Furies

by Lauro Martines

  The aristocratic republics of Venice and Genoa, little states, were the first to link and coordinate war and taxes. But they were small fry on the changing chart of European power politics. Far more successful in the linking of war and taxes was the Dutch Republic, with its vast reserves—Holland especially—of commercial and maritime capital. Next in the successful juxtaposition of armies and revenue came the princes of Brandenburg-Prussia. Shortly after 1650, they began to take firm control of public finance by binding it strictly to military needs. In working to build a “power state,” they developed a system of roving agents (“commissaries”) who supervised the administration of taxes and affairs connected with the army. In the eighteenth century, these officials, often trained in law, became key figures in the organization of the Prussian state.

  CHURCH LANDS WERE NOT MARGINAL to the fortunes of the fiscal-military state. England, Sweden, the Dutch Republic, the Rhenish Palatinate, Brandenburg, Hesse-Kassel, and other Protestant states paid their armies in part with wealth that had been looted from the Catholic Church. According to the historian R. L. Frost, the Swedish military state would have been impossible “without the Reformation … [and all the church land that then passed] into Crown possession. In 1523, it possessed 3,754 farms, the Church 14,340, the nobility 13,922, and the tax-[paying] peasants 35,239; by 1560, the Crown owned 18,936, the Church none, the nobility 14,175, and the peasants 33,130.”

  There was more. Having subjected the Lutheran and Calvinist churches to their control, princes quickly turned to enlist their support in the pursuit of blunt political aims. But Catholic princes were not novices in the art of using the Church for political ends. Priests and prelates had lent themselves to such purposes since time immemorial. Now and again, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about 18 to 25 percent of all royal revenue in Spain came from a tax on the clergy (the subsidio), from so-called “crusade” money (a papal grant for the fight against Muslims), and from the wealth of the country’s great military-religious orders of Santiago, Alcántara, and Calatrava.

  Jesuits attracted the venomous hatred of contemporaries precisely because they were seen to be meddling in politics. As confessors to kings and emperors, it was assumed that they worked to insinuate a special agenda into the earthly aims of their mighty penitents. And when they seemed to get in the way of high policy, as in the clash between Bourbons and Habsburgs in the 1630s and 1640s, to take one example, Cardinal Richelieu himself stepped in to clip the wings of King Louis XIII’s Jesuit confessors. Meanwhile, back in Rome, the nobleman Muzio Vitelleschi, general of the Order’s sixteen thousand priests, had to walk a fine line between moderate and more aggressive worldly policies, especially as the rank-and-file Jesuits were themselves likely to be divided in their political views.

  The emerging new state, in short, in Protestant as in Catholic lands, now occupied the temporal space once held by a church whose popes and wide web of prelates had once sought to compete with kings.

  SOVEREIGNTY AND THE POLITICS OF WAR

  By the fourteenth century, the study of Roman law and a rich line of legal commentary on the powers of the pope had come together to issue in a full-blown conception of sovereignty and political absolutism. No European state, however, was strong enough—or ambitious enough—to exercise the envisaged “plenitude of power” until the sixteenth century.

  In the matter of sovereignty, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation had a strange appearance. It was a kind of state, but it was not sovereign, because it consisted of states that verged on being sovereign. The emperors Charles V and Ferdinand II tried to expand its powers—in vain. It had virtually no army as such; its princes had armies, although they contributed on occasion to an Imperial force. It had no significant rights of taxation; these were claimed by the different princes and Imperial cities. And it could not make treaties that obligated its princes and cities, unless these agreed. In fact, German princes were free to conduct their own foreign policies and to make treaties, provided only that they did not enter alliances against the emperor. Militarily, then, the Empire turned into a big power only when the emperor was joined, say, by the electors of Bavaria and Saxony. But after 1650, such banding together went into a decline.

