The Roles of the State and the town in the General Crisis of the 1590s

作者：Brian Robert Pullan · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.4324/9781003607458-17 · 研究领域：Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

The contributors to this volume present the state in many forms. Let us call it, in general, the legitimate public body which exercises the highest effective authority and power available within a particular territory. Sometimes the state is a town, or at least a town senate or council, ruling an actual or former city state with an empire appended, ranging in extent from the compact hinterlands of the imperial free cities in Germany to the sprawling mainland and island empires of the Republic of Venice. But sometimes the state is a none-too-impartial umpire between towns competing for all too scarce supplies of food, and sometimes, as in Spain, it is an oppressor of towns, which loads them inefficiently with the responsibility for collecting taxes. In the shape of the Dutch Estates-General the state may be the representative organ of a military union composed of very diverse entities, heavily urbanised or largely rural, republican or princely in their sympathies. Sometimes the state has appeared as an intimate, paternalistic, territorial principality such as Hesse-Kassel, drawing into a closer relationship with petitioning village communities. Or it can be seen as a pocket monarchy encroaching on the autonomy of towns and thrusting bureaucratic tentacles into peasant communities formerly managed by village elders. Sometimes the state is the Church, as in the prince-bishopric of Dillingen, where ecclesiastical discipline is synonymous with good order; sometimes the lay state r...