The monarchs’ triumph

With the benefit of hindsight - always the historian’s best friend - the triumph of the monarchs during the period under consideration appears inevitable. Perhaps the most important single factor was represented by the prolonged, and as it were predestined, conflict between pope and Emperor which enabled the monarchs to play one off against the other; had the Emperor also been the head of the established religion, as was the case in virtually any other part of the world where similar political systems existed, then almost certainly his power would have proved suffocating and the modern state would never have been born.

As the list of their titles usually implies - almost without exception they were not only kings but marquises of this and counts of that - originally the monarchs themselves were merely great nobles who collected estates piecemeal until, one day and almost without noticing, they found them­selves at the head of a state. To this extent the question as to why they succeeded in overcoming the rest is meaningless: it reminds one of the story of the philologist who, having spent twenty years in an effort to determine who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, finally concluded that they had been written not by Homer but by another poet whose name was also Homer. This is but another way of saying that, of 500 or so contenders who presented themselves at the starting line and took part in the struggle,^[130] some were more successful than their fellows in setting up institutions, mobilizing economic resources, and translating those resour­ces into civil and military power. Hence they ended up by lording it over those fellows who submitted, and defeating (and if necessary killing) those who did not.

As with pope and Emperor, so vis-à-vis the cities, the monarchs were often able to play a game of divide-and-rule. On the one hand, and particularly in Spain and in Eastern Europe, it proved possible to harness the nobility in order to combat the cities and, if not to eliminate the latter altogether, at any rate to arrest their development and reduce them to political impotence. Elsewhere it was more a question of using the cities’ own internal divisions - as between rich and poor, merchants and craf­tsmen, those who lived within the walls and those who inhabited the subject countryside - in order to gain the upper hand over them. Frequently it was done by resorting to outright force, as in southern Germany in particular. In other cases it was an almost imperceptible process as royal appointees gradually curtailed urban democracy, took over the magistrates’ functions, levied taxes in their master's name, and suppressed occasional revolts when and where they took place. Whether rulers such as France’s Henry IV intended to put an end to their cities’ independence has been endlessly debated.¹⁰⁷ The point is that, in the long run he, as well as his predecessors and his successors, did precisely that.

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Regarded from yet another point of view, though, neither nobility nor the cities were defeated as decisively as this account might imply. As explained above, the former tended to retain both their privileges - such as exemption from taxes - and a near-monopoly on the upper ranks of government. The inhabitants of the latter lost their political indepen­dence and, as members of the Third Estate, saw themselves excluded from the ranks of government; but by way of compensation, the economic system of which they were both the main supporters and main benefici­aries was able to flourish as never before. Particularly in Western Europe, capitalism and monarchy marched together. Whether by means of tax­ation or loans, capitalism provided monarchy with financial muscle.

Having defeated their rivals by one method or another, the monarchs soon began to change the way they did business and presented themselves to the world. One of the earliest, and most important, changes took place in the military field. Owing partly to the personal nature of politics, partly to the knightly ethos, medieval rulers had normally commanded their armies in person and often fought hand to hand in the front ranks. Consequently casualties among them were by no means rare: some died; others were taken prisoner and had to be ransomed. For example, both the king of France and his heir were captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. James IV of Scotland was killed at Flodden in 1513; as already noted, the Battle of Pavia in 1525 ended with the capture of King Francis I of France. Not to be outdone, Francis’ rival Charles V fought hand to

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E.g. D. Parker, The Making of French Absolutism (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), pp. 66-7. hand in front of the walls of Tunis in 1535 and had several horses killed under him. Titian's portrait of the Emperor at the Battle of MUhlberg shows him as the perfect Christian knight, glued to his mount - he was, in fact, an excellent horseman - with his jaw firm and his gaze set, albeit, on this occasion, there is no indication that he fought in person.

By contrast, Charles' prudent son Philip II preferred to direct his far-flung campaigns by bureaucratic methods, relying on field comman­ders whom he selected from the highest nobility and surrounded with closely worded letters of instruction.

During the eighteenth century, the decline in the number of royal field commanders continued. The only important exceptions were Gustavus Adolphus' descendant, Charles XII, and Prussia's Frederick II, but even they no longer fought hand to hand but commanded from a safe position in the rear.¹⁰⁸ To compensate themselves for the lost joys of battle, some eighteenth-century monarchs, especially Louis XIV, would present themselves at the end of a siege, assume formal command, and put on heroic airs. Others, including notably Russia's Peter III, played with tin soldiers whom he would even take to bed with him. Of the three emperors who were present at Austerlitz in 1805, only one - Napoleon Bonaparte - was a military man and exercised effective command. The other two, Russia's Alexander and Austria's Francis I, acted as hangers-on and did little but put obstacles in front of their own subordinates - but this is to anticipate our story.

