War and the State in Early

Modern Europe: Widening

the Debate
Steven Gunn, David Grummitt,
and Hans Cools

While the debate on the role of war in state development in early modern
Europe has ranged widely, the participants have not answered its most funda-
mental question to the satisfaction of most historians. The difficulty has been
how to assess whether war was more important than other factors as a driver
of state formation. In practice it is more fruitful to study the role of war within
a multi-causal model, but to do this the interaction between war and other fac-
tors such as judicial, religious, ideological, and social change must be studied,
preferably in detail but in comparative context.

A t first sight it might be thought that the debate on the role of war
in state development in early modern Europe is quite wide
enough already. It crosses the disciplinary boundaries between history,
sociology, and political science. It subsumes the ever more ramified
debate on the ‘military revolution’ thesis first propounded by Michael
Roberts in 1955 and elaborated by Geoffrey Parker in 1988.1 It has
spread its influence geographically: from at least Parker’s intervention
it has been tied to the origins of European global dominance, and
recently attention has been focused on what eastern European devel-
opments can tell us that western European cannot, and on why China
did not have the same sort of state-building military revolution as
Europe.2 Discussion has drawn in the fourteenth century as the pro-
posed site for an infantry revolution, the fifteenth century as the scene
of a gunpowder revolution, the later seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries as the locus for a more convincing all-round military revolu-
tion than Roberts’s, and the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the
1
M. Roberts, ‘The Military Revolution, 1560–1660’, in his Essays in Swedish History
(London, 1967), pp. 195–225; G. Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and
the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1988); C.J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution
Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CL, 1995).
2
R.I. Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (Harlow, 2000); V.T. Hui, War and State
Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005).

War in History 2008 15 (4) 371–388 10.1177/0968344508095446 © 2008 SAGE Publications

372 Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools

period when the fiscal pressures of war led rulers to develop lasting
institutions in which they could negotiate effectively with their subjects
to mobilize their resources.3 Those taking the long view now have to
reckon with a military revolution lasting 500 years and at length chang-
ing political balances across the world.4 Any further spread might be
thought to presage collapse.
Yet in the terms in which it has mostly been conducted, the debate
seems incapable of answering its most important question to the satis-
faction of historians. Charles Tilly’s contention that ‘War made the
state, and the state made war’ throws down a gauntlet to those who
would explain the development of European states primarily in other
ways, whether as the outworking of the ideological inheritance of
empires and churches, the result of princely provision of justice, the
means for the enforcement of class interest, or a contingent and
unique series of struggles for political power and good government
within each polity.5 The issue is particularly pressing for the early
modern period, site of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation,
the Renaissance, the reception of Roman law, the ‘general crisis of the
seventeenth century’, the ‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’,
and so on. Somehow we need to test the importance of war against that
of other factors, and for various reasons the debate conducted in
recent decades is not successful in doing so. It is characteristic that
those seeking to summarize the findings of 50 years of contention
reach such qualified conclusions as that war ‘was not the only factor
leading to change, and its effects upon the growth of the state
were both more complex, and more variable, than Tilly and others
would allow’, that ‘it is … unclear that war led to the development of
more “modern” state forms’, that ‘war was not a discrete force acting
on states with a relentless modernizing pressure’, or that, while
armed forces and governments grew stronger in a series of ‘mutually
reinforcing processes’, this was only part of a much larger transforma-
tion of European states and societies.6
Tilly’s dictum fitted happily with Roberts’s original contention that
in the military revolution ‘the transformation in the scale of war led
inevitably to an increase in the authority of the state’, leading rulers to
centralize and modernize in administration, innovate in taxation,

3
C.J. Rogers, ‘The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War’, Military Revolution
Debate, pp. 55–93; J. Black, European Warfare, 1660–1815 (London, 1994); J.-P. Genet,
‘Which State Rises?’, Historical Research LXV (1992), pp. 119–33.
4
A. Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford, 2006), pp. 445–511.
5
C. Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making’, in C. Tilly, ed., The
Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1975), p. 42.
6
F. Tallett, War and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1495–1715 (London, 1992), p. 188;
J. Black, European Warfare, 1494–1660 (London, 2002), p. 212; A. James, ‘Warfare and
the Rise of the State’, in M. Hughes and W.J. Philpott, eds, Palgrave Advances in Modern
Military History (Basingstoke, 2006), p. 38; Gat, War in Human Civilization, pp. 472,
504–11.

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 War and the State in Early Modern Europe 373

cultivate national wealth by mercantilist economic policies, order their

noble subjects in hierarchies of military and administrative service,
subvert municipal liberties, and practise ‘ever-increasing interference
in the lives of their subjects’.7 Indeed, Tilly’s fellow sociologists and
political scientists have by and large been more enthusiastic advocates
of the military revolution than have Roberts’s fellow historians.8 They
have been happier than historians to judge states primarily by the
Weberian definition of ‘a human community that (successfully) claims
the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given ter-
ritory’, and therefore happier to assimilate external to internal coer-
cion and happier to search for developments in the state’s powers of
coercion as the benchmark of its maturity.9 They have also tended to
judge the ‘modern state’, the rise of which was to be explained, from
the perspective of the mid-twentieth century, when it seemed evident
that the state had achieved its maximum extent in conditions of global
war, whether hot or cold. How far a perceived ‘decline of the state’
from the late twentieth century may change such perspectives, as new
challenges develop to the identity and independence of the national
state, will be interesting to see.10 Already Tilly’s line charting the
decline in the numbers of European states from well over 80 in 1490 to
around 30 in 1890 and 25 in 1918 has deviated intriguingly towards
three dozen or more states but one European Union.11
Historians, in contrast, have often concentrated on the narrowly
military inputs of Roberts’s equation, infantry fire-power and the
tactics and standing forces needed to harness it, or on Parker’s major
additions to them, gunned sailing ships and the expensive trace
italienne fortifications capable of resisting siege artillery, rather than on
the state-building outputs. And when they have pondered the latter,
the result has sometimes been the trading of single case-studies to
argue opposite cases: did the advent of the trace italienne lessen the via-
bility of small states, as Siena in the 1550s would suggest, or bolster it,
as has been maintained for Mantua in the 1620s?12
Some historians, it is true, have addressed the debate in a more
tangential but satisfying way by investigating the war-making capacity
of individual states. Tony Thompson found anything but a straightfor-
ward link between military change and state growth in Spain in its

