid and the allocations for families are delivered. Two-tenths of the cash and the food rations are delivered to the troops every ten days following their arrival on the front line. The following month, rough figures for the needs of the whole army are to be estimated, and the commanders themselves should then make monthly reduction to the money and food provided at the outset. Once the troops and horses have returned, one checks demand every month in proportion to the total personnel. If they return during a month that has already been funded in advance, one extends the validity of the ‘routine vouchers’ to be paid in Zhenjiang. 49

It is useful to remember that the Huaidong General Command supervised supplies according to the military plans made by the Huaidong headquarters which was also located in Zhenjiang. The court had reorganized the imperial army in 1141 by dividing it into nine headquarters based in Sichuan (Xingyuan, Mianzhou or Xingzhou, Jinzhou), Jing-Hu (Ezhou, Jingnan, Jiangzhou), Huaixi (Jiankang, Chizhou), and Huaidong (Zhenjiang). Koiwai Hiromitsu, and more recently Lei Jiasheng, have studied the payment of soldiers in vouchers. They found that the General Commands followed two kinds of supply procedures with different kinds of vouchers: ‘routine vouchers’ (shuquan) and ‘exceptional vouchers’ (shengquan).50 Hong Gua’s memorial describes these two procedures: troops stationed in garrisons were provided with ‘routine vouchers’, including vouchers for their families, and troops on operations were provided with ‘exceptional vouchers’. Obviously ‘routine vouchers’ were devoted to the current needs of the imperial soldiers, while the ‘exceptional vouchers’ were handed out to troops leaving the garrisons for the frontline or sent to reinforce the front. The General Commands therefore should ensure fixed expenditures for ‘routine vouchers’, but allow for variable expenditures with ‘exceptional vouchers’. It is reasonable to think that in 1162, after the chaos of the earlier wars, the control of the General Commands over the payment of soldiers was a sensitive issue. Between 1127 and 1141, in the same regions where the war rekindled in 1162, lootings 49 每遇差出，即都統司量遠近以人數，移文總領所，預勘兩月或三月錢米。每軍逐將攢 類姓名，造成劵旁，發到糧審院，即時批放。或出戍日久，則又接續再勘。除月糧米折麥錢 并新添錢米存留養贍老小外，其預勘銀子及公據，係出軍之日就鎮江一頓支請，轉變錢物， 置辦路費，及分留贍家。其二分見錢及口食米，即就軍前逐旬支請。至次月全軍過勘大曆， 本將即以出戍人預勘過錢米自行按月回落。及軍馬還歸，逐月隨衆勘請。若回歸在預勘月分 之內，則以熟旁改界，就鎮江支請。Hong Gua, ‘Shu bing qingji qumo zuzhi zhazi’ 戍兵請給 驅磨阻滯劄子, QSW, 213.39. 50 Koiwai, Sōdai heiseishi, pp. 423–488; Lei Jiasheng, Julian mouguo, pp. 67–101.

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had been the normal ‘payment’ for the numerous bands of rebels and local warlords who may or may not have been allied to the Song. This is probably why the central authorities tried to exert strict control over the accounting procedures of the General Commands, in the hope that every agency would be able to meet the needs of the troops without causing discontent among their commanders. In Sichuan, thus further away from the eastern front between the capital and the Huai valley, the situation was different, as revealed by the testimony of Li Xinchuan. Wang Zhiwang, the general-controller, maintained that the difference was mainly structural. Wang had held several posts as a fiscal expert in Hunan, in the border area between present-day Sichuan and Yunnan in the Tongchuan Circuit, and eventually in Sichuan, where he served as general-controller between 1160 and 1162. He brought with him his expertise on the organization of public finances, or, in other words, his extensive awareness of the links between the central administration and Sichuanese agencies. One of the memorials he wrote as general-controller directly mentions the differences between the management of the southeast region and the financial organization in Sichuan: I have investigated the military operations in the South-East: the military commanders are in charge of the troops, the Ministry of Revenue controls the fiscal resources, and the court controls their allocations, tax collection, and fiscal policies. Today in Sichuan, which is located far away from the court, the General Command is not involved in military operations: for all decisions regarding requisitions or expenses, the agency simply orients itself on the stated requirements of the army, supplies goods one by one, and so just defer to it to meet its basic needs. It is quite different from the management in the South-East.51

This structural difference was of course related to the geographic distance from the court and the central administration, but the difficulties resulted primarily from a lack of cooperation between the military commanders and the General Command. According to Wang, this problem was not solved until Wu Lin returned to Sichuan as Pacification Commissioner (xuanfushi): 51 某契勘東南用兵，將帥統軍旅，户部總財賦，而朝廷制其予奪盈虛之柄。今四川去朝 廷遠，而總司不預兵事，凡有調發支費，只得據其所須，色色應副，不過委曲調䕶而已，比 東南事體大段不同。Wang Zhiwang 王之望, ‘Lun Sichuan zongsuo yu Dongnan shiti butong zhazi’ 論四川總所與東南事體不同劄, QSW, 197.224–225.

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Fortunately, the Pacification Commissioner Wu Lin is loyal, willing to serve the State, and committed to the saving of resources. Otherwise, how would the General Command be able to cover the expenses of our defence? Recently, we received a series of instructions that ordered all the armies and our offices should cooperate and avoid disputes. All the commanders complied with the regulations on reporting and our General Command stood by itself. Hence this sacred dynasty of ours clearly perceives that from more than a thousand li away the most distant regions have heard their instructions and obey happily.52

The role played by Wu Lin and his elder brother Wu Jie in the defence of the dynasty in Sichuan is well known.53 Born in the Gansu region, the two generals f irst fought against the Tanguts and then against the Jurchen towards the end of the Northern Song, before Jie became Pacif ication Commissioner of Sichuan. Right after Jie’s death in 1139, the general Wu Lin was sent to Qinzhou (Shaanxi), by authority of the Sichuan Military Executive Commissioner. He returned to Sichuan in 1161, when the recurring war compelled the court to abandon its policy of limiting the powers of the military. Wu Lin was appointed Pacif ication Commissioner of Sichuan and participated in the war with his son Wu Ting, who held the post of Military Commissioner in Lizhou Circuit. The Wu family thus became very influential in Sichuan and certainly familiarized themselves with the old system of military f inances created by Zhao Kai. When Wang Zhiwang placed responsibility for harmony and balance under the authority of Wu Lin, rewarding the general’s loyalty and concern for frugality, he sought to support a harmonious environment. In July 1161, Wang described the situation in Sichuan since the creation of the General Command as follows: The court changed the system by appointing a general-controller and actually distinguished his duties related to the f inancial agency: all the granaries and storehouses were to be labelled by the Ministry of Revenue and a court off icial would be in charge of them. As soon as Zhao Buqi was appointed general-controller of Sichuan, he made this 52 所幸宣撫吳璘忠義體國，愛惜財用。不然總領一司，何以支吾？近蒙累降處分，令諸軍 與本所務在協和，不生間隙。諸將莫不遵禀，本所以自立。斯葢聖朝明見萬里之外，遠方 聞指揮之下，皆大悦服。Ibid. 53 Wang Zhiyong 王智勇, Nan-Song wushi jiazu de xing-wang 南宋吳氏家族的興亡 (Chengdu: Ba-Shu shushe, 1995), pp. 114–115.

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specif ic point to the court: ‘Previously, when Zhang Chengxian [Jun] supplied Han Shizhong with money and food rations, it was solemnly proclaimed his position should be independent of the Pacif ication Commissioner, without binding obligations, and both used only official memoranda for their communication. Hence I asked to be given Zhang Chengxian’s old mandate’. The court issued an edict agreeing to this. Since then, army and finance both have their own offices; their powers counterbalance each other, and their respective authorities assist each other […]. Shu is more than one thousand li away; the exchange of memorials or reports often takes several months, and this is quite different from the situation in the South-East. Recently, the court appointed Vice-Protector Wu [Lin] as Pacif ication Commissioner; the court also ordered the Executive Military Commissioner Wang [Gangzhong] to work closely with him in all the affairs, to evaluate the situation and decide on priorities, and to relocate his off ices closer to Wu for more effective planning. This unif ication of Sichuan Military operations fits present conditions very well. The Pacification Commissioner exerts his authority over the army, the Military Commissioner decides strategic issues with him, and the general-controller is in charge of supplies.54

In addition, Wang Zhiwang stressed the re-emergence of military tensions with the Jin Empire and the possibility of renewed conflict. He proposed a new organizational structure, featuring more precisely defined powers and a more efficient performance of administrative acts: Since the reform and the creation of the General Command in Sichuan, there have been no military operations. If new military challenges arise, the situation will differ from now. We worry that every office issues its own proclamations without reference to others; the orders from the court thus temporarily become difficult to implement. What everybody is the most careful about is wealth; but what everybody is most envious 54 朝廷改置總領， 實分版曹之務， 倉庫皆以户部為名， 而以朝臣奉使。 趙不棄初除 四川總領日， 申畫一項云： 『昨來張成憲應副韓世忠錢糧， 申明與宣撫别無統攝， 止 用公牒行移， 乞移張成憲已得指揮。 』朝廷降旨從之。 自是兵與財賦各有攸司， 勢若 提衡， 輕重相濟。 […] 蜀在數千里外， 奏報往復動經數月， 與東南事體不同。 近朝廷 以吳少保為宣撫， 而應干事務， 令王制置同共措置， 且量事緊慢， 移司近吳， 以便計 議。 四川軍事有所統一， 甚合事宜。 是則宣撫制其兵， 制置共其謀， 而總領主其餉 饋。 Wang Zhiwang, ‘Cuozhi bei bian xiangkui chaozha’ 措置備邊餉餽朝劄, QSW, 197.232–234; YL, 190.3189.

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of is wealth also. The General Command alone, when dealing with the prefectures and commanderies, worries about its income and, when dealing with soldiers, cuts its expenses. In general, the performance of their tasks conflicts with common feeling; therefore everybody hates this administration […]. Today, Vice-President Wu [Lin] is loyal, and willing to serve the state, and he shows a strong commitment to his soldiers and the people. The academician Wang [Gangzhong] has understood the urgency of the present period and hence strives to observe procedures. Both are in sincere respect with me, which results in a good cooperation and mutual support. We are waiting for the clear definition of our duties according to the separation of the offices by the court, not simply on a temporary basis but as a long-term project. With such clear definitions, it would be easy to coordinate defence, and every agency could stick to its specific duties.55

Wang supported the unification of military authority very much because the appointment of Wu Lin in 1161 allowed ‘the General Command to react more easily’.56 Above all, this unification had reduced the position of the Military Executive Commissioner (anfu zhizhishi), Wang Gangzhong, who had held authority over the Sichuan military since 1158. In 1161, Wang Gangzhong eventually requested authorization to maintain control over a number of crucial posts he had officially controlled since his appointment, particularly the income from the agricultural colonies (yingtian) that several generals had long monopolized: We request that, according to the instruction given on the 22th of the 4th month of Shaoxing 15 (15 May 1145), beginning from Shaoxing 31 (1161), every year, at the end of the summer and autumn harvest, the two headquarters shall list the size of croplands cultivated by the group leaders, their quality, the initial quantity of seeds, and the number of bushels obtained from the harvest. In addition, concerning the management and supervision of agricultural officials, reports shall be sent to the offices of the Executive 55 四川自改總領所以來， 未經用兵，一旦有事， 與當時不同， 恐或諸司各有申明， 不 相參照， 朝廷行下， 臨時難以酬應。 人最所吝惜者財也， 最所貪愛者亦財也。 總領一 司於郡縣則急其入， 於将士則裁其出， 職事所行， 大扺皆拂逆人情， 為衆惡之府。 […] 今吳少保忠義體國， 兼愛軍民， 王閣學明達憂時， 務循法度， 皆與某心腹相照， 可容 協濟。 顧朝廷分司庀職， 非為一時， 當計久遠， 處畫分明， 則易相調䕶， 各得守其職 分矣。 Ibid. 56 本所差易酬應。 Wang Zhiwang, ‘Lun yun mi chongbei bian chaozha’ 論運米充備邊朝 劄, QSW, 197.231.

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Military Commissioner and the general-controller of Sichuan so they may both refer to them in order to evaluate rewards and punishments.57

The positive answer of the Ministry of Revenue to Wang Gangzhong’s request clearly opposed the strict separation of powers that Wang Zhiwang wanted enforced. However, in 1161, the latter also benefited from an extension of his fiscal authority. The General Command could now collect taxes that formerly were out of its control or simply had not existed before, as the Songshi, quoted by Lei Jiasheng, points out: 31st year (1161): before that year, seven-tenths of the revenues collected from mortgage and contract fees for land and buildings, paid by the people of all the prefectures, were collected as taxes for regional fiscal administrations, and third-tenths were collected as funds of the central administration. During this year, the general-controller of Sichuan, Wang Zhiwang, proposed measures to allow his office to collect such taxes in order to supply the troops. An edict gave agreement. It was ordered that dowries, wills, and burial plots should be established in contracts, which should incur taxes. As a result, within one year the administration received more than 4,670,000 additional banknotes of cash.58

The collection of these new taxes suggests that fiscal controls over land and farmers were part of the tensions between the General Command and Military Executive Commissioner Wang Gangzhong. It can hence be assumed that, in Sichuan, the court’s strategy was not only to grant fiscal and financial autonomy to the General Command, but also to regulate the powers of the military authorities. Wang Zhiwang positioned himself closer to Pacif ication Commissioner Wu Lin, since Wu’s newly gained, full authority over decision-making weakened the power of Executive Commissioner Wang Gangzhong, who was also a civil official. The central administration, if the situation demanded it, could continue to exploit the rivalries between commissioners by relying on the General Command, 57 乞依紹興十五年四月二十二日已降指揮，欲自紹興三十一年為始，每歲候夏、秋收成了 畢，從兩都統開坐諸頭項所種營田頃畝、土色高下、元下種子、所收斛斗數目，幷主管或 提振營田官職位，關報四川安撫制置司幷總領所，同共參照，通行比較賞罰。SHY, ‘Shihuo’ 63.120–121. 58 三十一年， 先是， 諸州人戶典賣田宅契稅錢所收窠名， 七分隸經總制， 三分屬係 省。 至是， 總領四川財賦王之望言， 請從本所措置拘收， 以供軍用， 詔從之。 凡嫁資、 遺囑及民間葬地， 皆令投契納稅， 一歲中得錢四百六十七萬餘引。 Toghto (Tuotuo) 脫脫, Songshi 宋史 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), 174.4223; Lei Jiasheng, Julian mouguo, pp. 137–161.

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which had built its legitimacy and power upon the routine circulation of information, especially the accounting reports. The General Command had thus become a vital element of the court’s control over Sichuan in times of war. This strategy was partly similar to the political agenda that Qin Gui had pursued in 1141, when the General Commands were first created in the southeast. However, in Sichuan, the court regularly changed the competences of various commissioners with respect to the army. Some were civil officials who could limit the power of military commanders, given that, since 1145, their resources had increasingly become dependent on the information provided to the central administration by the General Command. The development of an accounting culture and accounting procedures made it possible to anticipate events and to manage them using solid bookkeeping, to carry out effective auditing of shipments and stockpiles, and to exert a posteriori control. This culture played a crucial role in the Lin’an court’s successful policy to secure its control over troops committed to a new military conflict.

Conclusion This study has shed light on the role that the collection, compilation, and storing of accounting data by various civil and military offices played in the restoration of the administrative and political power of the dynasty between 1127 and the second conflict with the Jin at the end of the Shaoxing era. The chronological focus on events should be re-emphasized: to explore institutional change, we began with the administrative and fiscal imbalances that resulted from the shocks caused by the war. We did so because these traumas were the matrix within which the resilience of the fiscal institutions came to be rebuilt, leading to a reorientation of control procedures and the creation of new norms. The civil administration used the accounting system inherited from the Northern Song as one of the main ways to control the military, but we have observed the ability of the court to adapt various innovative fiscal and financial arrangements, established during the war at the regional level, to bring about a new centralization of power. By using the rivalry among military commissioners and between civil and military officials, the court was able to promote new accounting procedures that guaranteed the continuous circulation of quantitative information within the administrative structure and reinsured its preeminence. These procedures, which allowed for more adequate responses to increasingly complex and diverse situations, became a crucial element of the

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communication between the regional offices and the central administration, and in turn generated new prescriptive norms, for instance by alerting the imperial power to pay greater attention to the variety of fiscal regimes at the regional level. Hence, between 1141 and 1145, the central government could establish the four General Commands and adopt several financial and fiscal procedures invented in different regional contexts during the war. These four regional agencies, which had all been put under the authority of the Ministry of Revenue, allowed the court to restore its fiscal power, control financial resources, and stabilize the relationships between military and civil authorities. However, they could not avoid a certain degree of fragmentation of the fiscal and financial cohesiveness, since they had to acknowledge the intricacies of regional tax systems. At the beginning of the 1160s, renewed conflict prompted the court to reorganize this administrative structure, but a strict separation between the high military command and the civil control over the funding of military operations remained a core administrative and political principle. Even though in 1161, the dynasty decided once again to rely on the Wu family in Sichuan, the general-controller remained a powerful official, attached to the Ministry of Revenue and independent of the Pacification Commission. Moreover, in the Sichuan case, the new balance between military and fiscal officers contributed to the emergence of new hierarchies within the military organization. The central administration partly relied on the General Command to regulate military power, according to its own interests. In any case, we can assert that the recentralization of financial power during the second Song-Jin War depended on the ability of the Ministry of Revenue to adapt the management of financial and fiscal matters to new military challenges, since military spending had once again become the dominant post in the budget. It is worth mentioning that the general context of this adaptation was the diminution of resources in copper cash and in precious metals, and this situation required a recourse to various kinds of paper: not only the huizi banknotes or guanzi certificates issued by the administration, but also vouchers issued within the monopolies (yin), certificates of religious ordination (dudie), or even vouchers (quan) used to supply soldiers and their families. Accounting systems were also the main and only way to control the circulation of these papers and to provide access to the assets they represented. It is also important to comment on the extant sources. Within the limits of my research, I have noticed that the available details on the General Commands in the southeast are quite different from the information on

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Sichuan. We have access to several kinds of accounting data concerning the southeast, while the sources in Sichuan describe the general financial organization rather than concrete accounting procedures. The historian should be aware that this difference is in line with Li Xinchuan’s remarks on the divergence between the southeast and Sichuan. In other words, the substantial presence of accounting information in the southeast testifies to the close dependence of the General Commands on the central administration in this region, while the fewer details about Sichuan show that the General Command there enjoyed larger autonomy. In addition, another question can be raised: is our historical vision distorted by the scarcity of sources that survive? Moreover, were the sources available to Li Xinchuan already fragmented and partial? Finally, we would like to stress the technical aspect of this control by turning back to the vocabulary used in the documents that we have translated. What is striking is the precision of the terms, which pose great difficulties in devising correct translations and making clear what the officials and clerks were really doing. Obviously, this vocabulary had become a political idiom that nobody in office or at court could ignore, and we should pay more attention to this idiom in order to penetrate more accurately into the Song political world.59

References Abbreviations QSW: Quan Song wen 全宋文 (Shanghai-Hefei: Shanghai cishu chubanshe/ Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 2006). SHY: Xu Song 徐松. Song huiyao jigao 宋會要輯稿 (Taibei: Xin wenfeng chuban gongsi [ed. Peiping tushuguan, 1936], 1976). WXTK: Ma Duanlin 馬端臨. Wenxian tongkao 文獻通考 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986). YL: Li Xinchuan 李心傳. Jianyan yilai xinian yaolu 建炎以來繫年要錄 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936). 59 Some tools already exist in Chinese and Japanese. See Guo Daoyang 郭道揚, Zhongguo kuaiji shigao 中國會計史稿 (Beijing: Zhongguo caizheng jingji chubanshe, 1982); Fang Baozhang方 宝璋, Songdai caijing jiandu yanjiu 宋代財經監督研究 (Beijing: Zhongguo shenji chubanshe, 2001). See also Chūgoku shakai keizai shi yōgo kai 中國社會經濟史用語解, ed. by Shiba Yoshinobu (Tokyo: Toyō bunko, 2012).

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ZJ: Li Xinchuan 李心傳. Jianyan yilai chaoye zaji 建炎以來朝野雜記 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006).

Primary Hong Gua 洪适. QSW, vol. 213. Lu Xian盧憲. Jiading Zhenjiang zhi 嘉定鎮江志 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990). Toghto (Tuotuo) 脫脫. Songshi 宋史 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977). Wang Zhiwang 王之望. QSW, vol. 197. Xu Mengxin 徐夢莘. Sanchao beimeng huibian 三朝北盟彙編 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987). Yu Xilu 俞希鲁. Zhishun Zhenjiang zhi 至順鎮江志 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990). Zhou Yinghe 周應合. Jingding Jiankang zhi 景定建康志 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990).

Secondary Fang, Baozhang 方宝璋. Songdai caijing jiandu yanjiu 宋代財經監督研究 (Beijing: Zhongguo shenji chubanshe, 2001). Guo, Daoyang 郭道揚. Zhongguo kuaiji shigao 中國會計史稿 (Beijing: Zhongguo caizheng jingji chubanshe, 1982). He, Yuhong 何玉紅. ‘Bianyi xingshi yu zhongyang jiquan — yi Nan-Song ChuanShaan xuanfu chuzhisi de yunxing wei zhongxin’ “便宜行事” 與中央集權 — 以 南宋川陝宣撫處 置司的運行為中心. Sichuan daxue xuebao 4 (2007): pp. 26–36. Huang, Kuanchong 黃寬重. ‘Song ting dui minjian ziwei wuli de liyong he kongzhi — yi zhenfushi wei li’ 宋廷對民間自衛武力的利用和控制 — 以鎮撫使為例. In Nan-Song difang wuli — difang jun yu minjian ziwei wuli de tantao (Taibei: Dongda tushu gongsi, 2002), pp. 145–202. Kawakami, Kyoji 川上恭司. ‘Nan-Sō no sōryōsho ni tsuite’ 南宋の総領所につい て. Machikane yama ronsō (shigakuhen) 12 (1978): pp. 1–29. Koiwai, Hiromitsu 小岩井弘光. Sōdai heiseishi no kenkyū 宋代兵制史の研究, Kyūko sōsho 15 (Tokyo: Kyko shoin, 1998). Lamouroux, Christian. Fiscalité, comptes publics et politiques financières dans la Chine des Song: le chapitre 179 du ‘Songshi’ (Paris: IHEC, 2003). Lei, Jiasheng 雷家聖. Julian mouguo — Nan-Song zonglingsuo yanjiu 聚斂謀 國 — 南宋總領所研究 (Taibei, Wanjuan lou tushu, 2013). Lei, Jiasheng. ‘Nan-Song si zonglingsuo yu gongjun caifu de shou-zhi’ 南宋四總 領所與供軍財賦的收支. In Song shi yanjiu lunwenji, edited by Deng Xiaonan and Yang Guo (Wuhan: Hubei changjiang & Hubei renmin chubanshe, 2010), pp. 208–227.

