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Legal and Illegal Migration in Medieval Europe

Edward Peters

University of Pennsylvania (Emeritus)

1 Ruth Lane, Guilford, CT 06437

empeters@sas.upenn.edu

203-453-6842

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Legal and Illegal Migrants in Medieval Europe*

As soon as Senate Bill 1070 was placed on the desk of the

governor of Arizona for her signature in 2010, it was only a

matter of time before some well-intentioned but historically

challenged critic proclaimed that “Arizona has returned to the

Middle Ages.” The now-infamous SB 1070 required Arizona state

police to examine the immigration status of those they stopped

for traffic violations (actual or imagined) and suspected of

illegal entry into the U.S.. The earliest such critic I found

oddly based his conclusion on c. 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council

regarding the distinctive dress that it required of Jews and

Muslims . The writer made a connection between IV Lateran c. 68

and Arizona SB 1070 via, he claimed, the announcement by the

government of Poland in 1939 that Poland was resuming “the

medieval rule” (unspecified) and requiring (now only) Jews to

wear a distinctive sign on their clothing. Poland was followed by

Germany in 1941, and we know what followed.

Once again, a well-meaning but historically baffled

commentator had decided that an event that is both contemporary

and repugnant had to indicate a “return to the middle Ages.”

Where else in the distant or more recent past could such

unspeakable events be found, except in the Third Reich or

Stalin’s gulags, the other rhetorical dumps for twenty-first

century historical ignorance? Our critic not only misunderstood

the Shoah and medieval Europe generally, but he specifically

misunderstood c. 68 of IV Lateran.1 1

* This paper was originally given as a plenary lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of Americain Tempe, AZ, in March, 2011. It is written very much as orally delivered, with notes and bibliography added,

The hapless critic was Christopher Valen, a writer of mystery novels in St. Paul, MN, posted at http://open.salon.com/blog/christopher_valen on April 21, 2010. The most important contemporary theoretical analysis is Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford, 2014). For medieval Europe, much of the literature is surveyed in the essays and the extensive general bibliography in Anthroponomie et migrations dans la chrétienté médiévale, Monique Bourin and Pascual Martínez Sopena, eds., Collection de la Casa de Velazquez, Vol. 116 (Madrid: Casa de Velazquez, 2010). I am grateful to Marcia Colish for the reference. Onseveral regions, M. Balard and A. Ducellier, eds., Migrations et diasporas méditerranéennes (Xe-XVIe siècles (Paris, 2002), and Claudia Moatti, ed., La mobilité des personnes en Mediterranée de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne: procedures de contrôle de documents d’identification, École française de Rome (Rome, 2004); C. Moatti and Alain Renaut,eds., L’Étranger: les rendez-vous de l’histoire (Blois, 2003); C. Moatti and Wolfgang Kaiser, eds., Gens de Passage en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne: procédures de contrôle et d’identification (Paris, 2007).

As far as refugee-scale is concerned, nothing in medieval Europe resembled the events of April-July, 1994 and later in Rwanda, when 100,000 people (and eventually one million) were massacred, and one and a quarter million people fled into Zaire and elsewhere, where around 100,000 eventually died of disease. The recent study by Jason K. Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (New York, 2011) considers the problem exhaustively. The term refugee usually elicits more sympathy than illegal immigrant and itself contains a note of desperation, often with an apocalyptic dimension. The best current estimation of migrant/refugee numbers worldwide is 214 million, including, as of March 10, 2011, between 140 and 200

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thousand from Libya to Lampedusa. In 2014 and 2015 in both the Middle East andthe Mediterranean the numbers grew substantially and continue to grow. The Balkans have now become a favored route in lieu of the Mediterranean. The fateof Rohingya refugees from Burma to Malaysia, Australia, and Indonesia adds an Indian Ocean dilemma to the Mediterranean.

The history of migration-studies past and present is a major component of Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe (Oxford-New York, 2010), 1-36. I am grateful to Walter Goffart for the reference. For historical ethnicity, Jeremy McInerney, ed., A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean World (New York, 2014). The citizenship of children born in the United States by virtue of their birth alone, regardless of the status of one or both of their parents, asserted by the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution and last tested by a Supreme Court decision in the case of UnitedStates v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, is now also under attack with proposals for serious modification.

