Furies (15 page)

So exit political posturing and enter the bankers: the gentlemen who could raise and lend the immediate cash. Their far-flung networks were the arteries for the transfer of money or credit from one part of Europe to another. They had the contacts and could reach out to depositors. But of course they were motivated by the promise of profit. Their loans were secured by the future income from varieties of taxes, by the sale of bonds, by the spoils of office, or, as in the case of the Fugger banking house in southern Germany, by lucrative rights over silver and copper mines.

The ability to move money and credit across the face of Europe had a fundamental importance. Armies ranged far: French troops were dispatched to Italy, Germany, and Spain; Spanish regiments went to the Netherlands, to France, Italy, and Germany; Venetian and Dutch mercenaries were assigned to Germany and even sent into combat on the high seas; Swedish armies fought in Poland, Russia, and Germany; the mercenaries of the German Habsburgs found themselves in Italy, but also along the frontiers of Poland, France, and the Netherlands. And as soldiers trekked over long distances, their supply trains could not provide all they needed in the way of food and fodder. Local towns and villages became the suppliers.

The nascent “sovereign” state was developing muscle and showing it along the way, pushing far beyond its frontiers with soldiers and keeping this up for years. Payment of the ensuing gigantic debts
was then spread out over generations, as we shall see in some detail later. No medieval state had managed to do this. But neither had there been one which could rely on the resources of continuing fear, coercion, and degrees of loyalty. Early modern Europe had more than one such state, with France and Spain leading the way. Relying on just enough anxiety and loyalty among their subjects, these states were able to levy new rounds of taxes again and again. Indeed, their moneyed subjects got into the habit of investing in the “sovereign” debt by purchasing government bonds. Huge war debts could thus be borne for years.

A view of early modern Europe used to be glimpsed in what the old histories of the period called it: “The Age of the Renaissance and Reformation.” The implication was that two events had shaped the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: a) the rebirth of the arts and secular learning, along with a passionate new interest in the world of antiquity, and b) the Protestant revolt against the Roman Catholic Church, heralded by the breakaway Augustinian friar Martin Luther in 1517.

Our view of that period has changed. Historians now situate the Renaissance and Reformation in a more comprehensive, densely woven narrative. In this reorientation, at least for some historians, the primacy of change belongs to the rise of sovereign states. War, debt, and unprecedented taxation loom up to overshadow the European scene.

The matter of sovereign states may be approached through the question of coinage and currencies.

Europe in 1500 was a wilderness of different currencies. I refer not only to a cascade of coins in gold, silver, copper, billon, and other alloys, but also to lines of coins minted and issued by myriad territorial
governments. The Italian peninsula alone had more than a score of different currencies, coined in Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Rome, and Naples, as well as in Lucca, Siena, Ferrara, Mantua, Bologna, Urbino, Perugia, and lesser places. Spain and France were crisscrossed by a variety of currencies, and Germany, under the Empire, minted scores of them. Lower Saxony alone, in the early seventeenth century, had thirty different mints. In the Low Countries, where circulating foreign coins were carefully tabulated, ordinances carried “engravings of upwards of 1000 different pieces.” The aim was to provide identifications.

This bewildering diversity of moneys was a nightmare for travelers but a boon for money changers, some of whom, astute traders, journeyed hundreds of miles to ply their trade. Such a one was Lippo di Fede del Sega, a small-time money changer who came from a little village outside Florence and spent years in France, pursuing profit.

Wherever there was a legal title to mint coins, there, too, was a lawmaking authority and local arrangements to dole out justice—in other words, the rudiments of a state. The authority in question was also bound to have “foreign relations” and a little body of soldiers for defense. Here then was a micro half-state, as in all those places where the German emperor had granted or sold the rights of coinage to a city or a petty prince.

As Europe emerged from the late middle ages, the course of change cut a path through a thicket of “statelets,” or microstates. Political fragmentation—and the movement or trend away from it—may be tracked in upper Italy, which teemed with bustling urban communes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Cities such as Milan, Pisa, Genoa, Padua, Pavia, Verona, Florence, Lucca, Perugia, and Siena had broken away from a nominal subjection to the Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation. But by the early fifteenth century, war and conquest had seen most of them incorporated into the territories of the biggest regional powers: Venice, Milan, Florence, and
the papal monarchy. The pulling together of scattered authority went on in Italy right through the sixteenth century.

