The struggle against the nobility

As the fight against the universality of church and Empire was being won, the monarchs were also making headway against feudal particularism. The two processes were, in fact, interrelated.

⁵³ The Bull Zelo Domus Dei, dated 20 November 1648, quoted in G. R. Cragg, The Church in the Age of Reason 1648-1789 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1960), p. 9. position derived from its network of fealty and family connections that extended beyond individual realms. To make things worse, medieval monarchs themselves formed part of that network. There was scarcely a king whose entire holdings were located inside his own realm (whatever that may have meant); scarcely a king, too, whose realm was not riddled by independent and semi-independent principalities of every sort. In theory kings were supposed to be mightier than any of their subjects, possessing greater income, more land, and more vassals who could be made to do service in peace and war. In practice they were often the vassals of other men for at least part of their lands. As late as 1576 Jean Bodin in his Six livres de la republique was able to argue that there was only one king, i.e., that of France, who was sovereign in all of his territories and did not owe homage to others for any of them; and, strictly speaking, he was right.

The speed with which, starting from this unfavorable situation, the position of kings was built up was not uniform but varied from one country to another. Occasionally it was subject to setbacks lasting for decades or more, which meant that a country that had advanced further on the way sank back into particularism and, as often as not, anarchy and war.

Nor were things improved by the fact that Richard I the Lionheart (1189-99) chose to reign in absentia. He opened his reign by going on crusade in the Holy Land; on his return to Europe he was imprisoned and had to be ransomed. No sooner had he come home then he left England for the second time in order to fight for his possessions in France where he too met his death. Richard’s brother John (1199-1216) tried to make good the damage done by his lion-hearted predecessor and originally it looked as if he might succeed. However, in 1204 the loss of his Duchy of

Normandy to the French king made him dependent on his English revenues alone. Attempting to squeeze the barons (and the church, with results that have already been pointed out), he quarreled with them and was forced to issue Magna Carta, in which he made extensive concessions to the nobility as well as the church and the towns. When Henry III (1216-72) succeeded John, the position of the monarchy touched nadir.

Thanks to the practice of marrying sons and daughters to the offspring of foreign princes, all of the above mentioned kings also possessed lands, or at any rate dynastic interests, in places as far apart as France, the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, and Spain. In the Middle Ages, war, far from being waged on behalf of the ‘‘public,'' was something that rival noblemen of all ranks engaged in to defend or extend their various possessions.⁵⁴ This required them to fight in person; and the need to fight in person explains why not only English monarchs but all others tended to lead itinerant lives that took them far away from the centers of their power. Thus German Emperors, to the extent that they were not away on crusade, spent much of their time campaigning in Italy. Some French monarchs also went on crusade but, even if they did not, were forever rushing around their domains in an attempt to prevent them from being par­titioned by the Emperor, the kings of Aragon, Castile, Navarre, and England, the count of Flanders, and - particularly after 1356 - the dukes of Burgundy as well. There was, as yet, no foreshadowing of the idea that the territories of any single ruler ought to be unified by the nationality of his subjects, nor that they should have natural frontiers, nor even that they should be concentrated in one place rather than dispersed. Under such circumstances whatever progress toward centralization could be made was likely to be slow and, what is more, temporary. As often as not it backfired; sooner or later one's own native nobility was likely to rebel, join forces with a foreign invader, or both.

Beginning in the last decades of the thirteenth century, nevertheless, change was in the air.

54

See P. Contamine, The Art of War in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 260-70. professional basis and staffed by highly expert personnel.^[95] His son, Edward II, became the first king to ascend the throne without being elected by the barons. Though this particular Edward was destined to be deposed and subsequently murdered by his wife, Isabella, and her lover, Mortimer,^[96] an even stronger monarchy emerged under his son Edward III. By this time the characteristic English formula that a king ought to reign in Parliament had emerged and was in operation. Using it, Edward was able to obtain sufficient funds to start the Hundred Years War in order to make good his claim to the French throne; this was, it should be noted, an essentially personal cause (though of course he promised to share the loot with his vassals) rather than in any sense a ‘‘public” or ‘‘national” one. Though his conduct of the war was indecisive, at any rate there were no more baronial rebellions during Edward III's long reign (1327-77).

