16. The Business of States

TRUST AND OBEDIENCE

War among and within Christian states was more intense in the three decades before 1650 than at any time after 1500. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the disputes among the constellation of states in the Italian peninsula had drawn others in like a gravitational force, assisted by the pull of Habsburg overlordship and its dynastic confrontation with the Valois. The size of military establishments increased dramatically, abetted by technical changes in fortifications and firearms transforming warfare on land and at sea. Military escalation was encouraged by the Ottoman threat as well as the windfall inheritance of the Habsburgs and the hostile reactions to it of other powers. The costs of war, and the fiscal and organizational demands which it made upon Europe’s rulers, exponentially increased. Then, beginning with the winter siege of Metz by imperial forces from October 1552 to January 1553, the calendar of military operations was enlarged. The months of campaigning became virtually year-round. In addition, a strategy of mutual attrition took hold and military expeditions in more than one theatre against an enemy became common. Continuous attritional warfare increased its fiscal and administrative burdens and its impact.

Post 1559, the focus of warfare moved to the Low Countries and the ‘Spanish Road’ (as the French termed it) that linked Flanders via Franche-Comté and the Alpine corridors to the Mediterranean and the Hispanic peninsula. The Army of Flanders, sent to repress the Dutch rebellion in 1567, became the largest continuous army of occupation that Europe had yet seen. Like the Italian peninsula earlier in the century, the Low Countries became a vortex which internationalized Christendom’s divisions, this time along confessional lines. The frontier antagonisms with the Ottoman empire and more localized conflicts in the Baltic added to these fissures – notably the Baltic Seven Years War (1563–70) and the Long Turkish War (1593–1606). Above all, the civil and religious tensions provoked by the Protestant Reformation created a confessionalized view of international politics in the minds of publicists, diplomats and strategists, and punctually also in the emergence of Protestant and Catholic power-blocs.

Christendom’s deepening tensions in the second half of the sixteenth century remained unresolved. They served as an alla prima background upon which were superimposed the swirling struggles of the period from 1618 to 1648. Three interrelated conflicts with their epicentre in central Europe have become known as the Thirty Years War. In reality only the war in Germany lasted that long. Attached to it was a renewed struggle between the Spanish Habsburgs and the Dutch Republic (1621–48), as well as an open struggle for hegemony between France and Spain (1635–59). At the same time, there were separate, though related, wars in the British Isles (the Scottish and Irish Rebellions; the English Civil Wars, 1638–51), in Poland (‘The Deluge’, 1648–67), as well as a renewed contest in the Mediterranean between Venice and the Ottoman empire (the Cretan or Candian War, 1645–69). They were longer-lasting than earlier wars, more interrelated and unpredictable, and harder to resolve. Those with a confessionalized attitude to international politics were angered and bewildered by alliances and engagements made across religious boundaries and justified in the interests of the state. Wars were fought with exceptional bloodshed and consumed the lives and resources of those drawn into them from wider regions and at greater levels of engagement. The events in central Europe from 1618 onwards occupied combatants from across the European landmass. They compromised the stability of Europe’s states when they were under mounting pressures from within.

Internal state tensions were delineated by two periods of political crisis, the first (in the last decade of the sixteenth century) being the prelude to the paroxysm in the mid-seventeenth century. At their heart lay the decay in political certainties and a corresponding search for new ones. The arbiters of Christendom’s conflicts – the papacy and empire – had abandoned that role. Christian rulers stepped into their place, drawing their legitimacy and power from notions of dynastic continuity and sacral authority, derived directly from God through lineage and consecration. In addition, humanists had validated the notion of a ‘Christian commonwealth’, one which depended on an understanding about the objectives, means and exercise of authority between rulers and ruled. The problem was that the religious confrontations of the second half of the sixteenth century weakened that perception, raised question marks about the actions of those in power, and divided rulers from those whom they ruled. The relationship between Christianity and kingship changed.

At the same time, the powers and responsibilities of the state increased. There were more government agencies and greater activity, regulation and intervention in people’s lives and an emphasis on codification – of laws, but also of religious practices and social behaviour. The business of states grew, which required organization and cost money. Peacetime expenditures mounted exponentially, especially through cost-inflation in the housing, feeding, entertaining and management of princely courts – increasingly the heart of state-centred initiatives. The expenses of diplomatic and military establishments (such as garrisons) and of campaigns spiralled vertiginously. Those required to pay were bound to ask questions, especially as economic dislocation afflicted parts of Europe after 1580. Those questions fed into criticism of rulers and demands for fundamental political and institutional reform.

The broadening scope of state activity also increased the number of those upon whom rulers relied. Rulers became more dependent on mediated power, beholden to those to whom they had delegated their authority. The greater the reach of the state, the more important it was to secure the compliance of these intermediaries. They were no longer simply the viceroys or power-brokers who had traditionally acted as the eyes and ears of rulers. They included the entrepreneurs who ran the mints, the contractors who supplied the food for the princely household, the judges who had often purchased their offices (which then became an adjunct of their private wealth), the consortia of financiers who farmed customs duties and taxes, and the mercenary military officers and naval privateers who, by the early seventeenth century, had become semi-permanent heads of financial-military enterprises, operating in the name of states.

Such mediated authority was essential to the power of the state. But the contracting operations on which they were based raised questions about who was paying for what, to whom and for how much. The representative assemblies which had traditionally acted as channels of petitions and mouthpieces and defenders of local interests were sidelined, powerless to criticize subcontracted power, or compromised by the reality that some of these agents were in their own midst. Moreover, since the arrangements for mediated authority were the reflection of the power and influence of those who headed up the deals, there were good reasons for those who were unsuccessful in their bids, or who found themselves insufficiently rewarded for their services, to vent their dissatisfaction under the guise of charges of corruption, embezzlement or favouritism in order to disgrace their opponents. The result fed into a more profound and generalized disenchantment as the relationship between government and governed grew more distant and tense.

Those strains were more evident in regal unions, those where dynastic happenstance put states with different customs into an alliance under one prince. The religious confrontations of the second half of the sixteenth century posed challenges to composite monarchies, especially where religion was not a common bond. Even where it was, ‘core states’ shouldered a disproportionate share of the burden, justified by the development of more exclusive myths of rule. In Castile (for the Spanish Habsburg empire), Inner Austria (for the Austrian monarchy) and Protestant England (for the Stuarts) it took the form of a sense of an exclusive place in God’s providence. In each case, the privilege of executing the Almighty’s destiny carried responsibilities for which rulers demanded loyalty and a unique role for themselves.

Yet there were limits to the ability of dynastic rulers to broaden their appeal. Patriotism was potentially as divisive as claims to religious truth. The lesson Europe’s dynasts drew from the politico-religious turmoil of the later sixteenth century was that religion politicized their subjects, legitimizing the latter’s willingness to hold those in power to account for their actions. Religion encouraged clerics to think that they were independent from, if not superior to, lay powers. Rather than broadening the political spectrum, princes and advisers developed more exclusive claims to govern, emphasizing dynastic rights and patrimonial and patriarchal authority, justified on biblical and natural-law grounds. Wherever post-bellum politics sought stability in an authoritarian figure, one-man rule (‘absolutism’) offered a focus for loyalty which masked the failure of dynastic rulers to embrace wider political sentiments. There was a renewed emphasis on the sacrality of hierarchies and princely divine right to rule. Sacred monarchy had existed in the sixteenth century as a heterogeneous assemblage of rituals and ceremonies. In response to royal weakness, and a spate of princely assassination attempts, statesmen, judges and clerics constructed a more coherent picture of monarchical sacrality. In rites of consecration and interment, court ceremonies and choreographed royal appearances, there was a stronger emphasis on deification and on the majesty which distinguished a prince from ordinary mortals.

What happened when the majesty in question was that of the papal monarch? How did Europe’s states and princes negotiate their new sense of prerogative power with the Counter-Reformed papal monarchy? Papal secular authority had been fought over in Christendom’s most divisive debate before the Protestant Reformation (the eleventh-century ‘Investiture Controversy’). In the period from 1590 to 1630 the issue resurfaced, only this time the result was to foster mistrust of the papacy among Europe’s princes and reinforce the divinity that hedged kings. The Italian Jesuit Robert Bellarmine furnished persuasive arguments for the pope’s indirect secular power (indirect in the sense that it was derived from the pope’s spiritual authority). His writings became a focus for critics of papal claims to secular authority in a succession of high-profile international debates.

The latter began with the papal excommunications of monarchs in the late sixteenth century, the starting-point for discussions of papal secular power and the target of Protestant polemic. They continued through the storm raised by Jesuit writings, justifying tyrannicide under certain circumstances. Those views were exploited by Gallicans in the wake of an attempted assassination of the French king, Henry IV, in 1594 (and then the real thing in 1610). The arguments about papal secular power had unexpected outcomes. The counter-case for mistrusting the ultramontane objectives of the papacy was strengthened. So too was that for regarding tyrannicide as an act of parricide and desecration. Bellarmine’s apologies for papal indirect power became centrepieces in controversies over the papal interdict of Venice (1606–10) and the Oath of Allegiance (1606) required of English subjects in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. The resulting polemic brought the English king, James I, into confrontation with Bellarmine. Another Italian Jesuit, Antonio Santarelli, took up the cudgels when Bellarmine died. But his treatise on Heresies, Schismatics . . . and the Power of the Roman Pontiff (1625) was banned and burned in Paris while the Jesuits disavowed its contents. Only in retrospect was it evident that these quarrels had reinforced the divinity of kings and fostered mistrust of papal claims to intervene in secular affairs. Criticism of papal authority, hitherto the preserve of Protestants, now came from prominent Catholics as well.

