Political Culture, Political Space

Abstract

Most Habsburg historians agree that the medieval or feudal political order had been transformed by the late fifteenth century. Maximilian I (1493–1519), whom they view either as the last representative of medieval knights, or the first among ‘new monarchs’, was succeeded by rulers whose main aim it was to expand and consolidate the Habsburg dominions, centralize the administration and improve their military capacity. Although political culture retained many feudal elements in the following two and a half centuries, they are usually considered to be part of a stage in modern state-building; and this process, while slower and on a smaller scale, resembled the road to absolutism in other European countries. Historians have also followed RJW Evans’ lead in viewing the Counter-Reformation as a cornerstone in the formation of a symbiosis between the Habsburg rulers, the Church and the nobles. He believes that, although the ‘decisive years for [the monarchy’s] formation lay in the seventeenth century’, and ‘rested essentially on a series of bilateral agreements between the rulers and their mightier subjects’, the beginnings of the ‘aristocratic-clerical commonwealth’ must be sought in the later part of the previous century.¹