Medieval French castle
For a country to be rich and strong, it must establish efficient tax revenues. Medieval France was heavily divided, and kings were often unsustainable. A crusade and a hundred years' war brought France a reason to normalize taxes. It was after the war that the King of France finally realized his dream of taxation.
First, can the monarch levy taxes, and for what reasons?
Don't think that it is "human nature" for monarchs to collect taxes, in medieval France, kings once lost the right to tax their territories for centuries. It is likely that everyone will be confused, "The country established by the king cannot be controlled by itself?" In fact, in the context of the Middle Ages, people's loyalty to the king was also somewhat related to the germanic feelings for tribal chiefs, and "the capable person worked more" was the minimum requirement for the king by the subjects. In other words, if the king wants to be the leader, he must have strong strength himself. Subjects were loyal to the king in order to receive the king's protection and protection. On the basis of this reciprocity, the feudal lords would obediently be loyal and pay taxes.
Until the 16th century, taxation was seen by the French as an act as opposed to their own wealth. At that time, there was a popular proverb in France called "harsh taxes are like rats, fat themselves and harm the people", which fully shows the opposition between the people and taxes. In fact, the characteristics of the ideal monarch endowed by Christianity are "to protect the lives and property of the people from encroachment," which is often used as a reason to resist the monarch's taxation. The king's reason for taxation also derives from Christianity, first, the king needs to rely on the support of the people to maintain the country; second, the king is a God-appointed agent of the state, so he has the ability to use the tax to solve the people's troubles.
Farmers who work hard outside the castle
Second, the ideal is full, the reality of the bone: the king's bumpy taxation road
If you want to tax, first levy land. However, from the beginning of the division of the Frankish kingdom into three, the French kings who inherited the legacy of the empire gradually lost their precious territory. With the disintegration of France, strong local lords appeared in Burgundy, Normandy, Champagne and other places. They either relied on international trade to gain power, or relied on military conquest to establish centrifugal rule, or emerged from the foreign branches of the royal family to become one hegemon. Therefore, the weak French king is more like a puppet king living in the "Ile de France", and can only control the poor territory around him, so some people also jokingly call the French king at that time "the owner of the Ile de France".
In the beginning, the King of France was only regarded as a large lord of the richer territory, so the King was considered by the French to be only the "King of lords". The French king tried to implement a policy of marriage in the country in order to take over the power of the counts or dukes and local revenues through their descendants. Between 1190 and 1230, several kings of France successfully incorporated one territory after another into the kingdom's territory and divided them into fiefs with their sons. But even so, in the mid-13th century, the annual tax in the Area of Flanders, close to Paris, was still much higher than the overall tax revenue of the French royal family, and the French king still did not receive any decent benefits.
The feudal lords and the kings were separated from each other, and the royal power was increasingly threatened
However, from the 13th to the 15th century, the King gradually recovered almost as much land as he lost. Until the end of the 15th century, the French king could not regain the land of the Great Lords for his own use, but instead lost the loyalty of the local bolands such as Brittany and Orléans. His Holiness knew that the "little cleverness" of marriage could not achieve national unity. Thus, in addition to his commitment to marriage diplomacy with the counts, the king also made some reforms to his own financial situation.
The income that the king was able to control was mainly the rent of the royal fields, the exemption tax of the knightly class, and the surrender of some peasants. Between the two centuries, the king also added a few small pieces of income, including the royal family's usufruct tax on forest contractors, judicial taxes on the trial of criminals, and some mint revenues and customs duties. According to common sense, these taxes were basically enough for the royal family to consume itself, but the harsh reality once made the king's tax revenues insufficient.
Although the total amount of these taxes and fees is high, before the 14th century, they were mostly "customary taxes" that were not fixed by law, and accounted for the majority of the tax amount levied by the king. Moreover, these taxes were too dependent on land and agriculture, which linked royal income to climate and crop harvests, and thus became extremely unstable. Moreover, the local tax collectors hired by the French royal family demanded high interest rates, and at one time colluded with local forces to extract oil and water from both the king and the lord. In summary, it is unrealistic for the royal family to rely on the old taxes to raise revenues, so they must start to develop new sources of taxation.
