Books: Mutual Aid
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P. Kropotkin >> Mutual Aid
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Similar leagues were formed in Germany for the same purpose.
When, under the successors of Conrad, the land was the prey of
interminable feuds between the nobles, the Westphalian towns
concluded a league against the knights, one of the clauses of
which was never to lend money to a knight who would continue to
conceal stolen goods.(22) When "the knights and the nobles lived
on plunder, and murdered whom they chose to murder," as the
Wormser Zorn complains, the cities on the Rhine (Mainz, Cologne,
Speier, Strasburg, and Basel) took the initiative of a league
which soon numbered sixty allied towns, repressed the robbers,
and maintained peace. Later on, the league of the towns of
Suabia, divided into three "peace districts" (Augsburg,
Constance, and Ulm), had the same purpose. And even when such
leagues were broken,(23) they lived long enough to show that
while the supposed peacemakers--the kings, the emperors, and
the Church-fomented discord, and were themselves helpless against
the robber knights, it was from the cities that the impulse came
for re-establishing peace and union. The cities--not the
emperors--were the real makers of the national unity.(24)
Similar federations were organized for the same purpose among
small villages, and now that attention has been drawn to this
subject by Luchaire we may expect soon to learn much more about
them. Villages joined into small federations in the contado of
Florence, so also in the dependencies of Novgorod and Pskov. As
to France, there is positive evidence of a federation of
seventeen peasant villages which has existed in the Laonnais for
nearly a hundred years (till 1256), and has fought hard for its
independence. Three more peasant republics, which had sworn
charters similar to those of Laon and Soissons, existed in the
neighbourhood of Laon, and, their territories being contiguous,
they supported each other in their liberation wars. Altogether,
Luchaire is of the opinion that many such federations must have
come into existence in France in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, but that documents relative to them are mostly lost.
Of course, being unprotected by walls, they could easily be
crushed down by the kings and the lords; but in certain
favourable circumstances, when they found support in a league of
towns and protection in their mountains, such peasant republics
became independent units of the Swiss Confederation.(25)
As to unions between cities for peaceful purposes, they were
of quite common occurrence. The intercourse which had been
established during the period of liberation was not interrupted
afterwards. Sometimes, when the scabini of a German town, having
to pronounce judgment in a new or complicated case, declared that
they knew not the sentence (des Urtheiles nicht weise zu sein),
they sent delegates to another city to get the sentence. The same
happened also in France;(26) while Forli and Ravenna are known
to have mutually naturalized their citizens and granted them full
rights in both cities. To submit a contest arisen between two
towns, or within a city, to another commune which was invited to
act as arbiter, was also in the spirit of the times.(27) As to
commercial treaties between cities, they were quite
habitual.(28) Unions for regulating the production and the sizes
of casks which were used for the commerce in wine, "herring
unions," and so on, were mere precursors of the great commercial
federations of the Flemish Hansa, and, later on, of the great
North German Hansa, the history of which alone might contribute
pages and pages to illustrate the federation spirit which
permeated men at that time. It hardly need be added, that through
the Hanseatic unions the medieval cities have contributed more to
the development of international intercourse, navigation, and
maritime discovery than all the States of the first seventeen
centuries of our era.
In a word, federations between small territorial units, as
well as among men united by common pursuits within their
respective guilds, and federations between cities and groups of
cities constituted the very essence of life and thought during
that period. The first five of the second decade of centuries of
our era may thus be described as an immense attempt at securing
mutual aid and support on a grand scale, by means of the
principles of federation and association carried on through all
manifestations of human life and to all possible degrees. This
attempt was attended with success to a very great extent. It
united men formerly divided; it secured them a very great deal of
freedom, and it tenfolded their forces. At a time when
particularism was bred by so many agencies, and the causes of
discord and jealousy might have been so numerous, it is
gratifying to see that cities scattered over a wide continent had
so much in common, and were so ready to confederate for the
prosecution of so many common aims. They succumbed in the long
run before powerful enemies; not having understood the mutual-aid
principle widely enough, they themselves committed fatal faults;
but they did not perish through their own jealousies, and their
errors were not a want of federation spirit among themselves.