Much more than the heroism of the English longbowmen, the cen­tralizing efforts of the Plantagenet monarchs explain why, though the kingdom that they headed was small and weak, they were able to contend with the much larger realm of France.^[97] However, when Edward III died his son, Richard II, was only ten years old. For years he was helpless as various noble factions sought to manipulate the crown for their own purposes; the low point was reached when Parliament, led by a group known as the Lords Appellant, impeached his chancellor (1386) and set up a committee of eleven men to exercise the royal prerogative on his behalf.^[98] Fighting back, Richard mounted a sort of coup d’etat.

As events were to show, Richard, like his grandfather Edward III, was trying to do too much too fast. Once again rebellion was the result, and in 1399 he shared the fate of Edward II by being deposed and mur­dered. Under Henry IV and Henry V it looked as if the monarch had finally established itself; but this proved to be an illusion. Henry VI was just a year old when his father died in 1422. His minority was never officially ended, but from 1437 he was considered old enough to rule for himself. His main interests, however, were education and religion. Around him his noblemen fought for control - the more so since at least one of them, Richard, duke of York, by way of strict primogeniture had a better claim to the throne than the king himself. A period during which Henry was temporarily insane (1453-4) set the stage for the beginning of an armed struggle between the two branches of the English royal family, the House of York and the House of Lancaster. Henry, himself a Lancastrian, was captured in battle by the Yorkists (1461). The duke of York having died, Henry was deposed in favor of the latter's son who ascended the throne as Edward IV. He was released for the second time, fled to Scotland as a refugee, returned as the fig­urehead of an uprising against Edward, and was captured for a third time (1465). After being imprisoned in the Tower for five years, he was released, restored to the throne by the grace of a powerful nobleman, the earl of Warwick (‘‘The Kingmaker''), defeated by the forces of Edward IV, and finally executed in 1471.

Nor did the so-called Wars of the Roses end at this point. Though he had briefly lost his throne to his predecessor in 1470, Edward IV, once restored in the next year, was able to reign in peace, and died in his bed (1483). Not so his two young sons Edward and Richard; within a matter of months they disappeared, apparently murdered by their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who thereupon took the throne as Richard III. He had only just survived a noble rebellion led by the duke of Buckingham when yet another pretender to the throne, the Lancastrian Henry Tudor, left his exile in France and landed in Wales. Deserted by most of his supporters, Richard was defeated and killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field (August 1485), and Henry Tudor succeeded to the throne as Henry VII. Only then did the English crown cease to be the happy hunting ground of aristocratic faction.

Henry VII and, even more, his descendants Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, were finally able to establish their own ascendancy to the point that revolt on any scale no longer appeared practicable. Their principal instruments for doing so were the Court of Requests, the Prerogative Courts, and the dreaded Star Chamber, all of which shared the quality that they did not apply the common law. Instead of mobilizing armies of supporters as their fathers and grandfathers had done, nobles who fell foul of the crown were liable to be accused of treason and executed. By using confiscated church land to distribute favors on a grand scale, the monarchy was able to draw the upper levels of the aristocracy to itself.^[99] In 1625 the accession of Charles I marked the first time in England's history when a new king felt sufficiently secure to refrain from executing some of his predecessors' noblemen and putting others in their place - a clear turning point. When civil war did break out once again in the 1640s, the nobility's status had been completely transformed. This time they did not mobilize their supporters and lead them against the king. Instead most of them were found fighting on his behalf and, later, sharing in his defeat as their estates were confiscated and they themselves driven into exile along with their master, the future Charles II.

Unlike their English colleagues, French barons never got to the point where they deposed their kings and executed them; still, in a different way, progress toward making the monarch not just primus inter pares but a real ruler was even slower. Both the population and the territory of France were much larger than those of England, making them more difficult to control. Even under ideal circumstances a letter sent from Paris to an outlying city such as Toulouse or Bordeaux might take between ten and fourteen days to arrive and as long again before an answer was received; but then circumstances were seldom ideal. Nor was there any question of a one-time conquest and consequent redistribution of all lands. Starting from the Ile de France, the realm was joined together piecemeal over a period of several centuries. It always contained independent enclaves as well as provinces whose laws, traditions, and even languages differed widely from each other.

