Custom divided 15th c. Europe, as it had for centuries, into many traditional political communities, each of which thought of itself as having its own laws and privileges.

A few of these communities had no monarch, and were republican in form and oligarchical in practice.

Most communities were subject to some kind of prince, whether he be called duke, count, or king.  Yet even in a monarchy, the customary community had its rights and privileges, privileges that limited the prince's ability to legislate, demand military service, or collect taxes.
 
The customs that defined a political community were in a few places contained in a written constitution; Brabant, in the Low Countries, had a document called the "Joyous Entry," in which the privileges of the province had been guaranteed by a 14th c. duke in exchange for recognition of his rule.  Usually, the constitution was not a single document, but a series of legal precedents, as in Britain today.

Local privilege was defended and the local political will was expressed in a representative body.  In England and Scotland, this was called parliament; in other places, the assembly was called the Estates, the Diet, or the Cortes.  They were assemblies of important people with a right to a voice in public affairs.  In England, the bishops, great abbots and high nobility personally sat in the House of Lords, and representatives of the lesser nobles (i.e. knights) and important towns sat in the House of
Commons.  Lesser churchmen were sometimes assembled in the Consistory.  If the king wanted to tax his people, he consulted all three bodies.  Assemblies elsewhere were much the same.

Even without a representative assembly, however, a community could still have meaningful privileges.  In France for instance, during much of our period, regional high courts called Parlements (not at all the same as the English or Scots Parliaments but still playing much the same role) restrained the king's freedom of action at the same time as they enforced his law.

 Of course I am making it sound much simpler than it really was.  Reality is always complicated.  One traditional community could very easily contain others.   Up to 1500, the smaller customary communities were usually more vigorous, more real,
than the larger ones that often contained them.  After all, political action was easier on a small scale.

Counterposed to the idea of local privilege attached to corporate bodies or political communities was the idea of dynasticism.  Basically this means that some very rich families owned important political rights.

These rights were not thought of as deriving from some absolute, sovereign right to rule, as Roman emperors of antiquity had claimed, but were simply a bundle of specific privileges.  These privileges were scarcely different in kind from the privileges owned those they claimed to rule, the local communities with their charters and customs, the lesser lords who had their
own dynasitic enclaves, and local church bodies.

 Local custom divided Europe into hundreds if not thousands of enclaves, the number depending on how important you or any other observer might think a given set of privileges was.  Germany alone had about 240 such communities.  Custom was a divisive, centrifugal, force of European politics.  The centripetal, unifying force, was dynasticism, and the fact that marriage, purchase, and conquest could bring a number of distinct communities under a common rule.  A prince could often claim wide territories on the basis of blood descent from past rulers.  Holding on to those territories, making his rule a profitable reality, was another matter altogether.

Even the strongest dynasties could easily stumble.   In 1300, there were at least two rulers who look to our eyes like national
kings, namely Edward I of England and Philip IV of France.  Disunity among the royal family, the early death of kings without heirs, simple bad luck, unravelled their rule, and both countries went through repeated  civil warsover the next two centuries.  France was almost divided on a couple of occasions.   These, I remind you, were the strongest, most "national," monarchies in later medieval Europe.  Elsewhere, things were far more decentralized.

[Examples will be given in class of two noble families who put together empires piece by piece and then lost them.]

Such dynastic empires were fluid and fragmentary.,  And they were not, for the most part, the fruit of conquest.  In most of Europe, changes in dynasty usually took place because the direct male line, perhaps an entire royal family had died out.
If this happened in, say, Naples or Poland, it was easier for the nobles, church, and towns of the kingdom to accept a likely candidate with a distant hereditary claim than to fight.   Accepting the new king was not just painless, but profitable.  Influential groups could demand concessions and bribes for their acquiescence.  It was only when there were two or more candidates that things got unpleasant.

The result of this situation was that the fifteenth century was the heyday of small states.  The richest and most strongly ruled states were the Italian ones.    The Swiss cantons, when allied with one another, were a surprisingly effective power. Elsewhere, in the Netherlands and Germany, the most vital communities were also small independent and semi-independent ones.  Europe was perhaps a disorderly place under this regime.  There were a lot of wars.  But they tended not overly to harm the
prosperity of these communities.

The great weakness of this divided Europe was in relationship to the Turks, who had the strongest and most warlike dynasty of the time.  The Turks will be the subject of our next lecture.

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.