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In c. 68, one of four canons regarding Jewish status,

Innocent III said that since some places in Christian Europe

already required distinctive dress for Muslims and Jews, he and

the council were simply standardizing the practice throughout

Christian Europe precisely because Muslims and Jews were not

otherwise visibly distinctive, and this indistinguishability

confused good Christians.2 That is, not a word about legal or

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The obvious (and invidious) visibility of Jews and Muslims (and others) in Ruth Melinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Othernessd in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1993) is certainly not reflected in c.68. For the origins of the practice, Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York, 2015). On Jewish travel, Martin Jacobs, Reorienting the East: Jewish Travelers to the Medieval Muslim World (Philadelphia, 2015). Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (New York, 2004), 42, points out that on Europe non-citizens routinely were far more liable to torture, execution, shaming, and corporal punishment, cited in Guy Geltner, Flogging Others: Corporal Punishment and Cultural Identity from Antiquity to the Present (Amsterdam, 2014), 66. IV Lateran, c. 67 requires that Jews not “extort oppressive and excessive interest from Christians to whom they lend money under penalty of “being removed from contact with Christians.” C. 68 additionally prohibits Jewish presence in public “on days of lamentation and Passion Sunday,” nor were they to mock nor blaspheme Christ. C. 69 prohibits Jews from holding public office by which they may exert power over Christians.C. 70 prohibits Jewish converts to Christianity from following their old rite.Jewish responsibilities in regard to crusade funding are briefly noted in c.71, Ad liberandam. Text and trans. in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Volume I, Nicaea I to Lateran V, ed. Norman Tanner (Washington, D.C., 1990), 264-267. Nothingin the canons of IV Lateran refers to Jews as immigrants. Later royal expulsions of Jews from England in 1290, France in 1306, and Castile-Aragon in1492 indeed created emigrants, but they did so by royal command, not canon law. See William Chester Jordan, “Home Again: The Jews in the Kingdom of France, 1315-1322,” in F.R.P. Akehurst and Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden, eds., The Stranger in Medieval Society (Minneapolis, 1997) 27-45, and below, n. 4. On the status of Jews in canon law, Walter Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews (Ebelsbach, 1988).

illegal immigrants and their allegedly recognizable appearance –

quite the opposite sense of the Arizona statute.

Of course Arizona had not “returned to the Middle Ages” –

among other reasons because the state of Arizona had not existed

at the time, and “returning to the Middle Ages” has by now become

a fatigued rhetorical trope, flagged as such some years ago in a

brilliant presidential address to the Medieval Academy of America

by Fred Robinson and echoed since by Tim Reuter and others.3 So

have its now-toxic derivatives, “Crusades,” “The Inquisition,”

and “Feudalism.”

There certainly were real migrants and immigrants, legal and

illegal, in medieval Europe if such terms can be said to apply to

Europe at the time, and their history is important and

interesting, if not analogous to the present case of Arizona and

other states in the U.S. and northern Mediterranean countries,

particularly Spain, Italy, and Malta in Europe. Except for

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Fred C. Robinson, “Medieval, The Middle Ages,” Speculum 59 (1984), 745-756; Timothy Reuter, “Medieval: another tyrannous construct?” More recently, Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008), and Carol Symes, “When We Talk about Modernity,” American Historical Review 116/3 (2011), 715-726. Arizona was recognized as a Territory by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and became a state in 1912.

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refugees from wars (and even here on a much smaller scale than

the kind of war that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

have created and witnessed) they were very different from those

in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere today.4 In the next

few minutes Here I propose to note only a few aspects of medieval

migration in Europe from 400 to 1500 and ideas about them. Other

talks this afternoon and other sessions at this conference will

address yet other aspects of the topic.