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Liang, Gengyao 梁庚堯. Nan-Song yanque — Shiyan chanxiao yu zhengfu kongzhi 南 宋鹽榷 — 食鹽產銷與政府控制 (Taibei: Guoli Taiwan daxue chuban zhongxin, 2010). Liang, Gengyao. Zhongguo shehui shi 中國社會史 (Taibei: Taida chuban zhongxin, 2014). Liu, Yun 劉云. ‘Nan-Song Gaozong shiqi de caizheng zhidu bianqian’ 南宋高宗 時期的財政制度變遷. Zhongguo shehui jingji shi yanjiu 1 (2008): pp. 41–49. Nagai, Chiaki 長井千秋. ‘Waitō sōryōsho no kino’ 淮東総領所の機能. Machikane yama ronsō (shigakuhen) 22 (1988): pp. 41–64. Shiba, Yoshinobu 斯波義信, ed. Chūgoku shakai keizai shi yōgo kai 中國社會經濟 史用語解 (Tokyo: Toyō bunko, 2012). Wang, Huayu 王化雨. ‘Nan-Song Shaoxing qianqi de zhongyang qian Shu shuaichen’ 南宋绍兴前期的中央遣蜀帅臣. Sichuan shifan daxue xuebao 41, no. 1 (2014): pp. 22–29. Wang, Zhiyong 王智勇. Nan-Song wushi jiazu de xing-wang 南宋吳氏家族的興 亡 (Chengdu: Ba-Shu shushe, 1995). Yu, Wei 余蔚. ‘Lun Nan-Song xuanfushi he zhizhishi zhidu’ 論南宋宣撫使和制置 使制度. Zhonghua wen-shi luncong 85, no. 1 (2007): pp. 129–179.

2.2 Administrative Elites and the ‘First Phase of Byzantine Humanism’ The Adoption of the Minuscule in Book Production and the Role of the Stoudios Monastery Filippo Ronconi

Abstract This study investigates the interconnection between the adoption of the minuscule script for the transcription of Greek literary texts (one of the most significant innovations in the history of Byzantine book culture) and the huge cultural revival of ninth-century Byzantium. The focus lies on the social changes that occurred among the Constantinopolitan elites at the end of the eighth century as a result of the political events following the death of Emperor Leo IV. The adoption of the minuscule in the copying of books will be described as a three-step process, whose phases will be discussed with particular attention to the social milieus in which they emerged and developed (especially the bureaucratic circles of the capital connected to the finance administration and some monastic networks). In conclusion, the study emphasizes the importance of some very specific technical skills in one of the most decisive changes in middle-byzantine cultural history. Keywords: bureaucracy, financial administration, Greek script, minuscule, majuscule, Byzantine humanism, monasticism

One of the most significant innovations in the history of Byzantine book culture is the adoption of the minuscule for the transcription of literary texts, which took place between the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century: this script, which resulted from the process of normalization of a cursive that was already being used in bureaucratic milieus (Figure 2.2.1), superseded the traditional book scripts known as majuscule.

De Weerdt, Hilde, and Franz-Julius Morche (eds), Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463720038_ch02.2

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This phenomenon shortly preceded a wide cultural revival by which the empire emerged from a long period of decline. This study makes suggestions concerning the interconnection between these phenomena and investigates their causes, focusing on the relationship between such mutations in Byzantine (book) culture and the deep socio-political changes that took place in the empire from the end of the eighth century, the precursors of which can be traced back to the seventh century. It is structured into three main sections: the first section below briefly presents the innovative character of ninth-century book culture, with special attention paid to the manuscript tradition and to the circulation of classical texts. The following section then focuses on the socio-cultural and political conditions in which the adoption of the minuscule for the copying of books took place. It consists of three parts, which describe the three stages of the process in chronological order: the first deals with the cultural prominence of administrative milieus in Byzantine society during the period preceding the graphic change (i.e. in the seventh and eighth centuries), concentrating on the first isolated attempts to use the bureaucratic cursive for the transcription of books. The second part examines the socio-cultural significance of the spreading of this phenomenon outside bureaucratic circles during the last decades of the eighth century. The last part focuses on the role of monastic milieus in the normalization, ideological promotion, and dissemination of the actual minuscule into wider social circles from the beginning of the ninth century. A short conclusion closes the essay and draws attention to the role played by some specific bureaucratic technical skills in a central moment of the cultural history of Byzantium.

Innovations in Ninth-Century Book Culture Towards the middle of the ninth century, Byzantine cultural production was characterized by a rise in the composition of erudite texts that referenced ancient secular works and were written in a classicizing Greek that had not been used for centuries.1 This was the consequence, inter alia, of an increase 1 The best — but not usual — example of this trend is the Library of Photius of Constantinople, on whose composition, see. F. Ronconi, ‘Il Moveable Feast del Patriarca. Note e ipotesi sulla genesi della Bibliotheca di Fozio’, in Nel segno del testo. Edizioni, materiali e studi per Oronzo Pecere, ed. by L. Del Corso, F. De Vivo, and A. Stramaglia (Firenze: Gonnelli, 2015), pp. 203-238. Concerning the linguistic transformations of Byzantine Greek, see P. Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1971), p. 74; R. Robins, The Byzantine Grammarians: Their Place in History (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993), p. 12f., 26, 33f.; Jean Schneider, Les traités orthographiques grecs antiques et byzantins (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 332–334; A. Rollo, ‘“Greco medievale” e “greco

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in the transcription of classical writings during the first half of the century:2 even though religious works remained the most common,3 the copying of scientific and scholarly texts increased progressively, covering fields such as medicine, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, philosophy, and grammar.4 In the following decades, the same trend can be observed: in the framework of a persistent general increase in the production of books (which were written in minuscule script), the number of philosophic and scientific manuscripts rose further, as did the circulation of other ancient texts,5 including literary prose and poetry.6 These important cultural phenomena — which are known as a bizantino”’, Aiōn 30 (2003): pp. 429–473, 437f.; G. Horrocks ‘Lingua alta e lingua popolare’, in Lo spazio letterario del Medioevo, 3. Le culture circostanti, I, La cultura bizantina, ed. by G. Cavallo (Rome: Viella, 2004), pp. 457–489. On the linguistic levels of the eighth to ninth centuries in particular, see M.-F. Auzépy, ‘Controversia delle immagini e produzione di testi’. In ibid., pp. 149–182, 154, 156, 158; R. Browning, ‘The Language of Byzantine Literature’, in The Past in Medieval and Modern Greek Culture, ed. by S. Vryonis, Jr. (= Byzantina kai Metabyzantina 1 [1978]) (repr. in id., History, Language and Literacy in the Byzantine World [London: Variorum Reprints, 1989] pp. 103–133, here p. 114. In the following notes — which are designed to stimulate further reading and are not exhaustive — preference is given to titles that may aid in orienting the non-specialist reader. 2 It is possible to gain a first idea by consulting online databases: http://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/ and http://www.trismegistos.org/ldab/ (both accessed 22 May 2020); also see http://dvctvs.upf. edu/links/ (accessed 22 May 2020). On the requisite prudence in using these tools, see F. Ronconi, ‘Quelle grammaire à Byzance? La circulation des textes grammaticaux et son reflet dans les manuscrits’, in La produzione scritta tecnica e scientifica nel Medioevo: libro e documento tra scuole e professioni, ed. by G. De Gregorio, and M. Galante (Spoleto: CISAM, 2012), p. 68 and n. 21. 3 For the seventh and eighth centuries, legal, medical, geographic, lexicographic, and rhetorical works are reduced to a few titles: see the online databases in the preceding note. 4 Medicine: Paris. Suppl. Gr. 1156, fol. 23–25 + Paris. Coisl. 8, fol. 1 and 283 + Paris. Coisl. 123, fol. I + Mosq. GIM gr. 174 (Vlad. 387), fol. 1–2 (Paul of Aegina); Paris. Gr. 2179 (Dioscorides); geometry: Vat. Gr. 190 (Euclid); astronomy: Vat. Gr. 1291, Leid. BPG 78, Paris. Gr. 2389 (Ptolemy); mathematics: Laur. plut. 28.18 (Theon of Alexandria and Pappus of Alexandria); philosophy: Paris. Suppl. gr. 1362; Oxon. Corpus Christi 108 (Aristotle); grammar: Paris. gr. 2548 (Apollonios Dyskolos). 5 Aristotle: Vindob. Phil. Gr. 100 and Paris. Suppl. gr. 1156 (fol. 13–14); for Plato and the mezzoand neo-Platonic pagans of the ‘group B’ of that which is usually referred to as the ‘philosophical collection’, see F. Ronconi, ‘La collection brisée: Pour une étude des milieux socioculturels liés à la “collection philosophique”’, in La face cachée de la littérature byzantine: Le texte en tant que message immédiat, ed. by P. Odorico (Paris: Centre d’études byzantines, néo-helléniques et sud-est européennes — École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2011), pp. 137–166, and id., ‘La “collection philosophique”: un fantôme historique’, Scriptorium 67 (2013): pp. 119–140; for other authors in the ‘collection’ see Marc. Gr. 258 (Alexander of Aphrodisias), the scriptio inferior of the palimpsest Paris. Gr. 2575 (Ammonius and Simplicius) and Harv. Typ 46 (John Philopon); for astronomy and mathematics, see Vat. Gr. 1594 (Claudius Ptolemy). On the so called ‘philosophical collection’ in general, see now D. Bianconi, and F. Ronconi, eds., La “collection philosophique” face à l’histoire. Péripéties et tradition (Spoleto: Cisam, 2020). 6 See the information regarding the books of Leo the Mathematician (c.790–post 869, one of the finest scholars of the ninth century) contained in the epigrams of the Anth. Pal. 9.200–203,

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whole as the ‘first phase of Byzantine humanism’7 — are generally considered in Byzantine sources to be the consequence of the definitive establishment of the practice of venerating icons after the end of iconomachy (843). But these features — which concern at once the book culture and the intellectual trends of Byzantine society — must be understood in a wider context of events that unfolded during the final decades of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century: one of the most intense periods in the history of the Byzantine Empire, when new arenas of political action were formed by administrative personnel whose training in the study and transcription of texts was instrumental in extending their readership to much wider circles. As will be made clear, this process took place in a political context where propaganda gained central significance amidst growing tensions, and pamphlets and polemical anthologies were widely employed and diffused, contributing to the transformation of book circulation. Yet these complex phenomena also symptomized dynamics that were rooted in the previous centuries.

Socio-Political Mutations and the Transformation of Byzantine Book Culture The Prehistory of the Minuscule and the Cultural Role of Administrative Milieus Starting from the end of the sixth century, signif icant economic and demographic shifts due to climatic, epidemic, institutional, and, most 214, 57. Homer, Hesiod, Achilles Tatius, Paul of Alexandria, Theon of Alexandria, Aratos, Markellos and Kyrinos, Apollonios of Perga, Aristotle, Plato, the Eisagogē of Porphyrius, maybe Proclus, Epicurus and Chrysippus are mentioned here. 7 Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, and, before him, A. Dain, Les manuscrits (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1949), p. 112 (‘renaissance photienne’); B. Hemmerdinger, Essai sur l’histoire du texte de Thucydide (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1955), pp. 33–41; B. Hemmerdinger, ‘Une mission scientifique arabe a l’origine de la Renaissance Iconoclaste’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 4 (1962): pp. 66–67; J. Irigoin, ‘Survie et renouveau de la littérature antique à Constantinople’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 5 (1962): pp. 287–302, here pp. 301ff. The formula ‘Macedonian Renaissance’ is widely used among art historians and was used for the first time, to my knowledge, by K. Weitzmann, The Joshua Roll: A Work of the Macedonian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948). For a critical discussion on this topic, see P. Speck, ‘Byzantium: cultural suicide?’ in Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive, ed. by L. Brubaker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 73–84; J. Signes-Codoñer, ‘Helenos y Romanos: la cultura bizantina y el Islam en el siglo IX’, Byzantion 72 (2002): pp. 404–448; and J.-C. Cheynet, and B. Flusin, eds., Autour du Premier humanisme byzantin & des Cinq études sur le XIe siècle, quarante ans après Paul Lemerle (Paris: ACHCByz, 2017 = Travaux et mémoires 21/2), with special attention to the article by Jean‐Michel Spieser.

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crucially, geopolitical factors deeply reshaped the Byzantine Empire.8 The most important challenge was doubtless Arab expansionism,9 which consumed Byzantium’s most productive and urban provinces following the Byzantine-Persian War of 602–628, and thus accelerated ruralization in the remaining parts of the empire.10 In particular, Byzantium’s loss of Egypt interrupted grain supplies to the capital and led to the temporary abolition of free grain distributions in 618, resulting in a social crisis.11 Further enfeebled by Avar and Slavic incursions and split by the Monothelite crisis, the empire was deeply struck by the war economy first enacted by Emperor Heraclius (610–641)12 and maintained by his successors. Among them, Constans II (641–668) even appears to have planned a permanent transfer of the capital to Syracuse (Sicily), where he was mostly residing from 663 and where he was eventually assassinated.13 The ensuing period 8 L. Little, ed. Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); W. Behringer, Kulturgeschichte des Klimas: Von der Eiszeit bis zur globalen Erwärmung, (Munich: Beck, 2007), pp. 94–97. According to M. Hendy, Coinage and Money in the Byzantine Empire, 1081–1261 (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Studies, 1969), whose calculations should be read with caution, the imperial budget went from five or six million nomismata per year in the sixth century, to about two million in the eighth century (nomisma was the Byzantine currency equal to 4.5g of gold). See also, M. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, с. 300–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and C. Morrisson, ‘“L’économie monétaire byzantine”: à propos d’un ouvrage récent’, Revue numismatique 29 (1987): pp. 245–256. 9 A.E. Laiou, ‘Political History: An Outline’, in The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh Through the Fifteenth Century, vol. 1, ed. by ead. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), pp. 9–28, here p. 13; ead., ‘The Human Resources’, in ibid., pp. 47–55, here pp. 49–50; J. Lefort, ‘The Rural Economy, Seventh–Twelfth Centuries’, in ibid., pp. 231–310, here pp. 268ff.; G. Dagron, ‘The Urban Economy, Seventh-Twelfth Centuries’, in ibid., vol. 2, pp. 393–461, here pp. 397ff. 10 I am referring in particular to the urban areas of Alexandria, Antioch, and Beirut: G. Cavallo, ‘Conservazione e perdita dei testi greci: fattori materiali, sociali, culturali’, in Società romana e impero tardoantico, vol. 4: Tradizione dei classici, trasformazioni della cultura, ed. by A. Giardina (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1986), pp. 165–166; C. Mango, Le développement urbain de Constantinople (IVe–VIIe siecles) (Paris: De Boccard, 1985), pp. 51–62; P. Magdalino, Constantinople médiévale: Études sur l’évolution des structures urbaines (Paris: De Boccard, 1996), p. 55; J. Haldon. Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 425–435. Also see Dagron, ‘The Urban Economy’, p. 396; Laiou, ‘The Human Resources’, p. 50; Lefort, ‘The Rural Economy’, p. 269. 11 W.E. Kaegi. Heraclius: Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 88. For a different point of view, see V. Prigent, ‘Le rôle des provinces d’Occident dans l’approvisionnement de Constantinople (618–717): témoignages numismatique et sigillographique’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome — Moyen-Age 118 (2006): pp. 269–299, here pp. 270ff. 12 Kaegi, Heraclius, p. 110. 13 Theophanes Confessor, Chronographia, anno mundi 6160, ed. De Boor, 1883, p. 351. See V. Prigent, ‘La Sicile de Constant II: l’apport des sources sigillographiques’, in La Sicile byzantine de Byzance à L’Islam, ed. by A. Nef, and V. Prigent (Paris: De Boccard, 2010), pp. 157-187.

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of political instability, which began with the final phase of the reign of Justinian II (685–695 and 705–711), plunged Constantinople and its heavily diminished empire into a permanent state of crisis. As a last-ditch attempt at survival, the emperors of the Isaurian dynasty (717–780) enacted a series of administrative,14 religious,15 legislative,16 monetary,17 and urban reforms18 in a quest to concentrate financial resources on the war effort, in particular on the eastern front.19 It is during this period that the Byzantine power appears to have found faithful support from family clans of Caucasian and Central Micro-Asian origin, which are largely absent in sources from previous periods.20 The Byzantine elites morphed into ‘a range of competing and sometimes hostile families, clans, and individuals, each with specific cultural and political origins and allegiances’.21 While it is difficult to identify cohesive groups within this ‘range’, it would be equally unwise to deny the growing influence of military elites as a whole during the Isaurian period, whose development contributed to the detriment of the Constantinopolitan administrative elites.22 Thus, the previous phase of instability indirectly contributed to the cultural decline of the Isaurian period, and the consequent reallocation of resources in favour of the military that benefitted those social groups connected to the army. Describing the conditions of the Byzantine Empire around the year 700, the Short Chronicle of Patriarch Nicephorus notes, ‘on account of the frequent assumptions of imperial power and the prevalence of usurpation, the affairs of the empire and of the City were being neglected and declined; furthermore, education was being destroyed’.23 14 J.C. Cheynet, ‘L’administration impériale’, in Le monde byzantin, vol. 2, ed. by id. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006), pp. 125–150, here esp. pp. 146ff. 15 P. Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, pp. 34f., 107f.; V. Déroche et al., eds., Le monde byzantin, 750–1204: Economie et société (Paris: Atlande, 2007), pp. 135ff. 16 Τρωιάνος, Οι πηγές του βυζαντινού δικαίου (Athens: Εκδόσεις Αντ. Ν. Σάκκουλα, 2011), pp. 160ff.; M. Humphreys, Law, Power, and Imperial Ideology in the Iconoclast Era, 680–850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 84ff. 17 Dagron, ‘The Urban Economy’, pp. 212–213, 399; C. Morrisson, ‘Byzantine Money: Its Production and Circulation’, in Economic History of Byzantium, ed. by Laiou, p. 929f., 955f.; Déroche et al., eds., Le monde byzantin, pp. 212–213. 18 Dagron, ‘The Urban Economy’, p. 398. 19 J.C. Cheynet, ‘L’armée et la marine’, in Le monde byzantin, ed. by id., pp. 151ff. 20 Cheynet, ‘L’armée et la marine’, p. 177 and, with nuances, J. Haldon, ‘Social Élites, Wealth, and Power’, in A Social History of Byzantium, ed. by id. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp.179–180. 21 Ibid., p. 180. 22 Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, p. 94; W. Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 384–385. 23 Nicephorus Patriarcha, Chronographia brevis, 52, ed. Mango, 1990, p. 120.

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Though exaggerated in Nicephorus’s words, the cultural decline seems to have been real and further aggravated by the fact that many high-ranking administrative officials, hailing from learned milieus, were removed from office or relegated to a subordinate role early on in the Isaurian period: the Chronicle of Theophanes states for instance that, during the reign of Leo III (717–741), ‘especially those who were prominent by birth and culture’ were persecuted, and that ‘this led to the extinction of schools and of the education that had existed from the time of St. Constantine the Great’.24 Of course, this statement must be taken with a large pinch of salt: amongst the many causes of cultural decline in the eighth century, it is important to note that the official anti-pagan attitude, which had been developing since the reign of Justinian, also caused a decline in the number of centres of advanced studies and a dispersal of many ancient texts.25 Be that as it may, within the specific perspective of the history of Greek writing, the eighth century saw the climax of a long-term process that had been in the making for a long time26: a cursive script, which seems to have developed from late-Roman administrative writing, spread through increasingly far-reaching channels and became a veritable professional writing style throughout the central and peripheral bureaus of the empire. This script broadly entailed two sub-types that can be distinguished structurally as well as by degree of inclination around the axis (straight in one case, sloping in the other).27 Egyptian and Syro-Palestinian papyri of the Arab period appear to show that between the seventh and the eighth centuries, a script featuring a highly pronounced axial tilt (Figure 2.2.2) was commonly 24 Theophanes Confessor, Chronographia, anno mundi 6218, ed. De Boor, 1883, p. 405. 25 See for example Cod. Just. 1.5.18.4, 1.11.10: Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, p. 68f. 26 This script is also called ‘the script of the Greco-Roman koinē’: G. Cavallo, ‘La koiné scrittoria greco-romana nella prassi documentale di età bizantina’, Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 19 (1970): pp. 1–31; G. Messeri and R. Pintaudi ‘I papiri greci d’Egitto e la minuscola libraria’, in I manoscritti greci tra riflessione e dibattito, ed. by G. Prato (Florence: Gonelli, 2000), pp. 67–82. 27 Morelli, CPRXXII, 7ff. (who discusses the [tilted] cursive and the [straight] proto-minuscule, noting the fundamental difference that consists in a diverse construction of letters [he mentions the ‘ductus’]); G. De Gregorio, ‘Materiali vecchi e nuovi per uno studio della minuscola greca fra VII e IX secolo’, in I manoscritti greci, ed. by Prato, pp. 83–151, distinguishes between two ‘variants’ on the basis of a different tilt of the axis. See also M. Luzzatto, ‘Grammata e syrmata: Scrittura greca e produzione libraria tra VII e IX secolo’, Analecta Papyrologica 14–15 (2002–2003): pp. 5–90 (read with caution). On the use of scripts characterized by different tilts of the axis (sometimes in the same documents) in previous periods, see J.-L. Fournet, ‘P.Stras. V 318 complété: la grande philoponia d’Héracléopolis et les protocoles en cursive inclinée’, in Sixty-five Papyrological Texts Presented to Klaas A. Worp on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (P. L. Bat. 33), ed. by F.A.J. Hoogendijk and B.P. Muhs (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2008), pp. 243–253.