7
Roberts, ‘Military Revolution’, pp. 195, 204–08, 212–14.
8
M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD
1760 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 451–57; B.M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political
Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1992);
B.D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York, NY, 1994), pp. 63–104.
9
M. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills (London, 1991 edn), p. 78.
10
M. van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 336–421.
11
C. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 45–46.
12
J. Hook, ‘Fortifications and the End of the Sienese State’, History LXII (1977),
pp. 372–87; T.F. Arnold, ‘Fortifications and the Military Revolution: The Gonzaga
Experience, 1530–1630’, in Rogers, Military Revolution Debate, pp. 201–26.

War in History 2008 15 (4)

374 Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools

60 years of near-constant war on several fronts from 1560. The size and
cost of the military establishment certainly increased, and the top
levels of military administration expanded and became more profes-
sional. But expansion did not mean rationalization, and confusion
and feuding among bureaucratic bodies and between parts of the
composite Spanish monarchy dogged military undertakings.
Corruption, nepotism, and resistance to close supervision were con-
stants. The financial machinery staggered under the impossibility of
meeting assignments and the mounting burden of state debt. Steadily,
and against the better judgement of kings and ministers, a system
of administración, or direct recruitment and control by government
officials of troops, ships, and crews directly funded from central
government, with accompanying state control of military industries,
was driven out by one of asiento, or devolution of responsibility for
military activity onto private contractors or noble landlords and other
local authorities funded by private financiers with a call on future gov-
ernment income. Here war brought the decay of the state rather than
its development, ‘the failure of centralized, absolutist government’
with ‘a major readjustment of social authority, and hence ultimately of
political power within the state … to the detriment of the Crown’.13
For James Wood, sixteenth-century France likewise demonstrated at
best ‘the incomplete nature of the military revolution’ in the efforts
of the royal army to fight the civil wars after 1562.14 The compagnies
d’ordonnance of noble gendarmerie and the royal artillery train emerge
from his study as very brittle instruments of internal coercion, a signifi-
cant issue since the gendarmerie has long been seen as an ‘epoch-mak-
ing arrangement’, first of the standing armies that would become ‘the
very backbone of the new centralised greater state’, while cannon have
been seen as vital in forcing the ‘submission to the increasingly more
powerful state’ of ‘local entities’.15 The French armies may have been
able to fight the mighty Habsburg realms to a standstill in the wars
of 1494–1559, but they were quite unable to break the determined
resistance of the French Protestant minority. Troop dispositions and
administrative and financial structures designed to defend the fron-
tiers were hard to adapt against internal enemies. Armies plundered
what they needed from the civilians they were meant to be protecting,
and thus destroyed the tax base that was supposed to support them. In
two decades of war, rapid attrition among noble commanders and gen-
darmes left leadership in the hands of those who had known nothing

13
I.A.A. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, 1560–1620 (London, 1976),
p. 146.
14
J.B. Wood, The King’s Army: Warfare, Soldiers and Society during the Wars of Religion in
France, 1562–1576 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 309.
15
O. Hintze, ‘Military Organisation and the Organisation of the State’, in F. Gilbert,
ed., The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York, NY, 1975), pp. 195, 199; K. De Vries,
‘Gunpowder Weaponry and the Rise of the Early Modern State’, War in History
V (1998), p. 129.

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 War and the State in Early Modern Europe 375

but civil war, and the result was a decline into warlordism. Thus France
passed through a ‘cycle of military insufficiency’.16 In its next major
external test, the wars against the Habsburgs under Richelieu, as David
Parrott has shown, the French military system coped by compromise,
clientelism, decentralization, and desperate expedients rather than by
centralization, bureaucracy, and rational planning. As an underpaid
and disorderly soldiery preyed almost at will on the civilian popula-
tion, the ‘notion that a more disciplined and ordered society was
emerging through the demands of military expansion would have
seemed a mockery to contemporary Frenchmen’.17
We might go on: Olaf van Nimwegen has recently added the Dutch
army of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the prime
site for the tactical innovations Roberts thought drove the military
revolution, to the list of forces that limped through campaigns under-
strength, under-organized, and decidedly un-modern.18 Like others,
he has stressed that the later seventeenth century saw more impressive
increases in army sizes and more convincing improvements in organ-
ization and supply than the earlier decades emphasized by Roberts,
just as Jan Glete has shown that the later seventeenth century was the
age of the first great permanent battle fleets.19 Yet this recognition is
little comfort to the advocates of military revolution as an agent of
modernizing political change, as it has coincided with a reassessment
of later seventeenth-century ‘absolutism’ as a system of princely com-
promise with the social, political, economic, and dynastic interests of
the – predominantly hereditary noble – elite. Such compromises,
rather than bureaucratic modernization, have been used to explain
the effectiveness of the armed forces of Louis XIV’s France.20 Even the
Prussian military state, long the extreme example of planned and
confrontational military-fiscal state-building, can be seen as ‘essentially
contingent and consensual’, prospering by working with the grain of
aristocratic ambition and the natural structures of village life.21 For at
least one political scientist, indeed, such compromises have suggested
that in early modern Europe war did not maximize the power of the
state to the degree that it did in forging imperial China, but rather
‘deformed the state through self-weakening expedients’.22

