By now, it’s a very well known historical narrative: during the Middle Ages, kings were all powerful over their subjects. They ruled with a divine right, and therefore could raise taxes at will. After all, as God’s chosen rulers on earth, who would contradict them? Certainly not the king’s subject who, with the help of the Church, were all utterly cowed by the idea that to disobey the king was to risk eternal damnation.
But then came the Renaissance, the narrative tells us, and people discovered the idea that they had rights and that political rulers ought to be restrained by the law. These novel ideas were then magnified by the “Enlightenment” which further overturned the old despotism of the Middles Ages and the “will of the people” prevailed.
This narrative, however, is largely based on myth. It was not the case that the princes and kings of the Middle Ages could raise taxes with impunity or that they ruled with untrammeled power. Nor is it the case that the subjects of the medieval lords meekly accepted abuses of power. Moreover, the Church opposed the medieval rulers’ prerogatives at least as much as the Church supported them. Churchmen like Thomas Aquinas, for example, condemned tax increases as “sinful” while the general public condemned the Lords’ taxes as threats to well established property rights.
It was not the Renaissance or the Enlightenment that gave us ideas about limiting state power, opposing taxes, or protecting private property. Indeed, the best political ideas of the Renaissance—those that called for limits on political power—were holdovers from earlier medieval thought. In contrast, the late Renaissance is more characterized by innovations in political thought that asserted taxation is a good thing, and that kings ought to be able to raise taxes more easily for the good of a new thing we now call the sovereign state. It’s not a coincidence—as Rothbard points out—that absolutism in Europe comes on the heels of the late Renaissance.
Rather, during the Middle Ages, taxation was considered to be appropriate only as an extreme measure in times of emergency, and as a last resort. Kings were expected to subsist on revenues from their own private property, and to respect the private property of others. Importantly, public opinion often held to the idea that taxation was both unjust and parasitic. Modern post-Enlightenment notions, holding taxation to be a reflection of the “will of the people” would strike a great many medieval farmers, burghers, and nobleman as a very odd idea indeed.
The Prince’s Revenues and Scholastic Opposition to Taxes
In the Middle Ages in Western Europe—and especially where feudalism remained widespread—taxes were not considered to be the ordinary means by which a prince or lord could obtain revenue. Historian Martin Wolfe states that:
The prince’s revenues ... were not what we would call taxes but rather were rents, tolls, seigneurial dues, and a host of other items conceived of partly as the ruler’s family property and partly as God’s method of providing princes with what they needed to fulfill their proper functions.1
This type of self-funded civil government was also the assumed normative method of collecting revenue according to medieval churchmen who were influential on the matter. For example, Thomas Aquinas, answers the question of the prince’s revenues this way:
You asked whether it is licit for you to make exactions from your Christian subjects. In regard to this, you ought to consider that the princes of the earth were instituted by God not to seek their own gain, but to look after the common utility of the people… For this reason the revenues of certain lands were established for princes, that, living on them, they might abstain from the despoiling of their subjects…
For Aquinas, and for the Scholastics overall, taxation could be necessary as an extraordinary measure to keep the peace of for some other measure that is judged to be for the “common good.” (In medieval thinking, “common” necessarily means something that it literally good for everyone, such as the punishment of highwaymen.)
Jacob Viner further explains the Scholastic position this way:
To understand the Scholastic treatment of taxes one must bear in mind that taxation, as we now know it—namely, as a routine, normal, and respectable method of providing for the financial needs of government—is a comparatively modern phenomenon. In feudal times, on the other hand, rulers derived their revenues mainly from personal estates, customary tributes and dues paid by their vassals, tolls on strangers and on traffic on roads and rivers, war booty, rapine and piracy, and, in times of special need, from ‘‘aids,’” subventions, donations, etc., ... All of St. Thomas’ references to taxation that I know of treat it as a more or less extraordinary act of a ruler which is as likely as not to be morally illicit.2
After all, with so many routes of access to riches other than taxation, why should any good steward of resources need to resort to taxation?
This idea was further reflected in “In Coena Domini” (article 5), a recurrent papal bull between 1363 and 1770, first written by Urban V and modified by later popes until Pope Urban VIII. The text reads “All who shall establish in their lands new taxes, or shall take it upon them to increase those already exiting, except in cases provided for by the last in the event of obtaining the express permission of the Holy See.”
That is, taxation could be licit, but rare enough that the levying of new taxes ought to require a nod from the Pope.
