ABSTRACT
T HE INCIDENCE and scale of dynastic and politico-religious conflict were the most obvious, indeed dramatic, examples of the broadening range of sustained pressures on strictly limited princely resources. They must be seen, however, in the context of the changing nature of monarchy in early modern Europe. From the later fifteenth century, so-called Renaissance monarchy focused on royal image projection -- an extravagant Court, as a point of contact with the great men of the community, and the seductive purveyor of patronage as a means of control over them. It made government much more expensive and that is true even of monarchs \vho did not aspire to achieve absolutism.