Migrants and aliens, legal and illegal, go back to epic and

religious memory, to the tales of Aeneas and later other Trojan

refugee princes as foundation myths, to Odysseus’s voyages, and

to Exodus. The actual legal status of immigrants and aliens, full

citizens and half-citizens, was carefully considered, defined,

and regulated in the later Greco-Roman world.5 The character of

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The international group, International Organization for Migration, works globally with limited success. New York Times, Wednesday, August 31, 2011, A 1, A 8. articles dealing with Bangladesh and The Dominican Republic and Haiti respectively.5

Convenient brief bibliography for Greco-Roman law in Keechang Kim, Aliens in Medieval Law: The Origins of Modern Citizenship (Cambridge, 2000), 11 n. 29. This important revisionist study focuses on England, but it also deals with the Continent and canon law as well. Kim argues persuasively that medieval discussions of locals and aliens did not derive from a “revival” of Greco-Roman practice and doctrine. On early Christianity see next note. Kim is not very interested in denizenship. Degrees of Roman citizenship in the context of denizenship in England are considered in Edmund G. Berry, “Cives sine suffragio

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Greco-Roman legal doctrine on the subject greatly influenced the

self-definition of early Christians as aliens (from both God and

the world) and played a substantial role in shaping an early

Christian identity, as scholars from Harnack to Gerhard Ladner

and Benjamin Dunning have shown.6

But we are speaking about literal, not figurative or

spiritual, migrants and aliens. And immigrants, legal or illegal,

are species of the genus. The direction of recent research in

migration history has moved well away from the older analysis of

narrative, polemic, and anecdote, since these have often turned

out to be deliberately constructed in order to distort or conceal

in England,” The Classical Journal 39/8 (1944), 490-492. For denizenship in currentinternational contexts, Meghan E. Benton, A Theory of Denizenship (PhD diss. University College London, 2010), accessed at <discovery.ucl.ac.uk/624490/1/624490.pdf>.

On the complex variations on citizenship in medieval Europe, see Peter Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition: Plato to Rousseau (Chapel Hill, 1992), and Diego. Quaglioni, “The Legal Definition of Citizenship in the Late Middle Ages,” in City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, Julia Emlen (Stuttgart, 1991; Ann Arbor, 1991), 155-167, Julius Kirschner and Laurent Mayali, eds., Privileges and Rights of Citizenship: Law and the Juridical Construction of Civil Society ( Berkeley, 2002); Migration et régulations sociales en Méditerranée médiéval: Actes du Colloque réuni du7 au 9 juin 2007 en l’Abbaye royale de Fontevraud, Marne-et-Loire, sous la direction de Stéphane Boisellier, François Clément et John Tolan (Rennes, 2010).. Recent literature in Richard Bellamy and Antonino Palumbo, eds., Citizenship (Farnham, UK-Burlington, VT, 2010).6

Adolf Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity, I, trans. and ed. by James Moffat (rpt. New York, 1972), 493-517; Gerhard B. Ladner “Homo Viator,” Speculum 42/2 (1967), 233-259; Benjamin H. Dunning, Aliens and Sojourners: The Self as Other in Early Christianity (Philadelphia, 2009).

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a past or present rather than reveal it.7 Much more effective

have been the results of archaeology, with or without

accompanying texts, and osteoarchaeology, the study of physical

human remains.8 The current work of Patrick Geary and others

into genetic research on medieval human remains also indicates

that C.P. Snow’s old two cultures may be drawing together at

last, at least in such areas as this.9 Yet another location of

productive activity is the focused research group, like Seán

Duffy’s Medieval Migration Project which studies migration to Ireland

from the Anglo-Norman period to the end of the fifteenth century,7

E.g., Walter Goffart, Narrators of Barbarian History (Princeton, 1988), and Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations (Princeton, 2002). An example of a treatise directed specifically against foreigners is discussed by Patrick Henriet, “Xénophobie et l’intégration isidoriennes à Léon au XIII siècle: Le discours de Lucas de Tuy sur les étrangers,” in L’Étranger au Moyen Âge, XXX Congrès de la S.H.M.E.S., Göttingen, juin, 1999, Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Engeignement Superieur Public, Serie Histoire Ancienne et Médiéval 81 (Paris, 2000), 37-58.8

