Before sovereignty: society and politics in ancien régime Europe

Abstract

In the discipline of International Relations (IR), it seems to be an uncontroversial point that the passage of European civilization from the middle ages to the early modern period was also the transition from a system with a single supreme secular regent, the emperor, to one with plural supreme regents. This is implied in the ubiquitous view that the Thirty Years' War was a struggle between the ‘medieval’ conception of imperial suzerainty and hegemony over christendom and the ‘modern’ conception of a system composed of independent ‘sovereign’ states, with the 1648 peace that ended the war enshrining the victory of the latter.