Revolts and the Political Order of Cities in the Late Middle Ages

This article explores the place of revolt in the complex and polycentric societies of late medieval European cities. Understanding such societies is not easy within the conceptual paradigm of thinking about political order and disorder that has been handed down to us from the nineteenth century. Our notion of conflict is intrinsically bound up with particular concepts of state, class and revolution that are particularly geared to the explanation of modern political phenomena. 1 Karl Marx himself suggested that modern revolution was only possible in the context of a specific political order. In The Civil War in France he wrote that a revolution-like confrontation between the state and social forces only became possible when ‘the gigantic broom of the French Revolution … swept away all relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state’. Marx recognized that the development of the modern political order had previously ‘remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies and provincial constitutions’. 2