by Garrett Robinson

For previous entries in this series, see here and here.

Throughout the latter Middle Ages, the city of Lyon would receive a visit from the king every year. During this visit, the citizens of Lyon would fête their king and bestow upon him gifts. In turn, the king, whether or not he needed or desired the gifts, recognized the privileges of the city. This was a model of medieval politics: recognition that a group or community governed itself with only ritual gift giving in exchange.[1] Come 1548, however, Henry II did not bother to leave Paris to renew these privileges; instead, he issued the city their privileges from the comforts of the capital. “Lyon understood that what it had received it might also not have received,” John Milbank writes, “that it was no longer ruled, but commanded – that what it had received were no longer gifts but devices of state policy, manipulated by murderous politiques.”[2]

Where the preceding essay in this series focused on the political communities of the Middle Ages, in particular as represented by cities, nobles, and the Church, this essay will turn to the transformation of monarchical power during this period that created the modern state. During the sixteenth century, monarchs usurped the rights of communities, either peacefully as in the case of Lyon, or through violent suppression as in the case of La Rochelle. These communities – not just cities, but also groups such as the Church or the nobility – sought common goods according to shared traditions and ideas of the common good. Sixteenth-century monarchs brought about a revolution in political thought, wherein policy and bare power replaced the common goods of the community and of the kingdom.

True it is that medieval monarchs had sought to strengthen their authority in their own ways, frequently with proto-bureaucracies serving various judicial tasks. Henry II made great strides towards centralizing the judicial system in medieval England; Louis IX designed a system of prêvots that oversaw royal administration of the provinces. In Sicily, the last Hohenstaufen monarch feverishly mandated unprecedented law codes for his island kingdom. Throughout the Middle Ages, though, individual communities as well as the commonwealth understood that the exercise even of monarchical power had limits, and that correction of the monarch may be necessary should he overstep those limits.

The monarchies of the sixteenth century, though, centralized their countries in previously unforeseen ways and exalted their offices to ones beyond the ability of their subjects to correct. Henry VIII brought about the unification of the English kingdom in a way theretofore unimagined by criminalizing dissent from the monarch and his church. Through their union, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon planted the seeds of a unified Spain only for its vast empire to be reduced to an inefficient web of bureaucracy and patronage. The later Valois in France went about centralization in their own way through selling offices and finding ever more novel ways to convince the regional parlements to bend the knee.

Certainly, the early modern period of administrative growth and exaltation of the king’s position should not be treated as a single phenomenon stretching across the continent without nuances of its own. But monarchs did develop their own methods of governance, which, while radically differing from those of their forebears, would sometimes reference arguments from the Middle Ages. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, for example, appears much less offensive when one, like Blackstone, compares it with the dissolution of the alien priories under Henry V. But should such events really be compared? That is to say, did the early modern idea of sovereignty and royal or state powers grow out of the Middle Ages naturally, or did some sort of rupture occur?

Subjects of this time understood that the monarchs of their times no longer respected the traditions of their communities or the realm, despite whatever historical justifications such a monarch gave. One of the real tragedies of the Henrician Reformation, besides schism, was the way it greatly upset the ancient rhythm and communal structure of medieval parish communities.[3] In France, the Valois and Bourbon kings scrambled to patch together a kingdom to attempt to match the strength of their later Capetian counterparts, all the while dealing with the provincial parlements, which recognized that their attempts to centralize governance were less calls back to tradition so much as attempts to usurp authority that provincial communities had exercised for at least a century. [4]  Spain had its own troubles as the unified kingdoms struggled to understand what a single monarch of Spain would mean for their own ancient traditions of self-rule, which led to certain provinces creating their own perhaps overly colorful illustrations of the medieval rights of the nobility.[5]

The Reformation played a key role in giving monarchs the tools to control their subjects through endorsing a particular faith, as opposed to participating in a common faith together. This was true both for Catholic and Protestant countries: whatever religion the monarch chose, it became more and more clear that it was not for reasons of faith, but for political expediency. Rebellions of the faithful throughout the sixteenth century testify to the fact that communities recognized that the monarch and his advisors no longer understood their chosen faith to contain a moral tradition that should guide their interaction with their subjects. Instead, the imposition of a particular creed became a tool to define enemies of the state. In this new understanding, risings such as the Pilgrimage of Grace ought always to be crushed as illegitimate insurrections against the sovereign.[6]