16
Wood, King’s Army, p. 306.
17
D. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624–1642
(Cambridge, 2001), pp. 551–52.
18
O. van Nimwegen, ‘Deser landen crijchsvolck’: het Staatse leger en de militaire revoluties
(1588–1688) (Amsterdam, 2006).
19
J. Glete, Nations and Navies: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America,
1500–1860, 2 vols (Stockholm, 1993), I, pp. 173–252.
20
G. Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private
Interest, 1661–1701 (Cambridge, 2002).
21
D.E. Showalter, ‘The Prussian Military State’, in G. Mortimer, ed., Early Modern Military
History, 1450–1815 (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 118–34.
22
Hui, War and State Formation, pp. 48–50, 109–26, 139–42, 190–95.

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376 Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools

A more dynamic analysis has been provided by Jan Glete in his use
of Spain, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic to investigate ‘the emer-
gence of the fiscal-military state as a complex organisation’.23 Drawing
on ideas from economic sociology and engaging critically with both
the historians of the military revolution and the sociologists of state
formation, Glete has suggested that some early modern states man-
aged to deploy resources and new technologies more effectively than
their competitors, and thus to prosper in war and sell effective
protection to their subjects at an acceptable price. They did so by
providing for the negotiation of complex contractual relationships
between rulers, subjects, bureaucrats, and armed forces and the facili-
tation of social entrepreneurship. His approach thus circumvents the
awkward answers found by those who test early modern armies
and states against absolute standards of efficiency or modernity, by
asking which armies and supporting systems worked best in competi-
tion with their opponents, and why. Similar agendas, though without
the same theoretical elaboration, have been pursued for mid-
seventeenth-century England and for a range of Baltic states between
the 1620s and the 1700s.24 What this approach still does not provide,
however, is an investigation of how the effort to become militarily
effective shaped the state overall, or a comparison of the effects of mil-
itary-fiscal effort with those of other forces shaping the state, except in
so far as Glete might be taken to claim that the provision of protection
against violence was so much the most important motive for the cre-
ation of complex organizations for negotiating between political inter-
ests and co-ordinating men and resources that it, above all, shaped the
model towards which most European states tended as they developed
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards.25 This analysis
thus cannot engage directly, for example, with Wayne te Brake’s in
some ways analogous attempt to interpret the political development of
many early modern European polities in terms of patterns of political
negotiation between different social groups, which concludes that the
‘relatively rare political coalitions’ on which ‘the foundations of
enforceable territorial sovereignties’ rested were built more on ‘the
common bond of religious ideology’ than on princely war-making.26
If historians examining military developments have mostly concen-
trated on one country (or several for comparative purposes) and have
asked what made states militarily effective, some sociologists have
freely compared many polities to ask how the pressures of war led

23
J. Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as
Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London, 2002), p. 2.
24
J.S. Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-
Century England (Stroud, 1999); Frost, Northern Wars, pp. 310–27.
25
Glete, War and the State, pp. 51–66.
26
W. te Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500–1700 (Berkeley,
CA, 1998), p. 183.

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 War and the State in Early Modern Europe 377

some to develop as constitutional monarchies and others as autoc-

racies, on the basis that ‘domestic resource mobilisation is the crucial
intermediary between warfare and constitutional change’.27 In such
an analysis, the key to differing constitutional outcomes may be sought
in the degree to which the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries could be fought on an occasional basis or using resources
other than those of the subject population.28 In a more complex
model, it may be sought in the interplay of the nature of the inher-
itance of early medieval local government in different polities, the
timing of the onset of ‘sustained geopolitical competition’, and the
degree of independent influence of strong representative assemblies,
factors which might interact to produce not just absolutist or constitu-
tional states but bureaucratic or patrimonial versions of each: thus
Brandenburg-Prussia’s was a bureaucratic absolutism but France’s a
patrimonial variety, Sweden’s a bureaucratic constitutionalism but
Hungary’s a patrimonial.29 Such classifications are enlightening, but it
is striking how far they depend on the findings of historians working
on individual countries. Until about 25 years ago, France would surely
have been more readily seen as a model of bureaucratic advance in the
age of Richelieu, Colbert, and Louvois than as a paradigm of clientage
and compromise.30 And such analyses assume on the basis of previous
literature that military competition was the main driver of state forma-
tion, rather than demonstrating it by comparison with other factors.31
There are sociologists against whom this criticism cannot be level-
led. Charles Tilly and Michael Mann have developed all-embracing
models positioning war at the centre of a process of state development
as the product of the interaction of different fields of power and
explicitly engaging with other explanations for state growth. For Tilly
the fields were two: capital, incarnated in cities and markets, and
coercion, incarnated in states and armies, though their relationship
in any area must be seen in its geopolitical context.32 Such flexible
models enable differences between states to be read as differences in
the contribution of different factors in the model to their develop-
ment. Thus for Tilly the Venetian Republic and Russia occupied oppo-
site ends of the spectrum of European states, the first intensely rich in
capital but poor in coercion, the second rich in coercion but poor in
capital. In between lay rather more coercive or rather more capitalized
polities – such as Brandenburg-Prussia and the Dutch Republic – and
at the centre of the spectrum, forming the ideal to which subsequent

27
B.M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and
Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1992), p. 187.
28
Op. cit.
29
T. Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 6–10.
30
Op. cit., pp. 91–110, 125–39.
31
Downing, Military Revolution, p. xi; Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan, pp. 1–4.
32
Tilly, Coercion, p. 14.

