Early Modern Court Culture

Erin Griffey, Erin Griffey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000480320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

Through a thematic overview of court culture that connects the cultural with the political, confessional, spatial, material and performative, this volume introduces the dynamics of power and culture in the early modern European court.

Exploring the period from 1500 to 1750, Early Modern Court Culture is cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, providing insights into aspects of both community and continuity at courts as well as individual identity, change and difference. Culture is presented as not merely a vehicle for court propaganda in promoting the monarch and the dynasty, but as a site for a complex range of meanings that conferred status and virtue on the patron, maker, court and the wider community of elites. The essays show that the court provided an arena for virtue and virtuosity, intellectual and social play, demonstration of moral authority and performance of social, gendered, confessional and dynastic identity.

Early Modern Court Culture moves from political structures and political players to architectural forms and spatial geographies; ceremonial and ritual observances; visual and material culture; entertainment and knowledge. With35 contributions on subjects including gardens, dress, scent, dance and tapestries, this volume is a necessary resource for all students and scholars interested in the court in early modern Europe.

Part I People and political structuresConnecting power

1 MonarchsKings and queens regnant, sovereign princes and popes

Ronald G. Asch

DOI: 10.4324/9780429277986-3

Introduction

Monarchy underwent profound changes during the early modern period. In the fifteenth century, great noble families – in particular those who had some claim to the crown themselves as they were related by blood to the royal dynasty – could still compete to some extent with ruling monarchs in the pursuit of prestige and power. This held true even for old established kingdoms such as France and England where the succession to the crown was – in theory –strictly hereditary. Thus the dukes of Burgundy, who belonged to a junior branch of the house of Valois, the French royal dynasty, and were officially royal liegemen, managed to create out of their various dominions a powerful principality in the fifteenth century. This might even have allowed them to claim royal status one day had not Charles the Bold (1433–1477), the last Valois duke, overplayed his hand and died in battle against the Swiss in 1477. Equally in England, overmighty noble subjects repeatedly challenged royal authority in the fifteenth century, and between 1399 and 1485 three English kings were deposed or died in battle trying to crush a rebellion by a rival claimant to the crown. Over time, the distance in power and status between kings and even their most powerful subjects became more pronounced, at least in hereditary monarchies; however, the Holy Roman Empire is an exception to this rule. Even the greatest noblemen eventually lost the power to field armies of their own, although this process was not completed until after 1660 in France. At court, strict ceremonial rules increasingly created a greater distance between the king and even the most elevated of his aristocratic subjects, including his brothers or cousins. This did not mean that once powerful nobles were, in the seventeenth century, transformed into idle courtiers, effete and impotent. Rather it meant that they typically became stake holders in a system centred on the court and the monarch. Alternatively, they could still in many parts of Europe use parliaments and diets, the church or even law courts and urban corporations – as in Spain – as instruments to promote their interests, even possibly in conflicts with the king or ruler himself.

At the end of the Middle Ages, royal government was still very much a face-to-face business – on no occasion was a monarch’s authority greater than when he confronted his subjects in person. However, in the early modern period, the growth and increasing efficiency of bureaucratic structures, greater fiscal resources and improved means of communication allowed monarchs now to rule their realms more than in the past from a distance, relying on written orders given to local and regional officeholders, although admittedly the complete loyalty of such agents could rarely be taken for granted. Patronage – the distribution of places of power, prestige and profit – remained at least for the elites governed by the rules of face-to-face communication at court. Those who were unable to attend the court themselves usually had to employ the services of an influential patronage broker with direct access to the ruler to promote their cause. In any case, how the dynamics of power between court and local elites and between centre and periphery worked out in practice during this period depended very much on the type of monarchy.

