coming to include even movable goods. The English ‘strict settlement’ was in fact somewhat less rigid than the general continental pattern of the fideicommissum, since it was formally operative only for a single generation: but in practice successive heirs were expected to reaccept it.
17. The whole question of mobility within the noble class, from the dawn of feudalism to the end of absolutism, needs a great deal of further exploration. At present, only approximate guesses are possible for successive phases of this long history. Duby records his surprise at finding that Bloch’s conviction of a radical discontinuity between the Carolingian and mediaeval aristocracies in France was mistaken: in fact, a high proportion of the lineages who supplied the vassi dominici of the 9th century survived to become the barons of the 12th century. See G. Duby, ‘Une Enquête à Poursuivre: La Noblesse dans la France Médiévale’, Revue Historique, CCXXVI, 1961, pp. 1–22. On the other hand, Perroy found an extremely high level of mobility within the gentry of the County of Forez from the 13th century onwards: there the average duration of any noble line was 3–4, or more conservatively, 3–6 generations, largely because of the hazards of mortality. Edouard Perroy, ‘Social Mobility among the French Noblesse in the Later Middle Ages’, Past and Present, No. 21, April 1962, pp. 25–38. In general, the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance seem to have been periods of rapid turnover in many countries, in which most of the greatest mediaeval houses disappeared. This is certainly true in England and France, although probably less so in Spain. The restabilization of the ranks of the aristocracy seems equally plain by the late 17th century, after the last and most violent reshuffle of all, in Habsburg Bohemia during the Thirty Years War, had come to an end. But the subject may well reserve further surprises for us.
18. H. G. Koenigsberger’s chapter, ‘The European Civil War’, in The Habsburgs in Europe, Ithaca 1971, pp. 219–85, is a succinct and exemplary account.
19. The best general analysis of the Seven Years War is still Dorn, Competition for Empire, pp. 318–84.
Such was the general character of Absolutism in the West. The specific territorial States which came into existence in the different countries of Renaissance Europe, however, cannot simply be assimilated to a single pure type. They exhibited wide variations, in fact, which were to have crucial consequences for the subsequent histories of the countries concerned, and can still be felt to this day. Some survey of these variants is therefore a necessary complement to any consideration of the general structure of Western Absolutism. Spain, the earliest great power of modern Europe, provides a logical starting-point.
For the rise of Habsburg Spain was not merely one episode within a set of concurrent and equivalent experiences of State-construction in Western Europe: it was also an auxiliary determinant of the whole set as such. It thus occupies a qualitatively distinct position in the general process of Absolutization. For the reach and impact of Spanish Absolutism was in a strict sense ‘inordinate’, among the other Western monarchies of the age. Its international pressure acted as a special over-determination of the national patterns elsewhere in the continent, because of the disproportionate wealth and power at its command: the historical concentration of these assets in the Spanish State could not but affect the overall shape and direction of the emergent State-system of the West. The Spanish monarchy owed its preeminence to a combination of two complexes of resources – themselves sudden projections of common constituents of ascendant Absolutism to an exceptional magnitude. On the one hand, its ruling house benefited more than any other line in Europe from the compacts of dynastic marriage-policy. The Habsburg family connection yielded the Spanish State a scale of territory and influence in Europe, which no rival monarchy could match: a supreme artefact of feudal mechanisms of political expansion.
On the other hand, the colonial conquest of the New World supplied it with a superabundance of precious metals, which gave it a treasury beyond the range of any of its counterparts. Conducted and organized within still notably seigneurial structures, the plunder of the Americas was nevertheless at the same time the most spectacular single act in the primitive accumulation of European capital during the Renaissance. Spanish Absolutism thus drew strength both from the inheritances of feudal aggrandizement at home and the booty of extractive capital overseas. There was never, of course, any question as to the social and economic interests to which the political apparatus of the Spanish monarchy principally and permanently answered. No other major Absolutist State in Western Europe was to be so finally noble in character, or so inimical to bourgeois development. The very fortune of its early control of the mines of America, with their primitive but lucrative economy of extraction, disinclined it to promote the growth of manufactures or foster the spread of mercantile enterprise within its European empire. Instead, it bore down with a massive weight on the most active commercial communities of the continent, even while threatening every other landed aristocracy in a cycle of inter-aristocratic wars that lasted for a hundred and fifty years. Spanish power stifled the urban vitality of North Italy, and crushed the flourishing towns of half the Low Countries – the two most advanced zones of the European economy at the turn of the 16th century. Holland eventually escaped its control, in a long struggle for bourgeois independence. In the same period, the royal states of Southern Italy and Portugal were absorbed by Spain. The monarchies of France and England were battered by Hispanic attacks. The principalities of Germany were repeatedly invaded by tercios from Castile. While Spanish fleets rode the Atlantic or patrolled the Mediterranean, Spanish armies ranged across most of Western Europe: from Antwerp to Palermo, and Regensburg to Kinsale. The menace of Habsburg dominance, however, in the end quickened the reactions and fortified the defenses of the dynasties arrayed against it. Spanish priority gave the Habsburg monarchy a system-setting role for Western Absolutism as a whole. Yet it also, as we shall see, critically limited the nature of Spanish Absolutism itself within the system it helped to originate.
Spanish Absolutism was born from the Union of Castile and Aragón, effected by the marriage of Isabella I and Ferdinand II in 1469. It started with an apparently firm economic basis. During the labour shortages produced by the general crisis of Western feudalism, increasing areas of Castile were converted to a lucrative wool economy, which had made it the ‘Australia of the Middle Ages’,1 and a major partner of Flemish trade; while Aragón had long been a territorial and commercial power in the Mediterranean, controlling Sicily and Sardinia. The political and military dynamism of the new dual state was soon dramatically revealed in a series of sweeping external conquests. The last Moorish stronghold of Granada was destroyed and the Reconquista completed; Naples was annexed; Navarre was absorbed; and above all, the Americas were discovered and subjugated. The Habsburg connection soon added Milan, the Franche-Comté and the Netherlands. This sudden avalanche of successes made Spain the premier power in Europe for the whole of the 16th century, enjoying an international position which no other continental Absolutism was ever later able to emulate. Yet the State which presided over this vast Empire was itself a ramshackle assemblage, ultimately united only by the person of the monarch. Spanish Absolutism, so awesome to Northern Protestantism abroad, was in fact notably modest and limited in its domestic development. Its internal articulations were perhaps uniquely loose and heteroclite. The reasons for this paradox are doubtless to be sought essentially in the curious triangular relationship between the American Empire, the European Empire and the Iberian homelands.
The composite realms of Castile and Aragón united by Ferdinand and Isabella presented an extremely diverse basis for the construction of the new Spanish monarchy in the late 15th century. Castile was a land with an aristocracy of enormous estates and powerful military orders; it also had a considerable number of towns, although, significantly, not yet a fixed capital. The Castilian nobility had seized vast quantities of agrarian property from the monarchy during the civil wars of the later Middle Ages; 2–3 per cent of the population now controlled some 97 per cent of the soil. More than half of this, in turn, was owned by a few magnate families who towered
