ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ancient traditions being drawn upon at the turn of the seventeenth century, notably the development from elective, clan-based monarchy to primogeniture, and the development of the apanage system to recompense the loss of power to cadet members of the dynasty. It also explores how this system foundered in the early seventeenth century, with the increasing tightening of French ‘absolutism’, and how subsequent younger siblings in France modified their behaviour to resituate themselves into a new form of centralized ‘modern’ monarchy. Historians have long recognized that the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth were particularly anxious times, especially in terms of dynastic politics. The junior lines continued to be separated from the main line as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were only held together by a House strategy of keeping all of the dynastic territories within one of the Imperial Circles.
