History of Europe

By the time of the Treaty of Saragossa, when Portugal secured the exclusion of Spain from the East Indies, Spain had begun the conquest of Central and South America. In 1519, the year in which Ferdinand Magellan embarked on the westward circumnavigation of the globe, Hernán Cortés launched his expedition against Mexico. The seizure of Peru by Francisco Pizarro and the enforcement of Portuguese claims to Brazil completed the major steps in the Iberian occupation of the continent. By the middle of the century, the age of the conquistadores was replaced by an era of colonization, based both on the procurement of precious metal by Indian labour and on pastoral and plantation economies using imported African slaves. The influx of bullion into Europe became significant in the late 1520s, and from about 1550 it began to produce a profound effect upon the economy of the Old World. Nation-states and dynastic rivalries

The organization of expansion overseas reflected in economic terms the political nationalism of the European states. This political development took place through processes of internal unification and the abolition of local privileges by the centralizing force of dynastic monarchies. In Spain the union of Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia under John II of Aragon was extended to association with Castile through the marriage of his son Ferdinand with the Castilian heiress Isabella. The alliance grew toward union after the accession of the two sovereigns to their thrones in 1479 and 1474, respectively, and with joint action against the Moors of Granada, the French in Italy, and the independent kingdom of Navarre. Yet, at the same time, provincial institutions long survived the dynastic union, and the representative assembly (Cortes) of Aragon continued to cling to its privileges when its Castilian counterpart had ceased to play any effective part. Castilian interest in the New World and Aragonese ties in Italy, moreover, resulted in the ambivalent nature of Spanish 16th-century policy, with its uneasy alternation between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The monarchy increased the central power by the absorption of military orders and the adaptation of the Hermandad, or police organization, and the Inquisition for political purposes. During the reign of Charles I (the emperor Charles V) centralization was quickened by the importation of Burgundian conciliar methods of government, and in the reign of his son Philip II Spain was in practice an autocracy.

Other European monarchies imitated the system devised by Roman-law jurists and administrators in the Burgundian dominions along the eastern borders of France. In England and France the Hundred Years’ War (conventionally 1337–1453) had reduced the strength of the aristocracies, the principal opponents of monarchical authority. The pursuit of strong, efficient government by the Tudors in England, following the example of their Yorkist predecessors, found a parallel in France under Louis XI and Francis I. In both countries revision of the administrative and judicial system proceeded through conciliar institutions, although in neither case did it result in the unification of different systems of law. A rising class of professional administrators came to fulfill the role of the king’s executive. The creation of a central treasury under Francis I brought an order into French finances already achieved in England through Henry VII’s adaptation of the machinery of the royal household. Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, introduced an aspect of modernity into English fiscal administration by the creation of courts of revenue on bureaucratic lines. In both countries, the monarchy extended its influence over the government of the church. The unrestricted ability to make law was established by the English crown in partnership with Parliament. In France the representative Estates-General lost its authority, and sovereignty reposed in the king in council. Supreme courts (parlements) possessing the right to register royal edicts imposed a slight and ineffective limitation on the absolutism of the Valois kings. The most able exponent of the reform of the judicial machinery of the French monarch was Charles IX’s chancellor, Michel de L’Hôpital, but his reforms in the 1560s were frustrated by the anarchy of the religious wars. In France the middle class aspired to ennoblement in the royal administration and mortgaged their future to the monarchy by investment in office and the royal finances. In England, on the other hand, a greater flexibility in social relations was preserved, and the middle class engaged in bolder commercial and industrial ventures.

Territorial unity under the French crown was attained through the recovery of feudal appanages (alienated to cadet branches of the royal dynasty) and, as in Spain, through marriage alliances. Brittany was regained in this way, although the first of the three Valois marriages with Breton heiresses also set in train the dynastic rivalry of Valois and Habsburg. When Charles VIII of France married Anne of Brittany, he stole the bride of the Austrian archduke and future emperor Maximilian I and also broke his own engagement to Margaret of Austria, Maximilian’s daughter by Mary of Burgundy. Margaret’s brother Philip, however, married Joan, heiress of Castile and Aragon, so that their son eventually inherited not only Habsburg Germany and the Burgundian Netherlands but also Spain, Spanish Italy, and America. The dominions of Charles V thus encircled France and incorporated the wealth of Spain overseas. Even after the division of this vast inheritance between his son, Philip II of Spain, and his brother, the emperor Ferdinand I, the conflict between the Habsburgs and the French crown dominated the diplomacy of Europe for more than a century.

