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DOI: 10.1177/097194581001400110
2011 14: 138 The Medieval History Journal
Teofilo F. Ruiz
University Press, Princeton, 2009, xviii + 677 pages
, Princeton Lordship, and the Origins of European Government
The Crisis of the Twelfth Century. Power, Thomas N. Bisson,

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138 The Medieval History Journal, 14, 1 (2011): 129150
peasants or workers by the owners of land or means of production
(presumably more varied than hitherto assumed). John Haldon examines
closely the changes in the composition of the social lites over the
centuries as well as the different forms of income which led to a con-
siderable accumulation of wealth and power in certain social groupings.
Another set of contributions is dedicated to the court society, to the rela-
tionship between church and society as well as to the world of Byzantine
monks and nuns.
A very useful Glossary of Byzantine and Medieval Terms and an
index conclude the volume. The book is a basic handbook, which reflects
the present state of research in the different aspects of Byzantine social
history, and at the same time it is an invitation to delve more deeply into
these highly interesting fields. It can be recommended to students of
Byzantine history as a general introduction into social history as well as
to scholars interested in the latest results of research in Byzantine social
history.
Thomas Pratsch
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Jgerstr. 22/23, Berlin

Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century. Power, Lordship,

and the Origins of European Government, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 2009, xviii + 677 pages.
DOI: 10.1177/097194581001400110
For American medievalists, academic genealogies matter. In reading
Thomas N. Bissons monumental The Crisis of the Twelfth Century, this
remark is not an idle one. His book presents us with a history of the long
12th century that parallels Charles Homer Haskins fabled vision of that
period as one sharply defined by a renaissance of learning and cultural
production. The world of courtly poets, epic poems, Goliards, universities
and cathedrals was also a world of predatory lordship and violence. Those
themes, lordship, violence and authority, are at the heart of Bissons
work. Indeed, many of those who were at the centre of the intellectual
revival also wielded their lordly power in harsh and excessive fashion.
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Book Reviews 139
The Medieval History Journal, 14, 1 (2011): 129150
Genealogy matters, because Joseph R. Strayer was Bissons teacher at
Princetonas he was mine. Strayers vision of the development of
medieval government as an institutional progression from feudalism
to the early beginnings of the modern state is both foil and inspiration
for Bissons darker assessment of this transformation. Strayer was Haskins
student. From Haskinsthrough Strayer at Princeton and Charles Taylor
at Harvardran the two main genealogical branches of American
medievalism. Until his recent retirement from Harvard, Bisson held the
same position from which Haskins built medieval history in the United
States. It is, in fact, with evocations of Haskins and Strayer that Bisson
opens his book.
If Bissons work is in a sense a family matter, reviewing The Crisis of
the Twelfth Century, I fear, is so for me as well. As a student of Strayer a
few years after Bisson had received his doctorate, I grew up as a scholar
with a healthy (and abundant) diet of Bissons works. On the fierce
debate on the feudal revolution (Past & Present, 1994 and 1997)
readings that I assign regularly to my graduate studentsI stand firmly
on Bissons side of the debate by also seeing the 11th, and now the 12th,
century as a period when the powerful often lorded over and abused the
weak in unspeakably arbitrary fashion.
In assessing this book, therefore, I do so already with a methodological,
geographical (because of Spains centrality in his narrative) and ideo-
logical predisposition in its favour. The task is, however, far more daunt-
ing, not so much because of the complexity and scope of Bissons work,
but because I write from the context of two already published thoughtful
and incisive reviews: R.I. Moore (AHR, 113, 2010) and Robert Bartlett
(New York Review of Books). Both are scholars whose works and opinions
I admire and hold in the highest of esteem. And to add to the challenge
of saying something new, long before I was requested to write this review,
I assigned the book to two brilliant and hard working graduate students,
Kate Craig and Maya Maskarinec. They both wrote excellent and per-
ceptive assessments of the book.
In tackling this review, it is foolish to attempt to summarise Bissons
extensive treatment of the subject in any detail. In six long sections
each of them almost a self-standing monographBisson, after intro-
ducing the main themes of his book, traces the transition from an old
order to the turbulent world of lordship and violence after the year
1,000. Part Three (each part consists of different sections or quasi chapters)
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140 The Medieval History Journal, 14, 1 (2011): 129150
goes to the heart of the questions that animate this book, describing in
graphic details how those in dependence, whether peasants (mostly) or
even lords, experienced power. Part Four focuses on what he describes as
the crisis of power, including a brilliant discussion of the murder of
Charles the Good and the uprisings in cities along the road to Compostela,
while Parts Five and Six trace the slow emergence of novel ways of
wielding power and the endurance of lordship even in the face of
innovative accountability and the rise of public forms of control. The
epilogue wonderfully ties in all of the many strands that make this work
such a rich scholarly enterprise. That the book is such an accomplished
product was to be expected. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century represents
the outcome of Bissons long career as a teacher and a scholar. He shows
an easy familiarity with the subject only possible after years of studying
and reflecting on these topics. So how am I to approach this task? Where
to begin?
One place to begin is where Bisson ends:
[A] peasant poor, simple, on bended knees... who could not imagine a better
world than the old one of arbitrary lordship, the only one he had ever known;
a shared culture not so much of rights as of power: the pitiless, disdainful
power into which his tormentors had so easily lapsed.... It is for us to imagine
in his place. (p. 582)
Bisson is, after all, less interested in good lords (surely they were some)
than in bad ones, more concerned with the tormentors than those who
