you wrote:
“There were no bureaucracies in the Middle Ages. They didn’t have the technical ability to be bureaucracies.”
There were bureaucracies.
Just read From Ad Hoc to Routine: A Case Study in Medieval Bureaucracy. Contributors: Ellen E. Kittell - author. Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 1991.
A more recent book that at least touches on bureaucracies in the Middle Ages is:
Edwin S. Hunt, A History of Business in Medieval Europe 1200-1500, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Hunt shows that the medieval bureaucracies were small, but they still existed. The same people who invented double-entry accounting seemed destined to have some bureaucracies!
The term “clerk” comes from “cleric,” or “priest.” Hence, “anti-clerical” (which is almost synonymous in much of the world with “anti-Catholic”) refers to hating an ordained priesthood. You could say that the Catholic church invented the bureaucracy. On the other hand, the terms “clerk” and “bureaucracy” took on money-managing connotations which are a little out of place describing people in a culture that had not adopted the use of a zero yet.
One of the great developments of the later middle ages, along with the wide use of decimal numeration and real sentences.
Late medieval. Not during the time of the German/Roman Empire. The books you cite deal with the late Middle Ages.
They had chanceries, yes. But if you think that the government apparatus, record-keeping, administration of as king or bishop in the Middle Ages was anything remotely like a modern bureaucracy, you’re crazier than Joe Biden. They could never have fathomed what we mean by bureaucracy. It was not thinkable.