The second form of medieval political warfare was “configurative wars.” These were wars fought not over the existence of political units, but over the territorial configuration of mutually recognized sovereign states. This treaty named Edward as the successor to the Scottish throne, thus creating the kind of dual monarchy that brought Scotland definitively (if only temporarily) into the English empire. This second war concluded in 1357 with the signing of the Treaty of Berwick. In 1332, however, fighting was renewed by England’s Edward III as part of his general effort to assert, defend and recover the rights of the English crown throughout the territory of the English empire. The war ended in 1328 with the signing of the Treaty Northampton, which formally recognized the sovereignty and independence of the kingdom of Scotland. The English understood their invasion in terms of the legitimate assertion of the rights of the English crown in Scotland the Scots as a war for the very existence of the patria against a hated foreign enemy. Both sides saw their war as a “just war”. When, chafing under this new dispensation, the Scottish king defied Edward and entered into an alliance with France, the English invaded Scotland. Thus, when John Balliol assumed the throne in 1292 he swore homage to Edward, effectively reducing the kingdom of Scotland to a province of the English empire. Seizing the opportunity, Edward agreed, but only on condition that the successful claimant recognize his sovereignty over Scotland. In the mid-1290s, the extinction of the Scottish royal line forced the magnates of the realm to appeal to England’s Edward I to arbitrate competing claims to the throne (and thus avoid civil war). Second, a succession crisis in Scotland provided Edward I with the leverage the English needed to press their claims to sovereignty over the Scottish kingdom. This predisposed the king and his officials to look for opportunities to assert sovereignty over, and tighten their administrative hold on, those territories that they viewed as naturally or lawfully falling within their empire. First, Edward I embarked on an ambitious project of building and consolidating the government of this English empire. Two developments, however, were to alter this situation in the later-twelfth century in ways that exacerbated the antagonisms between the kingdom of Scotland and the English empire. Prior to the mid-twelfth century, they had worked at subduing Wales and Ireland, but had not pressed their claims in Scotland too forcefully, contenting themselves with a loose feudal overlordship that conferred little real authority and nothing approaching sovereignty. As Davies argues, English monarchs had long seen themselves as high kings of a state that encompassed all of the British Isles as well as Aquitaine in southwestern France. On the one hand, the Plantagenet kings of England (Edwards I, II and III) were seeking to incorporate Scotland into the political unit that Rees Davies has called the “first English empire”. ![]() The wars fought by England and Scotland between 12 provide an illustrative example of constitutive war. ![]() ![]() Typically, they involved violent conflicts between kingdoms seeking to assert sovereignty within what they considered to be their natural, rightful or imagined borders and other political units (principalities, communes, leagues or even kingdoms) seeking to resist these efforts and/or assert their own claims to sovereign statehood. These wars were characteristically the result of antagonisms between kingdoms with unequal or mutually unrecognized claims to sovereignty. The first of these I will call “constitutive wars,” which I see as wars over the very existence of certain political units as sovereign entities. In this, the first post of the Medieval Geopolitics series, I take a look at the two types of political war fought in medieval Europe.īoth of these types of warfare were the norm by the fourteenth-century. When it comes to warfare in the Middle Ages, the common belief is that it was always motivated by feudal concerns, religious convictions, or by what Thucydides called the eternal drivers of “honour, fear and interest.” The reality is that medieval wars were often the politics of state- (and empire) building.
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