THE RISE OF THE STATE AMONG GERMANS.
According to Tacitus the German nation was very strong in numbers. An
approximate idea of the strength of individual German nations is given
by Caesar. He states that the number of Usipetans and Tencterans who
crossed over to the left bank of the Rhine amounted to 180,000,
including women and children. About 100,000[30] members to a single
nation is considerably more than e. g. the Iroquois numbered in their
prime, when 20,000 of them became the terror of the whole country, from
the Great Lakes to the Ohio and Potomac. If we attempt to place the
better known nations of the Rhine country by the help of historical
reports, we find that a single nation occupies on the map the average
area of a Prussian government district, about 10,000 square
kilometers[31] or 182 German geographical square miles.[32] The Germania
Magna of the Romans, reaching to the Vistula, comprised about 500,000
square kilometers. Counting an average of 100,000 for any single
nation, the total population of Germania Magna would have amounted to
five millions. This is a rather high figure for a barbarian group of
nations, although 10 inhabitants to the square kilometer or 550 to the
geographical square mile is very little when compared to present
conditions. But this does not include the whole number of Germans then
living. We know that German nations of the Gothic race, Bastarnians,
Peukinians and others, lived all along the Carpathian mountains away
down to the mouth of the Danube. They were so numerous that Pliny
designated them as the fifth main division of the Germans. As much as
180 years B. C. they were mercenaries of the Macedonian King Perseus,
and during the first years of Augustus they were still pushing their way
as far as the vicinity of Adrianople. Assuming them to have been one
million strong we find that at least six millions was the probable
population of Germany at the beginning of the Christian era.
After the final settlement in Germany, the population must have grown
with increasing rapidity. The industrial progress mentioned above would
be sufficient to prove it. The objects found in the bogs of Sleswick, to
judge by the Roman coins found with them, are from the third century.
Hence at that time the metal and textile industry was already well
developed on the Baltic, a lively traffic with the Roman empire was
carried on, and the wealthier class enjoyed a certain luxury--all of
which indicates that the population had increased. But at the same time
the general war of aggression against the Romans commenced along the
whole line of the Rhine, of the Roman wall and of the Danube, a line
stretching from the North Sea to the Black Sea. This is another proof of
the ever growing outward pressure of the population. During the struggle
which lasted three centuries, the whole main body of the Gothic
nations, with the exception of the Scandinavian Goths and the
Burgundians, marched to the Southeast and formed the left wing of the
long line of attack. The High Germans (Herminonians) on the Upper Danube
fought in the center, and the Iskaevonians on the Rhine, now called
Franks, advanced on the right wing. The conquest of Brittany fell to the
lot of the Ingaevonians.[33] At the end of the fifth century, the
exhausted, bloodless, and helpless Roman empire lay open to the Germans.
In former chapters we stood at the cradle of antique Greek and Roman
civilization. Now we are standing at its grave. The equalizing plane of
Roman world power had been gliding for centuries over all the
Mediterranean countries. Where the Greek language did not offer any
resistance, all national idioms had been crushed by a corrupted Latin.
There were no longer any distinctions of nationality, no more Gauls,
Iberians, Ligurians, Noricans; they had all become Romans. Roman
administration and Roman law had everywhere dissolved the old gentile
bodies and thus crushed the last remnant of local and national
independence. The new type of Romans offered no compensation for this
loss, for it did not express any nationality, but only the lack of a
nationality. The elements for the formation of new nations were present
everywhere. The Latin dialects of the different provinces differentiated
more and more. But the natural boundaries that had once made Italy,
Gaul, Spain, Africa independent territories, were still present and made
themselves felt. Yet there was no strength anywhere for combining these
elements into new nations. Nowhere was there the least trace of any
capacity for development, nor any power of resistance, much less any
creative power. The immense human throng of that enormous territory was
held together by one bond alone: the Roman state. But this state had in
time become the worst enemy and oppressor of its subjects. The provinces
had ruined Rome. It had become a provincial town like all others,
privileged, but no longer ruling, no longer the center of the world
empire, no longer even the seat of the emperors and subregents who lived
in Constantinople, Treves and Milan. The Roman state had become an
immense complicated machine, designed exclusively for the exploitation
of its subjects. Taxes, state imposts and tithes of all sorts drove the
mass of the people deeper and deeper into poverty. By the blackmailing
practices of the regents, tax collectors and soldiers, the pressure was
increased to such a point that it became insupportable. This was the
outcome of Rome's world power. The right of the state to existence was
founded on the preservation of order in the interior and the protection
against the barbarians outside. But this order was worse than the most
disgusting disorder, and the barbarians against whom the state pretended
to protect its citizens, were hailed by them as saviors.