Under such circumstances there could be no question of building a unified administration on the English model. Kings such as Philip II (1179-1223), Louis IX (1226-70), and Philip III (1270-85) had to proceed very carefully. They balanced the privileges of church, nobility, and urban communities against each other, all the while keeping a wary eye on their neighbors who stood ready to exploit any divisions that might arise to help themselves to outlying towns and provinces. To make things worse, the French system of inheritance differed from the English one. Time and time again vast royal appanages, i.e., nonhereditary estates, were created to support the reigning king's younger brothers on the scale that was considered their due; time after time they proved a source of trouble and had to be reabsorbed into the realm, sometimes by the use of force. Still, progress as measured by the increase of the number of royal servants such as seneschals, prevots, and bailiffs was perceptible. Paid by the king - although, in practice, they tended to accumulate landed estates and turn into noblemen if they could - these royal servants supervised provincial affairs, levied taxes, and carried out the royal will in general.

59

These trends were particularly pronounced under Philip IV and his immediate successors, Louis X (1314-16), Philip V (1316-22), Charles IV (1322-8), and Philip VI (1328-50) in his early years. They began to take away seigneurial privileges, such as the right to strike money; in­troduced Roman law with its inherent centralizing tendencies;⁶⁰ appoin­ted their own advisers to preside over courts in newly annexed provinces; and built up their positions as the ‘‘fount of justice,” i.e., heads of the courts of appeals to which vassals could turn in cases brought against their lords and to which, indeed, the latter themselves were supposed to have resort. These measures were beginning to bear fruit when the Hundred Years War broke out in 1337. Unable to prevent invasion, the royal armies were defeated at Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). This gave the signal for bands of English troops - some under royal control, others not - to pillage the helpless kingdom. They ranged far and wide not only in the northwest but in the south and southwest as well; the most famous of their raids covered no fewer than 600 miles and most of Languedoc before, laden with booty, it ended in Bordeaux. Meanwhile the French king, unable to come to his subjects' aid, saw his authority disintegrate.

The ground lost to the monarchy had only begun to be recovered during the last decades of the century when England, in the person of Henry V, found a formidable warrior. In 1415 he crossed the Channel and inflicted on the French the defeat of Agincourt. All of western France was now in Henry's hands or had made its peace with him; a real danger even existed of the kingdom being partitioned between the English and their Burgundian allies. Paris itself was lost in 1419, and in 1422 the Treaty of Troyes made Henry heir to the French throne. France's sub­sequent recovery had more to do with its people, as represented by Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, than with the rule of the intermittently mad Charles VI (1380-1422). The turning point was reached in 1435 when Charles VII (1422-61) concluded the Treaty of Arras and split the Anglo-Burgundian alliance. In the next year he was able to reoccupy Paris; the English were finally driven out, their various French allies such as the duke of Brittany brought to heel, and royal control over the entire realm reestablished.

The Hundred Years War over, the task of rebuilding the authority of the French crown fell to Louis XI, whom we last met as he was estab­lishing the rights of the monarchy over those of the church. The early years of his reign were hardly auspicious. The members of the higher nobility (including his brother, Charles of France) resumed the tradition

60

P. Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), pp. 29ff. of rebelling against him in the name of their ancient liberties. Intriguing with the king of England as well as with the duke of Burgundy, they formed the so-called League of the Public Weal with the aim of dividing up the government of France, plus the newly formed royal army, among themselves; the king's fortunes touched nadir in 1468 when, during a meeting with the duke of Burgundy, he actually found himself under house arrest. Having ended the war under humiliating conditions - huge pensions had to be paid to the rebellious lords - he was able to start rebuilding his authority. He freed the high nobility from their obligation to do homage to him as their liege lord, thus dispensing with the idea of mutuality; in its place he put a formula under which all alike were his subjects.^[100] The number of tax-collectors was increased and royal taxation extended to additional territories that had previously been free from it. Provincial parlements were put under royal supervision, and a beginning was made on the construction of a comprehensive royal code of law in the hope of achieving greater centralization of justice.^[101]