John Magilton, et al., Lepers Outside the Gate: Excavations of the Cemetery of the Hospital of St. James and St. Mary Magdalene, Chichester, 1986-87 and 1993, Chichester Excavations 10, Research Report 158 (York, 2008), discussing the value of osteoarchaeology in identifying human remains in the context of a cemetery for lepers, and Piers D. Mitchell, “Migration to the Medieval Middle East with the Crusades,” Journal of Physical Anthropology 140/3 (2009), 518-525, the first instance in which stable isotope analysis has been applied to the migration of people from western Europe to the Middle East during the period of crusading. See also the work of Geary, next note.9

The extensive research project organized by Patrick Geary and others focuses precisely on genomic similarities and differences: “Using Genetic Data to Revolutionize Understanding of Migration History,” accessed at <https://www.ias.edu/about/publications/ias-letter/articles/2013-spring/geary-history-genetics > .

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or his similar Galloglass Project. There is also a growing interest

and literature on communications. The relatively new specialty of

anthroponomy, the study of naming patterns, has made some very

ambitious claims for authority.10 These are complex research

methodologies. Combining them into coherent general accounts

takes a great deal of skill. A very recent example that draws on

many of them is Robin Fleming’s recent study of early Britain.11

Although much of this research deals with relatively less

documented periods, like that of Fleming, it is clear that

combinations of these methods work across all of pre-Modern

Europe and elsewhere.

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E.g. in Bourin et al, above, n. 1, esp. pp. 1-7 and bibliography. On communications, see Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300-900 (Cambridge, 2001), and Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford-Malden, MA, 2000), as well as my review essay of both, “Quid nobis cum pelago: The New Thalassology and the Economic History of Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34/1 (2003), 49-61. Now, David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (Oxford-New York, 2011), esp. 628-640. On the unsatisfactory place of Byzantium in these and other works, Averil Cameron, “Thinking with Byzantium,” TRHS, 6th series 21 (2011), 39-57.11

Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 (London, 2010), and the works cited in the preceding note. The problem of multi-ethnicity has been considered for theByzantine empire in Helène Ahrweiler and Angeliki Laiou, eds., Studies on the Internal Diaspora of the Byzantine Empire (Washington, D.C., 1998), and Benjamin Arbel, Bernard Hamilton, and David Jacoby, eds., Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1204 (1989.

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Outside England, Frankish law recognized the warengus,

someone not from one of the various peoples that comprised the

kingdom of the Franks, but who had obtained a local protector.12

It also recognized the peregrinus, the pilgrim, the advenus, the

traveling merchant, the alienigenus, the refugee as individual or

group (like those Hispani who fled Arab conquests in Iberia in the

eighth century for southern Gaul, where they greatly influenced

Carolingian culture and where their religious orthodoxy was long

doubted), and the adventicus, the slave (war prisoners or other

human objects of commerce in slaves – but Christian and other

slaves could also be ransomed and settled). The unprotected and

uncategorized stranger in Frankish Gaul was extremely vulnerable,

but perhaps not numerous. S/He had no standing according to the

doctrine of the personality of law and depended on the protection

of a potens for safety.

Pilgrims were far better off, protected by law from

disturbance or injury and protected as individuals still, even if

they had become separated from the original group which had 12

F. L. Ganshof, “L’Étranger dans la monarchie franque,” L’Étranger, Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions, Vol. X (Brussels, 1958), 5-36. Ganshof cites the case of a Flemish female refugee whowas threatened with sale into slavery because she had not found a protector.

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acquired the privilege. And canon law required respect for the

pilgrim, if not always for the vagus, Christian or not, the

wanderer without a known domicile and of dubiously reputable

character: exiles from elsewhere, “migrant agricultural workers,

traveling tradespeople, hawkers, tinkers, pewterers,

knifegrinders, ragmen,” prostitutes, homosexuals, lepers, madmen,

jugglers, mimes, minstrels without patron, clowns, fools,

unemployed mercenary soldiers, and branded or otherwise visibly

mutilated criminals.13 Heretics, too, often came or were said to

come from outside – in Orléans in 1022 they were said to come

from Italy, as they were in Arras a little later. In Cologne and

later in southern France they were said to have come from Greece

or Bulgaria.14 In the later Middle Ages came the gypsies, or

“Egyptians,” possibly the ancestors of those Roma who so greatly

irritated former French President Sarkozy.

