The Rise of National Monarchies in the Late Middle Ages
The national monarchies of the late Middle Ages were the product of a long, painful, and uneven process. The kings of France, England, Castile, and the Iberian kingdoms, and the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, all faced the same set of problems in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — how to raise permanent revenues, how to raise permanent armies, how to enforce the king’s justice against the great territorial lords — and they all reached answers that resembled each other in outline. By 1500 a French or English or Castilian king governed through a professional bureaucracy, a system of royal courts, a salaried or commissioned army, and a centralised fiscal apparatus that would have astonished his great-grandfather.
The four cases that follow did not reach that point at the same speed, or in the same way. The Valois kings of France made a national monarchy first, and made it under the pressure of a long war and a humiliating foreign occupation. The English kings came close in the early fifteenth century, lost it again in the Wars of the Roses, and rebuilt it under the Tudors. The Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Aragon did so by welding together two kingdoms and exploiting the resources of the Reconquista. The Holy Roman Empire did not become a national monarchy at all; it became something else, a federation of principalities and free cities, that was to shape the politics of central Europe for the next four centuries.
This guide is organised in four sections:
- The kingdom of France in the late Middle Ages — the centralisation of the French state, Louis XI (“the Universal Spider”), and the Estates General.
- England from Richard II to the Tudors — the deposition of Richard II, the Wars of the Roses, and the early Tudor settlement.
- The Iberian kingdoms and the Reconquista — the long campaign against Muslim Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella, and the fall of Granada in 1492.
- The Holy Roman Empire and Central Europe — the Golden Bull of 1356, the long weakness of the late-medieval emperors, and the rise of the Habsburgs.
What the term “national monarchy” means
“National monarchy” is a historian’s term of art. In the late Middle Ages no one called the French state a “national” monarchy. The phrase refers to a state in which the king governs directly, through officials who owe their position to him and not to local lords, over a territory understood to be the homeland of a single people. The parlement of Paris, the Council of Castile at Valladolid, the English Privy Council, the Italian chanceries — these are the institutions that mark the transition from the feudal to the national monarchy. The Estates General in France, the Cortes in Castile, the Reichstag in the Empire, the Parliament in England, are the assemblies through which the king consulted, and was checked by, the political nation.
The national monarchy; is the late-medieval answer to a problem that the high-medieval kings did not face: how to govern a kingdom in which the great lords were as rich and as well armed as the king himself, and in which the church, the towns, and the royal officials all had interests of their own.
The crisis of the feudal order
The high-medieval kings of France, England, and the Empire had governed through a network of personal relationships: the king, his great vassals, the great vassals’ sub-vassals, and so on down to the peasantry. By the early fourteenth century that system was under heavy strain. The Black Death (covered in the overview of the Black Death) had broken the economic basis of the feudal order by making labour scarce and serfdom uneconomical. The Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) had forced the kings of England and France to develop new systems of taxation and new forms of military organisation. The Western Schism (1378–1417) had split the church, and the kings of Europe had been able to use the schism to win concessions from the pope that their predecessors would not have dared to seek. The Avignon Papacy (1309–1377) had drained the moral authority of the church and exposed the papacy as a temporal court.
The kings who came through this long crisis best were the ones who were able to use the crisis. The French kings used the war to extract a permanent direct tax (the taille) from the peasantry and to build a standing army (the compagnies d’ordonnance). The English kings used the war to develop a parliament that, in return for taxation, won a real role in government. The Catholic Monarchs used the Reconquista and the conquest of Granada to bring the military orders and the great Andalusian lords under royal control. The Holy Roman Emperors, who had no comparable crisis to ride, found themselves outflanked by territorial princes who built their own national monarchies in miniature.
What this guide does not try to do
The four sections focus on political structures and political events — institutions, taxation, law, war, dynasty. They do not, except in passing, treat the cultural, intellectual, or religious history of the period, which has its own sections in this site. They also do not treat the other political forms that the late Middle Ages produced and that the modern state eventually displaced: the papal state in central Italy, the great city-republics of Venice, Florence, Genoa, and the Hanseatic towns, the Swiss Confederation, the Teutonic Order in Prussia, the kingdom of Poland united with Lithuania by the Union of Krewo (1385) and the Union of Lublin (1569). These are the most important counter-examples to the “rise of the national monarchy” story, and a complete account of late medieval political history would have to give them more space than they receive here.