Humanist conceptions of the Christian commonwealth implied duties and responsibilities for lesser magistrates. The latter also had the power of the sword. They might include the delegates and representatives in Estates and Parliaments or law officers, militia companies, guild-masters and aldermen. But as the intermediaries of the state grew, so did the numbers of those with a stake in the commonwealth. The turmoil of post-Reformation politics had its impact on the way in which such intermediaries envisaged their part in rulership. The comparable experience to the civil wars of the later sixteenth century in Antiquity lay in the Roman empire of the first century AD after Caesar Augustus and in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC. Their historians – Tacitus and Thucydides – taught that, in a world where one could be wrong-footed by events, prudence was the order of the day. Notables (such as Cicero and Quintilian) who had been educated in rhetoric to become tribunes of the people were now urged to see the other side of the coin. Eloquence could inflame people’s passions. Speech was the vehicle of demagogy. Rhetoric was appropriate only in republics. Polemic and controversy were the instruments of religious conflict. The role of the notable was to mind his own business, think his own thoughts, distance himself from the populace and demonstrate his obedience to the state.

The model for such behaviour was to be found in the writings of the Stoics, especially Seneca. In the wake of the politico-religious contentions of the later sixteenth century and against the backdrop of the gathering maelstrom in Europe, the Stoics offered an honourable retreat (otium cum dignitate being the subject, in fact, of one of Cicero’s orations) from the rough and tumble of public affairs into a more private world (a salon, a garden, a stoa). There, statesmen, princes and notables would be free to reflect on, express and discuss the Stoic philosophy of mastering the passions (the root of misguided actions by misled common people) through fortitude and solace. These ideas appealed especially to lay notables, and were particularly congenial to those in Calvinist Europe who had been brought up to think of their role as bringing the world of passions into conformity with God’s law. Constancy, prudence, taciturnity in the face of criticism, acceptance of the part which one had been asked to play in public life, even if it might demand behaviour which defied traditional morality – these were the values around which the politics of the first half of the seventeenth century turned. They drove some to idealize a retreat from public life even as they inspired others to lead opposition to, and revolt from, authority.

International and domestic politics in the first half of the seventeenth century placed exceptional demands upon rulers’ sagacity, requiring them to communicate and negotiate with one another and with their people, while at the same time denying them the experience, opportunities and expectations to do so. It is hardly surprising that, with notable exceptions (Henry IV, Gustav Adolf), they failed the challenge. In addition, there were dynastic hitches caused by royal minorities and the accession of those who were mentally or emotionally challenged by the role which they were expected to play. Europe’s mid-seventeenth century paroxysm was the outcome of a deficit of trust and accountability.

THE CRAFT OF STATES

By the early seventeenth century, the term ‘state’ was beginning to eclipse some lexicons (‘commonwealth’) or add meaning to others (‘realm’, ‘dominion’). By 1650, ‘commonwealth’ was more exclusively associated with republics – and (in ‘The English Commonwealth’, proclaimed after the execution of Charles I) radical change. The French philosopher Jean Bodin belonged to the last French generation before 1789 to use the term ‘commonwealth’ (république) without being embarrassed by its associations with writers who emphasized the accountability of rulers. His was the first generation to suppose that (taking as his target the writings of the Protestant ‘monarchomachs’) a ruler who was elected or in other ways accountable could not, by definition, be sovereign.

Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) began thus: ‘A commonwealth is a lawful government of many households and that which is theirs in common, with sovereign power.’ He defined sovereignty as ‘the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth, which the Latins call majestatem . . . the greatest power to command’. Sovereignty, embodied in the power to make law, was unqualified and indivisible. Although Bodin conceded that the people might be collectively sovereign, that was an impermanent form of rule. His definition of sovereignty pointed inescapably towards singular, monarchical (in Bodin’s case, masculine) authority. ‘Since after God,’ he said, ‘there is on earth nothing greater than sovereign princes . . . it is necessary to take care of their quality in order that their majesty may be respected and revered in all obedience.’ Bodin went further. A sovereign prince is one who is exempt from obedience to the laws of his predecessors and even from his own. Of course, there were limits to that sovereignty. Practically speaking, a sovereign could not confiscate the property of his subjects or break agreements with other sovereigns without committing political suicide. More importantly for this lawyer-philosopher who sought his ultimate truths in the big picture, a sovereign could not set aside the natural law. That was what sanctioned private property and the family. Natural laws were created by divine authority which also legitimated sovereign power. If a sovereign contravened natural law, he would illegitimate his power and become a tyrant.

Bodin encountered critics from the start and answered them in the modified Latin version of his work, published a decade later. For many, however, his notion of sovereignty begged more questions than it answered. Had not Bodin supererogated papal claims to pre-eminence and placed them in the hands of princes? Where did sovereignty leave the privileges and jurisdictions of the Church? Where was Christendom in Bodin’s republic? Jesuits Robert Bellarmine and Antonio Possevino attacked his writings as belonging to an emerging category of politiques, those who undermined religion from within. Most of his works were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1596. Meanwhile legists in the Holy Roman Empire adapted Bodin’s ideas, dressing them up within a framework of public law and Christian traditions. But it was totally implausible for them to understand the empire in terms of a theoretically indivisible sovereignty any more than could their counterparts in the southern Netherlands or in Spain.

In Bodin’s native France, however, sovereignty was integrated into the French jurist Charles Loyseau’s conception of social hierarchy in his Treatise on Orders (1610). In due course, sovereignty sharpened the prerogative rights of the French monarchy. Richelieu’s counsellor Cardin Le Bret used it as a legal chisel to chip out the domain rights of the French monarchy in Lorraine. That was where Le Bret served as a royal intendant from 1624 to 1632 (the year his treatise On the Sovereignty of the King was first published). In its third recension of 1642, he incorporated into his text the experience he gained as a commissioner in tribunals summoned to convict prominent crown servants of treason. To those on the receiving end of this sharp-edged sword of sovereignty (Henri II, duke of Montmorency, and Louis de Marillac, a French maréchal, both executed in 1632 for rebellion; Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, marquis of Cinq-Mars, the king’s favourite, ditto in 1642, among others) the state had become a force that the greatest in the land had to reckon with.

Politics was emerging as an academic discipline in its own right, and with a literature to match. Regarded as a branch of moral philosophy through most of the sixteenth century, it began to be taught separately in Protestant Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century and was accorded its own professors. The growth of the ‘scientific’ literature on politics initially owed a great deal to exponents in the Italian peninsula who, under the guise of studying and commenting on Tacitus, found a way of discussing Machiavelli’s ideas without mentioning his name. As one Italian commentator wrote in 1588: ‘These political studies have become lately very respectable, and no man thinks that he would be able to gain honour in the world unless he understands the reasons of state . . .’ The following year, the Piedmontese Jesuit Giovanni Botero published his book On Reason of State (Della Ragion di Stato), remarking that he was ‘greatly astonished [during his travels] to find Reason of State a constant subject of discussion and to hear the opinions of Niccolò Machiavelli and Cornelius Tacitus frequently quoted . . .’ He drew on his experiences as secretary to Cardinal Carlo Borromeo before entering the service of Charles Emmanuel, duke of Savoy, whose entourage served as a think-tank for the craft of state. Botero defined reason of state as ‘knowledge of means capable of founding, keeping and increasing a dominion’. His experience led him to concentrate on princes, and how they hung on to power. Everything depended on the obedience of subjects, which was assured by princely virtue. That virtue was achieved through the science of statecraft, which involved moral and political philosophy, geometry and architecture, and above all history, which taught the rules of prudence.

Taking the Spanish empire and the global Catholic Church as his cue, Botero used comparative economic geography to measure the power of a state. In his The Causes of Greatness of Cities (1590) he asked a question which the emerging divergent patterns of growth in Europe made especially relevant: why did human population not grow proportionately to landmass? His answer was that places like northern Italy, France and the Netherlands were ‘great’ (that is, ‘rich’), not because of their natural resources or their political systems but because of the commerce and industry which sustained their populations. Trade was God’s gift to humanity, and the oceans were a providential path to universal commerce.

In his Universal Relations (completed in 1596) Botero offered a comparative analysis of the power of states, using the model of Venetian ambassadorial reports. He linked the increasing functions of government with the need for regular, extraordinary revenues, but indicated that the latter had to be related to the greatness of the country in question or proportionate to its economic resources. Princely virtue was to be expressed not merely in military prowess but in civil projects which increased a country’s riches. His examples included the public works programmes of Italian princes (for example, at Rome under Pope Sixtus V), fostering the local skills’ base through state sponsorship, and using tariffs to promote domestic industry. ‘Mercantilism’ (or, rather, the political economy underlying reason of state) came to be a defining political virtue among armchair state-builders in the age of the Thirty Years War. Botero’s works were required reading for the Spanish arbitristas and French mercantilists.

Botero’s writings had critics as well as followers. Did reason of state not furnish the arguments for the state being above the law? Did it not provide a licence for princes, in the name of the state, to violate religion, honesty and decency? Was it not a passport to princely opportunism, a vehicle for closet Machiavellianism? In 1621, the Venetian Ludovico Zuccolo noted that ‘barbers . . . and other artisans of the modest sort comment and discuss in their shops and meeting-places on reason of state’. Antoine de Laval, writing in France in 1612, was dismayed to discover that the term was ‘frequently on everyone’s mouth’. Revealing the hidden and real reasons behind actions undertaken for motives that were presented in other ways became a means to criticize the duplicity of those in power. For Henri, duke of Rohan, writing in self-imposed exile in Venice after his failed leadership of the French Huguenots, all politics boiled down to ‘interest’: ‘princes rule people, and interest rules princes’. ‘Interest’ (in the sense of ‘that which makes a difference to oneself’) emerged alongside reason of state as part of the language of politics.

