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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
What Is Our Historical a priori? The State as Common Sense and the Forgotten Municipal Archive
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
11
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2011-10-01
2022-12-10
2011-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Ron Makleff
2011/10/01
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2036-461X
16-17
en
What Is Our Historical a priori? The State as Common Sense and the Forgotten Municipal Archive
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19363/17234
11
WHAT IS OUR HISTORICAL A PRIORI?
THE STATE AS COMMON SENSE AND THE FORGOTTEN MUNICIPAL ARCHIVE
Ron Makleff, Hebrew University of Jerusalem




   Allow me to begin southwest of Paris on 5 July 1194, four months after Prince John of
England’s notorious defection by signing a pact with French King Philip Augustus. At the Battle
of Fréteval, John’s betrayed brother, King Richard, ambushes Philip and comes away victorious.
Among his treasures are the French royal baggage containers, which contain various kingly treas-
ures: gold, jewelry, and so on. Yet the royal baggage also contained some more peculiar items:
an undisclosed amount of furniture, which the king apparently could not do without in battle, and
of greater interest here, archival documents. At the time, these were probably considered part of
Philip’s treasury, but they included accounting books, fiscal charters, inventories of the royal
domain, tax books, even a primitive census and the royal seal.1
   Why would a 12th century king carry his archive around into battle? The origins of medieval
archives suggest not a pragmatic but a symbolic purpose: even at the turn of the 13th century, the
archive had immense symbolic significance. It signaled political authority; it marked the materi-
al and visual manifestation of the power of documents. Some of this we may attribute to the
sacrality the written word acquired as a result of the Church’s near-monopoly on literacy at this
point in Medieval Europe.2 Yet modern history suggests the symbolism to be more convoluted:
somewhere between sovereignty and sacrality.
   Indeed, it is the modern state, which more than any other political actor, has adopted a sense of
archival grandiosity. President Hoover, when inaugurating the Archives of the United States
called them, “a temple of history, an expression of the American soul.”3 French archival build-
ings, furthermore, are typically designed to resemble cathedrals – another indication of the sacred
importance and the symbolism embodied by archives. Yet in order to unpack this association of
archival monumentality and state sovereignty, a distinction must be drawn between the archive
and archives. A core underpinning of my argument here is to challenge the monopoly of the mod-
ern state on administrative political archives.
   I choose to do this by examining the history of the municipal archive in late medieval Europe,
focusing on autonomous cities across western Europe and the archives they held as autonomous
political actors.4 Remember that Europe was in this period certainly not a system of states; rather
it contained an array of political actors, all of which could have prevailed as the dominant form
of political organization: the kings gradually building states, autonomous cities, city-leagues,
ecclesiastical and feudal lords, and the Catholic Church.5 Moreover, the institutions of each of
these actors may have contributed to the “final product,” what we know today as the sovereign
nation-state.
   The accepted wisdom regarding state formation theory is that medieval kings, by collecting

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RON MAKLEFF

taxes in order to wage wars and waging wars in order to collect more taxes, created a war-tax-war
cycle which eventually precipitated the bureaucratic core of the modern state. The resulting
administrative apparatus included increasingly sophisticated royal archives and chanceries, where
official royal documents were produced and stored. Documentary practice became more regular-
ized, complex and voluminous.6 Yet very little research has been done on the origins of the
administrative methods which enabled that first flurry of royal state-building and document gath-
ering. Moreover, state formation theories focus exclusively on the apparatuses of the state’s pred-
ecessors, the royal courts later described anachronistically as nascent states. Theorists have been
hesitant to fully assess the role of other political actors in state formation.7 For example, it is typ-
ically postulated that the city contributed to state formation primarily and solely as a site for cap-
ital accumulation, capital tapped by the state to fund its wars of expansion.8 Consequently, theo-
rists reify the idea of the “state,” seeing late medieval and early modern feudal monarchies not as
the royal amalgamations they were, but as incipient forms of the modern state.9 In addition to suf-
fering from numerous logical pitfalls, such a narrative is problematic in that it excludes an entire
class of histories, of which the autonomous city and its municipal archive are only one.
   Furthermore, it is evident that the state did learn administrative methods from other political
actors, including the Church, cities and merchants.10 Such institutional learning could potentially
have occurred through conquest. Spanish rule in Northern Italy in the 16th century, for example,
coincided with sophistication of the Spanish royal archiving system, a process culminating in the
creation of the Castilian royal archives at Simanças.11 Institutional transfer of bureaucratic meth-
ods may alternatively have corresponded with the movement of individual municipal administra-
tors and merchants to royal court bureaucracies. 13th century Italian and Jewish financiers are
known to have moved from trade fairs such as those in Champagne to the princely administra-
tions of northwest Europe.12 Similarly, around the turn of the 16th century, Holy Roman Emperor
Maximilian began to prefer burghers (urban citizens) as candidates for his own administration,
eschewing the typical choice of nobles for such roles.13
   Hence the primary insight I hope will resonate with the participants of this conference: archives
are not merely a resource for the writing of history or the preservation of film. Rather, they have
been central institutions of the bureaucratic apparatuses of political entities for centuries. As such,
archives should also serve as a subject of historical analysis in themselves. Thus I want to look,
through the archive as institution, at the administrative legacy left by city upon the state. Such an
analysis requires a deeper look at the place of community in the archive – for that is the essential
difference between the archives of kings slowly forming states and the archives of autonomous
municipalities in late medieval Europe. The term community here refers to the urban “textual
community” coined by historian Brigitte Bedos-Rezak.14 She sees the municipal archive as the
place where a civic liturgy is practiced: archives held the documents which would be available as
“sacred” texts and icons for the rituals of enacting that civic community. By holding them the
archive itself came to play a role in the textual community.15
   Several communal aspects of archiving were exclusive to municipalities. First, public accessi-
bility: as a rule, municipal archives were accessible for free. 14th century London contained two
archives which recorded land transactions: the archive of the City of London and the King’s royal
chancery. The London municipality’s Husting Rolls recorded land transactions within the city
walls, and were free for the use of any and all.16 The King’s rolls, on the other hand, were limit-
ed to those who could pay a fee, and thus served a wholly different function and population.
   Another expression of the textual community in the urban archive was its incorporation and
activation of vernacular texts. Urban archives were much quicker to leave the republic the letters
– that is, the written language of Latin – and begin recording texts in local tongues. As early as

