After the 12th Century: War and Legal Order (or, of Historiography and its Chimeras)

The publication in 2009 of John Watts’s The Making of Polities renewed interest not only in the causal relation that is habitually taken for granted nowadays between war and the development of state institutions in the late medieval centuries (a question about which recent English historiography has produced other works of enormous interest), but also in the appropriateness of state categories to think about the changes that, driven by war or not, took place then in the field of the forms of political organisation of Western Europe. This paper looks at the the historiographic origins and development of the state-centred model of explaining those changes, and then explores (especially as regards the evolution of the idea of war itself) the potential for a jurisdictionalist model which, through a more contextualized reading of sources and closer attention to its long-term deployment since the 12th century, has been reconstructing the recent legal and related historiographies from, especially, southern European countries.