EUROPEAN UNION POLITICAL HISTORY
TEACHING GUIDE Nr. 1 “The origin of European nations”
1. Text:
a) Christianity and the new Germanic peoples
One of the reasons Germanic kings had problems consolidating their power was that, from
the beginning, they had to deal with local churches representing the whole of the
predominantly Roman population. This conflict would be resolved in favor of ecclesiastical
power after the kings converted to Catholicism. At this juncture, the Church came to
support royalty in exchange for the kings’ endorsement and defense of this religious
organization, profoundly influenced by the Roman political and legal model.
Christianity flourished relatively quickly amongst the Germanic peoples. In fact, those who
came into contact with the Empire were quick to convert to Christianity. In this respect
the role of the Goth Ulfilas (311-383), is worthy of note; to spread Christianity among his
people he translated the Bible into the Gothic dialect, creating the oldest text written in a
Germanic language (Wolfram 1990, 75-84). But Ulfilas was an adherent of the early
Christian school of thought known as Arianism, which denied that Jesus Christ was
coeternal with God the Father.
The Arians and pagans in each of the new Germanic kingdoms found themselves openly
squaring off with the Catholic bishops, who stood as the natural representatives of the
Roman population. The episcopal pressure was so great that beginning in the late 5th
century the Germanic kings, one by one, converted to Catholicism.
The first to embrace Catholicism was the Frankish King Clovis, baptized at Reims by the
bishop St. Remigius circa 496 (James 1991, 121-123). He was followed by the Burgundian
King Sigismund in 516; Rechiar, King of the Suebi in 550, catechized by St. Martin of
Dumium (Thompson 1980, 77-92); Authari, King of the Lombards, in 585; and the
Visigoth Reccared in 589, whose conversion was brought about by St. Leander.
The successive conversion of the Germanic kings to Catholicism augmented the political
influence of the churches, which henceforth made every effort to preserve the Roman idea
of political organization of which they were custodians.
b) The Church and the “Romanization” of the Germanic kingdoms
The influence of the Church on the government and the legal organization of the new
kingdoms was crucial because it served to sustain the Roman model of government.
Moreover, it can be said that the Church encouraged its continuation by imposing its
political ideology on the Germanic kings who converted to Catholicism.
The clearest and most relevant case is that of Visigothic Spain, where after the conversion
of Reccared (589), at the Third Council of Toledo (Orlandis 2007, 531-538), the Church
clearly imposed itself on the civil authority (Nirenberg 2012, 12-20). Of special note in this
regard was the role played by the councils of Toledo, mixed assemblies in which the
members of the Visigothic nobility served together with the bishops, and which adopted
rules essential to the organization of the kingdom (Stocking, 2000). For example, at the
Fourth Council of Toledo (633), an elective procedure to designate the king was approved,
having the important consequence that the nominee was anointed by the Church, a
ceremony that made him a sacred and inviolable individual, with the crucial corollary that,
by becoming a Christian king, he was made subject to the Church’s authority. It is in this
significant sense that Canon 9 of the 16th Council of Toledo (693), regarded kings as
“vicars of God.” A Christian ruler was thus given a consecrated quality, but this was
balanced by the duties which it entailed, including the necessity of royal obedience to
bishops (Chaney 1970, 255).
The last Germanic kings to be anointed would be the Franks. It was in 751, at the behest
of Pope Zachary, that the Frankish King Pippin, after being elected king “according to the
Frankish custom,” was duly anointed. As Geary (1988, 220) points out, this rite - which
had Gothic, Irish and Anglo-Saxon precedents - was an innovation in the Frankish
kingdom, as before Charlemagne’s father never before had a king been confirmed in his
office by ecclesiastical ritual.
The transformation of the meaning of the royal institution as a result of ecclesiastical
influence, reached its peak with St. Isidore of Seville (556-636), probably the leading
European intellectual of his time thanks to his Etymologiae, in which, among other things,
he set forth a “theory of kingship” (Feller 2001, 43). In his view, kings were obligated to
conduct themselves uprightly (Recte igitur faciendo, regis nomen tenetur) or sacrifice their royal
status.
Ecclesiastical influence in the political and legal sphere would be decisive in the West until
the Late Middle Ages and, more specifically, until the kings became “monarchs” and
sought to shake off ecclesiastical authority over them.
c) The origin of the European “nations?”
