By the thirteenth century, confederations of communes in western Europe were claiming important legal, political and military prerogatives for themselves in written charters of inter-urban alliance. Scholars have seen these alliances as a tool of the emerging economic elite or as forces of resistance to the sovereign territorial state taking shape in the late Middle Ages. To understand alternatives to princely polity formation in the wealthy, urbanized regions of Brabant, Flanders and Liège, however, this article studies urban alliances as a power in their own right by examining how new documentary practices contributed to older traditions of inter-urban collaboration. Towns and their coalitions created and distributed bilateral, multilateral and hybrid or concentric charters of alliance and kept them in their own archives, which they saw as repositories of legal security and authority. Meanwhile, archivists, chancellors and other technicians of legitimacy helped princes to consolidate legal superiority over their supposedly subject towns by spearheading the confiscation and destruction of communal archives, in particular their charters of alliance. They thus obscured the scale of inter-urban solidarity: this article reports fifty-eight unique alliances preserved in over 200 charters between 1219 and 1444 across these three regions.

中文翻译：

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南部低地国家的城市间联盟和合法性档案，1250-1450 年


到 13 世纪，西欧的公社联盟在城市间联盟的书面宪章中为自己宣称拥有重要的法律、政治和军事特权。学者们将这些联盟视为新兴经济精英的工具，或者是抵抗中世纪晚期形成的主权领土国家的力量。然而，为了了解布拉班特省、佛兰德斯和列日等富裕的城市化地区形成诸侯政体的替代方案，本文通过研究新的纪实实践如何促进城市间合作的旧传统，研究城市联盟本身就是一种力量。城镇及其联盟制定并分发了双边、多边和混合或同心联盟宪章，并将其保存在自己的档案中，他们将其视为法律安全和权威的存储库。与此同时，档案管理员、大臣和其他合法性技术人员通过带头没收和销毁公共档案，特别是他们的联盟宪章，帮助王子们巩固了对他们所谓的附属城镇的法律优势。因此，他们掩盖了城市间团结的规模：本文报道了 1219 年至 1444 年间这三个地区的 200 多份宪章中保存的 58 个独特联盟。