Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin (ebook reader play store .txt) 📕

On the Commune of the Laonnais, which, until Melleville’s researches (Histoire de la Commune du Laonnais, Paris, 1853), was confounded with the Commune of Laon, see Luchaire, pp. 75 seq. For the early peasants’ guilds and subsequent unions see R. Wilman’s “Die ländlichen Schutzgilden Westphaliens,” in Zeitschrift für Kulturgeschichte, neue Folge, Bd. iii, quoted in Henne-am-Rhyn’s Kulturgeschichte, iii, 249. ↩

Luchaire, p. 149. ↩

Two important cities, like Mainz and Worms, would settle a political contest by means of arbitration. After a civil war broken out in Abbeville, Amiens would act, in 1231, as arbiter (Luchaire, 149); and so on. ↩

See, for instance, W. Stieda, Hansische Vereinbarungen, l.c., p. 114. ↩

Cosmo Innes’s Early Scottish History and Scotland in Middle Ages, quoted by Rev. Denton, l.c., pp. 68, 69; Lamprecht’s Deutsches wirthschaftliche Leben im Mittelalter, review by Schmoller in his Jahrbuch, Bd. xii; Sismondi’s Tableau de l’agriculture toscane, pp. 226 seq. The dominions of Florence could be recognized at a glance through their prosperity. ↩

Mr. John J. Ennett (Six Essays, London, 1891) has excellent pages on this aspect of medieval architecture. Mr. Willis, in his appendix to Whewell’s History of Inductive Sciences (i, 261⁠–⁠262), has pointed out the beauty of the mechanical relations in medieval buildings. “A new decorative construction was matured,” he writes, “not thwarting and controlling, but assisting and harmonizing with the mechanical construction. Every member, every moulding, becomes a sustainer of weight; and by the multiplicity of props assisting each other, and the consequent subdivision of weight, the eye was satisfied of the stability of the structure, notwithstanding curiously slender aspects of the separate parts.” An art which sprang out of the social life of the city could not be better characterized. ↩

Dr. L. Ennen, Der Dom zu Köln, seine Construction und Anstaltung, Köln, 1871. ↩

The three statues are among the outer decorations of Notre Dame de Paris. ↩

Medieval art, like Greek art, did not know those curiosity shops which we call a National Gallery or a Museum. A picture was painted, a statue was carved, a bronze decoration was cast to stand in its proper place in a monument of communal art. It lived there, it was part of a whole, and it contributed to give unity to the impression produced by the whole. ↩

Cf. J. T. Ennett’s “Second Essay,” p. 36. ↩

Sismondi, iv, 172; xvi, 356. The great canal, Naviglio Grande, which brings the water from the Tessino, was begun in 1179, i.e. after the conquest of independence, and it was ended in the thirteenth century. On the subsequent decay, see xvi, 355. ↩

In 1336 it had 8,000 to 10,000 boys and girls in its primary schools, 1,000 to 1,200 boys in its seven middle schools, and from 550 to 600 students in its four universities. The thirty communal hospitals contained over 1,000 beds for a population of 90,000 inhabitants (Capponi, ii, 249 seq.). It has more than once been suggested by authoritative writers that education stood, as a rule, at a much higher level than is generally supposed. Certainly so in democratic Nuremberg. ↩

Cf. L. Ranke’s excellent considerations upon the essence of Roman Law in his Weltgeschichte, Bd. iv. Abth. 2, pp. 20⁠–⁠31. Also Sismondi’s remarks upon the part played by the légistes in the constitution of royal authority, Histoire des Français, Paris, 1826, viii, 85⁠–⁠99. The popular hatred against these “weise Doktoren und Beutelschneider des Volks” broke out with full force in the first years of the sixteenth century in the sermons of the early Reform movement. ↩

Brentano fully understood the fatal effects of the struggle between the “old burghers” and the newcomers. Miaskowski, in his work on the village communities of Switzerland, has indicated the same for village communities. ↩

The trade in slaves kidnapped in the East was never discontinued in the Italian republics till the fifteenth century. Feeble traces of it are found also in Germany and elsewhere. See Cibrario Della schiavitù e del servaggio, 2 vols. Milan, 1868; Professor Luchitzkiy, “Slavery and Russian Slaves in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Izvestia of the Kiev University, 1885. ↩

J. R. Green’s History of the English People, London, 1878, i, 455. ↩

See the theories expressed by the Bologna lawyers, already at the Congress of Roncaglia in 1158. ↩

A bulky literature, dealing with this formerly much neglected subject, is now growing in Germany. Keller’s works, Ein Apostel der Wiedertäufer and Geschichte der Wiedertäufer, Cornelius’s Geschichte des munsterischen Aufruhrs, and Janssen’s Geschichte des deutschen Volkes may be named as the leading sources. The first attempt at familiarizing English readers with the results of the wide researches made in Germany in this direction has been made in an excellent little work by Richard Heath⁠—“Anabaptism from its Rise at Zwickau to its Fall at Münster, 1521⁠–⁠1536,” London, 1895 (Baptist Manuals, vol. i)⁠—where the leading features of the movement are well indicated, and full bibliographical information is given. Also K. Kautsky’s “Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation,” London, 1897. ↩

Few of our contemporaries realize both the extent of this movement and the means by which it was suppressed. But those who wrote immediately after