Europe and England in the Sixteenth Century

T.A. Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134748198
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Primordi della storia moderna

This innovative textbook uniquely combines an integrated survey of European and English history in the sixteenth century. The book is structured in three parts: the Western european Environment, The Rise of the Great Monarchies and the Crisis of the Great Monarchies. It covers political, social, religious and economic history from the late Renaissance to Mary Stuart and Philip II. It recognises the amount of common belief and interest between the British Isles and Western Europe in the century of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and indicates how events on one side of the Channel influenced those on the other side. Key Features: * colourful and informative biographical sketches of major figures * clearly structured genealogical charts, chronologies and full glossaries * surveys of changing historiograhical debates, including contemporary issues * documentary exercises related to examination questions * lavish illustrations including maps, tables, photographs and line drawings Drawing on many years of classroom experience, Terry Morris presents in a highly readable and concise format the essential elements of narrative and debate while also indicating routes to follow for deeper and more advanced study. The book will be essential reading for students of early modern history.

PART I
THE WESTERN EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENT

• CHAPTER ONE •

The Sixteenth Century in Context

Western Europe as a unit

The political map of Western Europe

International relations

Population

Monarchy

The nobility

The commons

Patterns of trade and commerce

‘Distance, the first enemy’

The fear of the Turk

European state boundaries c. 1500

WESTERN EUROPE AS A UNIT

Most histories of Europe in this period deal with the continent as a whole, suggesting a unity of history, culture and economic life that did not exist in the sixteenth century. At the same time, it has become the normal practice to deal separately with the British Isles which, in this period, certainly had many cultural, economic and political ties with the opposite side of the Channel. This study presents an integrated survey of Britain and Western Europe, that part of the Continent lying west of a line from the River Elbe in eastern Germany to the Adriatic and down the east coast of Italy. East of that line lay the Ottoman Empire, whose religion, politics and culture were alien and fearful to her western neighbours. Further north, the politics of Poland, Lithuania, Muscovy and Sweden only rarely came seriously into contact with the affairs of any Western European state. When Queen Elizabeth of England sought a husband in the latter part of the century, even those Englishmen most eager for a wedding felt that proposed matches with the King of Sweden or with the Tsar of Muscovy were far too exotic to be taken seriously.

This east-west line was not impregnable. In the south, the Mediterranean was criss-crossed with traditional trade routes and with common cultural traditions that extended back into classical times. In his greatest work the outstanding French historian Fernand Braudel (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 1949), made a powerful case for treating the Mediterranean as an historical entity in its own right. Yet the expansion of the Ottoman Empire weakened this unity in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and one of the greatest European movements of these centuries, the European Reconnaissance, began as a deliberate and conscious attempt to bypass the traditional Mediterranean axes of trade and exchange.

THE POLITICAL MAP OF WESTERN EUROPE

France, Spain and England

Within this western part of Europe, by the end of the fifteenth century, an embryonic state system had developed. It was ‘embryonic’ in the sense that the present political divisions of Western Europe were only vaguely discernible within it, and also in the sense that modern forms of state government and administration were only partly developed. Indeed, contemporary Western Europe displayed a wide and complex variety of political systems.

Some of the political units of Western Europe showed features of modern statehood. France, for instance, was no longer the mass of conflicting feudal interests that had made the country prey to civil wars and invasion a century earlier. In terms of territory, population and other resources, France was by 1500 the greatest state of Western Europe. A succession of strong monarchs had established a centralised kingdom ruled by the House of Valois. Even so, diversity existed within her territories in law, in language and in social customs. Although the Valois kings busily added new territories to their realm, it is certain that the populations of those territories felt themselves to be primarily Breton, Burgundian or Provençal, rather than French.

The absence of a strong national identity was even more marked in Spain. Here too a central monarchy had been created, but only by the marriage of the monarchs of the two strongest kingdoms in the peninsula. In effect, the Iberian peninsula still consisted (after the conquest of Granada) of three separate kingdoms, each the product of the various stages of the reconquista, the long struggle against the Moors. Aragon and Castile preserved their separate laws, customs, representative institutions and privileges deep into the sixteenth century. The independent nature of Portuguese development, despite a brief period of annexation to the Spanish crown, helps us to appreciate how different the Iberian kingdoms were from one another at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon illustrates how much the shape and nature of the early sixteenth-century state were determined by the persons and policies of its rulers, rather than by any considerations of cultural, national or linguistic identity.

In many political respects the British Isles resembled the Iberian peninsula. Here, too, one realm, England, had emerged as the most populous and powerful, and a dominant monarchy was establishing itself, more or less in partnership with the aristocracy. As in the case of Portugal, another kingdom, Scotland, maintained her separate political and cultural identity. Hard as England might try to absorb Scotland, the latter was still an independent political unit at the end of the sixteenth century. Another element also existed. Ireland displayed a mixture of political forces unique in Western Europe, feudal influences existing alongside more primitive, tribal forces, often largely unrestrained by any central authority.