For the Jesuit advisers of Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria, and the publicists of Bethlen Gábor, who justified his allegiance to the Ottomans, his overlords, as a necessary ‘opportunity’ to consolidate his rule in Hungary, reason of state was a handy vehicle to justify otherwise controversial decisions. Such decisions were taken in accordance with a morality that had to be squared with political necessity, but their logic would remain opaque to those not party to how power worked. In his panegyric of Louis XIII, Guez de Balzac explained in The Prince (1631) that when ‘saving the[ir] country’ from ‘slavery’ to Protestants or Spanish Habsburgs, necessity ‘excuses and justifies everything’. Gabriel Naudé’s Political Considerations on Coups d’état was published in 1639, though it had been written earlier. Only a few copies were distributed to ‘strong minds’ (esprits forts) who understood that statecraft involved ‘a violation of public law for the benefit of the public good’. Duplicity was essential to power and not necessarily immoral. Statecraft meant making alliances with those who were not of the same religion. It was not infidel Turks but Christian princes who used religion as a cover for political ambitions (he cited Henry VIII’s revolt from Rome and the massacre of St Bartholomew). ‘Reason of state’ writings had a double effect. On the one hand, they reinforced popular perceptions that their rulers were not to be trusted. On the other, they epitomized changing political values.

MEN OF BUSINESS, MEN OF STATE

In farewell to the University of Padua after his studies, the Polish nobleman Wawrzyniec Goslicki published a treatise on the Polish Senate, dedicated to King Sigismund II. Shakespeare seems to have fashioned Polonius, the wind-bag senator in Hamlet, around its author. Pondering what constituted successful government, Goslicki focused on the interaction between monarch and citizens. ‘Some suppose,’ he mused, that the welfare of the state ‘proceedeth of good laws: others have thought that civill education doth enforme it; others imagined that the temperature of the heavens doth make men apt for civill life; some also do thinke it proceedeth from the endeavour of good Kings’. The Polish king should remember, said Goslicki, that his state rests on the ‘publique consent of all the Polonian Nation’, on men like himself. Goslicki’s analysis was not misplaced since the Polish Commonwealth accorded the nobles a major role. They were educated for, and expected to have, the opportunity to be of public service.

The problem was that the assemblies in which notables like Goslicki played that part were being sidelined. Senates, Diets, Estates and Parliaments in all but a few commonwealths found their role diminished or their activities discontinued. In an environment in which sacral kingship, the mystique of monarchy, sovereignty and prerogative rights played an increased part, the place accorded to assemblies whose activities reminded people of the commonwealth ideals was diminished. Instead, princely courts offered an alternative forum and a different ethos for notables. Manuals of etiquette taught notables the rules of civilized decorum at court. Civil life became not about public consent to rule but obedience through attendance, courtesy and the masking of one’s true feelings behind flattery or silence.

That said, the opportunities for those who wanted to participate in affairs increased as states became more multifaceted. That was exemplified in both councils and courts – the formal and informal power structures working together coextensively at the power-centres of states. Government by council was an established reality even in monarchies with the most absolutist of pretensions. In the elective monarchies of northern and eastern Europe, the royal council enshrined the aristocracy’s participation in power. In the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the twelve members of its Council of State, descending from its Burgundian namesake, became the executive committee of the States General. The burgeoning number of councils led to smaller inner privy councils, specializing in the great affairs of state for which confidentiality was essential. Membership was often predetermined by rank and status. In France, the princes of the blood regarded themselves as council members by right. In Poland, the chancellor, treasurer, commander of the army and the bishops were councillors ex officio. To exclude such individuals was to risk the charge of being autocratic, the prisoner of favourites and prey to one voice in counsel to the exclusion of others.

The problem was that of increasing and overwhelming affairs. One way of dealing with it was to allow everyday administration to be handled by ‘professionals’. Justice at its highest level was delegated to separate sections of the royal council. In France, its judicial (conseil d’état privé) and financial (conseil d’état et des finances) branches gradually emerged as separate entities in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the Spanish empire, there were already separate councils for the Inquisition, the military orders and the Cruzada (especially levied with papal consent) by the accession of Charles V, who soon added others for war, and then finance. In the German empire and most of its princely territories, the court council (Hofrat) spawned judicial courts (Hofgerichte), modelled on the imperial Chamber Court. The raising of revenue, handling of indirect taxes, management of debts, payment of servants, nomination of clergy and even diplomacy all became more complex.

Princely councils adapted their membership to include those with professional competence, albeit to different degrees. In the sixteenth century, almost all the members of the Council of Castile were university graduates. In France legally trained Masters of Requests prepared dossiers for the council but its membership was still dominated by nobles. In England and Scotland, experience, capacity, family ties and loyalty continued to be more important than a university education. The tendency was towards collective decision-making. In Spain, permanent councils were supplemented by temporary commissions (juntas) on particular issues. Pope Sixtus V followed the Spanish example, formalizing the existence of fifteen councils (‘congregations’) in January 1588, thereby transforming the cardinals into pontifical administrators.

The growing complexity of government business and council proliferation made coordination necessary, especially when princes were disinclined or unable to fulfil that function themselves. Coordinators functioned at an uneasy interstice between the informal and formal power structures, particularly clearly demonstrated in Rome by the cardinal-nephew, the papal superintendant and viceroy for state and foreign affairs. Scipione Borghese was an archetypical cardinal-nephew, running the papal state for Pope Paul V. From his personal apartments, Borghese chaired administrative congregations, handled patronage, received letters of state and selected which should be read out to the pope. Yet he did not exercise this authority independently, and informal and formal power structures complemented one another. The secretaries staffing the congregations, responsible for drafting letters and memorials on which decisions were made, also saw themselves as members of the Borghese family, loyal to both Pope Paul V and the cardinal-nephew. Scipione Borghese signed the paperwork and ran the apparatus, but he was not singly responsible for its decisions.

In other instances, the coordinating role of favourites grew out of traditional military and judicial offices. In France, the first favourite at the Valois court was Constable Anne de Montmorency. At the court of the Austrian Habsburgs, the equivalent figure was the high steward or court marshal. Elsewhere it was often the chancellor (or the Keeper of the Great Seal), titular head of the judiciary but often responsible for government and administration too. Where favourites owed their influence to proven ability, martial reputation or the rich patrimony of an established noble family they tended to become entrenched in power (Count Oxenstierna in Sweden, Cardinal Richelieu in France, Count-Duke Olivares in Spain). Competent favourites had their own favourites, their personal entourages being a means to secure their position. Their servants included secretaries of state and members of the aristocracy. Richelieu’s critics called the secretaries of the French state his créatures; the young aristocrats whom Count-Duke Olivares groomed for service were known as hechuras, his clients as olivaristas.

There was a logic to the increasing prevalence of favourites in European states from the end of the sixteenth century. As Francis Bacon (a favourite himself) observed, the more kings distanced themselves from their subjects, the more they craved friends: ‘For princes, in regard of the distance of their fortune from that of their subjects and servants, cannot gather this fruit, except . . . they raise some persons to be, as it were companions and almost equals to themselves.’ The English playwright Ben Jonson portrayed the rise of the favourite as the inevitable result of undermining the commonwealth in favour of absolute rule. Tacitus was the source for his play Sejanus His Fall (1603), in which Tiberius’s favourite utilizes the underhand guile of reason of state in order to become the emperor’s heir before hostile public opinion and a spy engineer his gruesome end. To Jonson’s near-contemporary Christopher Marlowe, homosexual infatuation explained the rise of Piers Gaveston, the ‘night-grown mushrump’ in The Troublesome Raigne and lamentable death of Edward II (1594). This was a glance at the French court of Henry III, whose emotional dependence on a succession of mignons was crudely portrayed by Catholic League critics as sexual deviance. Jonson’s target was the court of James I, where the king’s grooming of attractive young men was evident. Contemporaries could hardly ignore it and the correspondence between the king and his own mignons (Robert Carr, earl of Somerset – to 1615; then George Villiers, duke of Buckingham) suggests more than dalliance.

Favourites needed to maintain the monarch’s confidence. Ambassadorial correspondence describes the familiarities (smiles, bows, courtesies, lavish gifts, shared passions . . .) whose flow secured their ascendancy and put paid to their critics. These were never far away – especially since the targets of their disapproval were responsible for the execution of controversial policies and made themselves wealthy through the outsourcing of state power to private contractors. Rivals engineered the fall of favourites through whispering campaigns, focusing the increasing mistrust of those in power upon a particular individual. A royal frown raised questions; not being invited to a notable public event or to attend council was proof that disgrace had occurred, whether or not a favourite occupied an office of state. James I’s favourite Robert Carr was imprisoned in 1615 after a scandal involving the murder of his friend Sir Thomas Overbury. George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, escaped impeachment by Parliament but courted unpopularity for his incompetent foreign expeditions and corruption, and was assassinated. Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, ran the gauntlet of the many enemies he had made in his administration of Ireland in the 1630s, his impeachment on a charge of treason being the first scalp claimed by the Long Parliament in the Bill of Attainder (April 1641). Strafford was assured of Charles’s support: ‘upon the word of a king, you shall not suffer in life, honour or fortune’. A month later, the king assented to his execution under the threat of popular insurrection. Yet Strafford was initially accorded the luxury of an impeachment. Not so Louis XIII’s Italian favourite Concino Concini, assassinated on the king’s orders outside the Louvre in April 1617. His body was exhumed the following day by the Parisian crowd, ritually hanged from the gibbet at the Pont Neuf before hands, hair, beard and genitals were cut off, what remained of his body being dragged round the streets before being fed to dogs. Naudé thought such excess prevented this from being a perfect coup d’état.

The significance of secretaries of state underlined another dynamic within European states. Decisions were increasingly registered and conveyed in written and printed forms. Great matters of state continued to be registered under a Great Seal. The change came through papers issued under the ruler’s privy (or personal) seal. Letters of commission, contracts, nominations to offices, permissions, verifications and passports – such documents lay at the heart of the relationship between Europe’s political élites and its governing entities. The paperwork represented a dramatic rise of power at a distance. Almost 6,000 letters of Catherine de Médicis have survived – a fragment of an estimated 30,000 original missives. When she complained to Henry of Navarre about the burden, he retorted bluntly: ‘you thrive on this work’. Philip II, too, laboured at his documents into the night, reading despatches and writing or dictating his replies, complaining of exhaustion, eye troubles and headaches. In May 1579, for example, he received 1,200 petitions. His secretary Mateo Vázquez de Leca reported the complaint of the king that he had to sign 400 letters a day. Couriers and postal services were as important as military garrisons in the governing structures of Europe. The threat of being swamped by paper dictated the need for a favourite and pointed the way towards subcontracting as much state business as possible.

