Chapter 8 - Medieval European Civil Wars: Local and Proto-national Identities of Toulousains, Parisians, and Prague Czechs

Summary

LOOKED AT FROM the Far East, and specifically Japan, the civil wars or intercultural conflicts fought in High and Late medieval Catholic Europe look remarkably odd: coloured, to a lesser or greater degree, by an exclusivist religion or by semi-secularized byproducts of this same religion, they veer easily to a Manichaean black-and-white tenor. Japan was at war for most of its medieval centuries, from the twelfth century that saw the founding of the Kamakura Shogunate (1192), all the way to Sekigahara, 1600, the battle that definitely put an end to the Sengoku jidai, the era of the contending principalities. In contrast with run-of-the mill western European history writing, Japanese chronicles either depict enmities soberly, led by power politics and thus rich in side-switching, yet without much moralizing, or with an acute sense of the tragic, that is, by putting in dialogue contending norms or duties.

Civil wars, understood here as armed conflicts sustained over time and embracing a majority of the politically active members of a polity (civitas), could be expressive or formative of identities. So could be religion, in its purer or secularized forms. While historiography in the 1970s foregrounded the issue of ethnicity, and began fruitfully to emphasize its fluidity, it now recognizes that identity, whatever it is, had in the medieval West, and already in the earlier Middle Ages, much to do with religion, as envisioned by local elites. The following considerations, therefore, cross-fertilize civil war, religious conceptions, and the imagined belonging to a group by focusing on three dossiers. They are, namely, (1) the so-called Albigensian Crusade (1208/9– 1229); (2) the Franco-French civil war opposing the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons (1407– 1435); and (3) the Crusades waged by Emperor Sigismund against the dissident Bohemian Hussites and the latter's equally holy resistance to papal Catholicism (1419– 1436). In all three cases, one identification at play was the city: Toulouse, Paris, and Prague.