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used in official and, in some cases, private correspondence.28 On the other hand, another type, with a straight axis (Figure 2.2.1), was employed mainly in secular and ecclesiastical administrative circles, which were two closely linked spheres whose members came from the same social groups and shared a common educational background.29 This second type became a standardized style, which appears to have been used throughout the eighth century in an increasingly exclusive manner in fiscal documents.30 For those who aspired to a bureaucratic career, learning this form of writing (and professional education in general) did not occur in a structured teaching environment31 but within family circles, or directly within bureaucratic offices under the guidance of expert functionaries. Family and bureaucratic training often coincided, because of the clan-like organization of administrative milieus, and the affinal transmission of administrative positions.32 This (therefore not rigidly structured) ‘pedagogical training’ was 28 Morelli, CPRXXII, 7f., 10 n. 24. For a different opinion about this specif ic point, see De Gregorio, ‘Materiali vecchi e nuovi’, pp. 90, 97, 102–103, according to whom the tilted minuscule would have been less and less utilized because of its diminished legibility. But also see the objections — founded, in my opinion — of Morelli, CPRXXII, 7. On administration, society, and culture in Egypt in the period we are dealing with (and in previous centuries), see J. Gascou, Fiscalité et société en Égypte byzantine (Paris: ACHCByz, 2008), especially articles VI and XVI. 29 A. Cameron, ‘Texts as Weapons: Polemic in the Byzantine Dark Ages’, in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, ed. by A. Bowman and G. Wolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 198–215, here p. 213; Luzzatto, ‘Grammata e syrmata’, p. 11. The Vienna papyrus P. Vindob. G 3 is, from this perspective, an essential document: this fragment of rotulus contains the copy in facsimile of the affixed signatures of the participants of the oecumenical council of 681, of which the majority (24 out of 35) had used the straight cursive in the original. This was made up of representatives of the Churches of Cappadocia, Cilicia, Bithynia, Paphlagonia, Phrygia, Lychaonia, Lycia, Kariya, Armenia, Cyprus, and Rhodes: see G. De Gregorio and O. Kresten, ‘Il papiro conciliare P.Vindob. G 3: un ‘originale’ sulla via da Costantinopoli a Ravenna (e a Vienna)’, in Le Alpi porta d’Europa: Scritture, uomini, idee da Giustiniano al Barbarossa, ed. by L. Pani and C. Scalon (Spoleto: CISAM 2009), pp. 233-379. 30 Morelli, CPRXXII, 8ff., 11. See also De Gregorio, ‘Materiali vecchi e nuovi’, p. 102f.; Messeri and Pintaudi, ‘I papiri greci d’Egitto e la minuscola libraria’, pp. 74–75; Luzzatto, ‘Grammata e syrmata’, p. 59; E. Crisci and P. Degni, eds. La scrittura greca dall’antichità all’epoca della stampa: Una introduzione (Rome: Carocci, 2011), pp. 93ff. 31 On the continuity of teaching practices — in Constantinople and at the peripheries — through which the members of the elite continued their training (but in unstructured pedagogical environments), see Cavallo, ‘Conservazione e perdita’, pp. 164ff. 32 There are papyri containing exercises of untrained bureaucrats, sometimes assisted by more expert hands: Morelli, CPRXXII, 10. Some Greek papyri from the second half of eighth century contain exercises by Greek scribes who work in the Muslim chancery and practice documentary formulae by using the proto-minuscule script (like for instance CPRXXII, 17 and 18), see P.M. Sijpesteijn, Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 231.

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aimed at the acquisition of what Byzantine sources refer to as the notarikē methodos (notarial method), which principally suggested the writing of documents based on formal rules of grammar and orthography. Another essential skill was the ‘hands and ink technique’,33 which included the use of a cursive script characterized by the fusion of the strokes composing each letter and by the linking of subsequent letters and words (Figure 2.2.3).34 Functionaries who were destined to occupy positions at the higher level of the administrative hierarchy were further expected to acquire knowledge of the foundations of logic and rhetoric, needed for the redaction of official letters and other kinds of significant documents.35 The theoretical part of this training (known as enkyklopaideia) was based on a limited repertoire of readings, in particular grammatical and orthographical treatises.36 The training of high functionaries also included theoretical manuals or anthologies of logic and rhetoric, most commonly those of Aphtonios, Aelius Theon, and Hermogenes of Tarsus, but also texts of Aristotle, Demosthenes, and of a few other ancient authors.37 This coaching appears to have remained stable even during the ‘dark’ centuries (i.e. the seventh and most of the eighth centuries): in fact, in many Lives of saints who emerged from administrative ranks in that period, the training of functionaries is described (more or less explicitly, but always consistently) along these same lines.38 This is conf irmed by the papyrological f indings from the Arab period, consisting both of Greek documents and of exercises for 33 Ignatius Diaconus, Vita Nicephori patriarchae, ed. De Boor, 1880, p, 144, ll. 6–7. See Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, p. 130; Luzzatto, ‘Grammata e syrmata’, p. 12 and n. 22. Also, Theophanes Confessor, Vita Methodii patriarchae, PG 100, col. 1245 B and 1253 B. 34 Luzzatto, ‘Grammata e syrmata’, p. 23 (read with caution). 35 De Gregorio and Kresten, ‘Il papiro conciliare P.Vindob. G 32009’, p. 268 and n. 106. 36 These treatises were normally comprised of parts of ancient or recent works (often readapted) of Apollonios Dyskolos, Aelius Herodian, Dionysius Thrax, Theodosius of Alexandria, Theognostus, John Charax, and George Choeroboskos. See Ronconi, ‘Quelle grammaire à Byzance ?’ 37 G. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For Aristotle, this concerns mainly the Categories and the First Analytics: see Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, pp. 100ff., 132; F. Ronconi, ‘La main insaisissable: Rôle et fonctions des copistes byzantins entre réalité et imaginaire’, in Scrivere e leggere nell’alto medioevo, LIX Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, Spoleto, 28 aprile–4 maggio 2011 (Spoleto: CISAM, 2012), pp. 627–664. Most of the authors and works are mentioned by Theodore of Stoudios in his letters, see R. Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 20. 38 See for example Vita Nicephori patriarchae († 828: BHG 1335); Vita Ioannis Psichaïtae († 825: ed. van den Ven, 1902); Vita Michaelis Syncelli († 846: BHG 1296). On the Vitae of Plato of Sakkoudion († 814) and of Theodore of Stoudios († 826), see n. 61 below.

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apprentices.39 The continuous productivity of the central and peripheral Byzantine administration and the fact that for about one century the Islamic Empire opted to remain in charge of Greek-speaking functionaries in Syria and Egypt further demonstrate the efficacy of the Byzantine bureaucratic training system. Thus, in contrast to the crisis of classical education (which had been worsening from late antiquity onwards)40 and a general decline of writing skills, 41 a certain cultural continuity in the training of imperial and patriarchal administrative officials can be observed. These increasingly isolated figures became the guardians of a professional knowledge that ensured the preservation of a well-defined repertoire of secular texts in the seventh and eighth centuries. The elitist nature of this pedagogical continuity also has palaeographical implications: in the course of the eighth century, the bureaucratic cursive first came to be used, albeit sporadically and in particular regions, for the transcription of books. 42 These were, without a doubt, isolated attempts, generally consisting in books containing para-literary or documentary texts, often made in lay and ecclesiastical bureaucratic milieus (law miscellanies, proceedings of councils etc.). 43 It was only towards the end of the century that the use of this script started to spread in book production even outside the administrative circles. This phenomenon was the consequence of a sudden political transformation that took place in the Byzantine Empire in the two final decades of the eighth century.

39 Morelli, CPRXXII, 10, and Sijpesteijn, Shaping a Muslim State, p. 231. 40 On higher learning and activities related to logic, rhetoric, and other disciplines during the seventh and eighth centuries in Constantinople, and especially in other parts of the Byzantine empire, see Cavallo, ‘Conservazione e perdita’, pp. 164ff.; M. Lapidge, ‘The career of Archbishop Theodore’, in Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence, ed. by id. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–29, here pp. 11ff.; G. Cavallo, ‘Theodore of Tarsus and the Greek culture of his time’, in Archbishop Theodore Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence, ed. by M. Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 54–67, 54ff. On the controversial definition of ‘Late Antiquity’, see the contributions in R. Lizzi Testa, ed., Late Antiquity in Contemporary Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 41 Cavallo, ‘Theodore of Tarsus and the Greek culture of his time’. 42 An illuminating example is the intermediary script in the bis rescriptus manuscript Vat. Gr. 2306 + Crypt. A.d.XXIII (b) + Vat. Gr. 2061A, containing a Nomocanon of 14 Titles, copied, most likely, in Palestine. For the dating of the transcription of this Nomocanon to the eighth century, see De Gregorio, ‘Materiali vecchi e nuovi’, pp. 116ff. 43 An important witness in this sense is the hymnographer Andrew of Crete, local metropolitan and previously an imperial functionary. See M.-F. Auzépy ‘La carrière d’André de Crète’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 88 (1995): pp. 1–12 and Luzzatto, ‘Grammata e syrmata’, pp. 16f.

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The Adoption of the Minuscule in Books With her accession to power, Irene (752–803), widow of Leo IV, and from 780 regent to her son, the future Constantine VI, began to replace the most eminent members of the administrative cadres (mostly originating from the aristocracy of the themes)44 with palace eunuchs. These figures, excluded from any possibility of assuming the throne and generally lacking a Constantinopolitan family background, 45 were the most faithful allies of a regent whose authority lacked stability. Within only a few years, the eunuchs thus assumed a central role in all levels of imperial military and f inancial politics, occupying the strategic functions of logothete of the Dromos (a powerful minister responsible for, amongst other things, the postal service, the transmission of imperial orders, and diplomatic missions), 46 domestic of the Excubitores (at the time an elite tagma), as well as other major military positions. 47 Moreover, the imperial treasury (sakellion), the state f inances (vestiarion), and the personal funds of the empress (the private vestiarion and the koitōn) were partially entrusted to eunuchs. 48 Irene’s new priorities of political patronage prompted some members of the aristocracy and a number of influential generals of the previous two reigns to switch to the side of the empire’s enemies par excellence, the Arabs. 49 The weakening of traditional aristocracy and of military cadres seems to have fostered

44 A. Carile, ‘Roma vista da Costantinopoli’, in Roma fra Oriente e Occidente. XLIX Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo (Spoleto: CISAM, 2002): p. 98. 45 L. James, ‘Men, Women, Eunuchs: Gender, Sex, and Power’, in A Social History of Byzantium, ed. by J. Haldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 44; C. Messis, Les Eunuques à Byzance, entre réalité et imaginaire (Paris: Centre d’études byzantines, néo-helléniques et sud-est européennes — École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2014), pp. 97ff. 46 This was the eunuch Staurakios who replaced the logothete of the Dromos Gregory (PMBZ 2409). 47 Eunuchs and high functionaries replaced Constantine (the domestikos of the Excubitores: PMBZ 3826), Theophylact Rhangabe (droungarios-admiral of the Dodecanese: PMBZ 8294) and Bardas (general of Armeniakon theme: PMBZ 779); the eunuch John was named head of army, and the eunuch Theophilos, along with the patrician Theodore, was sent to put down a revolt in Sicily, see J. Herrin, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (London: Phoenix, 2001), pp. 77 and 79. 48 Déroche et al., eds., Le monde byzantin, p. 221. 49 This was the case of Elpidios, the strategos of Sicily (PMBZ 1515/ corr.), Nicephorus, probably the dux-governor of Calabria (PMBZ 5268), Tatzates, the strategos of the theme of the Boukellarii in Asia Minor (PMBZ 7241). See Theophanes Confessor, Chronographia, annis mundi 6273–6274, ed. De Boor, 1883, pp. 454–456.

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the administrative elites of Constantinople: among other things, some of their members gained control of the general off ice (logothesion tou genikou), which was responsible for the taxpayer registry and maintained several local branches.50 In addition, their inf luence grew further in ecclesiastical milieus after the resignation of the iconoclast patriarch of Constantinople Paul IV in 784, when Irene named a new patriarch, Tarasios, a patrikios and high functionary who hailed from a powerful family of Constantinopolitan bureaucrats and had once been at the helm of the imperial chancery (prōtasēkrētis).51 The new patriarch found himself at the head of a system that included clerics and functionaries,52 and thus he was able to enact Irene’s most ambitious reform: the restoration of the veneration of icons. This measure radically broke with the religious policies of her three predecessors and created a new consensus among groups who previously had been marginalized by Isaurian rule. Beyond the personal convictions of the regent, iconodulism provided Irene with an ideological cement that was capable — in an otherwise fragmented political system — of ensuring her wide support, both internally from large parts of the monastic community and externally from the Melkite patriarchates and from Rome. The ambitious move was facilitated to some extent by the investiture of numerous bishops who had risen from the imperial and patriarchal chanceries and thus were faithful to Tarasios and, by extension, to Irene.53 In sum, Irene’s regency spearheaded a series of targeted political actions against the very foundations of the preceding 50 Déroche et al. eds., Le monde byzantin, pp. 222–223. 51 PMBZ 5829 (Paul IV) and PMBZ 7235 (Tarasios). 52 M.-H. Congourdeau and B. Martin-Hisard, ‘Les institutions de l’Église byzantine’, in Le monde byzantin, ed. by Cheynet, pp. 100ff. The different offices of the Patriarchate (amongst them the central archive, the Chartophylakion, the Treasury, the Skeyophylakion, and the chancery) were probably reunited in the Thomaitēs, a Constantinopolitan building situated in the south of the Great Church of St. Sophia where the patriarchal library was also located. See R. Janin, ‘Le palais patriarcal de Constantinople’, Revue des études byzantines 20 (1962): pp. 131–155; and D. Bianconi, ‘Letture tardoantiche a Bisanzio nel riflesso della cultura scritta’, in Scrivere e leggere nell’alto medioevo: LIX Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, Spoleto, 28 aprile–4 maggio 2011 (Spoleto: CISAM, 2012), pp. 821–853, here pp. 832ff. 53 Theophilos and Michael, who became bishops of Nicaea and Synada respectively, had risen, for example, from the imperial chancery. Another bishop, Ignatius, had risen from the patriarchal chancery (he had previously been the skeyophylax of St. Sophia). See F. Ronconi, ‘Essere copista a Bisanzio: Tra immaginario collettivo, autorappresentazioni e realtà’, in Storia della scrittura e altre storie: Atti del colloquio internazionale, Università di Roma La Sapienza, 28–29 ottobre 2010, ed. by D. Bianconi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2014), pp. 383–434, here p. 412.

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regime, which she had been expected to preserve on behalf of his son, the future Constantine VI. As this fracture further enhanced the authority of administrative milieus at all levels, it is certainly no coincidence that towards the end of the eighth century, a growing number of books appeared in cursive script, the signature style of these milieus. This was no longer confined to book-documents, such as the minutes of Church councils or anthologies of the previous decades.54 Now this type of script was also used to copy edificatory works for a wider readership of churchmen and monks,55 as well as grammatical treatises,56 medical texts,57 and eventually even works of geometry, mathematics, and logic58 addressed to much larger lay audiences. Yet the Byzantine cursive didn’t lose its status as a professional script:59 in fact it can be stated that, in this first phase, copyists and their readers were typically trained in the civil and ecclesiastical administrations, or came from families that were traditionally vested in these bureaucracies. The spread of the cursive script beyond its traditional cadre was therefore a gradual process, reflecting a transformation which significantly affected the social structures of the Byzantine Empire, most importantly those of Constantinople in the following years.

54 Vat. Gr. 2200 (beginning of the ninth century) is the most accomplished example of the calligraphic normalization of the sloping cursive script. It is the most ancient book written on paper, probably produced in an upper level bureaucratic milieu in Jerusalem, and it contains a patristic anthology (L. Perria, ‘Il Vat. gr. 2200: Note codicologiche e paleograf iche’, Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici 20–21 [1983–1984]: pp. 25–68; De Gregorio, ‘Materiali vecchi e nuovi’, pp. 103ff.). See also Bodl. Barocci 26, fol. 26–354 (Byzantine cursive on a right-tilting axis, patristic anthology), probably from the first half of the ninth century (De Gregorio, ‘Materiali vecchi e nuovi’, pp. 128ff). 55 Khirbet Mird, P.A.M. 1+2 (tropologion); Sinait. gr. 591 (hymnographic roll); Sinait. gr. 794 (fol. 215–218: liturgical canons); Sinait. NE, gr. M 96 (liturgical canons); Sinait. NE, gr. M 211 (canons). See De Gregorio, ‘Materiali vecchi e nuovi’, pp. 126, 149. 56 Apollonios Dyskolos: Paris. Gr. 2548 (De Gregorio, ‘Materiali vecchi e nuovi’, p. 137). 57 Paul of Aegina: Paris. Suppl. Gr. 1156, fol. 23–25 + Paris. Coisl. 8, fol. 1 and 283 + Paris. Coisl. 123, fol. I + Mosq. GIM gr. 174 (Vlad. 387), fol. 1–2. For an attribution to the milieu of Sakkoudion or that of Stoudios, see Boris L. Fonkitch, ‘Sulla datazione dei codici greci del secolo IX’, in The Legacy of Bernard de Montfaucon: Three Hundred Years of Studies on Greek Handwriting, vol. 1, ed. by Antonio Bravo García, Inmaculada Pérez Martín, and Juan Signes Codoñer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 37–43, here p. 41. 58 Euclid (Vat. Gr. 190), Aristotle (Oxon. Corpus Christi 108), and the Commentaries on the Almagest (Laur. plut. 28.18). 59 Morelli, CPRXXII, 11.

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The Role of Stoudios Monastery: The Normalization, Ideological Promotion, and Dissemination of the Minuscule Within a fragmented social framework, some monasteries of Constantinople seem to have served as the catalyst of a huge cultural and political process, indirectly affecting the history of Greek minuscule script. When Irene became the sole ruler following the short reign of her son Constantine VI (November 790 to January 792), the political situation was unstable and increasingly gave rise to voices of dissent even amongst her own partisans. In the aftermath of the iconoclast controversy and the polemics that followed the Moechian affair of Constantine VI,60 the political anomaly of the suppression of a young emperor by his own mother (who had been regent, co-empress, and now basileus) forced Irene to reconf igure her basis of support. Under these circumstances, she reached out to the rising factions of an ultra-orthodox monasticism, notably its two principal leaders, Plato of Sakkoudion and his nephew Theodore,61 thus joining forces with one of the most powerful families of the Constantinopolitan bureaucracy. In fact, before becoming a monk, Plato had been zygostatēs (controller of the weight and quality of the imperial coinage, a dependent on the office of the sakellion),62 succeeding his uncle63 and possibly his father Sergius.64 Like Plato, Theodore had benefitted from training as a functionary to succeed his father in the imperial administration.65 The two monastic leaders joined ranks with Irene, who compensated by making Theodore head of the Constantinopolitan monastery of St John the Baptist of Stoudios (in 798 or 799), financing the restoration of the monastery, and endowing it with donations and tax exemptions.66 Under Irene’s watch, the Studite community became a key gathering place for the members of the administrative elite who were now converting to ultra-orthodox positions and embracing monastic life. Stoudios was not the only venue of this sort: around the year 780 for example, another monastery was founded by a certain Isaac near Constantinople. 60 Constantine VI repudiated the wife chosen by his mother (who did not have an aristocratic lineage) to marry Theodota, the lady-in-waiting of the empress and a member of a very powerful family of bureaucrats responsible for the imperial coffers: PMBZ 7899. 61 PMBZ 6285 (Plato) and PMBZ 7574 (Theodore). 62 Morrisson, ‘Byzantine Money’, p. 913. 63 Theodorus Stoudita, Laudatio Platonis, PG 99, col. 808 C. 64 PMBZ 6605. 65 PG 99, col. 117 C–D (Life A of Theodore), 237 A–B (Life B of Theodore). See Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, p. 123. 66 Theophanes Confessor, Chronographia, anno mundi 6288, ed. De Boor, 1883, p. 471.

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The descendant of a family working in the imperial administration and a senior functionary himself, Isaac took the monastic name of Theophanes and, later known as ‘the Confessor’, he is credited with the authorship of the Chronicle that bears his monastic name.67 His monastery seems to have been provided with a rich collection of books, some of which had been produced there.68 The monastery of Stoudios nevertheless developed a unique type of community embedded in a network of monasteries spanning Constantinople, Asia Minor, the Aegean Islands, and indirectly Palestine and Italy.69 As the core of this network, it emerged as a significant centre of book production70 with a large team of scribes under the supervision of a prōtokalligraphos (head copyist).71 Its impressive output cannot be solely explained by a desire to produce liturgical or devotional books: amidst the conflicts of the early ninth century, texts were used ‘as weapons’,72 and the Studite community became notorious for the production, transcription, and dissemination of pamphlets and anthologies of an explicitly political and religious nature.73 In the context of this activism, the administrative training of Plato and Theodore, according to which they designed the monastery’s own pedagogical curriculum, gained a strategic value.74 This curriculum gave specif ic consideration to the aptitude, age, and other individual characteristics of monks, but it generally entailed the study of grammar, orthography (grammatikē or grammatikē technologia), and the minuscule 67 PMBZ 8107. See Carile, ‘Roma vista da Costantinopoli’, pp. 81–82; F. Thomson, ‘The Name of the Monastery where Theophanes the Confessor Became A Monk: ΠΟΛΙΧΝΙΟΝ or ΠΟΛΥΧΡΟΝΙΟΝ ?’, Analecta Bollandiana 125 (2007): pp. 120–138. On the identity of the author of the Chronicle, his work and its paternity, see M. Jankowiak and F. Montinaro, eds., Studies in Theophanes (Paris: ACHCByz, 2015). 68 F. Ronconi, ‘La première circulation de la “chronique de Théophane”: notes paléographiques et codicologiques’, Travaux et mémoires 19 (2015): pp. 121–148, here 133. 69 On this network, see what Theodore wrote himself: PG 99, col. 169 A, 276 A, 1152 B, 1153 C, 1209 C. See Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, p. 122. 70 On monks producing parchment known as membranopoioi, membranopoiountes, or membranades, see Theodorus Studita, Magnae Cathecheses, 16, ed. A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, 1904, p. 109; Magnae Cathecheses, 94, ibid., p. 675; Magnae Cathecheses, 28, ibid., p. 195; Magnae Cathecheses, 112, ibid., p. 827; Magnae Cathecheses, 97, ibid., p. 700; Magnae Cathecheses, 102, ibid., p. 746; Magnae Cathecheses, 36, ibid., p. 269; Magnae Cathecheses, 46, ibid., p. 336. 71 Poenae monasteriales, PG 99, col. 273 B–C and col. 1740 C–D. 72 A. Cameron, ‘Texts as Weapons’. Also see Luzzatto, ‘Grammata e syrmata’, pp. 10f. 73 F. Ronconi, ‘De Stoudios a la Théotokos Evérgétes: Textes et livres du monachisme mésobyzantin, entre innovations et continuité’, in Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente nell’alto Medioevo, LXIV Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, Spoleto 31 marzo–6 aprile 2016 (Spoleto: CISAM, 2017), pp. 1312ff. 74 See Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, p. 128; P. Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, c.350–850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 322–323.

