Political network of central power agents: case of missi dominici

TL;DR

This paper applies social network analysis to study the organization and evolution of central power agents, missi dominici, in the Early Middle Ages, revealing changes in network structure and recruitment patterns over time.

Contribution

It introduces models combining social network analysis and statistical methods to analyze historical political networks, addressing data challenges and revealing structural evolution.

Findings

Network structure evolved over the studied period

Agents increasingly recruited from local aristocracy

Data limitations posed modeling challenges

Abstract

This study offers several models of social network analysis to examine the organization of central power agents, missi dominici, during the Early Middle Ages. Enriched by statistical analysis, different research hypotheses based on the current historiographical positions have been substantiated. On the one side, the network analysis allowed to highlight the evolution of network structure throughout the studied period and to observe a change in the framework of agents transition between reigns. On the other side, the statistical exploration of the relations between the agents and the places of their assignments confirmed some amplification, with time, of a tendency to recruit the agents among the local aristocracy. Finally, several difficulties related to the analyzing of missing data provided by fragmentary historical records as well as to modeling a complex multimodal political network were mentioned.