The Renaissance: Political Renewal and Intellectual Change 235became the great powers of the succeeding age. Not
only did perpetual taxes make the revenues of these
countries greater in real terms than those of their neigh-
bors, but they also made them predictable. Budgeting
for the long term became possible without the interfer-
ence of elected bodies whose interests were not neces-
sarily those of the prince. Above all, perpetual taxes
made borrowing money easier because lenders could be
guaranteed a return based on projected revenues.
Whether perpetual or temporary, late medieval and
early modern taxes were usually levied on some form of
moveable property. The governments of the day lacked
the administrative technology to monitor personal in-
comes, and land, though it was the principle form of
wealth, was usually tax exempt for a variety of political
and historical reasons. The goods of merchants and ar-
tisans were fair game, as were the commodities offered
for sale by peasants. Taxes on moveable property were
regressive in the sense that wealthy landholders and
rentiers could usually avoid them, but their impact on
other social groups is hard to measure. Collection was
never uniform and was rarely undertaken directly by
the state. The most common practice was to negotiate
the proposed yield from a tax with local authorities
who would then be responsible for its collection. The
rates collected were usually not those set by the legisla-
tion. Whatever their amount, late medieval taxes fell
predominantly on the most economically active, if not
the richest, segments of the population.
Governments knew this and attempted to encour-
age the transfer of resources from tax-exempt to taxable
activities. This is one reason for their almost universal
efforts to foster trade, mining, and manufacturing. It
also helps to explain the policy, common to both En-
gland and Castile, of favoring sheepherders at the ex-
pense of those who cultivated the soil. Wool could be
taxed; subsistence agriculture could not. Such policies
clearly influenced economic development, but their
overall impact on growth or on public well-being may
have been negative. Taxes were ultimately paid by the
consumer and were therefore a burden to be added to
those already imposed by landholders in their efforts to
compensate for falling rents.
Moreover, the maximization of tax yields often re-
quired changes in land use. Governments, through the
decisions of their prerogative courts, tended to favor
the extension of personal property rights over the
claims of feudal privilege. An example was the English
policy of encouraging landholders to enclose common
lands for grazing. This practice, which reached a peak
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, broke feudal
precedent and sometimes forced the expulsion of peas-
ants who needed the marginal income provided by the
commons for survival. As Sir Thomas More put it, “[I]n
England, sheep eat men.” This was perhaps an extreme
case, and enclosures may not have been as common as
More thought, but everywhere the extension of per-
sonal property rights to land had the immediate effect
of favoring governments and landholders at the ex-
pense of peasants. Thus, the most insistent demand of
German peasant revolutionaries was for a return to the
“old law” that protected their feudal status.
If one part of state building was finding new rev-
enues, the other was developing more efficient mecha-
nisms by which they could be spent. Most late
medieval states found this more difficult than locating
the money in the first place. Bureaucracies whose pur-
pose was to supply the needs of war grew like mush-
rooms but remained inefficient by modern standards
until after the industrial revolution. They were inhib-
ited in part by the same sense of corporate and personal
privilege that resisted other aspects of state growth, but
the underlying problem was structural. Communica-
tions were poor, and no precedent had been set for
many basic administrative procedures. Archives, the ba-
sic tool of record keeping, were rare before the mid-
sixteenth century. Censuses were unknown outside the
Italian city-states, and how they might have been con-
ducted in such kingdoms as France with their immense
distances and isolated populations is hard to imagine.
To make matters worse, the costs of war continued to
grow more rapidly than the sources of revenue. Neither
taxation nor the development of public credit kept
pace, and money was often in desperately short supply.
Because soldiers and officials were often paid poorly
and at irregular intervals, governments were forced to
tolerate high levels of what would today be called cor-
ruption. Bribery, the sale of offices, and the misappro-
priation of funds were common even in those states
that prided themselves on their high administrative
standards. The situation would improve under the “ab-
solutist” regimes of the eighteenth century, but the im-
provements were relative.
No two states were alike. Though all were con-
fronted with the need for consolidation and new rev-
enues, they achieved their objectives in different ways
according to their circumstances and traditions. The
city-states of Italy evolved along lines of their own and
have been considered separately in Chapter 10. The
sovereign kingdoms and principalities must be exam-
ined individually or in regional groups if their develop-
ment is to be understood.