Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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translated into English as Mediaeval Parliaments: A Comparative Study, London 1968. In fact, Marongiu’s book – as its original title indicates – is essentially concerned with Italy, the one region in Europe where Estates were absent or relatively unimportant. Its brief sections on other countries (France, England or Spain) scarcely constitute a satisfactory introduction to them, and it ignores Northern and Eastern Europe altogether. Moreover, the book is a juristic survey, innocent of any sociological enquiry.
3. Carl Stephenson, Mediaeval Institutions, pp. 99–100.
4. Ab omnibus debet comprobari: what touches all must be approved by all.
5. These alternative patterns are discussed by Hintze, in ‘Typologie der Ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes’, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Vol. I, pp. 110–29, which remains the best single text on the phenomenon of feudal estates in Europe, although curiously inconclusive by comparison with most of Hintze’s other essays: as if the full implications of his findings had yet to be elucidated by him.
6. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641, Oxford 1965, is the deepest existent case-study of the metamorphoses of a European nobility in this epoch. Criticism has focused on its thesis that the economic position of the English peerage deteriorated significantly in the century examined. However, this is essentially a secondary issue, for the ‘crisis’ was a much wider one than a simple question of the quantity of manors held by lords: it was a pervasive travail of adaptation. Stone’s discussion of the problem of aristocratic military power in this context is particularly valuable (pp. 199–270). The limitation of the book is rather its confinement to the English peerage, a very small élite within the landed ruling class; moreover, as will be seen below, the English aristocracy was extremely atypical of Western Europe as a whole. Studies of continental nobilities, with a comparable wealth of material, are much needed.
7. For a recent discussion, see J. H. Elliott, Europe Divided 1559–1598, London 1968, pp. 73–7.
8. J. H. Hexter, ‘The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance’, in Reappraisals in History, London 1961, pp. 45–70.
9. Roland Mousnier and Fritz Hartung, ‘Quelques Problèmes Concernant la Monarchic Absolue’, X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storici, Relazioni IV, Florence 1955, esp. pp. 4–15, is the first and most fundamental contribution to the debate on this topic over recent years. Earlier writers had perceived the same truth, if in a less systematic fashion, among them Engels: ‘The decadence of feudalism and the development of towns were both decentralizing forces, which precisely determined the necessity of absolute monarchy as a power capable of welding together nationalities. Monarchy had to be absolute, just because of the centrifugal pressure of all these elements. Its absolutism, however, must not be understood in a vulgar sense. It was in permanent conflict with Estates, and with rebellious feudatories and cities: it nowhere abolished Estates altogether.’ Marx-Engels, Werke, Bd 21, p. 402. The last clause is, of course, an overstatement.
10. Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, Paris 1578, pp. 103, 114. I have translated droit as ‘justice’ in this passage, to bring out the distinction alluded to above.
11. Les Six Livres de la République, pp. 102, 114.
12. Les Six Livres de la République, p. 103.
13. Trevor-Roper’s justly celebrated essay, ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, Past and Present, No. 16, November 1959, pp. 31–64, now modified and reprinted in Religion, The Reformation and Social Change, London 1967, pp. 46–89, for all its merits, restricts the scope of these revolts too narrowly, by presenting them essentially as protests against the expense and waste of the post-Renaissance courts. In fact, as numerous historians have pointed out, war was a very much larger item in the State budgets of the 17th century than the court. Louis XIV’s palace establishment was far more lavish than that of Anne of Austria, but it was not thereby more unpopular. Apart from this, the fundamental rift between the aristocracy and the monarchy in this epoch was not really an economic one, although war-taxes could and did set off wider revolts. It was political, concerned with the total position of the nobility in an incipient polity whose outlines were often still opaque to all the actors involved in the drama.
14. The Neapolitan upheaval, socially much the most radical of these movements, naturally least so. But even there, the first storm signal of anti-Spanish explosion were the aristocratic conspiracies of Sanza, Conversano and other nobles, who were hostile to vice-regal fiscalism and the speculative cliques which battened on it, and were intriguing with France against Spain from 1634 onwards. Baronial plots were multiplying in Naples in early 1647, when the popular tumult headed by Masaniello suddenly burst out, and drove the bulk of the Neapolitan aristocracy back to loyalism. For this process, see the excellent analysis in Rosario Villari, La Rivolta Anti-Spagnuola a Napoli. Le Origini (1585–1647), Bari 1967, pp. 201–16.
15. There is no comprehensive study of this phenomenon. It is discussed in passing by, inter alia, S. J. Woolf, Studi sulla Nobiltà Piemontese nell’ Epoca dell’ Assolutismo, Turin 1963, who dates its spread from the preceding century. Most of the contributors to A. Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the 18th Century, London 1953, also touch on it.
16. The Spanish mayorazgo was much the oldest of these devices, dating back over two hundred years; but it steadily increased in both numbers and scope, eventually coming to include even movable goods. The English ‘strict settlement’ was in fact somewhat less rigid than the general continental pattern of the fideicommissum, since it was formally operative only for a single generation: but in practice successive heirs were expected to reaccept it.
17. The whole question of mobility within the noble class, from the dawn of feudalism to the end of absolutism, needs a great deal of further exploration. At present, only approximate guesses are possible for successive phases of this long history. Duby records his surprise at finding that Bloch’s conviction of a radical discontinuity between the Carolingian and mediaeval aristocracies in France was mistaken: in fact, a high proportion of the lineages who supplied the vassi dominici of the 9th century survived to become the barons of the 12th century. See G. Duby, ‘Une Enquête à Poursuivre: La Noblesse dans la France Médiévale’, Revue Historique, CCXXVI, 1961, pp. 1–22. On the other hand, Perroy found an extremely high level of mobility within the gentry of the County of Forez from the 13th century onwards: there the average duration of any noble line was 3–4, or more conservatively, 3–6 generations, largely because of the hazards of mortality. Edouard Perroy, ‘Social Mobility among the French Noblesse in the Later Middle Ages’, Past and Present, No. 21, April 1962, pp. 25–38. In general, the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance seem to have been periods of rapid turnover in many countries, in which most of the greatest mediaeval houses disappeared. This is certainly true in England and France, although probably less so in Spain. The restabilization of the ranks of the aristocracy seems equally plain by the late 17th century, after the last and most violent reshuffle of all, in Habsburg Bohemia during the Thirty Years War, had come to an end. But the subject may well reserve further surprises for us.
18. H. G. Koenigsberger’s chapter, ‘The European Civil War’, in The Habsburgs in Europe, Ithaca 1971, pp. 219–85, is a succinct and exemplary account.
19. The best general analysis of the Seven Years War is still Dorn, Competition for Empire, pp. 318–84.
Such was the general character of Absolutism in the West. The specific territorial States which came into existence in the different countries of Renaissance Europe, however, cannot simply be assimilated to a single pure type. They exhibited wide variations, in fact, which were to have crucial consequences for the subsequent histories of the countries concerned, and can still be felt to this day. Some survey of these variants is therefore a necessary complement to any consideration