1.5 New Monarchies

Medieval kings shared power with nobles, the Church and towns. Centralization means pulling that power into the hands of the central government. New monarchs did this in a few main ways:

• Taxes: collecting regular taxes directly, so they did not depend on nobles' goodwill.
• Armies: building royal armies with gunpowder weapons. Cannons could knock down castle walls, so rebellious nobles were easier to crush.
• Courts and law: using royal courts to enforce the king's law across the kingdom.
• Officials: hiring educated men from the middle class, often lawyers, who owed their jobs to the king rather than to family power.
• Religion: gaining control over Church appointments and Church wealth.

England: Henry VII won the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, ending the Wars of the Roses and starting the Tudor dynasty. He restricted nobles' private armies and used the Court of Star Chamber, a royal court that met without juries, to try powerful nobles whom local juries feared to convict. He filled his treasury and leaned on local gentry who served as justices of the peace. His son Henry VIII broke with Rome and made himself head of the English Church with the Act of Supremacy (1534), and Elizabeth I's religious settlement of 1559 set up a Protestant Church of England under the crown.

France: Louis XI (reigned 1461–1483) expanded royal lands, including much of Burgundy after 1477, and raised the taille, a direct tax that fell on peasants and other commoners because nobles and clergy were exempt. Francis I signed the Concordat of Bologna (1516) with Pope Leo X. It let the French king nominate bishops and abbots, giving him control of Church jobs and wealth in France, which is one reason French kings had little reason to turn Protestant.

Spain: Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile married in 1469 and joined their kingdoms in a personal union. They tamed nobles, used local militias called the Hermandad to keep order and, in 1478, set up the Spanish Inquisition, a royal church court that hunted heresy, especially among Jewish and Muslim converts. They conquered Granada in 1492, expelled Jews who would not convert that same year, and later forced Muslims in Castile to convert or leave.

Sovereignty means supreme authority over a territory, with no higher power inside it. In 1576 the French thinker Jean Bodin argued that every state needs one sovereign power to keep order. New monarchs were moving toward that idea.

But centralization had limits. Nobles still held land and local power, parliaments and estates still had to approve some taxes, and the Holy Roman Empire stayed a loose collection of hundreds of states. Absolutism, the fuller version of royal control, comes later in Unit 3.

Italy shows the other side. Its city-states stayed divided, and after 1494 French and Spanish armies fought over them. Watching this, Machiavelli (see 1.2) described the state in purely practical, secular terms, as power a ruler must keep by whatever means work. Meanwhile, across Europe, merchants, bankers and lawyers gained a bigger political voice as royal officials, lenders to kings and members of town councils and parliaments.