The Business of War in Europe, 1000–1600 105
units for distinct enterprises. As a result, financial limits were diffuse
and acted only clumsily to limit the size of armies and military expen
diture in general.
Part of the difficulty was that the men who made decisions about
raising armies and planning campaigns were utterly out of sympathy
with pecuniary calculation. War was an affair of honor, prestige, heroic
self-assertion. To regulate it according to the grubby selfishness of
bankers and moneylenders seemed fundamentally wrong to the
majority of rulers and their ministers. On the other hand, the persons
who lent money to sovereigns had little to say in military administra
tion. How the king chose to use the money he borrowed was not
supposed to concern the lender. Hence no one routinely calculated
the balance between costs of military enterprises and likely returns,
whereas for shipping ventures overseas the investors in each voyage
measured their costs against prospective returns as shrewdly as they
knew how.
By giving away valuable rights—most commonly the right to collect
future taxes—rulers could borrow enough money to equip a larger
army than their tax revenues could support on a continuing basis. In
the absence of adequate tax support, such forces had to supplement
pay by resorting to plunder, i.e., by living directly off the country in
which operations were taking place, instead of spreading costs more
equably through taxation. But rulers who broke their promises to pay
their soldiers could not expect dependable obedience, especially in
wars fought far from the seat of government.
An obvious solution was for rulers to increase their tax income; and
in the first decades of the gunpowder revolution, successful monarchs
did so with conspicuous success.^35 But once local rivals had been
brought low and their income diverted in whole or in part to the
coffers of the central government, further increases in taxation were
difficult to impose. This was because until after the middle of the
seventeenth century, even in the best-governed states of western
Europe, subjects retained the option of armed revolt against royal tax
collectors and could expect to prevail if enough of their fellows felt
the same way.
Royal armies could of course be used to constrain reluctant tax
payers. That, after all, was how the Dutch wars (1568–1609) began.
- Richard Bean, “War and the Birth of the Nation State” Journal of Economic
History 33 (1973): 217, calculated that central government tax revenues in western
Europe doubled in real, per capita terms between 1450 and 1500, but grew more slowly
thereafter.