It is significant that most of these different kingdoms adopted the name of the Germanic
people which had settled the territory. Over the course of the Middle Ages, these
denominations ended up designating either kingdoms or regions. In the early 13th century,
the kingdom of the Franks would end up becoming the kingdom of France. The Alamanni
(Drinkwater, 2007), ended up giving their name to what in Spanish is Alemania, in
Portuguese Alemanha, in French Allemagne, (Germany). England is so named as it was the
“land of the Angles.” Burgundy, meanwhile, is the region where the Burgundians settled;
Bavaria, the land of the Bavarians; and Lombardy, the land of the Lombards. The names of
other regions in Europe, however, retained evidence of their Roman heritage, probably
because they were settled by multiple peoples: this was true of Spain (originally Hispania,
España in Spanish) settled by the Romans, Byzantines, Suebi and Visigoths before the
Muslim takeover in the 8th century; and with Italy (Italia), occupied by the Romans, the
Ostrogoths, the Byzantines and the Lombards. In both cases, the geographical
denominations prevailed. Thanks to this, legal historians in the 19th century influenced by
the Romantic and Nationalistic Movements, jumped to the conclusion that these peoples
formed a “nation” (Smith 2004, 236-257). Therefore, they considered that the territory of
the old Western Roman Empire was now occupied by the Visigothic, Ostrogothic,
Frankish, Burgundian or Lombardian nations, and that every Germanic nation tended,
therefore, to have its own “national” law. 1 As Wormald (2003, 21) points out, the
1
This is why there soon appeared “national” legal bodies, compilations of traditional Germanic law of the
specific nation. The Visigoths’ Codex Euricianus, formed before 484, was the first of these “national
laws,” to be followed by the Lex Burgundionum for the Burgundians, the Lex Salica and the Lex Ripuaria
possession of a lex came to be a highly significant element in the forging of any
acknowledged political unit in the West.
It is true that two communities initially existed in all these kingdoms: the dominant
Germanic minority and the remaining population, of Roman origin, as occurred, for
instance, in Gaul when the Visigoths arrived (Goffart 1980, 103-126). These two “nations,”
however, melded into one people over time, as the categories of Roman and non-Roman
were not always sharply defined, and the coming to power of the latter may have a less
decisive event than formerly thought (Moorhead 2001, 3). For example, in the case of
Visigothic Spain the merging of these two communities had taken place by the middle of
the 7th century.2 Eventually, the Germanic kingdoms tended to become genuine territorial
states in which Germans and Romans ended up forming a single body of citizens. But were
these Germanic kingdoms really European nations?
This is not clear and, as Geary (2002, 15) has rightly indicated, the real history of the
nations which populated Europe in the early Middle Ages begins not in the 6th century,
but in the 18th, as modern history begins then, and through the 19th century, developed as
an instrument of European nationalists3 following the outbreak of the American and
French Revolutions, in 1776 and 1789, respectively, when a “nation” came to be
understood as a “body of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted them into a
state which was their political expression,”4 as subsequently stated by John Stuart Mill in
1861,5 and Ernest Renan in 1882.6This meaning of the term would persist after the end of
for the Franks, the Edictum Rothari for the Lombards, the Lex Alammannorum for the Alamanni, and the
Lex Bajuvariorum for the Bavarians. Every “nation,” therefore its own law. The situation was a little
more complicated because the Germanic kings had to legislate for their Roman subjects as well, which
explains the promulgation of legal bodies such as the Lex Romana Visigothorum – also called the
Breviary of Alaric (507) - and the Lex Romana Burgundionum. During this stage the legal “principle of
personality” prevailed, with each nation or group applying its laws to its people, as such, notwithstanding
their precise geographical location, the principle stands in contrast to its counterpart, the territorial
system, under which the law is applied in a uniform manner throughout a given territory regardless of
personal origins and group affiliations. For an overview of this fascinating process of Law and ethnicity,
see Halsall 2009, 462-465.
2
Which we know about because in the year 654, the Visigoth King Recceswinth promulgated the Lex
Visigothorum, also known as the Liber Iudiciorum, a compilation of national Visigothic laws with
“territorial” validity, that is, binding throughout the Kingdom of Toledo upon all the subjects of the
Visigothic king, regardless of whether they were of Germanic or Roman origin (King 1980, 131-57). In
Ostrogothic Italy, Amory (2003, 82) indicates how during the reign of Theoderic, though society was
divided into barbari and Romani, they all belonged to a single res publica and had to observe Roman iura
and leges. The king was the prime supporter of the law that he had inherited, and added to it for the same
purposes for which it was formulated. By faithfully observing this Roman-royal law the population
ensured the securitas of the realm.