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The quoted terms are from Joel F. Harrington, The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (New York, 2013), 50-51. The high medieval period was not much different,14

Edina Bozoky, “Les cathares comme étrangers: origines, contacts, exil,” L’Étranger au Moyen Âge, 107-118 (cited above, n.6). Poisoners, too, were said to come from outside: Franck Collard, “Une crime venue d’ailleurs: portrait de l’étranger en empoisoneur,” L’Étranger au Moyen Âge , 95-106

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The church, of course, included all Christians (Christian

baptism was something like an original EU passport) and, in

theory at least, extended a limited protected status to Jews and

Muslims (who could be and were expelled from time to time, but

not as “illegal immigrants”). The first question asked by canon

law concerned the residential status of the Christian individual,

since, although Christendom was in theory a single place, there

remained many prominent instances of local autonomy and therefore

differences among provinces and dioceses, local rules, local ius

proprium. If he was a pilgrim passing through, he was protected

by laws concerning pilgrims, and later this status included

crusaders. If she was an advena, however, she possessed a quasi-

domicile, a distinctly canonistic category, which allowed the

individual a local residence without requiring permanent and

continuous occupancy for purposes of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Clerics, too, including bishops, were greatly restricted by canon

law from interfering in the territorial jurisdictions of other

clerics, and after the end of the twelfth century the traveling

character of Mendicants, collectors of funds for crusades,

pardoners, Flagellants, and other mobile penitential groups

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occupied an ambiguous space in established dioceses and parish

jurisdictions.

One might possess a residence of fact, a de facto house,

and/or a residence of intention, an animus domicilus, characterized

by the intention of becoming a resident. For the canonists, as

Willem Onclin long ago said, residence was far more important

than place of origin.15 The character of residence, not one’s

place of origin, defined one’s place in the structure of

Christian society, especially after that same IV Lateran required

mandatory annual confession to one’s parish priest (c. 21). And

under canon law, Christian foreigners, whether passing through or

returning from time to time, were entitled to the same Christian

charity as were locals.16 Of course, the charity of Christians

living along pilgrimage or crusade routes were greatly strained

in this regard. Large-scale pilgrimages and both overland and 15

Willem Onclin, “Le statut des étrangers dans la doctrine canonique médiévale,” in L’Étranger, Vol. X, 37-64, and Rowan Dorin, “Canon Law and the problem of expulsion: The origins and interpretation of Usurarum voraginem (VI5.5.1),” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Kanonistische Abteilung 99 (2013), 129-161, with an extensive literature cited that ranges far beyond usury. I amgrateful to Rowan Dorin for his advice on the subject.16

On temporary residence. Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cam bridge-New York, 2004). On alien-born clerics and religious establishments owned by continental ecclesiastical institutions, see Kim, Aliens in Medieval Law, 60-102.

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oversea crusade routes, put great pressure on the precepts of

Christian hospitality, sometimes, as in Bavaria and Hungary

during the First Crusade, disrupting it completely.

“In the beginning,” said Joseph Bédier, “was the road.”

Migrants were also travelers, and the circumstances of travel

certainly framed what migrants could do and how easily or with

what degree of difficulty they could do it.17 Although medieval

mobility was extensive and perhaps surprising in that regard, it

is even more surprising in light of the poor condition of roads

and bridges, the density and extent of forests and the dangers

they contained, latrones (especially if they were disguised as

pilgrims), the distance between shelters of any kind or

xenodocheia, the absence of a protective and familiar (and

obligating) social environment, the experience of encountering

only strangers, and the perception of oneself by others as a

stranger. In this sense, continuous residence in one place was

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See the excellent study of Timothy Reuter, “The insecurity of travel in the early and high Middle Ages: criminals, victims and their medieval and modern observers,” in Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, 38-71. I have dealt with some aspects of mobility in a crusade context in “There and Back Again: Crusaders in Motion, 1096-1291,” Crusades 5 (2006), 157-171. A more specific image is Caroline Smith, “Saints and Sinners at Sea on the First Crusade of St. Louis,” in Crusades: Medieval Worlds in Conflict, ed. Thomas F. Madden, James L. Naus, VincentRyan (Farnham UK-Burlington VT, 2010), 161-172.

