The Fabrication of Domination

Domination: Chapter 10

2010-05-17T11:55:00.001-07:00

10. CONCLUSIONS

The Questions are Still at Issue
At the beginning of this book I listed six key issues that I wanted to explore in our look at history:
(1) domination;
(2) inequality (stratification);
(3) scripting (fabrication);
(4) mystification;
(5) secrecy;
(6) malfeasance in office.

We have seen that office-holders through the ages have fabricated rules, mystified their offices, maneuvered in secrecy and operated in ways that were beneficial to the few at the expense of the many. Domination and inequality have been rampant in our historical tour.
In this final chapter I want to address these issues in light of the government of the United States. I am sad to report that the cancer that plagued polities through the ages is still with us. The most recent Presidency, that of George W. Bush certainly is one of the worst in years and stands out as the most arrogant and aggressive Imperial Administration in our history, but unhappily the cancer goes deeper than one man or his band of Neocon ideologues. The economics of war and corruption have eaten into the bowels of government.

Which History?

When I was a student at Cambridge I loved to go to the University Library, which houses many of the world’s great books and stroll through the isles of the history section. It has thousands of books on the history of the world and lots on the different regions of the globe. At the time I wondered what history’s function was. What does it mean to have a whole floor of the library holding thousands of musty volumes?
Then, during my experience as a teacher and researcher in the world of academia I came to see a disconnect between what was being written and discussed in seminars and that which was going on in the world outside. Of course, this is summed up in the oft-used phrase: The Ivory Tower. There is some truth to the stereotype. Most academics know what is going on in the world but they feel cut off from power. Not being influential and rarely consulted by those in command, they churn out academic tomes and articles that will get them tenure, promotions and salary increases (I did my share).
The histories so produced are not very threatening to the establishment; nor do they make an effort to connect what went on anciently with what is going on today and that which might be going on in the lifetimes of our grandchildren.
I have tried to write a different history. In so doing I want my reader to see that history can provide insights that are relevant and useful in making changes in our world, views that can help us make the world a better place. At the end of this chapter I will give some examples of things we can do.
Using the tactic of spindoctoring, fabricating the truth, élites throughout history have portrayed the powerless as “beggars running amok” (Enclosure debate in twelfth century England); underachieving and underproducing (Highland clearances); or “collaborators with the Muslim enemy” (Christian Catalonia). Having made such definitions, continue to treat the masses as undeserving of all the information available to government officials and higher ups. Élites in our historical tour, then, have demonstrated a certain arrogance and felt the need to operate without the people’s consent, hiding from them the operations of government.
Below, in our discussion of present-day
America we will see that not much has changed in this regard, except that it is a more complex situation today and, therefore, perhaps more difficult to understand. Note the newsman Walter Lippman’s (1889-1974) characterization of the American public as “the bewildered herd” in need of being shepherded by a “specialized class” of persons, today called Neocons (see “The Arrogance of Office,” below). Such views of the public permit leaders to promote opaque government, withholding information from the public and pursuing war plans that benefit a few at the expense of the majority.
This is not a new problem. James Madison voiced his concerns about the fate of democracy as time wore on. He warned of “a real domination of the few under an apparent liberty of the many…” [my italics]. He deplored “the daring depravity of the times” where private interests had “become the praetorian band of the government – at once its tools and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations” The founding father continues:

A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives (Chomsky 2002:15). .

In our historical tour we have seen some secret dealings: did the commoners in Yokut-Mono society have the information needed to resist the plots and devices of the little chief and shaman? Did Tlingit commoners and slaves have the information needed to fight their impoverishment in the face of lavish ego displays by their chiefs? Did the English peasant have the information needed to stop the enclosures? (the pamphleteers tried but they were being read mainly by other élites, some of whom did try to help the peasants). Did the Amerindians at Etowah have the information to stop the political abuses that undoubtedly contributed to the decline and collapse of their society? Even in today’s Sisalaland, do women and young men have the information they need to understand how divination contributes to their servitude? Did the Highland clansmen and clanswomen have the information needed to stop the clearances? Did the peasants of Catalonia have the information to fight off the Power of the Pen as élites there manufactured serfdom in their land? As the Central African Kings fabricated domination, did the people of Kubalannd have the information that would allow them to see through the fog of spin put up by the King’s priests? Do Americans today understand what is going on in the state-management system in Washington DC?
In most cases, the answer is no. Who was providing information? In a general sense, the priesthood or those attached to and benefiting from nearness to power. It is the same today. C. Wright Mills noted that news people in America are part of the power élite. Those at the top of the profession, who have six-figure salaries and mix and mingle with upper class are unlikely candidates to disseminate analyses and information that would be highly critical of the American way of life. The Kuba priests and the Catalan comital lawyers didn’t want to rock the boat and neither do the information-suppliers of our mass media. The cybernetic result in each case is filtered information for the public.
Filtered information is altered or incomplete information. No doubt some secrecy is necessary in carrying out foreign policy and in combating the very real dangers that exist in a post-9/11 world. Nevertheless, as I write this leaked memos from the State Department and elsewhere within the beltway point again and again to the fact that government lies to its people and in a democracy the level of secrecy should be very low, yet some say the Imperial Presidency is on the rise. Certainly, it is a tendency that a vibrant democracy should resist.

The Camouflage of “Democracy”

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1827) said that our liberty cannot but be guarded by the freedom of the press, but Americans have come to take democracy for granted and because of this apathy it has become a mask of ideality. We falsely believe that democracy exists, is working and we are content to accept the axiom that the press is watching our backs.
Democracy has become our Deity. Like the African kings of Kubaland who claimed to have Deity on their side, a modern day American President can thwart the will of the people because of the opacity of a highly authoritative office and a belief that democracy is working. The President claims to have the Deity-inspired. Constitution on his side and the Supreme Court is supposed to be watching that. Furthermore, in a declared democracy the free press is supposed to preserve awareness in the general public, as a guardian against despotism. These beliefs shield us from knowing what is wrong with our government and from taking action to correct those wrongs. The best shield is the belief in the absence of a shield.
In our modern day world the whole poleconomy, with its attendant institutions and culture of abundance acts as a shield for self-seeking men within government. Sometimes the shield breaks down dramatically, as with Watergate or the Enron collapse. At other times it slowly erodes away, as with the growing awareness on the part of the American people that they were duped into an unnecessary war in Iraq. But these are taken to be temporary faults and the system is assumed to be fundamentally sound and self-correcting.
Unfortunately, the appearance of media power, the idea that reporters are hard at work creating transparency, is part and parcel of the opacity that prevents the general public from knowing the truth about what is going on in government and in the world of business. We can see this in the following quote:

… what journalists should be doing is standing outside the cycle of symbolic and physical violence, corruption and manipulated information that makes up the power relations of society, so they can show audiences the truth of the system and how it works. But, instead, they, themselves, are immersed in this system of untruth. Like other players in this system, they engage in symbolic violence against reputations; they manipulate information to achieve various ends; they make covert alliances, and offer the public forms of untruth that masquerade as truth. And they do so even as they depict themselves as honest brokers who stand outside the system and expose it flaws to public scrutiny (http://www.transparencynow.com/news/preface.htm)

And much of the media is not even concerned with news or looking at important issues, but spews out “entertainment,” the equivalent of Aldus Huxley’s soma in Brave New World. And perhaps the media has a big brother, and it’s not the Big Brother of the novel, but one might say that “Big Brother Mall” is mightier than the Media. Or, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, “The mall is the massage.” Americans are so busy working to consume and working at consuming that they have been blinded to realities of despotism in the White House or the workings of the war machine in the state management system (see below).
Hegemony for the Kuba Divine King was about mind control, about only projecting some information in doctrinal form to keep his followers following. The Divine King had his High Priests and a whole cadre of functionaries in the Temple Complex that supported mind control. Today, the President of the United States has a press secretary and a whole cadre of functionaries in the Democracy Façade that support mind control. There are oligarchs in all facets of our society, men and women who greatly benefit in terms of prestige, power and property from the Democracy Façade. They are in government and commerce, the two frequently interacting with one another, and in pursuing their self interests they prevent democracy from working properly, doing so under cover of the widespread belief that this could not happen in a democracy. The "oligarchy" is deeply imbedded in governmental structure, corporations, political groups and the media. All participate in the business of obfuscation, of camouflaging what is really going on in official circles.
As early as 1945, a few years before Eisenhower made his warning to America, the sociologist C. Wright Mills called these oligarchs “the power élite.” Neither Professor Mills nor President Eisenhower was a conspiracy theorist and neither am I. We all, however, have come to understand that through networking powerful go-getters communicate with one another to create an informal power structure that exists alongside of the formal structures of each sub-world of business, government, political parties, PACs, lobbyists and the media. Through common activities – playing golf, belonging to the same élite clubs, intermarriage, being at the same “inside-the-beltway” cocktail parties – such peers of the realm share information and constitute the diffuse power behind domination. In most instances they do not intend to dominate, but as aggrandizers, they are in pursuit of prestige, power and property. Mind control – the limiting of information – is simply the byproduct of that quest.
No doubt the same was true of the courtiers of France’s Louis XIV or the priests and kingmakers of ancient Egypt. The game has changed little.
We have looked at a small part of the evolution of sociocultural formations – the fabrication of domination. The evolutionary period has been short, some twelve thousand years, which by Paleolithic terms is very short. We have looked at the evolution of sociocultural formations from early storing societies to the modern day. In essence I am saying that the fabrication of illusion began then and continues today.
Why illusion? Because aggrandizers benefit from it. It began at that moment when the Paleolithic was ending and the Neolithic was beginning because for the first time in human existence there was something for go-getters to go get: a storable, stealable surplus. It is no accident of history that war and slavery began at that point and continue today. Furthermore, a surplus to fight over generated other goals for aggressive men: prestige and political power. They were motivators then and remain so today for the office-holders and agents in politics, business, media organizations and other domains that provide opportunists access to prestige, power and property (e.g., organizations promoting evangelism, the movie business and other forms of illusion manufacture).
All are today concerned with spinning illusion, in one form or another. They, like their Neolithic counterparts, are intent on presenting their version of the “truth.” Let's ask these questions about illusion:

 Did illusion exist in the Paleolithic?

 If so, who were the scriptwriters?

 If there were Paleolithic scriptwriters, how far from truth (reality) did they stray in their spinning of versions of the truth?

 Did this distance between truth and illusion increase or decrease in the Neolithic? (We have seen that it increased)

 Since it increased, has it continued to snowball up to the modern day?

 If it has snowballed, what can we do about it?

Another way of thinking about this is that one’s control over one’s own life was far greater in the Paleolithic than it is now. Put another way, we are very greatly distanced from the forces that affect our lives. Did you get invited to Davos for the last meeting of the World Economic Forum? Were you involved in the secret meetings between Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz when they fabricated reasons to go to war in Iraq? Do you sit on the board of a giant corporation? Have you been involved in the inner workings of the WTO? For the vast majority of us, the answer to all of these questions in “no.”
Let's ask another question: Did they have a hidden agenda that you (1) don’t know anything about; and (2) can't do anything about? Now the answer becomes a bit fuzzier. Certainly the answer to number (1) is yes. The world is full of pockets of restricted information flows. It’s number (2) that becomes problematic.
I will deal with that question later, but let's continue with the comparison between Paleolithic man and a person in the modern world. In the Paleolithic the “blanket of illusion” was quite thin. Nature was very immediate and understandable and wants were minimal, as we are biological beings and, like other organisms, our basics are that we have to eat and avoid being eaten. Men and women of the Paleolithic had the fundamental tools to deal with these contingencies and each individual could do so without interference from illusions generated by others.
In those areas that individuals could not easily control pragmatically, however, is where illusion-generating began. No one in the Paleolithic solved the problem of sickness and death, so we see the emergence of shamans who claimed to have remedies for sickness, claims of an ability to cure. Handling death took a little longer, perhaps, but eventually we got lots of spindoctors there too. Paleoanthropologists have uncovered evidence of religious ideas early in human development. Ancient religious practices and beliefs of prehistoric peoples are inferred from archaeological findings. The oldest burials that attest to a belief in life after death date from 52,000–32,000 BP. Bodies were buried with grave goods e.g., stone tools and parts of animals, suggesting an attempt to placate the dead or equip them for a journey to the next world. Some corpses were adorned with red ochre. The first evidence of animal sacrifice comes from the Middle Paleolithic Period, which may have been offerings to the dead, to a higher power or to the fertility of the animal species.
Furthermore, seven thousand year old red ochre rock paintings from Finland, for example, show images of elk, men, boats, handprints and geometric designs. Archaeologists associate these with shamanism, especially in that some images portray experiences of metamorphosis, of falling into a trance and of summoning zoomorphic spirit helpers.
Paleolithic shamans were the first scriptwriters, the first persons to spin an explanation of sickness and death. In the face of these dangers, early shamans attempted to fabricate means of dealing with them and/or explaining them. Illusionary concepts and practices emerged. We see this in the study of contemporary forgers, e.g., the Zhun/twasi (!Kung) of Southern Africa. From them we have some indication of what prehistoric shamanism must have been like. They believe in a god named Prishiboro, whose wife was an elephant. His elder brother tricked him into killing her and, later, into eating her flesh. Her herd tried to kill Prishiboro in revenge, but his brother defeated them.
The Zhun/twasi also have many taboos concerning the dead as they believe that the ghosts of the dead can cause them injury or death. It is against the rules to say a name of the dead person once an annual ceremony to release the spirits of the dead has been performed for him or her.
Furthermore, the Zhun/twasi practice shamanism in order to communicate with the spirit world and to cure what they call star sickness. Shamans go into a trance state and run through fire to ward off evil spirits, who are thought to cause illness by shooting invisible arrows at a person. They also perform the laying on of hands and dances in a trance state to cure sickness. The shaman experiences n/um in a trance state, the pure energy that runs the cosmos. It is thought that such ritual practices activate n/um and can lead to a cure.
If we assume that there are no evil spirits shooting arrows at the sick in Zhun/twasi society, then we have to assume that their ideas and practices trying to deal with this are illusions.
Why would Paleolithic people have come up with such misapprehensions? What would a shaman get from performing trances and laying on of hands? It wasn’t property and, if the Zhun/twasi are any indication, shamans would not have gained power over people, except to help them. That leaves us with prestige, which is a powerful motivator for aggrandizers.
So humans can chase explanations for the inexplicable and achievers often arise to aid in the search for answers. Today clergy and quacks can acquire power over others and property in this process, as well as prestige, but in the Paleolithic only prestige motivated the men and women who sought to solve life’s mysteries. Once power and property could be accessed in this manner, the race to fabricate illusionary sociocultural formations was on.
The Paleolithic shaman didn’t lead band members very far from reality. The prehistoric illusionary blanket was quite thin by comparison to some of the elaborate fabrications that exist in our modern world. We live in a world where spindoctoring has become a way of life e.g., the advertising executive on Madison Avenue; the press secretary at the White House; the corporate moguls at Disney; we could go on, but the point is that much of modern culture is illusionary and some people benefit from the manufacture of illusion. Conversely, some people are hurt by it.
Freud discovered that we can be enslaved by illusion. His research demonstrated that we often misperceive the events of adult life, interpreting them in terms of childhood fears and desires. Moreover, even those with mild neuroses torture themselves for nonexistent sins and see enemies and dangers where they don't exist. Freud indicated that it was the ability to see truth that can free a person from illusion.
A minor neurotic idea might be that one can repeat an act that had bad consequences in the past and achieve good ones. People try that one over and over. But such a delusion only creates havoc in a small personal world. In the fabrication of domination, we are dealing with large-scale selfism wherein ambitious men have historically created false impressions that have led to social inequality, injustice and widespread mayhem.
Governmental neurosis might be seen as the oft-repeated process of making war to make peace. George Orwell, in his dystopian novel 1984, lampoons an illusionary world:
The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size (Orwell 1949:15)

Unfortunately, there is another modern day instance where governmental office is acting as a shield for deviant behavior and it is gravely affecting governance for the people. This is the fact that many Congressmen are pursing office as a temporary stepping-stone to consultancies in the military industrial complex, employment that brings them fabulous incomes and high-profile jobs within the Beltway. In Washington DC it is known as the revolving door syndrome. It is long been known that retired military officers could find lucrative jobs in industry and now Congressmen are beginning to see the dollar signs.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with either military men or Congressmen going into business upon leaving the government. The problem is that, in the case of those in Congress especially, it is possible to become involved in shady deals while still in office and use one’s congressional contacts after taking a job in industry, both to the detriment of the public good. In other words, post-congressional career goals of members of Congress threaten to undermine the function of the office i.e., serving the public to maintain and improve the public good. The problem is twofold: (1) lawmakers planning to become lobbyists can create laws to benefit their future employers; and, (2) ex-legislators can capitalize on their relationship with former lawmakers, “thus providing the groups that they lobby for added advantage” (Santos 2006:134).
The political structure of Congress has always been attractive to the ambitious and the pursuit of power and prestige there has led to some spectacular careers of honorable public service. It has also led to the downfall of many who have fiddled the rules or broken them to pursue the other motivator in our triad of inducements – property. They committed outright crimes, were caught and punished.
But now there is a more subtle form of deviance in Congress, going on under the camouflage of office. Adolfo Santos says, “one of the most understudied forms of political ambition – discrete ambition – is one of the most damaging to the representative process and the legitimacy of political institutions” (Santos 2006:2). He indicates that the legitimacy of the Congress is at stake because this phenomenon is growing. The rules of government are failing to constrain the raw ambition of many of the less-moral members of our legislature in Washington DC. The representative process is being undermined as legislators act in discrete ways while in office to help their future employers. This is compromising the public good.
In this fast-moving world of illusion and spin coming out of Washington DC it is difficult for the average citizen to understand what is going on. Santos says, “As the public becomes less able to comprehend complex public policy, it becomes easier for representatives to take advantage of this ignorance and sponsor legislation that they may not be held accountable for” (Santos 2006:15). This governmental slight-of-hand is further exacerbated by the fact that much policy is being handled by a few Congressmen in committee, not deliberated in public on the floor.
Members of Congress are granted wide powers of discretion, which allows for an abuse of office and shenanigans behind closed doors, especially when the issues are not being debated in public (Parker 1992). According to the intent of the founding fathers, democracy was supposed to be a system wherein the issues were debated in public and the American people could watch and monitor the process. This is what is supposed to distinguish our governance from what we have seen in our historical analysis with the discrete, shadowy actions of chiefs, kings and emperors. Edmund Burke felt that we could rely on the moral goodness of aristocrats in government to do the will of the people. Tell that to the clansmen in the Highlands of Scotland who trusted their lairds to do right by them and were eventually thrown off their land as the lairds cum landlords demanded more and more income from the land, eventually preferring sheep to the people over which they held guardianship. On the other hand, James Madison felt that the aristocracy needed structure and rules to prevent any deceitful behavior on the part of legislators. He felt that congressional rules should function to temper the ambitions of officer-seekers. Neither has worked, as today the desire for wealth is unbridled in Washington DC.
The Kings of Kubaland hid behind a façade of divinity to pursue great wealth and power at the expense of their constituents, siphoning off enough to ensure the support of a leisure class. Ten percent of the population lived splendidly, while the rest, in various forms of servitude, labored on their behalf. The Castle-Lords and the counts of Barcelona fabricated “legal” structures that enabled them to enserf the peasantry and went on to construct a Pariah State that acted not unlike pirates all throughout Iberia, the Mediterranean and North Africa, extracting tribute, killing people and stealing land.
I am assuming that the reader can see that today: The Kings of government in Washington DC hide behind a façade of democracy to pursue ambitions not dissimilar from those of ancient politicos. They are formulating a society where the rich are getting very rich very fast; while the general population lacks a proper national security infrastructure, adequate health care and forty-eight million of our citizens live in poverty, a figure twice that of Canada and the UK and three times as high as most European countries (Hicks 2005). While Scandinavian countries have a child poverty rate of 2-3%, the wealthy USA has a rate of 21.7%. “Both the U.S. child mortality rate (8.6 per 1,000 births) and infant mortality rate (6.9 per 1,000 births) was higher than those for Europe, Canada, and Israel” (Pal 2005). This is a society where the top one percent earns twenty-one percent of the income (NPR October 13, 2007).
The camouflage of office works for a few, but not for all, as was the case in ancient Africa, Catalonia, the Scottish Highlands and elsewhere. In those distant lands of the ancien régime, élites were rent-seekers. Has this changed? Note the quote from Adolfo Santos:

Congress has been structured to be more attractive to individuals seeking to profit financially from legislative service. [There are] two ways in which the changes have made the nature of Congress more appealing to “rent-seeking” legislators. First, the decentralized nature of Congress enhances the ability of individual legislators to influence the content of regulation and laws. Second, the existing institutional controls on the avarice and discretion of legislators are exceedingly weak. These characteristics make rent seeking an attractive feature of congressional service [my insert, his italics; Santos 2006:75].

Ethics reform acts have done little to stop such avarice on the part of the fortunate few at the top. Aggrandizers can always find ways around rules. What they don’t like is the light of day. Transparency is the only hope. We must have a clear view of what office-holders are doing and the means to correct wrongdoing and ill-advised policies.

Government Camouflage & the Military Industrial Complex

We have seen that office-holders throughout history have disguised their actions behind official camouflage. They have increasingly spent lavishly on things that did not benefit society. This has reached astronomical proportions in modern day America. Furthermore, much of the expenditure is not only on what does not help America, but it is hurting America, others and the environment. President Eisenhower warned us first. Here is part of his prophetic speech:
My fellow Americans:
Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor…
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad…
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense…
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs …Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
…Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose… (Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 (Public Papers of the Presidents, 1960, 1035-1040); see: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
I have included cogent parts of President Eisenhower’s speech because I think it is important for every American to read it. This prescient warning was issued almost a half century ago and the problem of what he called the military industrial complex has grown enormously and we have gone into more than one disastrous war due to its influence. In his farewell speech he expresses the hope that Americans will not allow the military industrial complex to grow and that government officials will improve upon governing over and above what he was able to accomplish in office. Let's see what has happened since.
As I am writing this chapter, President Bush submitted his war budget for 2007 and 2008 to Congress. “He is asking for an additional $93 billion in funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the period that ends on September 30 of this year, as well as another $142 billion for the coming fiscal year which runs from October 1, 2007 through September 30, 2008” (Leys 2007).
"Procurement" covers the cost of buying new equipment, ammunitions, weapons systems, etc., which are supplied by what President Eisenhower called the military industrial complex. The amount budgeted to buy new items grew from FY 2004 to FY 2006, but is now slated to take a gigantic leap in FY 2007:

FY 2004 — $5.5 billion 
FY 2005 — $18.8 billion 
FY 2006 — $23 billion 
FY 2007 — $44.6 billion
Furthermore, because procurement money is not spent in the year for which it is appropriated and carried over, the whole process becomes fuzzy. What actually goes on at the GAO is difficult to know. In the “rolling over” process lies room for “contrivances.” Moreover, a great deal of money is being spent in a cozy relationship between government and big business.
And war spending is on the rise, up “a stunning 94% increase from FY 2006 to FY 2007… ." We might ask: “Do we have a 94% increase in spending on education; cleaning up the environment; eradicating poverty or health care; updating our decaying infrastructure? The answer is no, war spending sucks away dollars that could be spent helping society, not killing people and our soldiers in faraway lands.
What is more, there is chicanery going on in Congress and the Department of Defense. With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military is “over strength,” so the enormously high baseline DOD budget is being upped through supplemental spending bills. In addition, the DOD’s documents do not clearly indicate “much in the way of concrete and detailed information on how these funds will be expended. Nor does it give any indication of why the costs are growing so exponentially yet again” (Leys 2007). This is true military-industrial-congressional camouflage.
The funding process for Operations and Maintenance seems to be a sinkhole. Recent reports by the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office are all critical of the accounting process. They conclude that it is impossible to determine how the money is being spent. This is especially true because in the big sinkhole, there are little black holes e.g., for the FY 2005 nearly 26% of spending went to “other supplies and equipment” and “other services and miscellaneous contracts.” Likewise, of the $98 billion for military operations in Iraq and the war on terrorism nearly 25% ($23 billion) was allocated for purposes described as “other.” We have little idea how those “other” funds get spent.
And what if we knew exactly where every cent went of the over $300 billion we spend every year on war? That’s not as important as the issues raised by President Eisenhower. His main point was that the military industrial complex would corrode our democracy and war is what is fueling the deterioration of our democratic way of life. I doubt that George W. Bush has ever read Eisenhower’s words, but when he decided that 9/11 gave him the right to govern by Presidential decree rather than respect the balance of power in our Constitution, he was fulfilling the prophecy in President Eisenhower’s words.
In deciding that 9/11 allowed despotism in the White House he created what he claimed that he wanted to destroy. He forgot that “those who fight for liberating truth cannot become enmeshed in the cycle of untruth and violence that they are trying to break” (http://www.transparencynow.com/news/preface.htm).
And untruth about feeding the war machine has real life consequences for those we send to fight government-created wars. When the Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee, Senator Ted Stevens (R. Alaska) pushed for more hi-tech military equipment at the beginning of the Iraq conflict, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) raised a warning, telling Stevens that his appropriations would “undermine DoD’s ability to adequately fund training, operations, maintenance, supplies and other essentials.” The letter went on: these unnecessary expenditures “would seriously damage the readiness of our armed forces and undermine their ability to execute current operations, including the war on terrorism” (St. Clair 2005:8-9).
It is now common knowledge that that is exactly what happened. Our sons and daughters went into Iraq without proper equipment and in insufficient numbers to accomplish the task of securing the peace and rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure destroyed by our hi-tech weaponry. On a personal note, my son fought in Iraq out of a Humvee that lacked armor plating to stop high-powered fire or roadside bombs. He indicated to me that the soldiers he fought with in Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq were repeatedly short of the basic equipment needed to fight a war.
This is only part of the picture. Expenditures on unneeded war technology takes funds away from the real war on terrorism, which is about securing our homeland against bombings, germ warfare and natural disasters. In short, because of secret deals in Washington DC between defense contractors, Congressmen and staff of the state management system our tax dollars are being spent on that which makes us less safe.
Our government’s ill-advised foreign wars have created a world that is more hostile to us and less supportive of what we really need to do to secure our homeland. We spend billions of dollars a year to create “blowback” (Johnson 2000). That money could be much better spent on shoring up America’s decaying infrastructure and securing our borders against terrorists (Flynn 2007).
The Steven’s letter and thousands of documents like it:

is the congressional equivalent of the Pentagon Papers for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In order to shell out billions for Star Wars and the F-22 fighter, Congress took money from accounts that would have improved the terrible logistical planning in Iraq and bought essential items for the protection of US combat troops, such as body armor
and armored Humvees (St. Clair 2005:9).

Secret deals in our nation’s capital are sucking up our wealth and undermining America’s future. Military spending is up, but protection has gone down.
That’s because much of the real defense spending on the Hill happens after hours and is planted in the bewildering copse of congressional earmarks, obscure line items conference committee ad-ons and last minute riders that most members of congress don’t even know how to interpret. And these convert ad-ons have spiked since 9/11, rising from $4 billion a year in 2001 to $12 billion a year in 2005 (St. Clair 2005:20).

The lack of transparency in our government’s procurement practices is undermining democracy and creating the slippery slope of our decline as a secure nation. The state management system’s backrooms are the place to be for America’s weapons manufacturers because, unlike most agencies, the Pentagon is not limited by its budget. If more military expenditure is needed, money is pulled from elsewhere to keep the war machine oiled and running. Americans need to start asking: where is that money coming from? What are we not doing with it because of war?
Institutional Growth & War

Writing the script of power is usually a group effort. In cases like that of little chiefs, they attract individuals who also want prestige, power and property e.g., the shamans of the Yokut-Mono we have read about. The Kuba King had his titleholders of the élite lineages in the Kuba kingdom. The lairds of the Highlands were surrounded by their tacksmen and when they were transformed into landlords, they had their estate managers, some of whom were tacksmen who themselves had found new avenues to prestige, power and property. The Count of Barcelona formed his poleconomic base in the capital, not alone, but with the help of Paladin Lords who became his inner court, clergy and bailiffs, all of whom benefited from the exercise of power; and all of whom contributed to adding rules and roles in the manipulation of the structure.
Thus, several aggrandizers may contribute to the formation of poleconomic institutions. This is especially true as the structure becomes more complex e.g., in the case of regional chiefdoms or kingdoms where the central figure and his courtiers must try to control opportunists at the periphery – the provincial governors, who may try to replicate the core institutions in their distant territories (Mann 1986). Institution building involves internal tension and the management of conflict if the institution is to survive and thrive.
President Eisenhower warned Americans of a rising threat to their sovereignty when he left office in 1961. He called it the military-industrial complex. I am sure he could not have imagined how large and powerful it was to grow, a complex set of practices within the Washington establishment, some formal, others informal. As time passed, this complex has jelled into what Seymour Melman called state-management (Melman 1971). This transformation occurred during the Kennedy Presidency.
The state-management institutional complex was the result of actions taken to augment military power in the Cold War Era and add economic efficiency by placing control of spending for war materials firmly in the hands of civilians in government (Melman 1972:261). Robert McNamara was the principal driver, under the aegis of the President. In place of an agglomeration of practices, relationships and rules (the military-industrial complex) McNamara formed a defined administrative control center that began to regulate tens of thousands of subordinate managers. In fiscal terms, it has become the “most powerful decision-making unit of the United States government.” Melman notes, “Thereby, the federal government does not ‘serve’ business or ‘regulate’ business. For the new management is the largest of them all. Government is business. That is state capitalism” (Melman 1972:262).
Once initiated, the system became a para-state within a state with a budget that exceeded many nation-states in the world. It was the beginning of a new imperialism. It is what has brought us to a point where the United States is spending ten million dollars an hour in Iraq.
Melman says that in the formation of state-management “a lust for power has been at work” but that “it is not explicable in terms of an individual’s power drive” (Melman 1972:263). This is as we have seen in our case studies in this book: once instituted, poleconomies are driven by the combined desire for prestige, power and property by office-holders and their factions within the poleconomic framework. All institutions in the poleconomy become platforms to launch careers of individual aggrandizers. In the state-management system in Washington DC the possibilities for capturing prestige, power and property are great as the military expenditures are mind-bogglingly huge. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that when the US government sends $4 billion dollars in cash on pallets weighing 363 tons to Iraq for reconstruction payouts, that the possibilities of graft are enormous (http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/06/iraq.cash.reut/index.html, February 7, 2007). The justification for such disbursements is war. Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, put it like this: “We are in a war against terrorists, to have a blame meeting isn't, in my opinion, constructive.” And so it goes.
Four billion dollars is pocket change in a war. The real opportunities, on a career basis, are in being in the loop of military-business-government relationships, both formal and informal. The possibilities for aggrandizement are towering (http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/06/iraq.cash.reut/index.html (February 7, 2007). It is very difficult to get exact figures on Department of Defense (DOD) spending, because of the lack of transparency, but OneWorld.net estimates it at $463 billion for 2006, not counting expenditures on the war in Iraq (http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/143510/1/8523), which are running approximately $24 million a day. Winslow T. Wheeler, Director of the Strauss Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information and the author of The Wastrels of Defense estimates that it could be as high as $63 billion more than the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations’ projection (http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/defense_budget_tutorial.htm).
It is not my intention to nail down an exact figure, which no one seems to be able to do anyway, given the nature of the beast. The point is that the state-management system in Washington DC is a black hole of expenditure and a haven for opportunists. It provides opportunities for getting prestige, power and property that dwarf what is going on at General Motors or any of the top Fortune 500 companies (Melman 1972:264).
Even in the 1970s, when Melman was writing Pentagon Capitalism, the newly-created central office of war expenditure, the DOD, was “beyond compare the largest industrial management in the United States, perhaps in the world” (Melman 1972:264). Melman went on:

Never before in the American experience has there been such a combination of economic and political decision-power in the same hands. The senior officers of the new state-management are also senior political officers of the government of the United States. Thus, one consequence of the establishment of the new state-management has been the installation, within American society, of an institutional feature of a totalitarian system (Melman 1972:264).

Melman notes that in the (now former) Soviet Union this was standard operating procedure and that, by contrast, in the United States this vast complex arose “unannounced and, in effect, [in a] covert fashion” (Melman 1972:265). Furthermore, the net effect of the creation of the state-management system is to increase military capability and the likelihood that America will go to war. He says:

This competence is a war-making capability. Hence, the very efficiency and success of the new industrial-management, unavoidably and regardless of intention, enhances the war-making capability of the government of the United States. As the war-making department accumulates diverse resources and planning capability, it is able to offer the President blue-print stage options for responding to all manner of problem situations – while other government agencies look (and are) unready, understaffed, and under-equipped. This increases the likelihood of recourse to “solutions” based upon military power (Melman 1972:265).

