The struggle against the towns

Church, empire, and nobility aside, the fourth type of political organiz­ation that had to be overcome before the modern state could be created were the urban communities. Particularly in Southern Europe, many of these communities were leftovers from Roman times; if the people and institutions did not display continuity from classical times, at any rate the physical sites and sometimes the streets and fortifications did.

From the beginning towns were corporate bodies. Whatever the extent of their privileges and the way in which they were gained, these were granted not to individuals but to all citizens who, being sharply differen­tiated from the rural population, possessed ‘‘free” - that is, nonservile - status. In this way towns contradicted the very principles of feudal gover­nment which were based on the interlocking rights of superiors over inferiors; nevertheless, from the point of view of the would-be centralizing monarchs, the problem that the towns presented was much the same as that posed by the nobility. Just as each nobleman was, to some extent, his own lord and exercised power inferior to, but not essentially different from that of the king, so towns had their own organs of government.

Finally, towns differed from villages in that, on top of these privileges, they possessed their own fortifications, guards responsible for the main­tenance of public order, and, in the form of militias (particularly in Italy), mercenaries, their own armed forces.⁸⁰ To one extent or another this organization and these forces - backed by wealth derived from trade and manufacturing - enabled them to assert their independence both against their original founders and against the higher authority represented by the king; this capability often extended to the point of declaring and waging open war.

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Also like noblemen, the influence of the towns was not purely local but supplemented by the connections that they maintained with each other across territorial borders. Trading relations represented one foundation on which such connections could be built; another was the commonality of institutions, given that newly established towns were often given, or else took for themselves, the laws and political organization of existing ones and were sensitive to any attempt to take them away. Whatever the basis for their feelings of solidarity, they often formed alliances or leagues aimed at securing the roads, maintaining the peace, and defending their interests in regard to freedom from tolls and the like. The most famous associations were those of northern Italy on the one hand and of Germany on the other. The former were created as early as the twelfth century. They successfully fought the German Emperors at Legnano in 1176, and were soon to witness the cultural flowering known as the Renaissance.

Above all, medieval towns were often able to take advantage of the conflicts between the various monarchs, princes, and noblemen to press for their own interests and even conduct their own foreign policy. As fortified places they could refuse entry to one side or another, thus making it necessary to engage in a long and costly siege; as centers of wealth and manufacture they could demand political concessions in return for men, money, and arms. This was all the more so because, as the latter became more sophisticated following the introduction of gunpow­der, they could no longer be provided by any rural blacksmith but had to be sought exclusively within or around the towns. As might be expected, the demands most frequently raised were for self-government on the one hand and immunity to various forms of taxation on the other. Seen from

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For a recent account of medieval urban institutions, see S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), ch. 6. this point of view, the rise of the great monarchies is largely the story of their rulers' attempts to reduce or eliminate those twin privileges.

As in the case of the nobility, the manner and speed with which the process was carried out differed markedly from one country to another. As in the case of the nobility, too, the results were broadly similar insofar as they led to the establishment of a strong central authority that towered above everybody else. It was most easily accomplished in England. Thanks partly to its insular position, partly to the Conquest, it became a unified country at an exceptionally early time; consequently the towns were unable to play off the king against foreign rulers as they did in so many other places.

The relatively subordinate position of the towns meant that they could retain their old charters, or be granted new ones, without the central government feeling itself threatened.^[120] It also permitted the uninterrup­ted development of their institutions which, in essence, continued in existence until the great reforms of the nineteenth century took power out of the hands of the urban oligarchies. Backed by royal power, their officials were able to avoid the ferocious struggles between guilds and patriarchate that marked their counterparts in every other country; more­over, the position of the towns explains why, though medieval England was as subject to noble revolts as any other country, from the time of Edward I on those revolts already bore a somewhat superficial character. The normal way in which aristocratic factions sought to gain control of the crown was by engaging in intrigue at court. At intervals they would also chase each other across the countryside, particularly in the north where one side or both could often call on the Scots to join the fray. Given the noninvolvement of the towns and the early collapse of feudalism in England, the only people they could rely on for their quarrels were their personal retainers and such volunteers as chose to join the cause.