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preferable to such uncertain mobility. These conditions affected

both protected groups of migrants – the protected and privileged,

merchants, pilgrims, students (as Hugh of St. Victor, and later

the Authenticum Habita and the decretal Parens scientarum put it,

“exiles for the love of knowledge,” but not always welcomed,

tolerated, or treated hospitably), official messengers, clerics

and so forth – and unprotected individuals and groups.18 But one

such type – Netherlanders and Germans west of the Elbe invited

east with the offer of attractive privileges stood a much better

chance of security while traveling and a favorable or at least

tolerating reception upon arrival.

The most visible migrants are military. I will cite only two

episodes. Lines 219-319 of Beowulf recount Beowulf’s and his

companions’ landing on the shore of Denmark and their encounter

with the weard Scildinga, the royal warden of the coast. The

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On merchants, Kathryn Reyerson, “The Merchants of the Mediterranean: Merchants as Strangers,” in The Stranger in Medieval Society, 1-13, and Kim, Aliens in Medieval Law, 23-59. Different English cities might have very different attitudes: Southampton generally welcoming, London guarded, York varying depending on the regional economy. On students, Élisabeth Morse et Jacques Verger, “Heurs et malheurs de l’étudiant étranger,” L’Étranger au Moyen Âge, 217-232 and Hilde De Ridder-Symoens, “Mobility,” Chapter 9 of A History of the University in Europe, General Editor Walter Rüegg, Vol.I, Universities in the Middle Ages, Ed. Hilde De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge, 1992), 280-304, at 299-303 . There is a vast literature on pilgrimage.

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nameless warden is very good at his job. The exchange between

them is long, formal, intricate, cautious and probing – among

other things of the distinction between worda end worca. Finally

satisfied, the warden escorts Beowulf, his men, and their weapons

and armor to the king’s herald and doorkeeper, Wulfgar, since

they have come to win praise, and are not outcasts from their own

land. The warden then turns back to resume his sharp watch on the

coast. This is an early instance of a law prohibiting entry to

some aliens and stating a reason for the prohibition.19 The

reverse side of this episode is found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

around the year 787, when the chronicle recounts that in that

year three ships “from the land of robbers” came ashore at

Portsmouth and, when told by the reeve that they had to be taken

before the king, killed him and subsequently wreaked great havoc

in the kingdom of Northumbria and elsewhere in Britain and

Ireland.

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Which touches on the problem of sanctuary and abjuration of the realm in later periods. For sanctuary, William Chester Jordan, “A Fresh Look at Medieval Sanctuary,” in Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and E. Ann Matter, eds., (Philadelphia, 2008), 17-32. On banishment and exile, see below. On Beowulf, R. D. Fulk, ed. and trans., The Beowulf Manuscript (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

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Other ships and settlers followed them, first wintering,

then settling and establishing communications back to their place

of origin. Migration, especially military migration, could be

double-edgeda two-way street. These episodes, however, flag

virtually the last military invasions of western Europe until the

twentieth century. But with them come other features: connections

and communications back to the Scandinavian homelands and later

from South Italy to Normandy, and from crusading armies and

settlers in the Holy Land to western Europe.20 The occasional

influxes of later war-refugees – e.g., from those Hispani who fled

into southern Gaul in the eighth century, to those who fled

before the Mongols into Dalmatia and Venice in the early

thirteenth century (bringing with them such dismal reports that

it seemed to some that the end time had come), of migrating

settlers following crusading armies into the Holy Land, and after

1204 into Byzantium, after 1262 into Angevin South Italy, and

refugees from southern France in the wake of the Albigensian

Crusade.21 Sometimes a once-invited military component might also20

An excellent example is Malcolm Barber and Keith Bate, trans., Letters from the East: Crusaders, Pilgrims and Settlers in the 12th-13th Centuries (Farnham, Surrey-Burlington, VT, 2010.21