Public Opposition to Taxes
Wolfe notes that from the Middle Ages into the early Renaissance, a general bias against taxation remained well established, and continued into the sixteenth century. Contrary to more modern views contending that tax revenues can strengthen economic prosperity and address the needs “of the people,” the medieval assumption was that taxes represented a net loss for society. Wolfe notes that
[F]rom the late thirteenth century until well into the Renaissance [the tax debate] reflects the prevailing view that regular national taxing—that is, annual royal revenue beyond traditional domainial income and occasional emergency aid—could have only bad effects on the economy. As late as Jean Bodin (around 1576) going theory held that as far as taxes were concerned the prince’s gain had to be the people’s loss. A favorite Renaissance metaphor was that the fisc was a parasite (le rat au corps), growing fat and sleek as its host grew thin and lifeless.3
The view of the secular activists and theorists on taxation was even less forgiving than that of the Scholastics. In his commentary on French views of taxation in the Middle Ages, Wolfe notes that among the French commentators
There were two associated pivots about which swung all late medieval and early Renaissance arguments on wealth and taxes: the inviolability of private property and the importance of restricting the royal fisc to its sources of traditional revenue. In the middle ages the ideal prince was an armed judge-a force useful to society primarily as an arbiter and as a protector of feudal, natural, and divine law. Therefore the men of this era did not regard royal revenues as contributions by participants in a commonwealth to expenditures that would increase the well-being of the people. They thought of the fisc as a householding operation, intended to support the royal family in proper style and to provide a small surplus which, when husbanded as it should be, would provide funds for emergency military affairs. The prince’s revenues, mainly, were not what we would call taxes but rather were rents, tolls, seigneurial dues, and a host of other items conceived of partly as the ruler’s family property and partly as God’s method of providing princes with what they needed to fulfill their proper functions.4
As is usually the case, then as now, the needs of warfare impelled many princes to press for ever larger tax revenues. In the Middle Ages, taxpayers in many cases responded with additional calls for respecting both private property and customary law under which taxes were largely fixed in place and not increased with ease. Moreover, dissenters contended that those who abused the people with tax increases would face dire spiritual consequences:
The new national taxes, the bruising fiscal expedients, and the hordes of new tax officials brought in by fourteenth-century kings trod painfully on important toes and on established ideas about property. Moralist writers then and in the early Renaissance took up and elaborated Aquinas’ findings that private property is itself part of God’s dispensation, the very basis of family life and public order, and as important as ruler- ship itself. They taught that any prince who fleeced his subjects so that he might live in pomp or gratify his lust for conquest was com- mitting a deadly sin; the sweat and the blood his subjects needed to produce this taxed wealth would stand as a permanent and vengeful witness against him until the final day of judgment. Another strand of hostility to the rising tax power of the Crown came from the “feudalists,” mainly legal experts working for great barons, who emphasized customary law for its importance in protecting each man in the fruits of his labor, his property, and his rights.5
Notably, the taxpayers were not fooled by monetary debasement either, and saw it as the form of taxation that it was. Wolfe continues:
This is why, when late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century kings were pushed by their higher expenditures to debasing the coinage and to imposing national taxes, they were scolded so often by being reminded of the good king Saint Louis-apart from his “crusader tithes,” this ruler was supposed to have managed very well on his traditional revenues alone. The belief that a well-ordered state should be funded without taxing, therefore, was an important part of medieval political views...6
But even in places where taxes were tolerated, taxation was often believed to be appropriate only to the loftier classes. For example, In England where the Commons had pushed new taxes in the early fourteenth century, few taxes were hated as much as what George Holmes called the “disastrous aberration of the poll taxes.” from 1377 to 1381.7 This tax, implemented by Parliament, violated “principles of taxation according to property and taxation only of the more prosperous...”8 The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 brought the taxes to an end.
The lack of public support for taxes stemmed in part from the fact that there was, at the time, no clear acceptance of the idea of the civil government as a “public” institution. There was the prince and his domains, and the prince performed necessary services as a condition of his wealth and high status. If the prince levied taxes, this was largely seen as the prince seeking to enrich himself and his close associates, family members, and allies.
Is the King a Man or an Institution?