Italy and the Habsburg Territories

Many areas of Western Europe lacked even this degree of political consolidation. In many regions, by 1500, the age of the city state and of the modest feudal fief was by no means over. Northern Italy was one such area, where Milan, Florence, Venice and other states flourished under the rule of great families, whose mercantile wealth, or whose success as soldiers of fortune, had enabled them to impose their authority upon the city and its surrounding territories. In all three states, and in many smaller ones, a high degree of civic development and of cultural achievement went hand in hand with serious political instability, sufficient to put the independence of the state at risk. South of Florence the Italian peninsula was divided between the feudal kingdom of Naples and the territories of the Church. From the year 321, when the papacy was first granted the right to own land by the Emperor Constantine, it had steadily accumulated territory across central Italy. There the Pope ruled much like any other European prince. After the trauma of the papacy’s temporary exile to Avignon (1309–78), this ‘temporal power’ became a question of particular importance, and was regarded as an essential guarantee of the political independence of the papacy.

Political fragmentation similar to that of northern Italy was also found in the Netherlands. In the early years of the sixteenth century we must understand the Netherlands as including, not only the modern states of Belgium and the Netherlands, but also substantial areas of what is now western Germany and northern France. Here, theoretically, a form of central, political authority existed that had no parallel in Italy. Initially, this was the authority of the Dukes of Burgundy, but with the death of Charles the Bold in 1477 the remarriage of his widow took these lands into the hands of the Habsburg dynasty. Nevertheless, the individual privileges of cities and provinces remained even stronger in the Netherlands than in Italy. Indeed, they remained so fresh and strong that attempts to subordinate them to centralised authority in the second half of the sixteenth century led to the revolt which destroyed Habsburg control over half of the Netherlands.

Since 1440 the Habsburgs had also monopolised the elective office of Holy Roman Emperor. The political authority of the dynasty thus divided into two distinct categories. On the one hand they were direct feudal overlords of their own territorial possessions, notably in Austria, the Tyrol and parts of the Netherlands. Within the Holy Roman Empire, however, they were elective lords, sworn to respect the privileges and the rights of the many territorial rulers within its boundaries. Here their rights derived, not from God, but from the consent of other princes.

The Holy Roman Empire, then, was not a state, but rather a collection of many states, united only by the theoretical authority and protection of the Emperor. It embraced traditional principalities such as Saxony and Bavaria, smaller feudal duchies such as Württemberg, and many independent cities governed by bourgeois oligarchs (Strasbourg, Nuremberg or Frankfurt) or by princes of the Church (Cologne, Magdeburg or Mainz). The idea that one prince might exercise authority over all this owed something to medieval theories about the unity of Christendom, but such an idea was extremely old-fashioned by this time. The sixteenth-century identity of the Empire owed far more to the ambition of the Habsburg dynasty in the fifteenth century.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Diplomacy

The history of diplomacy in Europe was a long one. The Church had been its pioneer, with her archbishops and cardinals officially representing her interests in their native lands. In addition, legates were dispatched from Rome to foreign courts to conduct pieces of specific and urgent business. Throughout the middle ages European ambassadors operated very much like the legates of the Church. They might be great statesmen, trusted servants of their royal master, or eminent churchmen, whose mission was to travel to a foreign court for the conduct of a specific piece of business: the declaration of war, the negotiation or ratification of a treaty, or simply an exchange of honours and assurances of friendship.

Italian city states in the mid-fifteenth century, with their increasing needs for secure alliances, began to practise a different form of diplomacy. More frequently their ambassadors operated as permanent residents in distant states, with the dual role of providing a steady flow of news and information, and of permanently and sympathetically representing the interests and values of their own state. From Italy the ‘new diplomacy’ spread northwards and westwards. Ferdinand and Isabella had dispatched resident ambassadors from Spain to Rome by the 1480s, and to Venice and England by the end of the century. Most other states imitated the trend over the next decade or two.

‘Resident’ ambassadors did not necessarily mean permanent representation. Spain sent three ambassadors to the French court in the first fifteen years of the sixteenth century, each of whom stayed between one and three years. For nine years of this period there was no Spanish ambassador in France. Sixteenthcentury ambassadors could be tactless and inefficient. Dr John Man, Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to Madrid in the 1560s, cannot have helped Anglo-Spanish relations by his habit of referring to the Pope as ‘a canting little monk’. Many of Man’s Spanish counterparts in London were guilty of listening to the wrong rumours, of hearing what they wanted to hear, and thus of misleading their masters. A system developed in the intimate context of northern Italian politics did not always translate easily to the wider European stage, where enormous problems of distance and communications often left ambassadors without news or instructions from home for months on end.