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be turned out, as Henry II did to Flemish warriors who had come

to England during the civil wars and settled, but continued to be

troublesome, and so they had to go. From Flemish warriors in the

twelfth century to Flemish weavers in the fourteenth, Flemings

often meant and met trouble in England.22 So did Muslim troops in

Lucera in the service of Manfred after 1260. So did French

followers of Charles of Anjou in Sicily after the Sicilian

Vespers. So did expelled Jews in 1290, 1306, and 1492. Continuing

denunciations of various independent and usually unpaid groups of

military personnel as routiers, brabançons, or condottieri (there was a

shadowy distinction between such bandits and mercenaries until

they were needed somewhere and temporarily legitimized) ran from

the Third Lateran Council in 1179 through the seventeenth century

For Byzantium, Ralph-Johannes Lillie, “Fremde im Byzantinischen Reich,” in Mit Fremden Leben. Eine Kulturgeschichte von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Alexander Demandt, et al., (Munich, 1995), 93-107, and Élisabeh Malamunt, “Les peuples étrangers dans l’idéologie imperiale: Scyths et Occidentaux,” L’Étranger au Moyen Âge. There is some evidence that aliens were linked with orphans in need of protection: Ivan Drpić, “The Patron’s ‘I’: Art, Selfhood, and the Later Byzantine Dedicatory Epigram,” Speculum 89/4 (2014), 895-935. An epigram on an icon of the Virgin, appeals (most likely - the following line is missing) for help and protection to orphans and aliens - orphanon te kai zenon at p. 922. On the Albigensian diaspora, Caterina Bruschi, The Wandering Heretics of Languedoc, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought (Cambridge, 2009), and Megan Cassidy-Welch, “ Memories of Space in Thirteenth-Century France: Displaced People after the Albigensian Crusade,” Parergon 27 (2010), 111-131.22

Derek Pearsall, “Strangers in Late Fourteenth-Century London,” in Akehurst-Van D’Elden, The Stranger in Medieval Society, 46-62.

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and remind us that internal European wars moved and often

displaced large numbers of people, not all of them refugees, but

all of them in one way or another, trouble

Well, tThese have been only a few aspects of individual and

group identity, movement, migration and immigration, external and

internal, if not quite strictly legal and illegal, from the

fourth to the sixteenth century. The period, long and internally

varied as it is, certainly looks very different in most of its

features from our own. Its principles and institutions – the

canonical mandate of cura animarum for all, sometimes sanctuary,

the use of exile as a political and criminal-legal instrument,

the flexible and uncertain principle Stadtluft macht frei, all were

weaker and more occasional than modern state-definition. The

exception is the Italian city-republics. Dante, for nineteen

years himself a bitter exile, spoke savagely of the earlier

corruption of Florence by the alien and thuggish immigrants from

Fiesole. But exile, too, was a feature of the city-republic, and

Dante himself felt the bitterness of exile as sharply as any

otherexile .23 And cities had definite edges: walls, gates,

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towers, guards, curfews, and public health- and - hazard concerns