This is a bureaucracy and bureaucratic office-holders do everything in their power to expand their activities, the number of employees under their control, the size of capital investments flowing through their office and by gaining control over subsidiary managements. In short, they do everything they can to expand the power of the state-management system and, coincidently and perhaps unintentionally, the likelihood of war.
In the state-management system, the three élites that C. Wright Mills discussed: military, political and economic, come together. Robert L. Heilbroner agreed, saying that “a military-industrial-political interpenetration of interests” benefits all three, though business is the junior partner, the tail that is waged by political and military officers who make the expenditure decisions (1965:51).
Civilians dominate the process, though there is a revolving door in Washington DC where by those who retire from one, the military or government, are attractive to business for their knowledge of how to get contracts approved. The state-management system is a playing field for aggrandizers and lots of kids want into the playground.
War expenditure, based on secret deliberations by insiders and technical experts, has taken on a mystique of invulnerability (Melman 1971). In this case, secrecy actually works to the advantage of the aggrandizers involved in hiding information from Congress and the people. Melman says, “The idea is that only persons with advanced technical training and access to secret information have the capability really to understand what is going on in this sphere” (Melman 1972:275). Those involved have been given “sacred cow” status and high-level security clearances and appear beyond reproach. Thus, more than half the administrative budget of the United States is not open to scrutiny.
It must strike the reader that this is not unlike the myth-making machines we saw in history, e.g., the efforts of the Kuba King to make a strong link between kingship and the Deity. If a domain is thought to be “not of the normal world” the average person considers it to be the province of a select priesthood. The same thing is going on with the war-making machine in Washington.
Money going into war is not going into making America safe (it has the opposite effect, spawning even more terrorism) and it is not being put into homeland infrastructure to make America more resilient to attacks and natural disasters (Flynn 2007). War funding has become parasitic. Parasitic growth refers to an expansion of production of unnecessary products, those not part and parcel of what is needed to sustain life safely in the United States. Furthermore, the products of the effort are destroyed – exploded or used up – in non-productive ways. They do not produce anything lasting for the USA.
Partly because of bad leadership and partly because our fiscal resources are going into war, we remain unprepared for the next terrorist attack or a natural disaster like Katrina (Flynn 2007). Based on the mystique of untouchableness in Pentagon activities we have allowed our government to become negligent. With a crumbling infrastructure at home, our families are less safe today than yesterday. Monies being blown up (or misplaced) in Iraq and Afghanistan could be put to better use here at home.
Most Americans are in denial over this or, like the proverbial ostriches, have their heads in the muck of consumerism. They are too busy shopping to care. Or watching TV sitcoms or “reality” shows. We are not really preparing for future cataclysms, for the real threats we face within our own borders. For example, an attack by terrorists on a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas into any American harbor could kill thousands and leave millions more without power or heat. Such an attack, with simple rocket propelled grenade launchers (RPGs) could bring the economy of a region to its knees and endanger millions. An attack on an urban power plant using noxious chemicals would kill thousands (Flynn 2007).
Our growing exposure to terrorism and natural disasters is largely due to poor leadership and our own indifference. We have an inadequate and decaying infrastructure handed down from previous generations. Old dams, inadequate dikes, an outdated public health system leaves us vulnerable. For instance, the next San Francisco earthquake could destroy antiquated levees that would contaminate the freshwater supply that most of California relies on for survival. Don’t our leaders think the terrorists are studying such possibilities?
We have abdicated our responsibility for a country in which entertainment and consumerism take precedence and wherein the Congress and we have accepted the state-management system. Most reports from the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress declare that (1) military spending is a stimulus to the economy and (2) we can spend on war at current levels and still maintain peace at home. This is wishful “guns and butter” thinking. We have been sold a myth i.e., that all this spending is about defense, when aggressive foreign policy and wars abroad have bolstered the energies of terrorists and made recruitment for them much easier.
War spending is now governed by a self-perpetuating, self-expanding war machine in our nation’s capital. It is parasitic and therefore exploitative, feeding the careers and pocketbooks of those inside the bloated bureaucracy. In our Catalonian example, we talked of the count-kings’ imperialism in Iberia and the Mediterranean as external aggression; while turning on his own people to extract renders was deemed internal aggression. Furthermore, the Crown of Aragón did little to build a social and material infrastructure at home that would benefit its people. I submit that the same processes are at work in America today.
In short, we have what Clyde Prestowitz calls an “armed economy” (Prestowitz 2003:161). Not only do we spend enormous wealth making munitions to kill our “enemies,” but also the USA is heavily involved in exporting arms. This is not surprising, since we invest in about 70 percent of military R&D in the world.

The Commerce, State, and Defense departments all maintain large staffs to sell and facilitate the export of American weapons to the world. In 1999, the last year for which statistics are available, the world’s arms trade rose to nearly $52 billion…a little more than half of this was imports by developed countries, the rest to developing countries. U.S. exports, which accounted for 64 percent of these sales, are likely to approach 70 percent in the future based on sales agreements already signed (Prestowitz 2003:164).

State management has become self-perpetuating. Even with less demand for big ticket military weapons after the end of the Cold War, expenditure on war has been on the rise, even before 9/11 and the so-called “War on Terror.”
In other words, there has been a military coup d'êtat in Washington, but not one where the military storms the White House with soldiers. Rather, this coup has been a slow erosion of the checks and balances that were written into the constitution; a rise of an Imperial Presidency; and the growth of the state development system. All have contributed to the rising power or the military as the principle driver in the U.S. economy. At the height of the Cold War, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, “It is no secret that the billions of dollars demanded by the Pentagon for the armaments industry are necessary not for ‘national security’ but for keeping the economy from collapsing” (2003:272-273).
And someone no less that the chief author of the US Constitution, James Madison, warned us long ago:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. . . . [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and . . . degeneracy of manners and of morals. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare…. (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18562.htm).

Lies about the Militarization of Space

In the next two decades, new technologies will allow the field of space-based weapons of devastating effectiveness to be used to deliver energy and mass as force projection in tactical and strategic conflict. These advances will enable lasers with reasonable mass and cost to effect many kills. This can be done rapidly, continuously and with surgical precision, minimizing exposure of friendly forces. The technologies exist or can be developed in this time period.
— U.S. Air Force Advisory Board, 1996

The state management system has fed off of weaponization on land, sea and in the air (inner space i.e., in earth’s atmosphere). Now, in public, the USA has entered into treaties to make outer space a non-military zone, but this is a lie. We are quickly moving toward a day when outer space will be feeding the war machine, although it already does, as I will explain below. Outer space will feed war expenditure in two ways: (1) it will be a launch pad for attacks on earth with a variety of hi-tech weapons housed on rotating stations pointed at earth; and, (2) it could become a battleground itself, with a variety of ships and weapons fighting each other in space.
We are already moving toward these two goals under the guise of “defense.” In 1999, several manufacturers wrote a Long Range Plan for the U.S. Space Command. It was designed to fund “defensive” systems and a “seamlessly integrated force of theater land, sea, air and space capabilities through a worldwide global defense information network” (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: ix).
Of course, what is defined as “defensive” from our viewpoint is understandably seen as “offensive” by the Chinese, Russians and others. In building weapons of any kind for space we are generating another round of the arms race, which will force other countries and ours to spend money, which could be used for better things. The estimate is in the hundreds of billions.
On August 31, 2006 the lives of your grandchildren were made immeasurably poorer by the actions of the Bush Administration. The President authorized a new space policy for America, replacing our commitment to using only peaceful means in space. The new document focuses on the military use of outer space. It also claims that keeping U.S. superiority in war is paramount in importance and resists the idea that treaties or international laws can or should limit our premier position as the world’s superpower (www.ostp.gov/html/us%20National%20space%20policy.pdf).
Thus, the Imperial Presidency decided behind closed doors to push for the weaponization of space without the people’s knowledge or consent. This leaves us with a bleak future and more needless expenditure on weaponry:

As the Bush administration continues its retreat to an outdated and inappropriate Cold War mentality, and moves toward the weaponization of space as a unilateral venture, the entire use of space for peaceful purposes is threatened. War in heaven can only impoverish life on earth (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 39).

The dollar figures for weapons in space are staggering:
Anti-ICBM defense – $150 billion (and it doesn’t work) (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 41).

By the end of the administration of Bush I, around $100 billion had been spent on anti-missile research (the largest weapons-research project in history with no positive results) (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 51).

Missile Defense at $10.4 billion was the Bush Administration’s largest single program expenditure in fiscal year 2007 (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 57).

Missile Defense is expected to balloon to a total expenditure of $247 billion between 2006-2024 (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 57).

Testing of space weapons has been going on while Americans have been busy buying things, working to buy more things and entertaining themselves. For instance, The Livermore Laboratory tried to develop an X-ray Laser to shoot down incoming missiles. When it proved a failure, the program was dropped in 1984, “although the public was not informed for a number of years” (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 49). These R&D programs spend billions and go on without our knowledge or okay of Congress or the public.
What is more, aspects of this failed X-ray Laser are back on the drawing boards as anti-satellite weapons. This is being driven by representatives of the arms industry, the Pentagon, development labs and conservative think tanks, which form a formidable lobbying machine. Weapons manufacturers are funding the effort to provide congressmen with campaign funds and perks to win over their support. It is estimated that they contributed over $4 million to thirty key members of congress in 2006 (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 49-50). They spend millions more in maintaining their Washington lobbying machine dishing our perks to important decision-makers.
It’s working. President George W. Bush ignored the failures of previous test, calling for early deployment of a national defense system, bringing back many of the Reagan Era proponents of the effort – Donald Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy and members of the Heritage Foundation and weapons manufacturers. These Neocons and their business buddies are spending billions on unneeded weaponry while America’s borders remain unprotected against the more looming threat of terrorism and our puny bulwarks against natural disasters are insufficient and crumbling.
Just as the Neocons lied about the need for war in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld fiddled the 1998 report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat. It stated that soon Iraq, North Korea and Iran would have the capability to strike the USA with atomic missiles:

Close analysis of the Rumsfeld report also reveals that Rumsfeld essentially changed the verbs of earlier less threatening CIA estimates from “mights” and “coulds” to “wills,” a shift to a series of worst-case assumptions, despite the lack of evidence of any significant changes in other countries’ real missile capability. Nevertheless, the report cited an imminent threat as the rationale for the United States to begin immediate construction of a ballistic missile defense (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 53).

Under the influence of the Neocons in his administration, President Bush in 2001 pulled America out of the ABM treaty, which had worked to prevent nuclear war for over thirty years. Just as he invoked terrorism as his reason for invading Iraq, he claimed the ABM treaty tied our hands in the effort to fight terrorism, even though a proliferation of weapons actually increases the chances of atomic weapons falling into the wrong hands (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 54). This is another step in the direction of an Imperial Presidency. One man, without congress, without the consent of the people, under the influence of right-wing ideologues, has taken away an international treaty designed to keep us as safe as possible in an unsafe world. In so doing, these conservative idealists have made the world significantly less safe.
As I write this, President Bush’s has moved against Iraq in his tripartite Axis of Evil, Iraq, North Korea and Iran. He his rattling our sabers against Iran and his refusal to negotiate early on forced North Korea to accelerate their nuclear program to get us to the negotiating table. Failing to negotiate with North Korea initially actually increased their weapons’ capacity and has made the world less safe. The Neocon mentality of aggression first has weakened America’s standing in the world and backfired in a burst of Blowback. The irony is that the Neocons bullied Pyongyang at the very time when the North Korean regime was moderating its policies, improving relations with Japan and South Korea and perhaps looking for a negotiated settlement rather than confrontation (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 59).
In our historical analysis of cases from the little chiefs of the Yokut-Mono society in early California to the Divine Kings of Africa we have seen leaders lie to their constituents. The process continues today in Washington DC and some experts feel that the Bush Administration has a “history of deceit in claiming the need for long-range missile defense and of deploying a system that doesn’t work… .” (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 64).
All this is going on with regard to weapons launched here on earth to earth targets, but the government is on its way to weaponize outer space, basing weapons there that can strike enemies in space and on earth:

In August 2004, the U.S. Air Force moved even further toward space weaponization with the release of its Counterspace Operations doctrine. The document explicitly mentions military operations conceived to “deceive, disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy adversary space capabilities.” The belligerent tone of these recent pronouncements is as disturbing as their content. They employ rhetoric of complete dominance and hegemony, not multilateral cooperation or diplomacy (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 69).

Tim Weiner of the New York Times reported that, “With little public debate, the Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars developing space weapons and preparing plans to deploy them” (2005). The ground-based missile defense system has proved a failure, yet our government is moving it into space i.e., spending your taxes on a system that has already proved a fiasco and a money-pit.
But it would seem that the administration does not believe that the ground-based missile defense system has failed but sees the move into space as part of a multi-layered missile defense system based on weapons on land, at sea and both in the atmosphere and outer space. This concept is one that surely makes the arms producers happy as more systems means more production and profits for them and for those in the state management system it means more work and kickbacks. This is also a “honey hole” in that systems can be produced and tested ad infinitum because there are none that have worked so far. The competitors are competing with no baseline of credulity. They are operating in a vacuum where the only criterion of success is getting the government contract to try to produce something that might work and the longer that process continues, the more profit flows from your pocket to theirs. This is a costly way forward:

As the United States moves toward space-based anti-missile systems, it is proceeding toward a major investment in an unproven form of defense, and one which, for many cogent reasons, should not be undertaken at all. The cost of an effective space-based system that could protect the country against an attack by a relatively small number of missiles has been established as anywhere from $220 billion to $1 trillion dollars. Spending this exorbitant amount of money on an unnecessary and unproven system, at a time when the United States is experiencing $400 billion annual deficits, huge trade imbalances, and is radically cutting benefits to students, the elderly, and the poor, brings into question both our values and our judgment (Caldicott & Eisendrath 2007: 75).

Our government is spurring an arms race that will not only impoverish our nation but will force other nations with even less resources to divert money from social programs to keep up with the United States. It could even cut into military budgets so much so that our traditional military will suffer, which seems to be the case already as many soldiers in Iraq have expressed the fact that they lack the equipment needed to fight the fight.
The Bush Administration is not only acting irrationally and immorally with regard to our people, but is debasing the lives of children and the unborn in other countries for decades to come. All this is being done is a policy vacuum in Washington DC and without input from the people. The enormously dangerous implications of a world with space weapons is in itself enough to make a rational person make sure of their utility, but this is not what drives the state management system. It is driven by greed, arrogance and profit. These are the same traits that spurred opportunists from the Yokut-Mono little chiefs, the greedy landlords of the Highlands of Scotland, the Count-Kings of the Crown of Aragón and many other office-holders we have encountered in this book, those who were supposed to help their people but impoverished them instead.

It’s about Illusion

In sociopolitical life, truth is constantly being re-shaped by power. The appearance of modernity distances us from the truth of our domination. You can control your own life less than your father or mother and they less than their father and mother, and so on back to the first appearance of the storable, stealable surplus. All along the historical path aggrandizers have been creating illusions, not very much different from the fanciful Wizard of Oz that Dorothy discovered pulling the chains and pushing the levers behind a screen. Today, “the picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality” (Chomsky 2002: 37).
To paraphrase the Democratic Party strategist James Carville, “It’s about illusion, stupid!” Since you are reading this book, you are obviously not stupid and you are not watching the boob tube, nor are you searching the mall shops for that one item that is going to make you happy (I have done all of these at one point or another in my life). But it’s still about illusion. There are still powerful forces at work in your life and mine that want you to accept the status quo. Certainly, in my Catalan example, the peasants have a very complex consciousness about their exploitation by élites. Their immediate need to maintain good relations with local Lords and their agents superceded their view of their overall exploitation and any possibility of action by them to obtain future relief. It is natural to smile at a man with a sword in his hand.
Dostoevsky wrote of the irrationality of humankind:

When in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. So I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage… [in routine]. Advantage! What is advantage? [my insert] (Dostoevskii 1960: 196-197).

Dostoevsky was talking about deviants, beatniks, poets, progressives, artists, whomever decides not to accept illusion. But his words can be attached to those mesmerized in front of a sports channel or wandering aimlessly through the countless stores and shops that have sprung up in America in the last half-century. They are caught in the routine of consumerism; they are infected with the disease of Affluenza.
When I used to do workshops on cross-cultural business for Fortune 500 companies, I used to tell attendees that, using one example from outside the United States, Brazilians work to live, while Americans live to work. This is poetically summed up in the Jackson Browne song:
I’m going to rent myself a house
In the shade of the freeway
I’m going to pack my lunch in the morning
And go to work each day
And when the evening rolls around
I’ll go home and lay my body down
And when the morning light comes streaming in
I’ll get up and do it again
Amen
Say it again
Amen

I want to know what became of the changes we waited for love to bring

Were they only the fitful dreams?
Of some greater awakening
I’ve been aware of the time going by

They say in the end it’s the wink of an eye

And when the morning comes streaming in

You’ll get up and do it again
Amen

Caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender, where the sirens sing and the church bells ring

And the junk man pounds his fender

Where the veterans dream of the fight

Fast asleep at the traffic light
And children solemnly wait
For the ice cream vender

Out into the cool of the evening
Strolls the pretender

He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there

Ah the laughter of the lovers
As they run through the night
Leaving nothing for the others
But to choose off and fight
And tear at the world with all their might

While the ships bearing their dreams sail out of sight

I’m going to get myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means?

And we’ll fill in the missing colors
In each other’s paint-by-the-number dreams

And then we’ll put our dark glasses on and we’ll make love until our strength is gone

And when the morning comes streaming in we’ll get up and do it again

Get it up again

I’m going to be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim to the heart and soul of the spender

And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Thought true love could have been a contender

Are you there?
Say a prayer for the pretender
Who started out so strong
Only to surrender (Browne 1976).

It is naïve to believe that the flow of information from the centers of media production to the public does not carry a message that instills complacency in people. This effect does not require malicious intent by media controllers, merely their desire to do a good job and make a profit along the way. But it is equally naïve to believe that there is not some intention involved. The creators behind the “dream-producing machine” do want to create needs, desires and motivations in the purchasing public. This is often simply that editors and producers want to sell newspapers or up their ratings to attract advertisement money, but in some cases there seems to be an overt political agenda e.g., in the case of Fox News, which hides behind the misleading slogan “We report. You decide.” It should read: “We decide what to report and how to slant it.”
It’s not that slanting the news is not good business. The American public is not reading the stories put out by independent media e.g., Democracy Now. Here are the stories Fox News says were most read on their website on February 17, 2007:

 Woman, 84, pleads to attempted sex abuse (having sex with an 11-year old).

 Missing Maine auctioneer turns up in Pennsylvania 5 years later. Didn’t want to be found.

 Arizona woman arrested after allegedly stabbing man during sex to drink his blood.

 Ralph Nader says he might run in 2008 if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination.

 Internet buzzing over mystery weapon found in Iraq (which was about an odd-shaped gun found in a weapons cache).

 Ricky Martin sticks up middle finger while singing about Bush.

 Reports: Britney Spears enters rehab, checks out.

 Baghdad calm amid beginning of new security sweep.

 Atlanta couple convicted of murdering son; church investigated for corporal punishment ties.

 Bomb explodes in Iran near site of previous deadly blast.

 Anna Nicole Smith’s will said estate to go to Howard K. Stern to hold in trust.

 Hillary’s malleable war opinion.

 Duane “Dog” Chapman closer to being extradited to face charges in Mexico.

 Explosion rocks Texas oil refinery, injuring 19.

 Colorado middle school teacher convicted of having students undress for sexual poses.

 Dog groomer accused of cutting dog’s ear off and gluing it back on.

Titillating entertainment seems to permeate the list. When not at the shopping mall, America does read (as opposed to malicious reports to the contrary), they just don’t read the right things, those that will help them make important changes to improve the lives of their grandchildren.
Media bosses compete for sales and ratings in a world where sensationalism sells. A side effect of competition by media executives to have their medium read, viewed or heard, is that a certain normalcy is projected, one that produces a complacency in human beings. The world will go on, despite what I think or do, and the New York Times, CNN, NPR and Newsweek will be there to report it all. The familiarity of CNN’s screen, with its well-known announcer and tickertape running underneath is a staple in American homes. Its familiarity comfortingly says: “See – Americans are well-informed.” In fact, Americans want and get a bland, white bread, version of the news. Even listening to NPR is like taking a bath with your clothes on. They play on the edges of serious analysis and critique but always stop short. Nevertheless, thank God for NPR, which presents more of the facts than most allowing a discerning listener to make up her or his mind and search deeper.
The media have a subliminal message: Don’t rock the “America the beautiful” boat. Barbara Ehrenreich put it like this: “the media are more than just an ‘environment’ or a kind of neutral space where ideas, images, and opinions compete for our attention” (2000: 10). Silence can be a message. I have traveled the world in my life and crossed the Atlantic dozens of times, living many years abroad. Every time I came back to the United States I was always appalled at the lack of world news and the superficiality of our news broadcasts. Living abroad I would get in depth and critical news analysis about many parts of the world. The American news was mainly presenting bland, non-threatening stories about American life. This approach is summed up in CNN’s Headline News approach and its one-minute segment “New of the World in a Minute.” Imagine such shallow coverage in the age of globalization where that which affects your grandchildren is being played out right now on a global stage, not in your backyard, but rather in how your backyard is interwoven with many backyards around the world.
In this book I have tried to show that scriptwriting began with the Jural Revolution and is with us today. The priests of early kings spun webs of deception to create a compliant populace. Today the news media provide this function. The kingly spindoctors were trying to distance the public from the truth, any information that would be harmful to the deal they had going with the king. Today the news media provide this function. Behind the pretty faces and gleaming teeth on CNN or Fox News are decision-makers who filter the news not unlike those robbed priests of old. In ancient Egypt, for instance, spinning illusions had a great poleconomic payoff. It still does today. Illusions still allow the power élite to pursue prestige, power and property at the expense of society
Self-delusion is the worst form of delusion. We Americans have been socialized to believe that we are something special in the world. It’s a nice story. I believed it when I was twelve. Now I am more enamored with the words of great men, like William Appleman Williams, a major figure in American historiography who wrote:

Empire is as American as apple pie.
Or as American as the ever westward moving frontier.
Or as American as helping other people, who believe the way Americans do…
Or as American as saving the world from the devil.
Or as man as the veils that Americans have woven to obscure the harsh reality of their imperial record. One of those is the myth of the original happy valley of innocence and isolationism. Another is the fantasy that world power was somehow, by someone, forced upon the United States at the end of the nineteenth century against its will. And the third is the legend that Americans have used their vast power with unique restraint and only on behalf of self-determination, freedom, and prosperity (1972: 58).

We will find ourselves in deep trouble geopolitically if we rely on acting on our own incorrect mythology. We need to move into a realm where we respect men like William Appleman Williams and Noam Chomsky and those who are struggling against the power of popular culture and the obscurantist press.
Chomsky and Herman have developed a “propaganda model,” which is an analytical framework that tries to analyze American media in terms of the basic institutional structural frame in which they operate. The authors conclude that, “the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them” (Chomsky 1988:1). They note that the media claim to be the people’s watchdog, but are not. Occasionally they report on a case that catches the public eye, for instance, the Enron scandals and it appears to the uneducated that the media are doing their job. But, in fact, they report these cases as “aberrations.” Enron shenanigans are described as individual deviations from a great system in which businessmen act morally and in the public interest. There is never any structural analysis that says, “the system is corrupt.” That would threaten élite interests too much. Instead:

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires symbolic propaganda (Williams 1972: 58).

Our system only allows newspapers, radio and television that appear to inform the public of the key issues that will impact our grandchildren. The average citizen does not see the information blitz by the media as propaganda because it is more difficult to see how this could be in the absence of state censorship. In a very subtle way, writers and broadcasters censor themselves.
We are caught up in a system wherein “money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public” (Chomsky & Herman 1988:2). And little more. This is because:

(1) the media industry is huge, owned by powerful people who support the system and who have a strong profit motive to filter the news and punish reporters who deviate from the path of presenting filtered news.

(2) since advertising is the principal source of the income of media owners, they have pecuniary reasons to filter the news in ways that do not offend corporate buyers of ads.

(3) agents of power in government, industry and “experts” provide the media with information that is already filtered. Dissidents and intellectuals are marginalized and rarely allowed to speak through the major media outlets. The media is a filter using pre-filtered information.

(4) the media receives flak from those with substantial resources, the power élite. They listen to these “squeaky wheels,” not the average citizen” (Chomsky & Herman 1988:chapter one).

(5) terrorism has replaced anti-communism as the “monster in the closet.” After 9/11, the media could again participate in a war against something. No media person could have come out in favor of communism and, likewise, no one is going to risk saying that (a) terrorists have some good points to make about American ills or that (b) the government is not firmly committed to fighting terrorism.

Our media provide information that is designed to fudge the truth. Image dominates reality. As Chomsky and Herman say, “the ‘societal purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state” (1988:298). Furthermore: “The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeling debate within the bounds of acceptable premises” (Chomsky & Herman 1988:298).
Just as our Yokut-Mono shaman acted to manipulate the truth for the little-chief, and scribes of the Count of Barcelona fabricated mystical ideas surrounding kingly power to support their leisure class lifestyle and war, the media functions in our society to present a “foggy” picture of what is really going on in our world. This is, I believe, not intended by many of the hardworking journalists in the media, who think they are doing what a journalist is supposed to do. And they are, just not by the thoughtful public’s perspective, but they please their bosses and the power élite.
Too, the media can be self-congratulatory, one arm claiming “good job” for the other arm. The myth of media independence is, thus, self-perpetuating. Contrary to the image of an aggressive press, their general lack of interest in really critical stories about the war machine in Washington DC or corporate malfeasance “have regularly permitted and even encouraged ever larger violations of the law…” (emphasis in original; Chomsky & Herman 1988:301). Patting themselves on the back, media operatives “permit – indeed, encourage – spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness” (Chomsky & Herman 1988:302; my emphasis). All the talking-heads on news programs, which have evolved into shouting-heads, appear to be debating the issues, but they are really about entertainment, not education. They talk and shout and the power élite applaud because their entire puffed-up clamor is not about critical analysis and change, just sound with no real fury.
The media analyst Ben Bagdikian indicates that the private mass media “does not merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world” (1980:x). W. Lance Bennett writes:

The public is exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media in response to these messages. … Leaders have usurped enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular control over the political system by using the media to generate support, compliance, and just plain confusion among the public (1988: 178-179).

The important thing to remember is that the top media specialists are part of the power élite or aspire to be so, rubbing shoulders on a daily basis with the powerful and wealthy to get their stories, living a fast-paced life on the expense account. News directors make an average of $73,800 a year and up to $250,000; while anchors average about $70,000 and can make a million dollars a year (http://www.journalismjobs.com/salaries.cfm). These figures are drawn from a wide range of media outlets and, of course, the major newspapers and stations pay much more than this. The salaries of the top news readers for CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox are well above $5 million annually. The CBS anchor Katie Couric is reported to have recently signed a five-year contract for $15 million. These are not “boat rockers.” If, as the founding fathers intended, the free press is to be a watchdog protecting our freedoms, then the dog is asleep, but hopefully not dead. We need to wake it up.

Commitment in the Modern World

Nootka chiefs and Highland landlords were doing some very similar things as modern capitalists in the global economy i.e., they were strategizing how to maximize their prestige, power, control over people and productive output, though the rationalization of the market had not yet really penetrated the region. They created institutions to bolster their quest. Theirs was a small game, now the gaming board is global, but it seems that the moves are more or less the same – how can I get more for less, how can I squeeze a little bit more value out of my position, my land, my people? The office-holders inside the state-management system (the military-industrial complex) don’t voice it as such. They have their own rationalizations, but the net effect of their actions (and inaction) on your grandchildren will be monstrously dreadful.
The motives of chiefs were a little bit different from Highland landlords, who came to dominate toward the end, as the Lowland Crown and English Market completed their penetration, but the processes were similar and resonate with what is today happening in the global economy. Enormous profits can be had by a few at the expense of the many e.g., playing Casino Capitalism (Strange 1986) in which big-time investors gamble with the future of your loved one, while pursuing immediate rewards. History has the lessons, but few are reading.
Chomsky wonders why domination continues. Most people think, if they think about it at all, that it is because government officials manipulate the truth. That certainly exists but Chomsky is perceptive enough to realize that, except in totalitarian societies, government is not the main manipulator. He says:

The problem isn't ‘governments,’ at least in the West. They are not much involved in doctrinal management (though there are exceptions, like Woodrow Wilson and the Reaganites, both of whom ran huge state propaganda systems – illegal in the latter case; there were no relevant laws in the Wilson era). Doctrinal management is overwhelmingly the task of corporate propaganda, which is extraordinary in scale and very significant in impact; and [it is also] the task of the general intellectual community…who perform a very important service by setting the bounds of discussion and thus entrenching the unspoken presuppositions of the doctrinal system…governments are marginal, outside of totalitarian states, though attention is always focused on them, to direct it away from what matters (31 March 1995; quoted in Barsky 1997:211).

I would say that almost everything Chomsky has written or said I came to on my own and I am almost always in agreement with his poleconomic views. Nevertheless, sometimes he goes over the edge, as with the last statement "to direct away what matters.” This implies a conspiracy – that some guys in a backroom are conspiring to direct our attention away from the fact that “it’s the economy stupid!” This is Chomsky’s frustration coming out, I believe. I feel it too, but the sickness of the West, what I call affluenza, is an infectious result of very successful capitalist production, a gigantic enterprise to produce anything and everything anyone might want, even if they don’t know they want it.
The projection of doctrine and the manufacture of consent is the end result of millions (trillions?) of decisions by office-holders in government, the business world, the media, the world of international organizations e.g., the World Bank, IMF, WTO, GATT, G-7 get-togethers, World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland (or wherever) for example. What is important is not who is running the show, but that the show is being run so far away from the average person that they: (1) do not know what is going on and, (2) could not do anything about it if they knew. Globalization has taken care of that.
It’s no longer about decision-making in Washington DC or Detroit. It’s about resolutions and assessments being made in Beijing, Bombay or Bonn. It is in the mix or a myriad of daily decisions about the deployment of prestige, power and property that our world today seems overwhelming. Yes, aggrandizers all over the planet are conspiring to manufacture consent, to get us to see the world as they want us to see the world. But they are engaged in a cottage industry. Any one effort is insignificant – peanuts. What is noteworthy is that which is so hard to comprehend – the end result of all those individual aggrandizing moments. It’s the global system stupid!
The nice thing about James Bond movies is that there is one, really weird, bad guy ensconced on some island and that when Bond finally kills the tyrant, the world becomes safe. We could substitute any comic book hero – Superman, Spiderman or whomever. It is a fantasy. The real world is much more complex. It is damn hard to kill aggrandizement. Lenin tried and it sprang up like a noxious weed right in his backyard – Stalin!
As long as there is a surplus to be had, history shows us that aggrandizers will scheme to corner the market. As long as there is power to be accumulated, aggrandizers will strategize to be sure that, when all is said and done, they are the powerful.
This is not rocket science. Rather it is common sense. You already knew this. I didn’t open your eyes to anything that you didn’t already know. The real question is: What do we do about it?
The answer is “struggle.” I could have written “nothing,” and the end result might not have been significantly different (but don’t tell anybody). Joe Six Pack and Noam Chomsky are going to get the same poleconomic world (though Noam is not going to be as happy about it as Joe). But if you believe that a better world is possible, then work to make it happen. Ask: where can I make an impact?
So let's talk about impact. Your impact is going to be like a ladyfinger, which in my youth was an effete firecracker, unlike the explosive cherry bombs. You are never going to set off an atomic explosion in the vast world system at work. But it is important to understand social evolution.
It was a big shock to me in my intellectual journey to realize that we are not civilized. We are still Neanderthals. We are cave dwellers, intellectually speaking. Some of us can imagine a much fairer society, but there are powerful forces that will work, on a daily and nightly basis, to prevent that world from taking shape. Why? Because élites greatly benefit from an uncivilized world. They like it like that. Civilization is not in their interests. Yet, it is in the interest of the vast majority of humanity.
You need to choose. Are you going to pander to the few or help improve the lives of the many? Struggle! Find somebody who thinks like you and get to work. Struggle! We have a long, long row to hoe. We are really infantile hominids with selfish social systems that have evolved to the benefit of the few at the expense of the majority of Humankind on earth. Take a stand or watch TV.
If you choose to take a stand and fight oppression then realize that it is not the political establishment or the economic establishment that you need to address, but the poleconomics of reality. By that I mean that, in actuality, neither politicians nor CEOs have power that is independent of each other’s powers. It’s poleconomics stupid! That is, it is the intermixing of decisions by businessmen and those by politicians that result in Affluenza, the sickness of over-consumption in our society.
You won’t change the world overnight. You might die thinking you have failed. But it is important that thinking individuals, those of you taking time out from slot machines and daytime TV to read this book make an effort. There is a cumulative effect. Certainly there are other cumulative effects going on. Perhaps we will devolve into the Dark Ages again, as opposed to the Gray Ages in which we are mired. But personal commitment is needed to lighten our world, to bring rays of hope into what clearly, to this point, has been a social world fabricated by élites for élites.

Press Your Government

The emperor has no clothes!
— Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875)

If you commit to putting pressure on the American government to move in a more humane direction it is imperative that it alter the idiotic foreign policy based on the false premise that we can spread democracy around the world.
It should be clear by now that local cultures and ways of life have not “melted” in America, which was supposed to be the great melting pot experiment. People cling to their religions, languages, customs and don’t easily “melt,” even in a single country. It is infinitely harder to spread democracy around the world. When we try, we fail, as in the former Soviet Union.
If President Bush knew a little history, he might not have blundered into Iraq spouting inane reasons. The historian Will Durant wrote of Greek democracy. After Alexander the Great’s conquests of Asia, the Greeks engaged in a centuries’ long effort to democratize the peoples who fell under Greek hegemony. Durant wrote:

The masses … continued to speak their native tongues, to pursue their long-accustomed ways, and to worship their … gods … . There was no such fusion of races and cultures as Alexander dreamed of; there were Greeks and Greek civilization on the top, and a medley of Asiatic peoples and cultures underneath … . Oriental monarchy proved more powerful than Greek democracy, and finally impressed its form upon the West … the Asiatic theory of divine right of kings passed down through Rome and Constantinople into modern Europe … . The Greeks offered the East philosophy, the East offered Greece religion; religion won … (1997:577-578).