It was only during the Civil War that the situation underwent a tem­porary change. Most historians agree that the revolt against Charles I was initiated by the gentry, landed property-owners who made up no less than three-quarters of the House of Commons.⁸⁴ Still, it was the towns, with London at their head, that provided the financial muscle as well as the appropriate ideology in the form of Puritanism. The towns' readiness to involve themselves in the war meant that it was fought on a far larger scale, and wrought much more destruction, than any of its predecessors; this was all the more so because England had become, owing to the decline of the nobility as a military case, essentially an open country with few modern fortifications capable of withstanding serious attack. What saved the situation was the fact that, following a century and a half of powerful Tudor monarchs, the central government's control over the entire realm had long ceased to be questioned. The Protectorate that emerged from the war was, if anything, stronger and more centralized than the monarchy whose place it took. And indeed it was Cromwell who launched England, hitherto much smaller and weaker than either France or Spain, on its way to the status of a great power that it was to occupy in the eighteenth century.

Whereas English towns put few obstacles in front of the central auth­ority, the same was not true of other countries including, above all, Italy and Germany. In Italy with its Roman traditions, towns arrived early and may, indeed, never have disappeared altogether. Though some of them were ruled by bishops, with hardly any exceptions they were neither founded by members of the feudal nobility nor governed by them.⁸⁵ From the beginning they stood out sharply from the countryside; far from having to be emancipated from it by the grant of privileges, the strongest of them started to conquer it in order to create an agricultural

⁸⁴ L.

91ff.

⁸⁵ For the characteristics of Italian cities during this period, see G. Chittolini, ‘‘Cities, ‘City-States,’ and Regional States in North-Central Italy,” in C. Tilly and W. P. Blockmans, eds., Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, AD 1000 to 1800 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 28-44. and commercial hinterland for themselves. Endless wars, most of them originating in commercial rivalry, also divided the towns from each other. As these wars caused the smaller ones to fall by the wayside, five large towns - Genoa, Venice, Milan, Florence, and Rome - emerged and succeeded in turning themselves into what were, for most intents and purposes, fully independent political communities. The power of the cities, both inside Italy and outside it by way of the networks of trade and banking that they created, peaked during the second half of the fifteenth century.

However, domination over others usually has its price and the Italian towns were no exception. As the most eminent of Florence’s historians, Francesco Guicciardini, was well aware, ancient city-states such as Sparta, Athens, and Rome traced their origins to the voluntary symbiosis of villages. Engaging in its career of conquest, Rome in particular had been able to turn its Italian subjects into willing allies with whom, until the ‘‘social war’’ of 90-89 BC, it shared fortunes good and bad. Not so medieval Italian towns. As they made their power felt outside their walls, they did not incorporate the inhabitants of the countryside (including such smaller towns as it contained) into their citizen-bodies; instead they merely sought to exploit them by means of tolls, taxes, and various other forms of economic discrimination designed to prevent the development of industry.⁸⁶ Not only were they unable to count on their subjects to fight for them, but they even required armed force to hold them down. Consequently they were never able to create national armies but were forced to rely on mercenaries instead. The latter, besides occasionally turning against their employers and taking over, were expensive and seldom inclined to fight too hard.

The results of this policy became apparent in the years after 1494. In terms of economic and cultural accomplishment Italy led the world; however, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively could Italian armies match the much stronger foreign ones that invaded the peninsula and fought each other on its territory. Often, indeed, those foreigners were welcomed by at least part of the population which sought (as in Pisa) to reestablish its independence or (as in Florence) to replace oligarchic by democratic rule or vice versa. For over half a century northern Italy in particular was turned into a battlefield. Here Spaniards, French, and Imperialists - each in their turn supported by ferocious Swiss mercena­ries - fought each other; as they were conquered and reconquered, one after another the cities lost their independence to central governments,

⁸⁶ F. Bocchi, ‘‘Citta e campagna nell’Italia centro-settentrionale (secc. XII-XIV),’’ Storia della Città, 10, 1986, pp. 101-4; M. Berengo, ‘‘Citta e contado in Italia dal XV al XVII secolo,’’ Storia della Città, 10, 1986, pp. 107-11. albeit such as were introduced from other countries. Notwithstanding Machiavelli’s hopes as expressed in the last chapter of The Prince, out of the five candidates only two, Venice and Rome, succeeded in surviving as independent states. Venice, its days of economic greatness gone after 1550, was too small to play a significant political role and soon came to lead the dreamlike existence so well portrayed in the paintings of Ca­naletto, whereas Rome, by virtue of its unique ecclesiastical character, was and remained opposed to everything that an Italian state might have stood for.

