Here’s a great book about 14th and 15th century politics, or perhaps more appropriately about power in the 14th and 15th centuries. The author provides an in-depth look at the multifarious political units that operated in this age and narrates the gradual emergence of large ”regnal polities”, the predecessors of nation states, in the fifteenth century. One of his main points seems to be that lasting governmental organs and political ideas grew in a self-reinforcing spiral where improving administration facilitated increasingly accepted jurisdiction, authority and representation, which in turn facilitated further improvements in administration. The discussion proceeds for the most part on a general structural plane. It is in fact sometimes hard to keep track of the author’s abstract terminology.

Perhaps as a counterweight to his abstract analyses, the author has included two chapters titled ”the course of events”, which focus more on specific decisions and decision-makers. Their geographical scope is very broad, ranging from Spain to Sweden and from England to Hungary, but it’s hard to learn anything from this never-ending succession of kings, lords and dukes unless one already knows these historical personages by heart. It is, by the way, a strange tradition in English historiography that most royal names are anglicized, so that King ”Charles IV” ruled Spain, ”John III” ruled Hungary and so on. Perhaps this tradition has historical roots, but it is absolutely impossible to follow a narrative where the same names and numbers recur again and again in different countries.

In any case, I would advice the general reader the skip the chapters on the "course of events". Anyone interested in the roots of the modern nation state should read the other chapters thoroughly.