If we turn to France, we find a process of parallel incorporation, as the French crown reclaimed a series of autonomous provinces (old fiefs of the kings of France): Normandy in 1358; Guyenne in 1451; Burgundy (and Artois briefly) in 1477; Provence, Anjou, and Maine in 1481; Orléans in 1499; Angoulème in 1515; Auvergne and Bourbon in 1527; and Brittany in 1532. France filled out.

Spain knew a similar trend in the uniting of Castile and Aragon, and in the Spanish conquest of Navarre and Granada. The expulsion of the Muslim emirate from Granada was completed in 1492, at the end of a pitiless ten-year war, for which the monarchs of Castile and Aragon “kept an army of 50,000 men and 13,000 horses on a permanent footing.”

In Germany, on the other hand, the swing toward consolidation was foiled by regional princes. They claimed to be acting in the name of “German liberties” and local customs. Emperors had to compromise or give way to their demands, including the demands of Imperial cities and of numerous lesser lords of the Empire. These, too, like the dukes of Bavaria or the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, governed their territories as autonomous or independent rulers. They consulted the privileged in representative assemblies (Landsstände), levied taxes, raised small armies, administered justice, passed laws, minted currencies, and conducted their own foreign policies. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) would exhibit in blood the perils of Germany's fragmentation.

War-making was an obvious characteristic of sovereignty. The costs of war, however, could hobble rulers, because war, as we have seen, had to be paid for primarily out of tax moneys, and taxes required the approval of the “estates”—representative diets made up of noblemen, urban elites, and clergy. There was no way around these, except by means of executive thuggery, and this was a recipe for trouble or even rebellion. Moreover, the need to obtain the fiscal
consent of the upper classes was as obligatory in the kingdoms of Spain, France, England, and the Baltic countries as in the urban republics of Genoa, Venice, and the Netherlands. Kings were far from being absolute: Their right to tax, and even to legislate, was ringed in by limitations.

In the face of an invasion or unprovoked aggression, all rulers had the obligation to defend the lands they governed. Hence any military crisis gave them the right to arm and assemble soldiers—either a local militia or fighters brought in from afar. Local militias satisfied customary defensive needs almost everywhere, but in the early modern world, they were too often inept and of little use in sustained warfare.

An old feudal prerogative, the princely right to summon the military arm of vassals survived, ghostlike, into the seventeenth century, despite the fact that princes and self-governing cities began to hire professional mercenaries as early as the twelfth century. This expedient, the hiring of mercenaries, sprang from the need to meet the expanding scope of wars, as these broke out and became more frequent during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the trail of Europe's explosive economic energies. By the early fourteenth century, the best troops were always mercenaries. In a Europe of war and more war, a prince's obligation to defend his lands faded into the right to assemble armies more and more often, even for aggressive purposes. Such action could be passed off as defensive. The distinction, passive or active, was nudged into subtleties, and bold or clever princes found ways of getting what they wanted.

But princes also had assistance from another quarter: in their claims to be hereditary rulers, that is, dynasts. This line of legal argument took on the raiment of a sacred right, especially when the claim concerned disputed territory, including, therefore, the possible need to use armed force. If early modern European political thinking accepted a hard axiom, it was in the idea that dynastic rights were somehow embedded in “natural” law. Accordingly, in a Europe of spirited economic energies, as rulers regarded their boundaries with
more zeal, the banner of dynastic rights was carried to the forefront of international relations, and there it would remain until the nineteenth century.

Princely bloodlines ran through marriages and offspring, spreading out, fanlike, to provide the legal substance for claims to territory. Marriage was the agency that made dynasties. But when a prince had muscle and loftiness enough, his bastards too moved in the shadow of majesty, married brilliantly, and could be centrally engaged in matters of war. This was the destiny of Margaret, Duchess of Parma, governor of the Netherlands (1559–1567), the daughter of a servant and of the Habsburg Emperor Charles V.