In Germany towns were more numerous, and their origins more di­verse, than anywhere else. Some, particularly in the south, had very ancient roots, having been established as Roman colonies; others, par­ticularly in the north, were created completely ex novo during the great period of eastward migration between the eleventh and early fourteenth centuries.⁸⁷ For the northern towns in general, and for those united in the Hansa (originally meaning An-See, ‘‘on the sea’’) in particular, the tur­ning point in their fortunes came during the second half of the fifteenth century. It was connected to a shift in the habitat of their chief product, herring, as well as growing Dutch commercial competition that led to their economic decline.⁸⁸ Whereas in England (and, as we shall see, France) there was usually the king to protect the towns against the worst that the nobility could do, in Germany the Emperor was too weak and remote to play that role - the more so because the center of his power was already beginning to shift to Bohemia and the Danube.

Thus, already in 1442-8 the elector of Brandenburg took advantage of the disputes between the patriarchate and the guilds of Berlin to deprive the town of its right of self-rule. From about 1480 on we begin to hear of cases in which townspeople were refused the right to harbor runaway peasants, were subjected to various tolls, and were even forced to render labor services such as hauling the lord’s goods. By 1500 there were no free towns left in Brandenburg; in time the system was extended throughout Prussia. The legal differences between town and countryside were largely eliminated, all alike coming under the dukes’ despotic rule. By the eight­eenth century, instead of breathing the spirit of liberty and participating in the commercial revolution that was making English and French cities rich, any Prussian town that was selected to house a royal garrison considered itself lucky.

Some of the Hansa’s members awoke to the dangers that faced them shortly after 1500. A number of congresses were held and various

⁸⁷ See H. Stoob, Forschungen zum Stadtwesen in Europa (Cologne: Boehlau, 1979), vol. I.

⁸⁸ On the fate of the north German towns, see F. L. Carsten, The Origins of Prussia (Oxford:

Clarendon, 1954), pp. 109ff.

schemes set afoot to reform the association and give it a more centralized character - including what it lacked most, a system of taxation and a common army. It was, however, a question of too little too late. German towns, though numerous, tended to be smaller than their Italian counter­parts.^[121] Surrounded by a very large number of petty noble domains, most of them had never been able to develop an independent power base by expanding into the surrounding countryside. Over the next hundred years some of them were simply annexed by the rulers of Denmark, Sweden, and Prussia with whom they had formerly been able to deal on equal terms. Others, though they retained their independence as free cities, sank into political - although, as the example of Frankfurt and Hamburg shows, not always economic - insignificance. The Thirty Years War hit some towns much harder than it did others; nevertheless, by demonstrating the Hansa's military impotence, it set the tombstone on the latter's grave. As a matter of fact some attempts were made to revive the association after 1648, but with little success.^[122] Only in the eastern Baltic, where the kings of Poland proved too weak to play a role analogous to that of the German princes, did a few towns such as Danzig retain their privileges into the eighteenth century.

Dominating the great trading routes between Southern and Northern Europe as they did, and often containing valuable minerals on their territory, south German towns were generally more successful in main­taining their prosperity than north German ones. For a time around 1500 it looked as if they had the option of turning Swiss, that, is, of creating a genuine alliance between town and countryside that would enable them to resist the encroachment of the territorial princes. As in Italy, though, these plans were defeated by the oligarchic outlook of the commercial elites which cared only for their own interests, narrowly defined. The Peasants' Revolt of 1525 frightened the south German towns. Aban­doned by an Emperor whose worldwide commitments made him mani­festly unable to protect them, thereafter they were generally inclined to cooperate with the princes.

