The New Monarchies

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the four claims that distinguished the New Monarchies from their medieval predecessors: monopolies on tax collection, organized military force, royal justice, and the religion of their subjects (LO F; Skill 1.A; KC-1.5.I.A).
• Account for the specific consolidation programs of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, Henry VII in England, and the French Valois kings, identifying at least one institutional innovation in each realm.
• Account for how Catholic monarchs initiated top-down religious reform of their realms in the decades before the Protestant Reformation (KC-1.2.II.A).
• Account for how the rise of commercial and professional groups in late medieval and early modern Europe contributed to and depended on the consolidation of royal authority (KC-1.5.I.C).
• Account for the role of Renaissance Italian political fragmentation in producing new concepts of the secular state (KC-1.5.I.D), and connect those concepts to the political theorists (Machiavelli, Bodin) who articulated them.

The CED's framing of Topic 1.5 is built around a single key concept: KC-1.5.I.A. The new monarchies laid the groundwork for the centralized modern state by claiming monopolies on tax collection, deploying organized military force, dispensing justice, and asserting the right to set the religion of their subjects. Three associated key concepts elaborate. KC-1.2.II.A identifies the religious dimension: monarchs and princes including Henry VIII and Elizabeth I in England drove religious reform from the top down to extend royal control. KC-1.5.I.C identifies the social base: commercial and professional groups gained influence and played a larger part in political life. KC-1.5.I.D identifies the intellectual context: Renaissance Italy's continuing political fragmentation provided the conditions in which new concepts of the secular state took shape.

The clearest case is Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. The marriage in 1469 of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile combined the two largest Iberian crowns into a personal union (the kingdoms remained legally distinct). Their joint rule (Isabella in Castile from 1474, Ferdinand in Aragon from 1479) produced an extraordinary consolidation in less than three decades. The Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478 under royal control rather than papal jurisdiction, and used to prosecute conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) suspected of secret Judaizing, and later moriscos (Muslim converts). The crown completed the Reconquista with the fall of Granada in January 1492, expelled the unconverted Jewish population in March 1492 (the Alhambra Decree), and funded Columbus's first voyage in August. By the time Isabella died in 1504 and Ferdinand in 1516, Spain was a Catholic confessional state with a royal Inquisition, a developing tax system, and overseas claims that would make it the dominant European power of the sixteenth century.

England under Henry VII (1485-1509) followed a different but parallel program. Henry seized the throne at Bosworth Field in 1485 to end the dynastic civil war that English historians later called the Wars of the Roses, and he spent the rest of his reign consolidating royal authority against the great noble families that had fought it. His principal innovation was the Star Chamber, a royal court that bypassed the slow common-law courts and dispensed swift, royally controlled justice against overmighty subjects. He rebuilt the royal finances through retrenchment, parliamentary subsidies, and the systematic exploitation of feudal dues. He avoided expensive continental wars, married his children into Spanish, Scottish, and French dynasties, and left his successor Henry VIII a treasury and a peaceful realm. The Tudor consolidation that this lesson previews — and that runs through Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1534 and Elizabeth I's confessional settlement of 1559 — built on the institutional foundations Henry VII laid.

France under the Valois took longer and faced larger obstacles. The kingdom was the largest in Western Europe and had the deepest tradition of internal noble autonomy. Louis XI (1461-1483, the so-called Spider King) crushed the great Burgundian state at the death of Charles the Bold in 1477 and absorbed Burgundian territories into the royal domain. His successors Charles VIII (1483-1498), Louis XII (1498-1515), and Francis I (1515-1547) consolidated royal authority piece by piece, expanded the standing army, fought the Italian Wars (1494-1559) for control of the Italian peninsula, and through the Concordat of Bologna (1516) brought the French church under royal control. The Concordat is a precise illustration of KC-1.2.II.A: a Catholic monarch initiating top-down religious control of his realm decades before the Reformation made the issue confessional.

