THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (23 page)

The strategic innovations of ever more expensive fortress design and complex infantry fire crushed those constitutional forms that could not adapt in order to exploit those innovations: first princely states, with their modest revenue bases; then the discontinuous Habsburg empire of princely states that risked decisive battles in so many theatres that it was bled dry by the new, more dynamic and lethal warfare.

The chief advantage of the kingly state over the princely states it dominated was sheer scale. Yet this advantage was not enjoyed by the Habsburg empire, which assembled a vast collection of princely states into a single constitutional unit. It is important to see how, despite enormous wealth and experienced forces, who were, as at Nördlingen, capable of devastating victories, the Habsburg imperial constitutional form was nevertheless vulnerable to the escalating possibilities of violence posed by the revolution in tactics.

The sheer quantitative advantage that imperial and kingly forms shared should not blind us to the constitutional, qualitative difference between the kingly state and the princely state. Henry VIII may have broken with Rome in order to marry again, a princely prerogative, but the fact that he could make himself head of a new national church is indicative of a change in the nature of monarchy.

When at the end of this period, the last of the great figures of the kingly state proclaimed,
“L'état, c'est moi,”
he was saying no more than other monarchs of the kingly state could have claimed; but he was saying a great deal more than the proudest Medici or Sforza. The kingly state had a voice distinct from that of the princely state. We can hear it clearly in the work of
Jean Bodin, one of the most influential European political philosophers. In his preface to the
Six Books Concerning a Republic
, written in 1576, Bodin attacks Machiavelli—the poet of the princely state—for suggesting that the leader of a state is bound to different moral rules than an ordinary man. Machiavelli's idea is fundamental to the notion of the State as something other than a human being, and thus something in whose service the prince must obey imperatives other than those that govern ordinary human behavior. Bodin challenges this advice as tending to weaken the monarch's authority. Whereas for the princely state the great leap is from the prince as person to the prince plus an administrative structure—the prince and the State—the transformation to the kingly state (the state already having been objectified) reverses this move and makes the monarch the apotheosis of the State. To put it differently: the princely state severed the person of the prince from his bureaucratic and military structure, thereby creating a state with attributes hitherto reserved to a human being; the kingly state reunites these two elements, monarch and state, and makes of the king the State itself:
“L‘état, c'est moi.”

If such a king were seen as immoral, Bodin argued, this would undermine the state's legitimacy. Moreover, he wrote:

These “others,” perhaps even more “dangerous” than Machiavelli, were writers who claimed the right of resistance for the people. Bodin insisted that all authority had to be vested in a sovereign, a single will. The king could impose any law on his subjects with or without their consent; to hold otherwise meant that the State was something less than sovereign, that it could be thwarted as when a man with a severe physical disorder finds himself unable to command his limbs to move. A king's will is the sovereign of the State just as a man's will is the sovereign of his body. This is the credo of absolutism, and it is the constitutional doctrine of the kingly state.

Perhaps we today are inclined to exaggerate the actual absolutism of the kingly state.
¹⁴
Things may look more monolithic from a distant perspective. Doubtless a more consensual and complex arrangement prevailed at the time than may now appear. For our purposes, however, it is enough to observe that contemporaries of this period perceived both an enormous change under way in the centrality of the State as well as a crisis of legitimacy besetting that State. For it was a significant change to place the State
in man, especially when it had been scarcely a century since the State was torn from the local princes who were so soon to be made redundant by it. Hobbes saw this clearly, and made it his life's work to give reasons why the monarch was not simply another man—owing to the move to an objectified State—and why the obedience owed the State could be owed to a man. In the
Behemoth
, he complains:

To overcome this attitude had been one of the chief goals of the consti-tutional form of the kingly state. Some form of constitutional response was certainly necessary owing to those strategic innovations that were marginalizing the princely states as well as imposing new demands upon them. The kingly state established itself as an absolute yet legitimate state form in the era that witnessed the permanent schism of the ecclesiastical regime (which had been the main barrier to the emergence of the kingly state) and the destruction of the imperial regime (which was the kingly state's main rival to succeed the princely state as the dominant constitutional order in Europe).

This outcome was far from obvious in the first half of the sixteenth century when Charles V attempted to consolidate a Habsburg empire against the opposition of the French king Francis I. In a way, the princely state can be said to have originated in the rivalry between the Habsburg dynasty and that of the Angevin/Valois of France, because the invasion of Italy in 1494 had been undertaken to support a French claim to the throne of Naples against the claims of Aragon; to this claim was later added the assertion of a French dynastic right to the Duchy of Milan against the Sforzas and their Imperial patrons. The opposition to French claims became unified, however, and vastly increased with the consolidation in one Habsburg heir, Charles V, of a staggering dynastic inheritance. Thereafter the modest princely states of the Italian peninsula were no longer principal players. Instead, Charles's vast continental realm of dynastic properties was eventually opposed by an alliance of princely states led by the champions of the emerging constitutional order of kingly states. Thus the competing variants of the State all contended, and, thanks to the sheer scope of Charles's inheritance, these forms played for stakes that would be historically decisive.