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378 Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools

national states would aspire, powerful realms of effectively capitalized

coercion such as England and France.33
For all their clarity of structure, such models present a dauntingly
wide range of ways in which wars might shape the state. Tilly defined
seven areas of state activity affected by war. Four are directly linked to
the coercive aspects of state power: war-making (against external
enemies), state-making (against internal rivals of the ruling power),
protection (of the state’s clients, such as trading corporations, against
their enemies), and extraction (from the subject population of the
resources necessary to exercise coercion). Three are more tangentially
linked to coercion: adjudication (of disputes between subjects), distri-
bution (of goods among subjects), and production (of goods and
services, initially for military purposes but later more widely).34 Yet it is
not clear how one might prove from this model that adjudication, for
example, was driven by the need to conciliate the subject population
in order the better to command their resources for military purposes,
unless it could be shown that in comparable polities internal judicial
institutions developed faster in those more deeply engaged in external
military competition. Ideas are denied any independent force in such
matters by Tilly, a feature which presumably made the historian who
has most closely adopted Tilly’s model for a general history of
European state development, Wim Blockmans, uncomfortable, since
he added cultures, incarnated in peoples, to capital-driven markets
and coercive states in his analysis.35 Likewise Michael Mann found he
needed four types of power, economic, military, political, and ideo-
logical, to construct a credible model, and his separation of political
power from military suggests the difficulties with Tilly’s single sphere
of coercion.36
The strongest argument Tilly and Mann were able to produce for
the primacy of war was fiscal. Tilly commented that budgets, taxes, and
debts reflect war’s centrality.37 Mann bolstered his account of state
development by analysis of English fiscal data from the twelfth century
to the eighteenth.38 The approach is one they have in common with
some political scientists, who have for example analysed fiscal statistics
in the attempt to separate out the seven wars between 1494 and 1945
most important in shaping modern statehood.39 Among historians,
those who have studied the fiscal institutions of early modern
European states have produced a narrative of state growth not only

33
Op. cit., pp. 30, 137–60.
34
Op. cit., pp. 54, 96–97.
35
W.P. Blockmans, A History of Power in Europe: Peoples, Markets, States (Antwerp, 1997),
pp. 15–33.
36
Mann, Sources, pp. 2, 10–11, 25–27.
37
Tilly, Coercion, pp. 74–75.
38
Mann, Sources, pp. 416–99.
39
K.A. Rasler and W.R. Thompson, War and State Making: The Shaping of the Global Powers
(Boston, MA, 1989), pp. 119–77.

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 War and the State in Early Modern Europe 379

more consensually held than that of the military historians, but also
subtly set in its social context, as the regressive or progressive impacts
of different levies, the sources of government loans, and the benefi-
ciaries of state expenditure are as susceptible to quantitative investiga-
tion as the overall burden of taxation on society.40 The politics of
taxation, indeed, lies at the heart of James Tracy’s compelling recent
account of Charles V’s efforts to mobilize his unwieldy multiple
monarchy and of their effects on his various realms.41
It is hard to doubt that it was military needs that drove up taxation
levels and dragged competing European states at various times
through the transition from a demesne state, in which the ruler’s
revenues mostly came from landholdings and judicial profits, to a tax
state, in which the government more or less efficiently taxed the
wealth of its subjects. Both the high proportions of expenditure
dedicated to war and the coincidence between lasting innovations in
taxation and desperate military need amply serve to prove the case. It
fits, too, with the visible connection, at least in the long run, between
a state’s military effectiveness and the wealth of the economies under
its control, Tilly’s interplay between ‘capital’ and ‘coercion’, William
McNeill’s relationship between ‘military power and money power’,
Paul Kennedy’s ‘interaction between economics and strategy’.42 But
all this starts from the point that the state’s primary identity is as a
participant in inter-state competition and that the subject’s primary
relationship with the state is one of coercion and extraction, best
quantified in fiscal terms. Mann, at least, recognized its Achilles heel,
qualifying his endorsement of Tilly’s verdict that war was central to
state growth with the recognition that reliance on such statistics under-
estimates the importance of the state’s judicial functions.43
Judicial growth can of course be measured, in terms of both litiga-
tion and legislation. In the first half of the sixteenth century, for
example, the volume of business in each of the English central courts
increased dramatically, the equity courts of Chancery, Star Chamber,
and Requests going from strength to strength and drawing in increas-
ing business from geographically peripheral and administratively
anomalous areas, while the older courts of King’s Bench and Common
Pleas dipped but then revived forcefully.44 In the Netherlands the
average number of surviving sentences issued by the Grote Raad at
Mechelen tripled between 1500 and 1550, and it drew in increasing

40
R. Bonney, ed., Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, 1995); R. Bonney, ed., The
Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c.1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999).
41
J.D. Tracy, Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War: Campaign Strategy, International Finance,
and Domestic Politics (Cambridge, 2002).
42
W.H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000
(Oxford, 1983 edn), p. 25; P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London,
1989 edn), p. xv.
43
Mann, Sources, pp. 433, 511–12.
44
S.J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 1485–1558 (London, 1995), pp. 76–92.

