The Business of War in Europe, 1000–1600 69
been able to make good their vision of a Christendom obedient to
papal governance, subjecting local fighting men as well as peasants and
townsmen to clerical control, western Europe would have come to
resemble China, where the Son of Heaven exercised jurisdiction over
peasants, townsmen, landowners, and soldiers through a corps of of
ficials imbued with Confucian principles.
Of course Christianity was not the same as Confucianism, yet in
interesting ways thirteenth-century administration of the Roman
church paralleled Chinese bureaucratic procedures. At least a rudi
mentary education was required to qualify bishops and other
high-ranking clergymen for office. Appointments were subject to
papal review, at least in principle. Office was not hereditary, and a
career open to talent often attracted gifted and ambitious men into
clerical ranks. In all these respects Christian prelates of the thirteenth
century resembled Confucian officials of Sung China.
Moreover, Christian doctrine was quite as hostile to the ethos of the
marketplace as was Confucianism. The condemnation of usury was
more explicit and emphatic in Christian theology than anything to be
found in Confucian texts; and distrust between Christian clerics and
Christian men-at-arms resembled the gulf separating Chinese manda
rins from the soldiery of the Celestial Empire, though it was not nearly
so wide. Had papal monarchy proved feasible, western Europe’s his
tory would not have duplicated China’s bureaucratic experience, but
divergences would surely have been far fewer than they actually were.
In fact, however, the papal bid for effective sovereignty throughout
Latin Christendom failed as miserably as the German emperors’ ef
forts had previously done. Christendom remained divided into locally
divergent political structures, perpetually at odds with one another
and infinitely confused by overlapping territorial and jurisdictional
claims.
This political situation permitted a remarkable merger of market
and military behavior to take root and flourish in the most active eco
nomic centers of western Europe. Commercialization of organized
violence came vigorously to the fore in the fourteenth century when
mercenary armies became standard in Italy. Thereafter, market forces
and attitudes began to affect military action as seldom before.^4 The art
- The closest parallel from the European past takes us back to classical times when
Greek mercenaries responded to a Mediterranean-wide market, both within Greece
and beyond its borders. See. H. W. Parkes, Greek Mercenary Soldiers from the Earliest
Times to the Battle oflpsus (Oxford, 1933) for interesting details about the first stages of
this development. The rise of Rome, however, meant monopolization of the Mediter
ranean market for military service after 30 B.C. Victory for the old-fashioned command
