Welcome to Cosmographia. This post is part of our Cartography of Networks series. For the full map of posts, see here.
In his book The Square and the Tower (2017), the historian
pits hierarchies against networks: two forms of social organisation, one vertical, centralised, tyrannical; the other horizontal, democratised, anarchical. Viewed through this lens, history reads as a cyclical struggle between the two forms of human order — sometimes hierarchies are in charge, other times networks have the ascendancy.To take the case of Europe, we can conceive the ancient Mediterranean as initially being a battleground of networks as the Greeks and Phoenicians traded and colonised their way around its shores. Then rose the hierarchy of the Roman state, which in its various forms dominated Europe for a thousand years, before its western half fell before a loose network of Germanic tribes and steppe nomads from the East.
The mediaeval period saw the emergence of hierarchies once more, as kingdoms arose in places like Denmark, England, and Sweden. Central and Eastern Europe, however, saw more confused orders emerge: the Holy Roman Empire, for instance, was a sort of nominal hierarchy with an elected Emperor at its top, but in truth functioned more as a complex interdependent network of German-speaking principalities, duchies, and minor fiefdoms. Further east, a smattering of weak states struggled for hegemony as rivalries between the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Old Prussians, various Rus’ principalities, and the Novgorod Republic were disrupted by the 13th-century invasion of the crusading Teutonic Order.
It was out of this milieu of weak hierarchies that the most powerful network of the Middle Ages would arise.