3
Though the history of Europe’s nations was a great success, the manipulation and exploitation of
nationalist ideology has perverted and distorted the practice of history, contaminating it with the poison of
ethnic nationalism, which has seeped deep into popular consciousness. Cleaning up this waste is the most
daunting challenge facing historians today (Kumar 2006, 7-21).
4
5
This was originally the meaning of the word “nation,” as pointed out by Hobsbawm (1994, 18-19).
John Stuart Mill believed that “a portion of mankind” could be said to constitute a nationality if “they
are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any otherswhich make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people”, and also have the
“desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a
portion of themselves exclusively.” National feeling sometimes is dependent upon and shaped by racial
identity and notions of descent, language, religion, and common geographical boundaries. Perhaps what
the First World War, when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson argued at Versailles that the
new European order should be based on a strict respect for the “principle of
nationalities,”7 a posture which gave rise to the appearance of new states and sparked a
resurgence of nationalism, leading directly to World War II.8
With reference to the Early Middle Ages, it seems unwarranted to employ the term
“nation” to refer to the Germanic peoples which ultimately developed independent
kingdoms; as Smith (1999, 8) has explained, anything which appears to resemble a nations
or nationalism, either in antiquity or the Middle Ages, must be understood as purely
incidental and exceptional. It should be noted, however, that in the later Middle Ages the
same term “nation” was used, but with another meaning: Europe’s medieval universities
were made up of “nations,” a term which designated a group of students from the same
most contributes to this feeling is the conviction that a given people shares a common past: “the
possession of a national history, and a consequent community of recollections, collective pride and
humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.” (Mill, 2008, 179-180).
6
In his famous speech given at the Sorbonne on 11 March, 1882, entitled Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?. For
Renan: “A nation is […] a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has
made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is
summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to
continue a common life. A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as
an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life” […] “Man is a slave neither of his race nor his
language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. A
large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which
we call a nation. So long as this moral consciousness gives proof of its strength by the sacrifices which
demand the abdication of the individual to the advantage of the community, it is legitimate and has the
right to exist.” Nevertheless, Renan believed that “Nations are not something eternal. They had their
beginnings and they will end. A European confederation will very probably replace them. But such is not
the law of the century in which we are living. At the present time, the existence of nations is a good thing,
a necessity even. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, which would be lost if the world had only one
law and only one master.” (Renan 1996, 41-55).
7
An idea that, paradoxically, Woodrow Wilson shared with Lenin. This is why in the Soviet Union the
Communist regime deliberately set out to create ethno-linguistic territorial “national administrative
units,” i.e. “nations” in the modern sense, where none had previously existed or been considered. As Eric
J. Hobsbawm notes: “The idea of Soviet Republics based on the Kazakh, Kirghis, Uzbek, Tajik and
Turkmen “nations´” was a theoretical construct of Soviet intellectuals rather than a primordial aspiration
of any of those central-Asian peoples.” (Hobsbawm, 1994, 166).
8
It was indeed the opinion of George Orwell when in 1945, in the first number of Polemic : A Magazine
of Philosophy, Psychology & Aesthetics, he wrote: "By "nationalism" I mean first of all the habit of
assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of
millions of people can be confidently labeled "good" or "bad." But secondly -- and this is much more
important -- I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond
good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be
confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to
be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas
are involved. By "patriotism" I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one
believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature
defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for
power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for
himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality..." Orwell
(2007, III, 361).