Charles was born at Ghent in 1500. His father was the Habsburg archduke of Austria, son of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, and of Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Charles's mother was the daughter of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile. Thus Charles promised to unite within one person an Austrian-Spanish realm that included the Low Countries, to which he might add the German emperorship and even lay fair claim to Burgundy. It was an astounding example of the dynastic conglomerations that were acquired through inheritance and the alliances of marriage. Such a “realm,” as I have used the term, was in essence a personal union of territories. To the modern eye some of these dynastic states seem very odd indeed, and would appear to have little hope of survival; their various geographic components seem too disparate in terms of culture, language, and institutions. This observation, however, anticipates the outcome of a struggle that Charles V and his successors had first to play out: it is only because the universalism of the Empire and the Church was shattered during that struggle that it seems to us that national culture, language, and local institutions are the stuff out of which viable states must be made. Indeed it was Charles's goal to reverse this development and restore the unity of a Catholic Europe.
*

One might say that the inheritance of Charles V created the conditions for a perfect experiment to determine whether in fact the State could encompass many different nations once the Reformation had so greatly sharpened the cultural differences among the peoples under his rule.

When Charles was crowned emperor in 1519, he had inherited not only vast dynastic properties from his grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon and his other grandfather, Maximilian, but also quarrels over the thrones of Naples and Milan, respectively; plus a third dispute over the crown of Navarre from one grandmother, Isabella, as well as a fourth dynastic claim, from his other grandmother, over lands lost to France by her father, the Duke of Burgundy. In all of these disputes his antagonist was the losing candidate for the emperorship, Francis I, who had become king of France.

What is important for our study is that both Charles and Francis failed to achieve their strategic objectives, so that by the end of this period in the mid-sixteenth century, it was clear that a dynastic realm agglomerating princely states across Europe could not succeed in creating an imperial state. Such an entity simply could not manage sufficient control of its do
mestic resources in order to maintain standing armies capable of the prolonged campaigns required to vindicate dynastic claims that were often geographically remote and politically fraught.

It took an entire century, however, for the new constitutional form of the kingly state to triumph, ascending a helical staircase whose steps connected religious conflicts on one side and dynastic ones on the other. For at the same time that Charles V was concluding the compact of Noyon with Francis I, which provided him with safe passage to his new Spanish inheritance, Martin Luther was proclaiming his doctrines for the reform of the Church. In the ensuing two decades—that is, until the beginning of the more radical career of John Calvin, which made matters considerably more difficult—religious strife rendered the domestic bases of both Francis and Charles ever more insecure, so that when their conflict ended with Francis's death in 1547, the main objective of Charles's policy was the suppression of the Protestant cause, which he himself had done much indirectly to support when his pursuit of hegemony in Europe had united anti-imperial German princes with religious reformers. Charles's motives at this moment were expressed in a letter to his sister:

The hostility of France toward Habsburg designs did not die with Francis, however personal the quarrel with Charles. Indeed the possibility of alliance between German princes and Henry II, Francis's successor, drove Charles to agree to the Treaty of Passau, whose provisions led to the Augsburg settlement in 1555.

Augsburg is an historic agreement because it provided that rulers were to determine the religious denomination of their respective states (the constitutional principle of
cuius regio eius religio
), matching Lutheran princes with Lutheran subjects and Catholic rulers with Catholic peoples. According to this principle, the decisions of the ruler as to which sectarian preference to adopt were binding also upon his subjects with the concession that dissatisfied persons were welcome to emigrate to more congenial states. This, with the migrations that followed, sealed the dominance of the princely state over the feudal princes who had ruled within a universal Christendom, and intensified the sectarian basis of the princely state. Augsburg enshrined the constitutional form of the princely state because it
attached to the State an attribute—religious affiliation—hitherto associated with a human being, the prince.

Charles, in frustration and despair at these developments, which forever fragmented Europe and ended his dream of a restored, single Christendom, abdicated in October 1555. He left his Spanish dominions (including the Netherlands) to his son, Philip II, and arranged for the imperial crown to be assumed by his brother Ferdinand, who possessed the Austrian lands of the Habsburgs. A putative constitutional successor to the princely state—a dynastic empire accumulating many princely states—had thus far failed.