In 1928, and again in 1934, in both his (equally unsuccessful) candidatures for the Collège de France, Marc Bloch rehearsed the need for a properly comparative history of the societies of medieval Europe. This would necessarily have included the “institutions” of medieval government. Nearly a century later, we still await such an enterprise. Meanwhile, and thanks to nationally distinctive historiographies, for the most part tailored to nineteenth-century rather than medieval realities, our understanding of such phenomena as the collection of taxes, the administration of justice, or the summoning of armies tends still to be siloed according to much later “state” frontiers. As the editor of the present collection also points out, there has long been a tendency to privilege particular regional models--those of England and France especially--as precociously signalling a future only dimly perceptible across large parts of Europe east of the Alps. Here, in regions that came late to the banquet of bureaucratically documented governmental record, western European historians often struggle to distinguish reality from stereotypical or patriotic myth.

Even in the seven volumes of the New Cambridge Medieval History, amidst a super-abundance of materials for comparison, the description of western European state formation (and dissolution) tends to be presented as an enharmonic but not always comfortable shift from each volume’s opening fanfare of “Common” or “General Themes.” Hence the inspiration for the present collection of fifteen essays, a sort of Cambridge History in miniature, intended to bring such outlying regions as Bosnia, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Khazarian khanate into discussion alongside the relatively familiar “systems” of Christian Iberia, the papacy, and the Anglo-Norman realm. Had each of the authors followed a uniform template, then we might indeed have arrived at greater clarity both over similarities and distinctions. Such a template might (indeed, for all this reader knows, may well) have asked for details in turn of the role of kings and their relative degree of control or dependence upon local aristocracies; the existence and effectiveness of tax gathering systems; the summoning of armies (whether for pay, or by service in return for land-holding); the degree to which dynasties succeeded or failed to accommodate the power of queens or such devices as minority councils; the emergence of representative assemblies, and the precise degree to which the centre maintained, or failed to maintain, authority over the administration of law. Were aristocrats self-made or recognized only after royal approval or investiture (as in England)? Were they tax exempt (as in the German empire) or obliged to pay tribute, and if so in cash or in kind? By what means were judges appointed, and to what extent were courts of appeal available or capable of counteracting local mechanisms of control? One can easily imagine a simple questionnaire in which such things might be set out in ordered sequence.

As things stand, however, what we are offered here are variations on a theme, some so remote both in tonality and rhythm as to abandon their audience amidst a cacophony of regional particularism. Too often, indeed, the old folk (indeed occasionally even völkisch) songs drown out any attempt to impose standard western notation. Some of the authors, such as Lois Huneycutt on the rise of administrative queenship in the Anglo-Norman realm, or Katalin Szende on the emergence of royally chartered Hungarian towns, treat competently enough of a single motif amidst a much broader symphony. Some, as with Erin Jordan on the kingdom of Jerusalem from 1099 to 1174, or Edward Schoolman on Italy before ca. 1000, focus on a single movement in time, at the expense of the before or the after. Others, such as Kirsi Salonen on papal government, or Kiril Petkov on Bulgaria, attempt a far broader chronological span, albeit not easily compressed within the average of fifteen pages allowed here. Some deal principally with political and administrative structures; others with the practicalities of political engagement. Most are written by academics at English-speaking universities, both in the UK and USA, but in many cases by scholars whose first language seems to be other than English, at least to judge by the lack of idiomatic fluency, and some truly shoddy copy-editing: “to control the controlled the episcopal see” (212), “through the preservation legal of legal records” (215), and so one might go on, for far too many pages. The two-column word list supplied at pp. 241-2 (opening with the lemmas “Bosnia, Bulgaria, Byzantium, centralization, coinage, Constantinople, crusade”) should in no way have been permitted to masquerade as an “Index.” All this is a pity, since there is much here that, more carefully tended, might have opened new avenues to understanding. Taken on their own, various of the essayists do indeed attempt a coherent naming of parts. Raffensperger’s introduction stresses three particular themes: the degree to which rulership was negotiated between the ruler and a variety of elites, the means by which such sharing was accomplished (i.e., as in thedispositio to a medieval charter, the nub of the matter), and the gulf that in many cases divided the ruler’s theoretical claims to legislate from the administration of law and government as experienced day by day. In his own chapter on Kievan Russia, he sticks closely to this brief, identifying the ruling family as a clan possessing several heads, with tax, war, and law as a triad of concerns in which the refusal of tribute from subordinate to superior could be serve as an incitement to armed conflict.