War in History 2008 15 (4)

380 Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools

business from the peripheral provinces; in the 1530s there were twice
as many appeals from Luxembourg as there had been in the 1520s,
and more than in all the years from 1471 to 1520 combined.45 Henry
VII’s parliaments passed 192 statutes in a reign of 24 years, whereas the
last seven years of Henry VIII’s reign alone produced 230.46 Philip II
issued on average 64 ordinances a year where Charles V had issued
37.47 But sociologists seem not to want to set such statistics against
those of taxation and army growth, and historians seem rarely to have
found a framework in which both types of growth can be measured
alongside one another. It is characteristic that Alan Harding, arguing
that lawyers and the ‘public culture based on the administration of
justice’ they created were more important in state-building than
soldiers or tax officials, engaged with arguments for the importance of
war by mere negation. The state, he concluded, was ‘not fundamen-
tally a concentration of power hardened in war with other powers, but
a country’s internal peace and order understood as a microcosm of an
ordered universe’.48
Others, to be fair, have subsumed war into their models, while
dismissing its primary importance. Joseph Strayer, keen to argue that
‘the process of state-building’ was driven on by internal judicial,
administrative, and ideological developments and was usually
‘checked, or even set back’ by war, admitted that wars did consolidate
state territories.49 Martin van Creveld, placing his stress on the evolu-
tion and institutional incarnation of the idea of the modern sovereign
state, saw the increased coercive, extractive, and bureaucratic powers
of states from the seventeenth century as the symptoms rather than the
causes of state growth.50 Perry Anderson, having characterized the
absolutist state as ‘a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal
domination’, argued that such states were in practice designed for war
because fighting for territory was ‘possibly the most rational and rapid
single mode of expansion of surplus extraction available for any given
ruling class under feudalism’.51 Even Michel Foucault, though his
vision of power was so all-pervasive that it is difficult to separate out the
state, let alone the effect of its wars, from his model, saw military insti-
tutions and practices – the barracks as a disciplinary enclosure, musket

45
J.T. De Smidt, ‘Rechtspreken, raadsheren en rechtspraak van Parlement en Grote Raad
van Mechelen’, in J. Gilissen, ed., Consilium Magnum 1473–1973 (Brussels, 1977), p. 75;
R. Petit, ‘Le Pays de Luxembourg au début des temps modernes: croissance de l’état et
contrepoids’, in W.P. Blockmans and H. van Nuffel, eds, Etat et religion au XVe et XVIe
siècles (Brussels, 1986), p. 92.
46
S.B. Chrimes, Henry VII (London, 1972), p. 177; S.E. Lehmberg, The Later Parliaments of
Henry VIII, 1536–1547 (Cambridge, 1977), p. 257.
47
P.P.J.L. van Peteghem, De raad van Vlaanderen en staatsvorming onder Karel V (1515–1555)
(Nijmegen, 1990), p. 186.
48
A. Harding, Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State (Oxford, 2002), pp. 337–38.
49
J.R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ, 1970), pp. 58–59.
50
Van Creveld, Rise and Decline, pp. 52–58, 127–84.
51
P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolute State (London, 1974), pp. 18, 31.

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 War and the State in Early Modern Europe 381

drill as the social construction of ‘docile bodies’ – as symptomatic of

wider changes.52 Yet none of these approaches has done much to
convince those who place their primary emphasis on war.53
An opportunity for historians to consider these different models of
state formation alongside each other and to weigh up the relative
importance of different factors in state formation might have been
provided by the European Science Foundation project on ‘The
Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th–18th Centuries’. The
project has resulted in the publication of seven volumes addressing
different themes in state development, each rich in argument and
detail across an impressive geographical and chronological range. But
the contributors to different volumes were (understandably, given the
scale of the enterprise) left free to publish mutually incompatible
arguments or, conversely, to neglect the areas of possible interaction
between their respective themes. The team investigating ‘war and
competition between states’ focused, with a few exceptions, either on
the ideology and practice of war and diplomacy or on the military
institutions of individual countries, rather than on the wider social and
political context of war and its impact on state development.54 Their
editor suggested that ‘the problem of war should be present – emphat-
ically, ubiquitously present – within each of the six other themes in
this series on the origins of the modern state’, but his colleagues
producing the other volumes evidently did not agree, and the impact
of war can be hard to locate in the series except in its fiscal compon-
ent.55 Martial themes intruded, as popular religious fervour supported
messianic crusading princes, soldiers and taxes provoked communal
resistance movements, invasions disrupted the normal relations of
local elites and central government, or rivalry between units of ‘socio-
political concentration’ promoted ‘the birth of absolutism’ and ‘the
process of individualization’.56 But other contributors flatly contradic-
ted Philippe Contamine’s assertion that ‘war was the most powerful
element in the development of states, or rather of “the state”’.57
Judicial centralization rather than military mobilization, for example,
was argued to be ‘the main force behind … the formation of the

52
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, 1991 edn), pp.
135–42, 151–55; M. Foucault, Power (London, 2000).
53
Tilly, Coercion, p. 36; Mann, Sources, p. 511.
54
P. Contamine, ed., War and Competition between States (Oxford, 2000).
55
P. Contamine, ‘Introduction’, in op. cit., p. 2; Bonney, Economic Systems.
56
J.M. Nieto Soria, ‘Propaganda and Legitimation in Castile: Religion and Church,
1250–1500’, in A. Ellenius, ed., Iconography, Propaganda and Legitimation (Oxford, 1998),
pp. 117–19; S. Imsen and G. Vogler, ‘Communal Autonomy and Peasant Resistance in
Northern and Central Europe’, in P. Blickle, ed., Resistance, Representation and
Community (Oxford, 1997), pp. 32–34; G. Aylmer, ‘Centre and Locality’, in W. Reinhard,
ed., Power Elites and State Building (Oxford, 1996), pp. 70–71; W. Weber, ‘Rulers and
Subjects: The Absolutist Making of the Individual’, in J. Coleman, ed., The Individual in
Political Theory and Practice (Oxford, 1996), p. 213.
57
Contamine, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

War in History 2008 15 (4)