The archives of Europe’s states were transformed from repositories of charters to arsenals of state authority. The change was not the result of foresight. More often than not over-ambitious projects led to disorderly, half-abandoned solutions. In the case of the papal archives, Pope Pius V wanted the chaotic paperwork in the Castel Sant’Angelo organized, recopied and installed in the apostolic palace – an archive for the monarch of global Catholicism. That was akin to instructions issued by Philip II in 1561 to his newly appointed archivist to create a central repository for his empire, or to Elizabeth I’s establishment in 1578 of the Public Record Office. By the early seventeenth century, most states could boast an archive. That paperwork, which is what has tended to survive, reinforces an impression of the institutional weight of the state, even though it was the less documented princely court which remained of central significance to the dynamics of politics and rule.

MAKING THE JUSTICE-STATE WORK

A good prince delivered justice. The reality was not as simple as that. A plethora of local jurisdictions lay in private (seigneurial, ecclesiastical, communal) hands. In general, justice was local, cheap and unprofessional (open to favour and worse); or it was distant, expensive and professional. There was no shortage of demands for justice. The mounting case-loads and burgeoning complaints about delays and legal chicanery were, in part, the result of the pressure from below and towards the state to settle the disputes which a less face-to-face society, regulated in new ways and at a distance by paper, created. The problem was that people’s aspirations were mutually incompatible: a local system of justice that was both professional and cheap.

States could multiply the number of royal tribunals to bring professional justice within the reach of localities and expand the kinds of cases they handled. By 1650, there were more magistrates, offering justice in the prince’s name, than there had been in 1520. The judicial sector grew; but the more it grew, the less ‘public’ it was. In the duchy of Bavaria, for example, the modest 162 individuals on the duchy’s payroll in Munich in 1508 grew to 866 by 1571. In France about 7–8,000 office-holders in justice and finance worked for the king in 1515. By 1665, this had grown to a corps of about 80,000. In most of Protestant Europe, Church courts were abolished and secular magistrates became the law-givers in ecclesiastical matters. But the majority of these officials, especially in France, had purchased their posts and, by the early seventeenth century, the reversion of their offices (the right to sell them on to a person of their choice). Judicial and financial offices were equally sold to wealthy competitors in Rome and in some of the smaller states. Office-holders came to regard their salaries as interest on the capital they had paid into the state’s coffers.

Another way to expand the reach of princely justice was to codify customary laws. Customary law developed widely in medieval Europe, especially in areas where Roman law was not taken as the basis for the justice offered in local jurisdictions. States encouraged magistrates to harmonize and publish customs. The increasing importance accorded to princely edicts was a response to the demand for reform in societies where greater mobility, and living within broader spheres of influence, created demands for social regulation in new ways. Aspirations for reform touched on major aspects of public living – from the price of foodstuffs to the regulation of clothing and the control of prostitution. There was an obsessive concern with managing everything that moved: goods, prices, diseases, heretics and vagrants. That meant creating local inspectors, controllers and certifiers – but their offices, too, were typically sold off or farmed out to a contractor. That ‘police’ ordinances were often reissued was less a sign of their failure than of the educative power of legislation. This was the golden age of the ‘justice-state’, intrusive in people’s lives.

Most ambitiously of all, Europe’s rulers received petitions from their subjects and offered redress on the basis of equity. Jean Bodin made equity a cornerstone of sovereignty, whose majesty was reflected in the power to answer petitions from subjects with prudence and mercy, reflecting the divine law of which the prince was the embodiment. French monarchs expanded the competence and utilization of Masters of Requests, magistrates who received petitions on the king’s behalf and reported on the equity of the case to the royal council. In Florence, the first duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I, encouraged subjects to write to him directly if they experienced problems with the law. He saw it as limiting corruption and presenting himself as the champion of the people. A sculpture, commissioned from Vicenzio Danti in 1564 and placed in the duchy’s newly constructed state offices (the Uffizi), depicted Cosimo with, to one side, a male figure representing law (‘Rigour’), and to the other, a female statue holding a measuring rule (‘Equity’). The requests came from ordinary people, phrased as appeals to the prince’s clemency in such a way that equity became a school in which the duke’s subjects learned the language of obedience and deference to the state. Making a speech in 1616 before the English Star Chamber, King James I praised the equity court of Chancery as an extension of his God-given rule, ‘the dispenser of the Kings Conscience, following always the intention of Law and Iustice . . . in this it exceeds other courts, mixing Mercie with Iustice’. For the early Stuarts, as for other princes in the early seventeenth century, justice was equated with exercising a prerogative and prudential power, exclusively that of the sovereign.

NERVES OF STATE

This was also the first age of the ‘finance-state’. Fiscal extraction expanded to hitherto undreamed-of levels and long-term borrowing became an established reality. The establishment of tax-states was a slow process. Aristocrats lived off their domains. At the beginning of the sixteenth century princes were expected to do likewise. In places, some rulers still did so. In the Danish Oldenburg state, the Landgravate of Hesse, Sweden – wherever the money economy was thin – the countryside was divided up into areas around a castle which acted as the focal point for collecting revenues in kind and cash. Part of the cash surplus went forward to the royal treasury. In northern Europe domain-extraction even increased for a while by the impact of the Reformation and the absorption of former ecclesiastical domains into royal hands. What dribbled into the central treasury, however, was limited. Domain-based revenues meant bullying officials into presenting better accounts, and organizing warehouses to store and sell the surplus. The other option was to alienate (or ‘privatize’) the domain into private hands in return for a one-off payment or a regular return.

Taxation was an opportunity for states to tap into the economic growth of the sixteenth century. In Denmark this involved the revenues from the Sound Tolls at the entrance to the Baltic (which gave the Danish monarchy a unique tax security) along with excise taxes on the sale of beer (Cise). In Hesse, the limits of domain-extraction were reached in the 1550s when the Landgrave’s debt reached a million florins or ten times its annual income. The result was the creation of a repartition tax on a personal basis, nobles as well as non-nobles, and the introduction of excise taxes, which (as in Denmark) proved a money-spinner. Where we can measure it, taxes rose and (even taking inflation into account) sometimes spectacularly so.

Castile, the fiscal heartland of the Spanish Habsburg dynastic empire, saw its overall revenues (including those from New World silver) increase from around 1 million ducats in 1522 to about 10 million ducats in 1598 (around 500 tons of silver). In France, the receipts to the treasury increased from about 3.46 million livres in 1523 to 17.6 million livres in 1599 (more than 200 tons of silver, over 70 per cent of the value of the silver imports from the New World). In Austrian Habsburg lands the establishment of the tax-state occurred late in the sixteenth century when the Long Turkish War pushed taxes up sixfold. The levies in Austria and the Tyrol alone totalled the equivalent of 6.6 tons of silver per annum by the early seventeenth century. Even privileged cities such as Augsburg or Nuremberg experienced a rise in fiscality – the taxation in the latter reached the equivalent of 8.1 tons per annum in some years. In the kingdom of Naples, revenues rose from not far short of 440,000 Neapolitan gold ducats in the early sixteenth century to around 2.5 million ducats in 1595 (the equivalent of 42 tons of silver). The English monarchy, where most taxation was a matter of negotiation with the Parliament, also experienced a modest real increase in revenue in the sixteenth century. Nor were such increases limited to princely territories. The revenues of republican Venice rose from about 1.5 million Venetian gold ducats in 1500 to 2.45 in 1600 (the equivalent of 66 tons per annum of silver). The Papal States, too, became a significant fiscal-state. The growth in public credit in the sixteenth century would have been impossible without such rises. The interest payments on that credit meant that princes were not better off but their states became bigger enterprises.

The tax-state was consolidated in the first half of the seventeenth century, especially among the belligerents in the Thirty Years War. Castile’s revenues climbed from 10 million ducats in 1598 to 18 million in 1654. France was the most precocious fiscal-state of all. According to the accounts presented at its council of state and finance, income grew to an astronomical level at the beginning of its direct military intervention in the Thirty Years War in 1635 – over 2,200 tons of silver and a notional 20 per cent of the country’s grain production. In the Dutch Republic, taxation reached a peak in the 1630s and 40s. In Denmark, the tax-state became a significant feature in people’s lives for the first time. In 1629–43, the annual amount raised in taxes was twice as great as in the period of 1600–1614, of which nearly two thirds was spent on the permanent army, and much of the rest on the navy.

There were only a few exceptions to the general consolidation of the tax-state in the first half of the seventeenth century. In the case of Poland-Lithuania, the union cemented at Lublin kept revenues and expenditures separate. In Lithuania, the domain was state property rather than the king’s. Supposed to support the costs of the state, it failed to do so. Instead, it was pledged against loans and leased out to nobles in return for low rents. When, in the wake of the Swedish invasion of Estonia and Livonia (in whose survival the Lithuanians had the greatest interest), the leaseholders were persuaded to pay more (the kwarta – introduced in 1633) to a new state treasury, the Lithuanians ensured that there was no inspection of domains and the proceeds remained minimal. In the face of the crisis of the Cossack insurgency of 1648, the Lithuanians, who did not usually fund the costs of campaigns in the south, did reluctantly accept an emergency hearth tax and higher excise dues, but this was hugely resented.

