European Parallels

Voltaire famously quipped that the Holy Roman Empire was "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" — and he had a point. The HRE was a loose confederation of hundreds of semi-independent political entities — kingdoms, duchies, counties, prince-bishoprics, free cities and imperial knights — united under a single elected emperor whose actual power over these territories varied enormously depending on his personality, wealth and political skill. At its greatest extent it covered modern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, northern Italy and parts of France and Poland.

The defining feature that distinguished the HRE from every other European monarchy was election. The emperor was not hereditary in theory — he was elected by the Prince-Electors, a select group of the most powerful territorial rulers within the empire. In practice the Habsburgs held the imperial title almost continuously from 1438 to 1806, making it effectively hereditary; but the electoral principle meant the emperor always needed to manage the electors' interests, which prevented the kind of centralised absolutism that France achieved under Louis XIV.

The three ecclesiastical electors — the Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier — illustrate the peculiar nature of HRE politics: the most powerful political actors in the empire were simultaneously its most senior Church officials. The Archbishop of Mainz served as Arch-Chancellor of Germany, the most senior official in the empire. The tension between secular and spiritual power that produced such drama in England was, in the HRE, institutionalised into the very structure of the state.

France developed the most centralised and theoretically absolute monarchy in Europe — culminating in Louis XIV's Versailles court, where the entire aristocracy was domesticated into courtiers dependent on royal favour. The French nobility was stratified into the noblesse d'épée (nobility of the sword — the old military aristocracy), the noblesse de robe (nobility of the robe — those ennobled through judicial and administrative office) and the ancient peerage of France, whose handful of dukes and princes ranked highest of all.

The genius and the fatal flaw of Louis XIV's system was its success in neutering the nobility's independent power. By requiring the aristocracy to attend Versailles, Louis destroyed their provincial power bases — they ceased to be regional lords and became dependent courtiers. When the financial crisis of the 1780s made reform necessary, the nobility that might have led reform had been transformed over a century into a class incapable of independent political action. They had traded real power for ceremonial precedence, and when the crisis came, they had nothing to defend themselves with.

Spain's nobility was shaped by the Reconquista — the seven-century campaign to recapture the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule. The warrior aristocracy that fought the Reconquista accumulated land, privileges and an intense pride in blood purity (limpieza de sangre — "cleanliness of blood") that distinguished it sharply from mercantile or Jewish lineages. The result was a nobility enormously proud of its ancestry and deeply suspicious of commerce — attitudes that shaped Spain's relationship with its American empire in ways that proved ultimately catastrophic.

The hidalgo class — Spain's numerous minor nobility — is unique in European history for the paradox it represents: a class that claimed noble privilege (exemption from taxes, from manual labour, from torture) without the wealth that normally sustained noble identity. The hidalgos' refusal to engage in trade or craft work, combined with their legal exemptions, created a massive non-productive class that drained Spanish economic vitality while the empire's silver from America enriched its enemies. Don Quixote — published 1605 — is, among other things, the most devastating satire of hidalgo values ever written: the impoverished provincial noble whose head is full of chivalric ideals and whose reality is comic delusion.

The Norse hierarchy predates the feudal system and operates on different principles — a more fluid, martial structure based on personal loyalty, reputation and demonstrable prowess rather than inherited rank secured by legal documents. The Old Norse social order was the raw material from which the Norman feudal system was partially constructed; the Normans who conquered England in 1066 were descendants of Norse Vikings who had settled in northern France a century and a half earlier.

What is most striking about the Norse system compared to later feudalism is its emphasis on personal reputation and the Thing — the assembly of free men where disputes were resolved and decisions made collectively. The Norse jarl's power was contingent on his followers' continued loyalty in a more immediate way than the feudal baron's: a jarl who stopped winning battles, stopped distributing wealth and stopped inspiring loyalty would find his men walking away. The feudal system bound men to lords through legal obligation and land tenure; the Norse system bound them through personal magnetism and demonstrated value. Both systems failed in the same way — when the personal bond between lord and man broke down — but they failed for different reasons.

Venice is the great exception — a major European power that operated for over a thousand years without a king, under an oligarchic republic whose unique hierarchy deserves attention alongside the monarchies. The Serenissima — the Most Serene Republic — was governed by a strictly closed patrician class whose names were recorded in the Golden Book (Libro d'Oro) and whose elaborately balanced constitutional structures prevented any individual from accumulating excessive power.

Venice lasted 1,100 years — longer than any monarchy in this survey — by successfully preventing any single family or individual from accumulating enough power to overthrow the republican system. The elaborate checks and balances, the secret ballots, the overlapping terms of office, the Council of Ten's ever-watchful eye — all served to keep the oligarchy collectively in power by preventing any member of it from rising too far above the others. It ended not through internal collapse but through Napoleon's casual annexation in 1797: "I will be an Attila for the state of Venice," he wrote. He was.