While there is broad agreement among scholars that interpersonal violence has declined significantly in Western Europe in the past six centuries, the reasons for it, its precise chronology and the meanings attributed it remain contentious. Many historians and thinkers argue that the decline is consistent and linear and evidence of a civilizing process by which violence is progressively tamed and overcome. The objections of Eurocentrism, Whiggishness and an exaggerated view of the reach of the state might may make the civilizing thesis seem outdated, but its supporters point to the historical data on homicide, which has been gathered since the 1970s. In England, which provides most of the data, rates, which are measured in terms of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per annum, were as high at twenty homicides per 100,000 in the late middle ages, dropping to around ten in 1600 and ending in the historically lowest rate recorded of one per 100,000 in the mid-twentieth century. This research has engendered a new strain of popular history writing on violence; harking back to Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages, it describes the endemic brutality of the Middle Ages in vivid hues, a world disciplined by the modern state and polished by Renaissance manners. The new orthodoxy sees medieval people as 'impetuous, uninhibited, almost childlike' and reduces the Middle Ages to a Monty Python cliché of robber barons, uncouth peasants and credulous fools. [1] It is an image that would continue to amuse were it not for the threat to pre-modern European History, which is particularly apparent in the US.
The main empirical support for the civilizing thesis comes from the sociologist Manuel Eisner, whose synthesis of 390 samples are used to produce impressive-looking graphs that demonstrate a consistent pattern of post-medieval decline in violence. [2] In fact, research over the last decade suggests that this othering of the Middle Ages rests on weak empirical foundations. Most of Eisner's data comes from north-western Europe, but in 1600 only about 20 % of Europeans lived on its north-western fringes. The flaws in the early modern English data, which have a tendency to underreport, are yet to be addressed. [3] Italy causes a particular problem for supporters of the civilizing process. Current evidence suggests that Italian homicide rates did not fall anywhere near as quickly as in the North. According to Eisner's figures, Italy had much higher rates of violence than elsewhere in Europe. In 1600, he puts the homicide rate in England at 7 per 100,000 and that of Germany at 11, while the Italian rate was 47. But early modern Italian states were certainly not characterized by a lesser overall level of state control. The inhabitants of Italian Renaissance cities were exposed to levels of social and economic interdependency far in advance of anything comparable in the North. It leaves supporters of the civilizing thesis puzzled for "whatever the deficiencies of early modern Italian states may have been they were certainly not characterized by a lesser overall level of state bureaucracy and judicial control than, for example, states in England or Sweden during the same period." [4]
In fact, we now know that homicide rates have historically gone up, as well as down. A new European homicide pattern is emerging which shows that interpersonal violence fell at the end of the Middle Ages only to rise again at the end of the sixteenth century, and peaking in the middle of the seventeenth century. Homicide rates fell thereafter and continued to fall steeply during the eighteenth century. The new evidence suggests that patterns of homicide are closely related to the social and political environment: high levels of interpersonal violence are indicative of an absence of social trust and institutions lacking legitimacy. Research on Bologna, whose archival riches encompass 11,000 volumes of documents for the early modern period and about half as many again for the medieval period, has been crucial to shaping the emerging research. This state of the art essay collection uses that material. Breaking down the traditional chronological divide, it demonstrates conclusively that the pattern of violence and its control is not one of linear repression. Homicide rates declined from high of 80 per 100,000 in the 1350s to approximately 30 by the 1440s. The rate was lower in the 1620s, but once again rocketed in the wake of the plague of 1630-1 and peaked in 1660 at a spectacular high of 105.9, indicative of the bloodletting of an undeclared civil war. [5] Although it is not addressed in this volume, the role of the immediate post-plague environment in fomenting violence is worth noting: neighbours fought each over untilled plots and abandoned houses; landlords squabbled over workers and tried to prevent them leaving in search of better pay; families without breadwinners accused their enemies of spreading the disease; food shortages turned trivial disputes into matters of life and death. The violence that resulted was not "expressive," but "instrumental': as the legitimacy of the social order came into question people's just sense of grievance boiled over and attacks on landlords and officials became more common.