The state’s major revenue streams came from Poland. But chronic monetary instability in the early seventeenth century (the intrinsic value of the Polish silver coin dropped by 41 per cent in the years from 1604 to 1623), exacerbated by the collapse of the international grain market following the outbreak of warfare in the Baltic and Germany, undermined its receipts. As in Lithuania, the majority of the royal domain was leased out at low rents to the nobility, from which the Polish Sejm reluctantly granted the kwarta in 1633. But its leaseholders paid only token amounts and only a small proportion (about 15 per cent) of the domain (the so-called ‘table’ estates, treated as prerogative revenues) turned in a significant return. So the Polish monarchy increasingly depended on extraordinary taxes granted by the Sejm, the most significant of which was a land tax, based on a land survey carried out in 1563. Although Polish kings attempted to use the military crises of the Swedish and Muscovite wars to instigate reforms, they were controversial, created distrust of the monarch, and were never carried out because Lithuanian and Ruthenian magnates and nobles knew that, if a new land survey were conducted, it would expose the extent to which they were not contributing. The only alternatives were revenue expedients (among them, a hearth tax and a ‘winter-bread’ (hiberna) levy) but their financial returns were outweighed by their political costs to the stability of the Commonwealth. The introduction of an excise on beer, vodka and wine in 1629 as a wartime measure was the most promising expedient but the divisions it created were so great that its introduction was only possible as a local levy from which the crown saw none of the proceeds. The 1648 Cossack rebellion exposed the fatal political and fiscal fragilities of the Commonwealth.

In England, too, the tax-state languished in the early seventeenth century. In 1603, James I inherited an English treasury that was solvent. The crown lands offered considerable potential for additional sources of revenue and the customs, the largest source of royal revenue, did not yield their full potential. Like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the British monarchy kept the revenues and expeditures of its three kingdoms separate. Although Ireland never paid for itself, Scotland just about managed to, and the major burdens of state were expected to be carried by England. But, as in Poland, that created political problems. The larger court which the regal union demanded, not to mention the place in Europe which its scale now invited, expanded expenditures and created debts which were criticized by English Parliaments when they met. The determined efforts to manage royal finances and cut costs by Lord Treasurer Lionel Cranfield in 1617–24 only reduced the annual deficit to £160,000 at the end of James I’s reign. In the meantime, because of the way that the English monarchy paid its servants (offering them the opportunity to enjoy fees, pensions and annuities) such zeal to control expenditure merely increased the impressions of corruption.

The accumulating debts of the British monarchy were managed through the farm of the customs to various courtiers who headed up merchant syndicates, and through hiving off prerogative functions and revenues to contractors. The attempts at radical change failed, most notably in the ‘Great Contract’ of 1610, when king and Commons nearly reached an agreement to abolish some prerogative revenues in return for a guaranteed annual financial sum from Parliament. The negotiations failed because the political will was lacking on both sides, but the principles were revived in 1621, 1626 and again in 1641. The Stuarts were reluctant to sacrifice prerogatives which embodied a high conception of monarchy. Parliament-men were not sure how to levy an annual tax, knew that they would face criticism from the constituencies for doing so, and were more than half-persuaded by the ambient criticisms of a corrupt court.

In the 1620s, the Stuarts sought, as was usual, to fund their modest and ill-judged military interventions in the Thirty Years War by calling on Parliaments for assistance. MPs were shocked at the amounts they were being asked to pay, but military costs had risen much faster than the limited English experience of the changed realities of continental war had prepared them for. In addition, although the Parliaments of 1621, 1624, 1625 and 1628 were generous by their own lights (that of 1628 granted five subsidies, more than Elizabeth I had dared ask of her Parliaments in the 1590s), the results were of increasingly less value to the Stuarts. The 1628 subsidies were worth £275,000, in return for which the Parliament demanded that the king raise no revenues except the ones he was legally entitled to. But that sum was nowhere near the million pounds that the king needed. A subsidy was, like the Polish land tax, notionally a tax on the annual value of a person’s land. As with the Polish Sejm, English Parliaments did not control the assessment of the subsidies they voted, and the fall in yield – from £130,000 in the middle of Elizabeth’s reign to £55,000 – reflected inflation, increased population mobility and the reality that, in a system of local self-government, prominent individuals could not be challenged to pay their share. As the financial returns from holding a Parliament diminished in the 1620s, so their political costs grew, since their debates increasingly focused not on how to raise revenue but on fundamental laws in Church and state, culminating in the Petition of Right (7 June 1628). Agreed by both Lords and Commons and ratified by a reluctant king, it attempted to restrict non-Parliamentary taxation, forced billeting of soldiers, imprisonment without cause and the use of martial law.

Disengaging from the Thirty Years War, Charles I raised money in the 1630s as best he could. Like his Polish counterparts, he resorted to revenue expedients based on his prerogative rights. This enabled him to raise forced loans and grant patents for monopolies on producing or selling goods, a slippery slope (very, in the case of the soap monopoly) towards an excise. In 1630, he dusted down his entitlement to fine people who had not been knighted at the coronation – a successful wheeze, raising the equivalent of two and a half subsidies. Similarly, he exploited his rights to enforce the laws designed to protect the forests. But, as the Venetian ambassador observed in 1635, these were ‘false mines for obtaining money, because they are good for once only, and states are not maintained by such devices’.

Charles’s other expedient was ‘Ship Money’, a prerogative levy to expand the navy that was apportioned out to county sheriffs, whose responsibility was to negotiate its payment by local parties as seemed equitable. That resulted in rating disputes, for (as a contemporary remarked) ‘in every place there are some malevolent spirits that labour to poison and censure . . . blasting this for an imposition, an innovation against the liberty of the subject’. The imposition was initially successful, apparently giving the lie to a sense of deepening resentments towards the Stuarts in England during Charles’s Personal Rule – the eleven years between 1629 and 1640 when he ruled without recourse to Parliament. Yet there were warning signs of organized resistance. A Puritan network, based in East Anglia but embracing the Buckinghamshire gentleman John Hampden and the earl of Bedford, existed through meetings of the Providence Island Company. They sought leave to challenge the legality of the writ and, in 1637, Charles I allowed Hampden’s case to be heard in the Exchequer. Hampden’s counsel included Oliver St John, legal adviser to the earls of Warwick and Bedford. St John argued that if, as the writ claimed, there was an emergency then (given the time-frame since its issuance) the king should have summoned a Parliament to deal with it. Hampden’s other lawyer challenged prerogative right more generally. On the latter the king won the case. Chief Justice Finch declared that ‘no acts of Parliament make any difference’ to the king’s prerogative power to raise money for the defence of the realm.

The case, far from stiffening the sinews of resistance, did not disrupt the continuing collection of the levy. Only in the context of the Bishops’ War in Scotland (1639), with its competing demands upon localities to levy and equip troops for the army, did the grievances of the 1628 Petition of Right resurface and the Privy Council’s grip on the levy of Ship Money falter. By then, however, Charles’s failure to achieve solvency through prerogative revenue-raising was completely exposed. In 1639, £328,000 of future receipts had been anticipated, bills went unpaid and (with the death or bankruptcy of his leading lenders) his financial backers were reduced to the customs farmers and his own servants (Laud and Strafford).

Indirect taxes on foodstuffs, wine, beer and salt were favoured innovations around council tables for new revenue streams since they could be seen as prerogative rights and it was said that they were paid for by outsiders or hidden in the sale price of a product. The Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, declared that such taxes were ‘pleasing to God, hurtful to no man, and not provocative of rebellion’. People were not easily fooled. Single-product excise duties were effective where a prerogative right could be claimed and where there were commodities of high value and resilient demand in buoyant economies. But when they were on commodities of lower value in cash-poor environments, and introduced with more dubious legality, they caused revolt. Taxes on salt were a tried and tested part of the finance-states of Genoa and Venice among others. But in the central regions of France salt taxes worked by demanding people make compulsory purchases of the product. The result was widespread fraud and periodic revolt against the hated gabelles. In the Spanish peninsula, too, the introduction of excise duties in the 1630s provoked provincial rebellion. The Dutch Republic was the first to move towards an excise – it may have invented the word – on a range of goods. In its urbanized environment, it formed a fiscal basis to the new regime. When France followed its example with a pancarte (so-called from the tariffs that were posted at the entry to main towns), it provoked a revolt and was withdrawn in 1602, and only cautiously reintroduced as a wartime measure later on in 1640. In England, too, Charles I’s efforts to expand state revenues on the basis of the prerogative rights in the 1630s resulted in a groundswell of resentment.

Fiscal innovations relied on stronger administrative structures for tax-raising, even though much of the collection still happened in local communities. They required new officials, treasurers and accountants. In France, a new officer (the trésorier de l’épargne) was established in 1523, flanked by treasurers of finance, and (from 1542) by sixteen regional treasury offices (généralités). In Habsburg Spain, the central financial council (Consejo de Hacienda) had powers over Castilian revenues, separate councils being responsible for overseeing the revenue-raising in other kingdoms and principalities. Thanks to the skills of the Hacienda its budgets were remarkably accurate. Spanish treasurers held together complex financial operations over large distances, dealing with colossal sums of money. Despite not having a centralized treasury, they kept track of income and expenditure, knew the consolidated and floating debts of the empire and recognized when things were getting out of hand.

Despite this strengthening of state officialdom, the consolidation of the fiscal-state was mainly achieved by the contracting out of revenue-raising and expenditure. Salt taxes, customs duties and excises – but also the provisioning of princely courts and armies – were leased out to consortia of tax-farmers and providers on a contractual basis. Tax-farming guaranteed revenues in ready money. In some states, it gave courtiers or others around the prince an opportunity for manipulation and bribery when arranging the lease. Above all, the resources could be anticipated as a loan while the burden of collecting tax was passed on to those (consortia typically included wealthy merchants and officials) who had the access to the money and the experience to handle the complicated operations of tax-collection in liaison with local agents. The downside was that tax-farming left the state at a degree removed from what was being levied in its name, not able to calculate (let alone diminish) the profits made by the tax-farmers in question while suffering from the unpopularity among the public at large which its perceived rapacity created.

