Prior to the mid-twelfth century, they had worked at subduing Wales and Ireland, but had not pressed their claims in Scotland too forcefully, contenting themselves with a loose feudal overlordship that conferred little real authority and nothing approaching sovereignty.
As Davies argues, English monarchs had long seen themselves as high kings of a state that encompassed all of the British Isles as well as Aquitaine in southwestern France. On the one hand, the Plantagenet kings of England (Edwards I, II and III) were seeking to incorporate Scotland into the political unit that Rees Davies has called the “first English empire”. The wars fought by England and Scotland between 12 provide an illustrative example of constitutive war. Typically, they involved violent conflicts between kingdoms seeking to assert sovereignty within what they considered to be their natural, rightful or imagined borders and other political units (principalities, communes, leagues or even kingdoms) seeking to resist these efforts and/or assert their own claims to sovereign statehood. These wars were characteristically the result of antagonisms between kingdoms with unequal or mutually unrecognized claims to sovereignty.
The first of these I will call “constitutive wars,” which I see as wars over the very existence of certain political units as sovereign entities. In this, the first post of the Medieval Geopolitics series, I take a look at the two types of political war fought in medieval Europe.īoth of these types of warfare were the norm by the fourteenth-century.
When it comes to warfare in the Middle Ages, the common belief is that it was always motivated by feudal concerns, religious convictions, or by what Thucydides called the eternal drivers of “honour, fear and interest.” The reality is that medieval wars were often the politics of state- (and empire) building.
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