The condition of society was no less desperate. During the last years of
the republic, the Roman rulers had already contrived the pitiless
exploitation of the conquered provinces. The emperors had not abolished,
but organized this exploitation. The more the empire fell to pieces, the
higher rose the taxes and tithes, and the more shamelessly did the
officials rob and blackmail. Commerce and industry had never been a
strong point of the domineering Romans. Only in usury they had excelled
all other nations before and after them. What commerce had managed to
exist, had been ruined by official extortion. Only in the East, in the
Grecian part of the empire, some commerce still vegetated, but this is
outside of the scope of our study. Universal reduction to poverty,
decrease of traffic, of handicrafts, of art, of population, decay of the
towns, return of agriculture to a lower stage--that had been the final
result of Roman world supremacy.
But now agriculture, the most prominent branch of production in the
whole Old World, was again supreme, and more than ever. In Italy, the
immense estates (latifundiae) that comprised nearly the whole country
since the end of the republic, had been utilized in two ways: either as
pastures on which the population had been replaced by sheep and oxen,
the care of which required only a few slaves; or as country seats, on
which masses of slaves carried on horticulture on a large scale, partly
for the luxury of the owner, partly for sale on the markets of the
towns. The great pastures had been preserved and even extended in
certain parts. But the country seats and their horticulture had gone to
ruin through the impoverishment of their owners and the decay of the
towns. Latifundian economy based on slave labor was no longer
profitable; but in its time it had been the only possible form of
agriculture on a large scale. Now, however, small production had again
become the only lucrative form. One country seat after the other was
parceled and leased in small lots to hereditary tenants who paid a fixed
rent, or to partiarii, more administrators than tenants who received
one-sixth or even only one-ninth of a year's product in remuneration for
their work. But these little lots were principally disposed of to
colonists who paid a fixed sum annually and could be transferred by sale
together with their lots. Although no slaves, still these colonists
were not free; they could not marry free citizens, and marriages with
members of their own class were not regarded as valid, but as mere
concubinages like those of the slaves. The colonists were the prototypes
of the medieval serfs.
The ancient slavery had lost its vitality. Neither in the country in
large scale agriculture, nor in the manufactories of the towns did it
yield any more returns--the market for its products had disappeared. And
small scale production and artisanship, to which the gigantic production
of the flourishing time of the empire was now reduced, did not leave any
room for numerous slaves. Only house and luxury slaves of the rich were
still retained by society. But this declining slavery was as yet
sufficiently strong to brand productive labor as slave work, as below
the dignity of free Romans; and everybody was now a free Roman. An
increasing number of superfluous slaves who had become a drug on their
owners were dismissed, while on the other hand the number of colonists
and of beggared free men (similar to the poor whites in the slave states
of America) grew continuously. Christianity is perfectly innocent of
this gradual decline of ancient slavery. For it had taken part in the
slavery of the Roman empire for centuries. It never prevented the slave
trade of Christians later on, neither of the Germans in the North, nor
of the Venetians on the Mediterranean, nor the negro traffic of later
years.[34] Slavery died, because it did not pay any longer. But it left
behind its poisonous sting by branding as ignoble the productive labor
of free men. This brought the Roman world into a closed alley from
which it could not escape. Slave labor was economically impossible and
the labor of free men was under a moral ban. The one could exist no
longer, the other could not yet be the fundamental form of social
production. There was no other help but a complete revolution.
