The sixteenth century has rightly been seen as a pivotal moment in the evolution of modern theories of constitutionalism and the right of resistance. There was admittedly nothing new in the idea that a body of people can justifiably resist or even remove a ruler judged to be behaving tyrannically. But the exercise of this power had usually been treated as a temporary response to some specific crisis of legitimacy. What was lacking was the idea that the people constitute the ultimate authority from which all legitimate governments must derive. Although, as we saw in chapter 2, this conception became well entrenched in the city-republics of the Regnum Italicum in the course of the thirteenth century, the apologists of monarchy in northern Europe generally continued to regard the institution of kingship as divinely ordained. It was not until the sixteenth century that there rose to prominence a more radical vision of monarchical government, a vision in which kings and other rulers were viewed as agents or mandatories of the people, who were in turn held to possess a continuing right not merely to limit but to control their rule. Only in this period, in consequence, do we begin to encounter the idea that the power to resist and remove tyrannical kings must be regarded as a moral right possessed at all times by the body of the people – and perhaps even its individual members – in virtue of their standing as the ultimate holders of sovereignty.