It didn’t work for Alexander, it didn’t work for the Catalan Count-Kings, it didn’t work for the British Empire and it didn’t work for the Soviet Union. Trying to establish hegemony over culturally diverse peoples doesn’t work, even if the goal is laudable. People everywhere feel that local is better than distant; small is better than big; ours is better than theirs. We have been watching the Former Soviet Union break into its constituent cultural parts for a couple of decades now. How is it that American politicians think that they can do what history shows is not possible?
George W. Bush claimed after 9/11 that he had capital and that he was going to use it. He did and he has used it up and now the American people have finally awakened to the fact that his policy in Iraq was ill-conceived and ill-advised. The only way to police the world is to do it with guns and America does not have the military personnel to even effectively beat insurgents in one small country, Iraq. How much more difficult would it be to have to try that on a much larger scale. We cannot and should not be the world’s police force. We should concentrate on our own national interests, not on wasting tax dollars on cultural imperialism.
Press your government to spend war monies on a universal health care system, education, fighting environmental pollution and detrimental emissions. There is so much that could be done at home with what goes into war. On an NPR talk show the other day I heard a truck driver call in and make a very valid point. He noted that because of a lack of a good rail system in America guys like him were making a living hauling around goods that could be more cheaply and efficiently moved by rail and the atmosphere would not be receiving enormous amounts of petroleum emissions from trucks. How many tanks and fighter jets does it take to build a railroad?

What We Need To Do

This book has been about the lack of transparency in poleconomic matters. I have also noted that democracy provides its own special brand of obfuscation. Our democracy exists, as well, in a whirlwind of affluence, in a bubble of exuberant consumerism, the likes of which the world has never seen. In such a maelstrom of options, it is hard to know which path to trod if you are interested in doing something significant.
If I had to pick one issue that I consider to be critical to the future of the human species it would be transparency. We are not yet civilized. We are in the infancy of the quest to find an equitable society where human needs are met, where trillions are not spent on war and where people are encouraged to find positive ways to express themselves.
Why is transparency the most important issue? Because improved transparency allows us to see and gives us an opportunity to know what politicos are doing with respect to all the other vital issues facing us: war, pollution, poverty and health care, to name a few.
In order to have a world where government works on the proper issues, which will take time to achieve, we must have transparency in government, corporations and the media. If we allow chicanery to continue behind the closed doors of government, corporate and media offices we will get more of the same – a Hobbesian world of all against all and Humankind against the environment.
Work to increase transparency in these three domains and you will be contributing to creating a better world. How can you do this? First, read diverse views. For instance, I read The Economist and listen to Fox News to get perspectives that expand my knowledge of what mainstream pundits are saying. I also read The Nation and Harper’s Magazine and pursue websites like Democracy Now! (http:www.democracynow.org/) and Common Dreams (http:www.commondreams.org/). I have also read a great deal by Noam Chomsky, although anymore I don’t dwell on what the progressives are saying because I could write most of what I read and I don’t grow in the process. Find your balance point and read.
Secondly, get involved. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman end their wonderfully revealing book, Manufacturing Consent, with this paragraph:

The organization and self-education of groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and activism, continue to be the fundamental elements in steps toward the democratization of our social life and any meaningful social change. Only to the extent that such developments succeed can we hope to see media that are free and independent (1988:307).

Will this take time? Yes, by all means, but remember that we have just taken the first step in a thousand-mile journey toward becoming civilized.
Find an avenue whereby you can act to reduce the opacity of office and increase transparency. It is vitally important that we know what is happening in the halls of power and that we devise strategies to curb very natural abuses that will occur if we don’t.
Here is a partial checklist of things to do beyond working ardently for greater transparency:

1) Push for more checks, preferably constitutional, on the power of the Presidency. If Congress has more power, it is closer to the people.

2) Work to make government leaders understand that it is our imperialist foreign policy that is generating hatred and terrorism toward the United States. End State Terrorism. Stop trying to remake the world in our own image.

3) Lobby for more diplomacy and less threats and aggression in our foreign policy.

4) Try to get our government to untie foreign aid (much of our “help” to poor nations has a rider that aid must be spent on American goods and services).

5) Work to get across the perspective that we are sinking environmentally, while we play the world’s bully (it doesn’t help to pick a bar fight when the Titanic is sinking).

6.) Make poverty-reduction an important national agenda.

7) Demand universal national health care.

8) Push for the creation of a viable national railroad system, while banning long distance hauling by trucks (unless zero emissions fuel for trucks is developed).

9) Demand that the money now going to war goes to education and that we create a national campaign to value teachers and intellectuals (some propaganda is good, after all).

10) See to it that the media presents a full range of viewpoints on crucial issues – from progressive to conservative.

11) Fight racism.

12) Insist on a better national defense system against nuclear attack and terrorism – your grandchildren are going to need it after the way our government has behaved.

Demagoguery and poleconomic oppression transpire when good people do nothing. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

SOURCES – CHAPTER 10: CONCLUSIONS

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St. Clair, Jeffrey. 2005. Grand theft pentagon: Tales of corruption and profiteering in the war on terror. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press.

Strange, Susan. 1986. Casino capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Transparency Now http://www.transparencynow.com/news/preface.htm

Weiner,Tim. 2005 (May 18). “Air Force Seek’s Bush’s Approval for Space Weapons Programs,” New York Times.

Williams, William Appleman. 1972. The rise of an American world power complex. In: Bliss, Howard & M. Glen Johnson (Eds.) Consensus at the crossroads: Dialogues in American foreign policy. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 58-72.

www.ostp.gov/html/us%20National%20space%20policy.pdf

Domination: Chapter 9

2010-05-17T11:54:00.001-07:00

9. Fabrication, Imperialism and the Extortionate State in Catalonia

The Rationalization of Rule

In twelfth century Catalonia communication between government officials and locals was less legal than it was informal, based on customs, the spoken word, of reminders, sometimes spilling over into intimidation. The Catalan legal system was profoundly affected by the increased use of convenientiae and written documents. Though presumably informal settlements continued to occur, the definition of evidence changed in formal court settings e.g., seigneurial, comital and ecclesiastical. The new legal system was moving away from the other means of settlement and toward a new officialdom. And in comitally-supervised settlements there was a shift from oral to written procedures; from the more or less oral placitum to a court based on the book. Before the document explosion of the eleventh century, in the ninth and tenth centuries, there was a working legal system organized by comital officers. These codes and practices were recorded in the Liber Iudiciorum. Yet, this was largely an oral system, with testimonies and oaths being given at assemblies (placita), though documents were admitted as evidence. This was variously presided over by counts, viscounts, bishops, abbots and secular judges. Wrong was assessed to one of the litigants or a judicial decree was issued. The proceedings were documented in writs called notitiae. Other writs were variously called recognitio, professio, exvacuatio and conditiones sacramentorum.
The Forum Iudicum, or the “Gothic Book,” as it came to be known, was a law book held by later counts. Legal representatives of comital law referred to the codes contained in the book to make legal decisions, the Forum Iudicum being openly consulted by judges. This was done in a formulaic fashion. Citations were largely procedural, rather than having to do with the interpretation of law. There was a bit of ritual or public display in this, the book acting as a relic and symbol of the past. Hence, it appeared to those present that things were being done “by the book.”
Legal changes produce concomitant changes in social life. That is, law affects social status and relations in society. Legal creation is more than a learned masquerade. It is the power to transform. Paul Freedman says of Catalan relations:
Legal teachings and innovations influenced relations between Lords and peasants, even when not describing an already-established actuality. The act of categorization can be shown to have had real-world influence on the mobilization of seigneurial power, its legitimization, the behavior of state authority, and the lives of the peasants (italics original; 1991:220).

This change, however, was not uniformly directed or felt in society. It was asymmetrically directed and legal change sponsored by élites had differential effects in society. As a case in point, written documents came into widespread use after the period of blatant cruelty (1020-1060). Writing gave brutality a distinctly legalistic cast. Through the Power of the Pen, paladin abusers became dignitaries and honored citizens. Documents became evidence, in a legal sense, even if the holder of the document could not read them. When legal conflict came up, documents proved essential. Bensch says:
In 1207, one donor was forced to declare that no document relating to the property in question remained in her possession, and later in the century documents were drawn up to record the transfer of charters kept in a box from one party to another for safekeeping. Even for those with the most rudimentary understanding of Latin, the manipulation of written texts already played a critical role in the business activities and judicial system of Barcelona in the eleventh and 12th century (1995:376).

This “new law” (increasingly comital law) was fashioned by the powerful in society. Voluntary settlements were nominal. In fact, the prohoms, local notables, had much more power to effectuate a desired result than peasants did. When such notable men appeared at a hearing to give evidence, act as signatories or intervene as official mediators (adiutores) or give judgment, they possessed cultural force embedded in their manner of speaking, dress and demeanor. It was asymmetrical justice. Formal procedures of adjudication had given the weaker party some protection. But the role of the prohoms expanded significantly. The collective weight of the prohoms claiming the privilege of interpreting local customs shifted the balance away from equality toward domination.
Writing was a poleconomic tool of the élite. By codifying custom, writing it down in their own way, formulating the words and phrases according to real or fabricated maxims of some ancien régime – Roman, Carolingian, canon or Visigothic – they could move law in the direction of their interests to the detriment of the illiterate class, those who merely signed the document with an X. Élites were doing the interpreting of ancient law, selecting or rejecting of its parts and its encoding. Law in their view became the law of the land, be it the seigneurial castrum or the larger domain of the Count of Barcelona.
Romanization of the legal process spurred state power. By the mid-twelfth century written evidence was well on its way to replacing ritual as authority, the latter being demoted to the status of mere ceremony. Monarchy had come to focus on written law and genealogy as testimony of valid claim. Until 1220, both compromise settlements and this new formalized justice system existed side by side. After this date, private compacts and evacuations lost ground. Traditionally, they were used for minor disputes, particularly over common walls and gutters between neighbors. Important cases were now settled by officialdom. Arbiters were still employed, but now they tended to have formal legal training and “they reached decisions fully exonerating or condemning the litigants.” Bensch sees this as a more efficient system, with a scribe being permanently attached to the court as of 1227. He says, “The transformation of the vicar from a ruggedly independent, often defiant delegate of comital authority to a dependable agent of justice presiding over regular courts reached its conclusion in the early thirteenth century, lending stability to local administration but also undermining the authority of prohoms and the method of dispute resolution they promoted” (1995:80).
This formalization of law had been going on for centuries by the time poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries decried the rise of legal sophistry and the confusion created by lawyers using Roman law to slow the legal process. In other words, the legal process was seen as having legitimately become dominated by the state and the élite estates e.g., the high ecclesiastics, nobles, knights and leading bourgeois.
A strong royal framework of legality had emerged after the chaos of the seigneurie banale. It was a royal system supported by rural lords and urban patricians. The count set up town councils to aid in governance. The men who acted as consuls were not unlike prohoms. They had élite interests, not those of the peasantry. Once more, Bensch notes that they were more formal in settling disputes, following the line of reasoning that this was an improvement. He sees the use of Roman law in the vicar’s court and town councils as a positive step. The consuls and the vicar were vying to dole out normative justice. I’ll bet they were vying for poleconomic positioning too. They were agents of a new form of domination, or rather an old one that had preceded the iniquities of the seigneurie banale. But just because legal processes became formalized and fell back into the bailiwick of the count-king in Barcelona, we must not automatically assume that this was not an exploitative system. Increased royal domination was still domination. Bensch hints at this later, saying that in spite of the organized and dependable nature of comital justice, below the surface, a tense, drawn-out struggle for power took place within the city. Professor Bensch indicates, however, that the change was positive. He sees secular urban courts as an improvement over the arbitrary justice of the castle-lords. He says:
The legal transformations behind the revival are multiple and intertwined: the promulgation of the complete Usatges with a marked regalian tone by count Ramon Berenguer IV, probably between 1149 and 1151; the infiltration of Roman and canon law into Catalonia in the twelfth century; and a renewed interest in Visigothic law…the distinctions between the various legal traditions are largely irrelevant, for they all Reinforced the power of the vicar and promoted the use of documents, the summoning of witnesses, and the dispensation of authoritative judgment (1995:80).

After 1250, the new legalism of the state gave rise to a cohort of lawyers, the iurisperiti. Over the next forty years, thirteen individuals appeared in Barcelona charters having the title of iurisperitus (lawyer). The professionalization of law was proceeding both within the auspices of the Crown and of the noble community. Romanizing formulae were being memorized and put to use. Prominent burghers who were knowledgeable in law were often appointed to assist the vicarial courts of Barcelona, attaching magister to their names. Members of the urban patriciate slowly absorbed the new legalism. They came to see the value of a knowledge of Roman and even canon law. This tied burghers ever more closely to the king and gave them access to public office and entrepreneurial opportunities. Royalist rather than republican sympathies provided a distinctive legalistic coloring to Barcelona’s patriciate. By the thirteenth century, some were called advocats or barristers and the lesser lawyers doing the legal paperwork were notaris. The rise of notaries or scribes at this time was a wide-flung phenomenon. Baldwin notes:
within the Mediterranean cities appeared the profession of notary, who attended to the legal side of business by translating documents, keeping records and certifying contracts. The notaries’ place in Bologna in the late thirteenth century is attested by their palace in the center of town. By that time a special school and curriculum had emerged to teach notarial science, for which Bologna was renowned. The result of these communal and notarial schools was to create a small but increasingly influential class of literate laity, which would have been an anomaly in an earlier period. The movement began in Italy, but by the thirteenth century all of western Europe was feeling its effects (1971:32).

Along with the new legalism, was there a new compliance? It depends on the class of the accused and his relative power vis-à-vis the accuser. We might keep in mind that in a stratified society, there are different levels of “withdrawal power.” The reader should not get the impression that the legalization of poleconomic life in medieval Catalonia led to conformity on the part of the accused, even those convicted. Presumably the peasantry had less wiggle room, but I’m sure they did have their ways. But it was élites who could more easily ignore a verdict (L. iudicium) of the placita and other judicial fora. For example, the case in 1017 of Hug I of Empúries and the Countess Ermessenda. He claimed land she possessed. In his complaint against the countess, Hug had not used normal procedure and confronted her directly. When she had suggested a placitum, he countered with the offer to settle the matter by a trial by battle (between a knight from each camp). She parried, citing the inappropriateness of this settlement process in Gothic law. Hug, who allegedly had little respect for the fine points of legal procedure, seized the land by force.
Ermessenda initiated a standard legal proceeding with a complaint against Hug. A placitum was held but Hug was a difficult participant. The judges had to devise ways to keep him at the hearing. When the verdict went against him, Hug and other aristocrats of his region refused to accept it. He simply walked away and the only recourse at that point would have been the sword, but the records end there and we do not know how the case was resolved, if at all. In the absence of a strong public authority and powerful troops to back up its judicial judgments, avaricious lords with their own knights could defy higher authority. If one or more of the parties to a dispute were unwilling to accept the judgment of the court, the proceedings would devolve to the level of violence.
Open expropriation of the peasant surplus and the direct exploitation of the peasantry had to be legitimized. This was done by juridical means. The power of the lord over the servile peasant was usually expressed in jurisdictional terms. The rich and powerful intuitively understood that to remain rich and powerful they had to limit entry into their class. This was true of town oligarchs and of the rural seigneurs. They were aided by those men who profited from being at the periphery of their power. Hilton says that the seigneur controlled the means of making money and was helped in this by the conservative elements in the community. Hilton rightly zeros in on the legal and administrative structures noting that through the courts of the castrum either the lord or the village notables operated a deliberate policy of breaking up accumulated peasant holdings to prevent a significant enlargement of the property on behalf of the wealthier peasants. This legal framework had commercial ramifications and served to maintain the status quo in the community.

Centralization and New Forms of Power

Legal conditions were falling more and more to comital control. The corts of Catalonia and the cortes of Aragón had two noble chambers, but no equivalent of the House of Commons. Between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries in Catalonia, Aragón and Valencia, the cortes held legislative powers. From the fourteenth century they exercised the right to authorize taxation and to make changes in the law.
After the seigneurie banale, the Crown was becoming more solidified, though bureaucratization was slow, creeping from personal rule to the rule of law. Even at the joining of Aragón and Catalonia, the king’s rule was still quite personal, even arbitrary. But the political theory of the Usatges and the Peace of God, supported by the church and Barcelona, was growing, leading to territorial consolidation and the spread of public authority. The delegation of royal powers to the countryside would eventually be institutionalized. The structure of domination was being written, so to speak, in royal statutes:

So while the old curial title of “seneschal” became hereditary and honorific in the Montcada family, ministerial functions in diplomacy, justice, and finance evolved in the king’s court among the more enterprising knights, such as Bertran de Castellet in the time of Ramon Berenguer IV or Guillem Durfort in that of Peter II, but especially among the secular clerks and scribes through whose labours professional literacy became indispensable to government (Bisson 1986:51).

As with bureaucracies everywhere, it was the “behind-the-scenes” worker bees who laid the foundations for formalized domination. This formalization of government was preceding to the chagrin of the military élite of Old Catalonia, the one social cohort that had ceased to prosper in the late twelfth century, but it was lingering on nonetheless.
Even before 1200, the Count of Barcelona was keeping records and other counts began to follow suit. Their household governments were also being bureaucratized, using written communication to extend their power geographically and to provide a record of what was said and transacted. This extension function of written documents was important in uniting Catalonia’s geographically separated countships, a decentralized model that even extended into the Aragón-Catalonia alliance: Catalan and Aragonese government remained mostly decentralized, and at the very best the unions constituted a federation of secular and ecclesiastical lordships. The federation produced a network model that struggled for rationalization into a genuine system that would work with the unified Arago-Catalan dominion.
The reality of the realm was more disorder than canonists and secular lawyers would have liked, but written documents prevented it from becoming too disorganized and fragmented. Part of the problem was that the castle-lords who had received comital fiefs came to regard them as private property. There was always poleconomic tension between these independently-minded Men of the Sword and the shaky public authority of the Count of Barcelona and lesser counts. Written documents provided some “glue” to the tenuous hegemony.
A century after the end of the “time of troubles” (1020-1060) the count-kings were still attempting to put the authority structure of their office back together. Slowly, they instituted a new legal system based in the courts of their vicars. This court became the “hub of justice” in the city. Vicars assumed important new judicial and supervisory capacities (remember these were the same officers renown for promoting extortion in their role as “revenue farmers” for the Crown).

Box 9.1. Genealogies of Counts and Kings

Counts of Barcelona

(Overlapping Claims)
Bera 801-820
Berenguer ca. 830- ca.835
Bernard of Septimania ca. 820- ca. 844
Sunifred I 844-848
William son of Bernard 848-849/50 (by seizure)
Alleran 848-852
Odalric 852- ca. 858
Humfrid ca. 858-864
Bernard of Gothia 865-878
(Appointed by Carolingian Emperor)

Guifre the Hairy
(Wilfred I) 870-897 (killed in battle)
Guifre II
(Wilfred II Borrell) 897-911
Sunyer 911-947 (abdicated, dying in 950)
Miro 947-966
Borrell II 966-992
Berenguer Raymond
Borrell III 992-1017
Berenguer Raymond
I (the Crooked) 1017-1035
Raymond Berenguer
I (the Elder) 1035-1076
Raymond Berenguer
II (the Fratricide) 1076-1082
Time of confusion 1082-1097
Berenguer Raymond
III (the Great) 1097-1131
Raymond Berenguer
IV (the Saint) 1131-1162 (Also Count of Provence)

Box 9.2. Kings of Aragón & Catalonia

Alfons I (the Chaste) 1162-1196
Pere I (the Catholic) 1196-1213
Jaume I (the Conqueror) 1213-1276
Pere II (the Great) 1276-1285
Alfons II (the Liberal) 1285-1291
Jaume II (the Just) 1291-1327
Alfons III (the Benign) 1327-1336
Pere II (the Ceremonious) 1336-1387
Joan I (the Hunter) 1387-1395
Martin (the Humane) 1395-1410
Fernando I 1412-1416
Alfons IV 1416-1458
Joan II 1458-1479
Fernando II 1479-1516

Alfons I (1162-1196) assembled a more efficient royal fiscal administration to deal with wayward bailiffs. He knew his domains better than ever before – and such knowledge gave him power. With his death and those of his chief accountants, this efficiency waned, reverting to a lack of professionalism in auditing and accounting procedures, yet it limped along. By the death of Jaume I (1213-1276) the bureaucratization of rule was well under way. Besides the sheer mass of documents accumulated by this time, this process showed the following characteristics:
 Centralization;

 Use of litigation, where written evidence assumed primacy over oral tradition;

 Assembly-line production on paper, mass copying and standardization of diplomatic form, formulas, abbreviations, punctuation and terminology;

 Use of classification by region, sub-units and cross-referenced through toponymical and subject indices;

 Abstracts and extracts;

 Records management through registration systems that produced summaries and authentication e.g., the use of author names, addresses, dating, purpose statements, authorizations and witnesses.

The Count of Barcelona was able to bring the government together by using written documents, archives and retrieval systems and by institutionalizing a more rational accounting structure. The seigneurie banale was raw despotism. What we see afterwards is a slow process of institutionalizing the cruelty of the seigneurial reign of terror. De facto mistreatment of tenants becomes de jure. Violent mistreatment becomes ius maletractandi. While the seigneurie banale favored situational oppression by the élite element in Catalonia society, over time that torment became formalized and directed from Barcelona through a more organized system of offices. Professor Bensch and I view the same historical scene somewhat differently. A “dependable agent” for him is a positive step; whereas I would ask, “in what way is he dependable?” In answering my own question, I would say that the system of domination and extraction of value from poor people simply became formalized – moving the exploitation from the level of the countryside and castrum to the urban court – from the hands of the rural seigneur into those of the burgher in vicar’s robes. Moving from a face-to-face system of exploitation to a more formal one, where exploitation was embedded in law books and legal procedures may not be a positive step when viewed from where the peasant sits (or stoops). Somehow, from that perspective, a distant urban bourgeois vicar doesn’t seem to be a better extortionist.
In addition to newly institutionalized oppression in the national government, there were new players in the game of dominance – members of the urban burgess class. We have seen some trends: a shift in power from rural to urban and from the lordship to the Crown. Connected to the Crown, increasingly, were financially sound urban merchants capable of supplying the king with the wherewithal to pursue his goals.
Whereas in the earlier days bailiwicks were awarded based on feudal relationships and trust in the bailiff based on sworn fidelity, later writs speak of bailiwicks being bought and sold. They were also awarded to creditors to cover the Crown’s debt. A bailiwick could be sold (vendere) by promising the Crown some predetermined part of the revenues. Clearly, for a bailiff with a “sharp pencil,” this was an advantageous way of doing business because the bailiff often had a fair degree of management leeway, at least in some administrations. From time to time there were reports of a crackdown by Crown auditors to check fraud and sometimes stop the unfair oppression by the bailiff of peasants in his domain.
Furthermore, since some of the received goods were perishables, bailiffs sold them on the open market, yet another exchange that could be fiddled to his advantage e.g., by selling them below value to a family member or friend and then taking a kickback. Also, the type of coin taken in such a sale could be juggled, taking valuable coins and exchanging them for inferior or debased coins in the private accounts of the bailiff. Bailiffs could “play the market” by “selling” goods to an associate for a low price, who would then hold them till the market was better, splitting the difference with the bailiff. Men in Barcelona did not compete for bailiwicks for nothing.
With regard to fiscal accounts, they were often written in note form and later recorded in administrative registers, such as the Libri Computorum Domini Regis. That transcription offered another change for alteration, as the originals (one level of transcription already) were discarded. Even these, written on paper, tended to disappear in time. Thus the oral script register discarding of the oral record was a process that favored those doing the recording and discarding. When it was completed, the register book was the final authority, as one chronicler put it: “as it is written in the book of accounts of the Lord King.” The justification for these records lay with the bailiff and his scribes.
But true accountancy in a system in which the bailiff was collecting rents in kind, services and coin of various kinds and values was extremely dicey. There was not much in the way of routine reckoning from bailiwick to bailiwick. This enabled a falsification of accounts by the bailiff as dues in kind, those provided through service and cash of varying amounts and quality of coin were computed, one kind being converted into another. Off-books income was part of the bailiffs’ game.
As tenure of bailiwicks was foreshortened the Crown developed better auditing procedures to foil malfeasance by bailiffs, though this system of accountancy was not as rationalized as many in Northern Europe. The accounting procedures were better under some administrations than others and generally remained more personalized and ad hoc than in the north. In northern terms the accountability of the Catalan count-kings was not so much backward as culturally different. As Bisson says of Catalan government:
the burden of traditional practice weighed heavily on fiscal administration. The delegation of autonomy of accounts remained vulnerable to financial urgency and baronial pressure, the auditors incapable of drawing a clear line between ordinary and extraordinary finance. Better perhaps than any other such records of their time, the early fiscal accounts of Catalonia evoke the disturbing ambiguities of an evolution from patrimonial exploitation to public administration. They offer precious witness to a distinctively Mediterranean administrative culture in its formative age (1984:I:57-58).

In 1151, accounting in the royal bureaucracy took a new turn. In that year, a grand survey was compiled for the old comital domains being directed by Bertran de Castellet. His approach prescribed the obligations of the tenants in the count’s lordship and also specified the shares of bailiffs and vicars charged with collecting renders. “This marked a step toward accountable service in the count’s domains,” according to Bisson. Indeed, he elaborates:

It is likely that the survey of 1151 was preparatory to a more demanding supervision of the bailiffs, for soon thereafter audits for individual domains were being recorded in written forms that became regular in the 1170s. By that time the inquires into the deportment of functionaries had been in progress for many years, quite long enough to prove that tighter surveillance would not suffice to transform territorial lordship into administration (1998:75-76).

How the Crown used Documents to Dominate

In the twelfth century Count Ramon Berenguer IV sought to reestablish his judicial authority, codifying many customs and practices in a new compendium of the law of lordship and fiefs known as the Usatges de Barcelona. He also instituted the institution of the capbreu or inventory. It was to include statements (querimoniae) of what the office-holders had seized from peasants, as well as statements of account (computa). Bisson notes:
What was apparently new at that time was – to speak of an innovation of territorial lordship in our terms – the idea of administrative review, the idea that prescriptive accounts (such as capbreus) should be supplemented so as to afford periodic statements of collection and balance by means of which the ruler’s courtiers could form better judgments of the quality of service (1998:79).

A text can become a “rally flag” for an organization or a cohort of “true believers.” In Catalonia, the Count of Barcelona deftly used the Usatges in this fashion, building a political system that could effectively counter the aggrandizement of the Sword, the piety of the Cross and the eagerness of the Purse. By writing a text like the Usatges, the “blur and buzz” of real human behavior in the past becomes concentrated and framed in a certain way, usually one advantageous to the writer, writers or class of writers.
I have said that documents can be used as political tools or even as weapons. Let me illustrate that with a case from Francia. A jurisdictional dispute arose between the diocesan bishop, Bishop Arnoul of Orleans and the Abbot of Fleury. The bishop claimed the right to try a case concerning a monastery and the Abbot of Fleury said it should be referred to Rome. To break the stalemate, the abbot methodically set to work researching his case. He put together all his arguments in two collections of texts between 991-994. His research was organized in favor of monastic liberty contra episcopal authority. His documents claimed the right to refer any dispute between the bishopric and a monastery to the pope. Armed with these texts, the abbot set off for Rome. His presentation of the case, backed up by researched texts, won him a privilege of giving Fleury an exemption from the coercive power of the bishopric. His case, as presented in Rome, was no different from that which he had been making for years in letters directed to the pope, but the mere fact that his ideas were now documented and arranged in a logical format based on research gave his argument punch.
The Count of Barcelona could not rule effectively by sending armies to force every minor rebellious prince to his knees. That would have been an impossible task. More effective bureaucratic administration was the key option and written documents greatly facilitated this, as governors and churchmen and lay governors began to rely more and more on public records. They could consult public archives; but more importantly, records (or copies) could be transported to a point of crisis in the countryside. Thus, rule of law could be taken to areas the central government was trying to tame, and there were many frontier towns in early Catalonia.
As the castle-lords were busy formulating a new world of peasant domination, so too did the Count of Barcelona reformulate his relation to them and the people at large using documents to establish feudal ties with rural magnates, to provide town franchises and to record the proceedings of legal actions, courts and later parliamentary doings. As with the Frankish society of its roots, life in Catalonia was transformed into one largely dependent on the written word for its religion, legal system, government and learning.
Roman archives did not survive intact. Medieval scribes wishing to use Roman law as a justification for present practices had to rely on scraps of parchment, scattered documents and glosses. Thus, the medieval record was creative according to McCrank. In other words, scribes had to interpret and interpolate quite a bit, and there were thousands of forgeries designed to re-create Roman law in the image held in the mind of the scribe and/or his employer. Baldwin notes that this had been done prior to the seigneurie banale and its aftermath:

The initial problem for the formation of legal science was the assembling of authoritative legal texts, but for the Romanists this task had been performed long ago. In the sixth century the Emperor Justinian at Constantinople had ordered the compilation of all Roman law into four major books: the Institutes (an elementary legal manual), the Digest (a collection of legal interpretations of the great classical jurists), the Code (legislations), and the Novellae (new laws). The total collection was known as the Corpus iuris civilis and embodied the highest expression of the Roman legal genius for centuries (Baldwin 1971:71).

The Corpus iuris civilis (a.k.a. the Justinian Code) was available to students of law in the eleventh century and greatly influenced how Catalan law was put together, but again Catalan scribes had optional law codes and could cherry pick which laws they wanted to support their case. Nevertheless, the Justinian Code was supportive of lex regia and would have been used extensively by comital lawyers. However, it did not come as a unified bundle, but with glosses and interpretations by contemporary jurists. Deciding which documents were the most important – fiscal records, privileges, titles to land and castles, treaties, decretals, glosses, summae – and then guarding them was a political act, obviously one with economic consequences. In a Weberian sense, Catalan officialdom was becoming rationalized with the preservation of hegemony in mind. McCrank notes that these governments, from Ramon Berenguer I (1035-1072) through Ramon Berenguer III (1097-1131), were beginning the process of using writing as a way to wield power across greater distances.
As Brian Stock has commented, “the new was often camouflaged in the vocabulary of the old.” By sifting through ancient customs, by combining old usages with newer practices, one could compile a cultural frame that was conducive to current poleconomic interests of the recorders. The fabrication or maintenance of domination could be accomplished in this recording-storage-retrieval process when the status of the oral informant and the recording agent (or his employer) were poleconomically asymmetrical.
The political history of Catalonia comes to us through documents, which are always imperfect and slanted records. Written documents leave out most of what happened in the day. Furthermore, not all primary records that were once created made it into our hands. Some were accidentally lost, but we must also ask who was preserving what and why. There had to have been poleconomic reasons why some documents were created in the first place and, beyond that, why some were protected and preserved more than others. Also, if records were destroyed deliberately, and they were, why was this done and by whom? These factors create a bias in the written record and taint our understanding of the emergence of a written culture. The clearest instances of preserved written records come to us from the papal chancery, royal chanceries and the lay notariate. Religious documents served to bolster the poleconomic strength of the Church; the same being true of royal records and reports; and the lay notariate’s instruments were preserved because of their importance to commercial development, providing, as they did, evidence as to ownership and rights to income relating to property.
After the Time of Insecurity (1020-1060), there was a need for order. Documentation provided a sense of this and Ramon Berenguer I (1035-1072) seems to have understood the political value of writing and textuality. By reforming how business was conducted, with greater forms of control, precision of language and written documentation, the count could more effectively rule and the monasteries could more easily control their donated properties. This was a time when both secular and ecclesiastical princes developed an “obvious forethought of the future,” as Professor McCrank put it. He notes that “a search was under way for older authority, precedents, proof and evidence, whatever its source, to compile the new codified and authoritative law.”
The Usatges de Barcelona was a law code traditionally attributed to Ramon Berenguer I (1035-1072), but it was really put together a hundred years after his reign. Fernández-Armesto says it was “cunningly predated to give it enhanced prestige” though it contained some genuine eleventh century ordinances pointing at the regulation of knightly violence. It was likely authored later and attributed to an earlier date to acquire a patina of antiquity:

(The Usatges) included the forbears of most of the great baronial families of the mid-12th century. Law was good if it was old; by presenting a program as the work of the count’s ancestors, the compiler insulated him from attacks. Second, the code includes elements that have been seen as part of the formulation of a ‘theory of the principate,’ including a declaration of the Peace within distinct territorial boundaries, a call for stable coinage, export controls on sales across the frontier, and the use of the Romanist appellation princeps. According to this theory, after his great conquests in the late 1140s at Almería, Tortosa, Llerida, and Fraga, a triumphant Ramon Berenguer IV set out to create a territorial principality, beginning a survey of his domains and reconstructing the comital court. The Usatges form a part of this rethinking of comital power (Kosto 2001:279).