The principal dynastic conflict of the age was less unequal than it seemed, for the greater resources of Charles V were offset by their cumbrous disunity and by local independence. In the Low Countries he was able to complete the Seventeen Provinces by new acquisitions, but, although the coordinating machinery of the Burgundian dukes remained in formal existence, Charles’s regents were obliged to respect local privileges and to act through constitutional forms. In Germany, where his grandfather Maximilian I had unsuccessfully tried to reform the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V could do little to overcome the independence of the lay and ecclesiastical princes, the imperial knights, and the free cities. The revolts of the knights (1522) and the peasantry (1525), together with the political disaggregation imposed by the Reformation, rendered the empire a source of weakness. Even in Spain, where the rebellion of the comuneros took place in 1520–21, his authority was sometimes flouted. His allies, England and the papacy, at times supported France to procure their own profit. France, for its part, possessed the advantages of internal lines of communication and a relatively compact territory, while its alliance with the Ottoman Empire maintained pressure on the Habsburg defenses in southeast Europe and the Mediterranean. Francis I, however, like his predecessors Charles VIII and Louis XII, made the strategic error of wasting his strength in Italy, where the major campaigns were fought in the first half of the century. Only under Henry II was it appreciated that the most suitable area for French expansion lay toward the Rhine. Turkey and eastern Europe

A contemporary who rivaled the power and prestige of Francis I and Charles V was the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, the sultan Süleyman I the Magnificent (1520–66). With their infantry corps d’élite (the Janissaries), their artillery, and their cavalry, or sipahis, the Ottomans were the foremost military power in Europe, and it was fortunate for their Christian adversaries that Eastern preoccupations prevented them from taking full advantage of Western disunity. A counterpoise was provided by the rise of the powerful military order of the Ṣafavids in Persia—hostile to the orthodox Ottomans through their acceptance of the heretical Islamic cult of the Shīʿites. Ottoman strength was further dissipated by the need to enforce the allegiance of Turkmen begs in Anatolia and of the chieftains of the Caucasus and Kurdistan and to maintain the conquest of the sultanate of Syria and Egypt by Süleyman’s predecessor, Selim I. Süleyman himself overran Iraq and even challenged Portuguese dominion of the Indian Ocean from his bases in Suez and Basra. The Crimean Tatars acknowledged his suzerainty, as did the corsair powers of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. His armies conquered Hungary in 1526 and threatened Vienna in 1529. With the expansion of his authority along the North African coast and the Adriatic littoral, it seemed for a time as if the Mediterranean, like the Black Sea and the Aegean, might become an Ottoman lake.

Though it observed the forms of an Islamic legal code, Turkish rule was an unlimited despotism, suffering from none of the financial and constitutional weaknesses of Western states. With its disciplined standing army and its tributary populations, the Ottoman Empire feared no internal threat except during the periods of disputed succession, which continued to occur despite a law empowering the reigning sultan to put to death collateral heirs. It was not unusual for the sultan to content himself with the overlordship of frontier provinces. Moldavia and Walachia were for a time held in this fashion, and in Transylvania the vaivode John Zápolya gladly accepted Süleyman as his master in return for support against Ferdinand of Austria.

Despite the expeditions of Charles V against Algiers and Tunis, and the inspired resistance of Venice and Genoa in the war of 1537–40, the Ottomans retained the initiative in the Mediterranean until several years after the death of Süleyman. The Knights of St. John were driven from Rhodes and Tripoli and barely succeeded in retaining Malta. Even after Spain, the papacy, Venice, and Genoa had crushed the Turkish armament in 1571 in the Battle of Lepanto, the Ottomans took Cyprus and recovered Tunis from the garrison installed by the allied commander, Don John of Austria. North Africa remained an outpost of Islam and its corsairs continued to harry Christian shipping, but the Ottoman Empire did not again threaten Europe by land and sea until late in the 17th century.

Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary were all loosely associated at the close of the 15th century under rulers of the Jagiellon dynasty. In 1569, three years before the death of the last Jagiellon king of Lithuania-Poland, these two countries merged their separate institutions by the Union of Lublin. Thereafter the Polish nobility and the Roman Catholic faith dominated the Orthodox lands of Lithuania and held the frontiers against Muscovy, the Cossacks, and the Tatars. Bohemia and the vestiges of independent Hungary were regained by the Habsburgs as a result of dynastic marriages, which the emperor Maximilian I planned as successfully in the east as he did in the west. When Louis II of Hungary died fighting the Ottomans at Mohács in 1526, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria obtained both crowns and endeavoured to affirm the hereditary authority of his dynasty against aristocratic insistence on the principle of election. In 1619, Habsburg claims in Bohemia became the ostensible cause of the Thirty Years’ War, when the Diet of Prague momentarily succeeded in deposing Ferdinand II.

In the 16th century, eastern Europe displayed the opposite tendency to the advance of princely absolutism in the West. West of the Carpathians and in the lands drained by the Vistula and the Dnestr, the landowning class achieved a political independence that weakened the power of monarchy. The towns entered a period of decline, and the propertied class, though divided by rivalry between the magnates and the lesser gentry, everywhere reduced their peasantry to servitude. In Poland and Bohemia the peasants were reduced to serfdom in 1493 and 1497, respectively, and in free Hungary the last peasant rights were suppressed after the rising of 1514. The gentry, or szlachta, controlled Polish policy in the Sejm (parliament), and, when the first Vasa king, Sigismund III, tried to reassert the authority of the crown after his election in 1587, the opportunity had passed. Yet, despite the anarchic quality of Polish politics, the aristocracy maintained and even extended the boundaries of the state. In 1525 they compelled the submission of the secularized Teutonic Order in East Prussia, resisted the pressure of Muscovy, and pressed to the southeast, where communications with the Black Sea had been closed by the Ottomans and their tributaries.

Farther to the east the grand principality of Moscow emerged as a new and powerful despotism. Muscovy, and not Poland, became the heir to Kiev during the reign of Ivan III the Great in the second half of the 15th century. By his marriage with the Byzantine princess Sofia (Zoë) Palaeologus, Ivan also laid claim to the traditions of Constantinople. His capture of Novgorod and repudiation of Tatar overlordship began a movement of Muscovite expansion, which was continued by the seizure of Smolensk by his son Vasily (Basil) III and by the campaigns of his grandson Ivan IV the Terrible (1533–84). The latter destroyed the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan and reached the Baltic by his conquest of Livonia from Poland and the Knights of the Sword. He was the first to use the title of tsar, and his arbitrary exercise of power was more ruthless and less predictable than that of the Ottoman sultan. After his death Muscovy was engulfed in the Time of Troubles, when Polish, Swedish, and Cossack armies devastated the land. The accession of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 heralded a period of gradual recovery. Except for occasional embassies, the importation of a few Western artisans, and the reception of Tudor trading missions, Muscovy remained isolated from the West. Despite its relationship with Greek civilization, it knew nothing of the Renaissance. Though it experienced a schism within its own Orthodox faith, it was equally untouched by Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the consequences of which convulsed western Europe in the late 16th century. Reformation and Counter-Reformation

In a sense, the Reformation was a protest against the secular values of the Renaissance. No Italian despots better represented the profligacy, the materialism, and the intellectual hedonism that accompanied these values than did the three Renaissance popes, Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X. Among those precursors of the reformers who were conscious of the betrayal of Christian ideals were figures so diverse as the Ferraran monk Savonarola, the Spanish statesman Cardinal Jiménez, and the humanist scholar Erasmus.