The results of that new move which mankind made in the
medieval city were immense. At the beginning of the eleventh
century the towns of Europe were small clusters of miserable
huts, adorned but with low clumsy churches, the builders of which
hardly knew how to make an arch; the arts, mostly consisting of
some weaving and forging, were in their infancy; learning was
found in but a few monasteries. Three hundred and fifty years
later, the very face of Europe had been changed. The land was
dotted with rich cities, surrounded by immense thick walls which
were embellished by towers and gates, each of them a work of art
in itself. The cathedrals, conceived in a grand style and
profusely decorated, lifted their bell-towers to the skies,
displaying a purity of form and a boldness of imagination which
we now vainly strive to attain. The crafts and arts had risen to
a degree of perfection which we can hardly boast of having
superseded in many directions, if the inventive skill of the
worker and the superior finish of his work be appreciated higher
than rapidity of fabrication. The navies of the free cities
furrowed in all directions the Northern and the Southern
Mediterranean; one effort more, and they would cross the oceans.
Over large tracts of land well-being had taken the place of
misery; learning had grown and spread. The methods of science had
been elaborated; the basis of natural philosophy had been laid
down; and the way had been paved for all the mechanical
inventions of which our own times are so proud. Such were the
magic changes accomplished in Europe in less than four hundred
years. And the losses which Europe sustained through the loss of
its free cities can only be understood when we compare the
seventeenth century with the fourteenth or the thirteenth. The
prosperity which formerly characterized Scotland, Germany, the
plains of Italy, was gone. The roads had fallen into an abject
state, the cities were depopulated, labour was brought into
slavery, art had vanished, commerce itself was decaying.(29)
If the medieval cities had bequeathed to us no written
documents to testify of their splendour, and left nothing behind
but the monuments of building art which we see now all over
Europe, from Scotland to Italy, and from Gerona in Spain to
Breslau in Slavonian territory, we might yet conclude that the
times of independent city life were times of the greatest
development of human intellect during the Christian era down to
the end of the eighteenth century. On looking, for instance, at a
medieval picture representing Nuremberg with its scores of towers
and lofty spires, each of which bore the stamp of free creative
art, we can hardly conceive that three hundred years before the
town was but a collection of miserable hovels. And our admiration
grows when we go into the details of the architecture and
decorations of each of the countless churches, bell-towers,
gates, and communal houses which are scattered all over Europe as
far east as Bohemia and the now dead towns of Polish Galicia. Not
only Italy, that mother of art, but all Europe is full of such
monuments. The very fact that of all arts architecture--a
social art above all--had attained the highest development, is
significant in itself. To be what it was, it must have originated
from an eminently social life.
Medieval architecture attained its grandeur--not only
because it was a natural development of handicraft; not only
because each building, each architectural decoration, had been
devised by men who knew through the experience of their own hands
what artistic effects can be obtained from stone, iron, bronze,
or even from simple logs and mortar; not only because, each
monument was a result of collective experience, accumulated in
each "mystery" or craft(30)--it was grand because it was born
out of a grand idea. Like Greek art, it sprang out of a
conception of brotherhood and unity fostered by the city. It had
an audacity which could only be won by audacious struggles and
victories; it had that expression of vigour, because vigour
permeated all the life of the city. A cathedral or a communal
house symbolized the grandeur of an organism of which every mason
and stone-cutter was the builder, and a medieval building appears--
not as a solitary effort to which thousands of slaves would
have contributed the share assigned them by one man's
imagination; all the city contributed to it. The lofty bell-tower
rose upon a structure, grand in itself, in which the life of the
city was throbbing--not upon a meaningless scaffold like the
Paris iron tower, not as a sham structure in stone intended to
conceal the ugliness of an iron frame, as has been done in the
Tower Bridge. Like the Acropolis of Athens, the cathedral of a
medieval city was intended to glorify the grandeur of the
victorious city, to symbolize the union of its crafts, to express
the glory of each citizen in a city of his own creation. After
having achieved its craft revolution, the city often began a new
cathedral in order to express the new, wider, and broader union
which had been called into life.