Propaganda does not always work. In this case, comital distortion appeared as a façade behind which Ramon Berenguer IV (1131-1162) and his compilers were attempting to construct a new conception of territorial power using an amalgam of custom and Romanist law. Perhaps the land barons saw value in the Usatges too because they used the book to their advantage from time to time by citing appropriate passages to support their interests in specific cases, usually concerning castle tenure. This is a good Catalan illustration of a wider principle: that élites can use codes and legislation to their advantage by selective reading and sifting through the rules to pick out those that foster their vested intersts. In this specific case, the castle-lords were able to use the count’s own propaganda against him by selecting those conservative passages supporting their jurisdiction and making them the central issue of the Usatges, not the regalian program that was the true interest of the count. As Professor Kosto put it, in the constitutional debates of the twelfth century, the “count lost control of his own weapon.”
Once custom was written down it could be modified only by a new redaction and was assumed to have existed in that form for all time and the natural evolution of customary ideas and procedures was thereby arrested. Documents functioned to record customs and memory and to project praxis into the future (the past & present aspects of documents). Furthermore, they acted to permit laws and practices, encoded on parchment and paper, to be transported from the castle keep to outlying areas (their spatial extension aspect). In fact, the Count of Barcelona had multiple copies of important documents made, as did other magnates, so as to be able to take them to moots and court proceedings, or to store them in the countryside for local reference. The spatio-temporal aspect of written documents allowed élites and their clerks to fabricate a self-service poleconomic order, one that maintained a hierarchy of domination that lasted some four hundred years.
This “constitutional crisis” lasted for most of the last quarter of the twelfth century. Some barons claimed exemption from the Statutes of Fondarella (1173), claiming that they had not sworn to uphold them. Others pointed out the newer statutes were in contradiction to the Usatges. One written code was being used as a weapon against another.
It was a constant struggle between the state-formation desires of the comtes and independent-minded paladin lords. Some barons, such as the Count of Urgell in 1187, were persuaded to institute a Peace and Truce based on comital law emanating from Barcelona (the Statutes of Fondarella instituted in 1173 by Alfons I, the Chaste, 1162-1196 ). Others were more recalcitrant. It was an ongoing struggle between territorial hegemony and that of independent fiefdoms. The barons were required to swear allegiance to Barcelona under oath, but it was difficult to enforce such symbolic niceties. At first, the effect of the statutes was to drive a wedge between those magnates loyal to the king and those opposed to public authority based in Barcelona. Yet in time royal power was enhanced by the process. Thomas Bisson noted that the 1173 decision to transform the old diocesan Peace into an instrument of royal territorial law was of fundamental importance for the future of Catalonia.
The count’s next move was to revise the statutes to make them more in accordance with the Usatges, which he knew were more respected by the baronial cohort. He also made some minor concessions to the barons hoping to win them over. The revised text was published in 1192 at Barbastro. The barons, however, saw this as another attempt to spread the overlordship of Barcelona. The king also sued some magnates, and went to war in Urgell (1186-94), though the details of that struggle remain unclear. The barons remained uncomfortable with a king and his entourage who seemed to be living high, while taxing the countryside to promote their own pleasure. Furthermore, they felt that their access to booty had been cut off by administrative fiat.
The king was fighting the forces of particularism (independent-minded castellans) and attempting to institute his wide-flung suzerainty. This was a time when the castle-lords were raiding each other for animals and loot and there were barons who disagreed with the policies coming out of Barcelona. In the early thirteenth century the House of Barcelona tried to get the Statutes of Fondarella amended to allow for raiding those lords who were not commended by the count-king.
One apparent strategy with regard to documents, the converse of forging them, was to lose them or claim that if not written, a royal action had no force. In 1188, the king promised not to levy the general tax called bovatge. Later, the subsequent king claimed that the withdrawal of the bovatge had not been “formalized” and imposed it again. This led to further conflict between the magnates and the Crown, so much so that in 1205 Pere II (the Great, 1276-1285) solemnly renounced the new taxes, retaining only customary encumbrances on his own domains. Furthermore, as a concession to the lords, he promised to reserve the appointment of vicars for knights of Catalonia to be chosen by general consensus and consultation with the lords and that the vicars had to swear to rule lawfully. These and other points were incorporated into a charter, similar to the Magna Carta, but there is no evidence that the charter of 1205 was ever disseminated, let alone observed. The magnates and castle-lords had independent ways.
The barons wanted some control over the appointment of vicars. The king agreed to this in 1205 at Girona. He would henceforth only make such appointments with the advice of the “good men” and only those of Catalonia could be vicars. It seems, however, that such “agreements” were widely disabused by both sides. The king continued to act arbitrarily without consulting the barons. The latter kept on with their violence and looting. In spite of the resistance of the barons, the Peace and Truce evolved slowly into territorial public administration.
Catalan history is filled with ideological contrivances that perpetuated privileged lives for the few and insecurity for many. The divine right of kings was a common one. In 1464, for example, Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles portrayed those rebelling against the Crown as abandoning Christianity. His logic: since the king was divine (or at least divinely appointed), to oppose him is to oppose God.
As part of the rationalization of administration, monks copied documents into a codex for easier retrieval. These copies could also be carried by traveling justices of the peace – to multi-site courts to litigate disputes. Documents produced there could also be brought back to the central archives. These many pieces of paper could then be classified according to name, date, place, subject and organized in a fashion that would allow easy retrieval. In essence, Barcelona was taking the state to the countryside.
The House of Barcelona also took it to the urbanites. The king turned to the townspeople (burgenses), granting them specific protections in the statutes of 1198. By the reign of Pere II (1276-1285), they were being invited to the periodic corts.
Also, in 1197 the king instituted new territorial-based taxes to be collected by vicars. He justified these with an urgent necessity of the Saracen war. Holy War became a stock excuse for seeking funds by the king.
In addition to using written documents to get across a political message, the counts of Barcelona used art. Not only were words used as political power, but also the documents of the cartulary were accompanied by illustrations or drawings, and were thus called illuminations. The artwork was calculated to project a powerful image of comital and kingly power. The count-king is not depicted alone, on his throne, holding his symbols of office, which was the standardized image of a king; but rather was drawn as an administrator, one actively involved with others in the work of ruling. In one picture, the accountant Ramon de Caldes sits just to the right of center, reading a document to the monarch, who is surrounded by his courtiers while a seated scribe works at a desk on the right. This is a depiction of a working king, one actively involved in administering a kingdom, presumably for the benefit of the people. This is an image of king as governor. Furthermore, the focal point of the artwork is not the king, nor any person in it, but rather it is the document being held. It is as much a proclamation of the value of documentary power as it is of royal power and the two are clearly linked pictographically. This is art as power, art as representing the written word as power. Kosto says, “The care taken to make the work a lavish production, its organization, and its artistic program allow the cartulary to transcend its administrative functions by expressing various conceptions of comital and royal power: the prince as territorial sovereign, as lord, as member of the court, or as administrator. Text and image combine to communicate more than the mere content of the documents (2001:285).
Not only were the counts attempting to use documents to create a more structured state, but also they preserved them for future reference. Archives had existed since Roman times, but became increasingly important in the formative years of the Catalonia State. The popes kept archives and, along with the efforts of Charlemagne, were direct continuators of Roman administrative practices. Rosamond McKitterick notes that also the Merovingian royal government should be considered as “firmly tied to the written word.” Also, the Visigoths preserved several of the administrative practices of Roman Spain in which writing played a key role.
Long-term retention of documents was thought commensurate with long-term rule. In the fabrication of domination, ecclesiastical scribes produced a variety of documentary tools for an enlarged court system and this increased litigation that relied on written documents as evidence, which was unheard of during the previous eras.
By binding loose parchments into codices it was thought that preservation and portability would be increased. This was especially desirable for judges to carry with them on circuit rounds. By the reign of Jaume I (1213-1276), mobile archives had been invented, both in loose charters in moveable chests and copies in even more portable volumes, in addition to local repositories of records for reference by traveling judges.
This archival rebuilding process continued during the reign of Ramon Berenguer III (1096-1131). It was part of a rationalization of rule, with a consolidation of comital manses northeast of Barcelona and a tightening of accounting over revenues and a revival of documentation, which included greater standardization and more continuity in the extant series of the cartulary. This effort at rationalization of rule was coupled with a renewed offensive against Islam and a resuscitation of incomes from the lucrative parias (tribute payments) from Muslim kingdoms. Now there was more money flowing through the administration and hence a greater need for accountancy.
Cartularies were a source of royal power. But this power was not extant in a body of dead letters. It had to be created through organization. Scribes were enlisted to shape society, create culture and formulate poleconomic reality. For example, because of the unification of Catalonia and Aragón:
Ramon Berenguer IV and his spouse, Queen Petronila of Aragón, had a critical need to codify more than cartularies to restore order, consolidate their realm, and reform it for the new era. They had to revamp the entire legal system, accommodate customals and Roman law through such efforts as the codification of the Catalan Usatges, and secure their archives as well as make them work with the scriptoria and chanceries that generated records. Unification was an enormous task, with an enlarged span of control three times the former magnitude. Moreover, this had to incorporate two Latin-based cultures with two vernaculars and more than six regional dialects (not counting the supra-Pyrenean complex), a sizable Jewish minority, and a third kingdom in which Muslims constituted the majority (McCrank 1996:I:279).

As the historical-material conditions changed, documents were added to the royal archives to update the Crown’s control over heretics, Jews and Moors. These additions also dealt with the regulation of prices and interest payments to Jews and mundane matters like the prohibition of tournaments. Jews were also prohibited from being vicars or judges. Others instituted the Inquisition. Also, there was the supportive work of Pere Albert, reinterpreting the Usatges in favor of the Crown, with respect to homages, fiefs, procedures and the power of castle-lords. Additionally, there was the Costumes de la Mar, for which Barcelona was later to become famous. Jurists tried to ground these changes in Romanist and canonist principles. In Aragón, a similar process was afoot in the codification of the fueros.
Historical preservation is a form of fabrication. The first line of preservation is what is written down and what is not. Beyond that scribal activity, the way documents are arranged, which documents are kept and which are discarded – all lend themselves to providing a certain slant to history. Thus, this preservation process has poleconomic power.
Having an organized archive with properly filed documents gave the Count of Barcelona and later the King of Aragón-Catalonia a legal edge on the unruly upland counts and castle-lords. It allowed the count to win court cases and spread his hegemony, eventually over all the land. Convenientiae and archived texts were a source of reference for political leaders trying to maintain the power of the State. Another form of political documentation came out of the legislative process, once the Count of Barcelona established the Catalan corts. From about 1301, in Catalonia there was increasing solemnity of the notarial record into which were incorporated letters of summons, together with summations of legislative and administrative procedure, pointing to a new recognition of the corts as a celebration of the associated powers of king and the estates.
The corts could alter the documentary record to benefit the interests of its aristocratic members in what appeared to be normal legislative change, even under the guise of being democratic (we will see this process still at work in the modern day administration of the American government in chapter 10). In the resistance to royal power in Catalonia, in 1412 for example, the corts demanded a new compilation of Catalan law. It was written in both Latin and Catalan by order of the diputació (the permanent delegation of the corts). This took place under what appeared to be a system of checks and balances between the key estates of the realm: the nobles, the urban bourgeoisie, the church and royalty. Since 1299, the count-kings had had to swear to abide by corts-produced law. No statute could become law unless ratified by the legislature. No royal member could be a member of the corts. On the surface, this seemed to be a system where there was a degree of liberty for Catalans.
With the formation of the Aragón-Catalan Crown, additional tensions were drawn into the political scene in Barcelona. Again, written documents were the basis of rule, with new twists in administrative procedures. Early in the fifteenth century, a veritable constitutional program was formulated. A new series of documents were written up based on resolutions by the corts. They stated that, henceforth, the king’s council (audiència) would be chosen by the legislature and that they should judge independently of the king. Recognizing the foundational nature of the Usatges and Constitucions of Catalonia, the king and his audiència were prohibited from making any judgment that countermanded a written code.
A conqueror was not done when the last arrow flew or the sword cut through the last of human flesh. A second battle always had to be fought, in early times in an oral re-definition of the situation; in later times, with the Pen. Professor McCrank says of the Kingdom of Aragón/Catalonia, “The paperwork attending to king Jaume’s conquest and reorganization of this mixed Christian-Muslim kingdom was extensive. An array of lawyers and scribes was more vital to his achievement than were the contingents of crossbowmen and knights. Thousands of documents went out to settlers, franchisers, and officials; thousands more proliferated at local levels (1996:I:294).
As the Catalans pushed into Muslim territory and established New Catalonia, documentation continued to play a key role in administration. Texts like that of the Regiment de la Cosa Pública was written by the jurats of Valencia and became a “manual” of government there and in Barcelona. Once these documents contained the ideas and embedded interests of the rics-hòmens in government, they became standard points of reference for further rule. Thus, over time, a base of written documents accumulated in Catalonia that codified élite concepts and procedures that enabled their continued creation of inequity in society.

The Legalization of Oppression: Internal Extortion

What the Sword had carved out, the Pen began to secure for the nobilitas of Catalonia for “all time” and with greater and more burdensome rents. The castle-lords became the scriptwriters, while the serfs were the actors in the play of feudalism. Who was at the top of society changed throughout European history: at times it was the king, his court and counts; at others that level of public authority ebbed away leaving a new “top,” that of the castle-lords. In spite of this ebb and flow, for the peasant there was always “someone” up there with a Sword. At times that is all the noble held in his hand; but at other times he held a book, that contained the rules of governance, which of course his scribes had written. Sometimes it was the king’s scribes writing, at others it was the clerks of the nobility. The peasants had no scribes.
Documentation was part of the process of exploiting peasants. Hilton makes the point that the intensification of exploitation and the increased documentation are not unconnected because these documents were the by-product of the administrative activity involved in the organisation of the thirteenth-century baronial estate.
In essence, feudalism in Catalonia was a time in which each person had to be documented, through oath or writ, as having a set place in a hierarchical order. The castle-lord was in such an élite hierarchy vis-à-vis the counts above and the milites castri below. The knights ruled over the peasantry. Under the seigneurie banale, peasants of the castellany were now asked to place themselves, under oath, in some permanent status, some immutable role in society. And it was a subservient role, to be sure. Peasants became serfs, as castle-lords demanded that they swear “documented” allegiance.
In the long haul, the Pen proved more powerful than the Sword, which in the later Middle Ages simply became a symbol of the aristocracy. This was a legalistic assertion of lordship that was to change the relation of lord and tenant and that between lords. It would even draw the Count of Barcelona into the new order of things, as he eventually began to compete with other landed magnates by giving out fiefs of land to attract and retain principal supporters. This more legalistic assertion of lordship would do more to impose serfdom than the direct violence of the eleventh century. While in the Period of the Sword (1020-1060), domination came with the sound of hoofs; later it was ushered in with the scratching of the Quill. Penning in key terms, phrases and clauses to contracts, scribes were able to capriciously fashion contracts to the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.
This imperious penmanship continued through the eleventh through thirteenth centuries to constantly refine documents to the benefit of the lords. This often came in the form of an oath made by the peasant, for example the 1129 deposition: “I promise, my lords, that I will reside on this land of Cocola and that I will be yours, as a man ought to be to his best lord.” As historical-material circumstances warranted, the lords simply changed the conditions of the depositions. Bonnassie notes the factors leading to create wealth for the lordship: technical progress, the conquest of new land and a corresponding increase in agricultural production. But this was not shared with the peasantry. The sociocultural context of the era was such as to make it impossible for peasants to benefit for long from the new wealth born of their work. No longer had slavery disappeared in Catalonia, than new chains were forged binding the peasant class to the land, condemning them to a sentence of hard labor with little remuneration. Furthermore, the creation of the powers of the ban or seigneurial jurisdiction prepared the new servitude, which was all the harsher because farmers had, for a short span, been able to believe themselves to be free.
Superior knowledge of the law and the customs of the land can be a powerful poleconomic tool. In a world of constructed rules, the writer has power, as does the person who understands the rules themselves and the alleyways between them to permit behavioral scope. Both writing and comprehending the law then becomes doubly powerful. For example, in 1171 the Bishop of Urgell complained that Ramon of Castellbò had detained episcopal tenants by illegal means. Ramon replied that some of the men were “his men” and others were held “by common custom,” which amounted to saying that he held a territorial right of jurisdiction. In this new world of feudalism, those with power could find “this or that” legal justification for their power grabs.
“This or that” often lay in the mists of time. The castle-lords began to search the past for legitimizing evidence to support their privileges and right to rule. As had occurred elsewhere in Europe, Catalan jurists began to study Roman law, selecting snippets of legal phrasing to justify the formation of a new legal code for Catalonia. The new codes relating to land and commended serfs were formulae of servile dependence and attachment to land that had been forcibly taken. The glove of law was being slipped over the fist of oppression.
The lords pointed to the writing of certain jurists of the past to confirm their thesis that servitude should remain intact. Legal strategists sought to elucidate particular points of law supporting domination and to describe and underscore the privileges of the lordship using Catalan custom and practice as rationales. Remember, many of these customs and practices had been committed to paper and could be used as precedents. In addition to law and custom, moral arguments were made i.e., that it was correct to maintain a poleconomic order that kept a “proper” balance between the estates.
By using Roman law, the castle-lords were constructing a mental edifice backed by paper writs, one that defined status and relations in self-interested ways. This allowed a sharper distinction to be drawn between those considered legally free and those who were legally unfree. Roman law was interpreted to mean that a free man could lower his status by means of a written agreement – by way of adscripticius, the inscription of his status, binding him to the soil. Thus, by using written documents and court proceedings, the tyrannical lords of the seigneurie banale were codifying procedure and routinizing transactions of oppression.
These “rights” of the lord were fabricated over time based on legalist interpretations of past customs, especially Roman law. Latin texts were used by élites to dominate the peasantry. Any infraction of these rules could be treated as a breach of contract, putting the serf in jeopardy of physical harm or fines or both. The indemnities placed on the remença serf often exceeded the means of the average peasant to pay and they were continually raised to insure this:
1070 – 2 ounces of gold
1072 – 6 ounces of gold
1079 – 2 pounds of gold
1090 – 5 pounds of gold

Shrewd landlords would have understood the impact of a codified form of custom on the minds of those accustomed to submission. If the lords were writing new law, why were they doing so? Basically, they were trying to turn their short-term gains into permanent ones. Once the oppressive base was established, those with Sword Power could begin to build Pen power. Kosto describes this for Catalonia, saying tenants:
had to pay a yearly sum consisting of a portion of the profits earned from the land or, rarely, a fixed quantity of produce. From the mid-eleventh century, there begin to appear in the contracts new elements that recall the terms of castle-holding agreements, including promises of fidelity, prohibitions against choosing another Lord (senior) for the property, and statements that the land was to be held in service and fidelity. Provisions that limited the contracts to grants for life or for the life of the beneficiary … gave way to language that implied perpetuity (my emphasis, 2001:108).

The lords were looking to firm up their patrimonies – to find long-term security in the written word. But some peasants sought the same. We see peasants seeking adscripticius, perhaps to be understood by the logic of the adage: any port in a storm. Some peasants offered themselves as the lord’s property to fix their dues and achieve a degree of security in a hazardous world, even enserfing their offspring and future generations. The downside of this “security” was that they could not make any unauthorized departure from the land. The advantage to the lord in written adscripticius documents was to be found the specificity or fine print that could be included. Kept in the castle, such a document could be used as a point of reference in any judicial proceeding later. For example, if a serf ran away and it could be shown in the document that there was no statute of limitation on the time the lord had to retrieve him, then the serf was never free no matter when and where he was eventually found. Freeman notes that the castle-lords were trying to circumvent comital law and place peasants under their own jurisdictions. Newly enserfed peasants had to renounce their former rights and submit to a new legal code, a private legal structure of the castle that was fabricated based on usurpation and a privileged interpretation of Roman law. As lords assumed the ownership of lands, peasants placed themselves under the jurisdiction of these élites through acts of commendation. They would be required in the presence of witnesses to place their mark on a written document stating that they were the “lord’s man.” This legally tied them and their family to a given piece of land and the lord-owner.

Oral Custom to Written Law

Ancient local custom, that established in the Marca Hispanica after the time of the Visigoths, was oral in nature. Oral history and traditional customs did not disappear once the lordship began to use written documents. The feudal bond between vassal and lord was enacted orally and ritually but written documents added specificity to the property rights and other privileges involved in the relationship. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, property relations became more important. Oral bonds become translated into written ones, as it became increasingly clear to castle-lords that solidity of patrimony through time could best be accomplished by wielding a Pen rather than a Sword. Ceremonies of investiture, designed “to ratify” according to traditio (tradition) came to be translated into written terms like festucare. This word written down in a document harked back to the Salic practice of exfestucatio. These terms derive from the Latin word festuca, meaning the reed or rod used as a symbol in performing various legal actions in ancient times (literally, “a piece of straw”). Throughout Feudal Europe one of the several things a lord could place in the hands of a newly made vassal was a straw, a twig or a short stick as a symbol of the bestowal of power. The receipt of the festuca symbolized the vassal’s formal acceptance of the establishment of a contract made between him and his new lord. Translating custom into written form was an act that provided the writer with power. The impact of such a document on peasants steeped in local beliefs often appeared to be one more symbol of authority and hence was powerful. Was the legal superstructure insignificant or tangential to the control of the community by the lordship? My view is that it was a momentous tool at times, but not the only one in the toolbox. There were economic and military tools as well. Status was important to the villagers themselves and that would have set up some degree of self-regulation e.g., if from time immemorial “everyone” had helped with the harvest of the lord and a given “deviant” refused to participate, s/he would have come under heavy community pressure, perhaps even accusations of witchcraft.
My experience from living in African villages tells me that once a person gets a reputation for being a deviant, it invites other sorts of labeling that can make his or her life very uncomfortable. Most of the time, people tend to gripe and grumble, but they go along with the crowd.
In the twelfth century, in the church, as in government, there was a shift going on from office based on sacral criteria to secular criteria, one based on rights, not rites. This was the widespread shift from liturgy to law. In this process, written law became increasingly important. Whereas in late antiquity, estates in society had been ranked based on their nearness to God, increasingly poleconomic power was to take over the ranking. Society was starting on the road to secularism.
I am mainly concerned, however, with the development of the state in Catalonia and its merger with Aragón, when it was much less personalistic than in the early days. Until late in the thirteenth century, rule by counts was done from horseback, as they visited their constituents and conversed face to face. This was because they had dispersed castles and important men to visit and renew their relations. By the thirteenth century in Northern Europe, personalistic administration was being rationalized and bureaucratized. This was much less so in Catalonia. Bisson says, “It would have been difficult to maintain a central account when the bailiwicks of Catalonia were being granted and their receipts recorded at different times of the year and, in some cases, not even at yearly intervals. Moreover, the king cannot have had much use of knowing his net domain proceeds when in practice he assigned payments on local revenues so freely that the accounts only exceptionally showed balances in his favor” (1984:I:153). In this loose administration, the king could play his poleconomic games, the Holders of the Sword could speak their minds over a glass of wine and the Men of the Purse could line their pockets more easily while in office. This was a personalistic system with a great deal of wiggle room for all concerned.
The less bureaucratic ways of these early times – horseback and homage, so to speak – slowly saw the advent of written documents in Catalan administration, but they did not completely transform the system into a rational bureaucracy. Initially, writing was used to confirm oral commitments, personal relations and to record bonds said to be firm – sort of a “documented personalism.” In other words, orality and documentation co-existed functionally.
Even the traditional concept of domain accountancy was not for purposes of cost analysis or budgeting; but rather was to verify rights and fidelity. It was a system based on personal relations between the count-king, his inner circle and the field representatives of the Crown. It was a system, in a time of economic expansion and its accompanying avarice, which did not lend itself to the control of graft. In such a system, the kings were reluctant to insist on the direct accountability of domains in the way that was already normal in Northern Europe. In this more feudalistic system, fiscal management for increased profit and efficiency was in its infancy. Control of domains, a vicarage or bailiwick, were given to noblemen known to the king or to creditors, practices that belied rational control.
To be sure, it was a “loose” accounting system. The notariate and scribal culture of the day did not lend itself to efficient accountancy, orderly auditing or clear numerical description of precisely what was happening in the king’s domains. Bisson describes less than rational scribal practices, a system with practical limitations: “scribes, it seems, helped to endow the most local occasions of account with ritual solemnity, summarizing the calculations in narrative rather than linear or itemized form” (1984:I:156).
Documents were used to confirm feudal rights and duties. For example, the count in possession of several castles could commend one to a junior, giving him responsibility over its maintenance and security in return for fidelity. This set up a chain of command. Documents were the paper trail of this authority structure, making explicit who controlled what for whom and for how long. And the documents showed the nature of tenure. Did the recipient receive full rights of alienation (rare), or usufructory rights or merely the right to take rents from the tenants. There was a myriad of variations in this regard.
Catalan documents fell into three groups: those dealing with civil and criminal law; those that concerned feudal customs; and others pertaining to sovereignty. The latter established that the Count of Barcelona derived his authority from God (non est potestas nisi a Deo). Thus, his powers to fulfill his legal, executive and judicial functions were being defined as royal, as in the case of a Divine King. The codex also notes that he held these powers for the good of the people. Yet he had dominion e.g., no one could construct a castle without his permission. His princely authority lay in the fact that “the world cannot live without justice.” Unfortunately, this ideal was not born out by comital actions in the history of internal and external aggression by the state.
Of course, state leaders claimed special circumstances in Iberia i.e., as good Christians they had to fight the infidels. God was unfurled as a military banner ahead of the Crown’s aggression against Muslims and as a general raison d'être of governmental authority. But the nobility too claimed to have God on their side. As both rushed to reap the benefits of their defeat of Muslim forces in Majorca, En Nunyo Sanç, Lord of Roussillon and Cerdagne, who had made the largest contribution to the victory and had claimed the largest reward, declared: “the king ruled by virtue of God’s grace,” and that nobles such as himself were “equally blessed.” Surely, he said, he was a vassal of Barcelona’s House, but also held such a position by divine election as well. Fernández-Armesto says, “The Count of Empùries, who spoke after (En Nunyo Sanç) in council, made this point explicitly on his own behalf and that of his kinsman, Guillem de Montcada: God has “made them” and they held land not only of the count-king but also “of their own allod.” Indeed, all the dominions accumulated by the House of Barcelona were and would be circumscribed by a fudged line between sovereignty and suzerainty” (my insert, 1992:45).
The count developed a regalian theory of power (potestas regius), which shows up in the Código ó Compilación de los Usatges and also the increasing Romanist thinking of his jurists. The use of written documents was of great use to the Crown. It helped the count to eventually establish a strong central government in a land of individualists. The absolutist position temporarily won out over social contract theory (the pactista philosophy) – the view that governance should be based on a contract between the key estates in society, but with the establishment of the corts social contract theory gained ground.
Documents were used to firm up offices, duties and social, political and economic relations. Ramon Berenguer I (1235-1276) not only had unbridled castle-lords to deal with, but his mother, Ermessenda, was a power-hungry thorn in his side as well. She had ruled as regent after the death of her husband, Count Ramon Borrell III (997- 1017). She was a daughter of the Count of Carcassone to the north of the Pyrenees and had pretensions to rule herself and certainly wanted to elevate the name of the House of Barcelona to rival those in Francia.
In a desperate effort to find allies among the lords to counterbalance his mother’s efforts and to cement his hold on the shaky feudal hierarchy, the count turned to the written agreement. In 1054, he sought out the notoriously fickle Count of Besalú, who came to Barcelona and swore fidelity (iurare fidelitatem) to become a man of the Count of Barcelona. The proceedings of the placitum were duly recorded by Ramon Berenguer I’s scribes.
Though it was not always effective, Ramon Berenguer I saw the value of the use of the written word to cement social relationships. During his reign, his scribes entered an era of scribal creativity and experimentation. There is a debate among historians of the area as to whether the count was a great innovator in this documentary revolution (Kosto’s position); or whether he was imitating the revolution already underway among the castle-lords of the area (the position of Bonnassie). I do not want to get mired down in this “primacy” debate. Rather, what is more important from my point of view, is this: a revolution was under way in which élites, great and lesser lords, were all (within a decade of each other) scrambling to document their dominance and privileges in the poleconomic hierarchy. Furthermore, over time, the “scramble” increased, as can be seen in Box 9.3.

Box 9.3. Castle-holding Agreements among
the Lay Aristocracy (1025-1174)
Dates Number of Agreements
1025-1049 3
1050-1074 20
1075-1099 29
1100-1124 29
1125-1149 35

The bureaucratization of rule also had a time factor. Early documents were bounded time-events in that they dealt with specific events and once the time frame of that event expired, they became dead letters, with no further value in a poleconomic sense. Convenientiae began a new process. They imposed no time limits, describing relationships that were meant to extend into an indefinite future. The count-king would not rule for ten years – kingship was to be eternal. The scribes and legalists were creating the authority of governance out of granite; not clay. The documents were prospective. They indicated an expansive futurity and the lasting structure of the state. The documentary language implied permanency and perpetuity. Rule was being written in indelible ink. Documents had become a tool of public administration. Kosto says, “The shift in literacy was not one from memory to written record, but from memory to imagination, from the use of writing to reconstruct the past to the use of writing to construct the future. Was this part of a rethinking of time itself?”
There was a rebirth of the public notariate and accompanying Italian practices that came to serve as a legitimating force for the new state. The language of scriptor publicus (count’s scribe) began to appear in documents in the mid-twelfth century. Written documents were coming from on high to deal with the problems of society below. Beginning as networks of individual agreements (convenientiae), scribal work was to coalesce into a bureaucracy. The count’s scribes were doing legal research, keeping records, creating archives, producing manuscripts and performing accounting functions, all of which contributed to the formation of a new state over and above that of baronial power.
The shift from an oral to a written culture had consequences. This gave rise to an increasingly professional corps of scribes and judges in the first half of the eleventh century and the importance of all kinds of legal documents corresponded to the decline of the comital placitum. The power of the written word and bureaucratic organization in this process of centralization can be seen in a single negative case. Ramon Berenguer III (1097-1131) had to absolve the guardians of the castle of Arraona from their oath and homage to him because he was not able to locate the document or scripturum. If the document had never existed it might have been easier for the count to win his case.
Corruption in office led the Ramon Berenguer IV (1131-1162), appropriately called “The Saint,” to step up the attempts to rationalize office-holding. The excess of extortion by his office-holders led him, in 1151, to dispatch a group of auditors on a survey of Old Catalonia. This resulted in a “Domesday Book” for the area, novel in its scope and form. Since most of the graft came because dues were not fixed (the administrator could easily skim), this remarkable inventory was an effort to reduce discretionary exactions. Nevertheless, it would have been next to impossible to completely rein in corrupt tax collectors, as they were the ones who made the rounds and aggregated the earnings. Like all ruthless opportunists, the vicars of Barcelona and other corrupt office-holders could find opportunities in official roles that allowed them to line their pockets at the expense of the Crown and, more importantly, the people.
Archives became very important to comital jurisdiction. The count could refer to them in cases of dispute over privileges and property. For example, in 1180 Alfons II (1285-1291) had to sue the castle-lord Pere de Lluçà for the right to access the castles of Lluçà and Merlès. Pere claimed they were his allodial property. In this case, as with many others, the power of documents prevailed. Drawing on his royal archives, Alfons II produced documents proving Pere’s ancestor had held them in fealty from Ramon Berenguer I (1035-1076).
Between 1249 and 1274, the king experimented with a series of charters trying to reach a just balance between royal authority and local autonomy. He also freed the paciarii (police) from supervision by the vicars to enable more just administration in the countryside. The paciarii were local men given the responsibility to enforce the rulings of the vicars. Apparently, his idea was that new charters and administrative procedures would alleviate the tension between the Sword and Crown. He was not altogether correct. In 1278 civil war broke out between the upland counts and castle-lords fighting against royalist troops. This civil war ended when King Pere II (1276-1285) defeated the rebels at Balaguer (1280), but wisely gained their trust through skillful negotiating tactics.
Élites were advantaged by this in two ways. First, they had the wealth to employ scribes and legal researchers to ferret out those aspects of Roman law that supported their position. Second, there was a great deal of disorder and mystification of legal terminology and this lack of systematization gave the application of law an arbitrary nature and that vagueness allowed much “wheeling and dealing” by élites and their scribes. Confused terminology and a lack of concreteness in legal practice and documentation created a state of affairs that advantaged aristocratic fabricators.
As I mentioned before, in the thirteenth century a House of Lords (corts) was instituted in Catalonia’s governmental structure. Historians situate the birth of the corts of Catalonia in an assembly called to the legat pontifici, Cardinal Pere de Benevento in Lleida in 1214. But it wasn’t until the reign of Pere II (1276-1285) that the Catalan corts were formally instituted. This was an evolutionary culmination of the shift from orality to documentation to legislative decree. As the corts were dominated by big upland baronial and ecclesiastical landlords, it was a step in the direction of a social contractual approach to governance. The documentary progression from convenientiae to corts was slow, but all along with the same intent: to provide legitimation for governance. When rule became more bureaucratic and less personal and when the corts were organized to involve the country’s magnates, compromise was necessary. In 1214, this led to a revision of the statutes, incorporating some concessions to dissidents e.g., the confirmation that the late king had eliminated disagreeable taxes.
I have shown that written documents significantly contributed to the formalization of rule and that castle-lords also used them to document and legalize the gains they had achieved by intimidation and violence in the seigneurie banale (1020-1060), a “firming up” of oppression that was acceded to by the state. I have deemed this “internal extortion,” the extraction of value from serfs through Sword Power validated by Pen Power. Let us now turn to what the state did once it was organized and merged with Aragón to become the Crown of Aragón.

