and conflicts within the feudal aristocracy to whose collective interests it ultimately ministered. At the same time, the objective complement of the political concentration of power at the height of the social order, in a centralized monarchy, was the economic consolidation of the units of feudal property beneath it. With the growth of commodity relations, the dissolution of the primary nexus of economic exploitation and politico-legal coercion led not only to an increasing projection of the latter onto the royal apex of the social system, but also to a compensatory strengthening of the titles of property guaranteeing the former. In other words, with the reorganization of the feudal polity as a whole, and the dilution of the original fief system, landownership tended to become progressively less ‘conditional’ as sovereignty became correspondingly more ‘absolute’. The weakening of the mediaeval conceptions of vassalage worked in both directions: while it conferred new and extraordinary powers on the monarchy, it at the same time emancipated from traditional restraints the estates of the nobility. Agrarian property in the new epoch was silently allodialized (to use a term which was itself to become anachronistic in an altered juridical climate). Individual members of the aristocratic class, who steadily lost political rights of representation in the new epoch, registered economic gains in ownership as the obverse of the same historical process. The final effect of this general redisposition of the social power of the nobility was the State machine and juridical order of Absolutism, whose coordination was to increase the efficacy of aristocratic rule in pinning down a non-servile peasantry into new forms of dependence and exploitation. The royal States of the Renaissance were first and foremost modernized instruments for the maintenance of noble domination over the rural masses.
Simultaneously, however, the aristocracy had to adjust to a second antagonist: the mercantile bourgeoisie which had developed in the mediaeval towns. It has been seen that it was precisely the intercalation of this third presence that prevented the Western nobility from settling its accounts with the peasantry in Eastern fashion, by smashing its resistance and fettering it to the manor. The mediaeval town had been able to develop because the hierarchical dispersal of sovereignties in the feudal mode of production for the first time freed urban economies from direct domination by a rural ruling class.10 The towns in this sense were never exogenous to feudalism in the West, as we have seen: in fact, the very condition of their existence was the unique ‘detotalization’ of sovereignty within the politico-economic order of feudalism. Hence the resilience of the towns in the West throughout the worst crisis of the 14th century, which temporarily bankrupted so many of the patrician families of the Mediterranean cities. The Bardi and Peruzzi collapsed in Florence, Siena and Barcelona declined; but Augsburg, Geneva or Valencia were just starting their ascent. Important urban industries such as iron, paper and textiles grew throughout the feudal depression. From a distance, this economic and social vitality acted as a constant, objective interference in the class struggle on the land, and blocked any regressive solution to it by the nobles. Indeed, it is significant that the years from 1450 to 1500, which saw the emergence of the first prodromes of unified Absolute Monarchies in the West, were also those in which the long crisis of the feudal economy was surmounted, by a recombination of production factors in which for the first time specifically urban technological advances played the leading role. The cluster of inventions which coincides with the hinge between the ‘mediaeval’ and the ‘modern’ epochs is too well-known to need discussion here. The discovery of the seiger process for separating silver from copper ore restarted the mines of Central Europe, and the flow of metals into the international economy; monetary production from Central Europe quintupled between 1460 and 1530. The development of bronze-cast cannon made gunpowder for the first time the decisive arm of warfare, rendering baronial castellar defences anachronistic. The invention of movable type brought the advent of printing. The construction of the three-masted, stern-ruddered galleon made the oceans navigable for conquests overseas.11 All these technical breakthroughs, which laid the foundations of the European Renaissance, were concentrated in the latter half of the 15th century; and it was then that the secular agrarian depression finally lifted, towards 1470 in England and France.
This was precisely the epoch in which a sudden, concurrent revival of political authority and unity occurred in country after country. From the pit of extreme feudal chaos and turmoil of the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years War and the second Castilian Civil War, the first ‘new’ monarchies straightened up virtually together, during the reigns of Louis XI in France, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, Henry VII in England and Maximilian in Austria. Thus when the Absolutist States were constituted in the West, their structure was fundamentally determined by the feudal regroupment against the peasantry, after the dissolution of serfdom; but it was secondarily over-determined by the rise of an urban bourgeoisie which after a series of technical and commercial advances was now developing into pre-industrial manufactures on a considerable scale. It was this secondary impact of the urban bourgeoisie on the forms of the Absolutist State which Marx and Engels sought to capture with the misleading notions of ‘counter-poise’ or ‘cornerstone’. Engels, in fact, expressed the real relationship of forces accurately enough on more than one occasion: discussing the new maritime discoveries and manufacturing industries of the Renaissance, he wrote that ‘this mighty revolution in the conditions of the economic life of society was, however, not followed by any immediate corresponding change in its political structure. The political order remained feudal, while society became more and more bourgeois.’12 The threat of peasant unrest, unspokenly constitutive of the Absolutist State, was thus always conjoined with the pressure of mercantile or manufacturing capital within the Western economies as a whole, in moulding the contours of aristocratic class power in the new age. The peculiar form of the Absolutist State in the West derives from this double determination.
The dual forces which produced the new monarchies of Renaissance Europe found a single juridical condensation. The revival of Roman law, one of the great cultural movements of the age, ambiguously corresponded to the needs of both social classes whose unequal power and rank shaped the structures of the Absolutist State in the West. Renewed knowledge of Roman jurisprudence dated back, in itself, to the High Middle Ages. The dense overgrowth of customary law had never completely suppressed the memory and practice of Roman civil law in the peninsula where its tradition was longest, Italy. It was in Bologna that Irnerius, the ‘lamp of the law’, had started the systematic study of Justinian’s codifications once again, in the early 12th century. The school of Glossators founded by him methodically reconstituted and classified the legacy of the Roman jurists over the next hundred years. They were followed, in the 14th and 15th centuries, by ‘Commentators’ more concerned with contemporary application of Roman legal norms, than with scholarly analysis of their theoretical principles; and in the process of adapting Roman law to the drastically altered conditions of the time, they both corrupted its pristine form and cleansed it of its particularist contents.13 The very infidelity of their transpositions of Latin jurisprudence paradoxically ‘universalized’ it, by removing the large portions of Roman civil law that were strictly related to the historical conditions of Antiquity (for example, of course, its comprehensive treatment of slavery).14 Beyond Italy, Roman legal concepts gradually began to spread outwards from the original re-discovery of the 12th century onwards. By the end of the Middle Ages, no major country in Western Europe was unaffected by this process. But the decisive ‘reception’ of Roman law – its general juridical triumph – occurred in the age of the Renaissance, concurrently with that of Absolutism. The historical reasons for its deep impact were two-fold, and reflected the contradictory nature of the original Roman legacy itself.
Economically, the recovery and introduction of classical civil law was fundamentally propitious to the growth of free capital in town and country. For the great distinguishing mark of Roman civil law had been its conception of absolute and unconditional private property. The classical conception of Quiritary ownership had sunk virtually out of sight in the obscured depths of early feudalism. For the feudal mode of production, as we have seen, was precisely defined by juridical principles of ‘scalar’ or conditional property, the complement of its parcellized sovereignty. This property statute was well adapted to the overwhelmingly natural economy which emerged in the Dark Ages; although it was never wholly adequate for the urban sector which developed in the mediaeval economy. The reemergence of Roman law during the Middle Ages thus had already led