382 Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools

Netherlandish state’ in the Burgundian-Habsburg period, bringing

with it princely sovereignty, new forms of citizenship, bureaucratiza-
tion evident in central and provincial councils, and a centralization of
power measurable in the flow of lawsuits.58
In practice those historians who have come closest to evaluating the
respective importance of war and other factors in a controlled way are
either those arguing over the centrality of war to particular political
systems, or those analysing the relationship between individual
provinces and the larger polities of which they formed part. As an
example of the former we might take the debate over the thesis that
later medieval England faced the choice between development as a ‘law
state’ or as a ‘war state’, and that the political compromises necessary to
ensure the effectiveness of the ‘war state’ inhibited and indeed coun-
teracted the development of the ‘law state’, a debate in which the most
convincing answer is that rather than being opposites, law and war
interacted in a process of ‘the growth of a complex political society’.59
Provincial studies are able to illustrate in a more textured way the
impact of different forces and their outworking through complex polit-
ical and social negotiation. For the early sixteenth century we might
compare David Potter’s study of Picardy, James Tracy’s of Holland, and
Tim Thornton’s of Cheshire.60 Potter’s was essentially a study of the
interaction of war and politics, though it allowed for the impact of
ideological, judicial, economic, social, and religious change. Tracy’s
and Thornton’s books separated more explicitly the judicial, religious,
and economic aspects of negotiation between centre and locality from
the military and fiscal. None provided unequivocal comfort for the
advocates of war-driven state formation. While war served to knit
Picardy tightly into the French state through intertwining networks of
military command, fiscal extraction, merchant contracting, noble
service, and court patronage, it blighted the local economy, broke
down systems of supply and administration, and pushed state finances
to the point of collapse in the 1550s, generating political tensions that
would feed into civil war. In Holland, political consolidation under the
pressures of military, political, economic, and religious change was
more effective at the provincial than at the national level, preparing the
ground for the successful revolt of the 1570s. Cheshire saw some
increase in the powers of central government to legislate, do justice,

58
H. de Schepper and J.-M. Cauchies, ‘Legal Tools of the Public Power in the
Netherlands, 1200–1600’, in A. Padoa-Schioppa, ed., Legislation and Justice (Oxford,
1997), pp. 250, 253–56.
59
R.W. Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages
(Oxford, 1988); G.L. Harriss, ‘Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late
Medieval England’, Past & Present CXXXVIII (1993), pp. 28–57.
60
D.L. Potter, War and Government in the French Provinces: Picardy, 1470–1560 (Cambridge,
1993); J. Tracy, Holland under Habsburg Rule, 1506–1566: The Formation of a Body Politic
(Berkeley, CA, 1990); T. Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, 1480–1560 (Woodbridge,
2000).

War in History 2008 15 (4)

 War and the State in Early Modern Europe 383

regulate religious life, tax, and raise men, but war, like other forces,
promoted the adaptation rather than the elimination of provincial
autonomy. Another discouragement to the model-builders is that the
answers to general questions suggested by these studies are heavily
dependent on the social, political, and strategic circumstances of each
particular province at the particular time studied.
Equally suggestive of the possibilities of studying the impact of
war in a more rounded way is Michael Mallett and John Hale’s
study of the Venetian experience.61 Venice moved from a military
establishment geared for expansion in the fifteenth century to one
combining standing forces, short-term mercenaries, militias, fortifica-
tions, artillery, and regulation by civilian bureaucrats in a strong defen-
sive system in the sixteenth. Each element of this system related in
different ways to the structures of government and society in the com-
plex Venetian dominions. Noble heavy cavalrymen were recruited
from the aristocracies of subject towns, and retained mercenary cap-
tains were granted rural fiefs in Venice’s hinterland. The ready arming
of mainland peasant militiamen symbolized Venice’s trust in its sub-
jects, as did the republic’s preparedness to fortify subject cities without
building garrisoned citadels which could be used to hold down the citi-
zens. Venetian nobles on their way to higher administrative, judicial,
and diplomatic posts acted as paymasters, supply officers, and inspec-
tors of fortifications. In all this Mallett and Hale detected no great
leaps forward in bureaucratic structures or fiscal-military strength, but
their work suggests how a study that related the impact of war on all
these groups to the impact of other types of social and political change
might provide a clearer picture of war’s function in the development
of the state.
Such a study is what we envisaged when we set out on a research
project to evaluate the relative importance of war as a driver for state
formation in England and the Netherlands between 1477 and 1559.62
We succeeded – to what degree the readers of the resulting book must
judge – in describing from detailed archival evidence the impact of war
on power relations of many kinds involving towns, nobles, and subjects
in general in the two polities. We detected some of the ways in which
war indeed built the state, increasing princely intervention in towns,
integrating nobles as provincial governors and campaign generals,
intensifying the mutual obligations of prince and people, and so on.
We examined the relationships between rulers and nobles, town elites,

61
M.E. Mallett and J.R. Hale, The Military Organisation of a Renaissance State: Venice, c.1400
to 1617 (Cambridge, 1984).
62
The project was kindly funded from 1999 to 2002 by the Arts and Humanities Research
Board. The results of our research as they illuminate the ways in which the two polities
were articulated for war and the effects of war on their political structures are presented
in S. Gunn, D. Grummitt and H. Cools, War, State and Society in England and the
Netherlands, 1477–1559 (Oxford, 2007).