A Pariah Ideology

Violence was and remains a fact of life, but generally, people make the distinction between legitimate violence perpetrated by the state and illegitimate forms. The latter is called piracy or brigandry or some such label that indicates that the majority of people – society – is against this form of violence. This is the binary contrast H. A. Ormerod sets up in his discussion of piracy in the ancient world: “Throughout its history the Mediterranean has witnessed a constant struggle between the civilised peoples dwelling on its coasts and the barbarians, between the peaceful trader using its highways and the pirate who infested the routes that he must follow” (1927:13). His dichotomy can be schematized like this:

Box 9.4. Ormerod’s Schema
Good Bad
Social Anti-social
Socially good
aggression Piracy
Citizen Barbarian
Peaceful trader Avaricious criminal
Civilization Criminality
Legitimate use of
violence by state Illegitimate use of
violence by outlaws

This is an unrealistic view of the world of the counts and count-kings or of our present world. Sometimes extortion can be part of state behavior and defined by officials to be legitimate. We could, following this line of logic, say that state piracy is possible. According to Marshall B. Clinard, this analogy between organized crime and state behavior can even be extended to multinational corporations operating in the Third World today. Needless to say, there is a blurry line between official and criminal behavior and one man’s necessity is another man’s outrage, which recently has dominated media coverage of the United States’ war against Iraq.
Self-seeking officials within the Extortionist State operate under structural constraints, but can engage in amoral or criminal behavior by corrupting the structure and/or knowing the structural side streets and passageways in which they can pursue their clandestine operations. Some have called these Pariah States.
In the final chapter I will look at the nature of opaque governance and poleconomic operations behind closed doors in the American government. In the present chapter I want to focus on the Crown of Aragón, the state that emerged out of the unification of Aragón and Catalonia. Certainly Arago-Catalonia is a prime example of a Pariah State in the Middle Ages. In the twin domains of the Crown of Aragón, the métier of the élite had always been war, plunder and imperialism, but there were less adventurous economic pursuits as well. Barcelona’s preliminary economic base had long been the agricultural output of the hinterland. Resident traders bought farm goods and transported them to the city. Too, there was a fishing industry, before shipping and long-distance trade and conquest became prime forces in Barcelona’s economic history. In the twelfth century mundane economics changed to become more imperialistic. The city was transformed from an undeveloped backwater town to a long-range emporium through a commercial revolution, which was, in large part, fueled by wealth obtained through extortion.
In the sociological literature, organized crime is portrayed as being synonymous with “corruption, murder, extortion, terror, manipulation, and guile” and as being “involved in conscious, willful, and long-term illegal activities.” To apply this definition to the activities of Catalonia-Aragón we only need to change one word – “illegal.”
Notice how Mahan’s statement below applies with equal fluidity to the way in which the Crown and the urban patriciate operated poleconomically in al-Andalus and the Mediterranean:
OC (organized crime) generates profit for gangsters by corrupting the authority structure. From corporate criminals to pirates, the pattern is similar. Their goal is entrepreneurial. They are bonded by necessity for secrecy. They use violence as a tool and as an expression of power. They are constrained by the opportunity structures, but they take advantage of them as well (my insert & emphasis; 1998:237).

The characteristics of organized crime as outlined by Adadinsky show a striking similarity to the activities of the Arago-Catalonian state in its relations with the Muslims world. Both consist(ed) of:

 Non-ideological – profit is the driving force, a trait shared with most economic corporations.

 Hierarchical – a few at the top dominate and reap most of the benefits.

 A lack of transparency – secrecy is needed to maintain a limited membership and curtain access to profits.

 Organizational commitment based on loyalty – disloyal members are dealt with severely as they threaten to make the organization transparent.

 Organization perpetuates itself – new recruits are trained by members to a normative structure.

 Willingness to use violence and bribery – violence, corruption, deceit and extortion form organizational essence.

 Having a specialized division of labor – different talents are organized to reach an organizational goal.

 Monopolistic – market control is vital because the primary goal is maximizing profits.

 Code of honor – forms the basis of group ethos.

Again, the only word that needs to be changed in Adadinsky’s definition is “illegal.” Essentially the Extortionist State of medieval Catalonia-Aragón operated as an organized crime syndicate.
The Count of Barcelona reformulated his authority, just after the seigneurie banale. Over the next two centuries this project was carried forward by successive counts building up the Catalan State, which eventually merged with Aragón. During that transition, Barcelona developed an expansionist ideology. The count-kings became involved in two kinds of extortion: external and internal. State extortion was somewhat like what goes on in the Mafia, but with slightly more transparency.
Initially, state income came from loot taken and tribute exacted from Muslim principalities to the south. This wealth was invested in more wars and the expansion of Barcelona’s maritime economic, which led later count-kings to colonize many outposts in the Mediterranean and to extort tribute from port cities along the Barbary Coast. This can be viewed as State Piracy, a form of self-interestedness clothed in the legal fictions of the state.
You could almost forgive the aggrandizement on the part of the monarchs of Barcelona had they cared for their people, but toward what social good did this extortion money go? Very little. Mostly it supported more war, imperialism, high living for the king and his viziers, construction of monumental architecture and kingly tombs. Barcelona also loved parades and ceremonial frivolities organized to bolster the prestige of the state. Little went to aid human security in Catalonia-Aragón.

External Extortion and the Reconquista

When the Moors invaded Iberia, an apocalyptic atmosphere came over Christendom. All sorts of prophecies and explanations of the loss of so much Christian land were expounded. Both Christians and Muslims were relying on diviners, oracles and prophecies to orient themselves in the chaos of war. Some showed darkness ahead; others divined light if sin could be expiated and the path of righteousness trodden. Booty may have been important in the Christian response, but the search for it was covered in a veil of piety. The Prophetic Chronicle said, “Our hope is Christ…that the enemies’ boldness may be annihilated and the peace of Christ be given back to the Holy Church.” It did not seem to matter that there had been precious little “peace” in the land prior to the invasion of the Muslim south. But now there was a theological justification for the exercise of preexisting warfare and pillage.
The ideology of the Reconquista was born in eleventh and early twelfth centuries. For Catalonia-Aragón, the Reconquista was mainly about taking back land in Valencia and Mallorca. The Book of Feats of Arms (Llibre dels feyts) concerns the reign of Jaume I (1213-1276) and stresses nationalism and the importance of conquest in the national character. This chronicle contains a first person account of the Catalonian Reconquista. It was composed in Catalan by an unknown author, though Jaume is thought to have written at least some of it between 1244 and 1274. It chronicles many adventures.
This military adventurism was part of the larger Crusades. Pope Gregory saw several advantages for Christendom in the Crusades. Of course, they were intended to liberate the Holy Land, but the pope reasoned that they also could help unite Christendom after the divisive disputes over his reform movement. Then again, he felt that papal prestige would rise at a time when his rule had its dissidents e.g., those supporting the German Emperor. Also, he hoped the Crusades would work toward terminating the schism between the two halves of Christendom – east and west, as well as provide an outlet for restless knights who had been ravaging their own people and lands prior to his call to Holy War.
Then there was booty, which could pay the expenses of a strike into al-Andalus and also produce a profit. Loot was an important motive in the crusades, involving the taking of slaves, gold, silver, precious stones, exotic cloth, sheep and cattle. For example, one-fifth of the plunder went to the count-king and the remainder was divided among the expeditionaries, the dependents of those who had been killed in battle and those who had stayed behind to guard the castles and domains of the castle-lords.
The count-king had a more pecuniary outlook, clothed in papal and chivalrous rhetoric. Certainly religious fanaticism and military valor became the dominant values in Spanish society during the Reconquista, however, the count-king was mainly interested in receiving parias, or protection payments in gold. The Muslim south had gold that was being transported over the Sahara Desert from West Africa into Iberia. Parias were paid by Muslim leaders in the south to thwart invasion by the Catalonians and Aragonese.
At this time, the County of Barcelona was not only being constructed as a lineage in a political sense, but also as an economic powerhouse and extortion was good economics. To an extent, the counts and count-kings participated in an extortionate protectorate over nearby petty princes of al-Andalus. The Crown had functioned as a channel for tribute (parias) and would act as a directorate for hostes et cavalcatas (military campaigns) against al-Andalus, their object being to find loot and land. This was a larger state-sponsored version of the exaction exercised by the castle-lords of the seigneurial banale. Both the rampages of castle-lords and the imperialism of the state must be seen in the cultural context of a medieval fascination with masculine adventure and in the Christian crusading mentality.
There was the flow of wealth into Barcelona, but there was a counter flow. That involved settlers taking up land in former Muslim territories that were conquered. Some settlers were moving south. The Reconquista also provided many commoners with the opportunity to acquire noble privileges. Some settlers were moving “up” to become ciutadans honrats. Honors were meted out to those who either earned them in war or paid for them. Derek Lomax says that Christians were interested in loot, rustling and land-theft and even though they claimed to be fighting for God they were often cruel and deceitful.
The Reconquista was a deliberately planned campaign, albeit it a long and disjointed one. When land was reclaimed, Christian settlers were brought in and (sometimes) Muslim farmers were expelled. Others were kept on as conversi workers. At other times, Christians moved into existing Muslim communities.
New Catalonia lands gave the Crown some breathing space by relieving it of the burden of having to supply too many fiefs from its own holdings. The Reconquista movement led to the availability of much booty, gold and land for paladin knights and adventurous nobles. As the Reconquest progressed it was exactly the availability of large tracts of land that made it unnecessary to resort to the benefice – the conditional grant of land in Old Catalonia – as the sole or even chief means of rewarding or creating a mounted force.
When adventurers settled down in New Catalonia, they set themselves up, just as their forefathers had done in Old Catalonia in the past, as providers of fiefs in return for loyalty and military service. In so doing, they passed on the ethos of feudal loyalty.
New Catalonia gave upwardly mobile noble sons and milites a chance at acquiring a landed estate. In this way, they could use violence to procure a patrimony that, in time, would become legitimized and clothed in the raiment of landlordism. Thus, plunder was defined by the state as a legal quest for finances. Time and effort on the part of the new owners transformed their ill-gotten gains into a respectable freehold. As I mentioned earlier, these landlords did this by perpetuating “noble” manners and by reproducing clothing fashions, an equestrian lifestyle, speech patterns, élite patronymics, etc. War plunder became the time-honored privilege of its owners. By definition, a noble had land and a personal and familial history of militaristic adventure. Raiding the Saracen south gave Catalan aristocrats and petty knights a chance at both.
Arago-Catalonians organized to make such raids and sometimes the clergy were involved, though some clergymen resisted. Under Count-King Alfons I (1162-1196), in 1164, the Cistercian abbot, Raimundo, formed many volunteers into a religious cofrade (confraternity) and they began to fight the Muslims as it had been hoped the Knights Templar would do. Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) took the new Order under his papal umbrella and approved its rule. These “real friars” were charged with the responsibility “to fight the enemies of the Faith” and were given a rule of life (regula) based on that of Cîteaux, but modified to facilitate warfare. There were other lay confraternities convened by Alfons I for military purposes e.g., Belchite (1122) and Monreal del Campo (ca. 1128) but lacking a religious base, they tended to die out after their fighting was over. In fact, in Arago-Catalan times, other orders wilted in the shadow of the Templars and Hospitallers who flourished in Iberia more than anywhere else in Europe.
While not all clergymen fought, the church, primarily in the form of monasteries, was active in claiming new lands in the Reconquista. After the Sword conquered, the Cross came in to develop the land. For example, Tarragona’s plain was considered a great despoblado, described in eleventh century charters as a “horrible and vast wasteland” where no human nor sheep grazed. Yet, the monks moved there and began to improve the land.
The Reconquista was a slow process. Christians held between a fifth and a quarter of Iberia in 1100 and by the thirteenth century the greater part was ruled by Christian Kings, Granada not being taken until 1492. But slow or not, crusading was a very profitable adventure for the imperialists of Arago-Catalonia.

The Extortionist State: The Mediterranean

The twelfth century was a time of expansion and turnaround, when Barcelona “leaned seaward, towards a destiny like Venice’s or Genoa’s.” It became a maritime power, its merchants becoming involved more and more in shipping and the government increasingly in “kickback farming” throughout the Mediterranean and southern Iberia. These were imperialistic activities designed to plunder certain areas and extort tribute from those wealthy regions that feared such pillage. Barcelona’s Crown led the way into governmental brigandry in al-Andalus and then expanded their executive banditry into the Mediterranean Sea.
Sometimes imperialists from Arago-Catalonia conquered islands or took poleconomically strategic ports by force, but at others they established treaties under threat of force. These provided a stream of revenue from North Africa and Mediterranean ports. Sometimes, to avoid the appearance of boldfaced exploitation, exacted payments went under several guises. For instance, in the 1271 treaty between Arago-Catalonia and Tunis, tribute was obscured as a payment for the loan of mercenaries. Similarly, in 1274, 1309 and 1323 treaties with Morocco and a 1309 treaty with Bejaïa, payments were couched as being for troops or galleys or both. Another treaty with Tunis of 1301 hid the tribute as compensation for a despoiled shipwreck.
Sometimes it was concealed as a continuation of the sums demanded by previous rulers – in short, well-established protection money. Often these treaties were defined to be economically beneficial for foreign merchants and governments, but foreign governments were required to make full payment even if scripted “economic ventures” produced insufficient profits to make such payments. This was common in North Africa and was an extension of the Catalan habit of bleeding Moorish neighbors of protection money.
This was imperialistic stake-claiming par excellence. And much of it involved slaving. For instance, in 1243 a special toll was applied to commerce between Tarragona and the Barbary Coast. The cargo was human, the only commodity mentioned on the shipping manifests.
In addition to receiving protection payments, Arago-Catalan imperialism in the Mediterranean was intended to create colonies or commercial zones that would feed revenue back home to Barcelona. One such colony was Sásser (Sassari in Sardinia). The Sards were disposed in 1329 and King Alfons III (1327-1336) set about the rationalization and formalization of this takeover. Between 1330 and 1333, he gave out 166 allodial honoraria (c. onores), made up of land proprietorships and jurisdictional privileges to knights, notaries, office-holders and others who had been involved in the conquest. In addition, he granted 1,393 fiefs, which were land grants with only rights in usufruct involved. Clearly, warfare in the Mediterranean was a venture with an economic payoff at the end of the road. Not only did adventurers get new land, but they were able to enslave the locals and export them for profit. Between 1370 and 1442, thousands of Sards, for instance, were indentured and shipped to foreign lands.
The imperialistic assault on the Mediterranean provided Barcelona with strategic points d’appui of economic warfare, stepping stones across the sea to the lands of saints and spices. Following an aggressive imperial policy, Crown pirates plundered the Mediterranean taking Majorca, Minorca, Sicily, Malta, Gozo, and laying title to Sardinia and Corsica. Crown piracy was justified citing illegal piracy as a raison d'être of attack and also the invasions were framed as an aid to the anti-Saracen cause. In 1311, Jaume II (1291-1327) wrote to the pope justifying the growth of the Crown’s imperialism in the Mediterranean in terms calculated to appeal to the crusading fervor of the Council of Vienne. He claimed that Arago-Catalan conquests were going forward because “the Christian army” might always have islands to stop at on their way to and from the Holy Land.
The House of Barcelona turned eastward to dominate Sicily, Sardinia, Alicante to the south of Valencia and the Balearic Islands about the same time as Catalonia and Aragón were forming alliances that would lead to building the nation of Spain. These Mediterranean jewels came under the control of the last kings of Aragón-Catalonia, Pere III (1336-1387), his son Joan I (1387-1395) and Martí I (1395-1410). King Martí left no living heir so an interregnum ensued in 1410, lasting two years and involving much maneuvering with “Fernando de Antequera of the Catalan House of Trastàmaras being elected king at the Compromise of Casp in 1412.” When he died in 1414, his son Alfons IV (el Magnànim) came to the throne, ruling till 1458. The marriage of Ferdinand II and Isabella of Castile, unofficially dated at 1469, was the beginning of Aragón-Catalonia’s merger with Castile and the emergence of the core of the new nation of Spain.
And while the warriors went forth into foreign lands, the scriptwriters were busy eulogizing the feats of those warriors and state-sponsored piracy. In their tales, aggrandizement was defined as an honorable and chivalrous adventure, even as a religious calling. Pirates were clothed in the raiment of dogooderism. The Argo-Catalans organized a “coalition of the willing” among mercenaries from other nations and “real” Catalan pirates in their domination of several Mediterranean island communities. Some of these were mercenary groups wherein Catalan was the lingua franca and others were pretenders to the Crown of the foreign territory in question. There was much at stake. One of the main financial backers of Crown involvement in the conquest of Sicily, for example, were corn dealers from Catalonia who hoped to conquer enough of the corn-producing areas of the Mediterranean to create monopolistic control of the corn market.
This poleconomic adventurism was romanticized in Catalan literature. One such laudatory chronicle (Tirant lo Blanch) concerning external raids was written by Ramon Muntaner (1265-1336) who participated in the campaigns in the East. The book is partly based on the exploits of Roger de Flor, who commanded the Gran Companyia Catalana (Catalan Company) and the infamously brutal Almogaver mercenaries in their exploits in Constantinople. This commander was glorified in his success there, being named “Mega-Duke and later Caesar,” in what surely had to be an inflation in congratulatory terms. However, the Catalan Company was successful in defending Constantinople against the Turks, acquiring “immense booty” in the process.
Such writing exalted military exploits, piracy, imperialism and violence e.g., the brutal assassination of Roger de Flor and his aides and the retaliatory assault by his remaining captains in what became famously known as the Venjança Catalana (Catalan Vengeance). The Catalans went on to conquer the duchy of Athens, which they made into their headquarters from which they launched a successful attack on the duchy of Neopatria. As late as 1348 the Catalans ruled Attica, Boeotia and Thessaly until they were eventually thrown out by the Lord of Corinth in 1388. In these chronicles the warlike escapades of the Catalans is elevated to heroic dimensions.

State Piracy

State piracy took place in the Mediterranean arena, where individual piracy was rampant. Furthermore, personal piracy overlapped with “official” duties of the state. Piracy for individual nobles was an opportunity that lay not too far out of bounds in early Catalonia. We can see this in the case of Count Pons Hugh de Ampurias, who lived between 1277-1313. He sometimes cooperated with the Count of Barcelona, at other times was at odds with him and eventually, in 1311, was accused in a Barcelona court of being a sodomite. This was a terrible accusation, since sodomy, which covered all possible illicit sexual contact between males, was thought to be so heinously unnatural that it was seen to be the source of earthquakes, famine, pestilence and the like. Accusations of sodomy for men, as with witchcraft imputations with women, were convenient political weapons; for example, the charges of sodomy brought against the Knights Templar in 1307 when the French king wished them disbanded, an action reluctantly agreed to by Jaume II (1291-1327).
It so happened that Count Hugh Pons was one of the few nobles who supported the Knights Templar in their fight to survive the political accusations coming from the papacy and Philip IV of France. From this crisis on, Pons was on the outs with King Jaume, a conflict that reached a breaking point in 1293 when the king began to construct several fortifications near the Ampurias border, while refusing to allow Pons to do likewise on his side. This was coupled with many minor poleconomic squabbles and the ongoing interference of the count-king in the affairs of the Country of the Ampurias.
By 1309 Pons had had enough. He appointed his son, Malgauli, to be his heir and went off to become a merchant-pirate in the Mediterranean. He had been an admiral in the Catalan-Argonese navy and it seems that he still had control of five galleys, which he had used in the “legitimate” service of the king. Now he put them to use as a private pirate.
In his piracy he angered the pope and the Venetians by attacking their merchants ships. They complained to Jaume, who was seen as responsible for this wayward count. Pons was also said to have traded with the Saracens, but this was a common enterprise for Catalan merchants and appeared to be a trumped up charge.
At this point, the Count-King of Barcelona accused Pons of stealing the five galleys from the royal navy. Pons was ordered to appear before a formal tribunal and Barcelona assured the Venetian legislature that the king had attacked Pon’s castles, burning one. If convicted, Pons could no longer have been a count and would have lost his political rights as a noble, forfeiting any property, which Barcelona could then confiscate. At this point, the other barons of Catalonia turned against Pons and supported the king. However, the case hung in the air, as it seems that Pons never returned to stand trial, remaining a pirate for the rest of his life.
Private piracy overlapped with and evolved into state piracy and legitimate trade. Professor O’Callaghan says that in the reign of Jaume I (1213-1276) “the Catalans, after initially profiting from piracy against Tunisian ships, developed more legitimate commercial relations with Tunis and established merchant colonies there. (The king) encouraged this, as it was a source of wealth for the crown as well as for his subjects, and from time to time the emirs sent him gifts of money as a sign of their friendship” (my insert, 1992:384).
In a suggestive manner, the payment of this tribute laid a foundation for imperialist ventures by future kings. Pere II (1276-1285) followed his father, Jaume the Conqueror (1213-1276), to the throne and interpreted the gifts of the emirs of Tunis as regular tribute. They were defined as payments to be made on a customary and ongoing basis. Spontaneous gifts had become regularized tribute. Some of the Moorish leaders balked at this and others betrayed the Iberians in their attempts to place puppet emirs in power. Such rebels were rewarded with violent raids, the exercise of Sword Power.
Tribute was often put to use by adventures who lived raucous lives. As was the custom in Catalonia, the Barcelonese conquerors of Majorca threw lavish banquets as a way of broadcasting success in plunder and garnering social status. Fernández-Armesto says:
Theirs was a world of status linked to consumption, measured in costly feasts and ostentatious displays of loyalty to the mainland dynasty. At least seventy-six craftsmen and decorators were employed – some Moors, some Greeks a few specifically slaves – to adorn the city chambers for the banquets. Two “painters of altarpieces and battle flags” decorated hangings to celebrate the obsequies of the mainland queen. And large sums spent on defense against the pretensions of the extruded island dynasty included the pay of eleven surgeon-bargers to serve the fleet. A society so abundantly supplied with quacks and craftsmen must have wallowed in surplus wealth (1992:50).

Piracy was not defined as a bad thing if they were your pirates. Jaume I (1213-1276) was forthcoming about the role of the state in banditry. In his autobiography, Book of Deeds, the monarch revealed that he saw maritime war as a means of gallantry and adventure, a romantic exercise in chivalric deed par excellence. In this book, the count-king elevated maritime banditry perpetrated by the government over and above land-based exploits. He romanticized seagoing raids with exaggerated rhetoric. Fernández-Armesto hints that perhaps the monarch sensed a little known “honor” among the “rats and hard-tack of shipboard life.” The count-king glorified the crushing of Majorca, Sicily and the other areas conquered in the Mediterranean, relishing in the renown these victories brought to him personally, to the Crown and to Catalonia. His writing displayed a dark sense of dynastic destiny. He gloried in imperialism, blessed it because it was being perpetrated by the church and hyped it as a means of poleconomic advancement for Catalonia. In other words, state piracy was portrayed as beneficial to Aragón-Catalonia by a king acting as a spindoctor.
I have presented the violence and extortion of the castle-lords and of the state. That of the latter I have deemed internal and external, with that directed outward going forward under the banner of Christendom, but really being about hard political and economic realities. In essence, to engage in wars in foreign lands to acquire territory, establish fonduks and receive protection money, the count-kings of Catalonia-Aragón operated in ways that perpetuated war as a way of life and did little to help the poor and downtrodden of their society with the wealth accumulated through violence. It went to two sources: (1) into the pockets of those already well off; and (2) back into the war machine.
In the next chapter we will explore whether this continues in present-day American governmental behavior, the actions of office-holders and government agents in the opaque bowels of what has been deemed the military-industrial-complex by the late President Eisenhower and the state management system by the Professor Melman.

SOURCES – CHAPTER 9: EXTORTIONIST STATE
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Amelang, James S. 1984. Barristers and judges in early modern Barcelona: The rise of legal élite, American Historical Review 89:1264-1284.

Baldwin, John W. 1971. The scholastic culture of the Middle Ages, 1000-1300. Long Grove, IL:Waveland.

Bensch, Stephen P. 1995. Barcelona and its rulers, 1096-1291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bisson, Thomas N. 1984. Fiscal accounts of Catalonia under the early count-kings (1151-1213) (2 Vols.) Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bush, M. L. 1983. Noble privilege. Manchester: University Press.

Bisson, Thomas N. 1985. Prelude to power: kingship and constitution in the realms of Aragón. In: Burns, R. I (Ed.). The worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror: Intellect and force in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 23-41.

Bisson, T. N. 1986. The medieval Crown of Aragón: A short history. Oxford: Clarendon.

Bloch, M. 1961. Feudal society (Trans. L. A. Manyon). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Boehne, Patricia J. 1989. The Renaissance Catalan novel. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

Bonnassie, Pierre. 1991 From slavery to feudalism in southwestern Europe (Trans. Jean Birrell). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brundage, James A. 1991. The politics of sodomy: Rex V. Pons Hugh de Ampurias (1311). In: J. E. Salisbury (Ed.). Sex in the Middle Ages: A book of essays. New York: Garland, 239-246.

Clinard, Marshall B. 1990. Corporate corruption: The abuse of power. New York: Praeger.

Collins, Roger. 1990. Literacy and the laity in early medieval Spain. In: McKitterick, Rosamond (Ed.). The uses of literacy in early medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 109-133.

Fernández-Armesto, Filipe. 1992. Barcelona: A thousand years of the city’s past. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freedman, Paul. 1991. The origins of peasant servitude in medieval Catalonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ganshof, F. L. 1961. Feudalism (Trans. P. Grierson). New York: Harper.

Hillgarth, J. N. 1978. The Spanish kingdoms, 1250-1516. Vol. II: 1410-1516: Castilian Hegemony. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hilton, Rodney. 1990. Class conflict and the crisis of feudalism: Essays in medieval social history. London: Verso.

Irons, William. 1975. The Yomut Turkmen. University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology Anthropological Papers.

Kosto, Adam J. 2001. Making agreements in medieval Catalonia: Power, order and the written word, 1000-1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lemarignier, Jean-François. 1967. Political and monastic structures in France at the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century. In: Cheyette, F. L. (Ed.). Lordship and community in medieval Europe. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 100-127.

Les corts Catalanes i la primera Generalitat medieval (s. XIII-XIV) http://www.gencat.es/historia/ccort.htm

Lomax, Derek. 1978. The Reconquest of Spain. London: Longman.

Lourie, Elena. 1966. A society organized for war: Medieval Spain, Past and Present 35:54-76.

Mahan, Sue (with Katherine O’Neil, Eds.). 1998. Introduction. Beyond the Mafia: Organized crime in the Americas. London: Sage.

McCrank, Lawrence J. 1996. Medieval frontier history in New Catalonia. Aldershot: Variorum.

McKitterick, Rosamond. 1990. Conclusion. In: McKitterick, Rosamond (Ed.). The uses of literacy in early medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 319-333.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 2008. The scripting of serfdom in medieval Catalonia: An anthropological view. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Niblock, Tim. 2002. Pariah states & sanctions in the Middle East. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

O’Callaghan, Joseph F. 1992. A history of medieval Spain. Itahaca: Cornell University Press.

Ormerod, H. A. 1927. Piracy in the ancient world. In: Eric Partridge (Ed.). Pirates, highwaymen and adventurers. London: The Scholartis Press, 13-37.

Read, Jan. 1978. The Catalans. London: Faber & Faber.

Satter, David. 2004. Darkness at Dawn: The rise of the Russian Criminal State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Sicker, Martin. 1987. The making of a pariah state: The advenurist politics of Muammar Qaddafi. New York: Praeger.

Stanley, William D. 2004. The Protection Racket State: Élite Politics, Military extortion and Civil War in El Salvador. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Stock, Brian. 1983. The implications of literacy: Written language and models of interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth centuries. Princeton: University Press.

Van Engen, John. 1998. Professing religion: From liturgy to law, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 29:323-243.

Zimmermann, Michel. 1992. Ecrire et lire en Catalogne du IXe au XIIe siècle. Paris: Thèse d’Etat.

Domination: Chapter 8

2010-05-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

8. MANUFACTURING THE STATE AND SERFDOM

Early History of Catalonia

We have seen aggrandizers at work in big man societies, as little chiefs, authority chiefs and kings. Now I want to detail the rise of the Count of Barcelona, who fabricated a state out of the chaos of the Marca Hispanica, that wasteland that stood between the Carolingian Empire in Francia and the Muslim principalities in Iberia (see map below). The countship eventually evolved into a kingship, as the monarchs ruled over an expanded domain, Aragón-Catalonia, as well as the land of Valencia they took back from the Moors.
This is a case wherein aggrandizers moved into a dangerous March and forged an incipient state out of the remnants of different politico-legal systems. This comital authority emerged among powerful paladin lords who at times cooperated with the count and at other times ignored his claim on suzerainty and at yet other times fought against the self-proclaimed monarchs in Barcelona.
First we will look at how castle-lords used the Power of the Sword to force the peasantry into de facto serfdom and then used the Power of the Pen to create written documents and laws to legitimize their oppression. In chapter 9 we will see the continuation of oppression, but not so much internally, but rather in the imperialism of what I call the Extortionist State.

Initially, the County of Barcelona was just one of several counties in the Marca Hispanica. The other counts and barons of the region considered the Count of Barcelona as a primus inter pares, but through aggrandizing moves, the early counts of the tenth century were able to put together a fragile hegemony that fell apart in the “time of troubles” (1020-1060, a.k.a. the seigneurie banale) when the paladin lords ran roughshod over the land. After this violent era, the Count of Barcelona reconstituted his feudal authority to forge an expansionist state that stretched into southern Iberia, the Mediterranean and North Africa.
Before AD 1000 the Marca Hispanica, or Spanish March, was inhabited by peoples coming across the Pyrenees to mix with remnants of Iberian tribesmen, Visigoths and Romans that were already there. Initially they came under the suzerainty of the Carolingian Empire, but eventually the counts of the March pulled away and the Count of Barcelona became a primus inter pares in the land, ruling weakly at first, with a great deal of independence being shown by castle-lords. The elevated status of the Barcelona Count came, partly, from the fact that the Carolingian Emperor had named him to be the marchio (marquise) of the whole territory.
Barcelona became the administrative focal point of the Marca Hispanica, now independent of the Carolingians. For the next several centuries, the presence of the Moors to the south was to play a key role in the structure of the poleconomic life of Barcelona and that of Catalonia, then later yet, the Kingdom of Aragón. The close proximity of the enemy made early city fathers cognizant of the need to build a strong defensive infrastructure and also provided a source of booty through frequent raids made by castellans in search of fame, political favor and spoils, some of which were state-sponsored forays (hostes). Soon, some of the Moorish principalities began to pay protection money to the Count of Barcelona, which became a significant source of income for the early comtes (counts).
Free of Carolingia, Barcelona had a new start, but the count still had impudent barons and wannabe paladin lords with which he had to deal. His feeble suzerainty in the area was to come apart in the period between 1020 and 1060 as the lords went on a rampage in search of prestige, power and property, using the sword to take land and enserf peasants on it.
There were essentially three sets of élites in the region: the Comte de Barcelona and other regional comtes; the upland magnates (barons) and holders of castles – the castle-lords; and the urban patriciate (patricii), which at first was limited in its poleconomic impact on government.
An administration was forming that initially was supportive of peasant migrants who wished to settle the area. But a strong élite with its own interests was taking shape as well. The count had inherited from Carolingia the concept of public law (L. publicæ). He was given the responsibility to protect the rights of a free peasantry against any abuses by the castle-lords or invaders. This was an important mandate, one that subsequent counts would not follow. Furthermore, there were local customs developed by the barons to tie peasants to them. “Free” peasants were not entirely so. Many free peasants were slowly becoming subject to customary constraints on inheritance and marriage. These were traditions of lordship that nobles claimed from time immemorial, but before the seigneurie banale (1020-1060) the dues and services required of the peasants was not oppressive by medieval standards. This was partly because the area was a frontier and not yet fully tamed and also because the castle-lords were making a living raiding the Muslim south.
Comital authority was to be a buffer against the aggrandizement of the aristocracy. At this early date, the counts heeded many peasant petitions and were mindful of their grievances and some communities were granted charters of franchise (franquichiae). In theory these early franchises removed endowed communities from seigneurial impositions. They were “legal umbrellas” of comital protection.
The church was also important in the settlement of the Marca Hispanica. It was organized through newly established monasteries and parish churches during which time the area remained a distant province of the Carolingian Empire. Sons and daughters of élite families took up key ecclesiastical roles. Sometimes the church worked with the government and magnate families; at other times against them, but both ecclesiastical and secular self-interestedness would become a factor in the oppression of the peasantry by the “time of troubles” (1020-1060).

Box 8.1. Symbolic Comparison of Nobles & Peasants
High Low
Light Dark
Rides Walks
Does not work Works with hands
Owns much land Tenuous hold on land
Lives in a castle Lives in a cottage.
Has virtue (virtus) Lacks virtue (virtus)
Has a special genius
(Ingenio) Lacks a special genius (Ingenio)
Has breeding (cultura) Lacks breeding (cultura)
Literate Illiterate

The tenth century was a time of resettlement of lands taken back from the Moors. Churches, monasteries, parishes and castles sprang up on re-conquered land and even in the Marca Hispanica. Secular administration came from Barcelona and ecclesiastical organization flowed out of Rome through cathedrals and parish churches. Church and state were closely aligned, as both were staffed by members of the same aristocratic families. Areas were marked out into parishes under control of the Count of Barcelona, his viscounts (vicecomes) and bishops of the church. Near the bottom of the élite hierarchy were encastled lords, though knights were yet below them. Some very wealthy castle-lords I call barons or magnates. They were the great nobles or grandees just below the counts. For protection of self, his familia and castle, the lord relied on trained knights equipped with shield, sword, breastplate and mailcoat. Some lords attached themselves to the church as lay canons (burgh
or layman); others remained more aloof. Brigand lords even raided churches.
The Count of Barcelona was the loftiest prince of the area, with other counts of Osona, Gerona, Urgell, Pallars, Cerdanya, Besalú, Empúries and Rosselló acting as subaltern counts, though this was a cause of much contention over time. Some of these counts and barons refused to support Barcelona, others pledged fidelity (fidelitas) but were lax in behavioral support and some were quite supportive in both word and deed. The latter were his “sworn men” – comtors, vicars and courtiers.

Box 8.2. Catalonian Hierarchy
Count of Barcelona (sometimes, King of Aragón)
Regional counts
Large landholding barons or magnates
or viscounts
Bishops, especially those commanding armies
Castle-lords
Lesser gentry (knights)
Allodists & serfs (collectively, the pobles menuts.)