Part one, "Criminal Justice: Procedures and Practice," charts the development of the medieval criminal justice system in Bologna from 1250. Gregory Roberts challenges the view that vendetta was legally sanctioned by medieval law and governments. Using a collection of possibly unique sources (the Corone ed Armi), he shows the effective of police measures and how controls increased during the thirteenth century. Roberts sees this not as a sign of top-down repression, but as a manifestation of the popolo's desire for security and regulation. One of the oldest debates in legal history has centred on the claim that the move from accusatio to inquistio trial procedures marks a significant step on the road to modern state formation, as public prosecution supplanted an essentially private process. Massimo Vallerani challenges these statist and teleological assumptions. He refutes the claim that accusatio trials were merely another facet of a culture of vengeance and shows how the emergence of the inquisitio was, as historians of heresy have shown, related to a desire to order and categorise certain types of person as undesirable and dangerous. Blanshei takes up the theme to demonstrate quantitatively the shift from the accusatio to the inquisitio process. She shows that the emergence of the latter stemmed in great part from the desire of republican and signorial regimes to exert greater control over justice. But, at the same time, the power to discipline and punish was tempered by the exercise of grace and clemency, which became a regular feature of the legal system. Trevor Dean offers a micro-level approach to how this transformation worked in practice. Using the journals kept by the podestà's criminal notaries, Dean is able to reconstruct the meticulousness of the fifteenth-century inquisitorial process. As Colin Rose argues, contrary to an older historiography, the establishment of new courts in the sixteenth century did little to change procedure. The famous Tribunale del Torrone, which developed from 1506, did not make the criminal law more punitive. Rates of execution declined significantly in the seventeenth century and the court continued to act mainly as a forum for conflict resolution, promoting arbitration at every stage of the process.
Part two concentrates on specific crimes. Cucini picks up on themes raised by Rose. Ideas about justice and feelings of injustice were shaped by the political context. The Tribunale del Torrone and its agents, widely seen by local elites as a symbol of papal tyranny, struggled to impose their authority. Cucini shows that already in the late fifteenth century the new inquisitorial courts came to be perceived as political instruments. The Bentivoglio regime struggled to maintain a façade of judicial integrity in its pursuit of political enemies. Their use of extra-judicial violence, the undermining of due process and the pursuit of public enemies as criminals was a sign of things to come. Margaux Buyck also connects judicial treatment of poisoning to its political context. Rather surprisingly, her investigation of 97 cases from the archives shows that the severe punishments proposed by statute were rarely carried out. Despite the declared atrocity of the crime, peace accords were permitted and negotiated. She concludes that the applications of laws depended on political circumstances, the level of tensions and the social status of the accused, not the perceived enormity of the crime. Meslissa Vise shows that blasphemy cases in the Bolognese court of the office of the inquisition were treated mildly, as one would expect in a church court intent on the rehabilitation of sinners. However, Vise also argues that civic and ecclesiastical authorities shared a common belief that blasphemy was a form of violence, and that this was a growing concern. The crime of rape has been one of the most difficult to study because of the problem of underreporting. Lodging a charge of rape was a high risk strategy that exposed a women's honour to public scrutiny. Carol Lansing sheds new light on non-elite victims, using a cache of documents from the 1280s. Her sample shows that the accusatio process was accessible to litigants of all social groups and evidently trusted to render justice. The decline of rape accusations, it appears, may be associated with the rise of the inquisitio with its higher costs and strict set of proofs required to prove guilt.