The four-claim formula KC-1.5.I.A identifies (taxes, military force, justice, religion) is meant to be read as a list of monopolies the New Monarchies claimed. Tax monopoly: a sustained royal effort to displace the local rights of feudal lords, ecclesiastical institutions, and chartered cities to levy tolls and dues, in favor of crown taxation that funded the royal apparatus. Military force: the development of paid royal armies and royal artillery that displaced the feudal levy and the great-noble military retinue. The Spanish tercios that dominated European battlefields from the 1530s through the 1640s, and the French royal artillery that broke fortified noble strongholds in the late fifteenth century, are the clearest evidence. Royal justice: courts answerable to the crown that bypassed seigneurial and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The Star Chamber, the French parlements, and the Spanish chancilleria all date from this period. Religion: the right to set the doctrine, ritual, and personnel of the church within the realm. The Spanish Inquisition (1478), the Concordat of Bologna (1516), and the English Act of Supremacy (1534) are the canonical examples.

Two further key concepts elaborate the social and intellectual context. KC-1.5.I.C notes that commercial and professional groups gained in power and played a greater role in political affairs. The new royal bureaucracies of late medieval and early modern Europe absorbed lawyers, accountants, secretaries, and administrators drawn from the urban merchant and professional classes; in France they came to be called the nobles of the robe, distinguished from the older sword nobility. The Italian merchant bankers of Florence, Genoa, and Augsburg lent the new monarchies the capital they needed to fund their consolidation. The relationship was reciprocal: the New Monarchies needed the urban professional class to staff their administrations, and that class needed the New Monarchies to defend trade and contract enforcement against feudal disorder.

KC-1.5.I.D identifies the intellectual context. Italy's continuing political fragmentation — the city-state system, the absence of a single dominant Italian state, the Italian Wars — provided the conditions in which new concepts of the secular state took shape. Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince (1513) is the period's most famous statement of secular political reason; Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) developed the concept of sovereignty (the indivisible supreme legal authority within a state) that would underlie European political theory for the next four centuries. The relationship between these theorists and the New Monarchies is less direct than the textbook story sometimes suggests: Machiavelli wrote in exile from a republican Florence; Bodin wrote during the French Wars of Religion. But their work supplied the secular political vocabulary that the New Monarchies' claims required.

The New Monarchies are best taught as a connecting hinge between Renaissance Italian civic humanism (Topic 1.2) and the Reformation princes of Unit 2. The same century produced the Italian humanist recovery of classical political thought, the Machiavellian and Bodinian secular theorists, the New Monarchies that consolidated state power, and the early Reformation religious upheavals that turned the New Monarchies' claims to control of religion into the great confessional question of the next 130 years. Topic 1.5 is therefore not a self-contained development but the political infrastructure on which the religious and intellectual conflicts of Units 2 and 3 will play out.

Three sources, each documenting a distinct face of the New Monarchies' consolidation: the Spanish religious reform, the Concordat with Rome that brought the French church under royal control, and the political theory that justified state sovereignty.

1. (Causation) Account for the four claims that distinguished the New Monarchies from their medieval predecessors (KC-1.5.I.A). For each claim, identify one specific institutional innovation that put it into practice in Spain, France, or England.
2. (Causation) Compare Ferdinand and Isabella's Spain with Henry VII's England. Both rulers consolidated royal authority in the same period, but they did so under different conditions. What were the most important similarities? The most important differences?
3. (Causation) Account for the relationship between the New Monarchies and the rise of commercial and professional groups in late medieval and early modern Europe (KC-1.5.I.C). Why was the relationship reciprocal rather than zero-sum?
4. (Causation) The Concordat of Bologna (1516) gave the French crown effective royal control over the French Catholic Church. Account for why France therefore did not undergo a Reformation comparable to Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1534, and explain what that comparison tells us about the relationship between Topic 1.5 and Unit 2.
5. (Causation) Account for the role of Renaissance Italian political fragmentation in producing new concepts of the secular state (KC-1.5.I.D). How did Machiavelli's Prince and Bodin's Six Books of the Commonwealth arise from different political crises and yet produce a related secular vocabulary?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.