Another significant trend in this period was the emergence
or
consolidation of more powerful and centralized states. Perhaps the most
obvious case was that of England, where the process was accelerated by
the establishment of a kingdom of continental origin through the Norman
conquest of 1066. Within the British Isles this kingdom went on to
conquer Wales and most of Ireland, though not Scotland, which succeeded
in retaining its independence through a process of defensive
Normanization. On the Continent the English state long retained and
sometimes greatly expanded its territories. But it finally lost them in
the mid- lifteenth century, and what emerged from the Middle Ages was a
strong but insular monarchy.
The rise and consolidation of the French state was
slower and somewhat
unsteady-what was good for England was bad for France- but in the end
it produced a stable domination of a large and populous territory. Both
these kingdoms were in some sense nation-states by early modern times.
The Spain that emerged from the demise of Muslim power in the Iberian
Peninsula tended in the same direction, but the formal unification of
the entire peninsula lasted only a few decades; even then the
Portuguese kingdom was never fully absorbed, and that of Aragon only in
the eighteenth century. In Germany and the Low Countries the eventual
failure of rulers to establish solid and substantial kingdoms led to
much greater political disunity, and Italy likewise remained
fragmented. This did not, however, render these regions unimportant:
they included the two most urbanized societies in Europe, those of
northern Italy and the Low Countries.
But the most interesting feature of northwestern European
states was
not their size; rather it was the character of their relations with
their subjects. At least two themes were in play here, both of them
encapsulated in the term "feudalism." One was a matter of the balance
of power within states. Rulers confronted the entrenched might of the
landed military aristocracy under conditions in which urban society was
initially poorly developed; indeed, until the rise of towns the only
substantial economic resources to which rulers had effective access
were likely to be their own estates.