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script.75 Theodore himself taught the art of calligraphy to his brethren,76 and some monks devoted themselves to the ‘technical learning of philosophy’ (technologia philosophias) in a quest to defeat their adversaries with ‘the syllogisms of Truth’.77 The whole of this monastic training (referred to in a Studite source as logikai technai, ‘logical arts’ or ‘technical knowledge’) aimed to form individuals capable of copying books, but also of actively compiling various types of letters, petitions, and other treatises, as well as anthologies on theological, dogmatic, and thus political questions.78 In short, it created a ruling elite ready to uphold Orthodox ideas both religiously and politically. Theodore felt it necessary that ‘the Orthodox (orthophrones)’ had ‘the force and linguistic capacity’ to fight with equal weapons against ‘the Unorthodox (kakodoxoi)’ and ‘to defeat their redoubtable war machines (eythybolous helepoleis)’.79 Contrary to most other monastic communities, the monastery of Stoudios also admitted children to the novitiate, who were entrusted to a master-monk80 and taught in a separate part of the monastery specifically designed for this purpose (the dōmation).81 These pedagogical efforts soon yielded results, also because the founders themselves set a good example: the numerous anthologies produced and transcribed by Plato circulated as much within monastic networks as amongst laypeople.82 Theodore himself was responsible for the writing and transcription of florilegia and, it seems, of pamphlets.83 His monks inundated Constantinople and its environs with books written in syrmaiographia (as they called the literary minuscule that derived from the

75 Anonymus, Vita sancti Nicolai Studitae, PG 105, col. 872. See also the ‘programmatic’ letter of Theodore to Naukratios (Theodorus Studita, Epistulae, 49, ed. G. Fatouros, Berlin, 1981, pp. 139ff), or one of the letters to John the Grammarian (Epistulae, 546, ibid., pp. 825-827). For the teaching of grammar at the monastery, see N. Kalogeras, ‘Byzantine Childhood Education and Its Social Role from the Sixth Century until the End of Iconoclasm’ (Ph.D. diss., Chicago, 1999), p. 153. 76 Theodorus Studita, Magnae Cathecheses, 43, ed. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, 1904, p. 308. 77 Vita B of Theodore, PG 99, col. 273. 78 Vita B of Theodore, PG 99, col. 273. 79 Theodorus Studita, Epistulae, 49, ed. Fatouros, 1981, pp. 139–140. 80 Poenae monasteriales, in PG 99 col. 1745B–C. 81 Anonymous, Vita sancti Nicolai Studitae, PG 105, col. 869–872. See J. Thomas and A.C. Hero, eds., Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), p. 92; Kalogeras, ‘Byzantine Childhood Education’, pp. 151–152. 82 Theodorus Stoudita, Laudatio Platonis, PG 99, col. 818 D. 83 Theodorus Studita, Epistulae, 275, 276, 278, 405, ed. Fatouros, 1981, pp. 406-409, 409-12, 415-418, 561-562; PG 99 col. 261 D–264 A (Life B). See also PG 99, col. 1848 B, and Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, p. 125 n. 55.

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bureaucratic cursive). 84 This syrmaiographia, which was not invented by the Studites and was certainly not exclusive to them, soon acquired signif icant status in Byzantine society, as evidenced most memorably by the Uspensky Gospel, which is the oldest dated manuscript written in the minuscule (835) and was copied by a monk of the Studite milieu named Nicholas. 85 From a graphic point of view, it represents the end point of a long process of ‘standardization’ that by that time had reached a mature and self-conscious stage.86 Nicholas composed his texts in a fast minuscule, but with diacritic symbols and without the morphological alteration typical of the cursive used in administrative documents. The efforts of the copyist-monk are still more remarkable when we consider that he used a fast minuscule, generally without accents and diacritics and characterized by numerous abbreviations, especially in the marginalia and the obituaries towards the end of the manuscript. The minuscule of the main text is thus the product of a writer whose habitual script is the cursive. In the Uspensky Gospel we can thus observe not only the definitive transformation of a type of bureaucratic writing into a literary script, but also, as it is employed to transcribe the Gospels, its final ideological promotion.87 Similar processes probably also took place in other monasteries (like the one founded by Isaac-Theophanes) and in some ecclesiastical circles.88 However, the scale and degree of intentionality accomplished at Stoudios does not appear to have been equalled elsewhere. Moreover, as already noted, the Studites stood out by turning this graphic innovation into a propaganda tool. 89 In fact the systematic adoption of a script characterized by a strong cursive nature at its base, allowed for a much 84 For the term syrmaiographia to refer to the minuscule, notably in the Stoudite milieu, see Rollo, ‘“Greco medievale” e “greco bizantino”’ (with bibliography). 85 Rossijskaja Federacija, St. Petersburg Rossijskaja Nacional’naja biblioteka (RNB) Ф. № 906 (Gr.) 219 (Granstrem 71). Excerpts can be viewed at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Uspensky_gospels.jpg (accessed 20 July 2020). 86 The fact that this manuscript was probably not copied in the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople is not notable from this perspective, as Nicholas was almost certainly trained in the capital. See F. Ronconi, Domanda, in Discussione sulla lezione Kaplan, Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente nell’alto Medioevo, LXIV Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, Spoleto 31 marzo–6 aprile 2016 (Spoleto: CISAM, 2017), p. 1059. 87 De Gregorio, ‘Materiali vecchi e nuovi’, p. 135. 88 Amongst the books from this period written in the minuscule and containing religious texts, whose graphic characteristics do not appear to be Stoudite, see the Paris. Gr. 704 (fol. 185–191, texts of Maximus the Confessor) and the Marc. Gr. Z 2 fol. 26–115 (Old Testament). 89 Ronconi, ‘De Stoudios à la Théotokos Evérgétès’, pp. 1313, 1317.

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wider dissemination of texts, as it guaranteed a hitherto unseen speed of book production. Thus, technical factors — such as the reduction of strokes for each letter and the graphical linking of characters and words (Figure 2.2.3) — proved to be important tools in the political battle that fuelled the institutional instability of the f irst decades of the ninth century. In fact, a new series of tensions soon developed in response to the fiscal policies of Irene. The concessions on tax exemptions for orphanages, hospices, hospitals, churches, and particularly monasteries,90 began to take their toll on the imperial coffers. It also affected the interests of finance off icials, since the collection of taxes traditionally incurred additional fees pocketed by the collectors, alongside various other bribes or gifts.91 It is no coincidence that it was the head of the central bureau for tax collection (logothetēs tou genikou) who overthrew Irene in 802 and became her successor as Nicephorus I.92 The new emperor further reinforced the status of administrative elites, inter alia by naming to the Patriarchate of Constantinople a former functionary in the imperial chancery (asēkrētis) and descendant of a family of bureaucrats, who had been a conf idant of Patriarch Tarasios when the latter headed the imperial chancery.93 Nicephorus balanced the imperial ledgers by, among other measures, abolishing tax exemptions for monasteries.94 Although the state economy was revived after a short process of financial stabilization, the fractures within Byzantine society remained deep. The monastery of Stoudios and the wider ultra-Orthodox factions, entered into a permanent opposition to patriarch and emperor. Thus began a further period of political struggles

90 J. Thomas, Private Religious Foundations in the Byzantine Empire (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987), pp. 123–127; Herrin, Women in Purple, pp. 104–107. 91 Déroche et al., eds., Le monde byzantin, p. 238. 92 Theophanes Confessor, Chronographia, anno mundi 6295, ed. De Boor, 1883, pp. 476ff. 93 On the Patriarch Nicephorus, see Theophanes Confessor, Chronographia, anno mundi 6295, ed. De Boor, 1883, p. 476; Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, p. 130. 94 He renegotiated a peace treaty with the Arabs (whose annual tribute was lowered from 140,000 to 30,000 nomismata) and provided the state with a monopoly of maritime loans by obligating Constantinopolitan armouries to supply them; he raised taxes, accomplished the redaction of the cadastre, instituted a court in charge of verifying tax contributions, re-established taxes that had either been reduced or abolished by Irene (such as the kapnikion, chartiatikon, dikeraton), and reinforced the administration, notably by strengthening the role of the central office (the logothesion tou genikou), where Nicephorus had entered into service. On the abolition of the tax exemptions to monasteries in particular, see Déroche et al., eds., Le monde byzantin, pp. 229ff. Also see Lefort, ‘The Rural Economy’, p. 286.

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and propaganda, inspiring once again the dissemination of pamphlets.95 The Studite community confirmed its political engagement in this phase, until it was dispersed in the aftermath of Leo V’s return to iconoclasm in 815. However, its members continued to be active in various places across the Eastern Mediterranean basin, and eventually returned to Constantinople where they were officially reinstalled after 843, following the restoration of iconoduly. A new era had begun, during which the Studite community again produced large numbers of manuscripts in the minuscule.96 In sum, throughout the troubles of an eventful period of many decades, the Studite group displayed (mainly due to the social origins of its founders) a profound awareness of the potentials of minuscule as a literary script, a script that they normalized and spread into wider groups of Byzantine society.97 This script, which — at the end of the process, in the first decades of the ninth century — was both elegant and fast to write, greatly facilitated the production of portable and inexpensive books in large numbers and over a short period of time, thus providing a useful tool for the extensive and immediate circulation of texts. These conditions largely contributed to the cultural flourishing of the middle Byzantine period.

Conclusion: Technical Skills and ‘Humanism’ The political instability that gripped the Byzantine Empire in the final two decades of the eighth century aggravated the social tensions that had been building up over a long period of time. It gave rise to a process that, over the course of just a few generations, altered the scope of Byzantine book production and prepared the field for the flourishing of what has been called ‘the f irst phase of Byzantine humanism’. This process was spearheaded by an important social group of bureaucrats, most notably 95 On the function of these anthologies, see Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin, pp. 224–225; C. Mango, ‘The Availability of Books in the Byzantine Empire, AD 750–850’, in Byzantine Books and Bookmen: A Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium, edited by I. Ševcenko and id. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1975), pp. 29–45, here pp. 44–45; Kalogeras, Byzantine Childhood Education, p. 153; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, p. 23; Ronconi, ‘Essere copista a Bisanzio’, p. 413 96 Towards the middle of the ninth century, the ancient section of Paris. Coisl. 269 (the epistles of Theodore of Stoudios), Vat. Ottob. Gr. 86 (Catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem), Paris. Gr. 494 (Basil the Great, Commentary on Isaiah), Patm. 742 (Gospels) and Vat. Gr. 2079 (homilies) were copied. 97 Ronconi, ‘De Stoudios à la Théotokos Evérgétès’, pp. 1312ff.

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f inance off icials, who were able to insert themselves into the political vacuum created by the weakening authority of Empress Irene. These milieus thus significantly improved their socio-economic position, whereas the predominance of military elites and of the aristocracy of the themes had contributed to a general cultural regression during the preceding centuries. However, the thinning-out of the administrative cadres during the seventh and eighth centuries had not entirely ruined the traditional mechanisms by which the skills needed for the functioning of the bureaucratic apparatus were transmitted.98 While Irene relied on the administrative elites (from which her family had probably emerged),99 this social group, suddenly propelled onto the political stage, produced highly cultured personnel who were capable of taking on important roles. Such figures were particularly visible within the Church (e.g. Tarasios and the patriarch Nicephorus), but also on the political scene, as exemplified by Nicephorus I, Irene’s successor. From the same ranks the cadres of the ultra-Orthodox monastic movement (e.g. Plato and Theodore) emerged, and created a ‘monastic bureaucratic training’ that took place most notably at the Stoudios monastery. As a result, this community promoted the great innovation that the adoption of the minuscule represented for the transcription of books and for cultural transmission. From the outset, the minuscule script held a position of ideological significance inside the Studite network, as it is shown by the fact that the ability to write in minuscule is presented as a topical attribute in the lives of saints that were composed in the community.100 With its didactic activities and the serial production of books in the minuscule, the Studite monastic network put in place a system for the transmission of knowledge that resonated with many other social spheres. In the beginning, it was a response to the rising demand for propaganda materials, especially during the reigns of Irene and her successor. Later, the second period of Iconoclasm further increased social antagonisms and, consequently, the use of political propaganda. This completed the definitive and irreversible

98 Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, pp. 428–429; Magdalino, Constantinople médiévale, pp. 34–40; Auzépy, ‘Controversia delle immagini’, p. 151. 99 Irene had come, it appears, from the high civil aristocracy of Athens: PMBZ 1439; Herrin, Women in Purple, pp. 56–57; R. Lilie, Byzanz unter Eirene und Konstantin VI. (780–802) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 36–41. 100 O. Kresten, ‘Litterae longariae, quae graece syrmata dicuntur: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung’, Scriptorium 24 (1970): p. 307; id., ‘Einige zusätzliche Überlegungen zu syrmaiographein’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 63 (1970): p. 281; Ronconi, ‘De Stoudios à la Théotokos Evérgétès’, p. 1314.

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integration of the minuscule in book production, as well as the exponential growth of its use in transcriptions from increasingly varied milieus. Thus, the Byzantine cultural and intellectual revival of the ninth century was not immediately caused by the reintroduction of iconoduly in 843, notwithstanding the information provided in the extant Byzantine sources that were generally produced by iconodules (most sources from iconoclastic milieus having been destroyed or revised).101 If it is the case that the textual patrimony of antiquity, sparsely transmitted beforehand, was reintegrated through the growing scholarly and cultural networks of the ninth and tenth centuries, then the roots of this process should not be sought in the end of Iconoclasm, nor in the rise of the Macedonian dynasty in 867.102 Rather, we must consider the relationship between this ‘humanism’ and the social background that favoured the adoption of the minuscule script in manuscript production, taking into account that its spread was also due to its ‘economic’ advantages, which involved saving space, time, and support in the act of transcribing. It must also be noted that the dissemination of the minuscule as a book script favoured the normalization of punctuation and diacritical signs (breath marks and accents), which had been only irregularly used in majuscule texts. In sum, the adoption of the minuscule for the transcription of books was the result of a long and complex process that took place during a period of restructuring of political power well before the mid-ninth century. This process built upon the ability of administrative elites (notably fiscal administrators) to reconfigure, according to political contingencies, the cultural patrimony that constituted both their identity and their professional tools. Their technical savoir-faire was based on structured practical knowledge, as well as on the reading and transmission of texts that were judged to be useful for the acquisition of rhetorical and linguistic skills. These circumstances came together to create the foundations for the flourishing that would occur in the following decades.

101 M.-F. Auzépy, L’histoire des iconoclastes (Paris: ACHCByz, 2007). 102 For the tendency to attribute the recovery tout court to the middle of the ninth century, see Dain, Les manuscrits, and Irigoin, ‘Survie et renouveau’: pp. 301ff.

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Appendix Figure 2.2.1  Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, PSI XII 1266. Official letter of Helladios to the pagarch, in the name of the topotērētēs (seventh century).

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Figure 2.2.2 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, PSI XII 1267. Letter of Theodoros to the pagarch (seventh century).

Figure 2.2.3 Examples of the linking of subsequent letters and words. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, PSI XII 1266 (see Figure 2.2.1).

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Prigent, Vivien. ‘La Sicile de Constant II: l’apport des sources sigillographiques.’ In La Sicile byzantine de Byzance à L’Islam, edited by Annliese Nef, and id. (Paris: De Boccard, 2010), pp. 157-187. Prigent, Vivien. ‘Le rôle des provinces d’Occident dans l’approvisionnement de Constantinople (618–717): témoignages numismatique et sigillographique’. Mélanges de l’École française de Rome — Moyen-Age 118 (2006): pp. 269–299. Robins, Robert H. The Byzantine Grammarians: Their Place in History (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993). Rollo, Antonio. ‘“Greco medievale” e “greco bizantino”’. Aiōn 30 (2003): pp. 429–473. Ronconi, Filippo. ‘De Stoudios à la Théotokos Evérgétès: Textes et livres du monachisme méso-byzantin, entre innovations et continuité’. In Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente nell’alto Medioevo. LXIV Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, Spoleto 31 marzo–6 aprile 2016 (Spoleto: CISAM, 2017), pp. 1293–1365. Ronconi, Filippo. Domanda. In Discussione sulla lezione Kaplan, Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente nell’alto Medioevo, LXIV Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, Spoleto 31 marzo–6 aprile 2016 (Spoleto: CISAM, 2017), p. 1059. Ronconi, Filippo. ‘Essere copista a Bisanzio: Tra immaginario collettivo, autorappresentazioni e realtà’. In Storia della scrittura e altre storie. Atti del colloquio internazionale, Università di Roma La Sapienza, 28–29 ottobre 2010, edited by Daniele Bianconi (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2014), pp. 383–434. Ronconi, Filippo. ‘Il Moveable Feast del Patriarca: Note e ipotesi sulla genesi della Bibliotheca di Fozio’. In Nel segno del testo: Edizioni, materiali e studi per Oronzo Pecere, edited by Lucio Del Corso, Franco De Vivo, and Antonio Stramaglia (Florence: Gonnelli, 2015), pp. 203–238. Ronconi, Filippo. ‘La collection brisée: Pour une étude des milieux socioculturels liés à la “collection philosophique”’. In La face cachée de la littérature byzantine: Le texte en tant que message immédiat. Actes du colloque international, Paris, 5–7 juin 2008, edited by Paolo Odorico (Paris: Centre d’études byzantines, néohelléniques et sud-est européennes — École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2011), pp. 137–166. Ronconi, Filippo. ‘La “collection philosophique”: un fantôme historique’. Scriptorium 67 (2013): pp. 119–140. Ronconi, Filippo. ‘La main insaisissable: Rôle et fonctions des copistes byzantins entre réalité et imaginaire’. In Scrivere e leggere nell’alto medioevo. LIX Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, Spoleto, 28 aprile–4 maggio 2011 (Spoleto: CISAM, 2012), pp. 627–664.

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Ronconi, Filippo. ‘La première circulation de la “chronique de Théophane”: notes paléographiques et codicologiques’. In Studies in Theophanes, edited by Marek Jankowiak and Federico Montinaro (Paris: Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2015 = Travaux et mémoires 19 [2015]), pp. 121–147. Ronconi, Filippo. ‘Quelle grammaire à Byzance ? La circulation des textes grammaticaux et son reflet dans les manuscrits’. In La produzione scritta tecnica e scientifica nel Medioevo: libro e documento tra scuole e professioni. Atti del Convegno internazionale, Fisciano-Salerno, 28–30 settembre 2009, edited by Giuseppe De Gregorio, and Maria Galante (Spoleto: CISAM, 2012), pp. 63–110. Schneider, Jean. Les traités orthographiques grecs antiques et byzantins (Turnhout: Brepols 1999). Signes-Codoñer, Juan. ‘Helenos y Romanos: la cultura bizantina y el Islam en el siglo IX’. Byzantion 72 (2002): pp. 404–448. Sijpesteijn, Petra M. Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Speck, Paul. ‘Byzantium: cultural suicide?’. In Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive, Thirteenth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham, 1996, edited by Leslie Brubaker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 73–84. Thomas, John, and Angela Constantinides Hero, eds. Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000). Thomas, John P. Private Religious Foundations in the Byzantine Empire (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks: 1987). Thomson, Francis J. ‘The Name of the Monastery where Theophanes the Confessor Became A Monk: ΠΟΛΙΧΝΙΟΝ or ΠΟΛΥΧΡΟΝΙΟΝ?’. Analecta Bollandiana 125 (2007): pp. 120–138. Treadgold, Warren T. A History of the Byzantine State and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Τρωιάνος, Σπύρος Ν. Οι πηγές του βυζαντινού δικαίου (Athens: Εκδόσεις Αντ. Ν. Σάκκουλα, 2011). Weitzmann, Kurt. The Joshua Roll: A Work of the Macedonian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948).