The means at hand for these grand undertakings were
disproportionately small. Cologne Cathedral was begun with a
yearly outlay of but 500 marks; a gift of 100 marks was inscribed
as a grand donation;(31) and even when the work approached
completion, and gifts poured in in proportion, the yearly outlay
in money stood at about 5,000 marks, and never exceeded 14,000.
The cathedral of Basel was built with equally small means. But
each corporation contributed its part of stone, work, and
decorative genius to their common monument. Each guild expressed
in it its political conceptions, telling in stone or in bronze
the history of the city, glorifying the principles of "Liberty,
equality, and fraternity,"(32) praising the city's allies, and
sending to eternal fire its enemies. And each guild bestowed its
love upon the communal monument by richly decorating it with
stained windows, paintings, "gates, worthy to be the gates of
Paradise," as Michel Angelo said, or stone decorations of each
minutest corner of the building.(33) Small cities, even small
parishes,(34) vied with the big agglomerations in this work, and
the cathedrals of Laon and St. Ouen hardly stand behind that of
Rheims, or the Communal House of Bremen, or the folkmote's
bell-tower of Breslau. "No works must be begun by the commune but
such as are conceived in response to the grand heart of the
commune, composed of the hearts of all citizens, united in one
common will"--such were the words of the Council of Florence;
and this spirit appears in all communal works of common utility,
such as the canals, terraces, vineyards, and fruit gardens around
Florence, or the irrigation canals which intersected the plains
of Lombardy, or the port and aqueduct of Genoa, or, in fact, any
works of the kind which were achieved by almost every city.(35)
All arts had progressed in the same way in the medieval
cities, those of our own days mostly being but a continuation of
what had grown at that time. The prosperity of the Flemish cities
was based upon the fine woollen cloth they fabricated. Florence,
at the beginning of the fourteenth century, before the black
death, fabricated from 70,000 to 100,000 panni of woollen stuffs,
which were valued at 1,200,000 golden florins.(36) The
chiselling of precious metals, the art of casting, the fine
forging of iron, were creations of the mediaeval "mysteries" which
had succeeded in attaining in their own domains all that could be
made by the hand, without the use of a powerful prime motor. By
the hand and by invention, because, to use Whewell's words:
"Parchment and paper, printing and engraving, improved glass
and steel, gunpowder, clocks, telescopes, the mariner's compass,
the reformed calendar, the decimal notation; algebra,
trigonometry, chemistry, counterpoint (an invention equivalent to
a new creation of music); these are all possessions which we
inherit from that which has so disparagingly been termed the
Stationary Period" (History of Inductive Sciences, i. 252).
True that no new principle was illustrated by any of these
discoveries, as Whewell said; but medieval science had done
something more than the actual discovery of new principles. It
had prepared the discovery of all the new principles which we
know at the present time in mechanical sciences: it had
accustomed the explorer to observe facts and to reason from them.
It was inductive science, even though it had not yet fully
grasped the importance and the powers of induction; and it laid
the foundations of both mechanics and natural philosophy. Francis
Bacon, Galileo, and Copernicus were the direct descendants of a
Roger Bacon and a Michael Scot, as the steam engine was a direct
product of the researches carried on in the Italian universities
on the weight of the atmosphere, and of the mathematical and
technical learning which characterized Nuremberg.
But why should one take trouble to insist upon the advance of
science and art in the medieval city? Is it not enough to point
to the cathedrals in the domain of skill, and to the Italian
language and the poem of Dante in the domain of thought, to give
at once the measure of what the medieval city created during the
four centuries it lived?
The medieval cities have undoubtedly rendered an immense
service to European civilization. They have prevented it from
being drifted into the theocracies and despotical states of old;
they have endowed it with the variety, the self-reliance, the
force of initiative, and the immense intellectual and material
energies it now possesses, which are the best pledge for its
being able to resist any new invasion of the East. But why did
these centres of civilization, which attempted to answer to
deeply-seated needs of human nature, and were so full of life,
not live further on? Why were they seized with senile debility in
the sixteenth century? and, after having repulsed so many
assaults from without, and only borrowed new vigour from their
interior struggles, why did they finally succumb to both?