By the first half of the seventeenth century, contracting out was a fact of life. Along with the consolidation of the finance-state went the broadening of the numbers of people engaged in contracting operations. By 1650, the 60,000 or more office-holders of the French state were complemented by the hundreds of contractors (partisans – those who had signed a parti, or contract) and thousands of agents (commis) operating for them. Contracts furnished the state with money, credit and expertise, but they were arrived at in a complex, secretive and surreal world. Although tax-farming contracts were officially auctioned to the highest bidder, the contractor-financiers operated under assumed names, and ensured that there was either only one tender or none at all. The French government was engaged in a perpetual cat-and-mouse game in time of war, forced to ensure a flow of funds by making deals with tax-farmers who became, at the same time, its lenders. The legal mechanism for investigating their peculation was known as a ‘justice tribunal’ (chambre de justice) but it could not be instigated during an emergency lest those whom it was established to prosecute ceased to lend money to the state. Although the financiers’ transactions were secret, they flaunted their wealth in lavish Parisian town-houses and lifestyles. The more contractor-financiers were a law unto themselves the more significant the boundaries between the public and the private became to their critics and the more the gap between the French capital and its provinces opened up. Their opponents called them ‘snakes’ and ‘blood-suckers’. Their critics grew more numerous and vocal as the precariousness of the contractor-financier pyramid of debts and obligations became more evident.

Spanish subcontracting of its fiscal operations to financiers through asientos was already well established. So, too, was its periodic inability to meet its contractual obligations, resolved by suspensions of payments on its contracts (bankruptcies). As the Spanish monarchy’s debts coagulated under the fiscal pressures of the Thirty Years War, so its efforts to find ways of keeping the empire financially afloat grew more desperate. A further bankruptcy in 1627 was accompanied by a debasement of the currency in order to devalue government debts. In addition, Olivares brought into the Spanish contractual system some new players – Portuguese-Jewish business families, resident in Seville and Madrid, who had cash reserves from their Far East, Brazilian and northern European operations. Olivares tempted them in by issuing pardons for relapses into Judaism before 1626, guaranteeing them immunity from the confiscation of their investments by the Inquisition, and giving them offices within the Hacienda. He then played them off against the Genoese financiers with whom they came to share the burden of financing the Spanish monarchy in the 1630s. By the early 1640s, the collapse of Spanish fiscality was imminent as all rents and taxes were committed twice over for at least five years in the future. Repayment of capital debt ceased and those on interest payments were threatened. The real value of revenues in Castile and elsewhere diminished as the impact of harvest failures and demographic decline affected southern Europe. From the mid-1640s, silver imports from the New World also shrank in volume and value. New taxes were politically impossible in an empire where provincial revolt became endemic in the 1640s. The solvency of the New Christian Portuguese bankers was undermined by Spanish military and naval disasters in the Atlantic. In 1645, as a conversos firm in Madrid failed, others refused to lend more money to the government. The Peace of Westphalia was accompanied by a double Spanish bankruptcy (1647, 1652) in which Portuguese and Genoese bankers faced ruin.

The French fiscal-state was the most precocious in the first half of the seventeenth century and its evolution offers the starkest example of these broader processes at work. Offices and annuities formed the core of the constituted debt of the French monarchy. The sale of royal posts was already very extensive and institutionalized in the French kingdom by 1600, but reached new intensities in the period of the cardinal-ministers (Richelieu, 1624–42; Mazarin, 1642–61). New categories of office were invented, some were ‘semesterized’ so that two or three people could share the same job and senior judicial posts were put up for sale. Critics of these measures drew on the ideals of the Christian commonwealth to declare that justice was being sold and the state corrupted. In 1604, the right to inherit offices was also turned into a tax (and known as the ‘Paulette’ after the first person to whom the tax-farm was contracted). The sale of annuities through the Paris municipality underwent a transformation as its administrators’ offices were put up for sale. That paradoxically removed any pretence that the rentes were being issued by a body that was independent of the state. By the 1640s, tax-farming embraced all the revenues of the French state including the tailles. In 1637, tax-farmers were given discretion over which assignations on particular receipts should be honoured, and which should not – thereby giving them power to determine what happened to revenue inflows. The payments of interest on rentes, like officers’ salaries, fell further into arrears – those for the last quarter of 1635, the year that France entered the Thirty Years War, were eventually paid as it signed the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659. In the looking-glass world of French finances in the 1630s and 40s, taxes had never been so high, but the state coffers had never been so empty.

As the demands for war finance became more desperate, so the recourse to short-term loans at high interest rates increased. The interest on loans was paid through mechanisms (comptants) which bypassed scrutiny through the accounting processes of the French monarchy. The loans came from fortunes which had been made at the expense of the state to which they would then be re-lent. Even Richelieu and Mazarin themselves participated in lending money to the state, for which they too were handsomely rewarded. Richelieu’s créatures included key figures in the extraordinary financial machine, individuals upon whom he could rely for their loyalty and discretion. State sovereignty became a legal coach-and-horses legitimation, justifying forced loans and allowing intendants sweeping powers in justice and finance to suppress provincial and popular revolts.

In various regions of France, peasants went into open revolt against tax-farmers. In places like Rouen, Bordeaux and Provence, the regime’s opponents included magistrates whose investments in royal offices and rentes had been compromised and local nobles who were alienated from the Paris-led financial merry-go-round. The French thinker Blaise Pascal spent the early 1640s in the Auvergne in ‘honourable retreat’ because his father had been a party to the revolt of Parisian rentiers of March 1638, and been forced into refuge to avoid reprisals. The budgets presented to the French council of state and finances were imaginary figments, reflecting financing contracting and the manipulation of power which sustained it. Parisian magistrates attempted to resist these innovations in a movement of legal opposition short of rebellion which then turned into the revolt of the Fronde, and their actions coincided with an undeclared bankruptcy in the French state.

The Dutch fiscal experience was different from that of France. Although the United Provinces was a tiny state it was subjected to similar demands to raise unprecedented taxation for war. The Dutch participated in almost every anti-Habsburg coalition in the Thirty Years War. They supported the Bohemian rebels in 1618. The Elector Palatine, Frederick V, took his court into exile at The Hague. When the Spanish launched their offensive in 1625, the Dutch led the anti-Habsburg alliance involving Denmark. In 1624, their coalition included the French and, from 1630, Sweden. Dutch armies, navies and garrisons were more sustained and significant in comparison to its population than those of France. But there was no bankruptcy, and outsourcing and subcontracting were kept in check. The deputies in the States General distributed the burdens of taxation agreed at a federal level around the provinces by means of quotas. Excises were farmed on yearly contracts but the accounting procedures were not bypassed. When the customs were briefly farmed out in 1625, opponents in the Estates of Holland successfully challenged the experiment with complaints about the profits of the consortium concerned and its illegal actions.

Provincial Estates introduced a great variety of taxes and at high rates. In Holland, the tax burden per head increased by 21 per cent between 1621 and 1650. In Leiden, 60 per cent of the price of beer, 25 per cent of the price of bread and 14 per cent of the price of meat went in tax. But the number of open protests was limited to a major disturbance following the new impost on butter in 1624 and some unrest in Frisia in 1637. Above all, the long-term debt was written out as permanent and transferable rents and life-time annuities. Much of it was borne by the ‘generality’, i.e. by the States as a whole, which meant that the low rates of interest in the core of the republic (Holland, Utrecht and Zeeland) were shared by them all. Because it was shared out on a quota basis, the public debt of Holland, the largest state, increased the most. By 1648, estimates of its total amount ranged between 125 million and 147 million guilders – more than thirty times its size in 1618. Yet there was no bankruptcy.

The first Receivers-General of the Union came from the Doubleth family – émigré merchants from Mechelen. Their house at Voorhout in The Hague, near the Binnenhof, where the States General met, served as the state’s unofficial treasury. They too made a fortune from putting their business acumen and willingness to take risks to the benefit of the state. They were accused of corruption by deputies at the Estates. Their books from the year 1618 had still not been accepted for audit a decade later. The provincial Estates and the States General kept a realistic eye on what was happening in the state’s finances. In the end, it was the dispersed nature of the political and financial institutions of the United Provinces which inspired investors with confidence. That, coupled with the economic good fortune of the Netherlands, ensured that interest rates remained low. Subscribers were ready to lend money to the state. High taxation as a result of war was not necessarily the agent of crisis in mid-seventeenth-century European politics.

Rulers in the early seventeenth century liked to boast about their financial and military power. In reality, both depended heavily upon infra-state financial apparatuses associated with political will. The English ambassador reported how Henry IV led him along the embankment in Paris between the Louvre and the Arsenal ‘vaunting’ that he had the military hardware at one end and the treasure at the other to fight ‘even to the end of a very long war’. Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy told Henry on his visit to Paris in 1601 that the distinction between Savoy and Piedmont was that ‘I get out of Savoy what I can, and from Piedmont what I want.’ Bavarian Duke Maximilian I was baffled that he managed to extract so much from his territories in 1632, reflecting that it would have been impossible for his predecessors to have achieved it. The business of states was that of money, what Cicero had described as the ‘nerves of the state’ (pecunia nervus rerum). The hard-edged reality of the Leviathan states was the recognition that, as Duke Maximilian had put it in 1611: ‘a prince who is not wealthy at times of adversity has neither authority nor reputation. If he loses these, the management of public affairs will collapse.’

THE BUSINESS OF WAR

Military change profoundly affected Europe’s states. It is sometimes called a ‘military revolution’, although that does not adequately delineate the chain-reactions, occurring over a long time-frame, which transformed the way that states defended themselves. What began in Italy in the fifteenth century was still being felt in the early eighteenth century. An arms race, unleashed in part by the way in which firearms and artillery affected the conduct of war, changed what soldiers wore, the equipment they carried, and the training and preparation that they needed. It transformed the role of the cavalry and its tactics. It altered the wounds they inflicted on one another and their chances of being killed. Firearms produced a step-change in the capital investment upon war. Weapons had to be purchased and stockpiled. Stronger fortifications required more investment in fixed-capital structures, which entailed maintenance and year-round garrisoning. Stronger fortifications meant longer sieges, stretching normal campaigning beyond the summer season and the equipment required. There was an equivalent arms race at sea, resulting from mounting guns on ships and a consequential shift in tactics to a style of combat based on firepower, similar to that used by artillery in sieges.