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Language and Political Communication in France and England (Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries) Jean-Philippe Genet

Abstract Symbolic power depends on the efficiency with which the values of any dominant group are transmitted to society at large. In the eleventh century, the Latin medieval Church initiated a fundamental transformation of the Western European symbolic communication system. In France and England, the symbolic power of the Gregorian Church was derived from the superiority of the spiritual power of the papacy. Its armies of monks and priests had to convince the members of the ecclesia (the Christian society) of the necessity to embark on the road to individual salvation under the guidance of the Church, imposing a new division between clergy and laity. Yet, whereas clericus and litteratus had earlier been synonymous, many lay people were now able to read and write. If the Church had developed its own administration and bureaucracy, the Gregorian educational and cultural revolution offered the same opportunity to cities and states, which thus acquired the capacity to govern by the written word. As the laity entered into an age of literacy, the foundations were laid for the genesis of a new type of state. Keywords: England, France, communication system, vernacular, literacy, administrative state

Political anthropology has familiarized us with the idea that power is more firmly based upon consent than on pure strength: domination is more often accepted than imposed, and constraint is more a sign of weakness than of assertive confidence. Consent depends chiefly upon symbolic power, and symbolic power is entirely generated and managed by the communication

De Weerdt, Hilde, and Franz-Julius Morche (eds), Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463720038_ch03

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system. Symbolic power is built on sets of values which have been described as ideology by Marx, but since this term has too often been used improperly and in rather simplistic ways, I prefer a term introduced by Maurice Godelier,1 which encompasses a much larger range of meanings: idéel, from idea, but not ideal, though the ideal is part of the idéel. The idéel is what is in the minds of all people in a given society, it is everything that is thought (either expressed through words or unformulated2) or dreamed, what is called in French the imaginaire (which is both the act of imagining and what is being imagined) as well as the media through which it is conveyed and perceived. The grip of symbolic power on the mind works through its influence on the imaginaire: in fact, through the efficiency with which the values of any dominant group in a given society are transmitted to be shared by those who are subjected to this domination as long as they accept it. The impact of political anthropology has led historians to focus their attention on symbolic communication systems. There is a classical description of the medieval communication system by Clanchy and Mostert which is based upon the sender/ receiver relation,3 but this may be supplemented by the more complete and complex theorization from a historical perspective which has recently been proposed by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger4 for the modern period in light of the experience of several German collaborative projects and of the sociological work of Habermas5 and Luhman.6 Stollberg1 M. Godelier, L’idéel et le matériel: Pensée, économies, sociétés (Paris: Fayard, 1984) [The Mental and the Material: Thought, Economy, and Society (London: Verso, 1986)]; and, more recently, id., Au fondement des sociétés humaines: Ce que nous apprend l’anthropologie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007), pp. 37–43. The English translator used ‘mental’ for ‘idéel’, but I prefer the French word. 2 What medieval philosophers called the language of angels, who had no body and could not speak words but communicated between them. On these different modes of communication, see T. Nani-Suarez, Connaissance et langage des anges selon Thomas d’Aquin et Gilles de Rome (Paris: Vrin, 2003). 3 See the introductions by each of the two editors in M. Clanchy and M. Mostert, eds., New Approaches to Medieval Communication (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 3–13 and 15–37. 4 B. Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘La communication symbolique à l’époque prémoderne: Concepts, thèses, perspectives de recherche’, Trivium 2 (2008), online : http://trivium.revues.org/1152 (accessed 23 May 2020). 5 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989 [1962]); for an application to the medieval period, see L’espace public au Moyen Âge: débats autour de Jürgen Habermas, ed. by P. Boucheron and N. Offenstadt (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011) and J.-P. Genet, ‘Espace public: du religieux au politique?’, in La comunidad medieval como esfera publica, ed. by H.R. Oliva Herrer et al. (Seville: Pub. Universidad de Sevilla, 2014) pp. 23–42. 6 N. Luhman, Legitimation durch Verfahren (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983); see B. StollbergRilinger, ed., Vormoderne politische Verfahren (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001).

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Rilinger stresses the fact that symbolic communication is a tri-dimensional — not bi-dimensional, as usually assumed — process: there is an information, encoded in signs; it is notified (mitgeteilt); and then recognized as a notification. She makes a distinction between symbolic communication proper and two other elements: instrumental action — the use of signs for specific and limited goals — and discursive conceptual communication. It is an important improvement over the stricter analysis of rituals, such as that of Gerd Althoff,7 which may have its merits for the High Middle Ages but cannot be easily applied, for instance, to the late medieval and modern periods because the cultural and political conditions changed.8 However, too much confidence in the intricacies and supposed significance of rituals may obscure the fact that the interpretation of symbolic codes is largely unconscious, always diverse, and sometimes contradictory. If the notification is often (but not always) perceived as such, it does not imply that it is properly understood. The words of discursive conceptual communication are the basic components of languages. They have a wide spectrum of meanings, which are modulated by each individual speaker through codes, styles, intonations, and registers; and decoded and understood according to their own mental capacities and dispositions by each individual receiver in the verbal exchanges (oral or written) of a given society. The same processes are probably true, if less obvious, for images, architectures, space structures, and sounds (including music). I would then rather adhere to a more general view of symbolic communication, following Cassirer’s old principles. It has the advantage of allowing us to focus the analysis on the basic components of the communication system and on their more or less sophisticated utilization, especially when the success of symbolic communication depends upon a proper assessment of the people’s expectations and skills by those who are on the issuing side of the communication process. It also gives more weight to words and language than to rituals, though the complex relation between the two is essential to produce an ‘efficient language’, a crucial requisite for a civilization in which

7 G. Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt: WBG, 1997), and see the critiques of P. Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 8 See M. Hébert, Parlementer: Assemblées représentatives et échange politique en Europe occidentale à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: De Boccard, 2014).

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the transubstantiation, that is the transformation of wine and bread into Christ’s body,9 was caused by the words of a consecrating priest.10 In this respect, medieval Europe offers a fascinating case study for comparative history, for it witnessed both a fundamental transformation of its communication system largely delineated by the Church, and the genesis of a new type of state, which Wim Blockmans and I have agreed to call the ‘modern state’.11 The present analysis will be restricted to two such states, England and France, because their differences offer a good case for comparison both between them — not least because they were linked by a fierce struggle during the whole period under consideration, each polity reacting to the other’s moves12 — and with other power systems. And, though communication may be non-verbal as well as verbal, we shall concentrate on verbal — written and/ or oral — communication, and more precisely on language, since the choice and ‘style’ (in the linguistic meaning of the term) of language are important — if not the most important — elements of political communication.

The Cultural Impact of the Division between Clergy and Laity Political structures and communications systems depend upon each other, with language being one of the key components of any communication system. In that respect, the first point which needs to be clarified is the social and cultural context in which political communication could eventually take place. The most salient feature of our two kingdoms is the fact that they grew in a context dominated by the symbolic power of the Church. 9 H. de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen Âge — Étude historique (Paris: Cerf, 2009 [1944]), and M. Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 10 I. Rosier-Catach, La parole efficace: Signe, rituel, sacré (Paris: Seuil, 2004); N. Bériou, J.-P. Boudet, and I. Rosier-Catach, eds., Le pouvoir des mots au Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). 11 See the seven volumes of Origins of the Modern State, ed. by W. Blockmans and J.-P. Genet, Oxford, 1995–1998, and W. Blockmans and J.-P. Genet, eds., Visions sur le développement des États Européens: Théories et historiographies de l’État Moderne (Rome: École francaise de Rome, 1993); also W. Blockmans, J. Borges de Macedo, and J.-P. Genet, The Heritage of the Pre-Industrial European State (Lisbon: Arquivos Nacionais/ Torre do Tombo, Divisão de Publicações, 1996). For a discussion of the term, and a new proposal, see J. Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 12 See for instance R.W. Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and C. Fletcher, J.-P. Genet, and J. Watts, eds., Government and Political Life in England and France, c.1300–c.1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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The traditional balance between emperor and church had been more or less kept alive in Byzantium and in the Carolingian Empire: it implied a close cooperation between the two powers and no clear-cut division between laity and clergy, except for its ascetic component, the monks. With the dissolution of the imperial power and the rise of feudalism in the West, the dominant class split into two competing fractions and the papacy took advantage of a temporary diminution of the empire’s influence to launch the western church on a new course, that of the so-called Gregorian Reform.13 Socially speaking, whereas Christian society was traditionally divided into three groups (clerics, monks, and lay people), from the second half of the eleventh century onwards, the Gregorian papacy imposed a division into two categories, secular clerics being assimilated with the monks and forming one group that was sharply separated from the laity. The strict celibacy of the clergy ensured the permanent reproduction of the Church’s power basis, since it prevented alienation to potential heirs. The imposition of an equally strict exogamy through the Canon Law also helped control the laity’s own faculties of reproduction. By trying to enforce the prohibition of marriage within given degrees of affinity, the Church manipulated through a subtle combination of refusal and dispensation the opportunities of alliance. This led to the progressive disappearance of the large family (Sippe) and to the prominence of more limited family groups in which both agnatic and cognatic links played a part. These often took the form of ‘topolineages’ in the feudal aristocracy, in which the repudiation of women was prohibited and remarriage was made difficult. Marriage was elevated to a sacrament, which required priestly intervention. These rules applied also to godparents. All this was central in terms of social control. But this would not have been accepted had not the Church deeply transformed religious beliefs and practices through the development of a complex but extraordinarily efficient symbolic system. The key element was the modification of Christian soteriology which imposed the charge of salvation onto the individual who had to redeem through his own conduct the debt owed to Christ whose martyrdom had become an obsessional presence 13 For this and what follows, see J.-P. Genet, ‘Pouvoir symbolique, légitimation et genèse de l’État moderne’, in La légitimité implicite (Le pouvoir symbolique, I), ed. by id. (Paris and Rome: Éditions de la Sorbonne/ École française de Rome, 2015), pp. 9–47; id., ‘La vérité et les vecteurs de l’idéel’, in Vérité et crédibilité: construire la vérité dans le système de communication de l’Occident (XIIIe–XIVe siècle) (Le pouvoir symbolique, II), ed. by id. (Paris and Rome: Éditions de la Sorbonne/ École française de Rome, 2015), pp. 9–45; id., ‘Introduction’, in Valeurs et systèmes de valeurs (Le pouvoir symbolique, III), ed. by P. Boucheron, L. Gaffuri, and id. (Paris and Rome: Éditions de la Sorbonne/ École française de Rome, 2016), pp. 9–44.

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through the proliferation of images. The image of the cross was scarcely seen in Carolingian times, but the suffering of Christ on his cross became an obsession in the High Middle Ages. In order to interiorize the Christian’s obligation to repay his debt as a member of the ecclesia, the Eucharist was given a prominent role, through the communion — with the constraint for confession that it entails — and the belief in the transubstantiation.14 This had to be done under the control and guidance of the Church, which imposed its symbolic power through penance and the fear of damnation: the frightening view of the Last Judgement with the pains of hell was also one of the images most frequently proposed to the faithful.15 The introduction of purgatory somehow mitigated the prospect of damnation, opening the door to negotiation through indulgences, while the Virgin and the saints interceded for the penitents. This was indeed a new or, as I prefer to call it, a second Christianism, as the Greeks soon noticed and as much later a group of reformers were to claim. Culturally speaking, the division between clergy and laity had largely unforeseen consequences. People from anywhere within the borders of the old empire conversing in ‘late spoken Latin’ or later in ‘proto-romance’ could probably understand each other, though with difficulties, while the authors of saints’ lives of the Merovingian period tried to adapt Latin to the linguistic abilities of their audience. But with Alcuin’s reforms, the Church opted from the eighth century onwards for a return to classical Latin, a language which had become incomprehensible to those who had not been to school, even in romance-speaking countries.16 The range of Latin ‘styles’ were sharply reduced as its popular derivations were replaced by dialects, some of which began quite early to be transformed into proper vernacular languages when a specific social ‘milieu’ existed to favour the refinement and formalization of their grammar and vocabulary. The status of Occitan in the southern courts from Aquitaine to Sicily is a good example of this, followed by the use of the French ‘langue d’oïl’ in the feudal courts of north-western Europe. Thus, the division, between cleric and layperson corresponded more or less in the eleventh century to the division between literati, that is, those able to understand Latin, and laici, technically illiterati. 14 H. de Lubac, Corpus mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen Âge — Étude historique, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1949), repr. in Œuvres complètes, vol. XV (Paris: Cerf, 2009); Rubin, Corpus Christi. 15 J. Baschet, Les justices de l’au-delà: Les représentations de l’enfer en France et en Italie (XIIe–XVe siècles) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2014 [1993]). 16 M. Banniard, Viva voce: communication écrite et communication orale du IVe au IXe siècle en Occident latin (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1992); id., Du latin aux langues romanes (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013 [1997]).

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This had a fundamental implication: the clerical monopoly of Latin meant the monopolization of access to the Bible and of the right to comment on it and preach its message. The first so-called heretics were lay literate communities who attempted to read and interpret the Bible independently, by-passing the control of the Church and encroaching on its symbolic power.17 The Church prevented the translation of the Bible for as long as possible, with the exception of a few, mainly ‘historical’ parts. The issue of symbolic power was indeed crucial to its dominance: the Church’s superiority was directly linked to the superiority of the spiritual power of the papacy over all other powers, including the emperor. But the pope had no army, and its clergy was not allowed to fight nor to shed blood. Its strength depended upon the capacity of unarmed monks and priests to teach the basic tenets of the Christian faith to the members of the ecclesia, that is, the whole Christian community, and to convince them to embark on the adventurous road to salvation under the guidance of the Church as a necessity. To achieve this, the clergy had to be well trained and in as great a number as possible. Thus, education became one of the primary objectives of the Church. Schools left the cloister for the cathedral, and the cathedral for the town, soon giving birth to the universities. And this educational revolution led to a cultural one. To improve and intensify the impact of the Christian message, the logic and philosophy of the Greeks was mustered to help produce a potent symbol of the incorporation of each Christian in the mystical body of the ecclesia through holy communion and the new theology of transubstantiation. Parishes were established and churches built everywhere, and they were staffed with a better-trained clergy due to the development of the schools. These advances were endangered by the rapid growth of the population, especially in towns, but the creation of the mendicant orders brought a solution to this problem. Bishops regularly published lists of what had to be known by each Christian, and priests and friars tirelessly preached a minimal stock of religious knowledge and the basic Christian values during the Sunday mass or during preaching tours. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council imposed on every Christian the obligation to receive communion at least once a year after confessing to a priest and being assigned penance. Ecclesiastical courts interfered with many aspects of daily life and kept a tight control on family affairs (including the validity of wills) and all aspects of sexuality. By the thirteenth century, Latin European society had become a Christian society, in which individuals 17 B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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shared a common set of principles and values, and the Church ruthlessly excluded those who rejected its authority.18 But this educational and cultural revolution did not benefit the clergy alone. The Latin word clericus has given birth in English to two different words, clerk and cleric (which is not the case in French). This obscures the fact that for centuries a clericus was both a literate person and someone in orders: those who spoke and wrote Latin were the clerics. There were some exceptions to the rule, especially in northern and central Italy and in Catalonia19 where the laicization of the scriptores publici and, from the twelfth century onwards, the notaries, gave birth to a prosperous and fastgrowing group of literati earlier than in France and England. These men were technically clerics as well as lay persons. But with time, the exceptions became more numerous, so that this duality gave rise to an awkward confusion: a man who was socially a laicus became a clericus on the basis of using Latin or simply being a student, but that did not make him a cleric. The growth of lay literati could and did mushroom with the changes in the educational system from the thirteenth century onwards.20 After the failure of the Carolingian renovation of the Roman Empire — Charlemagne, as is well known, had realized the potential of the written word, circulating his capitula and educating young lay leaders in his palace’s school — feudal lords relied on other means to impress the mostly illiterate people they ruled. Communication was by word, by image, and by participation in liturgies, meetings, or intercourse between individuals. Spoken language was therefore important, but since it was mostly used in interpersonal relations, it followed its own rules. Jan Rüdiger vindicates the existence of what he calls an ‘Arthurian’ political language emphasizing action besides an ‘Alcuinian’ political language emphasizing theory in the Carolingian era.21 Unfortunately, this has left very few traces in our sources. Once the Anglo-Saxon speaking elite was wiped out by the Norman conquest,22 none 18 R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 [1987]). 19 For Italy, see P. Cammarosano, Italia medievale: Struttura e geografia delle fonti scritte, 6th ed. (Rome: Aulamagna, 2000 [1991]), pp. 267–276; for Catalonia, see M. Zimmerman, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe–XIIe siècle) (Madrid: Casa de Velasquez, 2003), pp. 135–170. 20 For examples of miles litteratus or clericus militaris, and laymen able to speak or write Latin, see M. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (London: Wiley, 1992 [1979]). 21 J. Rüdiger, Did Charlemagne Know Carolingian Kingship Theory? (Stockholm: Runica et Mediaevalia, 2011). 22 Anglo-Saxon seems to have been the only Germanic vernacular language for which a strong policy of development was deliberately conceived (by King Alfred and his ecclesiastical councillors). See D. Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge

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of these vernacular languages — with the possible exception of Icelandic — had reached a level at which they could be written in the reasonably standardized prose needed for administrative purposes. In contrast with Roman antiquity, no proper administrative structures were attached to lay political powers in the medieval West until the end of the eleventh century. The only structures which could be described as such were those developed by the Church. It used written documents to keep its networks busy, which implied the existence of a common language, more or less bureaucratic agencies (chanceries or scriptoria in Rome, in the episcopal sees and in the greatest monasteries), and educated staffs. This in turn required schools, which the Church developed, albeit for other reasons, as we have seen. The papal claim to exercise supreme and universal power undermined the lay rulers’ confidence in the Church — if not in individual clerics — and they consequently felt a need to establish their own agencies. This was reinforced by two structural changes: the demographic consequences of the continuous economic growth (probably the longest experienced in European history) and the re-introduction of the Roman Law concept of territory.23 To control their subjects within these newly defined territories and to maximize their holdings in competition with their rivals, kings and princes could no longer rely on a personal relationship with their vassals. They needed to emulate the Church and create bureaucracies ex nihilo to introduce administration by the written word. However, in order to develop such agencies, more or less modelled on those of the Church, Latin language and rhetoric included,24 they had to staff these growing administrative agencies with clerics. They also had to bargain and negotiate for patronage with the ecclesiastical authorities because administrative expertise was non-existent outside the Church. Latin, which was by now the standard language of learning, also became the predominant language of administration and justice. The move to vernacular languages came only much later and was slow. The first administrative lay agency, the English Exchequer, was created by Henry I to manage his feudal rights and was duly staffed with clerics. The English king as overlord of the whole kingdom of England (a situation University Press, 2007), pp. 130–178, against M. Godden, The Translations of Alfred and his Circle, and the Misappropriation of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 23 M. Lauwers and L. Ripart, ‘Représentation et gestion de l’espace dans l’Occident médiéval (Ve–XIIIe siècle)’, in Rome et l’État moderne européen, ed. by J.-P. Genet (Rome: École française de Rome, 2007), pp. 115–171. 24 See B. Grévin, Rhétorique du pouvoir médiéval: les ‘Lettres’ de Pierre de la Vigne et la formation du langage politique européen, XIIIe–XVe siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2008).

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which the French king enjoyed only in his so-called demesne, roughly the Île-de-France around Paris) had major revenues, which he badly needed to fund his continuous wars. The Exchequer used tallies, which was based on a system of notches and worked as a non-verbal medium, even though a summary in words was scribbled on the side. The Exchequer also used chancery-type writing to keep record of how much money was owed to the king and for what reason.25 The earliest surviving Exchequer Roll (the so-called Pipe Roll) is that of 1129–1130, but there may have been earlier ones. The Barons of the Exchequer were judges, and they based their decisions on evidence. To produce evidence in written form became compulsory from 1278 onwards in England, but by the middle of the twelfth century it had already become normal practice in most European provinces where the use of charters from the tenth century onwards had familiarized people with the use of written documents. Michael Clanchy cites the example of Master David of London who defended the king’s cause against Thomas Becket in the courts of Rome, for which he had been rewarded with a yearly pension of twenty pounds. Fearing a change of winds, he wrote from France to his agent in London to gather and duplicate (by official copies made in the royal chancery) the documents justifying the payment. There were no fewer than eleven royal documents, not counting the letter to the agent and the original certificate that Master David kept in his own register.26 The recognition of, and need for, documentary evidence extended to all classes of society that were expected to have seals. The centralization of administrative practices in England makes this more obvious than in France, where the same situation emerged half a century later. In both kingdoms, this led to the creation of archives modelled on the ecclesiastical ones. This is a fundamental difference between Western and Islamic civilizations,27 where written documents did not gain official status until the fourteenth century in Mamluk Egypt and even later in the Ottoman Empire.28 But the need for document writing also came from below, through the development of pragmatic writing. Earlier views about the total disappearance of writing outside the Church in the High Middle Ages have been 25 Richard Fitz Nigel, Dialogus de Scaccario: the dialogue of the Exchequer, ed. by E. Amt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 26 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 27–29. 27 For a remarkable comparative study of the functions of the different linguistic levels in those two civilizations, see B. Grévin, Le parchemin des Cieux: Essai sur le Moyen Âge du langage (Paris: Le Seuil, 2012). 28 G. Martinez-Gros, ‘Mise en écriture et production documentaire en Orient’, in L’autorité de l’écrit au Moyen Âge (Orient-Occident) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2008), pp. 21–24.

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discarded since the archaeological finds of Bergen and Novgorod,29 and after scraps of accounts and receipts from the Merovingian period resurfaced.30 However, the size, population and functions of towns were drastically reduced in Western Europe (while in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds urban civilization continued to flourish). Economic growth brought them back, and the towns which began to flourish as commercial markets or centres of administrative and political power had nothing in common, both in their layout and in their power structures, with those of the late Roman Empire. This rise of commercial activity resulted in a growing demand for contracts and legal expertise.31 Notaries and public scribes were badly needed, and courts able to arbitrate commercial or property conflicts multiplied. The number of grammar schools where a basic knowledge of Latin was provided grew rapidly,32 and specific schools were created to teach the ars notarie of legal and commercial writing. As early as the beginning of the twelfth century, laypeople in the regnum Italiae had themselves become teachers of grammar, rhetoric, Roman Law and the ars notarie.33 Schools were also created to teach arithmetic. And apart from a knowledge of Latin, writing and reading had become essential skills for many members of the laity by the early thirteenth century. Even when they did not master these two capacities, the laity, especially in the towns but also in the countryside, had entered into an age of literacy. This society of extended literacy was also, from the thirteenth century onwards, a society of educated people.

State Growth and Cultural Transformations From the end of the thirteenth century onwards, some form of consent from the political society for the imposition of financial levies was required in the western kingdoms (France, England, the Iberian monarchies, Scotland) as 29 See examples in R. Britnell, ed., Pragmatic Literacy: East and West, 1200–1330 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997). 30 É. Renard, ‘Administrer des biens, contrôler des hommes, gérer des revenus par l’écrit au cours du premier Moyen Âge’, in Décrire, inventorier, enregistrer entre Seine et Rhin au Moyen Âge: Formes, fonctions et usages des écrits de gestion, ed. by X. Hermand, J.-F. Nieus, and E. Renard (Paris: Mémoires et documents de l’École des Chartes, 2012), pp. 7–36. 31 P. Boucheron and D. Menjot, La ville médiévale (Paris: Points histoire, 2011 [2003]). 32 The best case studies remain those devoted to England by N. Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London: Harper and Row, 1973) and id., Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 33 See R.G. Witt, The Two Latin cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 371.