Various causes contributed to this effect, some of them
having their roots in the remote past, while others originated in
the mistakes committed by the cities themselves. Towards the end
of the fifteenth century, mighty States, reconstructed on the old
Roman pattern, were already coming into existence. In each
country and each region some feudal lord, more cunning, more
given to hoarding, and often less scrupulous than his neighbours,
had succeeded in appropriating to himself richer personal
domains, more peasants on his lands, more knights in his
following, more treasures in his chest. He had chosen for his
seat a group of happily-situated villages, not yet trained into
free municipal life--Paris, Madrid, or Moscow--and with the
labour of his serfs he had made of them royal fortified cities,
whereto he attracted war companions by a free distribution of
villages, and merchants by the protection he offered to trade.
The germ of a future State, which began gradually to absorb other
similar centres, was thus laid. Lawyers, versed in the study of
Roman law, flocked into such centres; a tenacious and ambitious
race of men issued from among the burgesses, who equally hated
the naughtiness of the lords and what they called the lawlessness
of the peasants. The very forms of the village community, unknown
to their code, the very principles of federalism were repulsive
to them as "barbarian" inheritances. Caesarism, supported by the
fiction of popular consent and by the force of arms, was their
ideal, and they worked hard for those who promised to realize
it.(37)
The Christian Church, once a rebel against Roman law and now
its ally, worked in the same direction. The attempt at
constituting the theocratic Empire of Europe having proved a
failure, the more intelligent and ambitious bishops now yielded
support to those whom they reckoned upon for reconstituting the
power of the Kings of Israel or of the Emperors of
Constantinople. The Church bestowed upon the rising rulers her
sanctity, she crowned them as God's representatives on earth, she
brought to their service the learning and the statesmanship of
her ministers, her blessings and maledictions, her riches, and
the sympathies she had retained among the poor. The peasants,
whom the cities had failed or refused to free, on seeing the
burghers impotent to put an end to the interminable wars between
the knights--which wars they had so dearly to pay for--now
set their hopes upon the King, the Emperor, or the Great Prince;
and while aiding them to crush down the mighty feudal owners,
they aided them to constitute the centralized State. And finally,
the invasions of the Mongols and the Turks, the holy war against
the Maures in Spain, as well as the terrible wars which soon
broke out between the growing centres of sovereignty--Ile de
France and Burgundy, Scotland and England, England and France,
Lithuania and Poland, Moscow and Tver, and so on--contributed
to the same end. Mighty States made their appearance; and the
cities had now to resist not only loose federations of lords, but
strongly-organized centres, which had armies of serfs at their
disposal.
The worst was, that the growing autocracies found support in
the divisions which had grown within the cities themselves. The
fundamental idea of the medieval city was grand, but it was not
wide enough. Mutual aid and support cannot be limited to a small
association; they must spread to its surroundings, or else the
surroundings will absorb the association. And in this respect the
medieval citizen had committed a formidable mistake at the
outset. Instead of looking upon the peasants and artisans who
gathered under the protection of his walls as upon so many aids
who would contribute their part to the making of the city--as
they really did--a sharp division was traced between the
"families" of old burghers and the newcomers. For the former, all
benefits from communal trade and communal lands were reserved,
and nothing was left for the latter but the right of freely using
the skill of their own hands. The city thus became divided into
"the burghers" or "the commonalty," and "the inhabitants."(38)
The trade, which was formerly communal, now became the privilege
of the merchant and artisan "families," and the next step--that
of becoming individual, or the privilege of oppressive trusts--
was unavoidable.
The same division took place between the city proper and the
surrounding villages. The commune had well tried to free the
peasants, but her wars against the lords became, as already
mentioned, wars for freeing the city itself from the lords,
rather than for freeing the peasants. She left to the lord his
rights over the villeins, on condition that he would molest the
city no more and would become co-burgher. But the nobles
"adopted" by the city, and now residing within its walls, simply
carried on the old war within the very precincts of the city.
They disliked to submit to a tribunal of simple artisans and
merchants, and fought their old feuds in the streets. Each city
had now its Colonnas and Orsinis, its Overstolzes and Wises.