region or province who spoke the same language.9 These “nations” made their appearance
in Bologna at the beginning of the 13th century, as subdivisions of the collegia of foreign law
students, and formed for mutual protection and collective security against local authorities
(Kiber 1948, 3).10 It is significant that the term “nation” would also be used to refer to the
areas settled by merchants from the same region or kingdom, who did business in Europe’s
different trading squares; that is, associations of “foreign” merchants whose function was
to defend the interests of their “nationals.” 11
In any case it should be noted that the historical meaning of the term “nation” should be
considered carefully when wielded by “nationalist” historians in states featuring separatist
movements, such as in Quebec (Canada); in Belgium, where the state is on the verge of
disappearing due to the irreconcilable division of the Flemish and the Walloons; in Russia’s
9
As Kiber (1948, 3-4) points out, the term “nation” generally had a more limited connotation in the
Middle Ages than our modern socio-political or cultural concept of the term. It was frequently employed
interchangeably with the word gens, or was used to refer to the family, tribe or clan to which an
individual belonged. It was also used with reference to the country of one’s birth. It is in this sense that it
was used in medieval universities. However, place of birth and country of origin was not the only
determining factor. The statutes of the German nation at Bologna from 1497 also emphasized the
principle of a common language; as the German nation was considered to encompass all those scholars
with German as their native tongue, regardless of their place of residence. At the Spanish Universities of
Salamanca or Lerida there were, essentially, students coming from the Iberian Peninsula, but they were
still divided in nations. In the studium of Lerida, founded by King James II of Aragon in 1300, among the
12 nations two of them were from Catalonia, as they drew a distinction between Catalonians from the Sea
(Barcelona, Tarragona, Mallorca and Tortosa) and Catalonians from the Mountains (Urgel, Vich and
Gerona) (Kiber 1948, 157-158).
10
At the University of Paris “nations” emerged within the faculty of arts. The fact is that the most
important medieval European universities were gradually divided into “nations (nationes) made up of
students of a particular geographical origin. The number and names of these nations constantly changed
over the course of time, following and reflecting changes in the geographical recruitment of students
(Gieysztor 2003, 110). The University of Bologna, the oldest of the European medieval universities,
featured, for instance, two “nations”: the intramontani, who came from Italy (from “this side” of the
Alps), and the ultramontani (from “the other side” of the Alps), Frenchmen, Germans and Spaniards. But
ultramontani was also a term used to refer to students coming from a range of different regions. In 13th
century Cardinal Gil de Albornoz founded the Real Colegio Mayor de San Clemente de los Españoles (a
student residence facility for Spanish students) for those hailing from Castile. It continues to welcome
Spanish students even today. Spanish and Portuguese scholars attended the Sorbonne in the 14th and 15th
centuries (Courtenay 2007, 110-119). In 1661 Cardinal Mazarin created the Collège des Quatre Nations,
a school to educate, free of charge, 60 nobles hailing from four regions newly integrated into France by
virtue of the Treaties of Westphalia (1648), specifically students from the regions of Artois, Alsace,
Pinerolo, Roussillon and Sardinia – a measure to integrate the elite of these previously foreign territories
into the kingdom of France. Today it is the headquarters of the Institut de France in one of the most
beautiful Paris buildings along the Seine, across from the Palace of the Louvre.
11
Over the course of the Late Middle Ages, Europe’s most important trading squares frequently featured
groups of European merchants which were organized in “nations” that lived in a certain district, with
common privileges and their own authorities (consuls) which formed merchant courts to solve
commercial disputes without the intervention of the official justice system, as they fell under a special
“international” jurisdiction (Benson, 2002, 127-150). Today, the term “consul” continues to designate
diplomatic authorities who defend their nations’ interests abroad. The street layout of many cities
continue to reflect this former circumstance. Such is the case with the Genoese in Seville, and the
Castilians in Bruges (González Arce 2010, 161-202), a Flemish city in which there is still a street named
for the Spanish (Spanjaardstraat). The Castilian merchants settled in one of the wealthiest cities in Late
Medieval Europe, forging associations not only to promote their national interests, but to provide help to
their more helpless members, such as widows and orphans (Casado Alonso, 1995, 15-56). .
Georgia and Chechnya; and, to a lesser extent, in Spain’s Autonomous Communities of
Catalonia and the Basque Country, where there exist regional autonomy parties which, to
varying degree, endorse independence. The same dynamic has appeared most recently in
Scotland. In these cases, “nationalism” usually becomes a secular form of religion as well as
an ideological movement (Smith 2009, 79). As such, it is hardly compatible with historical
objectivity. As Geary (2002, 6-11) observes, a historian of the Middle Ages who listens to
the rhetoric of nationalist leaders, and who reads the scholarship produced by officials or
quasi-official historians is immediately struck by how interpretations of the period of the
dissolution of the Roman Empire and the barbarian migration have become, once again,
the fulcrum of political discourse across much of Europe. The problem is that it is not only
nationalistic political leaders who exploit history for political reasons, but reputable
scholars are also drawn into polemical uses of the past as well. This is why Geary believes
that any historian who has spent much of his career studying this earliest period of ethnic
formation and migration, can only look upon the development of politically conscious
nationalism and racism with apprehension and disdain, particularly when these ideologies
appropriate and pervert history for their justification.12
2. Basic chronology
378
The Visigoths defeat Emperor Valens at Adrianople.