Monarchy and dynastic rule came in many forms in the early sixteenth century. There were, on the one hand, the great dynastic empires, such as the realm of Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (1500–1558), composite monarchies which had, as a rule, been shaped by a long series of marriages and treaties laying down rules for hereditary succession between the great princely and royal families of Europe and, to a lesser extent, by military conquest. One ruler held a series of titles, governing each of his multiple kingdoms or principalities according to local traditions, frequently in cooperation or – as the case might be – in conflict with the estates and parliaments which tried to defend their ancient privileges. In such composite monarchies – or dynastic agglomerates as they have also been called – the ruler’s court was often the only institutionalised point of contact for the diverse and heterogeneous national and regional elites, and thus of crucial importance for the survival of the empire as a whole.¹ It was the real patria de todos, the fatherland of all subjects, where men and women, laymen and clergy, sought justice in lawsuits, tried to obtain grants, privileges and offices and sought to improve or reaffirm their social status.² The kingdoms and principalities ruled by the Habsburg dynasty constituted the most powerful of Europe’s composite monarchies in the sixteenth century, but there were other similar dynastic agglomerates. In northern Europe, the House of Oldenburg ruled Denmark, Norway and the two duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the latter being part of the Holy Roman Empire. Poland and Lithuania were ruled by the Jagiellonian dynasty until 1572; the junior branch of the same family held the crowns of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia at the turn of the sixteenth century.

Some of these dynastic agglomerations would, over the course of the early modern period, become more homogenous political communities, held together not only by allegiance to a specific dynasty but also a sense of shared identity, at least among the elite; often such a sense of identity was re-enforced by confessional loyalties. Thus Poland-Lithuania, admittedly more a republic of noblemen than a monarchy in the strict sense of the word, but still a truly multi-confessional commonwealth in around 1600, became a country largely dominated by Catholicism – at least among the nobility, which held a near-monopoly of political power – over the course of the seventeenth century.³ On the other hand, in the Habsburg monarchy, Protestants were marginalised or forced to emigrate after 1620, except for Hungary. But there were also more compact, more homogenous kingdoms, such as France and England, which though not nation states in the modern sense could to a certain extent already rely on a distinct sense of national identity which rulers could appeal to in times of crisis.

Finally, there were – in particular within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire and in northern Italy – a number of smaller- and medium-sized principalities, ranging from the powerful prince electorates in Germany (Saxony, the Palatinate and Brandenburg and, at least in theory, the kingdom of Bohemia) to much smaller fiefdoms and dominions. The more stable and larger principalities were to acquire over the course of the early modern period the institutional framework and the resources of genuine states and some of these states survived well into the nineteenth century. In some cases the ruling dynasties even managed to transform themselves into major players on the European stage, coveting and eventually achieving royal status. The Hohenzollern in Brandenburg – albeit only after 1648 – and the House of Savoy in northern Italy are obvious examples here but are not the only ones. The duke of Prussia (and elector of Brandenburg) crowned himself king, becoming Frederick I of Prussia (1657–1713) in Königsberg in 1701 and the House of Savoy achieved royal status in 1713 by acquiring the kingdom of Sardinia.

In any case, for the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it would be wrong to see European politics primarily in terms of the rivalry between competing states; rather it was the ambitions and aspirations of dynasties that shaped European politics. Princes saw themselves as part of an exclusive social group where rivals were often kinsmen or kinswomen. Politics was conceived not so much in terms of public interest and security but of friendship and enmity, personal loyalty and patronage, and more than anything else, status and prestige.⁴ Sovereign or semi-sovereign (the German princes, the Reichsfürsten, for example) rulers were the principal actors in this competition for status and power, although great noble families or individual aristocrats who were officially mere subjects could still participate in this contest; the dividing line between sovereign princes and mere aristocrats subject to a higher authority was often less than clear, as has already been pointed out. Thus, the dukes of Guise in France in the sixteenth century were a cadet branch of the House of Lorraine. The dukes of Lorraine were officially liegemen of the emperor but in practice almost completely independent, whereas the Guise were subjects of the king of France with the special status of princes étrangers (foreign princes). However, thanks to the status of their cousins in Nancy and the scope of their network of kinship ties and alliances beyond France, the Guise were far more than just a French noble family. In particular, in moments of crisis when royal authority was weakened, they acted almost as if they were a royal dynasty themselves. After all, Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587) had a Guise mother and had once been – briefly – queen consort of France. One hardly needs to emphasise that such families had their own princely households and courts which served as places where ties with clients and allies could be cultivated and reinforced.⁵

