#twitterstorians, ready for some pre-Christmas #RetroConflictsInspirations? Just, instead of giving, it is about taking. When studying conflicts in late medieval Northern Europe we inevitably run across the term pirate (seerover).

But too easily, Gregor Rohmann argues, have historians taken such accusations of piracy in the sources at face value, presuming a strict opposition between the criminal ‘pirate’ and the economy-minded merchant. Yet, how could the private use of force be illicit when there was no state with claims to a monopoly on violence? And when most instances of violence on sea actually stemmed from conflicts between merchants not shy to actively partake in it? ‘Piracy’, so Rohmann, was part of the economic system of late medieval Europe, not a threat from the outside; ‘pirate’ was less a defined legal category than it was a defamatory term undermining the reputation of an opponent. Only when wealthier merchants became sedentary and part of the urban elite, did they gain interest in a hierarchical monopoly on violence to protect their property: ‘The state legitimized itself by latching onto the economic elites’ altered demands for order and by criminalizing […] violent conflict practices.’ For #retroconflicts these are important considerations when looking at alleged escalation, the language of conflicts, but also institutional change over time.[....]

In his contribution to the The SAGE Handbook of #Diplomacy, Noe Cornago (@NoeCornago), writing about ‘Diplomatic knowledge’, brings together insights on 1) the role of historical conditions which make diplomatic knowledge and diplomacy altogether flourish and evolve; 2) a reflective and constructive attitude towards the Other in diplomacy – when gathering knowledge is the objective; 3) statecraft, e.g. how diplomats’ reports abroad are far more telling and personal than writs produced at ministerial desks, and 4) anthropological approaches to diplomacy, showing diplomats as the ultimate pragmatists.

All these aspects can be @RetroConflictsInspirations, but perhaps two interwoven arguments about diplomacy stand out most: the cultivated ability to constantly switch perspectives in order to reach a (#conflictmanagement) goal, and the recognition that face-to-face interaction is needed for this purpose. In our #medieval and #earlymodern mercantile settings, these approaches can be traced in the sources. Hanseatic #conflictmanagers knew that gathering and disseminating knowledge about conflicts required both writing and travelling. How did they deal with disruptions of activities through plagues, how do diplomats deal with it today?...[....]

Research on merchants abroad easily lends itself to analysis of the urban laws & institutions of their host cities – and questions of urban autonomy and its influences. In today's #RetroConflictsInspirations, the spotlight is on Portuguese merchants abroad.

Flávio Miranda provides a test of recent historiography with empirical data, by examining the processes of (commercial) conflict management: how did Portuguese merchants protect their interests, what problems/disputes did they face, what strategies were applied? The question then is, if it is possible to confirm the existence of any link between significant differences in rules, laws & institutions, and the merchants’ choice of markets? A question just as relevant for our Hanse merchants. One observation intrigues from the viewpoint of our project: “... ‘privilege’ seems to have been the keyword, rather than anything else, measured in terms of the economic advantages [Portuguese] merchants could have for trading in a specific territory.” (p.28) The inter-connectivity between foreign urban institutions, urban autonomy, legal/diplomatic networks and mercantile interests/privileges abroad, in relation to #conflictmanagement, is one to keep in mind on this (rainy) Monday afternoon.[....]

We like to stress the variety of medieval conflict in our #retroconflictsinspirations but sometimes conflict is just what you expect: revolts, riots, and rebellions.  This week’s microreview is about that kind of conflict, Samuel K. Cohn’s ‘Lust for Liberty’.

Subtitled ‘the politics of social revolt in Europe 1250 to 1425’, the book compares the testimonies of many medieval chroniclers to present a picture of group conflict in both its qualitative and quantitative dimensions. One of the first comparative studies of this kind of conflict, the book’s quantitative elements provide valuable context for our project, charting the relative growth and decline of different kinds of conflicts, using a typology of conflicts based on their motivations. The comparison highlights the city as the main stage for medieval conflict, with 90% of Cohn’s revolts happening in urban settings. In its qualitative dimensions, the books also prefigures some of our interest in how strategies and tactics affected conflicts. Cohn emphasizes the economic and social determinants of conflict, but he is also sensitive to the ways that conflicts are shaped by their participants. Even as we look at conflicts outside the realm of political revolt, Lust for Liberty’s account of the skill of managing communication and symbolism during a conflict offers both an valuable example and an illuminating comparative point for our history of conflict management.[....]

Competing legal orders without clear hierarchies and different overlapping institutions in every city and state: merchants of pre-modern long-distance trade in middle and western Europe must have been anxious to overcome this state of ‘legal fragmentation’ in order to solve their conflicts quickly and orderly. Or were they?

Time for more #RetroConflictsInspirations! In their contribution to the Oxford Handbook of European Legal History, Albrecht Cordes and Philipp Höhn argue that the negative connotation associated with medieval legal pluralism are ‘ex post description influenced by paradigms of modernity.’ Instead, medieval merchants were happy to use all options available to manage their conflicts.  And the coalescing spaces of legal and extra-legal conflict management provided them with a multitude of such choices and tactics - from courts and arbitration to the threat of feuds - to enforce their interests, to sustain communication in conflicts, and to contain escalation.
For #retro_conflicts, there is much to take away from this article but its focus on actors and choices, not on institutions, stands out. To not presume that conditions differing from the ideal-type of the modern state were perceived as negative and as something to overcome allows to consider the interests of individual merchants and their strategies to pursue them.[....]