The corruption of the religious orders and the cynical abuse of the fiscal machinery of the church provoked a movement that at first demanded reform from within and ultimately chose the path of separation. When the Augustinian monk Martin Luther protested against the sale of indulgences in 1517, he found himself obliged to extend his doctrinal arguments until his stand led him to deny the authority of the pope. In the past, as in the controversies between pope and emperor, such challenges had resulted in mere temporary disunity. In the age of nation-states, the political implications of the dispute resulted in the irreparable fragmentation of clerical authority.

Luther had chosen to attack a lucrative source of papal revenue, and his intractable spirit obliged Leo X to excommunicate him. The problem became of as much concern to the emperor as it was to the pope, for Luther’s eloquent writings evoked a wave of enthusiasm throughout Germany. The reformer was by instinct a social conservative and supported existing secular authority against the upthrust of the lower orders. Although the Diet of Worms accepted the excommunication in 1521, Luther found protection among the princes. In 1529 the rulers of electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, Hessen, Lüneberg, and Anhalt signed the “protest” against an attempt to enforce obedience. By this time, Charles V had resolved to suppress Protestantism and to abandon conciliation. In 1527 his mutinous troops had sacked Rome and secured the person of Pope Clement VII, who had deserted the imperial cause in favour of Francis I after the latter’s defeat at the Battle of Pavia. The sack of Rome proved a turning point both for the emperor and the humanist movement that he had patronized. The humanist scholars were dispersed, and the initiative for reform then lay in the hands of the more violent and uncompromising party. Charles V himself experienced a revulsion of conscience that placed him at the head of the Roman Catholic reaction. The empire he ruled in name was now divided into hostile camps. The Catholic princes of Germany had discussed measures for joint action at Regensburg in 1524; in 1530 the Protestants formed a defensive league at Schmalkalden. Reconciliation was attempted in 1541 and 1548, but the German rift could no longer be healed.

Lutheranism laid its emphasis doctrinally on justification by faith and politically on the God-given powers of the secular ruler. Other Protestants reached different conclusions and diverged widely from one another in their interpretation of the sacraments. In Geneva, Calvinism enforced a stern moral code and preached the mystery of grace with predestinarian conviction. It proclaimed the separation of church and state, but in practice its organization tended to produce a type of theocracy. Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger in Zürich taught a theology not unlike Calvin’s but preferred to see government in terms of the godly magistrate. On the left wing of these movements were the Anabaptists, whose pacifism and mystic detachment were paradoxically associated with violent upheavals.

Lutheranism established itself in northern Germany and Scandinavia and for a time exercised a wide influence both in eastern Europe and in the west. Where it was not officially adopted by the ruling prince, however, the more militant Calvinist faith tended to take its place. Calvinism spread northward from the upper Rhine and established itself firmly in Scotland and in southern and western France. Friction between Rome and nationalist tendencies within the Catholic church facilitated the spread of Protestantism. In France the Gallican church was traditionally nationalist and antipapal in outlook, while in England the Reformation in its early stages took the form of the preservation of Catholic doctrine and the denial of papal jurisdiction. After periods of Calvinist and then of Roman Catholic reaction, the Church of England achieved a measure of stability with the Elizabethan religious settlement.

In the years between the papal confirmation of the Jesuit order in 1540 and the formal dissolution of the Council of Trent in 1563, the Roman Catholic church responded to the Protestant challenge by purging itself of the abuses and ambiguities that had opened the way to revolt. Thus prepared, the Counter-Reformation embarked upon recovery of the schismatic branches of Western Christianity. Foremost in this crusade were the Jesuits, established as a well-educated and disciplined arm of the papacy by Ignatius Loyola. Their work was made easier by the Council of Trent, which did not, like earlier councils, result in the diminution of papal authority. The council condemned such abuses as pluralism, affirmed the traditional practice in questions of clerical marriage and the use of the Bible, and clarified doctrine on issues such as the nature of the Eucharist, divine grace, and justification by faith. The church thus made it clear that it was not prepared to compromise; and, with the aid of the Inquisition and the material resources of the Habsburgs, it set out to reestablish its universal authority. It was of vital importance to this task that the popes of the Counter-Reformation were men of sincere conviction and initiative who skillfully employed diplomacy, persuasion, and force against heresy. In Italy, Spain, Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, Poland, and the southern Netherlands (the future Belgium), Protestant influence was destroyed. John Hearsey McMillan Salmon Diplomacy in the age of the Reformation