As had happened in the north, some towns were annexed outright and were henceforward subject to direct government by the princes' appoin­tees. Others, retaining free or Imperial status, found themselves bypassed by history and deserted by trading routes which were shifting to the Atlantic; they sank into a torpor that lasted until the French Revolution and beyond. Perhaps the most fortunate ones were those selected as a Residenz or capital for the newly consolidating territorial states such as Munich, Mannheim, and Coblenz;^[123] Vienna, from where Ferdinand I ruled the newly consolidated hereditary lands, was even able to achieve politico-economic leadership over the entire Danube basin. Here and elsewhere, however, there was a price to be paid. In 1521-2, following an abortive revolt, Vienna's privileges - including the right to maintain a mint - were revoked. Municipal elections came to an end, and the Burgomaster, one Siebenburger, was executed.

Somewhere in between those extremes fell France and Spain. In the former, relations between crown and towns closely paralleled those bet­ween crown and nobility. Some progress toward asserting royal control over both was made from the days of Philip IV on; as in the case of the nobility, though, the French kings lost their towns during the Hundred Years War when many of them, caught between the adversaries, were forced to negotiate on their own behalf and strike the best bargain they could. Particularly during the critical period of the war from 1415 to 1435, many towns behaved almost as if they were independent political entities. Abandoned by the king, they conducted their own foreign policy and often used their own armed forces in order to defend themselves against the depredations of all and sundry. Nor did this kind of thing come to an end after 1435. Many towns found themselves inside the newly consolidated realm and thus at the king's mercy. However, others - particularly those located near the frontiers of Burgundy - were able to continue playing the old games.

From 1439 to 1559 French kings, though not fundamentally opposed to the autonomy of their bonnes villes, did everything in their power to make them amenable to their demands, particularly in regard to fi­nance.^[124] Charles VII himself showed the way, renewing royal taxes such as the taille and the gabelle on communities which were liberated from English rule and occasionally using force to suppress those which, like Lyons, refused to pay.^[125] Likewise, Louis XI aimed at making sure that they would obey the royal justice, supply royal armies as they passed through, and pay taxes. Given that his position was much stronger than that of his father, he sometimes went so far as to nominate their magis­trates directly; normally, though, his method was to have the council submit a list of three names to the bailiff to choose from. By the end of his reign many of the towns' fortifications were falling into ruin and their militias were no longer active.⁹⁴

As in the case of the nobility, French towns were given a new lease on political life during the religious wars. Spreading from Geneva, the French Reformation differed from the German one in that it never really took hold among the masses in the countryside. Instead it was most influential among noblemen (including, in particular, noblewomen) on the one hand and townspeople on the other. Time after time the Catholic majority, composing 90-5 percent of the population, turned against their Huguenot neighbors in massacres great and small. Forced to defend themselves, from 1560 on they turned the country into a veritable ar­chipelago of semi-independent communities, each with its well develop­ed organs of government and armed forces. As the term ‘‘League'' itself shows, both Catholic and Huguenot cities formed alliances among them­selves as well as with noblemen of their respective creeds (sometimes, when pecuniary interests predominated, those of other creeds). All fought each other in a desultory way, at times allying themselves with the crown and at other times opposing it even to the extent of taking the king prisoner. Though open warfare ceased under Henry IV the underlying reality remained much the same. Communal independence was, indeed, reinforced by the Edict of Nantes which, besides granting the Huguenots freedom of worship, permitted them to maintain their own fortifications and their own armed forces. These privileges go a long way toward explaining why, throughout the time of disturbances from 1610 to 1661, the towns were able to play a role similar to that of the nobility and to cause the monarchy as much trouble as the latter.

