ABSTRACT
The Renaissance and the Reformation dislocated the horizontal structure of medieval
Christendom. Three aspects of the sixteenth-century struggles to replace it with a new
organization of Europe are of special concern to us. The first is the impulse which the
Reformation itself, and the resulting massive religious stasis, gave to the fragmentation
and verticalization of Europe. Second, we must look at the ways those who wanted to
consolidate independent statos tackled the stasis, and their consequences. The third
aspect is the Habsburg bid to establish a hegemonial authority in Christendom and to
move the emerging states system away from fragmentation and towards the imperial end
of our spectrum.
