A main achievement has been the disentanglement of sovereignty concepts, and their dependent traditions. In the course of the project, a lost ‘scholastic’ tradition of sovereignty thinking that is connected to medieval cities (yet, not exclusively) was detected. Besides that tradition, the municipal traditions (as connected to the terms Bourg and portus) were important. However, the scholastic tradition mentioned proved fundamental. In the late Middle Ages, sovereignty-thinking was connected to a “natural” order. Publications on the topics mentioned are currently being prepared. The development of ‘sovereignty’, both as a legal concept and topos, has been considered as largely congruent with state formation processes; the historical scholastic tradition topples this idea and opens a perspective of competing sovereignty conceptions in the period of c. 1400-c. 1700.
A second main achievement concerns the interconnections between the cities studied as cases, from the angle of merchant networks, and its impact on causes of change in sovereignty-thinking. Networked sovereignty of cities was largely aligned with merchant networks, which had agents and contacts in several commercial cities. One of the findings of the project thus far relates to the involvement of prominent merchants in the Anglo-Dutch and Hanseatic trade, covering the cities of Southampton, Rouen, Bruges and Lübeck. These prominent merchants themselves instrumentally made use of local sovereignty and therefore some of the causes of changes in sovereignty conceptions as referring to commercial cities may have had to with strategies deployed within merchant networks. These networks were largely formed along the lines of nationality and in close connection to expat communities (nationes mercatorum). Sovereignty-related actions were not exclusively steered from within bodies of governance of cities, but also by merchants, in interaction with these bodies, or otherwise.