Moreover, great dynasties such as the Guise as well as the Bourbons in south-west France before they inherited the French crown in 1589, or some of the great noble families in Bohemia such as the lords of Rosenberg do not easily fit into a pattern of politics which carefully distinguishes between sovereign rulers and mere noblemen.⁶ Ecclesiastical princes also present a special case. The greatest of all ecclesiastical princes was of course the pope, but the bishops and archbishops of the Holy Roman Empire also ruled their own principalities and wielded considerable power, in particular in the case of the three prelates who held the dignity of prince elector: Mainz, Trier and Cologne.

In all these cases the ruler was elected – in Rome by the cardinals and in German prince bishoprics by the cathedral chapter. In the Italian case of the papacy, the clergymen in question descended from leading Italian noble families or from the urban nobility of Rome. In the German case they could belong to the great princely dynasties or to local noble communities such as the imperial free knights in Franconia or in the Rhenish territories.⁷ For the noble families, ecclesiastical benefices were not only a means to provide for younger sons – or in the case of nunneries and their abbesses for daughters – but also an important source of income. In the case of the papacy, the incumbents often tried to amass within a comparatively short time – most popes were elected at an advanced age – such a massive fortune that the status of their families among the leading noble dynasties in Rome and Italy was secured for centuries to come.

Monarchy in the age of the Reformation and confessional strife

But the papacy was a very special case. Among the secular rulers the most powerful one in the early sixteenth century was Charles V, who governed the foremost of the great dynastic realms of the time. No dynasty benefitted more from astute marriage arrangements and the biological accidents shaping hereditary successions between the 1470s and the 1520s than the Habsburgs. In 1477, the rich Burgundian lands fell to Charles’s grandfather, Archduke Maximilian (1459–1519), thanks to his marriage to Mary of Burgundy (1457–1482), the only daughter and heiress of the last Valois duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold. Maximilian’s son, Philip, later Philip I of Castile (1478–1506), married Joanna of Castile (1479–1555), the daughter and heiress of Isabella of Castile (1451–1504) and Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516), thus securing these kingdoms for the Habsburgs. And finally, in 1526, the Hungarian branch of the Jagiellonian dynasty came to an abrupt end with King Louis II of Hungary’s (1506–1526) death in the battle of Mohacs against the Ottomans. Once more it was the Habsburgs, in this case Charles’s brother, Ferdinand (1503–1564), who benefitted from this event.

Charles himself had been elected ruler of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519. He was already king of Castile and Aragon at the time and he could also call himself titular duke of Burgundy (the duchy itself had become French in 1477 as an escheated fief), duke of Brabant, archduke of Austria and king of Naples, to name only some of his possessions. His brother Ferdinand ruled not only the Austrian hereditary dominions of the dynasty – Charles had ceded theses principalities to him in 1521–1522 – but was elected king of Bohemia and Hungary –kingdoms he also claimed by hereditary right – after the death of Louis II.⁸

Charles V, the most powerful of all Renaissance monarchs, ruled an empire which comprised almost half of western Europe and substantial parts of the New World. In many ways, Charles’s dominions constituted the last universal monarchy in Europe before the Napoleonic age. Fighting against the enemies of the Christian faith – the Ottomans – in the Mediterranean and, in later years, against the Protestants in Germany as well, Charles appeared very much as a ruler in the tradition of the crusading princes of the Middle Ages, a true soldier of Christ. Like his medieval predecessors, he was nevertheless often at odds with the papacy. Succeeding popes saw themselves not only as the real leaders of Christianity – as opposed to the emperor – but also feared Charles’s power in Italy, which posed a threat to the Papal States.

Charles V often relied on family members to govern parts of his realm in his absence. Thus his brother, Ferdinand, exercised imperial authority in Germany while Charles was busy in Spain or in the Mediterranean. But that was not enough to ensure the coherence of the Empire. Charles was continually on the move, like many of his medieval predecessors. Because there was no unified administrative structure, the ruler had to appear in person from time to tim...