238 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

Flanders, Artois, Nevers, and Rethel and the Imperial County of Bur-
gundy into the bargain.1

The duel between Royal French Valois and Burgundian Ducal
French Valois who were thinly disguised under a Hapsburg Imperial
mask did not, however, result in a reunion of these two branches of the
House of France which, in the political circumstances of the Western
World of the day, would have brought with it a political reunification of
Western Christendom under the oecumenical rule of a resuscitated
Carolingian Empire; and, in proving to have been at least an 'undecisive
contest', if not a 'temperate' one,2 this opening round in a rhythmical
series of Modern and post-Modern Western wars justified the inaugura-
tion of a Balance of Power involving the Western World as a whole3 if
the value of this political device is to be measured by its capacity to
obtain for a society a maximum amount of political decentralization and
maximum degree of cultural diversity at a minimum cost in terms of
political friction and military conflict. Thereafter, as the further fluctua-
tions of this Modern Western Balance followed their rhythmic course,
they long continued on the whole to serve the interests of a Homo Occi-
dentalis who was at once their perpetrator and their victim, if we may
find an index of their beneficence in the concomitant net increase in the
number of participant Great Powers from the figure of two, at which it
had stood on the eve of the abdication of Charles V in A.D. 1555/6, to the
figure of eight, at which it stood in A.D. 1914.

In the course of those three centuries and a half, the number of Great
Powers in the Western World had gradually risen. It rose from two to
three through the fission of the Burgundian-Valois-Hapsburg Power
into a Spanish Hapsburg Monarchy and a Danubian Hapsburg Mon-
archy after the abdication of Charles V in A.D. I555/6,4 and then, during

1 The Imperial County of Burgundy (Franche-Comte*) had been inherited in A.n. 1347
by Jeanne, the wife of Count Louis II of Flanders and the daughter of another Jeanne
who had been the 'wife of King Philip V of France and the daughter of Count Otto IV
of Franche-Conite". Philip of France had married this older Jeanne m A.D. 1307, ten
years before he himself had come to the French throne in A.D, 1317, and Franehe-Oomti
had thus temporarily fallen into the possession of the French Crown; it hud then passed
into the hands of the Capetian duke of the French Duchy of Burgundy, Odo IV, in
A.D. 1330 through his marriage with Margaret, the daughter of Jeanne the elder and
sister of Jeanne the younger; thereafter, in A.D. 1347, it had been inherited by Jeanne the
younger upon Duke Odo IV of Burgundy's death; and, through Jeanne the younger, it
was subsequently inherited by her daughter Margaret upon the death of Jeanne the
younger's husband and Margaret's father. Count Louis It of Flanders* in A.«. 1384.

2 See Gibbon, E.: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire^ chap,
xxxviii, adfincm: 'General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Umpire in the West',

3 A local Balance of Power, involving the city-states of Northern and Central Italy,
had been in operation during the quarter of a millennium running from the death of the
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in A.D. 1250 to the invasion of Italy by King Charles
VIII of France in A.D. 1494.

* The first step towards the construction of a Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy had been
taken as early as A.D. 1532, when, by a^treaty signed at Brussels on the 7th February of
that year, Charles V had invested his brother Ferdinand with a regency over the
hereditary possessions of the House of Hapsburg, The second step had been taken in
A.D. 1526, when the Crowns of Hungary and Bohemia had been conferred on Ferdinand
after the Hungarians' disastrous defeat by the 'Osrnanlis at Mohaess (see II, ii. 177-9).
The third step was taken when Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor, in succes-
sion to Charles V, on the aSth February, 1558.

The separate existence of a Spanish Hapaburg Monarchy may be dated from Philip H's
succession to Charles V in A.D. 1556 in Spain and in the Burgundian dominions, which
were thereby reduced to the status of Spanish dependencies.