New Monarchies

7 Key excerpts on "New Monarchies"

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  eBook - ePub

  Contesting the Renaissance

  • William Caferro(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  12

  Advocates of new monarchy stressed its evolutionary nature. It supplanted medieval feudal monarchy and the Italian city-state as “the most complete and effective” political entity, with unprecedented coercive, economic, and military might. The prior forms were compared to “children.” The transformation took place primarily in the sixteenth century, contemporaneous with the French invasion of Italy and the Italian Wars (1494–1527) and the Reformation that weakened the Catholic Church. The New Monarchies engendered strong “national” feelings, undertook territorial expansion, and created national armies.

  The new monarchy remains a starting point for discussion of Renaissance politics in textbooks.13 It is most typically applied to France, England, and Spain. The states had different trajectories based on geographic, social, and economic considerations, but were similar in that they all experienced an increase in monarchical power and the formation of centralized bureaucracy in the sixteenth century.

  France is the most representative example. Centralized monarchical power coalesced in stages, culminating with the absolutist state of Louis XIV in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The historian Roland Mousnier, the staunchest advocate of French new monarchy, examined its genesis. He noted the rise of patriotic national sentiment in the work of the humanists Robert Gaguin (d. 1501) and Guillaume Budé (d. 1540) and the alliance between the crown and the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy. French new monarchy also involved the creation of a centralized royal bureaucracy with the power to dispense justice and levy taxes, a standing army and royal control of the church, initiated by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in 1438. The legal underpinnings of royal power were laid down by jurists who advocated a French style of Roman law known as “mos gallicus,” which posited the ruler as a patriarch at the head of the family. This notion was developed by Jean Bodin (d. 1596) in Les six livres de la république (Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1576), which argued that the monarch was above the law, his authority limited only by divine and natural law.14

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  Golden Age Spain

  • Henry Kamen(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  It is remarkable above all that political philosophy in Spain was notably anti-absolutist, especially when directed against for-eign rulers and their theorists. Particularly around the year 1600, Jesuit thinkers such as Juan de Mariana and Francisco Suárez backed (with the crown’s approval) ideas in favour of limiting 7 Absolute Monarchy in Spain kingly power. Tyrants, they wrote, can be deposed and even assas-sinated. Their works were bitterly denounced, and even burnt publicly, outside Spain; inside the country, there was no objection. The word ‘monarchy’ meant of course the system of kingly rule, but for Spaniards it also meant the conglomerate of territories attached to the crown. The Spanish ‘monarchy’ was an association of multiple kingdoms like the original union of the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon in the persons of Ferdinand and Isabella, in which each state functioned separately but under the aegis of a single crown. The dynastic principle was fundamental. ‘All past monarchies began in violence and force of arms’, wrote Gregorio López Madera in his Excellences of the Monarchy of Spain (1597), ‘only that of Spain has had just beginnings, great part of it coming together by succession’. When Ferdinand was recognised as king of Naples in 1504, so bringing to an end the wars in south-ern Italy, the crown was deemed to be his personally; and by no means was Naples subjected to Spain. In the same way, Ferdinand claimed to be king of Navarre in 1512 by dynastic right; the king-dom that he occupied remained independent of but associated with Spain. The most decisive contribution to the creation of the ‘monarchy’ occurred when Charles of Burgundy succeeded in 1516 to the thrones of Castile and Aragon, bringing with him as part of his inheritance the states of the old duchy of Burgundy. Dynastic right was also the fundamental issue that led to the occu-pation of Portugal much later in 1580 by Philip II.

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  The Essential World History, Volume II: Since 1500

  • William J. Duiker, Jackson Spielvogel(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- ries soon led to a search for a stable, secular order of politics and made possible the emergence of a system of nation-states in which power politics took on increasing significance. Within those states, there slowly emerged some of the machinery that made possible a growing centralization of power. In states called absolutist, strong monarchs with the assistance of their aristocracies took the lead in providing the leadership for greater central- ization. In this so-called age of absolutism, Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, was the model for other rulers. Strong monarchy also prevailed in central and eastern Europe, where three new powers made their appearance: Prussia, Austria, and Russia. But not all European states fol- lowed the pattern of absolute mon- archy. Especially important were developments in England, where a series of struggles between king and Parliament took place in the seventeenth century. In the long run, the landed aristocracy gained power at the expense of the monarchs, thus laying the foundations for a constitu- tional government in which Parliament provided the focus for the institutions of centralized power. In every major European state, a growing concern for power and dynamic expansion led to larger armies and greater conflict, stronger economies, and more powerful governments. From a global point of view, Europeans— with their strong governments, prosperous economies, and strengthened military forces—were beginning to dom- inate other parts of the world, leading to a growing belief in the superiority of their civilization. Yet despite Europeans’ increasing domination of global trade markets, they had not achieved their goal of dimin- ishing the power of Islam, a goal first pursued during the crusades.