Still, Louis' greatest achievement was not of his own making. The occasion for it took place in 1477 when Charles the Bold, fighting the Swiss, was killed near the walls of Nancy. He left an only daughter, Marie, who was eighteen years old and who promptly found herself threatened by a rebellion of her own nobility in the Low Countries where she was staying at the time. The ‘‘damsel in distress'' was rescued by the young Emperor Maximilian who literally arrived on a white horse and married her; however, by the time he did so, much of her inheritance both in France Comte and in Flanders had been occupied by Louis and nothing that Maximilian or his successors could do was ever able to change that fact.

Though the annexation of Burgundy did not bring the policy of cre­ating royal appanages to an end, at any rate from now on it was no longer to resort to military force in order to reabsorb them into the realm. Louis' sons and successors Charles VIII (1483-98) and Louis XII (1498-1515) devoted themselves less to internal affairs than to a whole series of Italian campaigns, their goal being to carve out additional kingdoms for them­selves. That they were able to do so was largely their father's achievement; when the constable of Bourbon, not having heard that the period of feudal anarchy had ended, rose in 1523 and conspired with Charles V he found only a few followers and was easily dealt with. More remarkable still, even the capture of Francis I at the Battle of Pavia in 1525 and his subsequent imprisonment in Spain did not lead to any serious civil disturbances.

Toward the end of Francis' reign, though, the situation changed once again. Driven by the need for money for his anti-Habsburg campaigns, he initiated the policy whereby governorships of provinces were established and sold, either individually or in blocks comprising several at once, to the highest bidder. In general the purchasers proved to be members of the highest nobility such as the Guises, the Montmorencys, and the Rohans. Just at a time when their old feudal authority was ceasing to have any meaning, they were able to add the resources of office, such as emolu­ments and the proceeds of tax-farming, to their private ones; as in England a century earlier, this gave them a new lease on life and the capacity to stir up trouble.⁶³

In 1559, when Henry II died unexpectedly as a result of a wound received during a joust, the results of this policy became evident. He left behind him a widow with an unsavory reputation, Catherine de Medici, as well as four sons, none of whom, as it turned out, were capable either of governing or of begetting an heir. By this time France, like other coun­tries, was in the grip of the Reformation. As Catholics and Huguenots battled each other, they looked for leadership to their nobilities under the Houses of Guise and Conde respectively. No sooner was the war with Spain brought to an end by the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis than civil war broke out. It was to last for some forty years and brought about as much destruction as any other episode in French history.

Anarchy peaked in 1589 when the last of Catherine's sons, Henry III, was assassinated. The heir apparent was now a distant relative, the future Henry IV, who was himself a Protestant and thus unacceptable to the majority. Engaged in a life-or-death struggle, both parties called on foreign rulers to assist them. The Huguenots repeatedly received Dutch money and English troops who were sent to defend - in reality, occupy - cities along the Atlantic coast. The Catholics on their part made use of papal mercenaries as well as inviting invasions by Prince Casimir of the Palatinate and Philip II of Spain, the latter their country's greatest enemy. Nine more years were to pass and several major battles had to be fought before Henry IV, who in the meantime had changed his religion, was able to establish his authority over the entire country.

Once established, Henry's reign proved to be relatively quiet. Not that it was safe: an amazing number of plots was hatched against him by various noblemen, most of them strict Catholics who refused to forget his Protestant origins or forgive his policy of tolerating the Huguenots. The

63

G. Zeller, ‘‘Gouverneurs des provinces au seizieme siecle,” Revue Historique, 185, 1939, pp. 225-56.

last of these plots resulted in the king's assassination; the nature of the links that may have connected the actual murderer to the nobility and to Spain has never been cleared up.^[102] That Henry's achievement was more of a personal nature than an institutional one is proved by the stormy history of the reigns of his successors, Louis XIII (1610-43) and Louis XIV (1643-1715). Both Richelieu and Mazarin saw the high nobility as the main enemies of the crown and did everything they could to reduce it to order. They razed such of its castles as were not located within the frontiers; they tried, though without much success, to forbid dueling; and they occasionally executed ringleaders pour encourager les autres.

