214 DESTINY DISRUPTED
people who controlled money could organize large impersonal forces for
war and eventually for work too. On the one hand, this transformed the
king as a power figure in his country: he was the one person best situated
to organize funding for large-scale military campaigns. But on the other
hand, kings had to organize their fundraising through their nobles. In
England, the organization of nobles whom the king had to call together to
ratify a new military campaign was called "parliament." The English
monarch's dependence on parliament to legitimize taxation eventually led
to the development of democratic institutions in England-but that was
still far down the line. In 1400, the transcendent grandeur of a king was
big news all by itsel£
Before nation-states emerged, the strongest forms of political organiza-
tion were loose collections of territory with quasi-independent authority
vested in many figures, at many levels. The overall leader had to operate
through many intermediaries. Any order he gave was likely to be modified
by every authority figure through whom it passed, not to mention dis-
torted as it was translated into various languages, not to mention altered as
it was made to fit local customs, not to mention lost entirely as people at
the final, most local levels forgot (or refused) to pass it on. The greatest
roar of the greatest emperor was likely to dissipate into a faint noise by the
time it reached the smallest villages in the most outlying provinces. But in
a nation-state, where everyone spoke more or less the same language,
where a single network of officials administered the rules from top to bot-
tom, where everyone was more or less on the same page, the king's policies
traveled without much distortion to every cranny and corner of his realm.
That's not to say that England or France was that kind of nation-state
in 1350 or 1400, but both were heading that way, and so were some of the
principalities in northern Europe. The emergence of the nation-state en-
abled a single coherent government to set policies that affected all aspects
of the lives of all the people living in its realm of control, people who still
thought of themselves as subjects but were on their way to becoming citi-
zens. So later, when the West went east, it was a case of nation-states, hard
and sharp as knives, cutting into empires, loose and soft as bread.
The European quest for a sea route to the Indies, a direct aftermath of
the Crusades, carne to a head just as nation-states were emerging in Europe,
just as the Protestant Reformation was turning the individual into a major