Where the towns' internal government was concerned Henry IV chose not to introduce any revolutionary changes. The fifteenth-century system whereby the lists of candidates for the mayoralty were submitted to the king remained in force; though Henry sometimes overrode his subjects' proposals, this was not always the result of deliberate policy, since in some cases it merely reflected the towns' own inability to come up with an agreed-upon list. His ambiguous attitude was reflected in contemporary opinion concerning Paris, the most important city of all. Some thought Henry never interfered in the city's affairs, others that he was sys­tematically trying to eliminate its independence. The truth seems to have been somewhere in between. In Paris and elsewhere the king made his power felt when the danger of tumults, or fiscal needs, rendered interven­tion necessary. From time to time he also saw a need to keep a well-

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B. Chevalier, ‘‘The Policy of Louis XI Toward the Bonnes Villes: The Case of Tours,” in Lewis, Recovery of France, pp. 265-93. known opponent from taking office or else used the offices themselves as a way of bestowing favor at no cost to himself. Otherwise, though, he was inclined to leave them alone.^[126]

In the long run, much more dangerous to municipal independence were the attempts of Sully, as secretary to the treasury, to bring their finances under his supervision. As a condition for authorizing taxation, he demanded that they submit their accounts every three years; in time, this would have given him effective control. In the event both Sully and his master passed from the scene before that control was complete, leaving the task to Mazarin during his later years. To recall a few landmarks only, in 1655 an anti-fiscal revolt at Angers led to a three-month occupation of the town by royal troops under the intendants; the age-old system of municipal elections was definitely suppressed and maire and echevins were replaced by royal appointees. Aix, having revolted in 1658, suffered a similar fate. When Marseilles revolted in the same year, it was treated by Mazarin almost as an occupied city; troops were quartered on it, parts of the wall were razed, the urban militia disbanded, the inhabitants disar­med, a new citadel built, and the very title of consul traditionally carried by the elected magistrates abolished. In 1692 Louis XIV completed the process by putting an end to the election of magistrates in all French towns. From then on, it was the intendants who ruled.^[127]

In Spain, thanks largely to the wars against the Muslims which forced successive kings to look to them for support, the tradition of self-gover­ning towns was as strong as anywhere else.^[128] However, during the last decades of the fifteenth century those wars were coming to an end. The Catholic kings were anxious to whittle away the towns' independence; the latter on their part were weary of anarchy and ready for a lead. Already since the fourteenth century occasional corregidores had been sent to some Castilian towns to oversee their affairs - then as now, the phrase ‘‘I am from the government; I am here to help you'' was one of the greatest lies in any language. In 1480 it was decided to introduce them into all towns which did not yet have them and to make their office permanent. Originally judicial officers, subsequently the corregidores also acquired administrative authority. They acted as de facto royal governors, control­ling all aspects of municipal administration including, in particular, finance. So long as Ferdinand and Isabella remained alive the system worked to the satisfaction of both sides. After their deaths, though, Charles V during his first brief sojourn in Spain in 1516-19 misused it to reward his favorites most of whom were both foreigners and ill qualified for the job; it was no wonder that the towns' ire was aroused.

When Charles, seeking the Imperial crown, turned his back on Spain in 1519, the towns thought that their time had come. Among the middle classes and artisans, resistance to aristocratic encroachment had been simmering for decades; now an additional grievance was found in the form of newly imposed royal taxes.⁹⁸ The sign for the rebellion was given in May 1520 when Toledo expelled its corregidor. In the next month the revolt spread to most of the cities of Old Castile. One by one they expelled royal officials and tax collectors - a few were unlucky enough to get killed in the process - and proclaimed a communidad. In July the representatives of four cities met at Avila. They set up a revolutionary junta which drove the regent, Adrian of Utrecht, out of Valladolid and established a rival government. The movement peaked in September when, now represen­ting fourteen of eighteen towns and backed by an army of its own, the junta proclaimed that the kingdom stood above the king and that they themselves represented the kingdom. After initial hesitation, the regent reacted by coopting the representatives of the high nobility into the government. Mobilizing their forces as well as his own, he defeated the rebels at the Battle of Villalar in April 1521. The various towns were besieged in turn, until finally Toledo itself was forced to capitulate in October 1521.

