A successful "Peasant's Republic"?

archaeogeek

Banned
Mercenaries were as a rule better soldiers until the introduction of standing armies anyway. ;)
They were better especially for the last part. If it was up to the french and english aristocracies, war would have been purely condottieri bullshit and riding down the other side's peasants while jousting, giving each other harsh words and then reconciling over dead peasants and a roast deer :p.

There is a reason the medieval republics were primarily mercantile.
Admittedly, there was not such a divide between peasants and the burgers in the early italian comuni afaik.
 

Zioneer

Banned
So the biggest problems were (1) lack of training, (2) lack of money for paying troops/good equipment, (3) lack of understanding and desire of "rule of the people", and (4) lack of isolated enough areas that could allow the peasantry to catch a breath before the nobles come again?

Hmm... For (1), could there there be a military campaign conducted by any monarchy that could lead to peasant soldiers coming back to their homes with a lot of military experience?

For (2), what if the peasant rebellion loots churches and monasteries perceived to be puppets of the nobles? Since some churches were storehouses for wealth, the peasants might be able to fund themselves through that.

For (3), would it be difficult to have a charismatic peasant hero-figure that has the powers of a king, but who allows regional (very small regions, if this is to work) representatives to advise him, slowly leading to a more republican form of government?

For (4), How about Tirol? Would that be a good spot for a long-lasting "peasant republic"?
 
There is a sliding scale of nobles and peasants, some nobles are quite poor and some peasants are quite rich. In a lot of Medieval armies the militia were free peasants who held their land directly from the king and were doing OK. They're not the people who would want to upset the applecart too much but they're the ones who are most likely to own a spear and shield and have done some time in the army.
 
The Anglo-Saxon fyrd is sort of interesting in that regard. Made of freemen, most of which are if not quite peasants not nobles.

Though translating things like the status of a thane is tricky, its a good example of a armed commoners.

Not the kind of state that would produce a peasant's rebellion, however, for the very reason that they were able to be such - they had a decent lot in life.
 
So the biggest problems were (1) lack of training, (2) lack of money for paying troops/good equipment, (3) lack of understanding and desire of "rule of the people", and (4) lack of isolated enough areas that could allow the peasantry to catch a breath before the nobles come again?

Hmm... For (1), could there there be a military campaign conducted by any monarchy that could lead to peasant soldiers coming back to their homes with a lot of military experience?

For (2), what if the peasant rebellion loots churches and monasteries perceived to be puppets of the nobles? Since some churches were storehouses for wealth, the peasants might be able to fund themselves through that.

For (3), would it be difficult to have a charismatic peasant hero-figure that has the powers of a king, but who allows regional (very small regions, if this is to work) representatives to advise him, slowly leading to a more republican form of government?

For (4), How about Tirol? Would that be a good spot for a long-lasting "peasant republic"?

1) That happened all the time, problem was, that the veterans got increasingly out of touch with the people back home and that they still lacked officers and sergants (who were noles / professionals serving all their life)

2) I think this is overestimated. Local churches seldom have much gold in them. The few realy gold covered ones are almost all in big well-defended cities. Of the money going to churches most went into the buildings itself or into upkeep (candels, priests). Most of the decoration (i.e. statues of the virgin, altar paintings) was expensive to make, but nothing you could pay an mercenary with.

4) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gaismair
 
The English Peasants Revolt came close to success in 1381, although it's questionable how long peasant rule could have lasted.

Maybe the Holy Land. The peasants' army under Peter the Hermit was largely destroyed on the way there, but suppose it had had better generals and better luck? It was ahead of the rest of the armies and might have set up something more egalitarian than the OTL Crusader states.
 
