Louis XIV and his Fellow Monarchs

Abstract

Thanks to his exceptionally long personal reign,¹ Louis XIV had what might be termed — from the point of view of the space at our disposal in this chapter — a superfluity of fellow monarchs.² Moreover, their number increased between 1661 and 1715, since some of Louis’ fellow sovereigns who were not monarchical heads of state (electors, dukes, landgraves, and lesser princes come into this category) attempted, and at times succeeded in achieving, the status of crowned head. In the European table of ranks it was relatively easy to cope with the few ‘mixed cases’: the elected kings of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Rzeczpospolita Polska, generally known in Western Europe as the Republic of Poland; the elected popes, who as temporal sovereigns of the small papal states counted little but carried great weight as the crowned spiritual heads of the Catholic church; the elected emperors of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the office that carried the undisputed highest temporal honours, and on which the Austrian Habsburg family had so strong a hold that, in Louis’ words, ‘the imperial crown has become virtually hereditary in the house of Austria’.³

First published in Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship, ed. John C. Rule (Columbus, Ohio, 1969), a paper read at a conference at Ohio State University in 1964.