Simultaneously with the communeros, the germanias, or popular as­sociations, of Aragon wrested control of the cities out of the hands of the authorities, though the two movements never cooperated. As in Castile, the rebellion was carried principally by the middle classes and aimed as much against the growing power of the aristocracy as against the crown. As in Castile, too, it was the latter that emerged the victor when the movementwas suppressed. However, the Spanish crown was less success­ful than the French one in balancing the nobility against the towns. In Aragon they were all but abandoned to the tender mercies of the grandees who for several centuries to come did everything they could to turn the country into a Mediterranean Poland. In Castile, defeat left them power­less, enabling Charles V and Philip II to suck them dry by means of royal monopolies, export duties, forced loans, and the repeated seizure of imported bullion." Committed years in advance to support Spain's

⁹⁸ For the history of the communeros movement, see S. Haliczer, The Communeros of Castile:

The Forming of a Revolution, 1475-1521 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981); and A. W. Lovett, Early Habsburg Spain, 1517-1598 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 30ff.

⁹⁹ See data in R. Trevor Davies, The Golden Century of Spain (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 180ff. military campaigns in the Mediterranean and, later on, the Netherlands, not even the growing flow of silver arriving from the New World could save the Castilian economy. The first signs of urban decay, occasioned very largely by the impossible demands of royal taxation which they were unable to resist, became evident in the 1560s.¹⁰⁰ Their piteous appeals for relief were to no avail. Between 1600 and 1700 Castile's urban population (except that of Madrid) fell by more than half,¹⁰¹ thus laun­ching Spain on the road to the economic and social backwardness from which it was to start emerging only after the Napoleonic conquest and, indeed, in the late twentieth century.

Finally, in two countries - Switzerland and the Netherlands - the towns, far from surrendering to royal government, were themselves able to take over. The greatest achievement of the Swiss towns consisted in that, unlike their Italian counterparts, they never lost the loyalty of the countryside - the cantons - over which they ruled.¹⁰² As Machiavelli in L'arte della guerra noted, after Fornovo in 1494 Italian armies became notorious for their ineffectiveness, melting away before the first shock. Not so Swiss ones, which for several centuries past had built up a well-deserved reputation for courage and even ferocity. Consequently they were able to resist the Habsburg attempts to dominate them; later they were equally successful in fighting off the rulers of Burgundy, France, and Savoy. Having done so, they switched to the offensive and consolidated from a patchwork of scattered districts, connected only by mountain passes, to a fairly coherent country. Though formal secession from the Empire came only in 1648, long before that Zurich, Bern, and the rest had built a loose confederation that was practically independent. Already it was adopting the policy of armed neutrality that was to charac­terize it in future centuries. Interrupted only by the wars of the French Revolution, it lasted until the outbreak of a brief civil war led to the creation of a modern Swiss state in 1847.

From 1384 on the Netherlands, hitherto a motley assembly of provin­ces ruled by a variety of dukes and counts, had fallen under the domina­tion of the House of Burgundy, which acquired them one by one. They underwent the same centralizing tendencies that prevailed in other coun­tries; and indeed throughout the fifteenth century Burgundy had, if anything, been ahead of other monarchies in this respect.¹⁰³ The direc­tion in which things were moving was dramatically illustrated in 1540.

¹⁰⁰ J. H. Elton, ‘‘The Decline of Spain,” Past and Present, 20, 1961, pp. 61ff.; A. D. Ortiz, The Golden Century of Spain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp. 184ff.

¹⁰¹ Figures from Fernandez Albaladejo, ‘‘Cities and the State in Spain,” p. 177, table 8.1.

¹⁰² On the achievement of the Swiss, see M. V. Clarke, The Medieval City-State (Cam­bridge: Speculum, 1966 edn.), ch. 7.

¹⁰³ H. Pirenne, ‘‘The Formation and Constitution of the Burgundian State,” American Historical Review, 14, 1909, pp. 477-502.

Charles V's own grandmother Marie had seen her rule threatened, and her advisers executed, by the magistrates of Ghent; now, using an antifis­cal revolt as his excuse, the Emperor in turn executed some of the town's leading citizens and deprived it of its ancient privileges, particularly as regards to the right to collect its own taxes. In this way the power of a community which for centuries had given endless trouble first to the French kings and then to Charles' own ancestors was broken, never to be restored, as commercial greatness deserted it and passed to Antwerp.