  By the late sixteenth century, the major European states were well on their way to being sovereign. French and Spanish kings stood up to the papacy, and not seldom bent it to their will. Protestant states spurned the authority of the pope and used the power of the Reformed Churches to advance their political designs. In Catholic lands again, the new state, moving gradually against the claims of regional assemblies and mighty local lords, pursued a monopoly over the powers of taxation and official violence within its borders. The rights to legislate and to dispense justice were already a part of its sovereignty.

  THE QUESTION NATURALLY PRESENTS ITSELF: Did political theory gain entry somehow, as an active force, to the claims of the state’s evolving sovereignty? Yes, but only when resistance to the state generated intellectual challenges. Arguments now had to be aired by government ministers and lawyers, and these claims migrated out into the forums of ideas, to give or to take in themes and inspiration.

  In the spring of 1420, in a tart exchange between two Florentine ambassadors and the privy councillors of their mighty northern neighbor, the Duke of Milan, the Florentines felt a slap on the face when they were suddenly told by one of them (a canon lawyer, no less), Ius in armis est, “Right is in the force of arms”: that is, might makes right. They were shocked by this outburst. And yet they knew—they must have known—that behind the punctilio of diplomacy this was what politics often came down to in relations between states. It had been so in conflict among Italian city-states for two hundred years. Evidently, then, the Florentines were reacting out of an entrenched feeling of decorum, the feeling that although brute power was the ultimate enforcer in an international dispute, you did not admit it in so many words, not in diplomacy. Instead, you employed masks and artful words.

  Shortly after 1500, dynastic claims began to vie for the proscenium of international politics with another principle: that of the “balance of power” in relations among states. The notion rested on a conception of regional security, and the argument behind it simply held that the leading European powers could not allow any one of them to become strong enough to pose a potential threat to the others. There was nothing in law, as in the case of dynastic rights, to give this political stance any legal validity, but none was required. Armed might sufficed to give it presence and force. Learned contemporaries found the stance in the politics of the ancient world. But fifteenth-century Italy, they observed, provided a recent and more instructive field of comparison. Here, for a time, the leading states—Naples, the papacy, Milan, and the republics of Florence and Venice—hit on a solution for their quarrels. In their quest for equilibrium, each was to have its proper weight. However, their achieved balance was soon wrecked by the clash between Valois and Habsburg princes in the Italian Wars (1494–1459), a fight over rival dynastic claims to the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan. Their claims were farfetched, but their armies provided the necessary teeth.

  Dynastic and “balance of power” arguments thus collided. In 1589, toward the end of France’s Wars of Religion, the supporters of King Henry IV, still a Protestant, lashed out at the aspirations of the Habsburg King of Spain Philip II, with a plea to the effect that France was being dangerously encircled by Habsburg power. Philip’s army occupied the southern Netherlands; one of his Habsburg cousins held the Imperial crown in Germany; and Philip, with money and troops, had thrown his support behind the intransigents of the French Catholic League, the very men who were fighting tooth and nail against Henry IV, against his claim to be the rightful king of France. His Calvinism, a supposed heresy, was being invoked to override his dynastic right.

  A few decades later, Cardinal Richelieu, France’s chief minister (1624–1642), made the struggle against Habsburg power the key to his foreign policy as he worked to ge
t a continental political balance. He pursued this objective with armies, money, propaganda, spies, ambassadors, and streams of letters. Tormented by the weight of his increased taxes and its bigger army, France hovered in a state of near rebellion against the cardinal, and leading magistrates saw his butting into the Thirty Years War as his war. In 1636, peasants “hacked a tax collector to pieces and dismembered a surgeon whom they mistook for a revenue official.” Yet Richelieu was not deflected from his course. He subsidized the Dutch Republic in its struggle against Spain and, with a view to blunting Habsburg power in Germany, was a central figure in negotiating the entry of Swedish armies into the Thirty Years War. In pursuit of this policy, he also hounded the Order of Jesuits and was ready for a clash with the pope himself.

