The expansion of trade all over the world and the European expansion also came with changes in political authority which supported the expansion.
15th century Europe, this was a post-feudal Europe that had seen the Mongols, the Bubonic Plague, as well as the Crusades: in short in close contact with the Islamic Mediterranean and already studying the Greco-Roman past. Upon this Europe experienced the cultural flowering of the Renaissance, again with the support of political authority.
Transition to regional (territorial states): from the rule of of feudal lords in Europe and from post-Mongol principalities in the frontiers on the remnants of the Roman Empire, Byzantium stil surviving but not in a strong centralized polity.
New forms of ruling in the entire Mediterranean that went hand in hand with two phenomena: one is socio-economic, the transition to capitalist society, and the emergence of new cultural-religious traditions, a changing Christianity in the continent of Europe and Islam as the spiritual bases of empire formation.
By the end of the 15th century, these regional states around the Mediterranean whether in city states in Italy, principalities in Germany, feudal monarchies in France and England, the kingdom based on uniting different geographies as in the case of Spain, formations of empire in the case of Habsburg, Safavid and Ottoman involved two importants elements: taxation as a new source of finance levied directly on citizens or subjects, and standing armies composed of mercenary forces and equipped with gunpowder, supported by state funds. These two elements are everywhere in the early modern era, and more than anything else these two elements that make the state made the modern world. They brought us to today, to the modern nation-state.
The Renaissance State
Duchy of Milan,
Republic of Venice,
Republic of Florence,
the Papal state in Rome,
the Kingdom of Naples.
BEYOND THE ALPS
France, three estates and Louis XI
England, Tudor dynasty and Henry VII
Spain: Fernando and Isabel, the Catholic Kings