At the dawn of modern times, when the king of France, Charles VIII, led twenty-five thousand soldiers down the length of Italy to lay hands on the kingdom of Naples, he was calling on a distant connection and a thirteenth-century claim of the dukes of Anjou. When Louis XII, his successor, invaded Lombardy in 1499, intent on seizing the duchy of Milan, the basis of his claim went back more than a hundred years to the marriage of a Visconti princess, Valentina, and Louis d'Orléans.

Europe's elites hearkened to the dynastic claims of the kings of Spain and France, of German princes and Habsburg rulers, and of lesser lords as well, even when the claimants jockeyed to bring new lands under their political sway. A dynastic claim to territory always pivoted on a question of legal rights, of honor, of duty, and even of squaring things with “divine and natural” law.

Diplomacy itself was governed by assumptions about the rights of dynasties. Never mind the ways of rulers. King Charles VIII—a living caricature: short with skinny legs, a big head, and a funny beak of a nose—was publicity for the assumption that royal blood could raise the strangest men to the pinnacle of powerful states. In a decision that was altogether his, the astonishing invasion of Italy (1494–1495), he was really seeking adventure and glory, and dreaming of a heroic crusade against the Ottoman Turks. His successor, Louis XII, also turned his face and soldiers to Italy, urged on by predatory
noblemen, and attracted not by the nonsense of chivalric dreams but by the visible wealth of Italy's northern cities.

A king inherited not only a personal domain but also a state and its lands, as though these had about them something of private property. If nationality, language, and religion in his territories happened to be different from his, this cut no ice. The essential point turned on a dynastic right, the legal grounds alleged by the kings of France and Spain in their wars (1494–1559) to be masters in Italy.

Meanwhile, were dynastic claims doing something for the subjects and citizens whose taxes paid for the wars? Or something even for the rule of law? Very little, if anything. War, anyway, like diplomacy, was the business of princes and courtly elites, not a topic for the twitter of subjects in town and country. Yet war, as we know, wanted money, tax money, and this compelled princes to turn to the high representatives of the nobility and rich bourgeoisie. These had to be consulted; there had to be discussions. Now every kind of ploy on both sides, menacing and silver-tongued, was borne into the key forums. Solutions varied, but a strong prince usually got some of the wished-for funds, then proceeded to rush into debt. Later, this too—managing the debt—would have to be negotiated.

A GENEALOGICAL CHART OF THE Habsburgs—the most dominant dynasty in the history of western Europe—reveals nothing but the bare bones of a vanished animal. The real creature appears only when we clad the chart with inherited dominions, wars, public debt, and taxes, along with appalling mistakes and tragedies. There were the salutary things, of course, such as donations to monasteries, convents, and churches, and the commissions made to many leading artists. But these take us away from the motors of Habsburg dominance.

The high fortunes of this dynasty began with the Duke of Austria, the Emperor Maximilian I (d. 1519). His marriage to Mary of Burgundy brought the Netherlands and parts of France as inheritances
to their son, Philip the Handsome. Philip, in turn, was married to Joanna, who inherited Castile and Aragon. And their son, Charles V (d. 1559), was heir to the Spanish crown, the Netherlands, Austria, Franche-Comté, and in Italy the kingdom of Naples: “all kingdoms and territories”—he noted in his memoirs—“given to him by God.” In 1519, with gold borrowed from German bankers (850,000 florins), Charles bought the Imperial crown from the Empire's seven electors, and this enabled him to claim the duchy of Milan, an ancient and nominal fief of the Empire. The bribe money would have sufficed—by cutting corners—to cover the wages for a year of about twenty-four thousand foot soldiers in the Venetian and other armies.

An “impresario of war,” as one historian has called him, Charles now attempted to exercise political control over much of western Europe. He ended by abdicating in 1555–1556 and dividing his dominions, but he also bequeathed prodigious debts to his heirs. Spain, the Netherlands, Franche-Comté, and his lands in Italy went to his son, Philip II (d. 1598). The German lands he willed to his own brother, Ferdinand I, who succeeded him as Holy Roman Emperor.