Though Richelieu in particular is sometimes regarded as the real founder of the French state, actually the results were mediocre. The two cardinals succeeded in making themselves hated like few administrators before or since; throughout their terms of office, discontent, fueled partly by the heavy demand for taxes occasioned by France's intervention in the Thirty Years War and partly by religious strife, was widespread. Times beyond number, towns and peasantry rose in revolt and found persons among the higher - even highest - nobility to lead them. Many of the nobles themselves still acted as provincial governors; but now they found an additional cause for anger in the royal policy of adding another layer of officials in the form of the intendants who were appointed over their heads. One way or another, in forty years there were no fewer than eleven waves of revolts. Though not all were equally significant, all without exception were instigated, led, or at least joined by important noblemen. The last wave was known as the Fronde and was led by Prince Louis Conde whose surname of Bourbon is sufficient evidence of his status. It lasted from 1652 to 1658 and for a time even succeeded in holding Paris against the royal armies.

It was only when Louis XIV came of age in 1661 that a fundamental turning point was reached and the French nobility finally tamed in much the same way as the English one had been a century and a half before. The policy of depriving them of their provincial governorships and appointing intendants in their place was pushed through systematically. The very basis of their status was altered; completing a job begun by Henry IV, Colbert by means of his great recherche de la noblesse refused recognition to any titles except those demonstrably originating in a royal grant. Thou­sands of noblemen, particularly minor ones who did not have the finan­cial means to fight their case in the provincial courts, lost their titles in this way. The remainder were stripped of their armed followings; the most important ones were given pensions and concentrated at court where the king could keep an eye on them. Conde himself forgot about rebelling and, returning to obedience, put his formidable military talents at Louis' disposal. He ended his days rowing ladies around the lake at Versailles; his fellow noblemen were soon found wearing perukes and competing as to who would hold the king's chamber pot.

64

Whereas in both England and France there was at any rate a single king with no titular competitors, the same was not true in Spain. The country, with its complicated terrain, had been conquered province by province during centuries of military operations against the Muslims; as late as 1479 it consisted not of a single kingdom but of two separate ones, Castile and Aragon, whose laws and traditions were entirely different. In the former some measure of stability was first achieved by Henry II of the House ofTrastamara (1369-79). His nicknames, Henry the Bastard and Henry the Fratricide, provide a sufficient explanation of the origins of his power and the way in which it was gained. His son John I (1379-90) was unremarkable; it was Henry III (1390-1406) who, playing the same role as Edward III in England, did most to reinforce the power of the crown vis-à-vis the nobility by building up royal institutions such as the council and the exchequer. Nevertheless the situation remained precarious. John (1406-54) succeeded his father as an infant. His entire reign was taken up by the quarrels of the nobility with his favorite, Alvaro de Luna, which finally made it necessary to confront and defeat the nobles in the Battle of Olmedo (1445).

The victory of Olmedo only settled the issue for the moment. When Henry IV took over in 1454, he inherited Luna, and again the result was several years of open civil war that lasted until the favorite was overthrown and executed. Though a capable commander - in 1464 he recaptured Gibraltar from the Muslims - Henry proved unable to dominate his nobles to the point that, in the very next year, they revolted and deposed him in effigy. The pretext for the quarrel was the succession which Henry wanted to give to his infant daughter. Spreading the rumor that he was impotent and therefore not her father, the magnates insisted that the throne should go to his half-sister Isabella, the real cause of the quarrel being, as usual, noble fears of royal centralization that would lead to the erosion of their privileges. At eighteen, Isabella herself confounded both her supporters and her opponents by eloping from the palace and secretly marrying Ferdinand II of Aragon. Thus the most important single event in the whole of Spanish history - the creation of a personal union of the two kingdoms - came about as the result of court intrigue and without the consent, or indeed the knowledge, of the king who supposedly was the most powerful in the peninsula.