However, in the next generation Charles' son Philip overplayed his hand by trying to suppress the Reformation and introduce new taxes - the famous alcabala or tenth pence - at the same time. Just as Charles had alienated the Spanish towns by introducing Flemish advisers, so Philip achieved the same effect in reverse when he sent a Spaniard (Nicholas Perenot) to succeed his own half-sister Margaret as governor of the Netherlands in 1565. By so doing he managed to do what few other rulers in any other early modern country had done: namely cause an alliance to be forged between the towns and at least part of the nobility. The outcome of the alliance, which directed its efforts against him, was the Dutch War of Independence. It lasted from 1568 to 1648 and was paid for almost entirely by the now highly prosperous, and prospering, cities of Holland and Zealand.

The United Provinces that came into being following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1579 did have a titular leader in the person of William the Silent. After his assassination in 1584 the position of Stadthouder or lieutenant-general was destined to remain in the hands of his family; far from being hereditary kings, however, each of his successors had to gain the approval of the Estates General before taking up the office. These princes lacked great private resources - having spent his fortune (quite modest, to begin with) to raise armies during the early stages of the revolt, William the Silent himself left nothing but debts. On the other hand, they did not have the right to levy taxes on their own. Hence, the House of Orange never even got close to establishing absolute rule toward which contemporary monarchs were working; indeed there were periods, as between 1650 and 1672, when the Provinces made do without any Stadthouder at all. Meanwhile the cities that were represented in the Estates, numbering no fewer than fifty-eight, kept their respective delegates on extremely tight leashes. To this extent they were the state.¹⁰⁴

¹⁰⁴ On the political system of the Netherlands, see C. Wilson, The Dutch Republic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), ch. 3; M. 'T Hart, ‘‘Intercity Rivalries and the Making of the Dutch State,” in Tilly and Blockmans, Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, pp. 199-203; also, at greater length, 'T Hart, The Making of a Bourgeois State: War, Politics and Finance During the Dutch Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

The dominant position of the Dutch patriarchate meant that, as in Switzerland, evolution toward modern, unitary, centralized statehood was arrested or at least delayed. And yet, remarkably, neither country fell victim to their much more powerful neighbors. This was due, in the one case, to unique geographical circumstances as well as the demonstrated military prowess which from 1500 on turned the Swiss into the first choice as mercenaries for those who could afford them. And, in the other, the cause was exceptional wealth - which made for the maintenance of efficient armed forces - combined, from 1688 on, with a more or less permanent alliance with the strongest Protestant power of the time.

With these two notable exceptions, the task of bringing the towns under royal control had been very largely achieved by 1660 or so. As the example of England shows, municipal institutions were not suppressed everywhere; many towns continued to enjoy a measure of autonomy in their internal government or ‘‘police.” It is also true that minor riots, most of them occasioned by poverty and unemployment, continued to be a frequent phenomenon in France in particular. However, neither riots nor urban self-government were capable any more of seriously threaten­ing the growing power of the state. Except for providing the personnel for minor posts such as night-watchmen, supervisors of markets, and prison officials, the urban militias which in their heyday had been able to defy kings and princes were allowed to decay. In Prussia the term ‘‘militia” itself was outlawed after 1670, and in other places the term became an object of derision.

The consolidation of territorial states also meant that the fortifications of towns located inside the country were neglected - if, indeed, they were not deliberately destroyed - and soon fell into ruin. The rest passed out of municipal control and into the hands of the commanders of royal gar­risons. In another century or so these factors were to revolutionize the role that cities played in war, changing them from centers of resistance to be besieged into mere fat, soft concentrations of wealth that an invader, following some battle, would occupy almost as an afterthought.^[129] The population was disarmed and the ‘‘bourgeois” and the ‘‘warlike” went their separate ways. Except in times of civil war, as in France after 1789, no longer could there be any question of towns refusing to admit their rulers or conducting an independent policy in league with foreign princes across the border, let alone of their engaging in military operations on their own behalf.

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