Robber baron
Encyclopedia
Robber baron (industrialist)
Robber baron is a pejorative term used for a powerful 19th century American businessman. By the 1890s the term was used to attack any businessman who used questionable practices to become wealthy...
. Robber baron behavior among the Germanic warrior class in medieval Europe indirectly lead to the papal-Catholic innovations of The Peace of God and "Truce of God".
Early development
For one thousand years, from 800 AD to 1800 AD, tolls were collected from ships sailing on the Rhine River in Europe. During this time, various feudal lords, among them archbishopArchbishop
An archbishop is a bishop of higher rank, but not of higher sacramental order above that of the three orders of deacon, priest , and bishop...
s who held fiefs
Fiefdom
A fee was the central element of feudalism and consisted of heritable lands granted under one of several varieties of feudal tenure by an overlord to a vassal who held it in fealty in return for a form of feudal allegiance and service, usually given by the...
from the Holy Roman Emperor, collected tolls from passing cargo ships to bolster their finances.
Only the Holy Roman Emperor could authorize the collection of such tolls. Allowing the nobility and Church
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
to collect tolls from the busy traffic on the Rhine seems to have been an attractive alternative to other means of taxation and funding of government functions.
They abused their positions by stopping passing merchant
Merchant
A merchant is a businessperson who trades in commodities that were produced by others, in order to earn a profit.Merchants can be one of two types:# A wholesale merchant operates in the chain between producer and retail merchant...
ships and demanding tolls without being authorized by the Holy Roman Emperor
Holy Roman Emperor
The Holy Roman Emperor is a term used by historians to denote a medieval ruler who, as German King, had also received the title of "Emperor of the Romans" from the Pope...
to do so. Often iron chains were stretched across the river to prevent passage without paying the toll, and strategic towers were built to facilitate this.
The Holy Roman Emperor and the various noblemen and archbishops who were authorized to levy tolls seem to have worked out an informal way of regulating this process.
Among the decisions involved in managing the collection of tolls on the Rhine were:
- how many toll stations to have,
- where they should be built,
- how high the tolls should be,
- and the advantages/disadvantages.
While this decision process was made no less complex by being informal, common factors included the local power structure (archbishops and nobles being the most likely recipients of a charter to collect tolls), space between toll stations (authorized toll stations seem to have been at least five kilometers apart), and ability to be defended from attack (some castles through which tolls were collected were tactically useful until the French invaded in 1689 and leveled them).
Tolls were standardized either in terms of an amount of silver coin allowed to be charged or an "in-kind" toll of cargo from the ship.
In contrast, the men who came to be known as robber barons violated the structure under which tolls were collected on the Rhine either by charging higher tolls than the standard or by operating without authority from the Holy Roman Emperor altogether.
Writers of the period referred to these practices as "unjust tolls," and not only did the robber barons thereby violate the prerogatives of the Holy Roman Emperor, they also went outside of the society's behavioral norms, since merchants were bound both by law and religious custom to charge a "just price" for their wares.
Interregnum period
During the period in the history of the Holy Roman Empire known as the InterregnumInterregnum
An interregnum is a period of discontinuity or "gap" in a government, organization, or social order...
(1250–1273), when there was no Emperor, the number of tolling stations exploded in the absence of imperial authority. In addition, robber barons began to earn their newly-coined term of opprobrium by robbing ships of their cargoes, stealing entire ships and even kidnapping.
In response to this organized, military lawlessness, the "Rheinischer Bund," or Rhine League was formed by and from the nobility, knights, and lords of the Church, all of whom held large stakes in the restoration of law and order to the Rhine.
Officially launched in 1254, the Rhine League wasted no time putting robber barons out of business by the simple expedient of taking and destroying their castles. In the next three years, four robber barons were targeted and between ten and twelve robber castles destroyed or inactivated.
The Rhine League was not only successful in suppressing illicit collection of tolls and river robbery. On at least one occasion, they intervened to rescue a kidnap victim who had been kidnapped by the Baron of Rietberg.
The procedure pioneered by the Rhine League for dealing with robber barons – to besiege, capture and destroy their castles – survived long after the League self-destructed from political strife over the election of a new Emperor and military reversals against unusually strong robber barons.
When the Interregnum ended, the new Emperor Rudolf of Habsburg applied the lessons learned by the Rhine League to the destruction of the highway robbers at Sooneck, torching their castle and hanging them. While robber barony never entirely ceased, especially during the Hundred Years' War
Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years' War was a series of separate wars waged from 1337 to 1453 by the House of Valois and the House of Plantagenet, also known as the House of Anjou, for the French throne, which had become vacant upon the extinction of the senior Capetian line of French kings...
, the excesses of their heyday during the Interregnum never recurred.
British Isles
The reign of King Stephen of England (1096-1154 AD) was a long period of civil unrest commonly known as "The AnarchyThe Anarchy
The Anarchy or The Nineteen-Year Winter was a period of English history during the reign of King Stephen, which was characterised by civil war and unsettled government...
". In the absence of strong central kingship, the nobility of England were a law unto themselves, as characterized in this excerpt from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The original manuscript of the Chronicle was created late in the 9th century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of Alfred the Great...
:
United States
The term robber baron was popularized by US political and economic commentator Matthew JosephsonMatthew Josephson
Matthew Josephson was an American journalist and author of works on nineteenth-century French literature and twentieth-century American economic history.-Biography:...
during The Great Depression in a 1934 book. He attributed its first use to an 1880 anti-monopoly pamphlet in which Kansas farmers applied the term to railroad magnates.
External links
- Robber Barons J. Bradford DeLong, University of California at Berkeley, and NBER
- Robber Barons or Captains of Industry? The Great Debate Authored by: Erica Berkshire (2003). University of Oregon.