At the time, Europeans had not yet fully developed the modern rationalization that tax revenues, once collected, were somehow the property of the “public” or held by the sovereign who functioned as a representative of “the people.” The evolution of this idea is described by Marco Bassani and Carlo Lottieri who note the that the civil government was not simply the ruler himself, but some sort of public institution. They write:
separation between the king as a person and the king as a function originated in the medieval age and immediately had some consequences for forms of ownership and resource extraction by the public apparatus.9
Nonetheless, in most of Europe, it was not until the early modern period that national monarchs were able to fully establish themselves as the accepted head of a state organization that collected and spent taxes as part of a “common utility.” For most of that period, kings and princes were forced to largely rely on their own private funds and
“... For a long time, using [Ernst] Kantorowicz’s words, “the distinction between what pertains ad coronam and what may be held de rege” ... was not crucial. Such a political order impeded a modern and strong presence of state power in society. When a ruler was basically a person and not a function or a role, it was almost impossible to build a sovereign order based on the supremacy of the state.10
Along these lines, Wolfe shows that one means of opposing taxation was to preserve a sharp distinction between the king’s property and everyone else’s. This helped to emphasize that the king did not represent a “public interest,” and thus the public’s wealth was not the king’s:
For the feudalists, a king’s property had to be delineated sharply from that of his people; when the king needed funds beyond his traditional revenues he had to request them from the French, both those living in the royal domain and those in the remaining fiefs.11
Another cultural foundation behind medieval opposition to taxation may have been a long-established aversion to taxation from the late Roman Empire when taxation was high but brought few benefits. This would have been especially true in the periphery of the old Empire where Roman tax officials, as late as the fifth century were strong enough to collect taxes, but the Roman state was not strong enough to actually protect farmers from criminals. As historian Paul Freedman has noted, for peasants, the shift from the Roman state to early feudalism not at all necessarily a step down from the late Roman Empire: “you weren’t worse off in the eighth century than you would have been in the fourth century,” Freedman says, “In fact, you might be better off because the taxation infrastructure wasn’t there” As the Roman bureaucrats disappeared from the lives of European peasants, “there was, in a way, more violence, but less state violence.” And the absence of Roman bureaucracy also meant the disappearance of countless Roman regulations that limited the freedom of peasants: “fewer rules, fewer repressions on the ability of ordinary people to do things like hunting or keeping their own produce or making arrangements among their own communities.”
In other words, the disappearance of the Roman state and Roman taxes (in the West) was hardly the end of the world for many Europeans, and this reality may have become engrained in European ideas about the alleged necessity of tax-financed states in later centuries.
Moreover, Chris Wickham notes that Roman taxes in the later days of the empire were not exactly well appreciated, writing that “Roman taxation was perceived as heavy, Complaints about its weight are endless; whole rhetorical systems were developed to characterize its oppressive nature.”12
Tax collectors in this period - the fifth century- were described as “tyrants” and “brigands.” These taxes were accompanied by “ferocious imperial laws” and the end result was “a world in which pretty much everybody, from the top to the bottom, was oppressed by the tax system.” Nor was the magnitude of the tax burden simply a matter of the Roman subjects’ imagination. Taxes were “genuinely high” under the Romans in the late empire, Wickham tells us, much of it imposed as a land tax on farmers.
The End of the Middle Ages and the Rise of Absolutism
While much of the anti-tax sentiment of the Middle Ages survived into the Renaissance—now called the “early modern period”—these ideas were slowly replaced by more modern ideas that laid the foundation for mercantilism and absolutism. As Murray Rothbard shows in his history of economic thought, Niccolò Machiavelli played an important role in this by de-Christianizing political theory and replacing it with amoral, consequentialist, technocratic thinking on the potential “benefits” of taxation. The morally privileged place of private property—recognized by Scholastics and many others of the Middle Ages—was reduced to merely one consideration among many. It was replaced by new theories, and under Bodin and other absolutists, taxes came to be seen as a means of forging a prosperous society through a strong state.
The absolutists, however, were unable to expunge from the minds of European taxpayers the notion that there remained a critical distinction between the king’s property—and thus the state’s property—and private property. It was perhaps Rousseau who dealt the greatest blow against the solicitous and resilient idea that the state and its taxes are not “ours.” With Rousseau, however—the most influential theorist inspiring the French Revolution—it could be said that everything the king or his state expropriated from the taxpayers remained “ours.” In the Rousseauean conception, everything the state does is a reflection of “the general will” and thus the distinction between property, tax, and state is essentially eliminated.
Yet, today, the common historical narrative on these matters tells us that it was the medieval mind that favored and actualized untrammeled state power while later proponents of absolutism, mercantilism, and a centralized state were somehow the ones who favored greater freedom. That version of history is problematic, to say the least.
Image credit: Medieval French manuscript illustration depicting three classes of medieval society: clergy, peasants, and the warrior class. Via Wikimedia.
- 1
Matin Wolfe, “French Views on Wealth and Taxes from the Middle Ages to the Old Regime,” The Journal of Economic History 26,No. 4 (Dec. 1966), p. 467-8.
- 2
Jacob Viner, Religious Thought and Economic Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978) p. 104-5.
- 3
Wolfe, “French Views,” p. 467.
- 4
Ibid.
- 5
Ibid., p. 469-470.
- 6
Ibid., p. 469.
- 7
George Holmes, The Later Middle Ages, 1272-1485 (Edinburgh, UK: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd, 1962) p. 228.
- 8
Ibid.
- 9
Luigi Marco Bassani and Carlo Lottieri, “Taxation and Forced Labor: “The Two Bodies of the Citizen in Modern Political Theology,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 27, No. 1 (2023): 226.
- 10
Ibid.
- 11
Wolfe, “French Views,” p. 470.
- 12
See Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800, (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2005).