Warfare on an increasingly large scale was also central in the creation of the modern state. The relationship between waging new wars and using those new wars as an excuse to raise taxes was a circular one, as the new taxes put the nobles and the cities more and more under the thumb of the monarch, and the monarch in turn used armies raised by those taxes to suppress dissident regions of his kingdom and expand his borders.[7] Peace became a “meteorological exception” as monarchs used their armies to both suppress dissident communities within and expand the borders of their kingdom.[8]

Despite these advances of monarchical power, many cities with proud independent heritages lasted well into early modernity. Even in France, the supposed sine qua non of absolutism, provincial cities led a long, ultimately doomed fight to protect their privileges and undermine the sovereignty of the king. The city of Arras, which lay in a gray-zone of sorts between the kingdom of France and the Netherlands, had an inscription over a particular gate that testifies to this struggle:

Quand les souris prendront les chats
Le rois sera seigneur d’Arras
(When the mice catch the cats,
the king will be lord of Arras)

Only in 1640 was this city, ostensibly an ancient part of France, brought under the royal sovereignty. Cities in other regions not only successfully resisted amalgamation into a monarchical state, but formed alternative political structures to the centralized state. The Hanseatic League, for example, maintained a structure of many different cities united for economic purposes while retaining many rights to govern themselves on a local level.[9] The Italian city-states also maintained a different sort of political form, wherein a larger city would annex neighboring settlements without depriving them entirely of their rights to rule themselves.[10] Both of these alternatives continued to thrive even as neighboring kings rearranged the politics of their realms into the form of the sovereign state. More could be said about these and other, similar structures elsewhere, but it should suffice to say that the modern sovereign state did not succeed the medieval political structures by necessity.

Justifications for the actions of monarchs during the early modern period frequently start with the supposed squabbles brought about by a proliferation of jurisdictions, especially religious ones, during the pre-modern period. The state, so it is argued, came about to form a neutral ground where sectarian squabbling would no longer have a place in political life.[11] Carl Schmitt, echoing these narratives, aptly summarized the invention of the sovereign state by noting that, where once the Church proclaimed,  “nulla salus ex ecclesiam,” the state would now say, “extra civitatem nulla securitas.”[12] Schmitt’s dictum, in which the state demands absolute submission in order to maintain “security,” renders illegitimate not just the jurisdiction of the Church but the jurisdiction of any of the other communities that flourished throughout the Middle Ages as well. It accurately describes, then, how the monarchical state of the early modern era, having stripped all other communities of any substantive authority, laid the groundwork for the secular and liberal nation state that followed.

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[1] I have taken this illustration from John Milbank. See “The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority,” New Blackfriars 85, no. 996 (2004): 224.

[2] Ibid. 225.

[3] See especially, Eamon Duffy, “Chapter 3, The Pursuit of Peace” and “Chapter 5: The Banishing of Saint Sidwell,” in The Voices of Morebath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

[4] The rise of a truly absolute monarchy in France, i.e. one that built the foundation for the modern state, took a great deal of time to perfect and occurred perhaps much later than is usually supposed. See generally J. Russel Major, From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles, & Estates (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1994).

[5] The legendary oath of the Aragonese and fueros of Sobrarbe come to mind here.

[6] Hobbes, one can say, retroactively justified the defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace and similar religious revolts on the continent: “But when it comes to confession of that faith, the private reason must submit to the public, that is to say, to God’s lieutenant.” Leviathan, Part 2, Ch. XXXVII. 

[7] Thus, for example, taxation after the Hundred Years’ War led both to revolts from towns and the feudal aristocracy, which, in turn, led to increased taxation to defeat those rebellions. Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York: Free Press, 1994), 34.

[8] See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (New York: Verso, 2013), 33.

[9] Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 122-129.

[10] Ibid, 142-150.

[11] Thus, for example, Judith Shklar, “The cruelties of the religious wars had the effect of turning many Christians away from the public policies of the churches to the morality that saw toleration as an expression of Christian charity.” Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblaum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 53.

[12] Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 48.