ABSTRACT
A sophisticated military and financial bureaucracy, responsible to the marshals and the treasurers of war, assumed the support of the companies. A special taille was ordered to furnish its pay and was collected in the customary manner. The companies endured for several centuries with this formal organization. However apt the characterization, they were certainly a novelty in fifteenth-century Europe. The very success of the reform and the response of society to it reveal much about the renaissance monarchy both in France and in Europe as a whole. Current historical scholarship has emphasized the relative weakness of the renaissance monarchy in France. Such studies suggest that contemporaries regarded the monarchy's powerlessness as a threat to the stability of society. Charles VII erected one pillar of that regime when he regularized his military forces. His use of the compagnies d'ordonnance clearly demonstrated the transformation of the constitutional balance at the very inception of the renaissance monarchy.
