Is administrative centralization fiscally efficient? The case of Renaissance public spending.

Abstract

Centralization has been considered one of the main features behind the success of the Renaissance European state. To date, historians understand this centralization as an administrative process, in which most of the affairs of government began to be managed by institutions formed around kings who increasingly took on more and more matters. In most cases, such process also led to a geographical centralization, as the chancelleries became fixed in one city, which generally also became the capital of the court. However, the effects of such centralization have not been as straightforward as most scholarship tend to think. This is clear in the case of public finance. While centralization was a key characteristic of fiscal success on the long run, it still posed several problems to the sovereigns at the beginning of these developments, related to the control of information flows and the effectiveness of the mechanisms put in place for collection and spending, which led to frequent hesitations and adaptations. So, centralization was also a key factor for most of the inefficient performance of Renaissance public finances. This was not only a technical issue, as such problems were behind the disaffection of a large part of the political society towards the state and royal power. In this sense, this problem was at the core of the crisis within the fiscal systems of several European states during the 15th century, as in France, England or Castile, something that was also at the core of the more general crisis of the Renaissance state. This contribution aims to examine these problems and provide some preliminary answers based on a case study: military spending in Trastamarian Castile.