ABSTRACT

The European development of ‘constraints on the executive’ has long been seen as critical in explaining global disparities in the quality of political and economic institutions – and hence differences in state formation, regime change, and economic development (North and Thomas 1973; North 1990; Acemoglu et al. 2001, 2002a, 2008; Jones 2008[1981]; Hariri 2012; cf. Stasavage 2010; Blaydes and Chaney 2013). The contention of the last part of this book is that we need to understand the origins of these institutions of constraints to understand the context in which the modern state, modern democracy, and the modern market economy arose (see Møller 2015b). The following four chapters are therefore devoted to pursuing these origins, an endeavour which requires that we delve into medieval Europe.