War

Writing of the years between 1450 and 1620, J.R.Hale concluded that ‘there was probably no single year throughout the period in which there was neither war nor occurrences that looked and felt remarkably like it’. States fought one another over disputed territories; factions fought each other within states over power and precedence; the common people were moved by desperate circumstances to rebel against their rulers. Even in times of nominal peace, rulers issued licences, ‘letters of marque’, to their seafarers to authorise them to raid the shipping of their rivals, while on land substantial bodies of mercenary soldiers travelled the Continent to find a quarrel in which they might earn their living.

As the sixteenth century opened, Western Europe was witnessing changes in the nature of warfare which some writers have perceived as a ‘military revolution’. ‘Before 1494’, J.R.Hale stated, ‘wars in Western Europe were chiefly a matter of violent housekeeping.’ The English Wars of the Roses, the French struggles against Burgundy and Brittany, and the conflict in Spain which eventually brought Ferdinand and Isabella to power were all wars to decide ‘who were to be the supreme landlords of the realm’. In most cases a swift and lasting conclusion was reached, and where the issue took longer to resolve the fighting tended to be sporadic and localised.

The wars of the sixteenth century became more intense and of longer duration. In part this was due to the fact that the states that fought them were now bigger and had access to greater resources. No single battle could destroy the capability of Francis I or Charles V to continue their struggles. In part, it was because the wars of the sixteenth century came increasingly to be fought over religious ideology. Protestantism in the north and west of Europe, and the Islamic advance in the east and south, provided causes which for some men were more important than life itself, and for which they would fight on, whatever the fortunes of war. Instead of short, formalised confrontations in which the fate of a dynasty could be decided in an hour, vast armies now moved at a painfully slow pace over large distances, at a cost which frequently bankrupted their masters.

A further revolutionising factor was the spread of firearms. Developing rapidly from the largely symbolic role that cannon played in the midfifteenth century, artillery was effective enough a hundred years later to render obsolete all medieval concepts of fortification. The development of handguns also revolutionised the infantry tactics of sixteenth-century armies. In the mid-century Venice and France both assumed that 30 per cent of their infantrymen would carry guns. By 1600 the proportion had risen to 50 per cent in France, and to 60 per cent in Spain’s armies. Firearms killed more effectively, and they wounded more dangerously, as the clean sword cut gave way to the bone-shattering impact of the musket ball. Contemporaries estimated that the use of artillery increased the cost of a campaign by between 30 and 50 per cent. Firearms also hastened the death of the chivalric element within warfare which, by the mid-century, would rarely be seen beyond the context of the joust. The superiority of the mounted nobleman in expensive armour meant little if his opponent could shoot him down at a range of 200 yards.

In general, armies grew in size in the sixteenth century. The French government estimated that it could call upon 20,000 soldiers in 1451, 50,000 in 1558 and 68,500 in 1610. The United Provinces of the Netherlands claimed a total of 51,000 soldiers in 1607, while Charles V calculated in 1552 that he could mobilise 150,000 men throughout his Empire. Yet such figures may be misleading. It was always easier to raise such a host for defensive purposes than it was for campaigns ‘out of the realm’, when it was unlikely that such forces could be kept together for any length of time. It was equally unlikely that any large proportion of them would be properly trained.

Where did the troops come from? By the end of the fifteenth century only three states, France, Burgundy and Venice, had anything that might be regarded as a standing army. In each case the force numbered about 8,000–9,000 men. In Castile, the Catholic Monarchs had a reasonable substitute in the form of the forces maintained by the Santa Hermandad. Only as increasing foreign commitments imposed the need for permanent garrisons did Spain undertake the expense of a permanent military establishment. In the early part of the century, and for certain wars, the feudal system still supplied a substantial proportion of most armies. Magnates assembled forces made up of their own feudal tenants and other clients to maintain their own honour and prestige and to maintain their favour with the king. The king in turn often found it advantageous to provide military employment for men who had the capacity otherwise to make nuisances of themselves at home. Such feudal armies, however, were unlikely to travel willingly to distant foreign wars.

The military history of the sixteenth century was thus dominated by the mercenary, the professional fighting man, moving from war to war as his only means of legal livelihood. Little changed in the 150 years that followed the first French agreement (1474) to retain a force of 6,000 Swiss pikemen. Even the wars that we think of as great national enterprises were substantially undertaken by foreign labour. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Flemings helped Ferdinand and Isabella to capture Granada, while Englishmen, Frenchmen and Germans predominated in the armies that fought for Dutch independence. By employing such men, kings and commanders raised the cost of warfare, and further lowered its moral tone, but they avoided the social risks of arming large numbers of their own native poor, and ensured an army that would not melt away at harvest time.

POPULATION

Most of the estimates made of the population of Western Europe in the sixteenth century are educated...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations and Supporting Material
• Introduction
• Part I The Western European Environment
• Part II The Rise of the Great Monarchies
• Part III The Crisis of the Great Monarchies
• Appendix