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577 Chapter 6 The End of the Middle Ages (Fourteenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Toward the Modern Concept of the State The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may be looked at from two points of view. On the one hand, from an economic and demographic viewpoint, it was a period of crisis and decline, due in particular to the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War. In terms of culture as well, these two centuries seem less bright than the classical Middle Ages of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. On the other hand, the period was rich in political developments. Throughout Europe the state as an institution experienced spectacular growth. The state apparatus grew decisively (a tax system, a judiciary, central and local bureaucracies, a standing army, etc.), nations asserted themselves. In doctrinal terms, the important attributes making up the modern idea of the state were developed in theoretical texts, which became numerous again since the link with ideas from antiquity was reestablished. If during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the state was, in some respects, in transition between a feudal monarchy and an absolute monarchy, it nevertheless showed original features: it was at this time, against the backdrop of the crisis of the church and the rise of Conciliarism, that “democratic” ideas appeared. Absolute monarchy triumphed in practice, but the intellectual seeds of new political ideas planted at this time began to grow again in the sixteenth century. In the following pages we will discuss the different characteristics of the state as they came into sharper focus during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This will include its abstraction (section I), its secularity (section II), its sovereignty (section III), the notion of the nation-state (section IV), absolutist expressions of government (section V), and representative or democratic expressions of the state (section VI). We will also describe the historical context. Part Three: The Christian West 578 I. The “State” as an Abstraction A. From the King to Crown and State In the Middle Ages a word for a “state” still did not exist.1 It was not until the end of the fifteenth century that “status” was used in this sense. Before this time, one spoke of res publica, regnum; civitas was derived from Latin translations of Aristotle. There were also several transitional concepts . In the twelfth century, John of Salisbury spoke of a “body politic,” and his definition circulated widely. His metaphor implied that all parts of the “body” were mutually dependent; this made it possible to condemn tyranny and rebellion both. Around the year 1400, Jean de Terre Rouge (also called Jean de Terremerveille) wrote that the supporters of the duke of Burgundy were but “putrefying members of the French body politic, and that they ought therefore to be amputated for the health of the whole.”2 Bishop Stratford used the same metaphor in 1327 to ratify the deposition of Edward II, labeling him the sick head of the body politic and calling for a new head. This image of the “body politic” is related to the rediscovered and much discussed Aristotelian idea of the “natural community.” According to Aristotle, the defining characteristic of this community is its self-sufficiency. This raises the question of the desired boundaries of the body politic: it must be sufficiently vast to live independently. The words “crown” and “royal crown” (corona regni) also came into use around this time. By the mid-twelfth century, the symbolic material object of the crown came to be an abstract concept, especially in England.3 Soon thereafter in France, Abbot Suger used the word “crown” in the same abstract sense. We find it used again in this way in 1158 in Bohemia and in 1197 in Hungary. Philip Augustus distinguishes his “person” from the “crown” in a letter to the chapter of Reims in 1197: he appealed for military aid against the Flemish “for the defence of my person and of the crown of the kingdom.”4 But, it was only in the fourteenth century that the idea became widespread throughout the West. Obviously, restrictions had to be placed on alienations of crown properties. Jean de Terre Rouge makes the point that kings had only usufructuary rights over the properties of the crown. Charles VI did not have the right to dispose of crown properties at the Treaty of Troyes:5 he did so to the detriment of the heir to the French crown. This was the beginning of the idea of the realm’s “fundamental laws” (a...

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