Why did monarchy emerge as ‘the only game in town’ in the power politics of the late Middle Ages?

by Justin_123456

In Europe in 1400, there is a variety of different state systems, city-states, merchant republics, town leagues, monastic states, ect., all seemingly a viable alternative to monarchy, and capable of being major players in international affairs.

By 1500, and certainly by the end of the Italian wars, all these alternatives of monarchy are either gone, or in a clearly subordinate position. What happened? How were the monarchs of the late Middle Ages able to build states that alternate systems could not rival?

ConteCorvo

Monarchies appear to have better withstood the changes brought by the transition between the end of the XV century and the XVI-XVII ones. However, I believe that some points should be clarified a bit.

Royal power in Europe had begun a process of centralization and stabilization of the sovereign's authority already at the end of the XII century and the beginning of the following one. During the second half of the 1100s, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, in his attempt to restore imperial authority over northern Italy (territories formally under the authority of the Empire since Charlemagne's times), he provided these territories with judicial officers and tax collectors in order to administer justice and obtain the material wealth provided by the flourishing trade taking place there. His nephew, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, German emperor and king of Sicily, doubled down on the enforcement of central authority, creating a system of royal farmsteads in the south of Italy, placing crown officials both in trade and legal matters, to the point of creating a new set of laws during the Melfi council of 1231 (the Liber Costitutionis, also named "Melfi Constitutions") and founding a new university in its capital, Naples, in 1224 to boost the education of judicial and administrative personnel required by both the royal chancellery and the various state apparati.

This trends sees a sort of ebb and flow throughout the Middle Ages. Still in the XV century we know that the Aragonese (and the Angevin before them) rulers of the kingdom of Naples summoned the realm's aristocracy in great assemblies (known in the sources as "parliaments" or "general parliaments") such as the one summoned in 1443 by Alfonso V of Aragon after his conquest of the kingdom where he negotiated with the feudataries his succession to the throne and sanctioned his legitimacy to rule. In the 33 assemblies which took place between 1443 and 1497, with no regular meetings and the occasional partecipation of the mayors of the cities present in the royal demesne, the Aragonese kings discussed and "brokered deals" with the major personalities of the landed nobility to achieve political objectives (like the legal system reform of the 1443 and 1484 assemblies), deal with internal affairs (like the suppression of baronal rebellions of 1459, 1478 and 1485) or to request an occasional (and I wish to stress occasional) extra financial support from the aristocracy to the king for pressing state matters, which make up 19 out of 33 recorded assemblies.

All this to make clear that kings were not absolute rulers in the Middle Ages. There was always the need to negotiate between the central power and the local ones, especially when justice and taxation (more generally, what we would consider the public power) were privately owned and administrated, necessitating the king to "carve out" space for his own influence in the private domains of the kingdom's dukes, counts and princes.

It is plausible that the strengthening and centralizing of European monarchies was connected to the increased wealth provided by the new trade avenues opened after the discovery and conquest of the Americas and the gradual shift of interest from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and North Sea. The increased revenues from colonial endeavors were collected mostly directly by the royal fisc, which in turn could employ it to pay for an enlarged bureaucracy no longer relying on local powers to express the public authority. More money also translated to more military power and we see the gradual creation of standing armies after the 1500s and the widespread usage of huge numbers of professional mercenaries in the XVI century. Lastly, permanent chancelleries and diplomatic offices played a key role in the consolidation of royal power by providing what we might call power projection in foreign affairs, given the creation of the first government espionage instances, although this is a lively debated topic.

As for the other forms of government you mentioned, it might be said that neither of them, with the exception of the Genoese and Venetian republics, which will live on well into the XVII and XVIII centuries, and the Hanseatic League, still alive and kicking during the 1500s, appear to have never achieved the structural stability and the material wealth necessary to undergo the same process mentioned above which instead was achieved by the French, Spanish and English monarchies to name some. They might have been the same powers the rulers needed to curb or negotiate with during their own consolidation process. An example is the clergy in England between the XVI and XVII centuries, whose parallel judicial courts were anathema to state theorists like Thomas Hobbes.
If by monastic states you mean the Livonian Order and Teutonic Order in the Baltic, I really don't know much about them so I can't fathom a guess about their dissolution.

This topic is huge and fascinating. I hope this overview helps your inquiry.

Sources:
Scarton E., Senatore F. 2018, Parlamenti generali a Napoli in età aragonese, FedOA Press, Firenze;
Senatore, F. 2010, Parlamento e luogotenenza generale. Il regno di Napoli nella corona d'Aragona, in Ángel Sesma Muñoz, J., (coordinator) La corona de Aragon en el centro de su historia 1208-1458. La Monarquia aragonesa y los reinos de la Corona, Grupo C.E.M.A., Zaragoza;
Provero, L., Vallerani, M. 2016, Storia Medievale, Le Monnier Edizioni, Mondadori, Roma.