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the 14th century in what is today Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, France and beyond, urban
administrations began to translate charters and city privileges, documents which autonomous or
semi-autonomous cities held as crucial expressions of their rights and identity.17 As a result, such
texts could be easily mobilized for urban politics and were sensible to the gathered crowds: for
frequent oath-swearing ceremonies of new officials, for rousing revolts and so on. However, in
the feudal monarchies, later to become states, as late as the 16th century the different regions of a
royal realm might speak different languages; they might have different names for the entity of
which they were ostensibly a part and be governed by distinct rules and by separate kingly coun-
cils.18 The fact that kingly archives and chanceries remained loyal to Latin texts until a much later
date is an expression of this disparity. Imposing a common language upon the “French” citizens
of Provence, for example, would take centuries more.
   Once the archive is viewed as subject of research, as an institution in its own right, a variety of
arguments can be re-examined. The historian Almut Höfert’s argument about the city’s legacy as
it lives on in the state can be critiqued in this way.19 Höfert sees the legacy of the city as an admin-
istrative one: the documentary practices developed in the city somehow made their way into the
state apparatus, and became a part of it. She proposes, however, a rather bleak view linking oli-
garchic urban politics with subsequent royal absolutism. In the 14th and 15th centuries, German
and Italian urban politics indeed became more exclusive and more oligarchic. Italian communes
often came under the seigneurial rule of a single family, while in Germany the number of fami-
lies represented on city councils shrunk drastically.20 This shift in cities towards narrower ruling
institutions coincided with massive documentary innovations, including the ways in which
archives were organized, the types of documents kept, the sophistication of city books, tax codes,
indexing and censuses. Höfert continues by arguing that such administrative methods, in the
hands of the newly entrenched urban elite, led not to the enforcement of equality among the citi-
zens, or even to the enforcement of the rule of law, but rather served to monopolize this new
elite’s understanding of the utilitas publica, the public good. By means of these new documen-
tary and archival methods, urban elites were better able to enforce their worldview and force it
upon the city’s residents. Pointing to Bodin’s concept of the civis in which he refers specifically
to the urban subject, Höfert claims that this use of documentary practices, which made citizen into
subject reached the state royal absolutist state.
   Thus archival methods made their way from the city into the state and brought with them the
mechanisms which subjected citizens to more centralized, efficient and nefarious control of a
knowledgeable sovereign. Documents and the urban archives, which made them accessible, were
the precursors of States “knowing” their subjects – in censuses, cadastral maps, urban planning,
and social controls. How can this be reconciled with my findings suggesting the urban commu-
nalism expressed in the archive? Staying within the archive as a subject of research suggests a key
difference in the way urban and royal polities wielded their sovereignty – an alternate explana-
tion for Höfert’s argument that the state learned absolutism, as it were, from the city. A fascinat-
ing example of such a difference is what I term “archival annexation,” the conquering and seizure
of archives by state-building rulers.
   Beginning in the 13th century, French kings conquered the archives of newly-won territories,
going to the lands they conquered, finding archival repositories, and taking control of and scour-
ing their contents.21 Burgundian state-builders in the mid-14th century did the same. To this day,
the archives of the Lille Chambre des comptes contain a series composed of both the documents
seized from conquered territories and those the Burgundians made themselves.22
   Evidence of such archival annexation, however, is limited to what we can call state-building