War in History 2008 15 (4)

384 Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools

mercenary contractors, and component parts in multiple monarchies

that enabled the deployment of much larger armies and navies in the
1540s and 1550s than in fifteenth-century campaigns, and the con-
struction of the first wave of gunpowder-proof fortifications in north-
western Europe. We suggested that comparison between England and
the Netherlands and between different towns and noble families within
each polity brought out the different balances between war and other
factors at different times and in different places. Thus religious policy
was apparently more important than war in shaping the state’s powers
over individuals in England and the reverse was the case in the
Netherlands; thus harvest failure and export difficulties did more than
war to stimulate government intervention in the economy in England
and the reverse was the case in the Netherlands; thus war was more
important in the relations between central government and towns on
the coasts of England than inland. But to have researched the effects of
changes in litigation, in princely policy towards the church, in
responses to the social problems caused by population growth, in the
same detail across the same period and the same range of case studies,
would have been beyond our capacities. It may perhaps be that a better-
designed collaborative project could achieve such a wide comparative
view; it is more likely that at least a series of studies asking roughly
similar questions might enable the construction of a clearer picture of
the relative importance of different forces at different times.
For we share the conviction of Wolfgang Reinhard that the search
for monocausal explanations for state growth is a forlorn one, that the
‘dilemma’ of ‘the abundance of theories’ about ‘the process of state
formation’ ‘can be solved by the simple means of an eclectic synthe-
sis’.63 If the procedure is simple, the synthesis need not be. Indeed,
Reinhard’s own is not, giving war an important but not unique role in
a multi-layered exploration of the developing state as an enterprise led
in their own interests, but under various ideological, economic, and
geopolitical stimuli, by its power elites, an approach that dovetails well,
as we have seen, with recent trends in the analysis of the ‘absolutist’
regimes supposedly born of the military revolution.64 It can thus leave
room for the greater or lesser importance of different factors at differ-
ent times, in different places and acting on different parts of society. In
effect this approach also characterizes the most ambitious recent
attempt to characterize the early modern English state, that by
Michael Braddick. Braddick analyses English state formation along
four axes: the fiscal-military state, vastly strengthened during and after
the crises of the mid-seventeenth century, is shown to have developed

63
W. Reinhard, ‘Power Elites, State Servants, Ruling Classes and the Growth of State
Power’, in Reinhard, Power Elites, p. 4.
64
Op. cit., pp. 3–18; W. Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt: eine vergleichende
Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt, 1999),
pp. 15–405.

War in History 2008 15 (4)

 War and the State in Early Modern Europe 385

at a different speed and under different stimuli from the patriarchal,

confessional, and dynastic aspects of statehood.65 Such flexibility
allows for the possibility that states viewed from the localities and in
their full social depth at times of comparatively low fiscal-military pres-
sure but comparatively high religious and economic strain and judicial
ambition – the English state from 1550 to 1640, for example – might
show considerable intensification of activity with barely any contribu-
tion from the pressures of war.66
Such an approach frees the historian not only to conduct the sort of
detailed research assessing the role of war that we have ventured for
England and the Netherlands, but also to ask other significant ques-
tions often unaddressed in the present literature. If agency is to be
restored to historical actors and the context in which their decisions
were taken is to be understood, there is a need for studies of their
thought-world that set war in context.67 Studies of strategic decision-
making such as Geoffrey Parker’s of Philip II are a good antidote to
ideas of rational military state-building from above, but ideally there is
a need to understand what Philip thought about his duties to do justice,
to preserve the church, to care for the poor, and so on, and how those
fitted with his thought on war.68 The nature of the sources, of course,
makes such study difficult, but somehow historians have to be able to
see the whole exercise of governing from above and the possibilities for
the communication of, and identification with, rulers’ views among
their subjects. This must be done without falling into the sort of specu-
lative overgeneralization that befell the efforts of a previous generation
to identify the spread of neo-Stoic self-discipline and social discipline
or civilizing courtly self-control among rulers, noblemen, and army
recruits alike.69 Imaginative use of source material other than state
papers – maps are a good example – should help in the task.70
Flexibility should also make it possible to focus on the interaction
between forces too often analysed as competitors in the contest
to explain state formation. Military policy and religious policy, for
example, seem to have worked against each other in the Habsburg
Netherlands, as German Protestant mercenaries worshipped freely in
services attended by Netherlanders who could be burned for holding
what the troops’ chaplains taught. In England war and religious

65
M.J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000).
66
S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (Basingstoke,
2000).
67
Black, European Warfare, pp. 3–7; James, ‘Warfare and the Rise of the State’, pp. 36–37.
68
G. Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, CT, 1998).
69
G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge, 1982); N. Elias, The
Civilising Process (Oxford, 1994 edn); for critiques see P.N. Miller, ‘Nazis and Neo-Stoics:
Otto Brunner and Gerhard Oestreich before and after the Second World War’, Past &
Present CLXXVI (2002), pp. 161–86; J. Duindam, Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the
Early Modern European Court (Amsterdam, 1995).
70
D. Buisseret, ed., Monarchs, Ministers and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of
Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, IL, 1992).

War in History 2008 15 (4)

386 Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools

change were more capable of reinforcing each other, as soldiers of

the Calais garrison were sworn to defend Henry VIII’s authority
against papal usurpation as well as French attack. In both polities the
co-operation of town authorities was important to central government
in organizing for war, but in the Netherlands intrusive heresy investi-
gations served to alienate urban elites, while their English equivalents
were entrusted with the implementation of religious change and
empowered by the confiscation of ecclesiastical property.71
Other varieties of change interacted with war in similarly complex
but significant ways. Developments in military technology and organ-
ization and court-based political centralization combined to promote
noble commanders who were more generals leading expert clienteles
than warlords drawing on their landed influence to lead local society
to war. Military need and the vision of a united sovereign state came
together in the Habsburgs’ bans on their subjects serving other rulers
in war, since ‘subjects are obliged to serve and stand by their own
natural prince and fatherland before all other lords’, and in the
Tudors’ increasing use of the militia service obligation of all able-
bodied males to recruit field armies.72 Military strength and economic
health came together in the English government’s concern to reverse
the growth of pasture farming at the expense of arable, which seemed
to bring not only high bread prices but also the substitution of feeble
shepherds for manly ploughmen in the national armed forces. Military
efficiency and the urge for moral discipline came together in Charles
V’s concern that his soldiers’ ‘infamous, indecent and abominable’
swearing was imitated by ‘young people and children’ to the great
scandal of their parents, or in English towns’ prosecutions of unruly
young men for not doing their archery practice.73
Perhaps the most fruitful field of investigation is the complex inter-
play between war and justice. While war might disrupt the operations
of justice, the creation or reconstruction of judicial institutions might
be justified by the need to sort out the divisions and confusions bred
by years of war, and cases might be drawn into superior jurisdictions
precisely because of the impracticality of litigation in war-torn areas.74