exercised their power justly. This is so even though the book concludes
with the stirrings of consensual rulership, accountability, the growing
of kings public power that marked the slow end to violent lordship. As
he did in his Tormented Voices, Bisson asks his readers to experience
power as most peasants, the weak and even lower lords did in the long
12th century. He asks us for empathy. He asks us to de-centre the 12th
century from the traditional teleologies of the past and to see the period
from the viewpoint of that peasant and thousands like him who found
themselves on bended knees, abused by his lord simply because the
latter could do so. But more than that, he forces us to see Europe no
longer from the privileged perspective of France and England, but from
a wide variety of geographical sites, with Catalonia and, to a lesser
extent, Castile-Lenwhere the workings of power, community and
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Book Reviews 141
The Medieval History Journal, 14, 1 (2011): 129150
consent were more precocioustreated as central and not peripheral to
the story. I, for one, truly appreciate this.
It is clear that The Crisis of the Twelfth Century follows directly from
his earlier work on the feudal revolution. Bisson modifies his own
view on revolutionafter all, how could a revolution endure for more
than two centuriesbut the present book is a long and detailed response
to his critics then. Reiterating his previous arguments about the rise of
castellans (and the importance of castles), the proliferation of lords, and
the disorder and violence that plagued the medieval West, Bisson now
expands on his arguments about social transformation, framing it within
the structures of pervasive lordly coercion, new vocabulary of depend-
ence, violence and peasant subordinationthose awful elements that
were inherent to lordship. Rather than continue the polemical debate
that arose after the publication of his first article on the feudal revolution
in 1994, here he has gathered overwhelming and vivid evidence for his
thesis, drawing from all of the medieval West with even some forays into
eastern medieval Europe. He deploys innumerable vignettes, case studies,
micro and comparative histories of regions and realms to alert the reader
to the pan-European nature of lordship and lordly violence. It is a story
about lord-kings, lord-bishops and lesser lords, all caught in the web of
significance that was at the core of lordship. Kings were first and foremost
lords, behaving as such, thinking as such, until that elusive and drawn-
out moment when expertise arose silently in a widening culture of
knowledge (p. 462) and governments or kingdoms began to emerge as
a reaction against exploitative lordship (p. 578) and as public domina-
tion on lordship and principalities (p. 573).
And then there is the sheer volume of the book. In the present fiscal
climate in which presses are reluctant to publish any academic book
over 300 pages, it is remarkable that Bisson had the courage and con-
viction to tell his story as he wished to: uncompromisingly, in all its
details. It is also remarkable that Brigitta van Rheinberg, the history
editor at Princeton University Press guided this book to its final pub-
lication. Few living scholars today have the skills and range to under-
take such a project, and although the profusion of details, examples and
the length of the book may seem overwhelming, in the end I think this
was the only way to tell this story. Not a textbook with the usual tendency
to simplify, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century instead problematises the
evidence, allowing us to see it from a variety of perspectives. It contains
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142 The Medieval History Journal, 14, 1 (2011): 129150
such depth that it invites to see it, as R.I. Moore suggested, as a kaleido-
scope, that is, to read it as different strands separately from each other,
but with a cogent and powerful overarching interpretation. This is
possible only because of Bissons erudition, his mastery of vast number
of primary and secondary sources. His case studiesI will never teach
the murder of Becket (or many other things) in the same fashionopen
windows into the 12th century, bring it to life as it was rather than as a
transition to something else.
One may quibble here and there. As noted, the numerous examples
can become overwhelming. Moreover, for a book about lordship that is
also about the victims of lordship, there is little notice paid to acts of
resistance, except for the laments of those the lords ground under their
feet. The broad millennial and heretical unrest that was part and parcel
of European medieval history from around the year 1,000 into the early
modern period were implicit responses to the oppressive inequality of
lordship. That is, lordship may have been intrinsic to the structures of
society, but not everyone accepted it without question. Then there is the
issue of violence, already raised by Robert Bartlett in his review. How
much violence? How different from other types of violence? Of course,
it seems to me that the question is not about violence per se. The question
is about power, the domination of the few over the many and the accept-
ance of that subordination and abuse as inherent to society. The private
and arbitrary nature of lordship may not after all be exclusive to the long
12th century. The social and political organisation of gangs in east-
central Los Angeles or the violence on innocent bystanders practised by
drug cartels in border cities and elsewhere may not differ much from the
manner in which power was experienced in medieval Europe. Warlords
in Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere in the world may be even closer
to the models of lordship described by Bisson. Yet, while these examples
are perhaps exceptional, the many vignettes that Bisson has given us
were normative for most people in medieval society.
Walter Benjamin once wrote in his Theses on the Philosophy of History
that There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time
a document of barbarism. Some historians wish only to emphasise the
monuments of civilisation. Others have purposely described the workings
of barbarity and the abuse of power, but few have done it with such
dramatic clarity as Bisson has done in this book. And even fewer have
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Book Reviews 143
The Medieval History Journal, 14, 1 (2011): 129150
demanded that their readers locate themselves in the place of that peasant
bended on his knees and experience what power was, not as some theor-
etical construct or intellectual formulation but as the relentless burden
of lived lives. Bisson does!
Teofilo F. Ruiz
Department of History,
University of California, Los Angeles

Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence, Johns

Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2009, xviii + 649 pages.
DOI: 10.1177/097194581001400111
The works by R.A. Goldthwaite devoted to the economic history of
Renaissance Italy and particularly to the history of Florence are, and
will remain, milestones for present-day and future historians. This most
recent work is a reconstruction of the economic history of the Tuscan
city from the start of its medieval growth, between the 10th and 11th
centuries, until the beginning of its decline in the last decades of the
16th century. Particular attention is devoted to the 14th and 15th centuries,
about which a wide literature exists by many Italian and foreign historians
alike. Florentine trade, industry and particularly banking in the late
Middle Ages have in fact been the object of keen research by several
generations of scholars, thanks to the unrivalled wealth of documents of
the Florentine archives, which until recently has been only marginally
exploited. The importance and utility of this most recent work by
Goldthwaite lies in the combination of variety and richness of infor-
mation in one lengthy, richly detailed book of some 650 pages. Since
there is no Bibliography at the end of the volume, the reader cannot
fully appreciate the extent and variety of the literature on which the
work is based.
According to the author, the economic history of Florence is the his-
tory of a capitalist economy, founded on the rationality of its entrepre-
neurs and bankers, able to exploit the widening of the market over a
long period and to progress to the forefront of the European economy
thanks to innovation in business, banking and industrial management.
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