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kings, princes and nobles. Autonomous cities did not carry out these annexations, even though
they did often conquer and control lands for protracted periods. Venice is a perfect example: it
never absconded with the archives of conquered lands. On the contrary: the Venetians willingly
and proudly shared their legal and administrative innovations with other cities. When Venice
agreed to Nuremburg’s request for a copy of its laws in 1508, the Venetians were so proud that
they commissioned a painting commemorating the event on the walls of the Doge’s Palace.23
Indeed, municipalities frequently shared administrative methods: their codes of law, judicial pro-
ceedings and decisions reached in particularly difficult judicial cases. Across western Europe
cities shared such administrative tools: Hanseatic cities shared entire law codes, Lübeck’s with 43
other Hanseatic towns, Frankfurt’s with 49 others;24 cities shared the charters granted them by the
French and English crowns; the citizens of English cities exchanged letters providing advice on
how they had received rights or privileges in their charters.25
   These signs of urban institutional sharing serve to reinforce the dual communal aspect of the
urban archive. Alongside an intercity network of “fellowship between self-governing cities,”26
there existed the internal fellowship enacted in the urban archive. A final example of this brings
us to the Flemish city of Ghent in the 15th century. There, in the midst of a rebellion against the
Burgundian state-builder Philip the Good, a group of rebellious citizens marched to the city
archive, removed files from it, and translated them from Latin into Dutch. From there they
marched on to the city’s market square where all the main political events of the city took place,
and read the texts aloud from the same balcony that had been used for the purpose in previous
rebellions.27 This episode suggests the archive as both muniment (derived from the Latin muni-
mentum, defense) and monument (derived from the Latin momentum, memorial), respectively: as
a political resource holding documentary weapons to be unsheathed in defense of rights, on the
one hand, and as a sacral symbol of urban independence and shared history, on the other.28 A view
of archives as no more than resources for history writing or as the sole purview of the nation-state
would thus miss a slew of important meanings and uses, and would occlude the unique interac-
tion between sovereignty and sacrality in the late medieval urban milieu.
   In this same vein, Derrida argued that there is no political power without control of the
archive.29 Charles Tilly has similarly suggested that the state may have covered its own tracks;
that is to say, the archival evidence that we have before us when studying the medieval period
may be biased before we’ve even looked at it: the state was victorious, and the archive is of course
shaped by the victors. To this my only response is to quote St. Augustine: “For we have not entire-
ly forgotten anything if we can remember that we have forgotten it. For, a lost notion, one that
we have entirely forgotten, we cannot even search for.”30 The municipal archive, I hope, has not
been entirely forgotten, as we have much to learn from it.



1    John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the
     Middle Ages, University of California Press, Berkeley 1986, p. 56.
2    Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Civic Liturgies and Urban Records in Northern France, 1100-1140, in Barbara
     Hanawalt, Kathryn Reyerson (eds.), City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, University of Minnesota
     Press, Minneapolis 1994, p. 35.
3    Quoted in Eric Ketelaar, “The Architecture of Archives: Whose Form, What Functions?,” in Archival
     Science, no. 2, 2002, pp. 239-261. On the symbolic power of documents and archives, see James
     O’Toole, “The Symbolic Significance of Archives,” in American Archivist, no. 56, 1993, pp. 234-255.
4    On autonomous cities in late medieval Europe, see Wim Blockmans, Voracious States and Obstructing
     Cities: An Aspect of State-Formation in Preindustrial Europe, in Charles Tilly, Wim Blockmans (eds.),