There's also economic problems with a peasant republic. In pre-industrial societies, there are only two significant factors of production, land and labor. The supply of land is pretty much fixed, while the labor supply varies with the peasant population. And for the most part, the better off the peasants, are, the more kids they have. You can get more crop from a given amount of land by working it with more peasants, but past a certain point you face diminishing returns so the crop-yield-per-peasant declines. Until capital arose as a third significant factor of production (allowing labor to become more productive without adding more men or more land) in the 17th and 18th centuries, what you generally saw was a cycle of:

  1. Good times following a technological shift or population shock when there were relatively few peasants and per-peasant crop yields produced a relatively high standard of living.
  2. The relatively well-off peasants have more kids and the population climbs to carrying capacity, where the per-peasant crop yield barely suffices to feed the peasant's family and pay the peasant's obligations (taxes, rents, etc).
In your typical medieval society, much of the land was owned by members of a hereditary nobility, who rented the land to their peasants. The rents represented the society's agricultural surplus, out of which nobles payed for governance, infrastructure, the church, the military, etc. The military in particular, since the nobility generally doubles as a military caste because 1) they need to be able to fight to hold their land against invaders, bandits, and squatters, 2) rental income is passive, which allows them to train for combat as a full-time job (a necessity with medieval hand weapons if you want to be good at it), and 3) they had the means to hire skilled craftsmen to make high-quality weapons and armor for them and to train and keep warhorses.

Because the nobles were skimming off rents from the peasant's crops, the subsistence level at which a peasant can no longer keep up with his expenses is higher, so the population of peasants leveled off at a lower level where there was still an overall surplus rather than rising to the absolute Malthusian carrying capacity. Without the nobles (or someone in the nobles' place) skimming off the surplus, a few generations later there would be no surplus.

Suppose the peasants successfully rise up and overthrow the nobility in a given area and set up a Peasant Republic, and assume this Republic isn't rapidly destroyed from outside. I'd expect to see one of four things happen:

  1. The initial population of revolutionary peasants divide the manor farms into yeoman plots. At first, the standard of living is great by medieval peasant standards, but over the next few generations the population rises, the yeoman plots are divided among multiple heirs, and the surplus disappears. The Peasant Republic winds up more densely populated than its neighbors, but its general populace is just as poor except there's no nobility with its associated military caste to drive off invaders. The populace can't even function as a militia effectively (certainly not on a level to hold off a determined attack by knights and men-at-arms), since they've got their hands full just feeding themselves.
  2. The initial population of revolutionary peasants collectivizes the manor farms. Same story as above, except faster because collective farms are generally less productive than privately owned farms and because there's less incentive for any one family to have fewer children.
  3. The initial population of revolutionary peasants divide the manor farms into yeoman plots, but practice a form of inheritance that does not subdivide the land each generation. Over time, a landless underclass develops which rents farmland from the landed heirs, effectively creating a new noble/peasant class divide.
  4. The Peasant Republic sets up a central government or a number of local/regional governments. The Republic government(s) collect taxes in place of the rents the nobles charged and use these taxes to pay for governance, infrastructure, military, etc. From the peasants' perspective, this is meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss.
 
Maniakes,

Interesting and well-thought-out commentary there.

About #4, it might not be so much a new-boss/old-boss situation if the overall taxes are lower and the government isn't abusive (i.e. no nobles trashing fields with their hunting, no bans on peasants hunting, no casual abuse of peasants by nobles, etc).
 
Maniakes,

Interesting and well-thought-out commentary there.

About #4, it might not be so much a new-boss/old-boss situation if the overall taxes are lower and the government isn't abusive (i.e. no nobles trashing fields with their hunting, no bans on peasants hunting, no casual abuse of peasants by nobles, etc).

Thank you.

Yeah, I think you're right about #4, depending on the exact situation. I'd expect the Peasant Republic government to have abuses of its own, but they'd probably be different in nature from the abuses of a feudal nobility. Interesting from an AH perspective, and potentially an improvement in quality of life from the peasants' perspective if they wind up with a relatively good Republic government after overthrowing a particularly abusive nobility.

Come to think of it, #3 is interesting as well, since the new aristocracy would be a large number of petty nobles used to dealing with each other as equals rather than a hierarchy dominated by Counts and Dukes, and the new aristocracy, even though it would very likely take on the role of a warrior/leadership caste, would still have a different cultural legacy than a traditional Nobility since it would have evolved from an egalitarian Yeoman culture rather than being military overlords from the start.
 