like those that deported Venetian glassmakers from the city to

Murano for fear of fire and the odor of the manufacturing

process. They also had areas of formal or informal confinement,

like the Judengassen that still (or again) mark historical Jewish

residential areas in the medieval cores of modern German cities

The experiences of the stranger/immigrant are just as

important as those of the locals who perceive them. Ernst

Schubert has made excellent and dramatic use of the Grimm

brothers’ animal fable “The Musicians of Bremen” to illustrate

the experiences of the outsider in terms of homelessness, the

sans-logis, the Unbehauste, domestic animals who have found that they

are no longer of value to the families who own them and so to

avoid death have stepped out on the road, never quite making it

On exile, Randolph Starn, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley-Los Angles, 1982), and Hanna Zaremska, Les bannis au moyenage, trans. Thérèse Douchy; preface by Claude Gauvard (Paris, 1996). For a later period in Florence, Susannah Foster Baxandale, “Exile in Practice: The Alberti Family in and out of Florence, 1402-1428,” Renaissance Quarterly 44 (1991),720-756. On acquiring citizenship, Patrick Gilli, “Comment cesser d’être étranger: citoyens et non-citoyens dans la pensée juridique italienne de la fin du Moyen Âge,” L’Étranger au Moyen Âge, 59-77. And the work of Peter Riesenberg and Julius Kirschner on citizenship (both cited above), and Kirschner, “Civitas sibi faciat civem: Bartolus of Sassoferrato’s Doctrine on the Making of a Citizen,´Speculum 48 (1973), 694-713. On the position of Florentine women as partial citizens, Claire Honess, “Feminine Virtues and Florentine Vices: Citizenship and Morality in Paradiso XV-XVII,” in Dante and Governance, John Woodhaouse, ed. (Oxford, 1997), 102-120.

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to Bremen (where, however, a fine and humorous statue of them

today stands proudly) but indeed obtaining their own house by

terrifying and expelling the band of robbers that lives in it

deep in the forest and thereby domesticating part of the

dangerous forest, but also, of course, turning the robbers

themselves into footloose wanderers.24

State-definition reduced the variety of places in which one

was a foreigner to the kingdom, the effectively sovereign

principality, or the city republic. Iurisdictio cohaeret territorio –

jurisdiction is coterminous with territory.25 The designation of

aliens could become precise and systematic, especially when

subjection and loyalty to the prince became more important than

freedom or unfreedom, place of origin, or residence.

But variations also remainsurvive. If you are indeed the

wretched of the earth, how wretched are you? And why – for

24

Ernst Schubert, “L’Étranger et les expériences de l’étranger,” L’Étranger au Moyen Âge, 191-215. The story first appeared in the second edition of the Grimm collection in 1819 and in all subsequent editions.25

Paolo Marchetti, “I limiti della giurisdizione penale: Crimini, competenza eterritorio nel pensiero giuridico tardo-medievale,” in Marco Belabarba, Gerd Schweruoff, Andrea Zorzi, eds., Criminalità e giustizia in Germania e in Italia. Pratiche giudiziarie e linguaggi giuridici tra tardo medievo ed età moderna. Annali dell’Istituto storicaitalo-germanico in Trento, Contributi 11 (Bologna-Berlin, 2001), 85-100.

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religious, political or economic reasons? Are you fleeing from or

to somewhere? How much of yourself are you willing or able to

transform in order better to fit into this place among this

people? How badly, if at all, do we need you (at the time in a

substantially underpopulated Europe which usually needed all the

people it could get)? For all the liabilities and uncertainties

of destinations, including conceptual uncertainties and hostile

reception, the wretched of the earth, the old miserabiles personae,

keep coming to Europe, North America, Malaysia, Indonesia,

Australia, and elsewhere. As difficult a problem as they pose,

the problem of those who encounter them is just as difficult. And

it was formulated long before the coastal interrogations of

Beowulf and the misadventures described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

even before Aeneas and the other fugitive Trojan kingdom-founders

and before Exodus. It is first found in Book XIII of the Odyssey

when Odysseus, waking up on a beach in an unfamiliar place, un

uncertain as to where he ishas gotten to or what will happen to

him (he is, although he does not yet know it, in his own island

kingdom of Ithaka), wonders first about the people who may live

there, whether they are proud and savage people, hubristai, and by

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semantic implication hostile to strangers, or are they decent

people, friendly to strangers, philoxenoi?

Immigrants, legal and illegal - and we – still have to

answer Odysseus’ question. What kind of people are they - and we?

Arizona has certainly not “returned to the Middle Ages.” It has

hastily and ill-advisedly made its ownengaged in a certain way

with brand-new twenty-first century legal and moral bedproblems.

Some places in the United States and elsewhere are perfectly

capable of being brutally “modern”. And there is nothing

“medieval” about the question today.

Thank you.

Edward Peters

University of Pennsylvania Emeritus

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