Linked to the change in the military field was a shift from itinerant to sedentary government. In this connection there is no need to go back as far as John Lackland of England who spent most of his reign touring his realm attended by a few family members and servants, a treasure chest, and 200 hounds; Louis XI of France, as well as his contemporaries the Emperors Frederick III and Maximilian I, were almost as mobile as him. Both secular and ecclesiastical rulers traveled to wherever there was a problem to be settled, and, according to their preferences, spent the rest of the time hunting animals or women.

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See M. van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 52-5.

spent more than a night in the same bed; during his last days he was reduced to such penury that he could not find an innkeeper who would take him in. As the example of Charles VIII and Louis XII shows, some rulers continued to spend many years away not only from their capitals but from their countries. Even the medieval idea of monarchs going on a crusade and abandoning government for the good of their souls had not been entirely forgotten, albeit from the late thirteenth century it tended to result in mere empty posturing. Thus it occasioned Erasmus' advice in The Education of a Christian Prince that they had better stay at home and mind their subjects' welfare.¹⁰⁹

As government became more centralized after 1550 or so, that advice began to be heeded. The first really sedentary monarch was, as already noted, Philip II. He struggled to govern from behind his desk, bending under the workload and often falling asleep over his papers. In England Elizabeth spent much of her reign traveling from one country house to the next; to her it was a question of saving money by living at the barons' expense. This was not the style chosen by her two successors, James I and Charles I. Together they exercised the closest thing that England ever came to absolute government - the years 1629-40 were known as the period of personal rule - and with short interruptions both of them chose to remain in or near London as they did so. Across the Channel, Catherine de Medici and her sons had been as itinerant as their predeces­sors, often spending months on the road. Once he had brought the civil war to an end, Henry IV normally resided in Paris; however, Louis XIII reversed the trend and often left his capital for months on end to inspect provinces, make ‘‘joyous entries,'' attend the weddings of his relatives, and oversee battles (he was incapable of exercising command).

Reflecting their new position high above ordinary mortals, the choice of partners that royalty could take in marriage narrowed. Medieval and Renaissance kings used family alliances to cement feudal ties and join new territories to their domains; hence they had often wedded members of the high nobility, either foreign or their own, such as duchesses and counts. For example, England's Richard II contemplated an alliance with the lord of Milan's daughter before settling for Anne of Bohemia, herself of less than royal stock. France's Louis XI married Charlotte of Savoy

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Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, L. K. Born, ed. (New York: Norton, 1964), p. 208.

(1451), Charles VIII Anne of Brittany (1497), and sixteenth-century French kings the daughters of the Medici ducal house. Now that provin­ces were ceasing to be regarded as private property and, except in Ger­many with its infinite number of petty principalities, most nonroyal families ceased to reign, monarchs sought to preserve their status by marrying exclusively into each other's families. The result almost amoun­ted to a kind of racism; as Lady Fleming, who in 1550 was briefly privileged to act as mistress to Henry II of France, put it, ‘‘the king's blood is a smoother and sweeter liquid than any other.''¹¹⁰ By the later eighteenth century even the Russian tsars, though long regarded as latecomers by the rest of Europe, were following the trend in a way calculated to put them far above even the greatest of their subjects. Elsewhere, systematic inbreeding practiced over generations sometimes led to noticeable instances of degeneration.

The shift from itinerant to sedentary government was itself part cause, part outcome of the growth in the size and splendor of courts. Gone were the days when a king such as Louis IX could be found sitting under a tree dispensing justice amidst his assembled nobles; the later the period, the more pronounced the trend toward majesty and the greater also the expense involved. The leaders in the field were the dukes of Burgundy whose etiquette has been made the subject of a famous description by Johan Huizinga;¹¹¹ first in Dijon and later in Ghent even to arrange the cutlery in other than the prescribed order was treated as an affront to the ducal dignity. But then it was precisely this quality which commended it to others, including Charles V - who spent his own youth surrounded by its splendors - Francis I, and Henry VIII.

Between 1500 and 1700 the number of royal attendants often rose into the thousands and even the tens of thousands. From the princesses of the blood - who could sometimes be found running across the palace so as not to miss some ceremony in which their presence was expected - to the most humble lackey they were subjected to something like a military discipline which determined who would do what, how, when, and to whom; and which, in turn, could not be maintained unless the all-power­ful monarch himself subscribed to it like the spring in a vast clockwork. As the duke of Saint-Simon said of Louis XIV, ‘‘with an almanac and a watch one could tell, three hundred miles away, what he was doing.''¹¹² To house these retinues it was necessary to construct entirely new pal-

¹¹⁰ Quoted in E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Royal French State 1460-1610 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 156.

¹¹¹ J.Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1965 edn.), pp. 39-44.