Come to think of it, #3 is interesting as well, since the new aristocracy would be a large number of petty nobles used to dealing with each other as equals rather than a hierarchy dominated by Counts and Dukes, and the new aristocracy, even though it would very likely take on the role of a warrior/leadership caste, would still have a different cultural legacy than a traditional Nobility since it would have evolved from an egalitarian Yeoman culture rather than being military overlords from the start.

#3 works on the grounds of realism, since a peasant revolt that's successful would probably have help from at least some nobles, since they're the ones with the fighting skill and weaponry.

At the Battle of Mello, the peasants exhibited decent military tactics--at first. That seems to indicate they either had a fair bit of knowledge themselves or had assistance from "those who fought."
 
Maniakes' post was excellent, though I have to disagree about collective agriculture as a universal. Collective versus individuated agriculture's effectiveness depends heavily on other structures like family / clan / land bearing capacity / centrality of the region / ease of invasion from the steppe equivalent.

However, Maniakes thinking is trapped within the Feudal mode of production. Could we not consider a fief held in perpetuity by a Monestary as a kind of Res Publicia Deus? Long term economic analysis of Southern England demonstrates the penetration of a new mode of production into the old from an unexpected quarter: the monestaries. The best wage labour data is that of monastically held fiefs.

And what did Peasant Rebellions cling to, other than land redistribution? Why their own capacity to interpret God.

Taking a big leaf from Luther Blisset's /Q/ here, and transposing it backwards in time...

What if Wat Tyler was a cobbler for a monestary. Paid by the shoe from birth, Tyler grated against his apprenticeship, and then with his father's success, against the family relationships within the petits bourgeois production unit.

Tyler then proceeds to become the headman of a peasant revolt with access to:
#Political forms of governance structured around discussion other than that monopolised by the nobility
#Political forms of discussion rooted in the Church
#A free the Church mentality
#Land redistribution
#A need to supplant his father, and possess the petits bourgeois productive mode for himself.
#A familiarity with wage labour and rent in coin

Its as ugly as a proletarian revolution resulting in a dictatorship of a new class; but, what if a peasant revolution allowed a petits bourgeois to take over a state and forcibly implement early elements of capitalism?

yours smearing poor heroic Wat Tyler's name,
Sam R.
 
There's also economic problems with a peasant republic. In pre-industrial societies, there are only two significant factors of production, land and labor. The supply of land is pretty much fixed, while the labor supply varies with the peasant population. And for the most part, the better off the peasants, are, the more kids they have. You can get more crop from a given amount of land by working it with more peasants, but past a certain point you face diminishing returns so the crop-yield-per-peasant declines. Until capital arose as a third significant factor of production (allowing labor to become more productive without adding more men or more land) in the 17th and 18th centuries, what you generally saw was a cycle of:

  1. Good times following a technological shift or population shock when there were relatively few peasants and per-peasant crop yields produced a relatively high standard of living.
  2. The relatively well-off peasants have more kids and the population climbs to carrying capacity, where the per-peasant crop yield barely suffices to feed the peasant's family and pay the peasant's obligations (taxes, rents, etc).
In your typical medieval society, much of the land was owned by members of a hereditary nobility, who rented the land to their peasants. The rents represented the society's agricultural surplus, out of which nobles payed for governance, infrastructure, the church, the military, etc. The military in particular, since the nobility generally doubles as a military caste because 1) they need to be able to fight to hold their land against invaders, bandits, and squatters, 2) rental income is passive, which allows them to train for combat as a full-time job (a necessity with medieval hand weapons if you want to be good at it), and 3) they had the means to hire skilled craftsmen to make high-quality weapons and armor for them and to train and keep warhorses.

Because the nobles were skimming off rents from the peasant's crops, the subsistence level at which a peasant can no longer keep up with his expenses is higher, so the population of peasants leveled off at a lower level where there was still an overall surplus rather than rising to the absolute Malthusian carrying capacity. Without the nobles (or someone in the nobles' place) skimming off the surplus, a few generations later there would be no surplus.

