III - Fifteenth-century civilisation and the Renaissance

Summary

In the history of the events which changed the face of Europe around 1500, we must distinguish two interlocking developments. Besides the cultural transformation from which the term ‘Renaissance’ has been borrowed to describe the whole period, there was the emergence of the states-system of modern Europe. During the last decades of the fifteenth century, England, France, and Spain, after long and complex preparation, had attained national unification under strong monarchies. In addition, a bilingual state had grown up in the rich border-lands of France and Germany—the State of the dukes of Burgundy. Since France, with an estimated fifteen million inhabitants, was potentially far superior to any of her competitors and, indeed, represented a type of Great Power not yet realised elsewhere (there were only about three million inhabitants in England, six million in Spain, and hardly more than six million in the State of Burgundy with the inclusion of industrial Artois, Flanders, and Brabant), France's neighbour-states of necessity combined their resources. The German empire, France's only equal in population, could not serve as a piece on the new European chess-board because it was a loose federation of territorial states and half-independent cities under the Habs-burgs, who had little power as German emperors. In its Austrian and Alpine dominions, however, this house possessed the largest and strongest of the territorial states, and so the anti-French counterpoise was built upon a system of princely marriage alliances, first (1477) between Habsburg and Burgundy, and subsequently (1496) between Habsburg-Burgundy and Spain.