The visible result of military change was fortifications whose traces still mark the European landscape – distinctive arrow-headed bastions of earth, the lowest parts reinforced in stone or brick to prevent the ramparts from being degraded, with outer-works known as ravelins (triangular), horns (twin-pointed) and crowns designed to deliver a curtain of fire upon would-be besiegers. Engineers were in demand, lured by projects and rewards from one prince to another as states increased their protection with the latest designs of fortified strongholds. Military manuals in the early seventeenth century were replete with ballistic details. Growing international tensions in Europe in the early seventeenth century are reflected in the thousands of miles of newly constructed or modernized fortresses. They included those built by engineers for Henry IV’s head of fortifications (the duke of Sully) from Savoy to Picardy on the French frontiers. Engineers for the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Habsburgs built defensive lines along the rivers in the Netherlands and in the lower Rhineland. The Austrian Habsburgs countered those built by the Ottomans across the Hungarian plain.

The importance of these fortresses in contributing to a military revolution can be exaggerated. Sieges were long and complicated affairs, expensive in materials and lives. Artillery was cumbersome and only fired mortar rounds slowly. As in naval warfare, the mobilization for siege warfare was a hostage to fortune. French commanders in the Thirty Years War found themselves committed by strategists in Paris to sieges which absorbed massive resources, the limited strategic gains being offset by a failure to hold a stronghold somewhere else. Shrewd military commanders in the Thirty Years War and English Civil War avoided sieges. What mattered was operational effectiveness, and for that the military equivalent of subcontracting was an important way for states to provide well-trained and reliable troops, feed and pay them, and motivate them to undertake the arduous route-marches and campaigns which the attritional warfare of the Thirty Years War demanded. Military ‘devolution’ (outsourcing) was as important as military ‘revolution’.

The resort to mercenaries to supplement the resources of a prince was well established, especially on the frontiers of Christendom, where the empty political spaces were occupied by militarized groups (such as Cossacks, Uzkoks and others) which had a tradition of combining raiding and piracy. Privateering was an established way of contracting for naval forces. Condottieri from leading families in the Italian peninsula (the Sforza, the Gonzaga) furnished forces to the Habsburg and Valois combatants in the Italian Wars, their contracts sometimes including a retainer (condotta in aspetto) to ensure that their men were held in readiness for another campaign. The best-trained forces of sixteenth-century Europe were its mercenaries. The Swiss infantry forged the technique of organizing a defensive square of soldiers with halberds, protected by a fringe of pikemen. That, in turn, was adopted by the Spanish tercio and German Landsknechte. The latter were mercenary soldiers, raised through the Holy Roman Empire by smaller German territorial princes and nobles whose units were then contracted out to princes. The effectiveness of the Swiss infantry squares depended on skills that were spread through the companies, coupled with leadership.

Those qualities were acquired by experience. Swiss soldiers were recruited from close-knit peasant communities, comrades staying together in their contingents. Their commanders came from families where military service was regarded as an honourable career. The double-pay pikemen at the flanks of the companies were especially crucial to their solidity under fire. The Landsknechte had a more diverse basis for recruitment (including, after the Reformation, religious diversity) but many of them saw it as a professional calling. Each company had its elected officers who were responsible for troop movements, lodging and supplies, and who represented the interests of the soldiers to the captain. As in the Swiss companies, the men were divided into small groups who trained together. German contracting colonels came from among the smaller territorial princes or imperial nobility, but officers were ‘acclaimed’ by the soldiers at large, assembled in a circle, the body which also collectively enforced military discipline. The notorious flamboyance of mercenaries’ clothing – multi-coloured jackets, slashed breeches and outrageous cod-pieces – reflected the cultural and social assumptions of men who flaunted their sexuality and killing prowess.

Cavalry companies (Reiter) were much in demand, another part of the German soldier-business. Military changes made the traditional ‘man-at-arms’ – a man on a horse, protected with plate armour – a specialized and expensive military weapon. Units of heavy cavalry still survived in France, Venice or Milan into the seventeenth century, satisfying noble pretensions, but mostly they were replaced by bands of mounted cross-bowmen and handgun-men, deployed with some armour protection. German Reiter specialized in the pistolier tactics known as caracol – from the Spanish for ‘snail’ – which created or exploited a collapse in the infantry squares of an opposing army. Such techniques were primarily responsible for the Protestants’ Mühlberg defeat (1547). It required considerable experience to undertake such manoeuvres in battlefield conditions.

Elongated campaign seasons, larger armies and attritional warfare expanded the opportunities for contracted-out military forces. At the same time, the insolvency of princes increased the attractiveness of sharing the costs of raising, equipping, paying and supplying armies with a military contractor. The military ‘enterpriser’ acted as both contractor and creditor. Enterprisers existed throughout the military hierarchy, from colonels and privateering captains through munitioneers and purveyors, up to generals and admirals. Their relationships with states varied, depending on what they offered (and were asked) to undertake. The willingness of enterprisers to expand their range of activities, to advance princes and governments credit, and to take on operational responsibilities, may of itself have intensified military engagements.

Operational-financial contractors existed in naval as well as military spheres. The Mediterranean galley squadrons of the Habsburgs were built, outfitted and maintained by private contractors. Genoese galley fleets were contracted to the Habsburgs. Three of the ships in the 1588 Spanish Armada were built by private contractors, and 45,000 of the 60,000 tons of the fleet that year came from hired merchantmen. Captains (Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh being notable examples) used their ships as business ventures. They raised their capital in consortia, running privateering operations or hiring their vessels to the state, as opportunities dictated. ‘Get a good ship and judiciously manage her’ was the advice to indigent younger sons of English gentry, brought up to believe the exaggerated stories of the profits accruing to Elizabethan adventurers.

The biggest profits from military contracting were to be made in munitions and armaments supplies. Genoa, Hamburg and Amsterdam acted as the centres, but they relied on secondary providers. The Genoese merchant houses of Stefano and Balbi provided the armour and arms to Spanish forces. The Marselis brothers were among the Hamburg munitioneers who serviced the needs of the armies of northern Europe. The Amsterdam armaments manufacturer Elias Trip built armed vessels for the Dutch East India Company, but hired them out to the Portuguese and Venetians during the Twelve Years Truce (1609–21), and then contracted them to the Dutch and the French. Louis de Geer, whose industrial concerns included the development of the Swedish copper and iron works in the 1620s, was approached by the Swedish general Lennart Torstensson in 1644 to provide a fleet of thirty-two crewed and armed Dutch ships against Denmark and Norway (Torstensson War, 1643–5). De Geer was happy to oblige – at a price (466,550 talers).

French and Dutch Protestant forces in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries recruited German infantry and cavalry. They were signed up for the duration of hostilities rather than for a campaign. The capitulations which laid out the terms of the contract were signed in the Rhineland cities where their commanders organized their financial backing. Although the core of the Army of Flanders was provided by Spanish veterans, the majority of the troops which served were raised by similar means. Then, in 1603 the government of the archdukes in the southern Netherlands handed over its operational management to the Genoese enterpriser Ambrogio Spínola, whose credit was better than that of the Spanish government itself. In the Long Turkish War the regiments in the Austrian Habsburg armies came from Italy, Spain and France as well as Germany, their cosmopolitan forces including many Protestant and Catholic enterprisers who followed where opportunities beckoned.

The importance of training increased with the spread of partially mass-produced portable firearms. These included the heavy-duty musket (supported by a rest on the ground when fired) and the lighter arquebus. These weapons were initially fired by a matchlock, a primitive mechanism that dropped slow-burning match-cord into a flash-pan to ignite the powder with the operation of a hand-lever. But dog-locks, wheel-locks and flint-locks – devices to produce a spark to ignite the charge – became more widely available. The introduction of the flint-lock is often credited to Marin le Bourgeois, a French gunsmith (and lute-maker) patronized by the French kings Henry IV and Louis XIII. But there was a trade-off between weapon weight and performance. Only larger-bore muskets could pierce armour at over 200 paces and, until the Thirty Years War (when the rifling of gun-bores that had begun to make hunting firearms more accurate was applied to military weapons), they were inaccurate. Portable firearms therefore depended on being used en masse and at close range with pikemen still essential to protect infantry in battle. Such developments placed even greater emphasis on drill and experience.

Gradually in the earlier seventeenth century the preference emerged for a more linear deployment over the more traditional large square blocks of troops. In his Art of War (1521) Machiavelli was among the first to stress the benefits of that formation. Contemporaries were aware of the disadvantages too. Linear formation lost the cohesion of the square. If challenged upon a flank, the long line had to pivot – a laborious manoeuvre, needing practice and officer oversight. Similar trade-offs were in play in the experiments with lightly armed, mobile cavalry organized into smaller units and shallow lines, offering great battlefield manoeuvrability but at the cost of the cumulative weight of a deep column of cavalry pouring into enemy positions. The Spaniards retained their company squares and it does not seem to have been a disadvantage to them. The French were slow to adopt newer cavalry formations but it did not compromise their victory at Rocroi (19 May 1643). Battlefield tactics did not spearhead a military revolution.

There was a profusion of printed books, covering every aspect of war. In words and diagrams, with lead soldiers, wooden models and mechanical toys, it was a subject of intense discussion. ‘Evrie day,’ noted the Elizabethan soldier Roger Williams, there were ‘newe inventions, strategems of warres, changes of weapons, munitions, and all sorts of engines newlie invented.’ For all that one learned in books, however, there was nothing like the experience of the real thing. The warfare of the late sixteenth century had created the pools of expertise which influenced soldiers of the next generation. The school of Alessandro Farnese, Spanish commander in Flanders in the 1580s and 90s, was highly prized. So too were those of Henry IV and Mauritz of Nassau and his cousin William Louis. The results were watched and to some extent copied in Protestant Europe in the next generation. In a letter to Mauritz in December 1594, William Louis mooted the idea of five rotating ranks of musketeers (based on the Ancient Greek military writer Aelian) to replicate the hail of fire which the Romans reputedly achieved with javelins and sling-shooters. It turned out that it took ten ranks to achieve that result. Intensive drilling was essential, as explained in Jacob de Gheyn’s Arms drill with arquebus, musket and pike (1607), the most successful military manual of its day.