In Aragon, as elsewhere, royal institutions made some progress during the fifteenth century^[103] but this did not prevent its history from being as stormy as that of Castile. Ferdinand I (1412-16) was himself a Castilian prince. He owed his throne not to any hereditary succession but to his election by the Aragonese nobility which, of course, extracted its pound of flesh in the form of a famous coronation oath that made its obedience conditional on the monarch's good behavior. Alfonso V (1416-58) was a capable ruler who, however, spent most of his reign fighting to establish a claim over Sicily and southern Italy which he had inherited from his ancestors. In 1442, under the influence of his mistress Lucrezia de Alagno, he moved his court permanently to Naples. His wife and brother, who were left behind, were unable to control the nobility which did as it pleased and drove both the cities and the peasantry into revolt by its fiscal demands.

Then it was the turn of John II. Within three years of his accession he had to deal with a revolt in Catalonia, the most difficult province of all, where the magnates offered the crown to Peter of Portugal; when the latter died, still not satisfied, they appealed to Louis XI of France for aid against their master. The war lasted for nine years and very nearly cost John his crown before it could be brought to an end by the capture of Barcelona in 1471; even then the outcome was not the nobility's suppres­sion but, on the contrary, a reaffirmation of its privileges accompanied by a general pardon for every ringleader but one, who was executed. John's son Ferdinand II, who later married Isabella, gained his own early mili­tary experience in these wars. Nor were the Castilian nobility at first inclined to accept him as their king. Instead they too called in the king of Portugal who himself had a dynastic claim. Discounting the years of the Aragonese revolt, it took the young couple ten years of near continuous war and, on Ferdinand's part, many heroic deeds before they were able to get themselves recognized in both countries. This did not prevent another major noble revolt in 1486, this time occasioned by the Catholic kings' attempt to recover land that had been alienated during the civil wars.^[104]

Throughout this period Spain was undergoing what can only be called a process of aristocratization.^[105] Not only did the members of all classes model their lifestyle upon that of the nobility, but the latter increased its economic power as its numbers declined to the point that, by the 1470s, there were only fifteen families of magnates left in Castile and two in Aragon.^[106] Against this background, progress in turning Castile and Aragon into a single country met with resistance on the part of both their assemblies and was abysmally slow. In 1507, following the expected death of Isabella and the unexpected one of her son, the duke of Medina Sidonia and the count of Urena revolted and threatened to dismantle Spain into its constituent parts. Using 4,000 troops, once again Fer­dinand was able to gain the upper hand; however, by the time he died in 1516, the only tangible achievement toward the construction of common institutions was the introduction of a unified currency.

Under Charles V (Carlos I as he was known in Spain) and his son Philip II the grandees' landed holdings took on monstrous dimensions. In Salamanca, for example, some two-thirds of both the population and the territory found themselves under noble jurisdiction. One magnate alone, the Marquis Diego Lopez Pacheco, possessed no fewer than 25,000 square kilometers of land and 15,000 vassals who brought him 100,000 ducats a year; another, the Duke of Infantado, was lord of 800 villages and 90,000 vassals.^[107]

Still, times were changing. Though the reconquista had been completed, the first two Habsburg kings needed the Castilian nobility's support against the towns and the middle classes who gave vent to their dissatis­faction by the revolt of the communeros in 1520-1. In return, they allowed them to exercise nearly absolute control over their estates, including seigneurial justice and the right to maintain private armies capable of holding their tenants in check. Thus reinforced in their positions the magnates finally made their peace with the royal government. Some of them entered its service as commanders and governors of overseas prov­inces - far from the center of power, it should be noted.

