Late Medieval Monarchy and the Origin of the Western State
The considerable surge in economic activity because of the multiplication of trade links (Commercial Revolution),and the rising cultural level coinciding with the emergence of the first European universities (Bologna, La Sorbonne, Oxford and Cambridge, Salamanca), were to transform European society in the Late Middle Ages.
The rigid tripartite structure into which feudal society was organized, featuring a landed nobility, peasants, and the clergy, was to fundamentally shift as a result of commercial expansion, the growth of cities, and the emergence of a new social class: the bourgeoisie, which would amass considerable wealth and gradually upset traditional relationships of power.These important changes would be reflected in the nature of Europe’s political and legal organization. Late medieval society would necessarily shed its feudal scheme as bourgeois city dwellers became the natural allies of the kings, in opposition to the traditional privileged classes. As we have seen in the last chapter, as of the late twelfth century, the old curia regia (royal court), composed of nobles and bishops, would absorb representatives of this new social class, which would discuss the kingdom’s key affairs with the traditional elite and the king.
Moreover, in the final medieval centuries, the confrontation between popes and emperors would enable a set of strong monarchs to assert the independence of their kingdoms from the papacy and the Holy German-Roman Empire, above all, in chronological order, in the kingdoms of Castile, France and England.
In European society, universalism and the feudal model would gradually decline as a series of kings tended to invest all power in their person. In this sense, the Castilian, French and English kings of the Late Middle Ages, had little in common with the German “royalty” which arose after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, because the very nature of the royal institution underwent three major transformations: the “kings” became “monarchs;” their crowns came to be inherited; and kings no longer ruled over a certain “nation” or “people”, but rather over entire territories.
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