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well as in the more or less autonomous cities and principalities of continental Europe. This made effective political communication crucially important. With the development of the political structure of the modern state, itself a by-product of geo-political and military constraints, the French and English monarchies had to mobilize consensus for their fiscal policies on a large scale. This required both information and negotiation to convince the political society of the legitimacy of the rulers and their political decisions (most crucially, that of going to war).34 In fact, what it implied was simply that kings now had to govern, something they had hardly done before. They had ruled because they were invested with the authority to do so, but they had not governed. It is Michel Foucault, in his lessons in the Collège de France in the early 1980s, who first drew attention to the fact that the concept of governing is a by-product of the attempt of the Church to convert and discipline its flock.35 The Gregorian Church ‘governed’ by obeying papal authority as transmitted through innumerable bulls and letters, and through priests who tried to reach their parishioners’ conscience and convince them of the legitimacy of the Church’s demands by means of preaching and spiritual guidance. Neither cities, nor states, which were at that stage only beginning to build their administrative structures, could do the same. They did not have a spatial structure equivalent to the parish, nor did they have enough agents to staff their administrations. Most lay rulers also did not have the equivalent of churches36 at their disposal (with the potent implications of the metonymic value of the word, especially in its Latin form, ecclesia).37 In sum, they still had to move from dominium to government, and royal and civic palaces with facilities for public meetings developed only slowly from the twelfth century onwards.

34 See Genet, ‘Pouvoir symbolique’. 35 See M. Foucault, Sécurité, territorialité, population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), pp. 92–254; M. Sénellart, Les arts de gouverner: Du regimen médiéval au concept de gouvernement (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995). 36 Kings and princes had large and prestigious buildings for their courts: the King’s Hall in Westminster was one of the earliest and largest, but it became a ‘palace of state’ only in the fourteenth century, when the necessities of the war with France brought back the household and the administrative agencies from York where the conflict with Scotland had drawn them. See J. Watts, ‘Looking for the State in Later Medieval England’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. by P. Coss and M. Keen (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 243–267, here pp. 248–249. 37 See D. Iogna-Prat, La Maison-Dieu: Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (Paris: Points histoire, 2006), and id., Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes: L’Église et l’architecture de la société (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2016).

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As a matter of fact, the first step towards government was judicial. Justice was probably the only Christian value for which the king was commonly held responsible, even by the Church,38 since it implied, in many cases, the shedding of blood. However, the general principle of the duty to maintain the peace, including the king’s peace, depended upon the exercise of dominium and mainly took the form of social arbitration by the kings and/ or by members of the local elites until the twelfth century. Government came into play when the king’s justice was able to adequately deal with the status of men and their property by legislative means. There is no doubt that the transformation of the judicial system conceived from 1166 onwards by Henry II and his councillors was revolutionary. It had to be, because the crisis of the civil war that had opposed King Stephen and the Empress Mathilda from 1135 to 1154, had produced anarchy and lawlessness while destroying the existing institutions. The Common Law and its corresponding judicial system is an extremely complex matter, but to explain why it became the cornerstone of political communication one could try to sum up three of its more salient features.39 First, judicial action in criminal cases was not initiated by the king’s officials, but by a panel of twelve ‘law-abiding’ men of a given town (which would later be called the ‘grand jury’) formed to indict potential criminals. Second, every free man could appeal to the king’s justice to receive a writ for a specif ic case (novel disseisin for being deprived of lands or other properties, morte d’ancestor for being cheated in the transmission of an inheritance, and so on), which would order the sheriff to summon the litigants to appear before a court at a given date. And third, the final decision was based on the answers of a jury of twelve free men (the trial jury) who determined the royal judge’s final decision. At all stages, ‘citizens’ were involved and supposed to give advice freely, unhindered by royal officials. The machinery was complex, and the plaintiff and defendant could be assisted by advocates (sergeants) and attorneys, but since all was done in French and not in Latin (French being the language of the English elites), it was thought — wrongly, as it turned out — that professional lawyers would not be needed. 40 38 The clearest and most authoritative view of the Church’s conception of the distribution of power between the pope and temporal kings is Giles of Rome, De ecclesiastica potestate, in Aegidius Romanus de ecclesiastica potestate, ed. R. Scholz (Weimar, 1929 [reprint 1969]). 39 R.C. Van Caenegem, The Birth of the English Common Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) and J. Hudson, The Formation of English Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta (London: Routledge, 1996). 40 P. Brand, Origins of the English Legal Profession (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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This reform was highly successful. It gave birth to a virtual direct link between the king and each of his subjects. Many of them found a niche in the system, as members of the juries or in attending the sessions of the county courts, while many others became in due course members of the legal professions as lawyers or attorneys. But something even more important happened: the reform nurtured a growing consciousness that the enforcement of law was not subject to the mere vis et voluntas of the feudal lord, but that it was part of a larger set of duties for which kings were held responsible, those of government. In other words, it paved the way for the introduction of royal government and the verbalization of grievances on the part of subjects. The Magna Carta crisis in 1215 cannot be understood without this prequel to the saga of the modern state, no more than that its famous 39th chapter (29th in the so-called Articles of the Barons) stated that ‘no free man shall be take or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined […] except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land’. 41 The direct cause of Magna Carta was the rejection of arbitrary taxation, and with it came the concept of communitas regni, at that time represented by the Barons, to oppose any arbitrary use of the king’s justice. However, time and again financial necessity brought the English kings, dispossessed of their precious continental lands and keen to regain them, back to arbitrary expedients. This led to a continuous struggle between crown and nobility, which ended with the defeat of Simon de Montfort and the institutionalization of parliament by Edward I. 42 The French king was not in a similar position. He did not even rule, except in his own so-called demesne. However, his demesne was skilfully augmented by Philip-Augustus, which made the king of France rich enough to compete successfully with the king of England — his vassal as duke of Normandy and count of Anjou — once he had created the first structures of a French royal administration. 43 However, the seizure of the Plantagenet lands made him richer still, and the French kings hence felt no need to create institutions which could create a ‘governmental link’ with their subjects. It is only when King Louis IX (Saint Louis) decided to put his kingdom on a 41 J.C. Holt, Magna Carta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 429 (‘Articles’), p. 441 (‘Magna Carta, 1215’); D. Carpenter, Magna Carta (London: Penguin Press, 2015), p. 52. 42 J.R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); M. Prestwich, Edward I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). 43 J. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

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war footing44 and enlisted the support of his subjects that he produced his great ordonnance de réforme. He did so because he intended to be absent for a long time on a risky crusade. Serious enquiries were made in order to evaluate the conduct of royal officers, an approach emulated by other Capetian princes such as Alphonse de Poitiers and Charles of Anjou.45 Louis organized frequent consultations of the aristocratic and urban elites, and enlarged councils often met at his request. 46 Yet the first real attempt to hold a national meeting of ‘representatives’ — not elected, but selected in this capacity — had to wait until Philip the Fair’s so-called meeting of the first États généraux in 1302. Though it has become a commonplace, the sharp contrast usually drawn between the English parliament and the French États généraux deserves to be qualified. The French kings organized an incredible number of meetings with their subjects. Yong Jin Hong lists 78 meeting of estates between 1302 and 1359, but like the ad hoc meetings of enlarged councils, these meetings had a changing composition and most of them were regional. 47 In addition, many other meetings between royal officials and representatives from individual towns and baillages took place in the meantime. Historians have usually attributed the slow progress of the French monarchy in setting up a fiscal system as efficient as the English one to the failure of its representative system, but on closer examination it appears that the last Capetians made frantic efforts to consult their subjects. To gain their support against external enemies, be it the Church, the Flemish 48 or the English, the French monarchs had to accept the message sent by the representatives of the realm. This support did not imply consent to permanent f inancial contributions, which was only achieved once the realm had virtually collapsed and found itself in dire need of recovering 44 See W.C. Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); however, the ‘testament de Philippe-Auguste’ of 1190 (also before the king’s departure for the Holy Land) is a less accomplished attempt in the same direction: no. 345 in the Recueil des actes de Philippe-Auguste, vol. I, ed. by H.F. Delaborde, C. Petit-Dutaillis, J. Boussard, and M. Nortier (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1916), pp. 416–420. 45 M. Dejoux, Les enquêtes de Saint Louis: Gouverner et sauver son âme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2014). 46 J. Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 47 Yong Jin Hong, ‘Le roi et la société politique: la monarchie française et le système de communication 1315–1360’, Part II (Ph.D. diss., University of Paris, 2010), pp. 449ff. 48 Flanders being part of the Kingdom of France and the Flemish French, it was against them that the king’s subjects were for the first time called to die for the fatherland: E.H. Kantorowicz, ‘“Pro patria mori” in medieval political thought’, American Historical Review 56, no. 3 (1951): pp. 472–492.

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from the consequences of the Treaty of Troyes. Even then, the French kings never succeeded in taxing the nobility. The inability of the French kings to create a unif ied judicial system must be regarded as one of the major weaknesses of the French monarchy. However, the righteousness of the king’s justice was never questioned. The willingness of Louis IX to offer justice at Vincennes to all those in need was widely publicized and seems to have left a lasting impression. Heavy penalties, including the public torture and execution of criminals (even, in some cases, of members of the nobility), were widely met with approval. 49 All this led to the recognition — except perhaps in Flanders — of the king as the superior fount of justice in France, an impression reinforced by the skilful staging of the king’s pardon, much more important a tool in France50 than in England, in line with the development of the ‘royal religion’ that revered the ‘most Christian king’ (rex christianissimus) and ultimately led to the notion of the monarchy by divine right.51 The Parlement of Paris was de facto, if not always de jure, recognized as an appeal court for the whole kingdom, even by the Flemish and the king of England as duke of Aquitaine. But there was no national law in France comparable to the Common Law. France was divided between provinces of customary laws (these differed widely) and provinces of written laws, somewhat different but unified by their common reference to Roman Law. This reinforced the strength of regional identities, which appeared in full strength in 1314 with the formation of the so-called Ligues de noblesse in reaction to the fiscal demands of Philip the Fair. At that time, Normandy and all the southern provinces had been under the French king’s authority for only a century, and the weakness of his administration had prevented the establishment of tight control. But this weakness turned out to be an element of strength in the long term, as the comparison with England shows. English identity was remodelled after the Norman conquest in opposition to the ‘barbarous’ Celts,52and the early strength and efficiency of the English administration led to the total control of Wales, Ireland, and even, for a short time, Scotland, but it also prompted a ‘nationalist’ reaction which prevented the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots from becoming 49 R. Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order, p. 139–183. 50 C. Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’: Crime, état et société en France à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991). 51 J. Krynen, L’empire du roi: Idées et croyances politiques en France XIIIe–XVe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). 52 J. Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000).

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‘British’.53 The very weakness and inefficiency of the French administration gave the Gascons and Normans enough time to turn French.54 Indeed, the only place where the French ever felt strong enough to impose a tough line in the English style produced the same result: the Flemish would never become French!

Latin and Vernacularity in France and England We can safely conclude that, despite French backwardness, the institutional channels for political communication, which in the case of the modern state is a two-way process, had been established by the end of the thirteenth century in both kingdoms. Much has been said on royal propaganda and liturgies, especially in the wake of Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies55 (which is fundamental for other topics as well), even from a comparative perspective,56 which remains by far the most promising approach. However, liturgies and ceremonies, even routinely repeated ones such as the royal entries, reached only limited audiences57 and we cannot observe or even less measure their impact on public opinion, another elusive concept about which a precise account can only be attempted in cases of rebellion58 or with respect to small milieus.59 A focus on ritual neglects what is both our main source and the only sure means to understand the ‘idéel’, language. It is only through language (language as such, not ‘political’ texts) that we can understand and reconstruct the values and expectations of the individual and assess their role in the ongoing dialogue between rulers and ruled. Language has to be dealt with properly, not as a stock of more or less appropriate quotations. Several external parameters have to be taken 53 Sir Rees Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 54 J. Given, State and Society in Medieval Europe: Gwynedd and Languedoc under Outside Rule (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1990). 55 E.H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 56 See, for instance, A. Boureau and C.S. Ingerflom, eds., La royauté dans le monde chrétien (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1992). 57 B. Guenée, Les entrées royales françaises de 1328 à 1515 (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1968); see also G. Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 58 S. Cohn, Jr., Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 59 See B. Guenée, L’opinion publique à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Perrin, 2002).

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into account: two have already been mentioned, the status of Latin and the problem of literacy, but other factors are also relevant to the problem of political communication and ought to be prioritized in a comparative approach: the structural balance between orality and writing, the choice and styles of language, and the social range of linguistic communities. From the early beginnings of royal administration and royal justice, and even as Latin was established as the language of the bureaucratic apparatus, those in power had to negotiate with different linguistic communities. France and England responded in various ways, in accordance with the level of development of their respective languages. As a second language that could be learned, Latin was always available. French was another matter. We can determine approximately when French began to be used by the royal households: only two acts originally written in French have been found for the reign of Louis IX, one of them being the Treaty of Paris of 1259 between Louis and his brother-in-law, the king of England, whose administration already used French. In the reign of Philip the Fair, the proportion of acts in French rose to 5 per cent of the output of the royal chancery. Under Philip VI, the proportion had risen to 20–22 per cent during the first years of his reign, but the proportion of texts written in French had risen to 80 per cent by 1330. The division between French and Latin, then, is a geographical one: French for the provinces of customary law, Latin for the provinces of written law. Latin made a brief comeback under John II, but after him the choice of language varied according to a document’s nature: French predominated, but Latin was used for more solemn acts.60 This periodization must be seen against the background of the evolution of the French language itself. There has been some debate about the precise nature of the idiom of the Strasbourg oaths of 842, but its first written manifestations in the tenth century, in the Cantilène de Sainte Eulalie and the two (independent) Livres of Saint Alexis and Saint Leodegarius, are also transcripts of oral literature, which remains true for the Song of Roland — the earliest text, which has been dated to 1198. During the twelfth century, nearly all our surviving witnesses are versified texts. French prose only appears in the thirteenth century with the chronicles of the Fourth Crusade (1204), the romance cycle of the Graal (c.1220) and, essential for our purpose, the written redaction of legal customs, from the Grand Coutumier de Normandie in 1235 to the Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir in 1285. For the period 1230 to 1240, French-language charters appear with more frequency. 60 For this and the following paragraph, see S. Lusignan, La langue des rois au Moyen Âge: Le français en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), passim.

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Jacques Monfrin has estimated the number of subsisting French charters to 4400, 35 per cent of which originate from Picardie and French-speaking Flanders, and 31 per cent from Lorraine, thus from outside the kingdom. Princely chanceries followed the lead. The dukes of Lorraine used French for the first time in 1231, and in the second half of the thirteenth century, Latin was used only for documents intended for the pope or for foreign princes. The same process can be observed in Luxembourg, Champagne, and Burgundy. The French chancery did not promote French as a national language as much as the kings of Castile and of Portugal, but it used it to disseminate and amplify its own message when the language had reached maturity both in its judicial form and in its status as a medium of social communication. The English king had at his disposal a standardized vernacular language that allowed the use of a remarkably efficient diplomatic tool — the writ.61 The conqueror, however, was forced to abandon his language, which was not understood by his own men, while the English-speaking aristocracy had been wiped out (according to Doomsday Book, members of the English aristocracy had kept only 4 per cent of the lands). His chancellors gradually turned to Latin to run the highly centralized system inherited from the Anglo-Saxon kings. Latin, which was understood by clerics of both Norman and Anglo-Saxon origins, remained the favoured language of the English chancery until the fifteenth century, while French was used early in other departments such as the Privy Seal office.62 However, when the Common Law was introduced, the king deliberately chose the language of the aristocracy for whom it had been chiefly devised, that is, French. Written tracts on the Common Law began to appear a century later, roughly at the time of the writing down of the French customs. In fact, the introduction of Common Law meant that the English administration and monarchy had two ‘second’ languages, since by the middle of the fourteenth century French had ceased to be a native language in England, except for in the upper levels of the nobility. Henry V (d. 1422) seems to have been the first English king to write his letters in English. Though parliamentary reports were in French (and in Latin from 1422), English became the standard language for parliamentary debates from 1362 onwards. The use of English in official 61 F.E. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1952). 62 For the following paragraph, see J.-P. Genet, La genèse de l’État modern: Culture et société politique en Angleterre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004), pp. 139–168, and A. Mairey, ‘These trewe conclusions in Englische: langues, cultures et autorités dans l’Angleterre du XIVe siècle’, Revue historique 637, no. 1 (2006): pp. 37–57.

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written documents came very late, though by the thirteenth century a growing part of the business in the courts was transacted in English. Only the formal parts were spoken in French, but writing was still in French and in Latin. In towns such as London or Coventry, English appears in official documents from 1380 onwards, but it was not until the 1420s that it became the rule. As in France, the English monarchy did nothing to promote the use of the national language. It waited until it had reached maturity, through the revival of English literary production, and especially after the great success of the so-called Ricardian poets (Langland, Chaucer and Gower). There is nonetheless an important difference between France and England. The French kings did their best to promote higher standards in the writing of French. It was the Italian poet Dante who, in his De vulgari eloquentia,63 proposed the theory of an ‘illustrious’ vernacular, with grammatical and lexical qualities on a par with Latin. One of the best ways to achieve this was to provide translations into the vernacular of the most important texts. The French royal family was keen on commissioning translations, starting with the famous De Regimine Principum of Giles of Rome, the most popular of the handbooks intended to teach good governance to lay princes. More than 300 copies of the Latin version survive today, as well as 100 for the 25 translations in nine vernacular languages.64 Nearly 100 texts were translated at the French court, culminating with the translations of Aristotle’s Politics, Nicomachean Ethics and Economics, made by Nicole Oresme, and Augustine’s City of God, made by Raoul de Presles for King Charles V.65 This was clearly intended to transform French into a langage de clergie, as Christine de Pizan puts it, equivalent to Latin and capable of dealing with concepts and abstract ideas. Nothing similar can be found in England, where the f irst princes to promote translation at the beginning of the f ifteenth 63 Dante Alighieri, De l’éloquence en vulgaire, trans. and annt. by I. Rosier-Catach (Paris: Fayard, 2011), pp. 158–163, 293–295, 322–324. 64 W. Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Leipzig: K.W. Hiersemann, 1938), pp. 211–228, 320–328; for the circulation of the text in England, see C. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c.1275–c.1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); N.-L. Perret, Les traductions françaises du De Regimine principum de Gilles de Rome: Parcours matériel, culturel et intellectuel d’un discours sur l’éducation (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011); M.J. Diez Garretas, J.M. Frajeda Rueda, and I. Acero Durantez, with D. Dietrick Smithbauer, Los Manuscritos de la version castellana del De regimine principum de Gil de Roma (Tordesillas, Instituto de estudios de Iberoamérica y Portugal, Seminario de filología medieval, Universidad de Valladolid, 2003). 65 C. Galderisi, ed., Translations médiévales: Cinq siècles de traductions en français au Moyen Âge (XIe–XVe siècles) — Étude et Répertoire, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011).

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century were the Prince of Wales (Henry V) and his brothers, the dukes of Bedford and Gloucester. After all, the native language of the English kings was French! But translations there were, and these were sponsored by members of the gentry, such as the Berkeleys, and by university clerics anxious to reach the whole Christian community. Most remarkable is the translation of the Bible by the disciples of John Wyclif, the success of which can be measured by the number of surviving manuscripts, some 250 of them. Its ownership was dangerous, though. If discovered, the book was burnt — and sometimes its owner as well.66 The need for an ‘illustrious’ English came from political society in England, not from the king, as was the case in France. The result of all this is that French and English could be used in several different ‘styles’ and ‘registers’, to use sociolinguistic concepts, which could service all the estates of political society. While Latin had been irretrievably lost to the popular classes of society, despite occasional mumblings of the Pater Noster and Ave Maria and the familiar music of the Sunday mass, English and French could be used at the same intellectual and artistic level as Latin while being the language of the popular classes. This happened one century later in the case of English, but by this time the process had proved much more efficient because England was a unified polity in terms of language, while France was still divided into different linguistic zones. In France the great division between the langue d’oc and the langue d’oïl remained in place, and, as already mentioned, the royal chancery still used Latin to write to southern towns in the fifteenth century. A high proportion of the southern high-ranking clergy, when summoned in 1394 to give their opinion in writing on the opportunity to suspend obedience to the Avignon pope in an attempt to bring the Great Schism to an end, did so in Latin, as they were unable to write in French.67 But there were also several French languages; the French of England was one of these, looking more and more like a sort of ‘second Latin’, a technical judicial and administrative language that was not actually spoken by anyone. There also were wide differences between the types of French spoken in Lorraine, Burgundy, Picardy, Normandy, 66 A. Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 228–277; M. Dove, The First English Bible: the Text and Context of the Wycliffite Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); A. Mairey, ‘Pour la charité et le commun profit: Bible, hérésie et politique en Angleterre’, in Le Moyen Âge dans le texte: Cinq ans d’histoire textuelle, ed. by B. Grévin and A. Mairey (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016). 67 H. Millet et E. Poulle, Le vote de la soustraction d’obédience en 1398, I: Introduction, édition et fac-similés des bulletins de vote (Paris: CNRS éditions, 1988).

