England may have developed a robust parliament, but it did not display radical democratic practices - rulers, for instance, were never elected. Instead, it was in central-northern Europe, in Hungary, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Denmark, Sweden, even Russia that elections of rulers were held.
Hungary was one of the few constitutional regimes of Europe since the early medieval period. It “has often been pointed out, especially by Hungarians, that there is a certain analogy between English and Hungarian constitutional history.”[1037] Poland also had a remarkable “republican” tradition, with a Parliament since the fifteenth century.
Yet in all these cases, absolutism ultimately prevailed in the early modern period. In Poland, noble veto powers became so effective that collective action was impossible when serious military threat was looming, leading to the dissolution ofthe Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealthby 1795. The Hungarian nobility also failed to marshal a coordinated front and Hungary dissolved under the Ottoman onslaught in the 1520s, being partially absorbed into the Habsburg Empire. Sweden oscillated between absolutism and constitutionalism, whilst Denmark that had similar beginnings lapsed entirely, as did Russia and the Holy Roman Empire.Why, despite such precocious beginnings, did these cases not sustain representative institutions? The main alternative explanation of this divergence focuses on military pressures. Ertman for instance discerned a lack of “sustained geopolitical stimulus” in the Continental cases before 1450, which prevented the build-up of the state. He also crucially pointed to weak central structures and a strong, entrenched nobility as distinguishing these cases.[1038] Downing similarly pointed to the Polish internal failure to mobilize in response to geopolitical pressures.3
However, English pressures have not been demonstrated to be proportionately heavier than Hungarian or Polish ones before 1450. The English fought against the French, Scots, Welsh, and in the Crusades between the 1150s and 1300 (the critical period of institutional formation), but Hungarian engagements during the formative thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were likewise multipronged.
Hungarians participated in the Crusades, but also faced Russia, the Cumans, Byzantines, Mongols, Lithuanians and Poles, and battles in the Balkans.[1039] Moreover, what counts as military “pressure” is endogenous to the capacity to withstand it: the Mongol invasion in 1241 could have counted as such if Hungarian forces had not been simply overpowered. When rulers were weak, they preferred to sign a treaty with rivals, like the Hungarian Charles I in the 1320s.[1040] The Polish Piast kings also had to fight the Teutonic order, Brandenburg, Lithuania, Bohemia and others from a meager base to reconsolidate the fragmented Polish kingdom after the 1320s, doubling its size.[1041] These pressures don’t register as strong because royal powers were too limited to present a sizeable resistance; opponents simply prevailed and territory was lost or a truce was signed. Although pressures increased after 1450, they cannot be confirmed as negligible earlier.So how can we explain the “entrenched nobility” that Ertman and Downing aptly identified as a key obstacle to constitutional practice in the Central European cases,[1042] if military pressures differed little? The argument in this book suggests that its roots lie in the power relations between king and nobility in the period of origins and especially the nature of landed property rights distributed by the king. The common denominator across these cases is that kings had weaker capacity and could not compel the most powerful as effectively, so most constitutional dynamics transpired with lower social groups - what I have called secondbest constitutionalism. Instead of strong groups contracting to limit the ruler’s power, as conventional narratives claim, the king coordinated with the lower nobility to contain the great lords. This reverses the English pattern, where either fear of an insurgent crown forced barons to include broader groups, as we have seen, or when the crown itself expanded access to new groups, it could still compel the most powerful.
I begin with the two cases of Hungary and Poland, discussing first their similar land regime, and then tracing the links between their various “constitutional moments” and the key variables in this account, namely ruler power, conditional land grants, judicial structures, petitions, and taxation, to assess levels of functional layering, institutional fusion, and collective action at the aggregate level.8 As at many points throughout the book, absent data on military troops, tax revenues, and other forms of coercion over both ranks of the nobility, royal strength is mostly deduced from observed outcomes. But the proposed claims seem to accord with historians’ assessments. I conclude with a consideration of key ways in which Sweden, Denmark, and the Holy Roman Empire can also be explained through this book’s logic.
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