On the Concept of a "Seignioral" Power

At the end of the seventeenth century, in the epoch of emergent political economy, a stirring story circulated about an occurrence in the mid-sixteenth century, on the fortune of Emperor Charles V and his civil financier. A variant of this tale went approximately as follows: On one of his travels, Charles V made a stop in Augsburg. In order to ensure due deference to the Emperor, the Fugger family, known for their fabulous wealth, provided magnificent hospitality and hung in the fireplace a bundle of cinnamon sticks, a spice among the most expensive goods at the time. After they had shown the Emperor a note of debt, with which he had redeemed a considerable sum on receipt, they burned the slip of paper and set the cinnamon on fire as well. These released into the air "a scent and a glow that the Emperor found all the more sweet and pleasant, seeing himself discharged of a debt that, considering his financial situation, he could have settled only with difficulty and that was presented as a gift in such a gallant way."

Although this anecdote, circulated by the French art theorist André Félibien in 1685,¹ is a complete fiction, it gains its meaning in correspondence with some related episodes. Similar stories were reported of trades-people from Genoa or Antwerp; the amounts of money vary considerably, but in every case the imperial promissory note is burned.² This circulation of gifts on behalf of the imperial coffers was made to appear so conciliatory, these stories have only superficially to do with the grand gesture and the clearance of princely debt. The anecdote reported by Félibien presents an entanglement between financier and sovereign whose resolution takes on a tragicomic character.

Aside from the fact that this anecdote belongs to a time when the Habsburgs' proverbial bankruptcies were already well known, an episode is described here in which sovereign and financial dynasty exchange places in a surprising way. It first invokes all the bonds Charles V owed to the Fuggers, among others, for imperial election campaign bribes. At the same time, the political order is reversed with a pyrotechnic turn. The burning cinnamon sticks demonstrate luxury and unproductive extravagance; the burned promissory note marks an early modern debt cut and consequently the record that the sovereign simply did not possess any more credit. In the patricians' house, the Emperor was confronted with the staging of polite luxury, as well as with the memory of his insolvency and unfulfilled obligation—an action that must have horrified the sovereign. If sovereignty is understood as a means of minimizing dependency, as a manifestation of one-sidedness, and as a figure of last resort,³ the merchant's gift becomes an unpatriotic act. This gift renders all reciprocity invalid; it interrupts the cycle of giving and giving-in-turn, and asserts a decisive asymmetry. While according to seventeenth-century tenets of sovereignty the prince or his revenue is viewed as the creditor of all creditors,⁴ the burned promissory note itself asserts an ultimate but also private form of creditor's authority in the relationship between sovereign and finance. The Emperor is given what is not the Emperor's; he receives nothing that belongs to him. This is the precarious solution to the situation: in the Augsburg setting of Félibien's story, the sovereign is made once again what he already was, namely ruler of the Holy Roman Empire by the grace of capital. This little story's scheme uses the generous performance of the financier to create referential confusion about where and in whom the position of sovereign power resides.

The anecdote thus reflects the difficult constitution of the public household in the Renaissance and its entanglement with contemporary financial capital. In this way it articulates an irritation already recognizable in the formulation of early modern tenets of state and sovereignty by Jean Bodin, Cardin Le Bret, or Charles Loyseau. Insofar as these theories strive to convey in a unified format the many forms of seigneurial agency and authority and to substantiate...