I am fairly confident that there will be. One of the things we have to keep in mind when we are discussing peasants is that they are not a homogenous class. Some of them - in many areas the majority - lived hand-to-mouth on precarious and tiny holdings paying outrageous rents. Others had securely held their lands for generations, or owned them outright, and ran a diversified agricultural business generating cash for manufactured goods and luxuries. Many of them, later in the period, apprenticed their children to respected artisans or sent them to university. Up until 1000, it is likely that people of such status would have been regarded, to all intents and purposes, as nobles, of course, but when nobility became defined as a hereditary class, they had nowhere to go. Now, call me cynical, but I think I have a pretty shrewd idea who will be in charge of any peasant republic.

Suppose the peasants successfully rise up and overthrow the nobility in a given area and set up a Peasant Republic, and assume this Republic isn't rapidly destroyed from outside. I'd expect to see one of four things happen:

  1. The initial population of revolutionary peasants divide the manor farms into yeoman plots. At first, the standard of living is great by medieval peasant standards, but over the next few generations the population rises, the yeoman plots are divided among multiple heirs, and the surplus disappears. The Peasant Republic winds up more densely populated than its neighbors, but its general populace is just as poor except there's no nobility with its associated military caste to drive off invaders. The populace can't even function as a militia effectively (certainly not on a level to hold off a determined attack by knights and men-at-arms), since they've got their hands full just feeding themselves.


  1. I don't think that's a given. Peasants were economically quite active and resourceful, and I don't think we will see general immiseration. Of course a rising population will mean more poor people, but not necessarily fewer wealthy ones. Aside from market-oriented craftwork, labour-intrensive cash crops or migration, early in period they could also become military predators. Or urbanise.

    [*]The initial population of revolutionary peasants collectivizes the manor farms. Same story as above, except faster because collective farms are generally less productive than privately owned farms and because there's less incentive for any one family to have fewer children.

    The traditional village of continental western Europe was something of an unequal collective. If the demesne actually ends up in the hands of the peasantry (which is not at all a given), it may well be turned into a kind of commons. But that was very different from what moderns mean by 'collective farm'. Owners had defined shares which could be bought, sold and securitised.

    [*]The initial population of revolutionary peasants divide the manor farms into yeoman plots, but practice a form of inheritance that does not subdivide the land each generation. Over time, a landless underclass develops which rents farmland from the landed heirs, effectively creating a new noble/peasant class divide.

    Except it wouldn't be. The main complaint of rebellious peasants was usually abuses of power, not power relationships as such. A peasant republic need be neither socialistic nor egalitarian or democratic, and AFAIK nonew of the historical examples were. Great inequality was a feature of most peasant societies. Look at a village in rural India, and all you are likely to see is poor people in miserable huts. From an inside perspective, though, you can trace the economic faultlines and understand which of the villagers is the one who rents out his plough team, who owns the motorcycle, who lent whom how much money at what interest, whose crop is in hock and to what amount, and whose kids go to school. Mionus the motorcycle, odds are your medieval village weouldn't be that different. And without the nobility to impose sumptuary laws, the wealthier peasants could even afford some ostentation. They sure did in Dithmarschen and Friesland.
    Again, BTW, undivided holdings were quite common in parts of medieval Germany, often in places where the peasantry remained a political power to be reckoned with. The result was often labour migration. Younger sons from Friesland and Dithmarschen populated Hansa cities and manned the proud fleets of the Netherlands while surplus young Swiss swelled the ranks of Europe's armies.

    [*]The Peasant Republic sets up a central government or a number of local/regional governments. The Republic government(s) collect taxes in place of the rents the nobles charged and use these taxes to pay for governance, infrastructure, military, etc. From the peasants' perspective, this is meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss.

Actually, the old boss was most often what they wanted back. Again, peasant republics were rarely egalitarian, and they hardly ever needed to establish whgo the boss was - they had one, or several, on hand. Normally the wealthy peasant class filled the role handily.
 
Top