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  Monarchy Transformed

  Princes and their Elites in Early Modern Western Europe

  • Robert von Friedeburg, John Morrill(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Yet an exclusively ‘top down’ perspective on state formation must be avoided. 11 Provincial elites saw potential gains as well as undoubted challenges in the new ambitions of centralising monarchical regimes. They welcomed the enhanced prospects of careers and material gain, together with the increased political and social stability which rulers promised and some- times achieved. They also made gains, moreover, within their own local- ity. The nobility secured greater control over the key resource, that of peasant labour, as rulers facilitated formal restrictions on peasant mobi- lity and an extension of seigneurial privileges, and tacitly acknowledged, over much of Europe, their own inability to intervene on noble estates. This authority was further strengthened by the social elite’s key role in the local administration of justice and, in parts of Europe, in military recruit- ment too. There came to be real synergy and an unexpected degree of overlap between the aims of rulers and their elites which was fundamental 9 Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, p. 57 and passim; Rabb, Struggle for Stability, pp. 20, 118–119 and passim; H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: A Farewell?’, in Politicians and Virtuosi, pp. 149–168, at pp. 164ff. The growing strength of the nobility and its importance had earlier been emphasised in a wide-ranging and acute survey by Ivo Schöffer, ‘Did Holland’s Golden Age Coincide with a Period of Crisis?’, originally published in Acta Historiae Neerlandica 1(1966), pp. 82–107, and reprinted in Parker and Smith (eds.), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, pp. 83–109, at pp. 100ff. William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985), is a model study of the local elite’s role in the achievement of stability in the southern French province of Languedoc, while Steven G.

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  The Modern World-System I

  Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century

  • Immanuel Wallerstein(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  136 The Modern World-System would have had the inverse effect. To a certain extent, as we shall see, this was true. The first sixteenth century was the era of imperial strivings, not of strong states, as we shall discuss in the next chapter. It was not until the failure of empire, of which we shall speak then, that strong states once again came to the fore. And indeed it would only be the eighteenth century that historians would deem the age of absolutism. 14 In fact, however, despite fluctuations in the curve, we are faced with a secular increase in state power throughout the modern era. The capitalist world-economy seems to have required and facilitated this secular process of increased centralization and internal control, at least within the core states. How did kings, who were the managers of the state machinery in the sixteenth century, strengthen themselves? They used four major mecha-nisms: bureaucratization, monopolization of force, creation of legitimacy, and homogenization of the subject population. We shall treat each in turn. If the king grew stronger, it was unquestionably due to the fact that he acquired new machinery to use, a corps of permanent and dependent officials. 15 Of course, in this respect, Europe was just catching up with China. Hence we know that a bureaucratic state structure is by itself insuf-ficient to demarcate the great changes of the sixteenth century, much less account for them. Nevertheless, the development of the state bureauc-racy was crucial, because it was to alter fundamentally the rules of the political game, by ensuring that henceforth decisions of economic policy could not be easily made without going through the state structure. It meant that the energy of men of all strata had to turn in significant part to the conquest of the political kingdom. To be sure, we are still talking in this era of a relatively small bureaucracy, certainly by comparison with contemporary Europe.

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  Western Civilization

  A Brief History, Volume I: to 1715

  • Jackson Spielvogel(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  In 1700, government for most people still meant the local institutions that affected their lives: local courts, local tax collectors, and local organizers of armed forces. Kings and ministers might deter-mine policies and issue guidelines, but they still had to function through local agents and had no guaran-tee that their wishes would be carried out. A mass of urban and provincial privileges, liberties, and exemp-tions (including from taxation) and a whole host of corporate bodies and interest groups—provincial and national Estates, clerical officials, officehold-ers who had bought or inherited their positions, and provincial nobles—limited what monarchs could achieve. The most successful rulers were not those who tried to destroy the old system but rather those like Louis XIV who knew how to use the old system to their advantage. Above all other considerations stood the landholding nobility. Everywhere in the seventeenth century, the landed aristocracy played an important role in the European monarchical system. As military officers, judges, officeholders, and landowners in con-trol of vast, untaxed estates, their power remained immense. In some places, their strength even put severe limits on how effectively monarchs could rule. 15-4 LIMITED MONARCHY: THE DUTCH REPUBLIC AND ENGLAND Q Focus Question: What were the main issues in the struggle between king and Parliament in seventeenth-century England, and how were they resolved? Almost everywhere in Europe in the seventeenth century, kings and their ministers were in control of central govern-ments. But not all European states followed the pattern of Experience an interactive version of this period in 15-4 Limited Monarchy: The Dutch Republic and England ■ 357 England, where king and Parliament struggled to deter-mine the role each should play in governing the nation.

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  Western Civilization

  A Brief History, Volume II since 1500

  • Jackson Spielvogel(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  In 1700, government for most people still meant the local institutions that affected their lives: local courts, local tax collectors, and local organizers of armed forces. Kings and ministers might deter- mine policies and issue guidelines, but they still had to function through local agents and had no guaran- tee that their wishes would be carried out. A mass of urban and provincial privileges, liberties, and exemp- tions (including from taxation) and a whole host of corporate bodies and interest groups—provincial and national Estates, clerical officials, officehold- ers who had bought or inherited their positions, and provincial nobles—limited what monarchs could achieve. The most successful rulers were not those who tried to destroy the old system but rather those like Louis XIV who knew how to use the old system to their advantage. Above all other considerations stood the landholding nobility. Everywhere in the seventeenth century, the landed aristocracy played an important role in the European monarchical system. As military officers, judges, officeholders, and landowners in con- trol of vast, untaxed estates, their power remained immense. In some places, their strength even put severe limits on how effectively monarchs could rule. 15-4 LIMITED MONARCHY: THE DUTCH REPUBLIC AND ENGLAND Q Focus Question: What were the main issues in the struggle between king and Parliament in seventeenth-century England, and how were they resolved? Almost everywhere in Europe in the seventeenth century, kings and their ministers were in control of central govern- ments. But not all European states followed the pattern of Experience an interactive version of this period in 15-4 Limited Monarchy: The Dutch Republic and England ■ 357 England, where king and Parliament struggled to deter- mine the role each should play in governing the nation.

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