ABvSOLUTE POWER IN EUROPE 213 For a long time domains were broken up, just as they were made, by the application of the same family policy: the prince at his death divided them among his children; John the Good, for example, had given Burgundy to his younger son. Finally in the four- teenth century the greater number of princes, desirous of maintaining the power of their house, gave up making sovereign princes of their younger sons, and adopted the rule that the domain should no longer be divided, but should pass intact to the eldest son. Charles V. established in France the principle that" the royal domain is inalienable/' Thus they succeeded in creating fn each country a unique centre, that is, a power which all the inhabitants obeyed, and in the country there was but one sovereign and one army to suppress wars in the interior of the country and to make treaties with other powers. This is what we call centralization. Centralization began in the fourteenth century; it then consisted of the union of the provinces into a single state, where the prince became the sole sover- eign. In Germany and in Italy the concentration went no farther; these two countries remained divided into principalities, they did not form a nation. Elsewhere, on the contrary, a single king gathered the whole coun- try into a single kingdom; the King of France by incorporating all the provinces of the kingdom in his domain, the King of Aragon by marrying the Queen of Castile, which made him "king of all Spain/'* France and Spain each formed a single nation. In England centralization went back as far as the establishment of the Norman dukes*