Not so in Aragon which, again thanks in large part to its nobility, was well on its way to becoming the most backward country in Western Europe. Nowhere else were feudal privileges as archaic or as extensive; during most of the sixteenth century the income which the province provided the crown was nil. Pursuing an old tradition, the grandees intrigued with their northern neighbor. This was carried to the point where there was some doubt whether, from the king's point of view, the province was an asset or merely a security risk.^[108] In 1591 there was another revolt which took Philip II 14,000 troops to suppress.^[109]

It was only then that the time for reckoning came. Though none of the province’s institutions was abolished, they were reformed to reflect the royal will. For the first time the king gained the right to appoint non­Aragonese as governors. The monopoly of the nobility over the justitia, a kind of prototype constitutional court left over from the Middle Ages and intended to protect subjects against arbitrary government, was broken; its head was replaced by a royal official and the remaining members were made subject to recall at the king’s pleasure. Finally, Philip reinforced the Inquisition - an instrument whose usefulness against political opponents as well as heretics had been demonstrated in Castile - by giving it a new fortified residence as well as a contingent of troops for its protection.^[110] Thus it was only a few years before Philip’s death that the task of bringing Aragon into line with the rest of the country was tackled and the indepen­dent power of the nobility finally broken, though this did not prevent further revolts during the seventeenth century.

In England, France, and Spain, the fight between crown and nobility at any rate proceeded more or less in the same direction and, sooner or later, yielded broadly similar results as the former was elevated far above the latter. This was not so in Germany where the situation was entirely different. However much the Holy Roman Empire was alive as an in­stitution and as an idea - in spirit, one might say - its real power had been declining since the second half of the thirteenth century, a state of affairs that the Golden Bull of 1356 merely confirmed. Responsibility for the Emperors’ weakness must be attributed to various factors including, not least, the sheer size of the countries they pretended to govern. On top of this came their struggle with the church on the one hand and their numerous commitments outside Germany on the other; rather than losing their independence, the most powerful members of the nobility were themselves able to build up their territories and launch them on the way to eventual statehood.

The factor that really opened their way was, once again, the Refor­mation. Until then the future of Germany had been in doubt; a modern historian has argued that an alliance between Emperor Maximilian with the south German cities in particular might have produced a united state.^[111] The cities were, in the early years of the sixteenth century, at the peak of their power; as a contemporary rhyme put it, the splendor of Augsburg, the wit of Nuremberg, the artillery of Strasbourg, and the money of Ulm ruled the world.^[112] By the 1520s all four, and a great many others as well, were giving Luther an enthusiastic welcome and were turning Protestant. Now the patrician merchant-bankers who ruled the towns in their own economic interests wanted nothing as much as peace and quiet. It is not inconceivable that they would have cooperated with Charles V against the territorial nobility; as they repeatedly told the Emperor, though, they were powerless to ignore the feelings of the common man and carry through his policy of enforcing religious unifor­mity. Conversely, if Charles himself ever contemplated relenting on the religious question we are ignorant of the fact. Given the firmness of his personal faith, he almost certainly did not - to say nothing of the effect that tolerating the Protestants would have had on his position as a universal, God-mandated Emperor.

During the first two decades of Charles' reign he was diverted away to other commitments in Spain, Hungary, Italy and North Africa. Hence he only returned to Germany in 1543-4, determined to tackle the problem. He brought with him Spanish troops under the command of the duke of Alba; at the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547, they easily scattered the haphaz­ard forces assembled by the Schmalkaldic League of Protestant rulers. However, he had come twenty years too late. He was able neither to reestablish his authority over the cities nor to force them back into the Catholic camp; their defeat merely opened the way to the princes who were being encouraged by Henry II of France. The storm broke in 1552 when one prince, Maurice of Saxony, turned upon Charles, taking him unawares and forcing him to flee from Innsbruck to Villach in Carinthia. Short of funds, faced with renewed threats from the Turks in the Mediter­ranean and from Henry II in Lorraine, Charles struggled on for three more years. However, the attempt to reestablish Imperial power was hopeless and, as we saw, he abdicated in 1555. Meanwhile the princes, whether Protestant or Catholic, swept through the country like raging boars. They secularized church property and annexed cities right and left.

