ABSTRACT
If a canny political observer, say a Venetian ambassador, had been asked in 1500 to single out the predominant form of government in ‘Europe’, which term he would probably have taken as referring to the community of Christians, he would have answered monarchy, the rule of one man as king, prince or signore, or, far more rarely, of one woman. Monarchical regimes were divided between those, the majority, which observed the principle of hereditary succession, and those, like the Holy Roman Empire or the Papacy, which were elective. Monarchical rule was an even more pronounced characteristic of the European political scene than it had been 250 years earlier. Between 1250 and 1350, for example, in most of the city-states of northern and central Italy, republican government was replaced by the rule of one man, the signore (Jones 1997; ‘The Renaissance’ in Part IV). In France and Germany in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were many cities which, though rarely attaining the condition of city-
states, had considerable powers of self-government; but by the end of the fifteenth century most of these had been firmly subjected to royal or princely government. The Swiss city republics, still formally part of the Empire in the fifteenth century, constituted a counter-example to this trend, as did the sixty-five imperial free cities. In an overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, Christian world monarchy was not to be found solely in secular society: the Catholic Church too was subject to one man, the Pope, who claimed not merely to be the heir of St Peter, to whom Christ had entrusted the care of his Church, but also to have the right, albeit a much disputed one, to be able to interfere in the government of kingdoms when he deemed it appropriate, and even to depose rulers for sin or negligence. Not all monarchical regimes, however, grew more powerful. The Holy Roman Emperor, for example, whose authority in theory extended over most of northern and central Italy, the German lands (increasingly referred to as the ‘German nation’), of which he was king, Bohemia and parts of Burgundy, was much less formidable in 1500 than his great predecessor Frederick Barbarossa had been in the twelfth century. An alliance of the Papacy with a powerful group of Italian communes and, in the second half of the thirteenth century, with the house of Anjou, had destroyed imperial power in Italy; while in Germany the growth in the powers of the imperial electors who chose the emperors was such that by the fifteenth century, in practice, the imperial constitution seemed to have two heads rather than one; but even that is too simple a description, for the wider body of German territorial princes exercised virtually all the key functions of government within their own territories (Box 1).
