3.3: Western Europe

Europe in 1453

Source: TimeMaps

In the Middle Ages, Spain had been divided between small Christian kingdoms in the north and larger Muslim ones in the south. The Crusades were part of a centuries-long series of wars the Christian Spaniards called the Reconquest,. Spain became a powerful and united kingdom for the first time when the monarchs of two of the Christian kingdoms were married in 1479: Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon. During their own lifetimes Aragon and Castile remained independent of one another, though obviously closely allied, but Isabella and Ferdinand’s daughter Joanna and her son Charles V would go on to rule over Spain as a single, unified kingdom.

The “Catholic monarchs”, as they were called, were determined to complete the Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. In 1492, they succeeded by capturing Grenada, the last Muslim kingdom. Full of crusading zeal, they immediately set about rooting out "heretics", forcing Jews to either convert to Catholicism or leave the kingdom. In 1502, they gave the same ultimatum to hundreds of thousands of Muslims as well. Most Jews and Muslims chose to go into exile, either to the relatively tolerant and economically prosperous kingdoms of North Africa or the (highly tolerant by the standards of European kingdoms at the time) Ottoman Empire.

The Spanish monarchs also attacked the privileges of their own nobility, in some cases literally destroying the castles of defiant nobles and forcing nobles to come and pay homage at court. After Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World in 1492, recalcitrant nobles were often shipped off as governors of islands thousands of miles away. The tax system was reformed to generate more revenue. By 1500, the Spanish army was the largest and most feared in Europe.

In many ways, the sixteenth century was “the Spanish century,” when Spain was the most prosperous and powerful kingdom in Europe, especially after the flow of silver from the Americas began. Spain went from a disunited, war-torn region to a powerful and relatively centralized state in just a few decades.

England

While Spain was becoming stronger and more unified, England plunged into decades of civil war before a strong monarchy emerged. After the end of the Hundred Years’ War, English soldiers and knights returned with few prospects at home. They enlisted in the service of rival nobles' houses, ultimately fueling a conflict within the royal family between two different branches, the Lancasters and the Yorks. The violent conflict over the crown, called the War of the Roses, lasted from 1455 – 1485. Ultimately, a Welsh prince named Henry Tudor, who was part of the extended family of Lancasters, defeated Richard III of York and claimed the throne as King Henry VII.

Henry VII proved extremely adept at controlling the nobility, in large part through the Star Court, a royal court used to try nobles suspected of betraying him or undermining the king’s authority. The Star Court’s judges were royal officials appointed by Henry, and it readily and regularly used torture to obtain confessions from the accused. He also seized the lands of rebellious lords and banned private armies that did not ultimately report to him. The result was a streamlined political system under his control and a nobility that remained loyal to him as much out of fear as genuine allegiance. During the 16th Century, Henry’s line, the Tudors, establish an increasingly powerful English state, largely based on a pragmatic alliance between the royal government and the gentry, the landowning class who exercised the lion’s share of political power at the local level.

The alliance was shored up by staggering levels of official violence through law enforcement and the brutal suppression of popular uprisings. For example, between 1580 and 1610, roughly 20,000 people were executed, a rate which, if applied to the present-day United States, would amount to 46,000 executions a year. Criminals who were not hanged or beheaded were routinely whipped, branded, or mutilated in order to inspire “terror” among other potential law-breakers or rebels. Despite the violence and its relatively small population, England did emerge as a powerful and centralized kingdom by the middle of the sixteenth century.

France

France emerged as the only serious rival to Spain. The French king Charles VII (r. 1422 – 1461), who won the 100 Years War for France and expelled the English, created the first French professional army that was directly loyal to the crown. He funded it with the taille, the direct tax on both peasants and nobles that had originally been authorized by the nobility and rich merchants during the latter part of the Hundred Years’ War, and the gabelle, the salt tax. Each of these taxes was supposed to be temporary sources of revenue to support the war effort.

Charles’s successor Louis XI (r. 1431 – 1483) managed to make the new taxes permanent. In other words, he converted what had been an emergency wartime revenue stream into a permanent source of money for the monarchy. Nicknamed “The Spider”, he had the ability to trap weak nobles and seize their lands under various legal pretenses. He also expelled the Jews of France as heretics, seizing the wealth of Jewish money-lenders in the process. Further, he liquidated the old crusading order of the Knights Templar headquartered in France. By the time of his death, the French monarchy was well-funded and exercised increasing power over the nobility and towns.