> ... I remember some historian (Braudel?) who argued that the empires
> of Charles V and Francis II failed because they attempted to build
> old-style tributary type empires at a time when the development of
> commodity production and international finance was undermining the
> viability of such empires. ???????
Even after a generation, Perry Anderson's *Lineages of the Absolutist State* remains perhaps the best general account. On Francis I and Charles V he wrote,
"In the first half of the 16th century, Francis I and Henry II presided over a prosperous and multiplying realm ... But neither Francis I and Henry II were yet anything like autocratic rulers ... the tax level at the end of Francis I's reign was not appreciably above that of Louis XI sixty years earlier ... Dynastic prestige at home was meanwhile assisted by the constant external wars in Italy into which the Valois rulers led their nobility: for these became a well-established outlet for the perennial pugnacity of the gentry. The long French effort to win ascendancy in Italy, launched by Charles VIII in 1494 and concluded by the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559, was unsuccessful. The Spanish monarchy -- politically and militarily more advanced, strategically commanding the Habsburg bases in Northern Europe, and navally superior through its Genoese alliance -- cleanly routed its French rival for the control of the transalpine peninsula. Victory in this contest went to the State whose process of Absolutization was earlier and more developed. Ultimately, however, defeat in its first foreign adventure probably helped to ensure a sounder and more compact foundation for French Absolutism, forced back in on its own domestic territory ... (pp. 90f.)."
--C. G. Estabrook