71
Gunn et al., War, State and Society, pp. 122–24, 305–08; Tracy, Holland, pp. 147–75;
R. Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture,
c.1540–1640 (Oxford, 1998).
72
Gunn et al., War, State and Society, pp. 138–76, 240–44; C. Laurent et al., eds., Recueil des
ordonnances des Pays-Bas: 2e série, 1506–1700, 6 vols (Brussels, 1893–), VI, p. 346: ‘de
ondersaeten voer alle andere heeren sculdich zyn hueren eygen natuerlicken prince
ende vaderland voer anderen te dienen ende by te staene’.
73
Gunn et al., War, State and Society, pp. 273–4, 291; Laurent et al., Recueil des Ordonnances,
VI, pp. 388–89: ‘infames, déshonnestes et abhominables’, ‘jeusnes gens et enffans’ ;
S. Gunn, ‘Archery Practice in Early Tudor England’, in preparation.
74
Laurent et al., Recueil des ordonnances, I, p. 116, III, pp. 89–90, 305; J.T. De Smidt and
E.I Strubbe, eds, Chronologische lijsten van de geëxtendeerde sententiën en procesbundels (dossiers)
berustende in het archief van de Grote Raad van Mechelen (in progress, Brussels, 1966–), II,
pp. 273, 374–75, 321, 352–53, 387–88; III, pp. 147–48, 328; IV, pp. 262, 269, 331; V,
pp. 444–45; VI, p. 50.

War in History 2008 15 (4)

 War and the State in Early Modern Europe 387

The different effects of war on litigation in different polities are

suggested by a comparison of the Grote Raad at Mechelen and the
Court of Chancery at Westminster. In the decades after 1477, when the
power of Burgundian-Habsburg central jurisdiction was in retreat, war-
related litigation was an important factor in stimulating the survival
and recovery of the Grote Raad. Some years 17 or 18% of its cases
arose from problems connected with war, and the average for the
years 1477–99 was 10%. As recovery took hold and the total volume of
litigation increased, so the proportion derived from war declined.75
Yet it still remained far above the proportion of war-related cases
represented among surviving bills to Chancery in an England longer
centralized and less afflicted by war, which ran at below half of 1% in
sampled periods between the 1470s and 1550s.76
There are many other ways in which the development of the judicial
and military functions of the state might be related to one another. The
same rhetoric of princely sovereignty ran through assertions of judicial
supremacy and legal uniformity and demands for wartime taxes and
military service. War bred theft, vagrancy, poaching, and other offences,
and actually inhibited the state’s achievement of the Weberian monopoly
of violence because of the need to encourage the ownership of weapons
for local defence; yet wartime conditions encouraged the assertion of
extreme investigatory and coercive powers against individuals such as
vagrant ex-soldiers.77 At regional level, bodies such as the Council of
Holland or the Council of the North might exercise both judicial func-
tions and those related to military co-ordination, just as town councils
did. The judicial functions attributed to noblemen exercising military
command seem to have served as some compensation for the under-
mining of nobles’ independent local jurisdiction by centralizing princely
courts of law. On the other hand, failure to exercise convincing military
leadership of the regional community might weaken the power of noble
houses to settle disputes by good lordship and arbitration. Local
tribunals might assert themselves against central power by trying miscre-
ant soldiers for their offences against the civilian population.78 Such
interactions can be profitably studied from archival records and
reflected upon with wider questions in mind about the impact of war on
government and society. Indeed they must be, if historians are to make
progress in setting the impact of war in its proper contexts.79

75
Figures are calculated from Smidt and Strubbe, Chronologische lijsten, I–V. For the overall
trend see op. cit., VI, p. viii.
76
Figures are calculated from List of Early Chancery Proceedings Preserved in the Public Record
Office, vols 2, 6, 10, Public Record Office Lists and Indexes, 16, 48, 55 (1903–36).
77
J.R. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 44–52;
Gunn et al., War, State and Society, pp. 277–80.
78
Gunn et al., War, State and Society, pp. 44, 109–11, 162–63, 201–03, 274.
79
For an attempt at synthesis along these lines, see S.J. Gunn, ‘War and the Emergence of
the State: Western Europe, 1350–1600’, forthcoming in D. Trim and F. Tallett, eds,
European Warfare, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, in press).

War in History 2008 15 (4)

388 Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools

It is doubtless optimistic to suggest that the debate on war and state

formation in early modern Europe might be so reorientated as to
enable all participants to contribute on mutually agreed terms and with
mutually acceptable classes of argument and evidence. Sociologists
will continue to debate primarily with sociologists, historians with
historians. Both groups may continue to disagree among themselves
about the most important characteristics of the ‘modern state’ whose
origins they are seeking. The ‘parachutists’, to use Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie’s distinction, will continue to search for workable models and
convincingly wide-ranging explanations of long-term change, the
‘truffle-hunters’ to search for enlightening sources and convincingly
complex evocations of past reality.80 But if the models can be built to
incorporate more of the source-based arguments about different
drivers of state growth and the archive-based studies can ask more of
the questions about the relative importance of different factors in
political change suggested by the models, then both should benefit,
and we should all stand more chance of deciding whether, when, how,
and how uniquely war made the state. If in one sense that constitutes
widening the debate, then perhaps the debate does need widening.

80
O. Hufton, ‘Fernand Braudel’, Past & Present CXII (1986), p. 212.

War in History 2008 15 (4)