382
Theodosius signs a first foedus with the Visigoths. They may settle in the Empire if
they pledge to defend it.
395
After the death of Theodosius I the Roman Empire is divided: the Western
Empire is inherited by Honorius (395-423) and the Eastern by Arcadius (395-408).
409 Romans abandon Great Britain. Britons are not deeply Romanized. During the 5th
century Great Britain is invaded by different German people. The most important are the
Angles and the Saxons. They push the Britons to the mountains and to the less fertile
lands (Scotland, Wales or Ireland).
416 Foundation of the Visigothic kingdom of Tolosa (actual French Toulouse) with
Valia as its first king.
476
September 4: Romulus Augustulus is deposed by Odoacer, the Germanic chieftain
of the Heruli. The end of the Western Roman Empire.
481
12
Clovis (+511), of the Merovingian clan, becomes King of the Franks.
This “pseudo-history” assumes, first, that the peoples of Europe are distinct, stable and objectively
identifiable social and cultural units, distinguished by language, religion, custom and national which are
unambiguous and immutable. These peoples supposedly arose either in some impossibly remote moment
of prehistory, or the process of ethnogenesis which took place at some moment during the Middle Ages,
but then came to a definitive stop. Second, ethnic claims demand the political autonomy of all persons
belonging to a particular ethnic group and, at the same time, the right of that people to govern its historic
territory, usually defined in terms of early medieval settlements or kingdoms, regardless of who may now
live in it. For a scholar discussion on ethnicity and nationalism, Spira (2004, 248-56). For the relationship
between racism and nationalism in the case of Basque nationalism, Douglass (2004, 98-106).
484 The king of Visigoths, Euric (466-484) is the first Germanic king to have created a
“national law” for his people the Codex Euricianus,
496
Clovis converts to Catholicism. Most of the others Germanic kings would do
the same. The church as the heir of the Roman empire favors the stability of political
power of kings.
568
The Lombards, led by King Alboin, invade Italy when pressured by the Avars,
soon driving the Byzantines out of northern Italy (Po Valley, which comes to be called
“Lombardy”).
573
Leovigild (573-586) ascends to the Visigoth throne and is considered the founder
of the Kingdom of Toledo, which would last until 711.
577 Battle of Dyrham. Decisive victory of Angles and Saxons. Beginning of AngloSaxon rule.
590-604 Pope Gregory the Great significantly bolsters the authority of the Church of
Rome over all of Christendom. He is the first pope that considers himself the successor of
Roman emperors decides to preach Christianity among the Germanic people that settled in
the different parts of the extinct West Roman Empire. He sends a mission for
Christianizing Anglo-Saxon England. The first Anglo-Saxon king to be baptized is
Aethelbert, King of Kent (c. 590-616). The Church as the heir of the Roman Empire
favors the creation of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. There are soon seven autonomous
kingdoms: the HEPTARCHY: Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria
(divided in two sub-kingdoms: Bernicia and Deira); Kent, Sussex and Essex.
600 Aethelbert Law Code is formed. The Law of the Kingdom of Kent is the oldest
written law in England.
654 Approval of the Liber Iudiciorum in the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo. Is the first
territorial Germanic Law binding both to Visigoths and Hispano-Romans that have
already merged as one single people under the authority of the King of Toledo.
3. Concepts
Ulfilas
Arianism
Catholicism
Anointment of kings
German nation
National Germanic law
Germanic territorial states
Councils of Toledo
Liber Iudiciorum
Nations (medieval universities)
Nation (modern concept)
Nationalism
Principle of nationalities
4. Questions:
1. Describe in which way the influence of Christianity and of the Catholic Church
transformed Germanic nations into Germanic kingdoms. Compare what happens in
Visigothic Spain, in the kingdom of Franks after Clovis and in Anglo-Saxon Britain.
2. Which actual European States or regions bear the name of a Germanic People? Explain
why others (as Spain or Italy) don’t.
3. Explain how evolved the relationship between Germanic invaders and the Roman
population of Western Europe. Think about how German national Laws became
Territorial Laws.
4. Were the Germanic kingdoms the origin of actual European nations? Give a structured
and grounded answer with the information provided in the third paragraph of the text.
5. Explain the different senses of the word “nation” that appear in the text.
6. Why according to the text actual nationalist historians pervert history?