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Text in [square brackets] was added especially for this online publication by Ellopos
VII - THE [WESTERN] MEDIEVAL STATE
Page 8
Late in the fifteenth century the Germans were mortified to discover that, although a nation, they had not become a state. They found that the centre of political power had shifted westward, that the destinies of Europe were now controlled by the French, the English and the Spaniards. These nations had perfected a new form of autocracy, more vigorous, more workmanlike in structure, than any medieval form of government. Germany in the meanwhile had clung to all that was worst and feeblest in the old order; her monarchy, and the institutions connected with it, had been reduced to impotence. The same process of decay had operated in the minor states of the eastern group. In Scandinavia, in Hungary, in the Slavonic lands, the tree of royal power was enveloped and strangled by the undergrowth of a bastard feudalism, by the territorial power of aristocracies which, under cover of administrative titles, converted whole provinces into family estates and claimed over their tenants the divine right of unlimited and irresponsible sovereignty.
To investigate all the reasons for the political backwardness of these eastern peoples would carry us far afield. But one reason lies on the surface. Outside the free towns they had produced no middle class; and their towns were neither numerous nor wealthy enough to be important in national politics. They were not even represented in the national assemblies. In consequence the sovereigns of these states were obliged to govern by the help of aristocratic factions; to purchase recognition by the grant of larger and larger privileges; and for the sake of power to strip themselves of the resources which alone could give their power any meaning. But good government in the Middle Ages was only another name for a public-spirited and powerful monarchy. Such monarchies existed in the western states; they rested upon the shoulders of a middle class of small landowners and wealthy merchants, too weak to defend themselves in a state of nature, a war of all against all, but collectively strong enough to overawe the forces of anarchy.
The Western Medieval Europe: Table of Contents
url: www.ellopos.net/politics/medieval-europe/
Cf. Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) * Ancient Rome * Ancient Greece * The Making of Europe