This collection marks an important stage in the process of dismantling the traditional edifice of premodern violence as spontaneous, unrestrained and brutal. My only criticism is that some of the labour of fellow workers in other countries is neglected. A more comparative perspective would have given Blanshei and colleagues better tools to complete their job. The collection demonstrates both the strengths and the weakness of Italian historiography, which is so deeply entrenched in local studies. We gain a great deal from a long durée study of one city. But it was German historians who were the first to launch a sustained critique of Elias's model and develop a counter-model that recognized the sophistication of late medieval civil society. Late medieval towns developed mechanisms of social control and institutions that prevented disputes from escalating. [6] French historians have long since shown that a binary distinction between the accusatio and inquisitio procedure is based on a misunderstanding of how the law worked in practice and that the rise of the latter did not completely erase the existence of the former. [7] Even in the eighteenth century century there was very little public prosecution in the modern sense of the term. The inquistio had to be compelled along by a plaintiff who supported the costs of the suit themselves, and the vast majority of criminal cases (even crimes of blood) ended in some form of composition. The attraction of the inquisitio for the state was that it generated income: it ensured that the state took its cut of the proceeds; its bureaucratic procedure maintained a panoply of officials. The venality of the system was most scandalous in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, where sales of pardons and amnesties for bandits undermined trust in official justice. In contrast, and as these essays prove, the courts of the medieval podestà of Bologna were models of probity and efficiency.
The transformation of our understanding over the last generation of how the law worked in practice and how it was used by litigants has constituted nothing less than a "Copernician Revolution." [8] Before 1700 there was no linear process at work that progressively repressed violence. Some of the top down initiatives attributed to modern states often made violence worse. The graphs that purport to show a smooth downward trend are a mirage because they ignore the catastrophic effects of civil war. Civil conflict will cause all forms of homicide to increase: common or garden killings will increase, not just political violence. Italy has a particularly important role to play in understanding the new European homicide pattern, because of the very high rates of violence that prevailed in the sixteenth century and seventeenth centuries compared to other regions. I would argue that 1500 does mark an important caesura in the history of violence in one sense, as traditional systems of social control came under increasing strain. The Italian Wars after 1509 developed into a bloody civil war in which public and private identities became dangerously interwoven and the use of extreme violence legitimated by the state and its organs of justice. These habits proved hard for Italians to shake off after 1559, a trend accentuated by the promotion of new codes of gentlemanly behaviour that promoted heroic autonomy at the expense of civic obligation and belonging. Civic authority was further eroded by the Counter-Reformation Church's aggressive promotion of peace-making that undercut secular law courts. In short, the violence that plagued Italy in the early modern was not caused by a "de-civilization process," but was a consequence of political conflict and social change, which combined to erode trust in civil society. This book is a testament to the achievements of the medieval city. The evolution of Bologna's legal institutions after 1200 was built on popular craving for justice. It is to the credit of this book that this is presented as no linear development. The erosion of trust in civic institutions was already under way in Bologna at the end of the fifteenth century. Once this trust was lost it was difficult to regain.
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Notes:
1. S. Carroll, "Thinking with Violence," History and Theory, Special Issue: Theorizing Histories of Violence, 56/4 (2017), 23-43.
2. M. Eisner, "Long-Term Trends in Violent Crime," Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, 30 (2003), 83-142.
3. R. Roth, "Homicide in early modern England, 1549-1800: The need for a quantitative synthesis," Crime, History, and Societies 5, 2 (2001), 33-67.
4. Eisner, "Long-Term Trends," 128.
5. p. xvii.
6. For example: Valentin Groebner, "Der verletzte Körper und die Stadt: Gewalttätigkeit und Gewalt in Nürnberg am Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts," in Alf Lüdtke and Thomas Lindenberger eds. Physische Gewalt: Studien zur Geschichte der Neuzeit (Frankfurt a. M., 1995), 162-189.
7. For a synthesis: B. Garnot, Justice et Société en France aux XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Orphys, 2000).
8. H. Piant, Une Justice ordinaire. Justice civile et criminelle dans la prévôté royale de Vaucouleurs sous l'Ancien Régime (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006), p. 208, quoting Alfred Soman, one of the early revolutionaries.