The provinces were not any better off. The most complete reports on this
subject are from Gaul. By the side of the colonists, free farmers still
existed there. In order to protect themselves against the brutal
blackmail of the officials, judges and usurers, they frequently placed
themselves under the protectorate of a man of influence and power. Not
only single individuals did so, but whole communities, so that the
emperors of the fourth century often issued decrees prohibiting this
practice. But what good did protection do to the clients? The patron
imposed the condition that they should transfer the title of their lots
to him, and in return he assured them of the free enjoyment of their
land for life--a trick which the holy church remembered and freely
imitated during the ninth and tenth century, for the greater glory of
God. In the fifth century, however, about the year 475, Bishop Salvianus
of Marseilles still vehemently denounced such robbery and relates that
the methods of the Roman officials and great landlords became so
oppressive that many "Romans" fled to the districts occupied by the
barbarians and feared nothing so much as a return under Roman rule. That
poor parents frequently sold their children into slavery, is proved by a
law forbidding this practice.
In return for liberating the Romans from their own state, the barbarians
appropriated two-thirds of the entire land and divided it among
themselves. The distribution was made by gentile rules. As the number of
the conquerors was relatively small, large tracts remained undivided in
the possession of the nation, the tribe or the gens. Every gens
distributed the land for cultivation and pastures to the individual
households by drawing lots. We do not know whether repeated divisions
took place at that time. At any rate, this practice was soon discarded
in the Roman provinces, and the individual lot became salable private
property, a so-called freehold (allodium). Forests and pastures remained
undivided for collective use. This use and the mode of cultivating the
divided land was regulated by tradition and the will of the community.
The longer the gens lived in its village, and the better Germans and
Romans became amalgamated in the course of time, the more did the
character of kinship lose ground before territorial bounds. The gens
disappeared in the mark commune, the members of which, however, still
exhibited traces of kinship. In the countries where mark communes were
still preserved--in the North of France, in England, Germany and
Scandinavia--the gentile constitution gradually merged into a local
constitution and thus acquired the capacity of being fitted into a
state. Nevertheless this local constitution retained some of the
primeval democratic character which distinguishes the whole gentile
order, and thus preserved a piece of gentilism even in its enforced
degeneration of later times. This left a weapon in the hands of the
oppressed, ready to be wielded by them even in the present time.
The rapid loss of the bonds of blood in the gens as a result of conquest
caused the degeneration of the tribal and national organs of gentilism.
We know that the rule over subjugated people does not agree with the
gentile constitution. Here we have an opportunity to observe this on a
large scale. The German nations, masters of the Roman provinces, had to
organize their conquests. But they could neither adopt the Romans as a
body into their gentes, nor rule them by the help of gentile organs. A
substitute for them had to be placed at the head of the Roman
administrative bodies that were largely retained in local affairs, and
this substitute could only be another state. Hence the organs of the
gentile constitution had to become organs of the state, and under the
pressure of the moment this took place very rapidly. Now the first
representative of the conquering nation was the military leader. The
internal and external security of the conquered territory demanded that
his power should be strengthened. The moment had arrived for the
transition from war leadership to monarchy. And the change took place.
Take e. g. the realm of the Franks. The victorious Salians had not only
come into possession of the extensive Roman state dominions, but also of
all the large tracts that had not been assigned to the more or less
small mark communities, especially of all large forest tracts. The first
thing which the king of the Franks, now a real monarch, did was to
change this national property into royal property, to steal it from the
people and to donate or give it in lien to his retainers. This retinue,
originally composed of his personal war followers and of the
subcommanders of the army, was increased by Romans, i. e., romanized
Gauls who quickly became invaluable to the king through their knowledge
of writing, their education and their familiarity with the language and
laws of the country, and with the language of Latin literature. But
slaves, serfs and freed slaves also became his courtiers. From among all
these he chose his favorites. At first they received donations of public
land, and later on these benefits were generally conferred for the
lifetime of the king. The foundation of a new nobility was thus laid at
the expense of the people.
But this was not all. The wide expanse of the empire could not be
governed by means of the old gentile constitution. The council of
chiefs, if it had not become obsolete long ago, could not have held any
more meetings. It was soon displaced by the standing retinue of the
king. A pretense at the old public meeting was still kept up, but it
also was more and more limited to the meeting of the subcommanders of
the army and the rising nobles.
