ABSTRACT
Warfare involved a dramatically urgent need for financial support, so that rulers nearly always contracted debts in order to finance their military campaigns. However, the state could obtain the liquidity and financiers it needed only if it were reliable and could offer guarantees based on its future revenues; it will be seen how this took different forms. Therefore, debt was the driving force behind the rise in tax revenues, and it can be said that military expenditure drove fiscal change and the public finance systems. The term “fiscal-military state” was coined by John Brewer in his 1989 study of Great Britain from 1688 to 1783, in which he debunked the belief that the British state was fiscally “light”. The term was subsequently used to describe all the other European states, since there was a very close connection all over the continent between war and the rise of the fiscal state.