¹¹² Quoted in E. Lavisse, Louis XIV (Paris: Tallandier, 1978 [1905]), vol. VII, part I, p. 157. aces. The first was the Spanish Escorial whose location at the exact center of the Iberian Peninsula made it well suited to the purpose for which it had been designed. Then came the French Palais Royal and Versailles (originally a hunting lodge that expanded into a community of 150,000 people); the Bavarian Nymphenburg, the Austrian Schonbrunn, and the Prussian Charlottenburg, to mention only some of the best known. Each one was partly residential, partly administrative, and partly ceremonial in character.^[131] Each was surrounded by a formal garden where even the trees were made to obey their royal master by taking on geometrical forms; each came, or was soon provided, with a list of those whose status made them worthy of entering it. Rulers seldom left these residences, and then only on occasions of state and in the company of the entire court - when Louis XV on one occasion moved from Versailles to another place he insisted on his daughter-in-law, though she was desperately ill, coming along. The days when any subject could, in theory at any rate, hope to meet his or her king face to face and submit a complaint were coming to an end.

In a Christian civilization, to compare a monarch to God was tan­tamount to sacrilege. The Counter-Reformation had put an end to the situation whereby a king such as Olaf of Norway or Louis IX of France could be both great warriors and saints; however, humanist scholarship rose to the challenge. Now that rulers were no longer beatified, it made available an entire series of deities for them to identify with. The favor­ite choice for males was Hercules - as the title was passed from one monarch to another, Henry IV of France on one occasion was actually called ‘‘the Hercules who now reigns.” Normally his female counter­part was the hunting goddess Diana; presumably Venus with her re­cord of adultery would have proved too embarrassing. Name-calling apart, royal weddings, christenings, joyous entries, and similar ceremo­nies were frequently attended by deities including Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Neptune, Minerva, and Bacchus, not to mention numerous nymphs who were often impersonated by young women in the nude.^[132] Those who created the relevant paintings, sculptures, and tab­leaux vivants based themselves on handbooks especially written for the purpose, which provided illustrations and in which the gods' various qualities were spelt out. In this way European monarchs were able to cavort with divinities, albeit such as were pagan and taken only moder­ately seriously.

The monarchs' triumph over their various competitors also found its expression in the way they themselves were painted and sculpted. Medi­eval kings up to the second half of the fifteenth century were often shown mixing freely with their nobles while engaged in such activities as hunting or banqueting. Others, more religiously inclined, may be seen at prayer humbly kneeling in the company of their patron saints. An immense distance separates these works from their successors from the time of the Counter-Reformation on. Already Vasari toward the end of his life (he died in 1574) painted the ‘‘Apotheosis'' of Duke Cosimo de Medici. Within the next fifty years Rubens, Velazquez, and van Dyck - all three of them immensely successful court painters - could be found producing vast canvases which show royalty, either alone or in exclusive family groups, dramatically portrayed against a background calculated to en­hance their splendor such as a garden, hunting trophies, or a siege. Hung in the palace, the largest paintings were intended as coups de theatre, confronting visitors with a different angle of their master's august person each time they entered a new building or room. Others, produced on a smaller scale, were meant to decorate the king's private quarters or else for presentation.¹¹⁵

Medieval rulers often had vertical statues of themselves placed inside niches on the walls of churches, whereas graves were decorated with horizontal effigies that represented them and their wives. During the second half of the fifteenth century the place of both styles began to be taken by larger than life, free-standing, equestrian statues made of bronze. Instead of being enclosed by buildings, their purpose was to decorate public squares, a fashion that started in Italy where people had the one of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill to serve as an example. Around 1475 the Sforza rulers of Milan became the first to commission statues of themselves on horseback, though they were never completed. Much later their example was followed in other countries such as France (Louis XIII) and Prussia (the Great Elector). Often the less martial a ruler the more heroic his statue. A case in point is the one of Charles I made by Hubert le Sueur in 1630. While the king is shown wearing jousting armor, it was precisely during his reign that the sport, which in any case had long lost any resemblance to real-life war, was abandoned.¹¹⁶

Whichever way one looks at it, the dawning age of absolutism found rulers raised to splendid heights rarely attained, if indeed contemplated, by their relatively humble medieval predecessors - including also the

¹¹⁵ See C. Brown, Van Dyck (Oxford: Phaedon, 1982), particularly ch. 4.

¹¹⁶ J. Pope-Hennessey, Italian Renaissance Sculpture (London: Phaedon, 1971), pp. 52-9. newly found, and eagerly sought after, ability to cure various diseases by a touch of the hand.¹¹⁷ Having destroyed their competitors or harnessed them to their own service, kings had power that in theory was unprece­dented. In practice, though, the isolated sites of the palaces that they built for themselves, the number of attendants by whom they were sur­rounded, and the amount of ceremonial on which they insisted all pointed in the opposite direction. As we shall see in the next chapter, other things being equal, the more absolute any monarch the greater his dependence on impersonal bureaucratic, military, and legal mechanisms to transmit his will and impose it on society at large. In the end, those mechanisms showed themselves capable of functioning without him and were even destined to take power away from him.

¹¹⁷ See M. Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (London: Routledge, 1973).