Just as formerly, the Roman farmers during the last period of the
republic, so now the free land-owning peasants, the mass of the Frank
people, were exhausted and reduced to penury by continual civil feuds
and wars of conquest. They who once had formed the whole army and, after
the conquest of France, its picked body, were so impoverished at the end
of the ninth century that hardly more than every fifth man could go to
war. The former army of free peasants, convoked directly by the king,
was replaced by an army composed of dependents of the new nobles. Among
these servants were also villeins, the descendants of the peasants who
had acknowledged no master but the king and a little earlier not even a
king. Under Charlemagne's successors the ruin of the Frank peasantry was
aggravated by internal wars, weakness of the royal power and
corresponding overbearance of the nobles. The latter had received
another addition to their ranks through the installation by Charlemagne
of "Gau"[35] (district) counts who strove to make their offices
hereditary. The invasions of the Normans completed the wreck of the
peasantry. Fifty years after the death of Charlemagne, France lay as
resistless at the feet of the Normans, as four hundred years previous
the Roman empire had lain at the feet of the Franks.
Not only was the external impotence almost the same, but also the
internal order or rather disorder of society. The free Frank peasants
found themselves in a similar position as their predecessors, the Roman
colonists. Ruined by wars and robberies, they had been forced to seek
the protection of the nobles or the church, because the royal power was
too weak to shield them. But they had to pay dearly for this protection.
Like the Gallic farmers, they had to transfer the titles of their land
to their patrons, and received it back from them as tenants in different
and varying forms, but always only in consideration of services and
tithes. Once driven into this form of dependence, they gradually lost
their individual liberty. After a few generations most of them became
serfs. How rapidly the free peasants sank from their level is shown by
the land records of the abbey Saint Germain des Prés, then near, now in,
Paris. On the vast holdings of this abbey in the surrounding country
2788 households, nearly all of them Franks with German names, were
living at Charlemagne's time; 2080 of them were colonists, 35 lites,[36]
220 slaves and only 8 freeholders. The practice of the patrons to demand
the transfer of the land titles to themselves and give the former owners
the use of the land for life, denounced as ungodly by Salvianus, was now
universally practiced by the Church in its dealings with the peasants.
The compulsory labor that now came more and more into vogue, had been
moulded as much after the Roman angariae, compulsory service for the
state, as after the services of the German mark men in bridge and road
building and other work for common purposes. By all appearances, then,
the mass of the population had arrived at the same old goal after four
hundred years.
That proved two things: Firstly, that the social differentiation and the
division of property in the sinking Roman empire corresponded perfectly
to the contemporaneous stage of production in agriculture and industry,
and hence was unavoidable; secondly, that this stage of production had
not been essentially altered for better or worse during four hundred
years, and therefore had necessarily produced the same division of
property and the same classes of population. The town had lost its
supremacy over the country during the last centuries of the Roman
empire, and had not regained it during the first centuries of German
rule. This presupposes a low stage of agriculture and industry. Such a
general condition produces of necessity the domination of great
proprietors and the dependence of small farmers. How impossible it was
to graft either the slave labor of Roman latifundian economy or the
compulsory labor of the new large scale production into such a society,
is proved by Charlemagne's very extensive experiments with his famous
imperial country residences that left hardly a trace. These experiments
were continued only by the convents and brought results only for them.
But the convents were abnormal social institutions, founded on celibacy.
They could do exceptional work, but they had to remain exceptions
themselves for this very reason.
Yet some progress had been made during these four hundred years.
Although in the end we find the same main classes as in the beginning,
still the human beings that made up these classes had changed. The
ancient slavery had disappeared; gone were also the beggared freemen who
had despised work as slavish. Between the Roman colonist and the new
serf, there had been the free Frank peasant. The "useless remembrance
and the vain feud" of the decaying Roman nation was dead and gone. The
social classes of the ninth century had been formed during the travail
of a new civilization, not in the demoralization of a sinking one. The
new race, masters and servants, were a race of men as compared to their
Roman predecessors. The relation of powerful landlords to serving
peasants, which had been the unavoidable result of collapse in the
antique world, was for the Franks the point of departure on a new line
of development. Moreover, unproductive as these four hundred years may
appear, they left behind one great product: the modern nationalities,
the reorganization and differentiation of West European humanity for the
coming history. The Germans had indeed infused a new life into Europe.
