| My dissertation describes the formation of European states from the late medieval to the early modern period. I do this by looking at the history of one city, Lille, over the course of a three-hundred-year period, from 1384 to 1667. During that time, Lille, a commercial and manufacturing center in a highly urbanized area of the Low Countries, belonged successively to French kings, Burgundian dukes and Habsburg princes. As such, it typifies the experience of cities that formed the border between emerging national states. Prior historiography has considered the government of the medieval walled city an independent political entity that was weakened by the rise of the early modern territorial states. I show instead that the medieval city government, far from representing the whole community, competed with other privileged groups for jurisdiction over people and their activities. Only in the early modern period did Lille's magistrates achieve the unity of shared jurisdiction their predecessors had sought, due in large part to state support of their vision.;Using sources such as town accounts, municipal and ecclesiastical trial records, city and state ordinances, and compilations of custom and jurisprudence, I examine conflicts that arose between Lille's city corporation and its political rivals for judicial, fiscal and defensive jurisdiction. My evidence indicates conflicts of power became conflicts over space in this period, as territorial control began to define the limits of governing authority. More than just an inert factor in the development of modern political institutions, therefore, bounded space formed the basis for a new kind of consolidated governmental authority. This way of seeing governing power was not evident or accepted, however; its creation entailed a struggle in political, legal, cultural and economic domains over a period of several centuries. My study thus enlarges upon analyses of 'revolutions' in early modern government by emphasizing the importance of territorial claims in the production of authority, for the city as well as the state. |