  Richelieu was a practitioner of a recent doctrine and ancient praxis: “reason of state.” The meaning of this expression, concisely put, was that all action in the interests of the state, however seemingly immoral, was justified by the higher a priori good of the state. Thus, for example, if a king ordered guardsmen to slay a group of high court judges for “reasons of state,” they would do well to carry out the deed. By the later sixteenth century, the reasoning behind this view was being taken back to the great Florentine political thinker, Machiavelli, as if he had been the architect of a new code of conduct.

  In a short work, The Prince, composed in 1513, Machiavelli had torn away the flummery and masks of formal political discourse and idealized advice in handbooks of conduct for princes. War and the maintenance of power, he argued, were the prime business of the prince. This was best seen in the ways of any successful “new” prince, who, more than hereditary princes or rulers, had to fight with every means at his disposal, fair or foul, to seize and hold power. Along the way, however, it was always better to have subjects and citizens on your side.

  Historians have underlined the importance of inherited dynastic rights in the politics of early modern Europe, and noted that these were viewed as “ideologically sacrosanct.” But in his reflections on political power, Machiavelli implicitly cast the claims of dynasty aside by suggesting that in a time of uncertainty and flux, a prince’s birthrights could not possibly suffice in a struggle for the survival of the state. This, instead, required armed might and exceptional political prowess. And if the principle of dynasty ruled much of European diplomacy for more than four centuries, this was also because strong lines of princes—Valois, Habsburg, Bourbon, Hohenzollern, Vasa, Romanov—were able to back up their dynastic claims with menacing armies. Without these battering rams and the support of allies, their arguments concerning the ties between territory and blood lineages would have been blown away like so much codswallop; and other claims regarding “natural” frontiers, security concerns, or economic necessities would have been thrust forward to govern diplomacy and foreign affairs.

  Machiavelli had been schooled in the committee rooms, at once brutal and subtle, of Florentine politics. He had seen Italy overrun by foreign armies, princes in the act of grabbing states, governments pushed aside rudely, the reign of one of the most corrupt priests ever to deck the papal throne (Alexander VI), and shameless exhibitions of political cynicism in the conduct of Italian and other rulers. Cast out of office and banished from Florence when the Medici overthrew the republic in 1512, Machiavelli took hold of himself by turning to reflect on the nature of political power, a man now haunted by its ghosts and living in a humble country house.

  Although a republican himself, when composing The Prince, in his disenchantment, he let his imagination take flight as he constructed a portrait of what it meant and what it took to possess or to make a princely state: that is, to exercise absolute political power. In sketching the portrait, he seemed to bring up to date the everyday realities of reason of state. Here, at all events, was an echo of the Milanese declaration to the Florentine ambassadors: “Might makes right.” And here too we pass over to ground that generated a cascade of questions and a vast literature.

  What was the state, and what its powers? How had it come into being? For whose good? Or rather, what was the good of the state? How did it relate to “natural law,” to “divine law,” to the church, to kings, to “the people”? Was it possible, for the sake of the state, to transmogrify criminal activity into something acceptable and right? Was the realm of politics a world with its own values, detached from all Christian morality? Was the prince, or supreme political council, somehow an embodiment of the state? What was tyranny? Could a tyrannical prince be justly assassinated? Were people, communities, and subjects meant to be consulted by those who stood at the head of states? What was treason?

  The stream of questions went on, and so did the answers in treatises, histories, primers, and pamphlets. If we had nothing else as evidence, the literature on those questions alone would be rich testimony to the overarching ambitions of the new state, as it threw its shadow over the life of Europeans in the form of more taxes, more armies, billeting, officials, political emergencies, and calls to invest in its bonds.

  Serious reflection collected around the supposed origins and power of the state, while also stressing the benefits of absolutism. But some political thinkers pointed to the dangers of absolute power, particularly when lodged in the person of a prince. They called for a check and “bridles” on the supreme executive authority: a job best done, as they saw it, by assemblies of noblemen, clergy, and town councils. It was a call, in short, for forms of limited monarchy. Writing amidst the tumult of the French Wars of Religion, Jean Bodin (d. 1596), the most distinguished advocate of absolutism before Thomas Hobbes, could see no other solution to the horrors of civil conflict than the powerful hand of absolutism. Yet even he held that new taxes required the consent of the governed. He based this claim on the idea of private property as enshrined in the a priori dictates of “natural law.” From where could the substance in tax yields come, if not from private property?