All in all, up to the “time of troubles” all sorts of élites, secular and ecclesiastical, great and aspiring, fed off of warfare and the spoils it provided, taking over new lands, building fortified towers and castles and raiding even further into Muslim lands to the south and west. This avenue of violent aggrandizement was to dry up when available lands were settled and the Count of Barcelona established an extortionate protectorate over adjacent Muslim principalities, ensuring a steady flow of gold parias (tribute) into governmental coffers. Of course, this made the castle-lords restive.
This tribute fed the comital state, but lessened the war-related income of the castle-lords. This policy by Barcelona meant that the Men of the Sword, the castlans who lived by raiding, were temporarily stymied by the self-interest of the Count of Barcelona. This was to have serious consequences – “blowback” to use a phrase developed much later in history – but one that also applies to eleventh century Catalonia. This count/baron tension came to a head in the form of a decline in the force of public law and the rise of the Men of the Sword in the seigneurie banale. If they couldn't raid enemy territory, they would turn on their neighbors in the Marca Hispanica. Brigandry became popular, even accepted by the noble class.

Fabricating State Law

The fabrication of dominion in the Marca Hispanica was built on maneuvers of the poleconomic players in the world of law. Each of the key poleconomic domains – the Barcelona Count, the regional counts, the barons and the church used different laws and customs to back their claims to rule. Barcelona claimed to rule by virtue of public law derived from Carolingia. From the tenth century on Barcelona counts issued charters, which were the functional equivalent of the fueros of León and Castile. Both were laws or sets of laws deriving from a recognized authority. As Charlemagne had done with his provincial governors, the Count of Barcelona communicated with his field personnel through segels, or “sealed letters of direction.”
This was a time when unwritten customs were still respected, but written law was taking precedence. For this reason, when the dust settled after the lords and knights ran riot in the seigneurie banale, they attempted to justify their unlawful theft of property and enserfment of the peasantry by manufacturing written documents. The Sword was validated by the Pen.
The first known charter was issued by Count Borrel II (954-992). This charter, dated 986, provided the residents of Cardona with security of tenure for their lands and freedom from some taxes and tolls (L. teloneum). In it, the inhabitants of the town were instructed to continue to pay their tithes to the Church of St. Vincent and to maintain the walls and towers of the hamlet for defense against both “pagans and Christians.” Peasants had rights of petition to public authority. For instance, under the ancient comital traditions of the Pyrenees, a community could institute a protest (clamore or rancura) to encourage comital officers to follow legal procedures.
Early comital law was often carried out at a placitum, an official hearing. The documents connected to a placitum were mainly a record of the oral testimony and the memory of witnesses (viditores), pointing backwards to custom and praxis. Such trials (placita) were confrontations between two sides that spoke in favor of their own interests. Advocates, called mandatarii, spoke in the presence of community leaders or men appointed by the Count of Barcelona. Sometimes the count himself presided. At such noble assemblies aristocrats worked out the rules to apply to their poleconomic behavior and to the lesser people in their world, the pobles menuts.
Thus, the franchised city (burgus) represented the national power of the House of Barcelona and was resented by the baronial opponents – the isolated magnates and castle-lords of the countryside. This was a major source of tension all throughout Catalonia’s early history – the conflict between the centralized authority of the House of Barcelona and aristocrats in rural districts.
In spite of this strain, as time passed, Barcelona became symbolic of legitimate public authority. Yet, the countryside was important too. Until late in the thirteenth century, more frequently than not, counts ruled from horseback riding throughout the territory to personally interact with subjects. This was because they relied on dispersed centers, which needed periodic visits by the count and his officers to renew allegiances with local élites. It is noteworthy that traveling on horseback with an armed escort (cavalarii armati) was an important symbol of power in medieval times.
This was dispersed rule, but the process of centralization was at work as well. Written documents became a symbol of centralized authority. They were an important part of the capitulary (document repository) that was kept in the Barcelona castle and in each provincial castle of the count. These documents were necessary for poleconomic rule. They were referred to by the count and his men when visiting his outposts and provided the memory bank for dynastic rule.

Box 8.3. Evolution of the Catalonian State
Comital
authority
derived
from Charlemagne  Seigneure
banale  Reassertion of
comital
authority  Territorial
state
Public
authority Private rule Public authority
Fidelity Power Homage Kingship
Personal relationship between lord
& subject Breakdown in the relation between
count & lord
Personal relationship between lord & subject Institutionalized territorial rule

In the 1180s, the count reorganized his documents to form the Liber Feudorum Maior, the Great Book of Fiefs (ca. 1192-1196). He was aided by the gifted accountant, Guillem de Basa. There were two main tasks: organize charters and create a better accounting of fiscal matters. It was a secular cartulary functioning as documentary justification for the state of affairs that had evolved out of the 1020-1060 struggles with the rapacious lords of the countryside. This was part of the transition from orality to textuality. Documents were a long-term investment, but in the short-term the count had to rely on personal interaction with the lords and even violence at times. The count had knights and could call on the services of castle-lords to support him against anyone who defied his authority or invaded the region. He also used symbols as weapons e.g., pomp, parades and ceremonies. Much of his authority stemmed from tradition, legend and much ceremony in Barcelona, which was said to have developed many royal rites and a love of stately processions.

Status, Power and Poverty

Domination requires defining the nature of the relation between these two “kinds” of people. The original Catalan theory of nobilitas was that of being “nobly born” (nobile genus). Genicot notes that without fail, charters and narrative sources attributed caste spirit and attitude to the nobility. This rigid class was set apart by both arrogance and generosity, though the latter tended to be found only in donations to the church, rather than alms given directly to the poor. Nobles also held special legal privileges (s. privilegium), in that they had a great deal of liberty or freedom from prosecution by those in public office. They enjoyed the right to have an armed following (cavalarii armati), as well as the duty (L. officium) to play a public role in a military, judicial and political sense i.e., to aid the Barcelona administration. They also held the right to receive the sacraments and only they could be buried in a church graveyard and enjoyed freedom from dues and taxes that fell to the common man. Military escorts of armed knights provided them with a physical shield against violence, but they also had a legal shield in self-generated laws and customs.
From the perspective of the Count of Barcelona, the upland barons and castle-lords were always fickle and of questionable fidelity. Some were sworn men of the count’s inner circle (mennada), but others were very independent minded. This made the extension of comital authority a slow process and, at times, difficult. Barcelona’s strength was to take a bit of a roller coaster ride up to the merger with Castile in the fifteenth century.
What is more, the count/nobility line of cleavage was not the only one in Catalonia. Other fissures included: knights (gentry) against the old nobility; merchants (mercatores) and artisans against the urban patriciate (the count’s men); and greater landlords against the remença peasants or against royal agents trying to recover alienated domains. The count had his hands full balancing the contrasting cohorts and their particularistic interests.
There were two divergent theories of governance at work in Catalonia: the pactista approach and the Crown’s absolutist perspective. The latter saw the count (and later the king) as divinely anointed. The Catalan ruling estates supported the pactista philosophy – a view that governance should be based on a contract between society’s key estates. Each estate was to have its own jurisdiction and laws. Of course, both left out the majority of people – the peasants. Aristocrats were content spouting platitudes about noblese oblige or the sanctity of charity and the like. Such inanities were uttered so “high up” that no one in the real world could hear them. The reality was that a small privileged class made up of the key estates of the Crown, Cross, Sword and Purse were living the high life. This secure life was had at the direct expense of the “small people” (pobles menuts) and very little was being done by those in any estate to help the poor in any significant way.
In the poleconomic structure of Catalan society, the people (pobles) had very little representation, if any. From time to time, a given monarch would nod in their direction but they did not have a permanent structural presence in government. They included the vast majority of society – rural farmers and working folk of urban areas. If anything, the gap between these subaltern poor (subdicti) and the privileged few at the top widened as time passed and those of the ruling class managed to institute more privileges for themselves and their factions (bàndols). It was certainly a government for the those who were honored, not for the powerless. The under-representation of the multitudes in government is symbolized by the name of the Barcelona plenary assembly, the Consell de Cent (Council of the Hundred). Those who served were members of the rentier class with having little in common with the great majority of the people or as they were often referred to by members of the class – the pobles menuts – “lesser people.”
Before the seigneurie banale, many castle-lords passively accepted the presence of the County of Barcelona, but did little to support it. A few comtors (members of the inner circle) were ardent backers of the Count of Barcelona, but for most barons there was a natural conflict with the Crown. Yet the castle-lords who were not the king’s homines solidus, his close councilors, often pushed for hereditary tenure of their holdings and independent rights. As the eleventh century began, this tension was growing, as more and more castle-lords refused to obey the count. As the same time, some of the count’s comtors became corrupt and began to think of themselves as provincial lords equal to and/or independent of the law of the realm. A quest for land, riches and prestige (most commonly achieved through combat) were driving the disorder.
When the power of the Count of Barcelona wavered, as it did from time to time through the ages, the local magnates would take advantage and impose themselves as a stronger rentier class on the hard-working peasantry of the countryside. This happened after 1017, when the stream of gold to Barcelona diminished suddenly. With a fragile countship, the barons in their castles became disorderly. In the tumultuous years of the mid-eleventh century, the encastled aristocrats established themselves as masters of the land, where they once had ruled as viscounts and vicars by the grace of the Barcelona ruler. In short, they turned their backs on comital authority.
Certainly, a stronger county emerged from the seigneurie banale. A century later, the upland lords were again complaining about the exactions and oppressive hand of the House of Barcelona. In a way, the count was doing to them what the castle-lords had been doing to the peasantry, each level living off the wealth of those below. Disgruntled magnates tried to impose a settlement whereby Pere I (1196-1213) would renounce any arbitrary dues on the nobility. On the other hand, at this time the counts were still attempting to put the authority structure of their office back together. Slowly, they instituted a new legal system based in the courts of their provincial vicars. In Barcelona, this vicarial court became the “hub of justice.” Vicars assumed important new judicial and supervisory capacities so there had been some improvement in the authority structure (remember these were the same officers renown for promoting extortion in their role as “revenue farmers” for the Crown).
Society as it Developed in Early Catalonia

Stratification in Catalonia dates from at least its invasion by the Romans and Visigoths. Their legal codes were primarily directed to secure the maintenance of privilege “obtained by the accident of birth.” The Visigoth’s Forum Judicum divided society into classes based on ethnicity and socioeconomic criteria:

Nobiles (nobles), all of whom were Goths and were subdivided as:
Primates
Seniores
Viliores (villeins), who could be Goths or Romans and were subdivided as:
Ingenui (freeborn persons)
Liberi (freed persons)
Servi (slaves)

Stratification in Catalonia can be seen in the indemnities required if a person was injured by another. Quoting from the Usatges, Professor Bonnassie says:

Whoever kills a viscount or wounds or dishonours him in any fashion, should make reparation as for two comtors; for one comtor the reparation should be as for two vavassors . (Usatges 4) In the case of the vavassor who has five milites , his murder carries reparation of 60 ounces of refined gold; for wounding, 30. If he has more milites, the composition will increase in proportion to their number. Whoever kills a miles will give a composition of 12 ounces of gold. Whoever injures one, inflicting one or more wounds, owes him 6 ounces of gold in reparation. (Usatges 5;1991:196).

From this book of rules, the Usatges, we can derive the logic that establishes a noble hierarchy with four levels: viscounts (equivalent to the count’s ambassadors or district commissioners), comtors, vasvessores (custodians or administrators of castles) and milites having these equivalencies:

Viscount = 2 comtors
Comtor = 2 vasvessores

(Plus, the number of
milites held increased
one’s status).

This can clearly be seen in Box 8.4, fashioned after Bonnassie:

Box 8.4. Compensation for Murder & Injury
(in ounces of gold)
Death Injury
Viscounts 160 120
Comtors 80 60
Vasvessores 40 30
Milites 12 6
Peasants 6 2

There was stratification at every level of society. Among the counts, the one in Barcelona was supreme, acting as the chief count and eventually becoming the King of Aragón, referred to as the comte rei (count-king, pl. comtes reis). The majority of other comital families in Catalonia were resigned to this state of affairs. Of the Catalan counts, only Pons Hug II of Empúries attempted to fight to retain some semblance of his independence. He was totally defeated in battle by count Ramon Berenguer III (1097-1131) in 1128.
We get the idea that stratification was ancient. Writing as late as the fourteenth century, the Catalan author Eiximensis (ca. 1340-1409) recognized three classes in Catalonia and Castile: mayores, medianos and menores. Box 8.5 shows the content of these classes:

Box 8.5. Iberian Social Classes in the Fourteenth Century according to Eiximensis
Class Name Class Content
Mayores (about 1.5%
of the population) Nobles, high ecclesiastics &
royals.
Medianos (about 19%
of the population) Royal officials, merchants,
lawyers, knights, notaries,
doctors & master-craftsmen.
Menores (this class
comprised
80% of the population). Peasants, hired workers,
servants, sailors, soldiers, friars,
chaplains & beggars.

In early medieval times, the main conflict was between men of the Crown, Cross and Sword. There were constant power struggles over land and its incomes between counts, barons (or magnates), castle-lords and ecclesiastical lords. Eventually, as the cities (especially Barcelona) developed, municipal burghers (burgenses) entered the mix. When Catalonia joined with Aragón under a single count-king, this quest for power was joined by the rural barons of Aragón as well.
As individual aggrandizers struggled, they identified with their peers: Men of the Cross with their “kind;” Men of the Crown with their “kind” and their comtors or “sworn men;” and the Men of the Sword with their avaricious peers and the milites or knights supporting them in battle and their extortion of the people. While these men worked with those in other estates, they strongly identified with their fellows.

I will discuss the various estates, sometimes using simple emblems of their status and power:

 The Crown – for the power and authority of the king, count-king (comte rei) or count, especially the Count of Barcelona. While the symbol of a Crown is not usually used to depict a count, I use it because it is indicated in the Código ó Compilación de los Usatges or the Commemoracions of Pere Albert and other political documents established the Count of Barcelona as non est potestas nisi a Deo – deriving his authority from God. Thus, his powers to fulfill his legal, executive and judicial functions were being defined as royal, as in the case of a Divine King.

 The Sword – for the castle-lords of the seigneurie banale.

 The Cross – for the prelates and abbots of the church, who acted to form ecclesiastical estates in a fashion non unlike that of the castle-lords.

 The Purse – for the franchised city folk led by the entrepreneurial patricians. The urban merchants or bourgeoisie.

 The Pen – initially these were men embedded in the church, ecclesiastical scribes. Later, lay scribes or notaries became widespread and even later, poets and intellectuals took up the pen to both support and decry the other estates and the general frame of society in Catalonia.

 The Plow – peasant farmers, the majority.

But this process of identity invention did not occur in a sociocultural vacuum. Relative to our theme of domination, there existed a cultural hangover from previous eras that provided a hierarchical mental construct that would have framed all such efforts.
Men of these estates operated in a cultural milieu that supported stratification. Their aggrandizing efforts to secure a foothold of power and wealth were esteemed, though this was not always a complete acceptance of their self-interestedness and its excesses; but an overall cultural habitus nevertheless afforded higher-ups, of whatever stripe, respect and deference and few restrictions on their use of violence.
As new lands were settled, over time natural variations in soil, climate and luck in acquiring favorable technology led to economic stratification, but in the Marca Hispanica immigrants of all kinds carried a generalized hierarchy model of society. Based on this cultural format, the weaker members of the area were submitted to a feudal structure by the strong. Thus, even though peasants moved hundreds of miles from their natal areas of oppression, they found that system reproduced in the new lands of the Marca Hispanica and later again in New Catalonia.

The Peasantry

The overriding concern of the peasants with food is summed up in Fernand Bruudel’s sense of them as “a community of grain.” They formed the vast majority of the population. Until the “time of troubles” they had a great deal of freedom compared to serfs in other parts of Europe, sort of “frontier liberty.” Nevertheless, they formed the bottom rung on the social hierarchy.
In a frontier situation like that of the Marca Hispanica identity production was part of the settlement process. Most of the peasants were former slaves or farmers who had existed at the bottom of the social ladder elsewhere. Before the imposition of serfdom, no doubt, newly freed slaves were trying to carve out a new identity as free persons, while some at the knights were trying to move up into the noble class. All were creating an identity space for themselves in the outskirts of European civilization.
“Serf” was not a desirable or acceptable identity for tenant farmers and it is one that they fought, but also one that they ultimately had to accept in the legal system, if not in their hearts. They had survived under local customs that prevailed even in the turbulence of the period after the rule of the Visigoths and the advent of comital power emanating from Barcelona. They had a saying, No et deixis els costums vells pels novells (don’t leave old customs for new ones).
Yet peasants accepted the new tyrannical order. Why? Culture may have played a significant role in this. Looking up from the bottom, they may have seen little chance of overturning a moral order that was thought to be fixed in nature. Peter Burke feels that peasants of early modern Europe were mired in fatalism, particularism and traditionalism. A sort of fatalist passivity prevailed, a moralistic individualism in which human nature was seen to cause injustice, a state of which no man could really escape. Moreover, the clergy were telling peasants that they should really be looking to an eternal reward, rather than benefits in this world.
The lords did little to help the peasantry and ecclesiastical almsgiving was insufficient to meet their needs. As Mollat has noted, the wealthy actually put more pressure on the poor to provide them with rents and services and policed them more heavily in times of trouble. For example, if famine struck, the lords demanded their normal food payments.
Those of the church were supposed to aid the poor, but this was rarely the case. As an illustrative aside, we can see that this has not really changed through the ages. David Graeber recently noted that the poor are more altruistic than the rich, even though the latter have far more resources to give to charities. He says: “Studies of charitable giving, for example, have shown the poor to be the most generous: the lower one’s income, the higher the proportion of it that one is likely to give away to strangers” (2007:32). Archaeological evidence points in the same direction. In ancient times, in times of stress the rich did not feed the poor, but rather hoarded resources and fed themselves.
In the documents from centuries of abuse we hear the cries of serfs and get a sense of the violence and savagery that rained down on them during the Catalan "time of troubles." This can be seen in a quote from Bisson’s Tormented Voices: “the memorials of complain stand distinct from other accounts: they are accounts of violence …(and) arbitrary behavior…Their governing verbs are “to take” (tollere), “take away” (or “steal,” abstulere, auferre), “break (in)” (frangere), “strike” (or “beat,” verberare), “seize” (rapere), “eject” (eiicere), “lose” (perdere), and the like… .”

Relations between Estates

Let’s look for a moment at how those of the Cross and those of the Sword got along. Perhaps the most important driving factor in the relations between ecclesiastics and lay nobles was that each had something the other wanted. In spite of the fact that they competed with each other in life for land, tenants and political favor; they had a basis for creating an alliance. Lay nobles wanted to appear religious, supportive of the church, as this was expected behavior in Christendom and they wanted salvation. Ecclesiastics wanted to build the poleconomic base of Christianity in the frontier.
In the ideal, the church had started out in Catalonia as a protector of the poor against the private desires (L. privatas appentiones) of the rics-hòmens. Early parishes were organized largely by the peasantry. However, in the space of two centuries, the places of worship had passed almost entirely out of the control of the village communities into that of the great families and abbeys. Furthermore, baronial families regularly began to make land donations to the church, sometimes with peasants connected, acts of piety that further cemented the dual elements of the élite stratum – the Cross and the Sword. As a means of mystification, church doctrines impressed on the peasants to follow both their ecclesiastical and lay leaders in defense of their frontier homeland against the Infidels to the south and in governance of the land.
Sometimes lords sought acknowledgements from the Crown, at other times from the clergy. Aristocratic landowners with excess land or those with no direct descendants could strive for secular and ecclesiastical security at the same time. When land was given as a fief to laymen or as a donation to the church, it was frequently given only partially, holding back its use rights, at least for the lifetime of the donor. Also it could be given with the understanding that it would be improved. Again, some of these gifts to the clergy gleaned immediate cash for the donors, with the church acting as a finance corporation. Some of this financing was accomplished “under the table” to avoid the condemnation of the papacy over the question of usury.
Also, bishops and abbots acted as landlords in the manner of castle-lords. However, donated land by itself was of little use to the church, except as a long-term investment. It was labor that was in perpetual short supply. To make the land productive, labor was needed. All estates competed for laborers. The following example from Kosto illustrates the procurement of someone to work church land:
in 1068, Guitard received a grant from Sant Cugat del Vallès of the manse of El Vendrell on the condition that he work the land and return half of the profits to the monastery. The agreement required Guitard’s fidelity to the monastery…this was an increasingly common condition for agrarian contracts. On the other hand, the agreement also included the unusual provisions that the monastery would provide half of the oxen required for working the demesne, as well as 2 sesters of barley every year to defray Guitard’s expenses for transportation (2001:110).

Yet, nobiles wanted to give land to the church for two reasons. Sometimes they got a cash kickback to tide them over in a cash crunch. That was the worldly or short-term reasoning. On a longer plane, there were what Samuel K. Cohn calls “strategies for the afterlife.” It was thought by some that churchmen could provide secure guarantees of eternal life. If not that, then surely they had the means to elevate a donor’s family name in the here and now.
That was the strategizing from the side of the nobles. On the other hand, bishops and abbots had artfulness as well. No doubt ecclesiastical élites manipulated the desire of patrons to establish a public statement of their lineal prestige to the benefit of the church. In Catalonia, this was successful as donations grew in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Both sets of élites were using each other to augment their particular avenues to status creation and security.
In this history, we see men of high status in this life trying to codify their prestige through various fabricatory means in order to ensure their rights and privileges to dominate others and property. Apparently, for true believers, this fabrication of domination carried over into the next life, as genealogy became more important in defining the boundaries of family patrimony and the importance of an élite name opened more and more doors providinng greater poleconomic opportunities. That is, urban patricians (burghers) and upland lords alike began to invest in donations to the church, in being buried in the parish cemetery, in having elaborate burial and in general, becoming prominent men in the cult of the ancestors, their names inscribed on prominent tombs. Conspicuously, stratification extends beyond the grave. Bensch elaborates this process:
Because patrician houses had such shallow foundations in early thirteenth-century Barcelona, the commemoration of ancestors through masses, chapels, and family tombs had a critical role to play in stabilizing family identity. By connecting family names and ancestors to the traditions of local churches, a spiritual pedigree could anchor and reinforce a thin, wavering bloodline (1995:385).

There was a need to perpetuate the family line with elaborate ecclesiastical rituals and the creation of stylish tombs. If ecclesiastical promises of eternal salvation rang hollow in the ears of some aristocrats, there was always worldly esteem to consider. Dominance in society could be enhanced by symbolic linkage to the church. The augmentation of dominion through alliance with the church could be had by making eye-catching donations, becoming a patron of a tomb in a church or cathedral, having a mass said for one’s family or ancestors, or lighting a perpetual flame at a specially-appointed side-altar. Some élites even went so far as to gather the bones of their relatives from scattered graves to place them in a magnificent churchyard tomb, or better yet, in the cathedral itself.
All this anchored élite families to Deity through public acts of piety. As keeping the family patrimony together became increasingly important to family heads, sometimes subsidized religious rites were not just for individuals, but masses were specifically designated to be said for the parentela, the descent group or family line. With what Bensch calls “the most personalized touch” some élites would buy an expensive purple shroud, which after the funeral would be donated to the church to cover the tomb of a saint, linking the family ever more firmly to eternal life. One enterprising aristocrat went so far as to donate two purple shrouds – one for a saint and the other to be cut into priests’ robes. Evidently, he saw the value of covering his bases in both worlds.
Another strategy to ensure eternal distinction for an élite family was their attempt to secure places for their sons and daughters as ecclesiastical agents. This was a practice of lords from the hinterland, one which the up-and-coming burghers imitated. By the thirteenth century, several urban patrician houses had succeeded in having their sons serve the church. To an extent, for both rural and urban aristocrats alike, local monasteries and churches were simply a dumping ground for unwanted sons and daughters; but, on the other hand, their entry was a status symbol, especially for the urban élite, a sign of their election in this life and a foothold in the next. Their ecclesiastical strategy had both a short-term and a long-term aspect.
Catalonia in the Early Middle Ages was a tiny world and there must have been a great deal of exchange between élites of all stripes. The zenith of the city bourgeois would come later. In spite of minor tensions, men of the Crown and church worked closely together. Bishops went to war riding next to counts and castle-lords, for example. Also the church financed many campaigns against the Moors. The secular activities of such clerics (s. clericus) were not far afield from those of the average castellan of rural Catalonia. Men of both domains saw benefit in working together as protectors of public authority and the House of Barcelona donated a great deal of conquered land to the church, monasteries and military orders.
The Count of Barcelona had a special poleconomic relationship with monastic foundations acting as colonial agents on his behalf. Professor McCrank notes:
there was a comital policy of creating a balance of power between the regular and secular establishment of the church, balancing monastic centers in the countryside with the influence of bishops in their cities. Hence, the house of Barcelona became a major patron of strategically placed new monastic foundations. Through monastic communalism, the counts pursued a policy of colonization, resettlement, and agrarian expansion under the guidance of corporate enterprise that was resistant to both episcopal control and the vested interests of other comital families (1996:2:26).

In this way, monks who were willing to risk their lives and establish a base in the frontier lands were used to attract peasant settlers, spreading the authority of the Count of Barcelona. Lay brothers ran corporate farms or granges, relying on lay tenants for land clearance and development. McCrank continues:

They engaged in tradition of all sorts, held a distinct economic advantage in the form of papal exemptions from diocesan tithing and other privileges, and exploited local resources – both natural and human – to build large monastic domains. The image of small communities of lone monks carving civilization from the wilderness is appealing, but it has also been shown that in France and other areas most land reclamation had been begun, if not substantially completed, before the arrival of the monks (1996:2:31-32).

The Seigneurie Banale: Fabricating Serfdom by the Sword

The seigneurie banale can be defined narrowly or more broadly. In the narrow sense it is the violent usurpation by the castle-lords of public authority in the “time of troubles” – 1020-1060, when the count was supposed to protect the peasantry, but didn’t. Nevertheless, lordly exploitation of the peasantry was not confined to this brief period of defiance of the House of Barcelona. In reality, and in contrast to much of the rest of Iberia and indeed Europe, the Catalan seigneurie banale lasted for the next four hundred years and then was only slightly amended in the fifteenth century.
Also, there was a process of fabricating domination going on in the time before the troubled centuries in Catalonia that existed at two levels: (1) the forming of the House of Barcelona and its tenuous hegemony over the region; and, (2) smaller lordly bannums (commands) wherein the lords fabricated customs and practices that tied peasants to the land in various degrees of servitude and gave the lords rights to extract dues and services from them.
Prior to 1020 these bannums were not especially onerous by medieval standards. The Marca Hispanica was a frontier and peasants needed some protection against foreign marauders and criminals. For such protection they traded part of their surplus and services.
The reason why the bannum became oppressive during the seigneurie banale was due to the disappearance of opportunities to raid and loot the Muslim territories to the south and southeast. Prior to 1020, the lords derived much income from such adventures and did not need to place heavy burdens on the peasantry.
What changed the situation was the fact that the Count of Barcelona established peace treaties with the Muslim principalities, exacting parias (tribute) in gold in return for promises that the raids would stop. This deprived Catalan lords of their main source of income and they turned their violence homeward. Furthermore, as Box 8.6 shows, gold was becoming plentiful in the region during the “time of troubles” and this set off a scramble for status and power among the lords.

Box 8.6. Increase in Gold use in Catalonia’s
Commercial Transactions
Date Percent
1040s 39
1070s 77
1070s in
Barcelona 95

I have detailed this oppression in detail elsewhere (Mendonsa 2008). In this chapter I am focusing more on the legalistic encoding of the oppression than on the rampaging by paladin lords, though for roughly a forty-year period they used threats and violence to place the peasantry in a state of fear, exacting in the process enough wealth to maintain their aristocratic lifestyles.
This was immoral tyranny on two accounts. First, the Count of Barcelona was responsible for the protection of the weak in his domain. He did not stop the berserk storm of violence inflicted on the poor. Though in all fairness, the count could not move against the lordship militarily because they castle-lords and their knights were the only source of combatants at this time in history as widespread use of mercenaries was a thing of the future. Secondly, the bannum was, by definition, a reciprocal agreement between lord and peasant, with the former protecting the latter against bandits, some of whom were neighboring lords. In the seigneurie banale, the many of the lords became bandits.
What concerns us here is how this immoral behavior, the threats, intimidation and actual violence, eventually led to exactions that were justified by laws. After 1060, the count and regional lords participated in a legalization of the oppression carried out during the seigneurie banale at the tip of a sword. This functioned to enserf the peasants, transforming them into codified serfs.

Fabricating Serfdom by the Pen

The establishment of féodalité et seigneurie resulted in the diminishment of the collective rights of peasants. Many local communities had established households that drew on collective resources – pasture, timberlands, meadows, stone quarries, streams – that were controlled as commons by the peasant community. The castle-lords usurped these customary rights. Under the bannum imposed by the seigneurs, use of the commons would have to be purchased. In effect, the seigneurie banale placed a price on things and services that previously had been free or organized according to a communalistic ethos. In this process the scattered surpluses of the peasant economy were concentrated into the hands of the dominant class.
In the seigneurie banale, the landed élite struggled to round out their terrorism and level their subject population to subaltern legal status. Enserfment was the goal. The castle-lords added bannum to their possessions, especially the right to rule in capital crimes, but also the right to fabricate laws to tie peasants to them as serfs. Some free peasants were forced, at the tip of a sword, to sign written contracts that transformed them into serfs, bound to the lord in perpetuity. Temporarily, the landed seigneury took on the functions of a state, holding powers of lordship over land and people. Law was privatized, so to speak.
When the rules became “firmed up” after the worst of the troubles, they favored élites. Land and rights to peasant dues and services were concentrated in the jurisdictions of powerful castellans. The “firming up” process was done by a reasoned choice of regulations that upheld lordly claims and a re-working of others. The castle-lords and their scribes picked through the laws to be found in:
 Ancient customs (costumes)
 Roman law (especially important)
 Visigothic law
 Ecclesiastical (canon) law
 Carolingian law
 Comital law (lex regia)

The “sorting” process led to a new set of codes that was eventually agreed upon by the Count of Barcelona, who needed the support of the castle-lords. This reformulation of law benefited the ruling class at the expense of the newly-defined serfs.
Box 8.7. Permanency of Class Relations before,
during & after the Seigneurie Banale
Class
Structure Before During & immediately
after Long after during the emergence of the Crown of Aragon-Catalonia
Rich & powerful Count of Barcelona Count & castle-lords King
Castle-lords Castle-lords & powerful
burghers
Middling gentry
(miles) Middling gentry (miles) Middling gentry (miles) Middling gentry (lesser burghers & rich peasants)
Poor & powerless Poor & powerless Poor & powerless Poor &
powerless

Words have power. In society, there are those who script codes and those who carry out the scenarios created by the scriptors (scriptwriters). In the Catalan case, the idle rich – the castlans – were the scriptors, those hatching plans that would benefit themselves. Their plans were not socially positive, not designed to increase human security in terms of building institutions and economic means of achieving a better life for the populace. Moreover, these immoral laws were eventually codified in the Constitcions de Cataluyna in the fourteenth century, as well as many interim legal statutes.
These codes created bondsmen or serfs who were known as remenças. This term derived from their requirement to pay a “redemption fine” to leave their lord’s and tenements. This was formalized servitude and it was severe. Professor Freedman says of Catalonia, it “developed a form of lordship similar to that of the rest of Europe but more severely applied.” Moreover, it was to outlast European serfdom.
Serfdom in Catalonia was about tying tenants to land in order to extract the maximum amount of dues and services possible. This cut into any sense of freedom former residents of allodial manses had. In effect, the allod-holder (freeholder) had ceased to be the real master of his land or life under the seigneurie banale. He could no longer alienate his land without the lord’s consent (laus) and usually this was permitted only between tenants of the lord’s domain – within the castrum. The idea was to prevent land from going to anyone outside the legal scope of his ban. Freehold property had expired under the weight of onerous obligations loaded upon it. Under the seigneurie banale, increasingly, castle-lords obtained ownership of land and human beings, which were bought and sold like chattel. Even the donations to the church came with bondsmen attached. Men were giving men to “God” in hopes of saving their eternal souls. Regarding servitude’s causes, Professor Freedman says:
There is only an imperfect dichotomy between the “real” world of economic well-being and the “artificial” world of legal status. Precisely because of their artificiality, determinations of servitude or privilege, backed by institutions and force, changed the condition of the peasantry and explain part of the impetus for the changes between tenth and thirteenth centuries (when freeholders were transformed into serfs – my addition;1991:13).