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and the Île-de-France. A unification around what was called le français du roy, the French of the royal chancery and the translations sponsored by the royal court, was progressing in the fifteenth century, but far from achieved. The dynamism and vitality of Picard French, whose boundaries were defined by the Picard Nation of Paris University’s Faculty of Arts, and which was boosted by the prosperity of the northern French and Flemish towns (where French was used as a second language and regularly taught in schools) and the principality of the dukes of Burgundy has recently been stressed by Serge Lusignan.68 This linguistic situation has been aptly described by British historians as ‘vernacularity’.69 The advantage of this concept is to offer an extension of Dante’s vulgari eloquentia, which is indeed well suited to the rhetoric of the Italian city-state, but does not apply easily to the courts and bureaucracies of the French and English monarchies. Nor does it explain the social expansion of the vernacular in spite of the existence of sharply differentiated classes. Vernacularity proved to be an indispensable tool for the development of the political society, easing the process of government by allowing efficient communication between the king and the bureaucracy and society at large. But through vernacularity the whole society was permeated by words and concepts emanating from the Church as well as from a range of different social groups. The best example discovered so far is the presence of words and notions borrowed from the famous — and rather difficult — poem of William Langland, Piers Plowman, in a handful of cryptic alliterative poems probably posted on church doors by rebels in 1381.70 Vox populi, vox Dei is a popular expression attributed to Alcuin, but, following the work of several international research groups, the traditional view that, because of their lack of education, peasants and town workers were voiceless and unable to play their part in the political dialogue has now been discarded. There were two main reasons for this: first, the development of pragmatic literacy, which reached the village through the manor court, and the yearly process of accounting, reinforced the literacy of the masses, while the divide between those who were able to read and those who were not was diminished by 68 S. Lusignan, Essai d’histoire sociolinguistique: le français picard au Moyen Âge (Paris: Garnier, 2012). 69 E. Salter and H. Wicker, eds., Vernacularity in England and Wales, c.1300–1550 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011); J. Wogan-Browne, N. Watson, and G. Taylor, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory (Exeter and Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1999). 70 S. Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 93–106.

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a culture of ‘aurality’, that is, the practice of reading out aloud.71 Second, levels of education were probably much higher in the later Middle Ages than traditionally assumed. The high number of English secondary schools is well known thanks to Nicholas Orme,72 but recent studies have also demonstrated a high level of primary and secondary education in French towns, especially where Picard was spoken. Primary schools taught the vernacular, and if the secondary schools taught Latin, they taught it in the vernacular — that is, in French. The English schools seem to have turned to English after the Great Plague of 1348–1349.

Conclusion: Culture, Communication, and Political Structures The purpose of this chapter has been to show that, while a major change in political structure is always the product of a deep social change, it may also be linked to a cultural revolution. Western Christian society underwent one such revolution. History offers many examples of a dominant class divided between two or more distinct and competing parts that are nonetheless collaborating with each other.73 However, the violent assertion of the absolute superiority of the clerical part of Christian society by its leader, the pope, claiming authority over all other powers, might be more exceptional. The Church was far weaker in terms of material resources and military strength than the feudal aristocracy, and it had to rely on symbolic power to assert its superiority. To succeed, the Church required a complete transformation of the communication system, which involved the educational, intellectual, and even linguistic structures of Christian society. This triggered a cultural revolution, a revolution that would not have been possible without the extraordinary length and magnitude of the economic growth between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, triggering an extraordinary extension of cultivated lands and the rebirth of towns, making new resources available. But, in the end, the Church did not reap all the benefits. In the long term, the winner was to be the modern state, since the ‘cultural revolution’ enabled not only a return to administration by writing, but also the emergence of a system of political communication. 71 J. Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval France and England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 72 See note 32. 73 See the comments of Chris Wickham on the aristocracies of the late Roman Empire, which, mutatis mutandis, may also be applied to the Byzantine Empire: C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 151–258.

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In assimilating the techniques of pastoral governance familiar to popes and bishops and in creating — often unwillingly — the institutions and practices of political dialogue, lay rulers bolstered their own legitimacy and were able to create and tap into a new resource, the fiscal one, to wage their wars and assert their dominance, while pretending to act for the common good and the defence of their subjects. But the existence of a generalized communication network, indispensable for the development of the modern state, was not due to state action; it was rather a development parallel to that of the state, at the same time permitting and nourishing it though prompted and directed by other motivations. The chains of causality are complex and may be deceptive. The comparison between France and England also shows that, confronted with the same challenge of the Church, the two political societies reacted differently. However, in the end, the same model prevailed. True, this would not be the case if the comparison had been extended to the empire, to towns, principalities, and lordships, but to do this would have been impossible within the scope of this chapter. Nonetheless, it is clear that, if the ‘cultural revolution’ had the same impact on society as a whole, we can expect that its effects on the different political structures depended upon their position in the communication system. What seems most important to me is that, in using comparative history in a global perspective, historians ought not to neglect the cultural dimension. The experience of the medieval ‘cultural revolution’ initiated by the Gregorian Reform demonstrates that the expansion of schooling, the birth of universities, the reintroduction of Byzantine Roman Law and Greek philosophy, and the development of vernacular languages spoken from the highest to the lowest levels of society while being written as well for pragmatic and for intellectual reasons on a par with Latin, created the preconditions necessary for establishing a political dialogue between rulers and their subjects once the appropriate institutions and administrations had been established. Without political dialogue and communication there is no modern state. Political dialogue requires much more than liturgies and highly sophisticated rituals; it requires languages, and for these languages to be used and understood by the whole political society, education and a systematic diffusion of basic values are necessary. What is unique about the Latin West is that although these were provided by revolutionary monks to repay humanity’s debt to Christ, the benefits were, rather unexpectedly, reaped by kings who, in dire need of income to pay for ferocious territorial wars, invented a state in which levels of taxation could be maximized through political consent. A comparative approach must not neglect this cultural dimension.

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Part II Letters and Political Languages

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Political Communications, Networks, and Textual Evidence A Cross-Cultural Comparative Approach to Written Sources using Letter Collections Julian Haseldine

Abstract This chapter proposes a method for the comparative analysis of political communications which is potentially applicable to different languages, cultures and political structures. Political communications are defined not in relation to culturally pre-determined categories of relationships (allies, clients, friends, etc.), but as individual interactions or transactions between actors which have specific functions at specific times. The concept of ‘communicative function’ is proposed as the basis for the profiling of relationships, which is in turn the basis for a culturally neutral comparative analysis of political communications. Examples are given of the application of this methodology to a number of Western medieval letter collections, an important source of evidence for political communications and networks, along with suggestions for future directions of research. Keywords: communicative function, transactions, relationships, networks, letter collections I am grateful to the organizers of the ‘Communication and Empire’ project for their invitation to participate in the colloquium in Rome in 2015, which has allowed me to consider my work on medieval European friendship networks in the broader context of the comparative study of political communication. For the methodology proposed here, see also my position paper, ‘Medieval friendship and social networks: a transaction-based approach’, (version 001, November 2014, available at https://www.academia.edu/12795804/Medieval_friendship_and_­social_networks_a_transactionbased_approach, accessed 25 May 2020), and on friendship as a form of political communication, J. Haseldine, ‘Friendship Networks in Medieval Europe: New Models of a Political Relationship’, Amity, The Journal of Friendship Studies 1 (2013): pp. 67–86, with a review of the literature. The study

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Political communications are the detectable components of the networks which historians now increasingly see everywhere as the substrate of human societies and as shaping forces in polities. They are the manifest interactions and exchanges which can be visualized as the nodes and vectors of social or political networks which in turn are emerging as an important explanatory model for group formation, influence, common action, trust-building and many other forms of political activity up to the level of state formation. While networks themselves are not substantive entities, neither are they metaphors; rather, they are descriptions of abstractions which can model or visualize the complex sums of the many human relationships and exchanges which constitute political activity. A generic concept of political communications, as of networks, offers obvious potential for cross-cultural comparative history. The communications and interactions themselves, however, are embedded in social practices, articulated through linguistic and genre conventions, and related to philosophical traditions or shared assumptions which can differ between cultures to the point of apparent incompatibility. Where, for example, China’s famously enduring examination system was founded on the belief that mastery of the written word corresponded to mastery of truth and to ethical purity, the ancient Western tradition of rhetoric took as equally axiomatic the exclusive authenticity of the spoken word and the indirectness or dissimulation of the written. How can any comparative study of texts cross so fundamental a divide even before we take into consideration the different linguistic and genre conventions, social hierarchies, or religious and political institutions, and the ever-changing historical contingencies of times and places, as well as the practical experiences of individual actors? In some ways, of course, this is merely to restate the basic challenge of comparative history. The degree of linguistic, literary and historicalcontextual understanding required to interpret written sources in their own cultural context raises the question of whether it is practical or even possible to identify modes of communication and interaction which are sufficiently generic to be comparable across cultures while sufficiently meaningful to inform us about the political communications within each society. How can we compare, for example, European Latin petitions or friendship letters with Chinese zhuang or qi letters without stripping away of historical networks is a large and rapidly growing field; a good starting place is the Historical Network Research website (http://historicalnetworkresearch.org/, accessed 21 June 2016) which is developing a bibliography. On Western medieval letters, see below, n. 12.

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the shared cultural and linguistic frames which made these communications meaningful to the correspondents? Drawing on work on Western sources, I suggest here a method for the comparative analysis of political communications, specifically using letters, which, for all their differences in provenance, language, and context, were, in both cultures, among the most important media for such communications. Political communications cannot be clearly categorized because their meaning and effect depends on the context of the individual relationships in which they were deployed; relationships in turn cannot be categorized, as friendships or allegiances, as affective or instrumental ties, or as public or private bonds for example, because they are themselves each multiplex and unique, comprising many different interactions, obligations, and bonds. Different types of communication or forms of address do not correspond simply or directly to different types of relationship, one type denoting a friend, another an ally or dependent, for example. Rather, such communications are themselves part of the complex set of interactions which make up any relationship, and the same expression or request can have a different meaning in different relationships. It is proposed here that individual political communications must be interpreted not as direct evidence for different types or categories of relationships but as having specific communicative functions at particular times and in particular contexts. Thus, they must be treated not as external or objective evidence for the nature of relationships, but rather as component interactions, or transactions, of unique relationships, and ones which can be correlated with other kinds of interaction, such as gift giving, material support, entering into contracts or marriages, and so forth. By identifying the communicative function of each such transaction, it is possible to understand more accurately both the purposes of political communications and the complex, multiplex nature of human relationships. This I term a transaction-based approach to political communications. This approach also allows us to better understand the principles underlying the compilation and transmission of letter collections and thus their value as historical evidence for relationships and for political communication. The specific methods for the application of a transaction-based approach to historical relationships and to historical sources I have termed, respectively, profiling of relationships and profiling of sources. In what follows, I first set out my reasons for this approach to political communications and then go on to suggest possible bases for its application to cross-cultural comparative history through these methods of profiling.

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Political Communications and Comparative History Political communication is hard to define categorically. It could be taken to include messages, dialogues, gifts, or benefactions, declarations of support, the motivation or instigation of active cooperation in political, legal, or military causes, proclamations, or any other instances of the transmission of ideas, information, or resources between individuals or between individuals and groups, in writing or orally. These in turn could be direct, for example letters or orders sent to an individual, or indirect, relying on implication rather than explicit statements, such as articulations of ideals to which actors may feel the need or desire to conform, or threatening gestures. Furthermore, such communications cannot be distinguished clearly from non-political communications: similar interactions and exchanges occur in contexts which we might think of as private or personal. This is because political communications can only be defined in terms of the relationships within which they function and through which they are transmitted: the same messages or actions will have different meanings, effects, and consequences depending on whether they are directed to allies, friends, or enemies; to equals, superiors, or inferiors; to kin or clients. Indeed, what makes a communication ‘political’ depends largely on a judgement about to whom it was directed. It is in this sense not a category of human interaction, but a context.1 Critical to the study of political communications, therefore, is identifying the nature of the relationships within which they functioned and which in turn formed the networks through which they flowed. Friendship networks, political networks, patronage, educational, or professional networks are indeed increasingly part of the vocabulary of historical writing, although these have been defined with varying degrees of precision. This raises an obvious and familiar question of definition: the terms in different languages which can be translated as ‘friend’, ‘ally’, ‘follower’, ‘patron’, ‘client’ and so forth refer to different social, legal, and personal situations which changed over time and carried different connotations in different languages and cultural contexts. How do forms of clientage or service, for example, compare in terms of the relative status of those involved, the social value or the degree of honour or of subjection conferred by the tie, and the specific obligations or expectations that came with it? To take another example, 1 On the wider historiography of political communication, see the Introduction and the chapter by De Weerdt and Watts in this volume; this chapter is concerned with the particular problem of identifying communications and relationships from written historical sources.

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friendship in pre-modern societies has often been described as a quasiformal bond, entered into with deliberation and constitutive of political and social structures, but the sorts of acquaintances deemed appropriate to call friends or to address in intimate registers in Chinese or European cultures in different centuries varied enormously. It is evident that even within the same language or culture apparently analogous terms can designate bonds or relationships whose specific components are very different. Is it possible, then, to propose culturally neutral definitions of relationships as a basis for comparing the particular linguistic conventions or cultural practices observed in the evidence in order to determine, for example, how Eastern concepts and practices of dependence, or of friendship, differed from Western ones? Or must one always be explained by reference to the other, leading to Euro- or Sinocentric readings? Even if we attempted to establish culturally neutral points of reference, this in turn would run the risk of treating all types of relationships as universal human experiences which differ only superficially in linguistic or cultural expression — ideal forms of friendship, dependence, or allegiance which endure over time. Those purportedly universal experiences are themselves easily conflated with modern assumptions and unrecognized or internalized social norms, ideals, or practices; here the language or culture of the researcher becomes the fixed point of reference, implicitly according its version universal status. While in theory this too can be taken into account to some degree, in practice it has been common to refer, for example, to genuine friendship, or to ask whether historical actors were really friends, by which is meant having a close emotional bond as distinct from a mere political or mutually beneficial understanding.2 Such apparently innocuous questions can therefore impose modern culturally embedded concepts, assumptions or theories of relationships onto the historical evidence. It is not at all evident that, for example, premodern friendship was experienced, felt, or articulated in ways consonant with such assumptions, or that hierarchical relationships were accorded 2 The most influential book on medieval friendship, B. McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), sought to recover the genuine feelings ‘behind’ literary expressions; in a new introduction to a reprint (2010, pp. li–lxxi), McGuire reflected that he had sought in friendship ‘more than a social context’ (p. lvii) and saw it as ‘a historical constant with many variables’ (p. lxvii). On equality, patronage, and friendship, see A. McCue Gill and S. Rolfe Prodan, eds., Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts, and Expressions (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014). I have reviewed the literature on medieval friendship in ‘Friendship Networks in Medieval Europe’, pp. 69–72; see also A. Classen and M. Sandidge, eds., Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010).

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cultural values in relation to ideas of equality or freedom which would be recognizable today. The concepts and practices of the past do not veil what ours simply reveal, nor is human experience divorced from linguistic or cultural articulations, which need merely to be stripped away to show the objective commonalities persisting over space and time. An alternative approach has been emerging over a number of years, primarily through studies of friendship in both Byzantine and Western European sources. These studies have explored methods for correlating the use of friendly language with other forms of exchange, cooperation, or interaction, such as gift-exchange, material or legal support, patronage, or involvement in the same political causes, in order to determine the sorts of obligations, support, and exchanges entered into with, or expected of, those called friends. The aim of such approaches has been to infer from the specific interactions of those who called each other friends what the term itself meant in practice, to build up from usage and context a picture of how the term was used and understood by contemporaries rather than to impose a prescriptive definition of friendship on the historical evidence or to seek to identify in the historical evidence a universal or predetermined form of friendship. One of the results of this has been a more varied picture of human relationships, with a number of different models or categories of friendship emerging, including among others spiritual friendship, political friendship, instrumental friendship, and affective friendship. It has also illuminated the ways in which friendship overlaps with other ties such as patronage, kinship, or teacher-pupil relationships. Together these models and insights potentially offer a rich typology of human relationships.3 However, such categories or typologies themselves raise another critical problem: rarely if ever does the evidence for historical relationships accord with clear or exclusive categories. All human relationships include many if not all of these elements — degrees of affection, shared ideas or like-mindedness, mutual benefit, or dependency — as indeed does our own lived experience. Affection can lead to cooperation and allegiance, but equally, material cooperation or shared political views can lead to genuine emotional engagement. Some of the relationships we think of as the most intimate and affectionate, those between spouses or between parents and children, involve the closest financial dependencies and mutual interests, while political differences can shatter the most long-standing relationships or bring together the unacquainted in close and enduring engagements. Human relationships, that is to say, are multiplex. We can no more categorize relationships than 3

See the references in Haseldine, ‘Friendship Networks in Medieval Europe’, p. 72.

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we can political communications, as both involve unique combinations of different exchanges in different contexts. When we have a drink with a colleague, we do not pause to determine whether this is an affective or an instrumental drink. However, if every communication, every linguistic formulation, and every relationship is unique, the possibility of comparative analysis — indeed of much meaningful historical analysis — of human relationships appears to recede. But this apparent impasse arises specifically from conflating two distinct phenomena: relationships and social roles. The first are the individual and unique multiplex relationships into which all actors enter, the second are generic types of relationships — friendships, allegiances, kinships, partnerships and so forth, which carry expectations of behaviours and interactions. Such roles do not correspond to exclusive or discrete groups of individual relationships, for the reasons noted above: no affectionate bond is wholly isolated from social context, no allegiance or partnership is without any emotional involvement. Friends, acquaintances, partners, and contacts are not exclusive groups, into one and only one of which every relationship must fall. Roles and their associated behaviours and expectations — or role relations — are nevertheless effective causal phenomena. As concepts by which we seek to understand and organize our social experiences, terms like friendship, allegiance, or patronage, while not absolute or exclusive categories, do articulate shared assumptions, social norms, and common understandings and so, within any given cultural context, have an internal coherence. To call or refer to others as friends or allies conveys meaning in context: actors and observers share a sufficient understanding of what is meant in practice to respond in mutually comprehensible ways. In other words, such terms convey meaningful social information which does not depend on precise theoretical categorization (which explains the absurdity of the distinction between instrumental and affective drinks noted above — it is not that we do not analyse the social situation of drinking together, but that we do so using different terms of reference). Thus, even if role relations are perceptions rather than neutral descriptions of objective social phenomena, they affect behaviours, choices, and actions. They constitute a language which articulates individual or group social or political solidarities. The use of the terms which denote them has a communicative purpose: there are many possible reasons why someone may or may not be called a friend or an ally — it may be to persuade, to flatter, to incite, or to shame them into action; it may be to include or to exclude them from a group; it may be to suggest or imply relative social position or political alignment. Similarly, there may be many reasons why one multiplex relationship is referred to by

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one term, say friendship, and another by another, such as ally. The use of the terminology of roles is therefore itself a form of communication and not a neutral record of a situation, and as such will carry different connotations in the context of different relationships. 4 Political communications, then, cannot be defined categorically because they comprise interactions and exchanges which occur in, and whose import is determined by, the context of particular relationships. Those relationships in turn cannot be categorized exclusively as instances of one or another role because they are multiplex. Furthermore, roles and role relations are themselves not categories but forms of communication, and so also linguistically and culturally determined like other communications, and also depend on the context of the relationships in which they are articulated. It is the individual and unique relationships therefore which determine the meanings or nature both of role relations and of political communications. The question remains, however, whether it is possible in practice to analyse relationships without recourse to such overarching but artificial categories or typologies of roles. If each relationship is treated as a unique combination of interactions, instead of assigning it to a category such as friend or ally, or affective or instrumental friend, or genuine or political friend, can we still meaningfully study relationships as historical phenomena? The key to reconciling roles and relationships is to recognize the use of the language of roles as another interaction within any given relationship. Thus, the act of calling another actor an ally or a friend is not the basis for a definition (e.g. friends are those who exchange gifts, offer assistance, and pray for each other), but is just another interaction. It is then possible to examine any combinations of interactions, asking whether particular interactions, for example offering legal or financial help, occur mainly in 4 There is a considerable sociological literature on role theory and the ways in which individuals orient themselves to social norms or expectations arising from social roles. This has also been incorporated into Social Network Analysis (SNA) using the concepts of position and structural equivalence (a development which has included considerations of this specific problem of the lack of exact correlation between roles and individual relationships): see J. Scott, Social Network Analysis: A Handbook, 2nd ed. (London etc.: SAGE, 2000), pp. 123–145, and A. Ferligoj, P. Doreian, and V. Batagelj, ‘Positions and Roles’, in The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis, ed. by J. Scott and P.J. Carrington (London etc.: SAGE, 2011), pp. 434–446. These methods were developed with researcher-generated data, not pre-modern historical evidence, in mind; a pioneering application of network analysis to a medieval source is M. Mullett, Theophylact of Ochrid: Reading the Letters of a Byzantine Archbishop (Birmingham: Ashgate, 1997), drawing more on the anthropological analyses of Boissevain and Mitchell in the 1970s than on SNA approaches, but offering an excellent discussion of the problems of using historical evidence in network analysis (see ibid., pp. 163–222, and on role relations, p. 164).

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the same relationships as, or conversely mostly in different relationships from, exchanging gifts, or cooperating in political disputes, or addressing one another in affective language, or any other interaction for which there is evidence. In this way it can be possible to build up profiles of relationships and then to compare them, to see whether certain combinations of interactions are common or rare. The resultant profiles are not restricted to predetermined categories: there are no arbitrary tipping points at which any relationship has to be deemed no longer affective but instrumental, no longer private but public, and so forth. In other words, the method proposed here involves not categorizing but profiling relationships. We could then ask practical questions such as the degree to which those who called each other friends also cooperated in disputes, or acted together in political causes, or exchanged gifts, allowing us to analyse the components of relationships comparatively, as will be discussed in the next section.5 This approach is also relevant to the study of networks, since it is the interactions between actors, not designations of their generic role relations, which constitute the active links which can be visualized as networks. While it has been common to talk of friendship networks, political networks and so forth, these are strictly speaking descriptions or visualizations of overlapping networks each made up of different interactions. What we might call a ‘political network’, for example, may be a mixture of formal allegiances or contracts, of marriage ties, of financial donations or loans, or of support in competition for office, not all of which would exist between all pairs of actors and each of which could be visualized separately. The network is a composite of overlapping but distinct sets of ties — networks within the network, or more technically, multiple networks. This is indeed an important method within Social Network Analysis (SNA), where stacked matrices of different ties can be correlated to assess their relative importance in networks. The classic application of this to historical data remains Padgett and Ansell’s study of the Medici, which correlated nine types of tie among elite Florentine families using block modelling of stacked data to identify the means by which the Medici were able to take over the state, at the same time disproving a number of existing hypotheses.6 5 My own applications of earlier versions of this method appear in J. Haseldine, ‘Friends, Friendship and Networks in the Letters of Bernard of Clairvaux’, Cîteaux. Commentarii Cistercienses 57 (2006): pp. 243–280, and id., ‘Friendship, Intimacy, and Corporate Networking in the Twelfth Century: The Politics of Friendship in the Letters of Peter the Venerable’, English Historical Review 126 (2011): pp. 251–280. 6 J.F. Padgett and C.K. Ansell, ‘Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434’, American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (1993): pp. 1259–1319. The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis (see n. 5) offers a detailed coverage of the history, theory, and applications of SNA.