Drawing large incomes from the estates they had still retained,
they surrounded themselves with numerous clients and feudalized
the customs and habits of the city itself. And when discontent
began to be felt in the artisan classes of the town, they offered
their sword and their followers to settle the differences by a
free fight, instead of letting the discontent find out the
channels which it did not fail to secure itself in olden times.
The greatest and the most fatal error of most cities was to
base their wealth upon commerce and industry, to the neglect of
agriculture. They thus repeated the error which had once been
committed by the cities of antique Greece, and they fell through
it into the same crimes.(39) The estrangement of so many cities
from the land necessarily drew them into a policy hostile to the
land, which became more and more evident in the times of Edward
the Third,(40) the French Jacqueries, the Hussite wars, and the
Peasant War in Germany. On the other hand, a commercial policy
involved them in distant enterprises. Colonies were founded by
the Italians in the south-east, by German cities in the east, by
Slavonian cities in the far northeast. Mercenary armies began to
be kept for colonial wars, and soon for local defence as well.
Loans were contacted to such an extent as to totally demoralize
the citizens; and internal contests grew worse and worse at each
election, during which the colonial politics in the interest of a
few families was at stake. The division into rich and poor grew
deeper, and in the sixteenth century, in each city, the royal
authority found ready allies and support among the poor.
And there is yet another cause of the decay of communal
institutions, which stands higher and lies deeper than all the
above. The history of the medieval cities offers one of the most
striking illustrations of the power of ideas and principles upon
the destinies of mankind, and of the quite opposed results which
are obtained when a deep modification of leading ideas has taken
place. Self-reliance and federalism, the sovereignty of each
group, and the construction of the political body from the simple
to the composite, were the leading ideas in the eleventh century.
But since that time the conceptions had entirely changed. The
students of Roman law and the prelates of the Church, closely
bound together since the time of Innocent the Third, had
succeeded in paralyzing the idea--the antique Greek idea--
which presided at the foundation of the cities. For two or three
hundred years they taught from the pulpit, the University chair,
and the judges' bench, that salvation must be sought for in a
strongly-centralized State, placed under a semi-divine
authority;(41) that one man can and must be the saviour of
society, and that in the name of public salvation he can commit
any violence: burn men and women at the stake, make them perish
under indescribable tortures, plunge whole provinces into the
most abject misery. Nor did they fail to give object lessons to
this effect on a grand scale, and with an unheard-of cruelty,
wherever the king's sword and the Church's fire, or both at once,
could reach. By these teachings and examples, continually
repeated and enforced upon public attention, the very minds of
the citizens had been shaped into a new mould. They began to find
no authority too extensive, no killing by degrees too cruel, once
it was "for public safety." And, with this new direction of mind
and this new belief in one man's power, the old federalist
principle faded away, and the very creative genius of the masses
died out. The Roman idea was victorious, and in such
circumstances the centralized State had in the cities a ready
prey.
Florence in the fifteenth century is typical of this change.
Formerly a popular revolution was the signal of a new departure.
Now, when the people, brought to despair, insurged, it had
constructive ideas no more; no fresh idea came out of the
movement. A thousand representatives were put into the Communal
Council instead of 400; 100 men entered the signoria instead of
80. But a revolution of figures could be of no avail. The
people's discontent was growing up, and new revolts followed. A
saviour--the "tyran"--was appealed to; he massacred the
rebels, but the disintegration of the communal body continued
worse than ever. And when, after a new revolt, the people of
Florence appealed to their most popular man, Gieronimo
Savonarola, for advice, the monk's answer was:--"Oh, people
mine, thou knowest that I cannot go into State affairs... purify
thy soul, and if in such a disposition of mind thou reformest thy
city, then, people of Florence, thou shalt have inaugurated the
reform in all Italy!" Carnival masks and vicious books were
burned, a law of charity and another against usurers were passed--
and the democracy of Florence remained where it was. The old
spirit had gone. By too much trusting to government, they had
ceased to trust to themselves; they were unable to open new
issues. The State had only to step in and to crush down their
last liberties.
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