![]() ![]() What emerged was a stronger, centralized form of monarchy in which the monarch held much more power than even the most powerful nobleman. ![]() ![]() That changed starting in the early seventeenth century, primarily in France. As demonstrated in the case of the French Wars of Religion, there were often numerous small states and territories that sometimes rivaled larger ones in power, and even nobles that were part of a given kingdom had the right to raise and maintain their own armies outside of the direct control of the monarch. ![]() The central idea behind absolutism was that the king or queen was, first, the holder of (theoretically) absolute political power within the kingdom, and second, that the monarch's every action should be in the name of preserving and guaranteeing the rights and privileges of his or her subjects, occasionally even including the peasants.Ībsolutism was in contrast to medieval and Renaissance-era forms of monarchy in which the king was merely first among equals, holding formal feudal authority over his elite nobles, but often being merely their equal, or even inferior, in terms of real authority and power. In other words, while the monarchs of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries certainly knew they were doing something differently than had their predecessors, they did not use the term “absolutism” itself. “Absolutism” is a concept of political authority created by historians to describe a shift in the governments of the major monarchies of Europe in the early modern period. ![]()
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