Developments in the political sphere paralleled social processes. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European kings strengthened their military and financial power.


i. The powerful new states they created were as significant for Europe as the economic changes that were occurring. Historians have therefore called these kings ‘the new monarchs’. Louis XI of France, Maximilian in Austria, Henry VII in England and Isabelle and Ferdinand in Spain were absolutist rulers, who started the process of organising standing armies, a permanent bureaucracy and national taxation and, in Spain and Portugal, began to play a role in Europe’s expansion overseas.

ii. The most important reason for the triumph of these monarchies was the social changes which had taken place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The dissolution of the feudal system of lordship and vassalage and the slow rate of economic growth had given the first opportunity to kings to increase their control over their powerful and not-so-powerful subjects.