Provincial rebellion, the revolts of provinces, regions, and entire subject kingdoms against their monarchical center, were endemic in early modern Europe, evidence of the fierce resistance provoked by the aggressions of royal state builders. To be sure, it might be said that much of the political history of medieval Europe was related to the growth and expanding functions of the state – or, if one prefers, to the emergence and consolidation of the state out of conditions of feudal independence and fragmentation of authority. Nonetheless, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the transition to a new political order in the monarchies of Western Europe. Step by step, late feudal kingships evolved into much more centralized governments of an absolutist character, wielding ever larger bureaucratic resources to perform the tasks of national and imperial rule. Royal power steadily extended its reach in breadth and depth, equipping itself in the process with new administrative means to achieve the political integration of kingdoms, to govern dependent realms and imperial possessions, and to make polity, social order, and economy instrumental to its supreme will and interests. Understandably, contemporary legal and political thought was much preoccupied with rationalizing and facilitating these developments; or else, contrariwise, it set itself to formulate a case against the absolute power of kings. In 1576, in his encyclopedic treatise of comparative politics, Six books of the commonweal, Jean Bodin provided one of the most influential justifications for royal absolutism through his examination of the nature and necessity of sovereignty.