The way in which the princes themselves gained control over their nobilities is best exemplified by Bavaria.^[113] During the fifteenth century, as a result of countless fratricidal wars, divisions, and redivisions, the nobility as represented in the Estates had remained almost the sole institution that held the country together. Their power peaked during the minority of Duke William IV (1508-50), i.e., the second decade of the sixteenth century; thereafter, though, it declined. The chink in the Estates' armor proved to be the huge debts undertaken both by William himself and by his successor, Albrecht V (1550-79). Repeatedly these debts threatened to bring government to a halt; repeatedly the Estates were compelled to assume them. Meanwhile a combination of ducal bullying and chicanery ensured that they should neither be able to main­tain their own collecting machinery nor gain a veto on the contracting of future obligations. Nor were the Estates able to stop the dukes from obtaining more money by taxing their own peasants and, on pain of secularization, the church. The fact that he had money, or at any rate could obtain it on his own or his Estates' credit, enabled Albrecht to insist on taking only Catholics into his service. By the time of his death the Bavarian Counter-Reformation, and with it the construction of a close alliance between church and throne, was well under way.

The example set by Bavaria was followed, though later rather than sooner, by many of the remaining principalities including Prussia, Saxony, Hesse, Württemberg, and Austria. However, a difference did exist between Prussia and other parts of Germany. In the former the power of the nobility over its peasantry tended to grow after 1550 as hereditary serfdom was introduced and many old feudal burdens reim- posed.^[114] Though serfdom also existed elsewhere in Germany, at any rate a class of free peasants was permitted to continue and some of them were even able to achieve modest prosperity. Furthermore, the nobility's powers of police and jurisdiction were less extensive than in Prussia.

The German princes' march toward greater control over their nobilities was interrupted by the Thirty Years War, when most of them were reduced to playthings in the hands of much greater rulers whose forces invaded Germany from all directions. In 1648, though, it was resumed; there was nothing that contemporaries wanted more than law and order. This time the example was set by Frederick William of Prussia (1640­88). Nicknamed the Great Elector, he levied taxes in order to raise troops and then used the troops to send the Estates packing. His successor Frederick I gathered the fruits of his policy and, having obtained the Emperor's permission, was able to have himself declared king in Borous- sia. Germany's remaining princes had to content themselves with less exalted titles; by way of compensation they built miniature imitations of Versailles and competed among themselves as to who could design the most extravagant uniforms for their troops. The Estates had not been defeated everywhere; in Württemberg in particular they remained alive and well. Still, and as the Treaty of Westphalia had confirmed, by the third quarter of the seventeenth century those among Germany's count­less principalities large enough to be considered something more than their rulers' private property were themselves turning into states.^[115]

The monarchs' victory over their nobilities was, in some ways, bought at the expense of the rest of society. Except in England, where the Revolution of 1688 brought all classes under the common law, many of their privileges survived intact. Though varying from one place to an­other, normally these privileges included special juridical status, i.e., the right to be tried by courts made up of members of their own class and exemption from the more degrading forms of punishment; freedom from certain forms of taxation, both direct and indirect; and a near-monopoly over top positions in the administration, in the army, and at court. In addition to this, there were such symbolic marques as the right to meet the sovereign face to face, wear a sword, hunt (a right no longer economically significant to the members of the upper classes, but much resented by those of the lower ones to whom it was denied), and to maintain a family coat of arms.^[116] No wonder that from this time until the cataclysm of 1789 - until, indeed, the upheavals of 1848 - whenever the monarchs were threatened the nobility rallied to their side. It stood by them, fought with them, and, as in France during the Terror, sometimes died with them as well. The deal that it cut with the throne was highly successful. Some­times, as in Prussia and Spain, it was able to arrest the development of the towns while at the same time retaining and even extending its feudal rights over its own tenants.

However, the price of privilege was a loss of independence. From being he crown's competitors, the nobility was turned into its associates. From wearing armor, rallying to the royal cause, and carrying their own banners while fighting for it they were, shortly after 1648, made to don uniforms and thus literally turned into ‘‘the king's men.'' After that date not even the greatest nobleman in any country could hope to play the role of a Warwick, a Guise, a Conde, a Tilly, or a Wallenstein - to say nothing of the fact that, as the Holy Roman Empire declined and several kings assumed ‘‘Imperial'' rights, the confirmation of old titles and the creation of new ones had itself turned into a royal monopoly. As the eighteenth century went on, the nobility's gradual loss of an independent role made its privileges more and more difficult to justify in the eyes of society at large. Before they could be abolished, though, the instruments which would enable royal power to assert itself had to be built.