Tax collector responsible for regulating the market
III. Two Wars: The "Battle of God" That Stimulated The Reform of the Royal Tax System
Louis IX launched the Crusades in the mid-13th century, the "first revolution" that stimulated changes in the financial management of the royal family. When it comes to war, people complain about its labor and economic damage. It seems that once a war is launched, the entire country will lose its development opportunities due to economic decline, but is this really the case? Although King Louis was captured during this expedition and the state paid 1.5 million Tulifour to redeem the monarch, only a fraction of that money was settled through regular tax revenues. That is to say, France is facing an unprecedented disaster this time. The royal family's wealth is depleted, but the king saves or does not save?
The King of France in the film and television drama
To raise money, Louis's vassals persuaded the populace to introduce a new tax called the "Business Permit Tax." This tax largely adapted to the development of the new wool textile industry in France, and the royal family gradually adopted the business tax as a permanent tax, successfully finding a suitable source of income for itself. Faced with the dilemma of the king's capture, the citizens of Paris no longer clamored to protect their property, but were willing to provide financial assistance to the government inspired by national feelings. Who would have thought that the income that could not be earned during the king's strong time in the past could be earned from this, which is really quite touching.
Crusades
In addition to the "business tax", the French kings during the Crusades also levied for the first time a "priestly tithe", which was called to raise money for war against the pagans. In the collection of the "priestly tax", the King also enlisted the help of the Pope and the French Council of High Priests. They helped the king preach the benefits of paying the clergy's tax and prayed for blessings for the taxpayers, which attracted a large number of taxpayers from the highest and lower levels to the poor. This tax reached its peak during the reigns of Philip II and Louis IX, and even developed the "knightly contribution" that the eldest son of the feudal nobility had to pay when he was knighted.
During the Hundred Years' War, the security of the country once again became a crucial issue. Beginning in the 1450s, the French royal family formalized the precedent of collecting "grants" during the war years, which remained in use until the 19th century. This subsidy was originally used to repair the military port and consolidate coastal defense, but it was later levied when the war subsided. In 1356, King John II of France was captured at the Battle of Poitiers. The royal treasury experts and jurists preached to the people a completely new concept, the saying that "the king fights for the people, and the people should provide for the king".
The king discussed a tax plan with the clergy
The people were again inspired by patriotism and agreed to give the king the power to collect permanent grants. But that's not all, in the days between wars, the French mercenaries raided the cities and villages of France more than once, and the people felt that even in peacetime, they could be more painful than in wartime, because "the sword that defended them was in the hands of outsiders". Thus, when Charles V was still crown prince, he proposed a number of new taxes such as salt taxes, transit taxes, trading taxes, and liquor to establish a standing army belonging to the French. This incident also marked the beginning of the French monarchy from decline to prosperity, and the complicated and sound tax items also became the biggest boost for the French king to launch a unified war in the future.
The tragic Hundred Years' War
Wen Shijun said:
In addition to raising taxes by normal means, His Holiness often solved real problems by squeezing the wealth of the Jews in the country at special moments. In the two wars, the ministers of Paris announced in emergency the confiscation of the property of the Jewish merchants in the city and drove them out of the country for heresy. During an anti-Semitic wave in 1347, a Jewish banker named Einhard was called "the fat sheep of the King." His power had infiltrated the French, German, Spanish and other European royal families and provided them with loans for a long time, and his strength was almost as rich as the enemy of the country, but it was not protected by the law and could be trampled by the king at will. It is conceivable that in the process of disposing of jewish property, His Holiness was able to loot what a wealth of additional wealth. Of course, compared with the stabilization of conventional taxes, this kind of "windfall" approach is still not very desirable.
bibliography:
Richard Bonnie, The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Press, 2015
Xiong Fangfang, "From 'Territorial State' to 'Tax State': The Establishment of the Taxation Right of the French Monarch in the Late Middle Ages," World History, No. 4, 2015.
(Author: Haoran Wenshi Porcelain Country Garbage Dump)
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