  Conflict between Protestants and Catholics brought to light another cluster of questions. Could a king be denounced as a heretic, or be held to account for governing against “the laws” of God? Did kings hold power directly from God, from “the people,” or in some tricky fashion from both? And if indeed their reign was “ungodly” or “heretical,” could they be deposed? Deposed by whom? Could they be legally killed? Killed by individuals, or did regicide have to be the work of an official body of some kind?

  Religious diehards topped the lists of those who took the more extreme views in answers to these questions: men such as François Hotman, Theodore Beza, Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, Guillaume Rose, and Juan de Mariana. But this particular stretch of the debate peaked in the late sixteenth century and quickly subsided. It could not hold a persuasive plea for very long. The arguments in favor of deposing ungodly kings, or of killing heretical “tyrants,” disturbed moderates on both sides of the confessional divide and won little approval. In a world ruled by “anointed” kings, powerful noblemen, oligarchies, and churches that bent to authority, the educated classes were too tightly held by the habits of deference and obedience to hearken to any but those voices that supported princes and dominant elites.

  Yet one departure into extremes calls for a comment here: the formal execution of the king of England, Charles I, in 1649. Unless this event can in some fashion be counted as an assassination, it stands alone in the chronicles of the period. And yet it may be readily fitted into its larger political world, for in the anatomy of the state as a limited monarchy, king and representative council (diet or Parliament) were meant to come together as one in the leading affairs of state. Civil war, however, denoted a profound schism in the state; and this indeed was the pressing background to the beheading of Charles I. In the bloody clash between king and Parliament during the 1640s, Charles lost, was brought to trial, and sentenced to death. If he had triumphed in the civil war, heads would certainly have rolled on the other side, although less dramatically so. Compared to that of a king, the beheading of a clique of parliamentarians would not h
ave been seen as such a pointed challenge to the authority of “the state.”

  Some fifty years earlier, France was the ground of a scene with affinities to the English event. In August 1589, with the assassination of King Henry III by a Dominican friar, the next man in line to the throne was the Protestant prince, Henry IV of Navarre. France’s civil war now took a bloodier turn, and the new king—hard though the event is to imagine—might conceivably have ended on the scaffold if he had been defeated, like Charles I, and captured on the field of battle. He was opposed by a formidable alignment, including Paris, the Paris Parlement, the powerful Catholic League, the University of Paris, and an array of Catholic grandees, all with the external support of the pope and the king of Spain. The French state, in short, was divided against itself: the working relationship between king and representative elites had broken down. The divisions would not be healed until Henry IV made a public conversion to Catholicism.

  IF PRINCES EXPOSED THE LIMITS of their authority by turning to the necessary assemblies or diets for more taxes, as warlords they were able to assert themselves more menacingly. For even with their limited means, they managed to provoke or start wars, then faced their people with the fait accompli. Once a war started or an invasion threatened, the all too convenient “facts on the ground” argument tended to constrain assemblies into voting for more revenue. Again and again in the Italian Wars, in the French Wars of Religion, in the Netherlands, in the Thirty Years War, and in the Northern Wars around the Baltic Sea, princes sent armies into the field, knowing perfectly well that they, the rulers, would quickly run out of what it took to keep them there: cash and credit. Now more tax money was likely to dribble in, but too slowly, never enough, and nor would any short-term loans suffice to keep their armies from mutating into swarms of desperate men. The inevitable came next: Their soldiers ended by finding the wherewithal for war in the houses of enemy civilians, by scraping it from the backs of their own peasantry and modest townsfolk, or, in dire circumstances, by taking it from the pockets of their elites.