We also read here, thanks to the Novgorod veche or town council, and the toppling of rulers deemed unfit to command, of the emergence of something approaching communal decision-making processes. Even so, with fewer than 200 administrative instruments surviving from before the 1270s, our knowledge of the practicalities of law enforcement amongst the Rus remains largely conjectural, albeit profuse compared to the mere six charters (one of them a post-medieval forgery) that Kiril Petkov can muster for his chapter on medieval Bulgaria. Petkov sets out deliberately to challenge various myths, not least over Bulgaria’s supposed status as an ersatz-Byzantium. This stands in distinct contrast to Emir Filipović’s chapter on Bosnia, where a series of essentially nationalistic tropes are recycled, including the surely unprovable claim that the Bosnian nobility, even when in open conflict with their king, “remained loyal to the Bosnian state, which they considered to be abstractly represented by the crown and the assembly” (63). “Says who?” would be the sceptic’s response. Remaining east of the Alps, Katalin Szende’s chapter on the Hungarian towns emphasises their role in attracting French and German immigrants, with nearly fifty such settlements chartered by 1300, in a few instances adopting the very grandest of communal seals (here impressively illustrated). The competition for settlers apart, one might wonder what was specifically “Hungarian” about these developments, and perhaps regret that the mixture of natives and outsiders does not lead to comparisons with other parts of Europe, not least with the boroughs of Wales or Ireland.

With rather broader span, writing of medieval Poland, Paul Knoll fuses a brief outline narrative to precisely the sort of details, on chronicle and charter sources, that are sometimes lacking elsewhere. The picture that emerges, of evolution from Piast war band to an administrative class capable of outlasting the rule of any one duke, is succinctly drawn, albeit offering no real challenge to the prevailing consensus: in many ways a model of what other chapters might have achieved had their parameters been more closely defined. Equally succinct, and no less useful, Nathan Leidholm, on Byzantium from the 850s to 1204, traces the parabola from centralized tax collection to privatised rent franchises, offset against the imperial management of an increasingly vast estate of expropriated land. As in Poland, where from 1384 rule was assigned to the youngest daughter of the previous king, acknowledged specifically in her own right as “King” Jadwiga, Byzantium allowed considerable agency to females within the imperial family, albeit with women excluded from all other administrative roles.

From even further east, albeit with only tenuous connection to the other studies here, Alex Mesibov Feldman considers Khazaria, a region that many readers will know from Arthur Koestler’s Thirteenth Tribe, but here entirely scotching Koestler’s thesis, insisting that the conversion of the region’s rulers to Judaism, from the 830s onwards, was followed by no such conversion for the bulk of the Khazak peoples. Not least as a tour of the available sources, this offers useful guidance. So too does Erin Jordan, surveying the Kingdom of Jerusalem after 1099, where compromise and consultation between ruler and nobility remained crucial to survival in an only partially conquered land. Here, elite politics remain the focus, at the expense of any detailed consideration of local government or the nitty gritty of tax collecting, knights’ fees, or interaction between conquerors and the conquered. Turning westwards, Kirsi Salonen considers the paradox of the papacy: a highly centralized bureaucracy, in many ways the best-preserved relic of classical Roman imperial rule, nonetheless obliged to temper its claims to universal authority in the face of the myriad complications and compromises involved in applying papal law at the level of kingdoms or individual dioceses. The Church looms large, too, in Hans Jacob Orning’s account of Norwegian kingship, emerging from bitterly contested rivalry between at least three distinct regional elites, themselves only welded together once Danish influence had waned in the south, with the northern church of Trondheim central to the consolidation of royal authority thereafter.

From England, a region where national consolidation occurred far earlier, Lois Huneycutt begins by emphasising the power exercised by queens, almost as co-rulers across the century from 1066, before embarking on a brief historiographical conspectus of writing on English statehood, from Stubbs via Joseph Strayer to “H. R.” (recte H. G.) Richardson. Germany and its empire secure a clear and concise contribution from Jonathan Lyon, noting the power of princes, churches, and towns within administrative structures entirely dependent upon negotiation between ruler and ruled: structures lacking any fixed capital, any unitary system of laws or taxation, and any direct attachment to the figure of the emperor and his court save as an often-distant tribunal of appeal. This is ground magisterially surveyed in Len Scales’s Shaping of German Identity: a survey that might usefully have been included in Lyon’s bibliography.

Finally, in what is in many ways the most accomplished of the essays in this volume, conceived not as survey but as portrait in miniature, Simon Doubleday considers the career of a priest named Ecta alias Lázaro, in 1037 mortally wounded at the battle of Tamarón near Burgos, previously servant to the rulers “in” (rather than “of”) eleventh-century León. This at a time when there was more symbiosis than ideological conflict between the worlds of Iberian Christianity and Islam, and when the victor of Tamarón, the king of Castile, was as much a client as a rival of his Muslim neighbours to the south. Even thirty years later, Doubleday suggests, the transfer of the relics of St Isidore from Muslim Seville to Christian Burgos was most likely conceived as an act of friendship rather than as a surrender to military superiority. The irony here is that by more or less ignoring whatever editorial template was supplied to him, Doubleday paints a canvas a great deal livelier yet in every sense as revealing as those daubed in earnest shades of grey elsewhere. However worthy their intentions, collections such as this can sometimes offer greater enlightenment from a few grains of evidential sand, than from the entire windswept reef of transnational synthesis.