In Language and Conflict. Selected issues, the sociolinguist Karol Janicki constructs bridges between linguistics, communication studies, philosophy, social psychology and conflict studies. The result is a highly original structure. We integrate it into our #RetroConflictsInspirations due to a number of reasons. Historians study past conflicts through language in #primary sources, so the role of language in conflict and of conflict is crucial.

Language activates frames in the mind, and as such can both fan the flames of conflict and remove the fuel. Also, the same words can mean different things to people due to the underpinning that personal life experience provides. The use of symbolic language by humans is thus a mixed blessing. We know it for the present and the past, though it does not mean we pay enough attention to it. In  our project, this translates into a conscious effort to analyse the conflict discourse, with a caveat. As Janicki also points out, somewhat tongue in cheek for a linguist, that symbolic language is overrated in communication: p. 44 'Language is extremely simple compared to the complexity of the non-linguistic world'. It has a tendency to organize the world into binaries like us/them, good/wrong, though in fact there is a range of experience in between. He adds an important remark for historians: when looking at the past, all the complexities of the use and interpretation of language are amplified. What is the way forward, then? For the present, Janicki posits that we have to take this fuzziness of language in conflict into account. For us as historians of conflict, it is of interest to see to what extent people in the past were aware of it. [....]

Today our attention is focused on how to analyse #conflictmanagement from an interdisciplinary approach, due to our broad variety of source material. In particular: law and its role in diplomatic/economic centered conflicts. As Alain Wijffels points out while discussing Anglo-Hanseatic commercial conflicts, law was not on the forefront of these relations. The main focus was on diplomacy & trade. But legal documents can add valuable insight, esp. when scholars look beyond conflict resolution and analyse the conflict process.

“Law may not have been seen as offering a way out of the conflict, in the sense of a form of dispute resolution but it did contribute by formalizing the controversial issues and subjecting them to legal arguments supported by legal authorities, to secure some form of conflict management.” (p.172) Wijffels chapter is this week's #RetroConflictsInspiration since legal institutions/actors involved in Hanse-related conflicts will be used to e.g. demonstrate law as a tactic or how Hanseatic legal authority was perceived. A. Wijffels, “Legal authorities as instruments of conflict management. The long endgame of Anglo-Hanseatic relations (1474-1603)”, Godfrey, M. (Ed.) Law and Authority in British Legal History, @CambridgeUP  (2016), pp.170-191. [....]

A key idea in our project is that managing conflict is about more than just resolution. Conflict managers can escalate, or drag out, or just let conflicts fade away. Our #RetroConflictsInspirations review today is all about cases of unresolved conflict and its consequences. The Emperor’s Old Clothes (2015) by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger analyses four moments of conflict in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. But these aren’t the Empire’s great wars, or even its intellectual debates. They are about symbolism.

Drawing on cultural sociology, the book argues that in the Empire’s constitutional politics you can never separate hard questions of policy from symbolic questions of presentation and representation. That, it argues, would be an anachronism. In that kind of world, conflicts over the symbolic were more than a question of courtesy. As #conflictmanagers on the political stage navigated the ‘expectations about expectations’ at the heart of the Empire’s politics, they were at every moment reshaping the Empire itself. The Emperor’s Old Clothes can, therefore, act as a great illustration of the historical contingency of conflict management practices and the high stakes that conflict management often had in the pre-modern world. AC

This week’s #RetroConflictsInspirations is provided by the collaborative work of Hilde de Weerdt, Catherine Holmes, and John Watts, ‘Politics, c.1000-1500: Mediation and Communication’, Past & Present 238 (2018), 261-296.

Combining case studies spanning from Song China to late and high medieval Byzantium and France, the three authors suggest a new way to write a global history of medieval politics. Akin to New Diplomatic History, they are less interested in comparing institutions and trajectories than in analyzing the practices of politics ‘the messier ways in which power is negotiated.’ Focusing on mediation and communication, they show how actors as different as Chinese students or French and Byzantine noblemen and town assemblies acted as mediators in interaction and conflicts between high powers, communities, and individuals. Apart from the common interest in actors, processes, and practices, it is the article’s methodology which influences our project as a whole. Its approach of combining regional studies to assimilate findings and establish common patterns is also highly valuable when analyzing case studies stretching from London to Tallinn. But it also inspires us to look further: How can our understanding of the #Hanseatic world add towards writing a bigger, global history of conflict management?[....]

This week’s #RetroConflictsInspirations is the work of Michael Jucker on medieval secrecy, e.g. in “Secrets and Politics: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Late Medieval Diplomatic Communication” Micrologus. Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies 14 (2006) 275–309.

Focussing in particular on Switzerland, he shows how written and oral, verbal and non-verbal secret communication in #premoderndiplomacy were intertwined. Secrecy is presented as a sophisticated tool, furthering change and – perhaps more surprisingly - stability. Drawing on Valentin Groebner, he fleshes out examples of secrets as gifts: secrets had (and have) a function in diplomacy. Secret diplomatic communication happened at various political levels in cities. This certainly echoes in our material on the #Hanse and northern Europe. Moreover, the understanding that most secrets are lost or inaccessible to us as primary sources, has actually brought our research further. How? Through the shift of focus to when, how and why communication ABOUT secrets was mentioned, even without content disclosure. Talking and writing about secrets had a specific function in the Hanse. It delineated #trust, both externally and internally, in a highly flexible manner. The languages of trust and secrecy shared roots and fruits.[....]