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The terminology employed to describe interactions between actors varies according to discipline conventions. Elsewhere, I have proposed the term ‘transaction’ to refer to any exchange of ideas, information, or resources between actors for which the evidence comes from historical written sources, in part to distinguish it from the use of the term ‘relations’ in SNA; although this refers to similar interactions, SNA methodology was developed principally to analyse researcher-generated data, in which definitions of interactions and of terms and categories of role relations can be standardized, specified, or agreed with the subjects, and in which complete data can be collected through questionnaire-based research, neither of which applies to historical situations or sources.7 It might finally be objected that to use transactions in this way is just to propose another typology or set of categories, and at one level this would be justified: every human interaction is also a unique event in time and space; nor can we claim that the concept of the transaction reduces human interactions to a culturally neutral base — a gift after all is never simply a gift, the material exchange is never free of its conceptual medium. The crucial point however is that transactions are not multiplex, and as such can offer a basis for the comparative analysis of multiplex relationships.

Profiling Relationships and Profiling Sources The study of political communications and networks, then, depends on distinguishing clearly between relationships and roles. Historical sources, especially letters, often make statements and claims about roles and refer or allude to contingent obligations or expectations, elaborating on the actions or duties of the true friend, for example, or the nature of loyalty. However, as is clear from the preceding discussion, the use of a term for a role is not direct evidence of a relationship, and the context in which an interaction might be mentioned necessarily affects its nature as evidence. Nor can the apparent tone or register of the language used be taken as proof of any particular degree of acquaintance or affection. One of the earliest observations in the study of Western medieval friendship, first explored by Southern in the 1960s, was that strongly affective language in letters was addressed to recipients with very different degrees of acquaintance to the writer, and therefore that inferring friendships from friendly language constituted a 7 Haseldine, ‘Medieval friendship and social networks’, pp. 11–13. The term carries different connotations in anthropology and in psychology.

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circular argument.8 The same could also be said to apply to one of the most common epistolary practices in medieval Europe — sending letters whose only content is an expression of friendly sentiments or praise for the piety of the recipient, often accompanied by an exhortation or meditative reflection on a spiritual or devotional theme. Often referred to as ‘letters of friendship’ or ‘spiritual letters’, these have been taken as evidence of close emotional ties because they served no pragmatic function — they conveyed no material requests or practical information and were not media for the transaction of business — and so appear to be fulfilling a need for emotional contact, expressed in terms either of personal emotional engagement or of shared spiritual experiences. Yet these letters too were addressed to very different types of acquaintance, and indeed for this reason have sometimes alternatively been dismissed as the exchange of meaningless commonplaces.9 It would be wrong, however, to see such letters as having no function. Their function was to cultivate a relationship — what has been described as relationship servicing — irrespective of the character or emotional content of that relationship.10 It is true that the expression of a sentiment to another in itself can serve to meet an inner or emotional need, and that this is as much a function of human communication as the transaction of business. The problem is that, given what we do know about the different contexts in which such letters were written, we cannot know whether such needs were being met by any given letter. We could make reasonable inferences about this if we could profile the relationship, in the ways described above, and compare it to other relationships in which similar messages were exchanged, but we cannot take the message itself as proof of the relationship. If it were 8 R. Southern, Saint Anselm and his Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, 1059–c.1130 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 67–76; also, id., Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 138–165. The use of affectionate language could also be highly codified, conveying specific but not emotionally close bonds, as, for example, Francesca Trivellato found for early modern mercantile correspondence, where expressions of love and friendship functioned as code for attestations of reciprocity and reliability, a practice which she sees as showing some important continuities with medieval epistolary practices. See F. Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009), here esp. pp. 177–183. 9 The approach to letters as evidence of emotional bonds was developed most influentially in McGuire, Friendship and Community; for expressions of friendship as commonplaces, see A.H. Bredero, Bernard of Clairvaux: Between Cult and History (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), p. 227. 10 See Mullett, Theophylact, pp. 204, 215–220.

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found, for example, that such messages were only exchanged with those who were long-standing acquaintances of the writer, or who lived in close proximity, but not with those who were involved in the same political causes, then we might conclude that these messages correlated with long-standing emotional ties and were not consistently determined by later political alignments; but the prof iling evidence might instead indicate no such correlation, and so the sending of the message must be fulfilling a different function. Indeed, many case studies over the years have shown precisely that neither the use of friendly language nor the exchange of these sorts of friendly or spiritual letters correlates to long or close acquaintances.11 In other words, to understand the nature of the transaction we need to understand the communicative function of the document within the relationship. For letters and letter collections this is particularly complicated. For medieval Western Europe virtually all surviving letters are preserved in letter collections, highly selective compilations made by the authors or by collaborators during the authors’ lives or soon after their deaths.12 The numbers preserved often amount to only two or three per year of the adult life of the writer; there is evidence that they were revised, although the extent of revision cannot usually be known because the copies sent almost never survive; there is also clear evidence that many were originally only parts of communications which also included oral and other written messages, often of a confidential nature, and gifts. The evidence which survives therefore represents highly selective and potentially revised extracts of only parts of original communications, and because of this a letter collection must be understood as a distinct literary enterprise and emphatically not the mere 11 See e.g. J. McLoughlin, ‘“Amicitia” in Practice: John of Salisbury (c.1120–1180) and his Circle’, in England in the Twelfth Century: Proceedings of the 1988 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by D. Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), pp. 165–181; W. Ysebaert, ‘Ami, client et intermédiaire: Étienne de Tournai et ses réseaux de relations (1167–1192)’, Sacris Erudiri 40 (2001): pp. 415–467; Haseldine, ‘Friends, Friendship and Networks’; id., ‘Friendship, Intimacy, and Corporate Networking’; see also G. Constable, Letters and Letter Collections (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), pp. 15–16. 12 Some surviving collections were archival accumulations, or kept for business or legal purposes, mostly from the later Middle Ages and in vernacular epistolography; others were didactic collections or formularies, but the medieval and humanist Latin tradition was dominated by what Constable has called the ‘planned literary collections’; the few exceptional survivals outside collections were also mostly preserved for specific reasons and not by chance (Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, pp. 55–62, quotation at p. 57). Recent scholarship also suggests that the boundaries between the didactic and the literary collection were not as sharp as has been supposed (see e.g. B. Grévin, ‘From Letters to Dictamina and Back: Recycling Texts and Textual Collections in Late Medieval Europe (Thirteenth-Fourteenth Centuries)’, in Medieval Letters: Between Fiction and Document, ed. by C. Høgel and E. Bartoli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 407–420).

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preservation of an archive of correspondence, or even of a representative sample of that archive; it was compiled for purposes of its own which were different from the purposes of the original letters which were copied into it.13 For example, a letter which may have been intended to persuade the recipient of a course of action may be preserved long after that function is no longer relevant, either to demonstrate the stance taken by the writer or to advertise a connection with a particular individual, and in either case the selection will necessarily have been informed by hindsight. The letter in a collection, that is to say, most likely had a separate and distinct function from the letter which had been sent and one which is related to the aims of the collection. This could mean, for example, preserving some relationships and not others, or more interestingly, as we shall see, presenting only one aspect of a more complex relationship. The image or reputation of the author, presented for posterity, was central to this process and these collections have been called literary memorials.14 Thus, while the discreet nature of letter collections as historical sources, with their own purposes distinct from those of the original letters sent, has long been recognized, and suggestions made about the aims of individual collections, finding a systematic way to investigate comparatively the principles of selection applied has proved more difficult. Here again transactions offer a potential solution. Letters can offer evidence for many transactions and ties, referring or alluding, for example, to gifts, donations, meetings, kinship, confraternity, god-parentage, or membership of the same religious community, order, chapter, or household. In some cases, however, the letter itself is also the medium for the transaction: it may contain an order or request, or be an intervention in a dispute, or fulfil what we have termed a relationship servicing function, including using affectionate language or declaring friendship. It is these transactions which the letter conveys, rather than those to which it may also refer, which relate to its communicative function in the collection. The original letter sent (bearing in mind that this will almost certainly no longer 13 As has long been recognized, see e.g. A. Morey and C. Brooke, Gilbert Foliot and his Letters (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 8–31; Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, also reviewing earlier work; G. Knight, The Correspondence Between Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux: A Semantic and Structural Analysis (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 1–23; W. Ysebaert, ‘Medieval letters and letter collections as historical sources: methodological questions and reflections and research perspectives (6th–14th centuries)’, Studi Medievali 50, no. 1 (2009): pp. 41–73; C. Høgel and E. Bartoli, eds., Medieval Letters: Between Fiction and Document (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015). 14 E.g. J. Haseldine, ‘The Creation of a Literary Memorial: The Letter Collection of Peter of Celle’, Sacris Erudiri 37 (1997): pp. 333–379; the term ‘literary memorial’ was Timothy Reuter’s.

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exist) will have had a function related to the circumstances and historical context of its composition, evidence for which, external to the surviving text itself, may exist to varying degrees or not at all. For the letter in a collection, however, the context is not the historical setting of the original composition but the collection itself. While recovery of the original historical context can help us understand the letter as it may have been first composed, if we want to understand its function in the collection, the reason for its inclusion and what it is there to show, its possible narrative aims, and how the compiler may have viewed its likely reception and impact, the text itself and the texts preserved with it are more relevant. These present what might be called its ‘explicit’ function — what it tells us directly without reference to any original or purportedly objective historical context which might be presumed, inferred, or reconstructed. While all transactions for which evidence survives can contribute to the profiling of a relationship, it is those relating to this ‘explicit’ function of a letter which are critical in profiling letter collections.

Profiling Letter Collections: Some Twelfth-Century Examples If transactions offer the key to the communicative functions of letters in collections, which ones were typically preserved? Many letters convey material or pragmatic interventions in disputes or political causes, including requests or appeals for legal, financial, or material support, statements or offers of support, invocations to action, and acts of mediation. In some cases, the writer is in direct conflict with the recipient. Recommendations and the communication of news or information are also common. Other letters are concerned with the production and dissemination of texts and ideas, including requests to borrow books, commissions for new works, and requests for advice on drafts of works in progress. Treatises on questions of theology, ethics, or monastic life are often cast in epistolary form and preserved as integral parts of letter collections, along with epistolary dialogues on similar themes, and other letters which serve to propagate the ideals of the writer’s religious order. Notable among the latter are so-called letters of vocation or conversion, ostensibly written to persuade or praise individual conversions to religious life but which often serve as vehicles for general statements of the ideals and practices of a particular order.15 Then there are relationship servicing letters, as defined above.

15 See Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, p. 15; Haseldine, ‘Friendship, Intimacy, and Corporate Networking’, p. 265.

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Here it is particularly important to note the distinction between a letter’s communicative function and its rhetorical form. In the medieval West, letter-writing came to be understood and taught as a branch of rhetoric; one feature of this tradition was the captatio benevolentiae — the securing of the goodwill of the reader or listener, which often prefaced requests and appeals and which could take the form of a profession of love or friendship or of spiritual praise.16 An expression of affection which prefaces a request in this way serves that pragmatic function; if it does not, then its function may be relationship servicing. In practice this can be hard to determine, especially where requests or recommendations are appended to letters as postscripts rather than included as elaborate petitions, and any future comparative study would also have to determine how to take this into account consistently. There is also evidence that letters were curtailed when included in collections, leaving only professions of affection and removing practical details. Here, what may have been composed as a preface to a request is effectively preserved as a relationship servicing message for the purposes of the collection, to advertise the association between the correspondents rather than to facilitate business. One advantage of the transaction method is that it allows such functions or interactions to be studied flexibly without the need to impose fixed categories of roles or relationships. For initial comparative analyses, for example, it can be convenient to group transactions very broadly, while for more detailed analyses these can be sub-divided into smaller groups, or analysed separately, as the illustrations below demonstrate. Because such groupings do not reflect fixed categories, any letter collection can be profiled using any other combination or grouping of non-multiplex transactions, or none: the precise choice of analytical criteria depends on the question being asked, and the method can be used to profile letter collections comparatively provided that the same criteria are applied to all, and that such groupings of transactions are clearly distinguished from transactions themselves. Appendix 1 shows some suggestions for a possible basis of a comparative analysis of letter collections, moving from individual transactions on the left to the broadest groupings on the right, in this case using the terms discussed above. For a future comparative study of Western and Chinese letters, additional transactions or different groupings, or both, would certainly need to be added in the light of further comparative source-critical considerations. 16 There is a considerable literature on medieval rhetoric; on epistolary rhetoric, see B. Grévin and A.-M. Turcan-Verkerk, eds., Le dictamen dans tous ses états: Perspectives de recherches sur la théorie et la pratique de l’ars dictaminis (XIe–XVe siècle) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015).

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Three examples of twelfth-century monastic letter collections can illustrate some of the possibilities of this approach. The collections are those of the prominent abbots Peter the Venerable (abbot of Cluny, 1122–1156), the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux (abbot 1115–1153) and the Benedictine Peter of Celle (abbot of Montier-la-Celle, 1145–1162, and St Rémi, Reims, 1162–1181).17 The twelfth century has been characterized as a ‘golden age’ of European letter-writing, and many substantial collections of the letters of monastic authors, whether compiled by themselves, with collaborators, or posthumously by others, survive. Monastic institutions occupied an important place in all medieval European polities, controlling extensive landed and financial resources and functioning as centres of education, and were fully integrated into aristocratic society as foci of local power, patronage, and political identity. The largest could become important local agents of royal power, while religious leaders occupied influential positions in royal governments. From the late eleventh century, the emergence of new religious orders led relatively rapidly to the fundamental reorganization of the European monasteries into international orders, a process helped by the Gregorian Reform and the shattering of the early-medieval theocratic consensus, which produced an alternative source of authority to regnal power and gave both popes and monastic leaders greater scope for independent political agency. Some of the latter, most notably Bernard of Clairvaux, have come to be regarded as major independent political actors able to dominate kings and popes. While such claims are certainly exaggerated by the hagiographical nature of the evidence, monastic orders occupied a central place among the many overlapping and autonomous political structures whose complex interactions determined medieval European politics.18 The conflicts, rivalries, and disputes over both ideology and resources which the emergence and expansion of new religious orders 17 The modern editions are The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. by G. Constable, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1967), hereafter LPV (at present there is no complete English translation); Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. by J. Leclercq, H. Rocher, and C. Talbot, 8 vols. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977), vols. vii–viii, hereafter SBO [for an English translation see The Letters of Bernard of Clairvaux, ed. and trans. by B. Scott James (London, 1953), new ed. B. Mayne Kienzle (Stroud, 1998)]; The Letters of Peter of Celle, ed. and trans. by Julian Haseldine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), hereafter LPC (he was bishop of Chartres 1181–1183 but left no letter collection for this period). 18 On a ‘golden age’ of medieval letters, see Morey and Brooke, Gilbert Foliot, pp. 8–9, and Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, p. 31; on overlapping political structures, see J. Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 123; Bredero, Bernard of Clairvaux, argued that the image of Bernard created in the sources has distorted historical judgements of his influence.

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engendered from this period, and which figure prominently in monastic letters collections, were therefore far from local or internal. The authors analysed here were each associated in different ways with the monastic reform initiatives of the twelfth century and were also in contact with one another. The correspondence between Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux is among the most intensively studied of the period and offers perhaps the best-known evidence of a wider series of disputes between the established Cluniacs and the Cistercians which encompassed both ideological and material conflicts, including those over the transfer of monks between orders, a common flashpoint at a time of competition over recruits, resources, and ideals. The two used professions of friendship to frame diplomatic overtures and seek resolutions while also asserting the claims of their orders.19 Indeed Peter the Venerable’s abbacy was critical in Cluny’s meeting the threat of the new orders, reforming and redefining its identity.20 Peter of Celle, of a younger generation, became an influential proponent of reform and one of a number of leading Benedictine sympathizers with and mediators for the Cistercians.21 Appendix 2 shows the result of applying a very broad level of functional analysis to these collections.22 Here, only four, quite widely inclusive, criteria have been used: pragmatic interventions, conflicts with the recipient, relationship servicing, and literary or ideological subjects, following the definitions given above; more detailed analyses using subdivisions of these criteria, such as those suggested in Appendix 1, or others, can equally be made, as discussed below.23 For comparison, the same analyses have been applied to other contemporary or near contemporary collections, those of Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury (1070–1089), Saint Anselm, who left letters as prior (1063–1078) and as abbot (1078–1093) of the Benedictine monastery of Bec (Normandy, France), and then as archbishop of Canterbury (1093–1109), and 19 The most detailed treatment is Knight, The Correspondence. 20 See M. Saurette, ‘Rhetorics of Reform: Abbot Peter the Venerable and the Twelfth-Century Rewriting of the Cluniac Monastic Project’ (Ph.D. diss., Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 2005). 21 See LPC, pp. xix–xxviii. 22 Peter of Celle left two separate collections, one for each of the abbacies he held; on the transmission of Bernard of Clairvaux’s letters, see note 26 below. 23 Letters with more than one function can be counted fractionally (e.g. as 0.5 or 0.3 of a transaction under each heading) and the percentages calculated using the total number of letters, or each transaction counted as 1 and the percentages calculated using the total number of transactions; the first method has been used for the graphs in Appendix 1 below, but the results for each method are broadly similar.

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Gilbert Foliot, successively abbot of Gloucester (1139–1148), bishop of Hereford (1148–1163) and bishop of London (1163–1187). Peter the Venerable and Peter of Celle’s collections stand out as similar, although even here, with collections where the cultivation of friendship and spiritual converse were manifestly prominent themes,24 pragmatic letters are in the majority. The only exceptions are Peter of Celle’s early letters, but this is less marked in this respect than Anselm’s letters as prior of Bec. Indeed, Anselm has been credited with the particularly intense and original cultivation of epistolary spiritual friendship, but his letters as abbot look more like those of the two Peters, and his letters as archbishop look very much like those of Lanfranc and Gilbert Foliot.25 The literary groups seem to tell different stories again, and there is certainly no simple abbatial-episcopal split here, no proof of devout abbots cultivating pious friendships while bishops were pressed by business. Gilbert Foliot’s letters as abbot are little different in profile from his episcopal letters. Bernard of Clairvaux’s also look more like those of the bishops. Bernard was promoted, in life and more so in death, as the voice of the Cistercian order and a dominant influence in European politics, and the letter collection certainly contributed to this reputation, which may be reflected in this atypical profile. Importantly also, for Bernard the letters in the main or ‘official’ collection show a very similar profile to those which survived outside, as individual letters or small groups.26 This is the only case where substantial numbers of letters survived outside a collection, and suggests that the same principles of selection were applied by those involved in the preservation of single letters or small groups of letters as by the compilers of the main collection, and so that these survivals cannot be treated as a benchmark of original correspondence against which to measure the selection process of collectors. Rather, both result from highly self-conscious selective processes.27 This is only a brief and provisional profiling of a few letter collections which can only indicate something of the complexity of 24 See the comments in Morey and Brooke, Gilbert Foliot, p. 13, and LPC, pp. xxi–xxviii. 25 On Anselm’s spiritual friendship, see Southern, Saint Anselm and his Biographer, pp. 67–76; id., Saint Anselm: A Portrait, pp. 138–165. 26 Conventionally referred to as the corpus epistolarum (of which a number of recensions were made) and the epistolae extra corpus (divided into two series, which simply reflect those included in the nineteenth-century Patrologia Latina edition and those subsequently identified): SBO vii., pp. ix–xxiv and viii, pp. 233–238. 27 The alternative conclusion, that both reflect the nature of the original correspondence, is less plausible given what we know of the degree of selection applied but would still mean that letters surviving outside collections should not be seen as fundamentally different from those in collections, and the question certainly merits more research in the light of profiling of collections.

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questions of image-making and purpose which a full study might address, yet already some intriguing findings are revealed. More detailed profiling of the three main collections considered here reveals some different patterns and parallels. The pragmatic letters break down in surprisingly similar ways: between 40 and 50 percent of these in each collection contain specific material requests (48%, 42% and 42% respectively),28 of which only a small minority are for the writers’ own communities (8%, 5% and 14% of the requests group). Recommendations, predominantly for monks, occur in many letters (14%, 28% and 27%), while other more general interventions such as statements of support, mediations and excuses are scarcer (just 10%, 4% and 16% when taken all together). In each collection, a large number of letters defend the interests of other members of the religious orders (56%, 46%, 60%), and to a notably lesser extent members of the secular church (28%, 37%, 23%) — mostly bishops, with disputed episcopal elections accounting for the largest number — while lay recipients, secular clerks and female recipients of all statuses are statistically marginal.29 Finally, all preserve almost exactly the same proportion of letters in what can be termed major political causes, that is matters of wider concern than the cases of individuals or single institutions, such as papal schisms, the Crusades, or the Thomas Becket affair (19%, 20%, 18%). Taken separately, these results might not seem at first sight particularly surprising for the correspondence of abbots, but two things stand out: the similarity in the profiles and the virtual concealment of the extent of the writers’ involvements with the lay aristocracy and with women, or their involvements in local patronage and politics, in education, or in the management of their communities. Relationship servicing letters also occur in comparable contexts in each collection. All include letters to the writers’ own monks, addressed individually or collectively, and to former monks who have moved elsewhere, usually when they have been appointed abbots. These tend to be on the themes of duty and separation and to stress the need to place vocation and duty before personal feelings. In addition, there are letters of spiritual exhortation, praise, or admonition, including a few to strangers known by reputation or through 28 Figures are given in the same order as the collections are presented in Appendix 2 — Peter the Venerable, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter of Celle. Unless stated otherwise, percentages are of the group under discussion, not of the whole collection. 29 Only 8%, 15%, and 3% to lay recipients, nearly half of which are to kings, or in Bernard’s case kings or queens; 2%,