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     Cities and the Rise of States in Europe A.D. 1000 to 1800, Westview Press, Boulder 1994, p. 227;
     Fernand Braudel, The Mediterannean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Harper &
     Row, New York 1972, vol. 1, pp. 396ff.
5    Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1996.
     The array of political competitors in late Medieval Europe is also described in Charles Tilly, Reflections
     on the History of European State-Making, in Charles Tilly, Gabriel Ardant (eds.), The Formation of
     National States in Western Europe, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1975.
6    Though there are dozens of variants, the quintessential case is made in Charles Tilly, Reflections on the
     History of European State-Making, cit. A more nuanced version of the argument appears in Charles
     Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States A.D. 990-1992, Blackwell, Cambridge 1992, pp. 15-16.
7    For a discussion of this problem, see Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, cit.
8    Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States A.D. 990-1992, cit., p. 51.
9    On the idea of feudal monarchy and the medieval conglomerate state see J.H. Elliot, “A Europe of
     Composite Monarchies,” in Past and Present, no. 137, 1992, pp. 48-71.
10   On the Church’s contribution to the development of the bureaucratic apparatus of the early modern state
     see Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot, Blackwell, Oxford 2000,
     pp. 120ff; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in
     the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Princeton University Press, Princetion-New York 1983, p. 37; Jacob
     Soll, Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System, University of
     Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2009, p. 27.
11   Federico Chabod, Was There a Renaissance State?, in Heinz Lubasz (ed.), The Development of the
     Modern State, Macmillan, Toronto 1964, p. 37; Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, Riverside
     Press, Cambridge 1955, p. 230.
12   Gérard Sivéry, Non-Literary Sources in the B Series of the Archives of the Department of Lille for the
     Period 1250-1330, in Richard Britnell (ed.), Pragmatic Literacy: East and West, 1200-1330, The
     Boydell Press, Woodbridge 1997, p. 76.
13   Thomas A. Brady, The Urban Belt and the Emerging Modern State, in Peter Blickle (ed.), Resistance,
     Representation, and Community, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1997, p. 249.
14   Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Civic Liturgies and Urban Records in Northern France, 1100-1140, cit., p. 34.
15   For a similar argument more closely following the role of the urban archive see Eric Ketelaar, “Records
     out and Archives in: Early Modern Cities as Creators of Records and as Communities of Archives,” in
     Archival Science, no. 10, pp. 201-210.
16   The Husting Rolls also displayed some markedly sophisticated innovations in the practice of indexing,
     a key aspect of modern archiving which royal archives were often two centuries later to develop than
     were their municipal counterparts. See Geoffrey Martin, Records and Record-Keeping in Medieval
     London, in M.V. Roberts (ed.), Archives and the Metropolis, Guildhall Library Publications, London
     1998, p. 75. For more on English royal archiving see Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written
     Record: England 1066 to 1307, Edward Arnold, London 1979, pp. 121ff.
17   See the collection edited by Richard Britnell, Pragmatic Literacy: East and West, 1200-1330, cit., espe-
     cially the chapters by Manfred Groten, Richard Britnell, Manuel Riu, Geoffrey Martin and Thomas
     Behrmann.
18   Harald Gustafsson, “The Conglomerate State: A Perspective on State Formation in Early Modern
     Europe,” in Scandinavian Journal of History, vol. 23, nos. 3-4, 1998, pp. 196-197.
19   Almut Höfert, States, cities, and citizens in the later Middle Ages, in Quentin Skinner and Bo Strath
     (eds.), States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003.
     The noted argument is presented on pages 69-71.
20   See Richard Brown, “Death of a Renaissance Record-Keeper: The Death of Tomasso da Tortona in
     Ferrara, 1385,” in Archivaria, no. 44, 1997, pp. 1-43, p. 10; Thomas A. Brady Jr., The Urban Belt and
     the Emerging Modern State, cit., p. 243.
21   Olivier Guyotjeannin, French Manuscript Sources, 1200-1330, in Richard Britnell (ed.), Pragmatic
     Literacy: East and West, 1200-1330, cit., pp. 62-63.

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22 This is the B Series of the Archives of the Department of Lille. For an overall survey of this series see
   Gérard Sivéry, Non-Literary Sources in the B Series of the Archives of the Department of Lille for the
   Period 1250-1330, cit., pp. 74-75.
23 Ann Katherine Isaacs, Maarten Prak, Cities, Bourgeoisies, and States, in Wolfgang Reinhard (ed.),
   Power Elites and State Building, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996, p. 218.
24 See Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and its Competitors, cit., p. 162, note 57; see also Harold
   Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Harvard University Press,
   Cambridge 1983, p. 376.
25 See for example, Geoffrey Martin, English Town Records, in Richard Britnell (ed.), Pragmatic Literacy:
   East and West, 1200-1330, cit., pp. 119-130, pp. 127-128.
26 Ann Katherine Isaacs, Maarten Prak, Cities, Bourgeoisies, and States, cit., p. 218.
27 Peter J. Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent,
   Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1996, p. 110; Marc Boone, “The Dutch Revolt and the Medieval
   Tradition of Urban Dissent,” in Journal of Early Modern History, no. 11, 2007, pp. 351-375, pp. 356-
   357.
28 Eric Ketelaar, “Muniments and monuments: the dawn of archives as cultural patrimony,” in Archival
   Science, no. 7, 2007, pp. 343-357, p. 345.
29 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1995, p. 11, note 1.
30 St. Augustine Bishop of Hippo, Confessions, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1991, Ch. XIX.




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