Freedman goes on to point out that in this time period, farmers were “unquestionably serfs,” that is men tied to the lord through a hereditarily transmitted bond. They were “men of their lords” and not at liberty to leave lord’s bannum. They were homines proprii et solidi – bondsmen. Another term was added to documents – affocati (tied to the hearth) to give greater strength to the bond. Clearly aristocrats were starting about the work of formulating laws – what the people called mals usos – bad customs. These were documents drawn up by the lordship and there was undoubtedly an element of coercion in the making of such vows. Bondsmen were subject to fines if they broke these rules. Behind all this was the raised sword.
When a serf was jurally attached to a castrum, he paid dues to the lord. Needless to say, those rents went up constantly. One of the attractive features of a long-term contract, from the perspective of the tenant, was to acquire security against inflation in his obligations. To get around this, the lords added extra rents such as braçatge (one-sixteenth of the crop) on the crop. Another was the vignogolia, a levy on the wine harvest. These were also subject to price rises over time. They were added on top of regular dues. Such increases worsened the position of the tenants over time (you may recognize this from our discussion of the case of the Scottish Highlands).
The oppression of the lords on the peasantry was about degradation to their self-esteem by treating them as slaves, not allowing them to move about and forcing them to pay arbitrary rents. During the seigneurie banale, things got worse for the peasants. The Pen writing the contracts was held in a aristocratic hand, or more correctly the hand of a scribe, often a monk. Most aristocrats were illiterate at this point in history. As time passed, contracts and convenientiae used to document domination gave way to even more formal authentication e.g., the juridical texts and constitutions of the Crown corts (House of Lords), which formalized the serfdom of the peasantry. The increasingly official oppression of the peasantry congealed into the mals usos of the period between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.
This new servitude did little to the amount of rents paid. Free and unfree paid more or less equally, but the difference came in the increase in liability of serfs under the mals usos and redemption payments. A serf who wished to move out of a lord’s jurisdiction had to pay the redemption fee himself, even if he was moving to be under the dominion of another lord. Furthermore, servile status opened the bearer up to arbitrary law enforcement by the castle-lord, which often led to additional exactions and economic burdens, none of which could be effectively appealed to any higher authority since by the end of the twelfth century the Count of Barcelona and the castle-lords were all more or less reading from the same page.
Homines proprii or owned men were not merely individuals, but whole families could be owned, some by monks and cathedral chapters. How did this situation come about? The answer lies in pledges required of peasants by the lords, made in the presence of notaries. Once recorded, these writs became reference points for continued enserfment. Castellans were able to require those living within their jurisdiction to submit to such registration and documentation.
The linkage between chattel slavery and serfdom beginning in eleventh century Catalonia can be seen in the emergence of the legal concept of ius maletractandi issued by the Catalan corts in 1212, but which de facto began in the eleventh century. This marked the appearance of the concession of a right of mistreatment to lords with respect to their enserfed tenants. It was an inversion of the normal understanding of law as protection. Nobles became exempt from prosecution for mistreating their tenants and they were given the right to disenfranchise peasants for minor delicts and non-compliance. These laws weakened the previous protection of the peasantry by counts and by the church’s sanctity legislation. New charters and writs gave the wielders of the Sword new Pen-power. Relative to the peasants, these written documents were of two types: commendations and recognition charters. In the former, a peasant was converted into a serf – his or her status changed. In the latter, the existing status and obligations of the peasant was confirmed – his or her status did not change, but was recorded so that there was a public record of the relation of the peasant to the lord.
Along with the emergence of legal mistreatment of tenant farmers – ius maletractandi – there was also a linguistic shift. They had been called rusticos previously, but were transformed into remenças (serfs) becoming men lacking manners (cultura), virtue (virtus), luz (light) and ingenio, the special intelligence nobles felt they possessed. Lacking such attributes, which can be summed up in the label nobilitas, serfs also lost the privilege to govern and were eternally assigned to the status of subalternus – “those below.”
Rules changed at the Sword’s tip and were firmed up at the point of the Pen. The feudalization of Catalonia was about aristocrats gaining control of land, labor and dues. Violence and extortion got them part of the way there; but they had to complete their oppression by effecting rule changes. For example, inheritance became more important. Castle-lords wanted the designation of a single heir (hereu). Partible inheritance was now to be avoided, keeping family wealth together, preventing the fragmentation of the patrimony. By 1160, this practice was established and assured the lord uncontested and uninterrupted succession preventing the fragmentation of property.
The lives of tenants also became more onerous as formerly free land was consolidated into large estates. Fields, orchards and vineyards were regrouped into “rational” units to stabilize exaction of dues and services. From these huge estates, many owned by the church, a serf family was given a plot to work. Previously, a free allod-holder who had leased from a monastery or wealthy landowner a parcel situated on the border of his own property could stop working it if he chose. This could be done without incurring any sort of fault, but with the coming of serfdom the tenant no longer had the right to leave his holding. He had become a legally documented remença serf.
Thus, rent contracts became an instrument of tyranny in most cases, as the contract normally indicated that the lessee was to reside “all the days of his life” on the land leased to him and his family (ibi semper stetis dum vixeretis). Tied to his land, the remença serf had almost no rights. He could not sell the lease and on his death, he could only pass it on within his family, thus preserving the lord’s hold in perpetuity. In effect, sons were being born into serfdom and daughters’ marriages were controlled by the landlord under the custom called ferma de spoli.
Feudal aristocrats were not trying to improve the productivity of their farms, but rather they worked to fabricate jural means of securing their dominion over poor farm workers. Rather than bolstering the productivity of his land the lord simply attempted to secure a legal hold over more land and serfs. As Professor Bisson notes, the “most lucrative trade was in lordship.” And some of these aristocratic hoodlums could be very petty in their mistreatment of the serfs and must have had a great impact on the identity of self worth of those so afflicted. For example, lords took all sorts of items from their tenants:
These were household stores of provisions, including substantial measures of feedgrain, wheat, … wine, bacons, and chickens. Berengarius Bonfill claimed to have lost a horse, a plowshare, and an axe. Everyone itemized seizures of clothing, coverlets, towels, and other forms of cloth, shoes, pottery, and utensils for cooking and eating. The list could go on (Bisson 1998:56).

The Emergence of Convenientiae

The written agreements known as convenientiae began in Catalonia with the phrase, Hec est convienientia (“This is the agreement”). During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, these documents were part of a trend of using documents to establish the poleconomic order. The convenientiae were documents, covenants or written agreements commonly used throughout Lombardy, Provence, Languedoc (on the Frankish side of the Pyrenees) and in Catalonia to the south. They can be defined as contracts by which two parties came to an agreement, freely and without the intervention of any public or private jurisdiction, about the definition of the obligations binding one to the other and pledged their fulfillment. They were part of the attempt by castle-lords to cover up (in paper) the injustices perpetrated during the height of the rampages of the mid-eleventh century. Such documents were constructed to legitimize the acquisitive actions of the castle-lords and their milites castri (knights).
Convenientiae tended to record agreements in four steps: default, warning, opportunity to amend and application of sanctions. These were stacked in favor of aristocrats. For example, how could a peasant issue a summons to a castle-lord or count in violation of an agreement? Or more correctly, how could he enforce a summons even if he got an advocate to issue one? Lords could warn (commonere) and demand (mandare) conformity from a peasant because he had the military capacity to follow up, whereas the reverse was not true. Even angry crowds of peasants attacking a castle could rather easily be dispersed by the charge of a few mounted knights. Counts had messengers (missi or nuncii) to deliver summons and the martial power to back up their message. If the peasant sent such a messenger, he was more easily detained or abused (reguardum habere) by the castle-lord than would be the case in reverse. Potestas was the power to command and to punish. Demanding potestas of a castle would be far more difficult than trying to control a peasant’s manse. Settlement of a dispute by ordeal or trial by battle would favor a castle-lord who would have a knight of the castum perform this on his behalf, whereas the average peasant would lack men to back him up.
Convenientiae emerged at the beginning of the seigneurie banale. During the formation of Catalonia, documentation of the poleconomic power structure became important to élites. Kosto says, the trickle of convenientiae that existed between the 1020s and the 1040s “became a flood” from 1050 on. Fewer than fifty survive from the first half of the eleventh century, while over six hundred are preserved from the latter half. In every region, counts, viscounts, bishops, abbots, clerks, castlans, and peasants all took advantage of the new form to record their agreements.
Why did the convenientiae emerge at this time in Catalan history? And why did the convenientiae and other written forms come to replace the older placitum? It appears that this was part of the general breakdown of comital authority, which was the basis of the placitum, and a move toward particularistic settlement of disputes and ordering of relations. Individual lords could have scribes write up documents on an ad hoc basis, one suited to the uniqueness of the situation without reference to public authority. This was a time of innovation and the creation of new ways of recording élite interests and of ordering relationships between each other and property. Kosto says:
Scribes, from Vic and elsewhere, added the term convenientia to these records of dispute settlement, but this does little to clarify matters. It is often impossible to distinguish, on the basis of content, between convenientia, concordia, diffinitio and placitum. Scribes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were released from the framework of their early medieval formularies, which had presented them with the three principal options described in chapter I: notitia, exvacuatio, and conditiones sacramentorum. Faced with a more flexible procedure to record, they failed to create standardized types of records. But they nevertheless created records, and that in itself is significant (2001:102).

Convenientiae framed the new feudal order. They were drawn up to try to regularize the somewhat violent relations between magnates in Catalonia. For example, in 1183 a document was written to govern the relations between Galceran de Sales and Berdat de Romanyà in which the latter promised not to take violent action against Galceran or allow harm to come to him at his castle of Romanyà. For his part, Galceran promised that if any conflict erupted between them, he would not attack Romanyà. In addition, Berdat promised not to establish any new customs (novitates) in the lands subject to the castle and “paid to Galceran the sum of 200 soldi.” It is clear from this case that Galceran was superior to Berdat and that the latter was receiving a fief in return for fidelity and military service.
Clearly convenientiae illustrate relations of power, lords and counts tying knights and lesser men to the castle and to broader military service with promises of land, loot and social elevation. These linkages are explicit in the documents of the day dealing with homage, fidelity, the grant of a fevum, military service and a system of working the land. Convenientiae emerged as patrimonial solidification became important viz., as land became scarcer and conflict between castellans over wealth came to the forefront.
The older oral form was less reliable in terms of proof and evidence in a court of law. Placita and convenientiae operated differently in important ways. The documents connected to a placitum were mainly a record of the oral testimony and the memory of witnesses. They pointed backwards, to custom and praxis. The convenientiae looked to the future. These newer documents established relationships between lords and men with regard to castles, land and privileges and attempted to solidify the relations involved in the protection and exchange of such material wealth and the power it generated. Convenientiae were detailed mechanisms to guarantee the stability of these relationships into the future and to ameliorate any conflicts over property and privileges that might arise. The structure of the placitum world looked back to custom; but the new world of documentation devised in the eleventh century looked forward to a new order of things. And unlike the tenth century comital placitum, the use of forward-looking written documents was an attempt to firm up a family’s hold on property and privileges and this was a much broader phenomenon than the exercise of public or comital law. Castle-lords, bishops, monks and even peasants were scrambling to document their holdings. These were new popular instruments of poleconomic power.

The Remença War and the Sentencia

From the time of Ramon Berenguer I (1017-1035), the counts had been supportive of the barons against the interests of the peasants. This backing briefly faltered in the events leading up to the Remença War of the fifteenth century. Why did this rebellion come to pass? Historians disagree as to the exact mix of causes, but at this time the serfs rallied, became organized, armed themselves and demanded freedom from the weightier mals usos and the ius maletractandi, especially the restriction on their ability to move out of the lord’s jurisdiction. In 1395, there were about twenty thousand remença households who fell under these laws. This constituted approximately a fourth of the Catalonia population and there were many other peasants who were not strictly serfs, but who were subject to some feudal exactions such as contributing toward the maintenance of ruined castles. Times had changed. Most castle-lords were now not involved in combat except in ceremonial jousts. Militarism had become property of the state and was directed externally in importance ventures. Also, intellectuals in the royal court and society were beginning to question the morality of serfdom.
Yet this threat was critical to nobles and the church, both receiving almost all their income from renders paid by serfs. Even the city government of Barcelona owned several baronies nearby. Additionally, individual burghers in Barcelona and other urban areas had acquired feudal rights and, consequently, their interests were interwoven with the rural nobility and clergymen who lived off of the surplus labor of the peasantry. Freedman comments on the peasants’ motives:
What they were opposing was in some respects the increased oppression following the economic dislocations of the fourteenth century. The tightening of lordship constituted a response to a crisis of revenue and perhaps influence. It has been shown, however, that the targets of the Remenças were customs established and routinely levied long before the Black Death and the factional conflicts of the fifteenth century. The ultimate success of the peasants was due to the convergence of war and social conflict, to the unusual (if not always dependable) favor of the king, and perhaps to some division among the powerful about the utility and justice of at least the symbolic aspects of the servile regime (2003:202).

For whatever reasons, the serfs had had enough and there were those in the royal household who supported them, if not always for the right reasons. Aristocrats were divided on this issue. The conservative diputació (executive committee of the corts) and the audiencia (supreme ruling council) were anti-remença to be sure. In their attempts to maintain serfdom, the lords created the fiction that the struggle was, not with the peasantry, but with the Barcelona rulers. It was framed as a constitutional struggle between the independent rights of owners and the Barcelona administration. The disputació cast itself in the role of the protector of Catalan liberties and tradition. Its members claimed the right to dominate remenças by virtue of custom, existing documents and legislation. They also used classic propaganda techniques e.g., in 1462 the Barcelona counselors accused the remenças of being evil men, ones who would upset the hierarchy of God’s realm with a radical egalitarian society.
In that same year, precipitating a civil war, the Catalan diputació sent the militia against the rebellious farmers in Gerona and also against Queen Juana, whom they perceived to be a supporter of the rebels. However, in a break in the fighting in about 1474, it was evident that the Crown’s support of the peasantry was faltering, even though peasant armies had fought with the King Joan II (1458-1479) against the French and others who wished to take advantage of the civil war. In a conference with the Catalan lords held in Gerona, the king agreed with the most onerous symbol of servitude – the right of lords to mistreat their homines proprii with or without cause (ius maletractandi).
Royal support of serfdom became codified. In 1486, it was Fernando I (el Católico, 1412-1416) who proclaimed the infamous Sentencia Arbitral de Guadalupe. This established the legal and social relationships in the Catalan region and stipulated a series of repressive moves to pacify the area and re-establish the principles of authority. The “Sentencia” did away with the compulsory nature of the “Six Abuses” that were a combination of duties that bound the peasants to their grounds as serfs of the castle-lords. However, the peasants still had to pay for each of the mals usos abolished. This policy put an end to an issue that had threatened Catalonia during three reigns.
The remença peasantry disappeared, giving way to the enfiteutico peasantry, in which a peasant enjoyed the right to work the land, but still needed to pay dues to his lord, direct dominion over the land staying in aristocratic hands. The barony also maintained civil and criminal justice and appointed mayors and juries as upholders of the law. Some have argued that the Sentencia mainly benefited the privileged segment of the peasantry, leaving rural conditions largely unchanged. Certainly, the peasant wars were only partially successful with the poorer peasants remaining impoverished and powerless in the face of fabricated domination.

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Domination: Chapter 7

2010-05-17T11:51:00.001-07:00

7. KINGDOMS AND EARLY STATES

What are Kingdoms?

Kingdoms are expanded chiefdoms. Aggrandizers love expansion and chiefs were constantly trying to improve their access to prestige, power and property. Chiefs aspired to be paramount chiefs and paramount chiefs wanted to be kings. To expand, they looked for ways to finance their selfism. Dr. Junker writes of the Philippine polities in the late-first millennium to mid-second millennium, which were complex and evolving poleconomies:
Wealth for generating, maintaining, and expanding political power came from a number of production and exchange contexts that are intimately intertwined, including foreign luxury good trade, local production of status goods by attached craft specialists, bridewealth and other status good exchanges between local elites, goods circulated through the ritual feasting system, tribute mobilization, and seizure of valuables during raids. As in the European Iron Age and the African Iron Age, the internal processes of sociopolitical evolution and interpolity competitive interactions that had little to do initially with foreign trade may have provided the complex economic infrastructure necessary for some Philippine polities greatly to expand their foreign trade interactions (1999:385).

In other words, chiefs in the early Philippines seized local opportunities to acquire prestige, power and property and when foreign trade brought new possibilities for aggrandizement they seized the moment, competing with each other to rise to the level of paramount or acquire kingly status.
Chiefdoms and kingdoms were the stepping-stones to the state. They formed interstitial stages between segmentary societies with sodalities and family headmen and the large and complex agricultural states such as Sumer, Egypt or that of the Aztecs. I am not interested in distinguishing stages, one from another, say a chiefdom from a kingdom, or a kingdom from an empire. More interesting to me is the linkage between them, the processes by which domination and hierarchy were fabricated in all.
In fact, in my writing about Africa it was very difficult to distinguish chiefs from kings. In a general sense, kings tend to have more power, rule over larger and more complex societies and their power has been materialized in more complex institutions and material manifestations e.g., monuments, palace art, etc. Also, kings frequently rule over several chiefdoms, the chiefs being his subalterns.
There is usually a great deal of pomp and ceremony revolving around a king. Furthermore kings were more likely to have well-developed temple complexes and priests to supervise the materialization of his connection to Deity. Yet again, while female chiefs existed queens were more common.
Kings and their courtiers fabricated materializations of elevation, of the high or divine status of the king e.g., sacred groves, steles and pillars, but also a materialization can be behavioral. For example, in the presence of the Swazi King of Southern Africa a commoner would be expected to speak of himself disparagingly as a “stick,” a “dog” or a “nothing.”
But with a few ad-ons of symbolism of greatness, kings acted more or less as did chiefs, creating ways to access and hold power over prestige, power and property. The difference between a chief and a king is a matter of scale: chiefs wanted to expand their hegemony and become kings, with subordinate chiefs under them. When fabrication was successful, a chief could expand his hegemonic control over more territory and people, proclaiming himself a king.

The Problem of the King’s Death

Le roi est mort. Vive le roi!—“The king is dead, long live the king” is a phrase commonly uttered following the accession of a new monarch in various European countries, particularly in the United Kingdom. It succinctly encapsulates the problem of the king’s mortality and the need to continue the office even though the man has died. If the office is a fabrication, it cannot appear to be so. It must be materialized ad infinitum. It must appear to be eternal, though the occupant is mortal, the office is undying.
The question of succession to high office plagues all centralized political systems. Some African polities settled on orderly ways of handling the death of a monarch, others did not. The Swazi had a system that worked through the queen mother. She was not allowed to have more than one son. Once she bore a son, she was not allowed to have more children. If her husband died, she was restricted from following the leviratic custom common to Swazi women. This restrictive practice was designed to prevent competition between brothers for the office of king.
The fabrication of rules of succession to high office began as little chiefs made the transition to authority chiefs and as one moves up the evolutionary ladder, the poleconomic stakes are higher and rules about who is in line to take control become more and more defined. Usually this was handled through the kinship idiom e.g., the practice of primogeniture whereby the eldest son succeeds his father. Or in matrilineal systems, such as the Asante of West Africa, office is passed from mother’s brother to sister’s son.
Preventing conflict as opportunists rose to power was a central part of the fabrication of domination. In conquest kingdoms, those formed by war, fabrication of legitimacy came after conquest. In kingdoms that evolved more slowly, ingenious devices to prevent conflict emerged e.g., among the Swazi upon his appointment, the king would enter into a blood brotherhood relationship with several tinsila (lit. “body dirt”). The bodies of the king and his age mates had incisions made into which royal attendants placed blood from the others, along with special medicines concocted by royal priests. The first two tinsila were symbolically and sociologically the most important. They were called the nation’s “twins.” They alone could touch the king’s body, wear his clothes and even eat from his dish. They protected the king from princely rivals and acted as go-betweens with people having complaints. They were drawn from commoner clans and only they could perform the routine and intimate rites associated with the person of the king. The tinsila functioned as a social shield against the competitiveness of royal family members.

The Risk of Despotism

The main inherent tensions in a kingdom are these:

 Between king and élite rivals

 Between king and court councilors

 Between king and the people in general

 Between king and major factions in society

 Between king and the provinces (center vs. periphery)

In each of these domains, there were fabricators at work to countermand fabrication by the king. More generally, as men rose to take on the mantle of kingship, societies developed ways to prevent the king from becoming a despot. This was broadly the case throughout Africa. Political forces emanating from other élites and the common people heavily regulated African kings. That does not mean that some did not try to elevate themselves above the people and other politicos.
The rise of the king among the Edo people of Benin and the ongoing battle between his power and that of the chiefs in the kingdom provides a good case of a struggle played out in many places and times in royal history. In fact, the rise of Benin to a position of eminence was an anomaly in a region where political organization leaned toward heterarchy and acephaly. Small-scale sociopolitical formation was the norm. While the Edo were organized in kin units and sodalities like so many other stateless societies in Africa, they did have a title system and the creation and bestowal of prestigious titles by the king was a means by which he was able to rise and maintain his majesty.
In Benin’s lore, there were four phases in the rise of the kingdom. First, was a hazy phase whose rulers’ names have been lost to antiquity. Second, the Ogioso dynasty ruled the land. Established by Obagodo, this dynasty governed Benin till the thirteenth century. An atypical brutal and despotic ruler, Owodo brought this long dynasty, with 31 kings, to an inglorious end. His misrule, cruelty and highhandedness made him extremely unpopular, as was his son who followed in his forlorn footsteps.
This audacious behavior led the people to react against the power of the sovereign. Both Owado and his son were deposed and banished from the kingdom and the chiefs determined to have nothing more to do with the Ogiso family and went to a republican system of government, electing a primus inter pares from among themselves. Despotism caused these gerontocrats to assert their power and demean the grandeur that had become attached to the king.
The third era was meant to institute a nonhereditary and elective system, but it was short-lived. The fabricators went to work, though the history becomes somewhat problematic at this point. Apparently, a ruler’s son claimed succession to his father’s kinship, bringing a negative response from the chiefs. Nevertheless, they could not agree on a successor – and here is where there may have been some re-writing of history: there are two possible stories. First, some say that the deadlocked elders appealed to Oduduwa, the King of the Yoruba ritual center of Ile-Ife to send a prince of their royal house to break the stalemate. Second, prosaically, some claim that the Yoruba took advantage of the interregnum to invade and conquer Benin. In any case, prince Oranmiyan arrived from Ile-Ife to inaugurate the fourth and Yoruba era in Benin’s dynastic history.
Oranmiyan brought new concepts and methods of governance, religion, warfare and artisanship. The fourth era was a time of consolidation, a growing militarism and imperialism. Oranmiyan married an Edo woman who succeeded him as oba (king during the Yoruba era). But the Yoruba kings were still not entirely free from Edo councilors, called the uzama nihinron. They retained their power based on their ancient status as kingmakers. Obas struggled with uzama nihinron restraint but did manage to attain some degree of autonomy under the rule of the fourth oba, Ewedo.
The florescent reign of Ewedo marked the start of the amalgamation of royal paramountcy in Benin history. He moved to incorporate the regency through the fabricatory use of symbols e.g., the oba wore a scorpion pendant on his back to indicate that he too had a “sting." Little by little, he became a more forceful potentate, reducing the power of the chiefs. In other symbolic moves, the oba required his councilors and chiefs to stand in his presence, while he reclined in kingly repose. He instituted customs giving him alone the right to wield the Sword of State (Ada) and he prevented chiefs from conferring titles, reserving that right for himself. To enhance a sense of mightiness, he built an extensive new palace and created an intricate system of court organization and a hierarchy of courtier chiefs, as opposed to the traditional or town chiefs, the uzama nihinron. The oba was successful in elevating the monarchy once again, while reducing the power of those outside his inner circle.
Many new court offices were materialized. The elaborate organization of his palace officials had three facets. First and most senior was the Iwebo unit, led by the uwangue, who was in charge of the oba’s regalia and later was given responsibility for trade and finance. Second, was the Iwegue group. Headed by the esere, this unit was composed of the king’s personal attendants and intimate courtiers. Third, the Ibiwe palace component led by the osodin was allotted the responsibility for the oba’s wives and children. Each of these units had a separate residential quarter in the palace complex.
The embellishment and augmentation of the palace, architecturally and organizationally, was a finessing strategy by the oba to thwart the will of the people as expressed through their representatives, the traditional chiefs. By setting himself up as the supreme ruler, the oba could create new non-hereditary titles, give land, wealth and honors to his underlings and effectively manipulate those competing for his favor. Loyalty and service to the oba brought honor, influence and wealth. Losing the trust of the king could mean demotion, exile or even death.
No matter how elevated the oba became, the uzama nihinron still held some authority and warranted respect. A uzama nihinron who fell into disfavor with the king could only be banished, not killed, as a lesser subject might be. The uzama nihinron and the town chiefs continued to controvert the despotic tendencies of the oba when they thought his actions were contrary to their interests.
As trade increased in the region, especially when Europeans began to buy slaves, the power and wealth of the oba rose to heights that strained his relationship with the uzama nihinron and others. New opportunities stimulated new efforts to expand the king’s power.
The reign of Ewedo laid the groundwork for an expansive era. He acquired new weaponry such as horses and swords. The oba and his generals reorganized the military. Clearly, the military might of the kingdom was growing, but it was still small. That changed in the fifteenth century when an usurper took the throne – Ewuare. He stormed and burned the palace and killed the ruling Oba, violently wresting power from the rightful heirs to kingship. A class aggrandizing usurper, Ewuare saw new opportunities in the changing post-contact world and struck.
As a ruler Ewuare was said to be a “powerful, courageous and sagacious” builder and organizer, a man who led Benin into an imperial era. He became even more autocratic than former monarchs in Benin and he transformed the small state into an expansive empire. The size and grandeur of this civilization was remarkable, especially given its location in the dense forest, which made expansion and construction especially arduous.
Under Ewuare’s despotism, warfare became more frequent. Archaeologists have revealed a vast complex of walls and ditches spanning some 9,900 miles in total length and covering some 2,500 square miles! Ostensibly, Benin employed its extensive army to expand its frontiers and to subjugate provincial populations, demanding tribute from them. The earthworks surrounding the city indicate conflict with neighbors and the likelihood that royals were maintaining such battlements to defend their wealth and power.
With revenues from slaving and trading, even greater materialization took place. After securing himself on the throne, Ewuare had a new palace built and he redesigned Benin City. A dual division was established with the ogbe (palace) apart from the ore (town). A broad avenue separated them. The ore had urban quarters to house different age-graded guilds of craftsmen – diviners, physicians, bards, smiths, carpenters, executioners and weavers. Each quarter, guild and age-grade was integrated into and controlled by courtier-bureaucrats in the ogbe.
Civil unrest had marked Ewuare’s rise to power and perhaps to placate the aristocrats and citizens, he created two sets of chiefs, one based in the palace (eghaevbo n’ogbe) and town chiefs (eghaevbo n’ore). Together, these two sets of chiefs constituted an advisory council to the oba. Chiefs were given the responsibility of, and a share in, gathering taxes and tribute in the kingdoms and its provinces. This appeared to be an attempt to more effectively integrate the palace and the town and the core with the periphery.
Again, even with an aggrandizing king like Ewuare, it was difficult for a king to rise too far above the people. Subaltern chiefs became a permanent and official counterweight to the power of the oba, although the offices were supposed to be non-hereditary. The allocation of such positions gave the oba great leverage in trying to “stack” the council in his favor.
In Africa, it seems, once a king attained a certain level of power, the people would reassert their democratic rights through chiefs, councils and sometimes outright civil unrest. In Benin, led by their “chief of chiefs” – the iyase – the council of chiefs became a de facto counterbalance to royal authority. By the seventeenth century, the iyase had become the commander of the army as well as the main spokesman for the opposition, not unlike a prime minister who could censure the oba publicly. It would appear that the oba wasn’t the only fabricator at work.
There was symbolic and public recognition of the fact that the king had opponents. In Benin, the opposition between the public and king was institutionalized in ceremony. For example, when any member of the town chiefs died, the palace would send for the lower jawbone of the corpse, symbolic of the regular dispute with the oba he had conducted in life.
Perhaps as he aged Ewuare began to think of extending his domination beyond his death. He tried to enhance the Edo principle of primogeniture in the minds of the chiefs and people by giving formal recognition to a successor before his death. Oba Ewuare created a new title, edaiken (heir apparent), and made him a member of the uzama council. The king gave him a village to rule on the outskirts of the capital, sort of a fiefdom in waiting.
Kingdoms are often aggressively expansionist. As indicated by the construction of defensive walls, legend and reports by Europeans, the rulers of Benin became warlike. Ewuare himself turned to military conquest. State priests extolled his war magic and bards sang praises to his valor in battle. His propagandists advertised Ewuare as a gifted leader.
Using force Ewuare brought recalcitrant subjects under his control and expanded the frontiers of the kingdom incorporating new tributaries. To the east he moved on the stateless Igbo; to the northeast the empire incorporated the Afenmai and other small groups; to the northwest the oba extended his suzerainty over the important Yoruba kingdoms of Owo and Akure, as well as Ekiti and Ikare villages.
Ewuare’s son succeeded him and strengthened the army becoming legendary as Ozolua the Conqueror. He led his army into battle and developed a reputation as a fearless commander who would not let his soldiers retreat. He had many military successes, putting pressure on the powerful kingdom of Ijibu and stubbornly attacking the recalcitrant Ishan to a standstill “before he was assassinated by his war-wearied and exhausted army” – another way the people reasserted their authority in the face of royal excess.
However, Ozolua’s son, Esigie, continued in the military vein meeting and defeating the invading Igala army. Esigie’s son and successor, Orhoghua, successfully led his army against the Mahin and carried his military might to the coast, where he established a war camp (eko) on the island that was to become the important town of Lagos, which, as it developed, became an important vassal State of Benin and one of the first protectorates established by the British.
Benin was on the rise militarily when other strong states around them had done the same and when this organic development was about to be truncated by the Colonial Era. Benin had expanded about as far as possible without having to defeat major rivals – the Nupe Kingdom to the northeast and the Oyo Kingdom to the northwest. On its eastern flank was the river Niger and to the south was the sea.
Kings fabricate materializations of their highness, but sometimes a monarch can rise to such heights that he loses power. When an oba had been killed on a military expedition, the new king began to delegate martial duties to the iyase – the head of the council. The oba now became more of a figurehead, restricted to the palace and ceremonial duties. The militaristic side of royalty was de-emphasized and ritual dimensions of royal office were given emphasis.
With the rise in prestige and power of the iyase and council, the oba-ship declined in political authority as the king became hedged with taboos and religious duties. He became the captive of the impulses and desires of his chiefs and the power of the people once again waxed stronger. As Professor Afolayan says, seven obas of the seventeenth century were “weak, obscure and effete, hardly distinguishable from one another.”

Kingly Display

Kings usually developed an ideology that gave them preferential access to sumptuary goods and services. These were sumptuary rules that gave his chosen aristocrats preferential access to jewelry, fine housing, ornate clothes and other decorative symbols of high status. On the whole, kings lived more elaborate lifestyles than chiefs and part of their increased power came from an augmented and opulent standard of living, one far beyond the reach of the average member of the kingdom. Lets look at a couple of Mughal monarchs as examples.
Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar – “Akbar the Great” (1542-1605) – was a Mughal Emperor who reigned at a time when he could develop a court life that was incredibly lavish (r. 1556-1605). After completing the subjugation of the majority of the Indian subcontinent, Akbar moved to increase the revenues of his centralized state. He devided the empire into twelve provinces and established in each a provincial governor, tax collector and a religious overseer. He specified that these important posts were non-hereditary, guarding against the universal tendency of provincial governors to become independent of the centralized state. He also made needed changes in the economic sphere that improved his income and the state began to flourish under his reforms. This was an efficient system that extracted the surplus value of labor from the peasantry to support state building and the lavish lifestyles of several Mughal shahs over some three hundred years of rule.
Akbar put this wealth to use in kingly display, first in the area of monumental architecture, starting with a magnificent mausoleum in homage to his father. He built few mosques and allowed temples of other religions to stand, but he poured vast sums of money into royal construction – cities, palaces, pavilions, quadrangular courts, baths and monumental gateways. Some of this architecture was a mixture of Turkish and Indian styles.
As he seemed to want his monuments to symbolize a unified state, he made moves in social and religious areas to demonstrate at desire for harmony. He abolished Islam as a state religion and proclaimed tolerance for all faiths. He expressed a desire to become integrated with India, rather than simply being a foreign conqueror. Muslims were no longer to be privileged citizens and the discriminatory tax on non-Muslims was dropped. Furthermore, he adopted the Hindu custom of darshan, appearance at the royal window each morning by the king.
Akbar also spent much of the day meeting with petitioners in royal audiences, some public, other in private. Here he received gifts and gave out favors.
The evenings were given over to pleasure and amusement. The king was a lover of sports, song, dance and music, as well as the pictorial and plastics arts. He kept hundreds of pachyderms for his beloved elephant fights and he adored hunting, being renowned for his marksmanship.
The monarch considered artistic expression to be a “tangible testimony of his reign and of the dynasty to which he belonged.” His royal workshops turned out artwork, jewels, woodcarvings, pottery, carpets and even clothes, which the king himself liked to fashion:

Every year, a thousand costumes were made for the sovereign, and one hundred and twenty of them were laid out in protective bags, ready for his use. These clothes were stored according to the days, the months, their date of entry into the wardrobe. The same was true of lengths of cloths that were destined to be kept as they were, or else cut up. Secretaries wrote down all the information concerning the origin of the garment on a label sewn on the bag. (Berinstain 1997:59).

Although illiterate himself, Akbar attached great importance to books. He had several great libraries and employed papermakers, binders, gilders, calligraphers and painters to produce poetry collections, biographies and books of legends chosen by the emperor himself, many of which he had read to him. He also had the great Hindu epics translated from Sanskrit into Persian, the official language of the state.
He also made use of painters and artists to illuminate books and produce murals and paintings, using a variety of styles from the West, India and the East. Sculptors and jewelers produced fine art as well for the great shah, an artistic tradition that would continue after his death. For example, Shah Jihan, the Mughal ruler who had the Taj Mahal built, had a second palace, the Great Red Fort of Agra. I had the opportunity to explore the palace and was fascinated by his bedchamber. I mention this here because it illustrates the sumptuary services great monarchs could receive. The shah slept on a bed covered with pillows and cushions that were elevated above a pool of water in a large room with windows made of louvered stone to allow airflow. At each corner of the pool of scented water there was a pad for a slave to stand while he gently fanned the perfumed water to create pleasant fragrances in the air currents that wafted over the Shah as he slept, or perhaps while he played with one of the ten thousand concubines he kept, in addition to his four legal wives.
In addition to kingly display in his palaces, Shah Jihan continued the tradition of Mughal kings in traveling throughout his sovereign domains to carry the image of opulent and spectacular wealth and power to the people. When he journeyed around India he was often accompanied by thousands of courtiers, his concubines, soldiers, thousands of elephants and horses and household items and art to impress all who observed the royal procession.
This elaborate way of life, replicated by many rulers in numerous kingdoms throughout history, not only the Mughals of India, was the direct descendant of the earlier sumptuary rules of early chiefdoms. Early chiefs may have had access to less splendid goods and services, for example being carried about on a litter, or adorned in flowers or feathers, or being tattooed over their entire bodies; but even these early symbols of status were privileges that enhanced the elevated position of the chief. Kings just developed more ostentatious displays of their assumed elevated status and the Mughal emperors carried such state theater to a zenith.