Therefore the dissolution of the states in the German period did not end
in a subjugation after the Norse-Saracene plan, but in a continued
development of the estate of the royal beneficiaries and an increasing
submission (commendatio) to feudalism, and in such a tremendous increase
of the population, that no more than two centuries later the bloody
drain of the crusades could be sustained without injury.
What was the mysterious charm by which the Germans infused a new life
into decrepit Europe? Was it an innate magic power of the German race,
as our jingo historians would have it? By no means. Of course, the
Germans were a highly gifted Aryan branch and, especially at that time,
in full process of vigorous development. They did not, however,
rejuvenate Europe by their specific national properties, but simply by
their barbarism, their gentile constitution.
Their personal efficiency and bravery, their love of liberty, and their
democratic instinct which regarded all public affairs as its own
affairs, in short all those properties which the Romans had lost and
which were alone capable of forming new states and raising new
nationalities out of the muck of the Roman world--what were they but
characteristic marks of the barbarians in the upper stage, fruits of the
gentile constitution?
If they transformed the antique form of monogamy, mitigated the male
rule in the family and gave a higher position to women than the classic
world had ever known, what enabled them to do so, unless it was their
barbarism, their gentile customs, their living inheritance of the time
of maternal law?
If they could safely transmit a trace of the genuine gentile order, the
mark communes, to the feudal states of at least three of the most
important countries--Germany, North of France, and England--and thus
give a local coherence and the means of resistance to the oppressed
class, the peasants, even under the hardest medieval serfdom; means
which neither the slaves of antiquity nor the modern proletarian found
ready at hand--to whom did they owe this, unless it was again their
barbarism, their exclusively barbarian mode of settling in gentes?
And in conclusion, if they could develop and universally introduce the
mild form of servitude which they had been practicing at home, and which
more and more displaced slavery also in the Roman empire--to whom was it
due, unless it was again their barbarism, thanks to which they had not
yet arrived at complete slavery, neither in the form of the ancient
labor slaves, nor in that of the oriental house slaves?
This milder form of servitude, as Fourier first stated, gave to the
oppressed the means of their gradual emancipation as a class (fournit
aux cultivateurs des moyens d'affranchissement collectif et progressif)
and is therefore far superior to slavery, which permits only the
immediate enfranchisement of the individual without any transitory
stage. Antiquity did not know any abolition of slavery by rebellion, but
the serfs of the middle ages gradually enforced their liberation as a
class.
Every vital and productive germ with which the Germans inoculated the
Roman world, was due to barbarism. Indeed, only barbarians are capable
of rejuvenating a world laboring under the death throes of unnerved
civilization. And the higher stage of barbarism, to which and in which
the Germans worked their way up previous to the migrations, was best
calculated to prepare them for this work. That explains everything.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] Author's note.
The number assumed here is confirmed by a passage of Diodorus on the
Celts of Gaul: "Many nations of unequal strength are living in Gaul. The
strongest of them numbers about 200,000, the weakest 50,000." (Diodorus
Siculus, V., 25.) That gives an average of 125,000. The individual
nations of Gaul, being more highly developed, should be gauged more
numerous than those of Germany.
[31] Translator's note.
3861 square statute miles.
[32] A German geographical mile contains 7,420.44 meters, or 7.42044
kilometers; hence a German geographical square mile contains 55.0629
square kilometers, equal to 21.2598 square statute miles.
[33] Translator's note.
The Ingaevonians comprised the Friesians, the Saxons, the Jutes and the
Angles, living on the coast of the North Sea from the Zuider Zee to
Denmark.
[34] Author's note.
According to Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, the main industry of Verdun in
the tenth century, in the so-called Holy German Empire, was the
manufacture of eunuchs, who were exported with great profit to Spain for
the harems of the Moors.
[35] Translator's note.
The "Gau" is a larger territory than the "Mark." Caesar and Tacitus
called it pagus.
[36] Translator's note.
The name given in ancient law to dependent farmers.