ABSTRACT
The Renaissance and the Reformation dislocated the horizontal structure of medieval Christendom. Three aspects of the sixteenth-century struggles to replace it with a new organization of Europe are of special concern to us. The first is the impulse which the Reformation itself, and the resulting massive religious stasis, gave to the fragmentation and verticalization of Europe. Second, we must look at the ways those who wanted to consolidate independent statos tackled the stasis, and their consequences. The third aspect is the Habsburg bid to establish a hegemonial authority in Christendom and to move the emerging states system away from fragmentation and towards the imperial end of our spectrum.