The Materialization of Maya Kingship in Cerros

The people of Cerros in what is now Belize were egalitarian people who worshipped their ancestors, but their cosmology supported ideas that enabled kings to rise up and create a political system that justified emergent stratification. These kings and their priests invented ideas that harnessed social energy by tapping into the nature of existing Maya concepts of the cosmos and the Otherworld. Kings “invented symbols that transformed and coordinated such age-old institutions as the extended family, the village, the shaman, and the patriarch into the stuff of civilized” (Schele & Freidel 1990:97). By “civilized” the authors meant kingly or hierarchical, a classical florescence dominated by the high kings (s. ahau; pl. ahauob).
As I have said chiefs and kings often arose to deal with problems in society. That was the case in Cerros, where the Maya of that community were faced with cultural tensions due to outside forces that were upsetting their egalitarian way of life. The culprit was trade with other Maya communities and their Mesoamerican neighbors, commerce that was creating wealth for some and not for all. This was an anathema in a society that regarded the accumulation of wealth as an aberration. At the same time, raised-field agriculture and extensive water management systems created a need for managers.
Kings had to be careful propagating their ideas of rulership in Cerros because the people were independent minded and not use to organizing labor pools necessary to maintain these systems. New hierarchical kingship, the institution of ahau, appeared to solve such problems. Cosmologically, the main problem was that the Maya conception of the cosmos included an egalitarian society. Kings had to somehow reconcile this concept with hierarchical leadership, to turn a negative into a positive or social good.
For the Maya, ahau became the key symbol of and rationale for the noble class. Ahau addressed the fact of inequality, not by doing away with it or denying it, but rather by embedding the contradictory nature of noble privilege into the very fabric of life itself using ritual, symbolism and monumental architecture. The kingly rites declared that the king was divine and had magical powers, acting as a pivot and pinnacle of a pyramid of people, his sovereignty extended out and embracing all person in society. He was the key conduit to the Otherworld, the means of contacting the dead and their protector against disaster and death. Having a linkage to the Otherworld, he had a hand in everything that happened in Cerros.
About 50 B.C. the village began a program of urban renewal. The people abandoned their previous dwelling and positioned themselves around a central plaza where the king started construction on a temple. This edifice was constructed according to the Maya concepts of sunrise/sunset, the east to west path of the sun and the rising of the Morningstar and the setting of the Eveningstar. Ritual and cosmology dictated the temple plan:

The front door of the temple was as wide as the stairway to enhance the dramatic effect of the king entering and leaving the space. The doorway leading into the back of the temple was not set directly behind the front door; rather, it was in the western end of the center wall. This design was intentional. It created a processional path through the temple interior that led the king along the east-west axis of the sun path to the principal north-south axis of the outer stairway.
The journey of the king inside the temple culminated (or began, depending on the ritual) in a small room built in the eastern corner of the front gallery … To enter this room, the king had to walk through the front door of the temple, circle to the west (his left), pass through the center-wall door into the rear gallery, and then circle back to the east to enter the room from the back gallery. In other words, he spiraled the inner sanctum in a clockwise direction. When he left the room he reversed the spiral, moving in a counterclockwise direction – thus emulating the movement of the sun from east to west (Schele & Freidel 1990:110-111).

The inner sanctum was thought to be a propitious spot where the film-like layer separating this world from the supernatural world was especially thin, hence the special ability of the king to communicate with Deity. In the little “holy of holies” the king carried out, alone and in darkness, rites that purported to maintain the kingdom in prosperity and safety, some of which included piercing his testicles and bloodletting. When finished, he would appear to the people in bleached white cotton garments that would clearly show the blood stains letting the people know that he had been in communication with the ancestors and the Otherworld.
The Maya had an elaborate cosmology, which most, from the highest to the humblest, knew and the design of the temple and its attendant rites were designed to connect the king to the Otherworld and reinforce his authority. Wherever he stood, he was the figurehead and centerpiece of carvings and symbols that spoke to the people. These symbols and rites said: The King of Cerros as the primary ahau existed because he was in communication with the other ahauob, the gods also protecting the community from the Otherworld (Schele & Freidel 1990:116).
This initial temple was only the beginning of the king’s building as he harnessed an enormous release of social energy in the community. Within a generation an acropolis was under construction as well as other structures, stelae, panels and art depicting the power of the king. Everywhere was the image of the severed head, the central symbol of royal power. During this zenith of Cerros kingship monarchs sacrificed highborn victims taken in war by cutting off their head in ritual fashion. Battle was the central symbol in much of the art.
In this example we see one way a king fabricated a new structure that gave him control of society, using artistic symbols, monumental architecture and rituals to set himself atop a pyramidal structure that gave him privileged access to wealth and power. Rather than attempt a completely new set of rites and symbols, he king, his priests and architects devised a system based on what the people already knew and understood. To be sure, it was tweaked somewhat, but in a way that was acceptable to the people and explained the changes that had come upon a previously sleepy, communalistic town.

The Formation of Kuba Kinship
The Kuba of Central Africa began as a loose association of chiefdoms in what is modern day nation-state of Congo. They lived south of the confluence of the Kasai and Sankuru Rivers. Their neighbors called them the Kuba, but they had no specific name for themselves. Once their polity became centralized, they called themselves simply “the people of the king.” This was a small highly centralized state in the end. It was only about two-thirds the size of Swaziland or Belgium, and historically contained between 120,000 and 160,000 inhabitants.
In the sixteenth century ancestors of the Kuba migrated southward out of Mongo-land and the Kuba Kingdom was constituted by sub-ethnicities including the ruling Bushoong, the Pyaang, Bulaang, Kayuweeng and the Kaam. When they arrived they found Twa and Kete peoples living there, who eventually became integrated into the kingdom. The height of the kingdom was during the mid-nineteenth century. Europeans first reached the area in 1884. Nsapo warriors invaded Kubaland during the late nineteenth century, and the kingdom was weakened, fracturing into its constituent chiefdoms.
The Kuba zone, to which they migrated centuries back, was a diversified environmental sector with many rivers, Savannah plains and forest, intermixed in a manner that allowed most villages access to all, although some were located on creeks rather than the larger rivers. The three original groups of the Kuba Kingdom were associated with these three zones: the Twa were forest dwellers; the Kete made their living in the Savannah; and the Kuba were said to prefer to live near large rivers and fishing was important to their way of life.
The political organization of the Kuba went from being a loose amalgam of disparate peoples and chiefdoms to a highly centralized kingdom based on Divine Kingship. Professor Vansina is not sure if Shyaam or others fabricated the centralized state, but Shyaam is given credit as being the Innovator king (see below).

Kuba Economy
In addition to fishing, the Kuba economy was based mainly on agriculture and hunting, as well as fishing. Until the nineteenth century they remained more or less peripheral to long-distance trade. Their products included yams, millet and sorghum. Later plantains and bananas came in from the east, while from the Americas they received maize, sweet potatoes, eggplant, beans, peanuts, cassava and tobacco. The introduction of maize transformed their economy, allowing two crops and in some cases three crops a year. This economic development, which began in the reign of King Shyaam, created higher yields and more surplus to siphon by the king and his élite cohort. At that point, the kingdom grew and became more centralized.
The major trade route, the Mbunun-Kongo circuit to the Atlantic Coast, marginally affected the Kuba. The absence of many trade words in their language indicates that involvement was slight and came late, probably around 1750. This is also evidenced by the fact that they did not use the major currency of that trade route, the Olivancillaria nana or cowrie shells. Cowrie shells arrived in Kuba country in the eighteenth century and must have become plentiful, as they eventually replaced traditional gifts and bridewealth payments even in the villages.
Mainly, however, the shells were thought to have magical qualities and were embedded into sword handles, artwork and ritual objects. More commonly, the Kuba used squares of raffia cloth (mbal) as currency. Ostensibly, the Kuba were also marginal to the Atlantic Slave Trade, buying more slaves than they sold, which reflects their position in the interior and their labor-short economy. Unlike the mani kongo the Kuba King (nyim) did not grow powerful by participating in the European slave trade.
The Kuba King did give passing traders protection and some believe that the innovator king, Shyaam, was himself a trader. In any case, there was a political need to establish market peace, protect traders and maintain the infrastructure of marketplaces and roads. The king undertook this and he also employed his own buyers, traders who regularly made purchasing forays. The king also taxed trade, though this was only part of his income.
Trade somewhat influenced Kuba social organization. The European lust for ivory may have contributed to the formation of a group known as Itwiimy, an elephant hunting association. As one can imagine, hunting elephants with spears was a dangerous operation and the association had many rituals and magical charms to thwart injury and death for its hunters. By the 1950s, when Vansina was doing his work there, the association had evolved into a semi-secret society with vague religious overtones.
In their migration to their eventual homeland, the remnants that finally coalesced to become the Kuba formulated rules of governance. Some migrants started as a military operation, coming as they did from the Lunda-Chokwe Kingdom, where the king presided over a militaristic polity based on disciplined war camps (kilombo) inhabited by regiments of initiated soldiers whose lives were based on a militaristic way of life, not kinship.
Military ventures based on the logic of predatory accumulation were not uncommon in Africa. This fact not withstanding, the Kuba were less militaristic than many. They developed formal rules for conflict resolution and war was the result in the breakdown of arbitration or a defense against the attacks of others.
But war was put to use when the Kuba scored a victory. The king would use the occasion for royal display. Military victories were followed by the symbolic fabrication of domination, the royal ideology demonstrated through song, dance, ceremony, art and other symbolic means to reinforce the idea of kingly power.

Kuba Stratification
Labor was always in short supply and warfare brought the Kuba slaves, which they also acquired through trade. Prisoners of war were placed in slave villages, while most purchased slaves worked as domestic servants or entered the king’s militia. Those slaves working for patricians and royals were given new names and had more or less privileged status vis-à-vis captured slaves.
Children of slaves (even if married to another slave) could become free, although it was difficult for the first generation to completely throw off the stigma of slavery and the Kuba were known to say, “only the grandchildren became truly free.” A slave who gained the respect of his master could be manumitted or sometimes could buy his freedom, some even receiving titles in the aristocracy. In 1892, the king had over five hundred personal slaves, plus many slave villages. An industrious slave could even be given a noble title. A female slave could be manumitted if she married her master, but most were kept as concubines. In 1892 the Kuba King had over five hundred personal slaves, plus many slave villages (matoon). Thus, a significant portion of kingly income was based on slave labor.
The king also required corvée labor from free villages, which was less onerous than slave villages provided. Required free labor was used to build vine-suspension bridges, walls, roads and for general upkeep and repairs. Any village could fall into slave status for insubordination or due to any grave offense against the state. One of the officers residing at the capital, the kubol matoon, was responsible for organizing the slave labor and tribute. In general, slave villages were required to provide more tribute, more labor and were given the most onerous tasks.
Clearly, Kuba society was a highly stratified class-based society (see Box 7.3). In addition to slaves, there was a class of persons known as ngady. They were pawns or serfs, virtual slaves, but persons who were able to keep their kinship status and they had the opportunity to work their way out of bondage. Ngady worked in the capital under the direction of the wives of the king or patricians, performing hard labor, although their kin status prevented arbitrary abuse in most cases. Slaves and even free villages revolted at times under the weight of extraction, but the Kuba state used severe repression and terror as instruments of rule.

Fabrication of Kuba Kingship
Kingship formed the core of this stratified society. The origin myth of kingship indicates that long ago there was war on the Iyool plain (a Savannah between two forest regions), with a member of the victorious Bushoong clan becoming the first nyim. Legend says that somewhere in the seventeenth century (1620?) the great culture hero, Nyim Shyaam established the Kuba state.
With the rise of such aggrandizers, kingship trumped kinship. As anyone familiar with Africa knows, village life is the focus of traditional African life and that elders are to be respected. It is for this reason that Shyaam was fond of saying, “I am the oldest of all villages,” implying that as a senior, he would protect all villages beneath him in rank. The king had to demonstrate that he was above the common throng. The untouchable status of the Kuba King was materialized in an installation rite. In it, the king committed an act of incest to show that he was not bound by kinship rules, being more powerful than clans.
Myths are sometimes about confirming continuity. For instance, the truth-tale is told about King Shyaam, the founder-hero. He is said to have been a foreigner and the son of a slave who did not have a legitimate right to rule the Bushoong clan or the Kuba as a whole. But he was cunning. He knew that the way a Bushoong chief passed his authority to his heir was to spit on him. Therefore, he hid by a Bushoong rubbish heap and when the chief passed, he spat, accidentally hitting Shyaam. Such a legend establishes a linkage between the Bushoong Chiefdom and the rule established by Shyaam. In reality, he was a foreigner who reorganized Kuba society according to new symbols of authority, expanding the Bushoong clan-chiefdom into the mightier federated Kuba Kingdom.
Kuba mytho-history is mooy ma walawal (“words of yore”). Lacking writing, theirs was an oral history, which formed a body of tradition that existed, but which was not supposed to flow or change beyond what we might call homeostatic flux. Mooy ma walawal validated the sociopolitical structure.
Neither Western history nor oral traditions in faraway lands are static. They are formed and reformed according to the dictates of living agents. That was the case with mooy ma walawal. For instance, the anthropologist Jan Vansina noted that tobacco showed up in seventeenth century Kuba myths. In later versions, the Biblical Genesis story appeared, beginning in the 1950s. Tradition is a living, growing entity because it is a poleconomic device. It is put to work by agents. Such agents have goals in mind, ones that will afford them more prestige, power and property.
Vansina notes that the fact that Kuba myth has many versions does not invalidate its “truth” in the minds of the Kuba. Anthropologists know that myth is a “just-so” story, a truth that is difficult to counter with logic. Vansina indicates that the Kuba pattern of thought is more additive than oriented toward creating exclusive categories of knowledge. Unlike Western thought, which strives to establish discrete categories; philosophical speculation is inherent in the Kuba thought mode.
For instance, the Kuba have at least seven major creation myths. I will only give one short version: Nyony aMboom (the otiose High God, so common in Africa) created the world and humankind, either by vomiting or by giving names in thought or utterance. Eighteen such children appeared, including Heaven, Earth, Sand of the River, Sword, Stone and the River Kasai.
In general terms, these myths and their various elements explained why the Kuba world is the way it is. For instance, in one version the first man and his sister were living alone in the forest and committed incest and the animals of the jungle reprimanded them and the incest taboo came into being. In another version, the sister, while going through the forest, accidentally brushed up against something and discovered salt. Such myths explain why the River Kasai is there, why the king rules and who is senior to whom. They explain who controls whom.
In Kuba mytho-history, chronology does not matter. The telling is usually non-linear and made up of selected points from myth and embellished with anecdotes to make a point within an overall framework of mythological acceptance by the listeners. Their history is not a string of events, but rather a patchwork quilt, the patches of which can be moved around to form different patterns within the overall concept of an historical quilt. Each muyum (court storyteller) may tell a myth slightly differently, with glosses that give it a special quality he wishes to convey. Glossing and embellishing a tale is admired and acceptable in Kuba oratory. In the fluidity of Kuba mytho-history, it was easy for kings aspiring to garner more power to embellish and expand on current versions of myths to sacralize the office of king, to make themselves into Divine Kings.
Kingship among the Kuba was their cynosure, the ultimate prize in both access to material goods and in a sense of éclat. Establishing divinity for the king was necessary in the context of a society where notables vigorously competed for power. Kuba aggrandizers competed for material goods, prestige and offices in the power structure. While the Kuba had an elaborate administrative and judicial system – the authority structure – power struggles largely took place “behind the scenes” of Divine Kingship. It involved power politics, the use of sorcery and, at times, open warfare.

The Resulting Kingship Structure & Stratification

It would seem that it was Shyaam who fabricated the hierarchical nature of the kingly system. Vansina writes:

Shyaam took over a unified chiefdom, which had some titled offices. He and his successors made a bureaucracy out of those by creating new titles that complemented the existing offices and by developing the idea that all titles together formed a single, overarching system. In doing this the rulers developed not merely a territorial organization but a set of coherent, central institutions at the capital. They were so successful that in time the bureaucrats, the kolm, formed a power bloc in their own right and became the backbone of a new social class, the patricians. The pattern of social stratification was profoundly altered and social-class formation became more pronounced (1978:128).

This hierarchical system was bolstered by a series of military victories by Shyaam and his successors. Vansina says, “Royal power grew so fast that by the middle of the eighteen century king Kot aNce could exile and execute eagle-feather chiefs with impunity… .”
In this highly stratified system, élites were members of a leisure class intent on conspicuous consumption. As such, they were the main patrons of the artists, who produced some of Africa’s more spectacular artwork. Their displays of status were manifested through ostentatious feasts, wearing finely embroidered clothing, especially the finely woven velvety textiles that were also exported as a signatory trade item of the Kuba. Cloth type was indicative of rank, measured in the novelty of pattern, the skill of craftsmanship in its making and the labor invested in its production.
Investment in the arts was one means to higher status. Another was developing an intricate knowledge of the complex mytho-history of the Kuba kingdom. In a more general sense, status was displayed through conspicuous consumption, demonstrated leisure, wearing finery, living in luxurious accommodations, outshining others by lavish feasting and gift giving and through participation in royal ceremonies. It was the king named Mboong aLeeng that formalized this leisurely life for capital residents, forbidding them to farm.
Such personal striving (dyaash) was allowed and encouraged by the king, but it had to remain within the bounds of kingship. Kolm had to strive, but the nyim did not, as he was the Divine King, on top of the hierarchy and close to Deity (Ncyeem). In fact, he alone was Nyceem Nkwoonc, “God on Earth.” Indeed, an abyss lay between the king and all nobles.

Box 7.1 Kuba Stratification (After Vansina 1978)
King (Nyim)
Notables Group 1: Kikaam – a single individual, acting as the
representative of all kolm (notables) living at the capital.
Named by the ngwoom incyaam (Crown Council), not by the king.
Notables Group 2: kolm matuk mabol – literally, “notables of the
corners of the village.” Group of four top officers of the state.
Notables First Rank:
kum ashin
1. cikl
2. ipaancl
3. nyimishoong
4. nyaang “chiefs of the Lands” or provincial
governors
1. chief of three lands (provinces)
2. chief of two lands
3. chief of one land
4. chief of one land
Notables Second Rank:
no special name
1. mwaaddy
2. nyoom
3. kaan angel abol
4. ipaacl ikikaam 1. Representative of royal children &
grandchildren
2. Representative of potential successors
to the king
3. Representative of the government of
of the capital city as a town
4. Deputy of the kikaan angel abol
Notables Third Rank: no
special name
mbyeemy

seven different titles Ritual specialist, named by the ngwoom
incyaam; a member of the Muyum’s clan.
Each title was ranked by seniority of
nomination
Notables Fourth Rank:
no special name
1. mbeem

2. mbyeeng

3. shesh
4. iyol
5. katyeen
6. mbaan

various deputies for the
male titles of this
rank 1. “Father of the king” or the
representative of one half of the capital
(one moiety)
2. “Father of the capital” or the
representative of the other half
of the capital (the opposite moiety)
3. chief military officer of the
mbeem moiety
4. chief military officer of the
mbyeeng moiety
5. Female representative of the women
of the mbeem moiety
6. Female representative of the women of
the mbyeeng moiety
Notables Group 3: kolm
bukwemy
12 top-ranked kolm The kolm were the bailiffs responsible for collecting tribute and organizing corvée
labor. Each was ranked by seniority of
nomination
Notables Group 4: no special
Name

60 or more kolm Each kolm was ranked by seniority of
nomination
Commoners
Pawns (ngady)
Slaves

To live in the capital city near the nyim was prestigious and to be one of his courtiers even more so. Life at court was considered the center of civilization. The privileged residents of the Kuba capital referred to villagers as bakon or “country bumpkins.” Most notables aspired to be as close to the king as possible. Patrician life was a dream by comparison to that lived by workers. Élites formed a leisure class, living in walled compounds, served by slaves and pawns and entertained at night by snake charmers and performing artists. Peripheral villages and provinces were seen as less desirable than “city lights.” Furthermore, to sustain a lavish lifestyle, those in the center siphoned wealth and labor from the common folk and slaves in outlying villages and provinces.
In a politco-legal sense, women were considered inferior to men. Even royal wives worked and held no special status. The only women who led a more or less leisurely life were the mother and sisters of the king and perhaps their female offspring.

Kingship & Access to Wealth
During the Age of chiefs (before the beginning of the seventeenth century) all of the Mongo and Kuba chiefdoms had to fight against two tendencies: internal factionalism and the desire of aggrandizing élites to displace the chief or succeed him; and the threat from other chiefs and usurpers from neighboring ethnic groups. This competition never went away in the Kuba Kingdom that emerged from such struggles, but it was sublimated, pushed down in the hierarchy below the Divine King.
Clever kings instituted court offices that gave aggrandizing rivals a slice of power. The king was assisted by three very important court figures. The muyum was the head ritualist and court historian, a pundit who kept the royal genealogies and chronicles. The mwaaddy was the eldest son of the king. The third figure and gender counterpart to the males of court was the female who taught royal songs of the nature spirits to the royal wives. Here, we see the linkage between nature and the forest, on one hand, and the political system on the other (a very similar relationship to what we saw in the Kongo Kingdom).
The elaborate nature of the political life of the Kuba people of the Congo was so impressive to the first missionary into the region, a Black American named William Sheppard, that he theorized that they must have descended from Pharaonic Egypt. Most Western visitors were dazzled by the Kuba’s elaborate court ritual, the stately nature of the royals, ubiquitous royal art, the pomp of court, the etiquette of the courtiers, the intricate nature of the political system and its sophisticated legal procedures.
The Kuba system was extremely hierarchical and authority was centralized with the nyim. No office at any level was a miniature of any other. All officers reported to the king. This despotic authority came slowly. In the seventeenth century the crown council (ngwoom incyaam) could rebuke the nyim, but by the eighteenth century the king came to stand outside the legal system, becoming more absolute in authority. He could arbitrarily fine, arrest, torture and kill opponents.
Nevertheless, the king needed officers. There were many different kinds of officials, serving the king as at-large bureaucrats, carrying out specific tasks e.g., collecting taxes, fines, tribute, spying and the administration of justice. Each administrator’s function was distinguished by the wearing of a different kind of feather. Kolms each had their own praise name, emblem, installation ritual, burial rite and ideology. There were about one hundred and eighty of these officers and with the passage of time kolms proliferated to the point where almost any man over forty was considered a kolm.
Kolms holding office were called “feather officers,” as they were given a feather of office. Such office-holders used their calling as “feather chiefs” to become wealthy. Nevertheless, the king was the wealthiest. By 1880, the riches of the Kuba King far exceeded that of any member of the patrician class, who themselves were much wealthier than the average Kuba citizen. The nyim held absolute power. His right to arbitrary decision-making was praised in oratory, song, proverbs and art, being backed, as it was, by the power of the forest spirits and Deity.

Manufacturing Divine Kingship

Kuba royal power was created and maintained symbolically. Divine Kingship was based on the doctrine that the king and Deity were to be considered one and the same. The king held an important hoard of supernatural charms. This “Basket of Charms” was kept in the forest by the muyum (chief priest). His shrine included the skull attributed to a founder politico, a kaolin egg which could kill any tyrant king (this from a previous reign) and the remnants of a huge iron double bell – the bell of Woot, as well as a paddle on which the definitive markings of all ethnic groups within the kingdom were carved.
Great care was taken to manufacture royal adornment and ritual. The substantial and extraordinary costume of the king weighed nearly a hundred and fifty pounds and was worn at his enthronement and burial. Each stitched or painted decoration had a specific message. Collectively, they indicated that the king was “beyond normal,” the embodiment of both the patricians and the people. Moreover, the costume contained a feather for each of the royal offices in the king’s bureaucracy. Each officer wore one feather, but the nyim wore them all.
Vansina believes that such symbolism of Divinity developed over a very long time, perhaps beginning with the reign of “Shyaam the Magician.” The aim of the royal garb, its message patches and regal pageantry was intended to create awe in the followers of the nyim.
When the royal bureaucracy was created, Shyaam was likely the one who created the mwaandaan, a special royal belt worn by the king and also given by him to members of his eighteen titled crown councilors (ngwoom incyaam). This belt symbolized royal power. When the king and his councilors met, any belt-holder could veto any proposal by the nyim by holding up the belt and moving it up and down. Over time, however, successive king’s whittled away at the power of the councilors as the nyim became more and more absolute and Divine. A councilor thought to be a traitor to the king could have his entire lineage relegated to slave status by the breaking of his mwaandaan belt. This could be applied even to the entire council, should the nyim be displeased with them.
The use of symbolism in the royal bureaucracy is instructive. Each officer had a feather as a material insignia of office. Office-holders were distinguished by different types of feathers. Furthermore, feathers were grouped in sets. Significantly, birds of prey represented officers attached directly to the nyim. Moreover, the nature of the office was delineated by the position of the feather on the body of the office-holder. Vansina notes that the system allowed the Kuba to become so enamored with political organization, and above all with public honors, insignia, and pageantry, that the “mirage of the feather” had become the main emphasis of the political culture. Each titled office had its own ideology, praise name, emblems and the more important ones even had their own funeral and installation rites. Vansina records the case of one titleholder to indicate the extreme intricacy of the symbolism connected to office:
At the capital, the nyaang, a provincial governor, had to be from an aristocratic clan. He commanded the region Ncol, just as other governors commanded other regions. He wore a white oxpecker feather, as did two of the three other governors and as did the king when he wore the hat of his grand costume…Nyaang wore a special hat, as did the other governors, and carried a wooden staff like the staffs of the ngwoom incyaam, although his staff was of a lower rank. He wore a red copper hat needle, which only two other notables were entitled to wear. An adze was worn over his shoulder, and two tiny bows were worn under his shoulders, as they were by other governors; other kolm wore bowstrings, as did the king, who wore hippopotamus tusks on his shoulders. Nyaang’s belt of bark belonged to a set that included the higher-ranked mwaandaan of the ngwoom incyaam, and a lower-ranked embroidered belt worn by lesser kolm. The back ornament he shared with all the main kolm and the king. Rings worn around the wrists and ankles recall sets of rings and baldics of different metals and of raffia, sometimes studded with cowries, all varying according to rank.
Nyaang’s insignia were identical to those of one other governor, the nyimishoong, who preceded nyaang in rank: he was placed before him in the public processions and just after him in the speaking order at councils. Nyimishoong’s iron staff and the blades of his adze indicated the difference between them: nyaang’s adze resembled a rake with four teeth; nyimishoong’s had two entwined blades of different shape. One look at the adze told the observer where nyaang ranked among the provincial governors (1978:32-33)

Such elaboration of costume, insignia and processional placement indicates that in the Kuba context prestige was emblematically doled out by the nyim to status-seeking aristocrats.
Other lore became important. The king and his lineal descendants were thought to have special royal blood, which entitled them to kingly authority. This blood was said to have spiritual power. Ceremonies were held periodically to materialize this lore e.g., priests sang nature songs (ncyeem ingesh), recited proverbs (nkwoon), shouted praise names (shoosh) and, more generally, narrated and reshaped Kuba political history, all in support of kingship and the king of the present.
Beginning with King Shyaam, who was said to be a great magician, the office of nyim became associated with extraterrestrial forces and theking was thought to channel those forces through official war magicians, royal diviners and medicine men. Shyaam appears to have been a major architect of the concept of a Divine King. He was the first to claim that “the king was a nature spirit, ngesh.” Based on the idea that nature is impossible for normal beings to control, its management through control of the ngesh or nature spirits was a powerful tool in the hands of the king. In the broader religious beliefs of the Kuba the ngesh played an active role in fertility, fecundity, war, hunting and the curing of illness – almost everything important in Kuba life. Obviously anyone controlling the ngesh would have great strength in Kuba society.
This belief in the king as Divine was bolstered by anecdotes about Shyaam’s madness, which Africans generally equate with being possessed by the spirits of the wild. But Shyaam was not exactly like the ngesh priestesses who would go into the bush, claim possession and return to teach commoners songs and proverbs they had been taught by the spirits. He was thought to be a spirit.
In the non-African context, it is more common for a Divine King to be connected with a high God, not forest-dwelling spirits. But in Africa, the Creator God is a distant Deity, not intricately involved in the day-to-day affairs of Humankind. Thus, for the Kuba mind, the linkage of the Monarch to the ngesh would have had greater weight.

Increasing Power & Wealth-Access under Divine Kingship

So what did this “greater weight” earn the nyim? Essentially, everything an aggrandizer dreams of – the most prestige, power and property in the kingdom. He was able to drain the surplus off of every household in the land. Matrilineages only maintained a corporate hold on communally-created fish ponds, while each individual family worked the fields and stored their own crops. It was this household unit that had to supply corvée labor and taxes to the local representatives of the king, the Feather chiefs. Those near the capital also had to work on the king’s fields (shash anyim).
Professor Vansina has noted that the Kuba had a strong work ethic, villagers laboring in the fields from 6 a.m. till 8 p.m. In this work orientation, laziness was so frowned upon as to be equated with witchcraft, certainly anti-social. We do not know whether this was always the case as they migrated southward into their final place in the rainforest, or whether this ethic developed in Shyaam’s times and beyond as the centralized polity extracted more and more to support the ten percent of the population who did not work – the capital-based leisure class.
Tribute collected by each provincial governor was then brought to the capital city and presented to the king at an annual durbar. In 1892, it lasted two weeks, while tribute was presented and tabulated. At the same time, a census was taken to ensure proper payments by provincial governors. Kuba tribute was paid in farm products, bush meat, raffia cloth, ivory, salt, hides, iron, knives, hoes, pottery, baskets, camwood, carved objects or clay for pottery (specific items depended on local supplies and the economic specialization of certain villages).
The king also had access to virtually any women in the kingdom he desired. King Shyaam expanded his harem by requiring each clan to supply him with a wife, thus taking his private bordello from less than twenty to hundreds, expanding the royal enclosure so much that royal builders had to construct a larger capital.
Even though these women were informal lovers of the king, they lived in a special place. Living in the royal enclosure was a sign of Kuba élite status e.g., only eagle-feather chiefs and the king did so among the Kuba. As a singular place, the capital city was enclosed with a wall and the palace of the king with yet another wall. These officers of the state were set apart by place of residence and by unique costumes e.g., the wearing of feathers and clothing with special insignias. Some of the more trivial privileges of the king were:
only the king could keep sheep;

only the king could wear brass & this metal was used in the manufacture of the royal drums (pel ambish);

only the king could wear the royal costume, which weighed one- hundred and fifty pounds, being laden with imported prestige items e.g., cowries, brass and copper. It was also covered with numerous talismans and symbols of office;

only the king could wear hippopotamus tusks on his shoulders.

Trivial or not, privileges and insignias of office served as elements of display, materializing the king’s authority, along with the whole set of symbols that presented the king to the world as a Deified being.
Once Shyaam had proclaimed himself to be a nature spirit, history records that royal symbols and etiquette followed, with many praise names and songs acclaiming the king’s power. These fabrications “give the impression of an increasing wealth of symbolic material attached to kingship.” Vansina says pageantry stresses the king’s unique position not only as head of the bureaucracy but as one deriving his legitimacy from Deity. Shyaam in legend says, “My kingship stems from Nyony aMboom (God). This kingship, God gave it in my hand.”
The almighty nature of kingship was demonstrated in the rites accompanying the burial of the king and the installation of a new one. By the end of the nineteenth century these ceremonies lasted a full year and included every segment of society.
Shyaam is remembered as the “magic king,” and likely was responsible for creating symbolic linkages between the ndol statue and kingship. The ndol statue was a materialization of the continuity of the king’s divinity. Upon the monarch’s death, a personal statue was carved, which was thought to receive his Divinity. The king’s successor would sleep by the statue, the power infusing his body so as to enable him to take up the mantle of leadership. Part of the relic archive of the king included all the statues of previous kings together with the “Royal Basket of Charms.”

Abuse of Kingship
As with many Divine Kings, the nyim became increasingly cruel from the seventeenth century onward. By the nineteenth century he used terror in warfare against non-Bushoong peoples and imposed arbitrary judicial sentences on his own subjects. If the nyim was divine, it was not the divinity for which the people would have wished.
In time, the kingdom went into decline and in the late nineteenth century was invaded by the Nsapo people and broke up into its constituent chiefdoms.

SOURCES – CHAPTER 7: KINGDOMS

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Berinstain, Valerie. 1997. India and the Mughal Dynasty. New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers.

Cavazzi, Giovanni. 2001 (1732). Queen Anna Nzinga, 1654. In: Collin, Robert O (Ed.). Documents from the African past. Princeton: Markus Wiener.

Egharevba, J. U. 1968. A short history of Benin. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press.

Goody, Jack (Ed.). 1966. Succession to high office. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hilton, Anne. 1985. The Kingdom of Kongo. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Junker, Laura Lee. 1999. Raiding, trading and feasting: The political economy of Philippine chiefdoms. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Kuba people. http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/people/Kuba.html

Kuper, Hilda. 1963. The Swazi: A South African kingdom. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 2002. West Africa. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. New York: Viking.

Schneider, David M. & Kathleen Gough (Eds.). Matrilineal kinship. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir. 1970 (1873). Religion in primitive culture (Introduction by Paul Radin). Gloucester, MA: P. Smith.

Uzoigwe, G. 1977. The warrior and the state in pre-colonial Africa, Journal of Modern African Studies 13:3:469-481.

Vansina, Jan. 1968. Kingdoms of the Savanna. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Vansina, Jan. 1978. The Children of Woot: A history of the Kuba peoples. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.