in this sense down to the end of the Ancien Regime. Typologically, of course, the campaigns of European Absolutism present a certain evolution in and through a basic repetition. The common determinant of all of them was the feudal-territorial drive discussed above, whose characteristic form was the dynastic conflict pure and simple of the early 16th century (Habsburg/Valois struggle for Italy). Superimposed on this for a hundred years, from 1550 to 1650, was the religious conflict between Reformation and Counter-Reformation powers, which never initiated but frequently intensified and exacerbated geopolitical rivalries and provided their contemporary ideological idiom. The Thirty Years War was the greatest, and last, of these ‘mixed’ struggles.18 It was promptly succeeded by the first of a wholly new type of military conflict in Europe, fought for different objectives in a different element – the Anglo-Dutch commercial wars of the 1650’s and 1660’s, in which virtually all engagements were maritime. These confrontations, however, were confined to the two States in Europe which had experienced bourgeois revolutions, and were strictly inter-capitalist contests. The attempt to ‘adopt’ their objectives by Colbert in France proved a fiasco in the 1670’s. However, from the War of the League of Augsburg onwards, trade was nearly always an auxiliary co-presence in the major European military struggles for land – if only because of the participation in them of England, whose geographical expansion overseas was now wholly commercial in character, and whose goal was effectively a world colonial monopoly. Hence the hybrid character of the last 18th century wars, juxtaposing two different times and types of conflict in a strange, single mêlée, of which the Seven Years War furnishes the clearest example:19 the first in history to be fought right across the globe, yet as a sideshow for most of the participants, for whom Manila or Montreal were remote skirmishes compared with Leuthen or Kunersdorf. Nothing reveals the failing feudal vision of the Ancien Régime in France more than its inability to perceive the real stakes involved in these dual wars: together with its rivals, it remained basically fixated on the traditional contest for land to the end.
1. The Swedish monarchy was actually to receive much of its income in kind, both in dues and taxes, well into the early modern epoch.
2. A full-scale study of mediaeval Estates in Europe is badly needed. At present, the only work with some international sidelights appears to be Antonio Marongiu, Il Parlamento in Italia, nel Medio Evo e nell’Età Moderna: Contributo alla Storia delle Istituzioni Parlamentari dell’Europa Occidentale, Milan 1962, recently and somewhat misleadingly translated into English as Mediaeval Parliaments: A Comparative Study, London 1968. In fact, Marongiu’s book – as its original title indicates – is essentially concerned with Italy, the one region in Europe where Estates were absent or relatively unimportant. Its brief sections on other countries (France, England or Spain) scarcely constitute a satisfactory introduction to them, and it ignores Northern and Eastern Europe altogether. Moreover, the book is a juristic survey, innocent of any sociological enquiry.
3. Carl Stephenson, Mediaeval Institutions, pp. 99–100.
4. Ab omnibus debet comprobari: what touches all must be approved by all.
5. These alternative patterns are discussed by Hintze, in ‘Typologie der Ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes’, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Vol. I, pp. 110–29, which remains the best single text on the phenomenon of feudal estates in Europe, although curiously inconclusive by comparison with most of Hintze’s other essays: as if the full implications of his findings had yet to be elucidated by him.
6. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641, Oxford 1965, is the deepest existent case-study of the metamorphoses of a European nobility in this epoch. Criticism has focused on its thesis that the economic position of the English peerage deteriorated significantly in the century examined. However, this is essentially a secondary issue, for the ‘crisis’ was a much wider one than a simple question of the quantity of manors held by lords: it was a pervasive travail of adaptation. Stone’s discussion of the problem of aristocratic military power in this context is particularly valuable (pp. 199–270). The limitation of the book is rather its confinement to the English peerage, a very small élite within the landed ruling class; moreover, as will be seen below, the English aristocracy was extremely atypical of Western Europe as a whole. Studies of continental nobilities, with a comparable wealth of material, are much needed.
7. For a recent discussion, see J. H. Elliott, Europe Divided 1559–1598, London 1968, pp. 73–7.
8. J. H. Hexter, ‘The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance’, in Reappraisals in History, London 1961, pp. 45–70.
9. Roland Mousnier and Fritz Hartung, ‘Quelques Problèmes Concernant la Monarchic Absolue’, X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storici, Relazioni IV, Florence 1955, esp. pp. 4–15, is the first and most fundamental contribution to the debate on this topic over recent years. Earlier writers had perceived the same truth, if in a less systematic fashion, among them Engels: ‘The decadence of feudalism and the development of towns were both decentralizing forces, which precisely determined the necessity of absolute monarchy as a power capable of welding together nationalities. Monarchy had to be absolute, just because of the centrifugal pressure of all these elements. Its absolutism, however, must not be understood in a vulgar sense. It was in permanent conflict with Estates, and with rebellious feudatories and cities: it nowhere abolished Estates altogether.’ Marx-Engels, Werke, Bd 21, p. 402. The last clause is, of course, an overstatement.
10. Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, Paris 1578, pp. 103, 114. I have translated droit as ‘justice’ in this passage, to bring out the distinction alluded to above.
11. Les Six Livres de la République, pp. 102, 114.
12. Les Six Livres de la République, p. 103.
13. Trevor-Roper’s justly celebrated essay, ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, Past and Present, No. 16, November 1959, pp. 31–64, now modified and reprinted in Religion, The Reformation and Social Change, London 1967, pp. 46–89, for all its merits, restricts the scope of these revolts too narrowly, by presenting them essentially as protests against the expense and waste of the post-Renaissance courts. In fact, as numerous historians have pointed out, war was a very much larger item in the State budgets of the 17th century than the court. Louis XIV’s palace establishment was far more lavish than that of Anne of Austria, but it was not thereby more unpopular. Apart from this, the fundamental rift between the aristocracy and the monarchy in this epoch was not really an economic one, although war-taxes could and did set off wider revolts. It was political, concerned with the total position of the nobility in an incipient polity whose outlines were often still opaque to all the actors involved in the drama.
14. The Neapolitan upheaval, socially much the most radical of these movements, naturally least so. But even there, the first storm signal of anti-Spanish explosion were the aristocratic conspiracies of Sanza, Conversano and other nobles, who were hostile to vice-regal fiscalism and the speculative cliques which battened on it, and were intriguing with France against Spain from 1634 onwards. Baronial plots were multiplying in Naples in early 1647, when the popular tumult headed by Masaniello suddenly burst out, and drove the bulk of the Neapolitan aristocracy back to loyalism. For this process, see the excellent analysis in Rosario Villari, La Rivolta Anti-Spagnuola a Napoli. Le Origini (1585–1647), Bari 1967, pp. 201–16.
15. There is no comprehensive study of this phenomenon. It is discussed in passing by, inter alia, S. J. Woolf, Studi sulla Nobiltà Piemontese nell’ Epoca dell’ Assolutismo, Turin 1963, who dates its spread from the preceding century. Most of the contributors to A. Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the 18th Century, London 1953, also touch on it.
16. The Spanish mayorazgo was much the oldest of these devices, dating back over two hundred years; but
