Armed citizens in medieval Europe

If I wanted to fit the policy of a typical pre-1917 Eurasian state on weapons into a tweet, I would say “all free full citizens have to keep as many weapons as the state can make them in their homes, and carry as few weapons as the state can make them in public.” (That is a massive oversimplification, but its close enough often enough to get people thinking).

So there was a big difference between having arms and carrying arms. From the Roman Republic to 19th century North America, we tend to see laws requiring citizens to own arms, and banning anyone from carrying weapons, especially swords and knives, within city limits.

Perhaps the operative word here is “State”?

There were no real States in Europe other than Byzantium (sort of) and then the Ottoman Empire, in the High to Late Medieval period. France and England, some of the Iberian Kingdoms, and the Teutonic Order were trying to become States, but they weren’t quite there yet.

Anyway, the reasons we can speculate all day long about, the reality is that citizens routinely walked around armed in basically every town under every form of German Town Law, with a couple of exceptions. That is essentially what Prof. Tlusty’s book was all about (though she starts around 1520) and it’s certainly a big part of what my lecture was about.

Armed citizens, down to the rank of Artisan, appear routinely in the civic artwork of the period, their right to carry arms is specified in the town charters, it is discussed and litigated in the town council records, it is mentioned by chroniclers and in memoirs. And this was the case from at least the 11th Century through at least the 17th in at least 500 cities I know of. If you doubt my word on this which type of evidence would you prefer?

As for how they managed to have all these people carrying swords without constantly hacking chunks off of each other, Tlusty gets into that a lot and so does my lecture. There were a lot of formal laws against things like drawing your sword, various forms of making threats with it, and so on, and if you hurt someone in a fight you better have a good reason.

This is a mural in Augsburg by George Breau circa 1530, there is one for each season (you can see the others here)

Note all the people carrying sidearms!

Note German Town Law was used from Flanders to Romania and from the Swiss Confederation to Finland. It wasn’t just in Germany.

Yes, and it was the city which over and over bans the carrying of arms. When people live scattered across the land and there are few recognized authorities, its often customary for men to carry arms, partially because they usually have weapons in reach for hunting or field work anyways, and partially to assert their claim to be free men who can enforce their rights in an uncertain world. These societies usually present the keeping of arms in individualistic terms, like honour, or as a way to enforce hierarchies within society: rich over poor, men over women, free over unfree, and community members over resident foreigners.

When large numbers of people start living together in close quarters and seeing many strangers come and go, they usually notice that carrying arms leads to many woundings, robberies, and bullyings and start to restrict it and push other means of settling disputes. These are the societies which usually present the keeping of arms in civic terms: the community against its neighbours, against wannabe one-man rulers, or against kings. That is the logic behind the Athenian customs which Thucydides describes and the Roman customs which Cicero, the canonical gospels, and Petronius take for granted.

It sounds like in the 16th century some of the German towns had a hybrid of the individualistic and the civic approaches that depended on special customs around violence.

This would be incorrect if you are trying to imply that it was a new situation in the 16th Century. To the contrary, it was probably beginning to decline by the 16th Century in many places as the religious wars started up and some towns lost their rights and autonomy.

City self-management was not ever a ‘one size fits all’ situation. What may have seemed obvious to Thucydides or in Athens did not necessarily make sense in Strasbourg or to the citizens of Wroclaw.

Part of what makes the medieval period so interesting is that there was such variegation in governmental and legal systems. In Central Europe, the approach taken to the issue of an armed citizenry was to manage the violent actions not the carrying of the weapon. This was quite a conscious decision, they wanted to keep the citizenry actively involved in the defense of the town rather than follow the model of so many Italian towns and turn it over to the Condottieri. Machiavelli commented on this quite a bit, noting “German cities are completely independent, don’t have much territory around them and obey the emperor only when it suits. They are not afraid of him, nor any other powerful rulers in the area. This is because these towns are so well fortified that everyone realizes what an arduous wearisome business it would be to attack them. They all have properly sized moats and walls;
they have the necessary artillery; they have public warehouses with food, drink and firewood for a year; what’s more, to keep people well fed without draining the public purse, they stock
materials for a year’s worth of work in whatever trades are the lifeblood of the city and whatever jobs the common folk earn their keep with. They hold military exercises in high regard and make all kinds of arrangements to make sure they are routinely practiced.””

Athens was a slave state with a strict hierarchy. Towns like Zurich or Hamburg were quite a bit more republican in their outlook and more democratic in their system of management. Not to say they had Universal Suffrage or anything, but the rulers ruled at the sufferance of the governed and were routinely overthrown.

You do realize Imperial City in the Classical era of Athens, Sparta or Rome and “Imperial City” in the medieval period mean two completely different things, right? Even Venice had relatively little interest in conquering other cities – what they wanted to do was secure their trade routes and supply lines. Imperial or Royal cities in Central Europe just meant they had Imperial immediacy, meaning no prince had any authority over them except the Emperor or King, and in the case of the HRE, that basically meant Laissez Faire.

I don’t think it actually is an open question at all. It’s a recognizable process. Jurg Gassmann and I found a bunch of records a few years ago which described the process in Bologna – regulations for their Armed Societies in the years between mid 12th century through the early 13th. I believed he published something on it though the emphasis was on the use of urban cavalry in the militia not so much on individual citizens rights, but they were also in those records.

It was simply a matter of when the larger part of the population, usually meaning the artisans, became a substantial part of the city government. In most places this took place in roughly that same time period, in some a little earlier, in others a bit later. For example in Flanders the biggest changes took place after the big victory at the Battle of Courtrai in 1302. The craft artisans played a major role in the war so they demanded great rights in the town government.

Most towns went through a phase where they became independent, usually ruled by their merchant class or so-called ‘patriciains’, then they went through a second phase where the artisans other middle or working class estates took some power in the government, typically in the high medieval period.

By the late medieval period, towns which still had autonomy, mostly in Central and Northern Europe, had some kind of mixed or hybrid government which involved some representation by the crafts and some by the patricians and wealthier merchants.

For example Strasbourg had a Senate consisting of 300 craft alderman, a council of thirteen (for defense) a council of fifteen (for finance) and a council of twenty (for guild laws). The first two were split between craftsmen and patricians, the last was patrician only. It was a shared power arrangement which was agreed to after the craftsmen had won a series of successful uprisings.

Most towns with an artisan or partially artisan government had pretty liberal weapon laws for citizens. Again, this is because the citizens made up the bulk of the town watch and the militia. That’s the difference between north and south of the Alps. The Italian towns were getting worn out by war and invasions and gradually gave over control of their militias to military contractors, who eventually took over, ala the Sforza and Visconti in Milan.

In France and England the monarchies were much stronger, and the same eventually became the case in the Iberian kingdoms. But all of the dynamism in the High to Late medieval period was in North-Italy, Flanders and the Holy Roman Empire in roughly that order. You really don’t see that much great art or literature coming out of France or England compared to the more urbanized regions of Europe in this period. Their heyday was later, with the opening of the Atlantic in the Early Modern Period.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Hans Hellinger.