"Hospitalitas"

Abstract:

Good government requires a constitution that demarcates what political agents can and cannot do, and such a constitution must be self-enforcing. The medieval West was characterized by the estates system, where the political power of monarchs was roughly balanced by that of a landed and militarized nobility. This rough balance of power contributed to a Western tradition of limited government and constitutional bargaining. I argue that this balance has important roots in the fifth and sixth century barbarian settlements that occurred within the frontiers of the declining Western Roman Empire. These settlements provided barbarians with allotments consisting of lands or claims to taxes due from those lands. These allotments aligned the incentives of barbarian warriors and Roman landowners; they also realigned (or newly aligned) the incentives of barbarian warriors and leadership elite as their roving confederacies became stationary kingdoms. Barbarian military forces became decentralized and the warriors became political powerful shareholders of the realm.