Humanists championed the virtues of conscripted militia and criticized the unreliability, venality and lack of zeal in mercenary soldiers. Their case supported the vision of a Christian commonwealth in which citizens defended the patria in support of their prince. The reality was, however, that wherever conscripted citizen armies were attempted (for example, Machiavelli’s Florentine experiment in 1512 and the French ‘legions’ of the 1540s), they were a failure. Cheaper, they were poorly trained and tended to desert. Justus Lipsius (who knew little about armies but a lot about Tacitus) influenced the next generation with his critique of flamboyantly dressed mercenaries who were a law unto themselves, and his arguments in favour of disciplined, conscripted troops. ‘I likewise require modestie of apparell’ runs the English translation of Book V of his Politics, where he presented his blueprint for ‘a severe conforming of the souldier to valour and virtue’. Military enterprisers in the Thirty Years War and English New Model Army generals disciplined their troops not because they read Lipsius but because they had a stake in the units they commanded.

The regiments which campaigned in the period from 1620 to 1650 were raised and maintained in a variety of ways. There were forces that were financed, administered and directed by the state (parts of the French and Spanish armies, the core of the Swedish army, the New Model Army) at one extreme of the spectrum. General contractors (such as Albrecht von Wallenstein, Ernst von Mansfeld and Bernard of Saxe-Weimar) who ran armies almost as private states in their own right lay at the other. In between there were entrepreneurs offering packages of military and naval force but under the overall control of statesmen, partially state-controlled operations, where some elements (munitions, supplies and so forth) were contracted out, and specialized providers of munitions and other services. Particular circumstances dictated the degree to which military forces were contracted out. What they all had in common was a willingness to fight longer and harder, with higher proportions of casualties. Some of the battles of the Thirty Years War (Rheinfelden, 1638; Freiburg, 1644, for example) lasted over twenty-four hours. At the second battle of Breitenfeld (1642) half of the imperial forces lay dead or wounded or had been taken prisoner; 30 per cent of the opposing Swedish troops were dead or injured. At the battle of Jankau (1645) Lennart Torstensson’s Swedish army of German mercenaries was pitched against the imperial forces led by Melchior von Hatzfeld. Four to five thousand of the 16,000 soldiers on the imperial side were killed or missing by the end of the battle, and a similar number were captured by the Swedes. Regimental soldiers were tough, resourceful and adaptable – prepared to undertake forced marches of hundreds of miles and then pitch into battle without delay.

Such commitment was not generated by loyalty to an individual ruler, except when he was also a battlefield commander as in the cases of Gustav Adolf and Oliver Cromwell. It owed little to religious or patriotic zeal. The armies were composed of different nationalities: Gustav Adolf’s army in northern Germany in 1631 comprised 43,000 Swedes and 36,000 Germans, Scots, Livonians and Latvians. The Army of Flanders was Spanish in name but cosmopolitan in composition. An Italian colonel in imperial service might recruit German or Hungarian soldiers, supplemented by men from Italy or elsewhere. Colonels and commanders did not generally impose confessional adherence on their forces. Religious pluralism was the consequence of recruiting and retaining soldiers for their experience rather than their zeal. Many of those fighting in the English New Model Army (1645–60) did so for religious reasons, and Cromwell became notorious for appointing those of humble means but strongly held Protestant beliefs (‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else,’ he wrote to the earl of Manchester). But when their junior officers and ranks became politicized over back-pay in the years from 1647 to 1649 they supported the Independents, who rejected a state-imposed religious confession. Scottish Calvinists who, like Robert Munro, joined Gustav’s army ‘for the cause of religion’, fought for a Lutheran of decidedly broad-minded views, at odds with the ecclesiastical establishment of his own country, subsidized by Catholic France. Maximilian of Bavaria’s determination to insist on Catholic officers in his army inherited a broader tradition, encapsulated by the Jesuit Antonio Possevino’s 1569 manual, A Christian Soldier (copies of which were distributed to troops before Lepanto), which drew on crusading traditions. By 1650, those were traditions in clear retreat.

Military commitment was generated within fighting forces themselves. Battlefield commander-enterprisers had a personal financial stake in the survival and success of their units. Their own reputations as well as the fortunes of their backers rested on the operational decisions they made. Survival depended on developing and retaining experienced soldiers. Whatever short-term gains there might have been in recruiting dregs, in the longer term it was ‘able’ seamen and ‘old soldiers’ whose experience counted for most. Securing their services meant recruiting from as broad a background as possible, offering competitive pay, equipping them well, increasing the numbers of double-pay men in the ranks and enhancing prospects of advancement. Year-on-year campaigning, with the reality of different states competing for what military enterprisers offered, strengthened the contemporary perception in the Thirty Years War that soldiery was a career. Among the 15,000 troops of the Bavarian army which disbanded in 1649, six regiments had served continuously since 1620, and a further six had been in action for over two decades. A majority of regiments in German forces had perhaps seen a minimum of six years of continuous campaigning. Most important of all, battlefield commanders were responsible for feeding and paying their men. Their own credit lines and logistic support were essential to their military success.

‘. . . SENT TO LIE ABROAD’

Christendom’s established political hierarchies fractured as its unity collapsed. That was reflected in the exclusive titles which princes accorded themselves and the resulting squabbles in Europe’s chanceries. The pride of place traditionally accorded the emperor was contested by Valois monarchs, who claimed to be the ‘eldest son of the Church’ (following the salutation offered to Charles VIII by Pope Alexander VI at Christmas 1494), a title contested in both Madrid and Vienna. At the concluding session of the Council of Trent, Philip II asserted his own pre-eminence over other European princes, despite alarm in Rome. Standing on ceremony was at the heart of the diplomacy of this period. The English ambassador to the court of Louis XIII, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, recalled in the 1630s an anecdote of Philip II reproaching an ambassador for aborting a negotiation over a quarrel about ceremonial. The ambassador was said to have replied: ‘How so . . . Your Majesty is nothing but ceremony!’

Conventions determined how princes conducted their relationships. They habitually wrote to one another as ‘my brother’, ‘my sister’ or ‘my cousin’ – and such appellations were often the dynastic reality. By serving as godparents to one another’s offspring they took one another’s names, echoing a princely affinity that was expressed in their choices of spouses and marital strategies for their children. Most peace negotiations of this period revolved around a princely marriage and, even if they did not result in uniting hearts and minds, their political significance remained considerable. Eleanor of Austria, wife of Francis I by the Treaty of Cambrai (1529), widow of Manuel I of Portugal, served as intermediary between her husband and brother, Emperor Charles V. Elisabeth de Valois, Philip II’s wife following the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), served as a conduit between the French court and Madrid from 1565 until her death in 1568.

Catherine de Médicis was not alone in the second half of the sixteenth century in making marital strategy a plank of international policy. By then, however, confessional divisions complicated diplomatic marriages. For the majority of Europe’s ruling houses it became hard to conceive of a successful marriage crossing confessional boundaries. When Queen Elizabeth opened negotiations in 1579 with the French king’s younger brother, François d’Alençon, duke of Anjou, they foundered on a vociferous English dislike for the French (Catholic) match. The fear that a cross-confessional marriage was the first step to a dynastic change of confessional allegiance was not illusory. Protestant John Vasa of Finland eloped with the Polish Catholic Catherine Jagiellon in 1562. When John became king of Sweden in 1569, Catherine’s influence led to a Catholic-inclined church order and the reintroduction of Latin in Swedish church services. John and Catherine’s son Sigismund was brought up a Catholic in Poland at the instigation of his mother and inherited the Polish throne. But he was eventually deposed from the Swedish throne in 1599 by his uncle Charles (Charles IX of Sweden) because of fears about Sigismund’s Polish background and Catholicism. The Peace of Westphalia was distinctive precisely because it was cemented with no dynastic marriages. It was also the first major international peace treaty in Europe not to be endorsed by the papacy.

Spectacular summits encapsulating the society of princes in the sixteenth century (for instance, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, June 1520) went out of fashion as absolute rule distanced monarchs not merely from their subjects but also from one another. By contrast, diplomatic agency grew in importance. Permanent diplomatic representation was a well-established custom among the principalities of northern Italy in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century, the need to have ‘an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’ – as England’s Venetian diplomat Sir Henry Wotton remarked – became overwhelming. The dukes of Ferrara, Mantua and Parma and the state of Venice regularly had agents in Paris, Madrid and Prague in the sixteenth century. The papacy established a network of nuncios in the pontificates of Leo X and Clement VII, just as the forces of the Protestant Reformation emphasized the importance of winning friends and finding out what was happening.

By 1600, most of Europe’s states north of the Alps had regular diplomatic representation that would become the hallmark of the European state system. There were debates and hiccups along the way. One issue was whether diplomatic representation was appropriate when princes were not in alliance with one another. Another was to what extent it was appropriate, and in what circumstances, to have an ambassador accorded to a prince of another faith. Other concerns were voiced about ambassadorial conduct and privileges. By the early years of the seventeenth century, the permanent ambassador had come to stay. The ambassadorial presence consolidated the society of princes and emphasized the exclusiveness that was at the heart of absolute claims to rule.

Why individuals agreed to serve as ambassadors is a complex question. They were not well rewarded. On the other hand, diplomatic service was a ladder to higher things since ambassadors had the ear of the prince. Diplomats were also at the heart of Europe’s information inflation. Diplomatic despatches became longer and more frequent. Ambassadors were part of power-networks and corresponded with more people. Don Francés de Álava, the ambassador of Philip II at the French court of Charles IX in the 1560s, assured a correspondent: ‘night and day in this household we do nothing but write to all parts of Europe’. The Spanish ambassador in Venice in 1587–8 received 1,000 letters from fellow Spanish diplomats. The mental distances among Europe’s power élites shrank as they accessed this information. Securitizing it became more important. Ciphers grew more common; breaking them more pressing. Mauritz of Nassau’s servants cracked the ciphers used by Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris. Henry IV’s mathematician François Viète broke the Spanish codes in the 1590s, revealing Spain’s plans at a crucial moment in the Catholic League. But information inflation did not always mean greater knowledge. On the contrary, it heightened suspicions about the intentions of others.