This was a golden era for diplomats and international lawyers. To the network of alliances that became established throughout Europe during the Renaissance, the Reformation added confessional pacts. Unfortunately, however, the two systems were not always compatible. The traditional amity between Castile and England, for example, was fatally undermined when the Tudor dynasty embraced Protestantism after 1532; and the “auld alliance” between Scotland and France was likewise wrecked by the progress of the Reformation in Scotland after 1560. Moreover, in many countries, the confessional divisions of Christendom after Luther created powerful religious minorities who were prepared to look abroad for guarantees of protection and solidarity: for example, the English Catholics to Spain and the French, German, and Dutch Calvinists to England.

These developments created a situation of chronic political instability. On the one hand, the leaders of countries which themselves avoided religious fragmentation (such as Spain) were often unsure whether to frame their foreign policy according to confessional or political advantage. On the other hand, the foreign policy of religiously divided states, such as France, England, and the Dutch Republic, oscillated often and markedly because there was no consensus among the political elite concerning the correct principles upon which foreign policy should be based.

The complexity of the diplomatic scene called for unusual skills among the rulers of post-Reformation Europe. Seldom has the importance of personality in shaping events been so great. The quixotic temperaments and mercurial designs of even minor potentates exerted a disproportionate influence on the course of events. Nevertheless, behind the complicated interplay of individuals and events, two constants may be detected. First, statesmen and churchmen alike consistently identified politics and religion as two sides of the same coin. Supporters of the Bohemian rebellion of 1618, for example, frequently stated that “religion and liberty stand or fall together”: that is, a failure to defend and maintain religious liberty would necessarily lead to the loss of political freedom. The position of Emperor Ferdinand II (1619–37) was exactly the same. “God’s blessing cannot be received,” he informed his subjects, “by a land in which prince and vassals do not both fervently uphold the one true Catholic faith.”

These two views, precisely because they were identical, were totally incompatible. That their inevitable collision should have so often produced prolonged wars, however, was due to the second “constant”: the desire of political leaders everywhere, even on the periphery of Europe, to secure a balance of power on the continent favourable to their interests. It is scarcely surprising that, when any struggle became deadlocked, the local rulers should look about for foreign support; it is more noteworthy that their neighbours were normally ready and eager to provide it. Queen Elizabeth I of England (1558–1603) offered substantial support after 1585 to the Dutch rebels against Philip II and after 1589 to the Protestant Henry IV of France against his more powerful Catholic subjects; Philip II of Spain (1556–98), for his part, sent troops and treasure to the French Catholics, while his son Philip III (1598–1621) did the same for the German Catholics.

This willingness to assist arose because every court in Europe believed in a sort of domino theory, which argued that, if one side won a local war, the rest of Europe would inevitably be affected. The Spanish version of the theory was expressed in a letter from Archduchess Isabella, regent of the Spanish Netherlands, to her master Philip IV in 1623: “It would not be in the interests of Your Majesty to allow the Emperor or the Catholic cause to go down, because of the harm it would do to the possessions of Your Majesty in the Netherlands and Italy.” Thus, the religious tensions released by the Reformation eventually pitted two incompatible ideologies against each other; this in turn initiated civil wars that lasted 30 years (in the case of France and Germany) and even 80 years (in the Netherlands), largely because all the courts of Europe saw that the outcome of each confrontation would affect the balance of power for a decade, a generation, perhaps forever. N. Geoffrey Parker The Wars of Religion

Germany, France, and the Netherlands each achieved a settlement of the religious problem by means of war, and in each case the solution contained original aspects. In Germany the territorial formula of cuius regio, eius religio applied—that is, in each petty state the population had to conform to the religion of the ruler. In France, the Edict of Nantes in 1598 embraced the provisions of previous treaties and accorded the Protestant Huguenots toleration within the state, together with the political and military means of defending the privileges that they had exacted. The southern Netherlands remained Catholic and Spanish, but the Dutch provinces formed an independent Protestant federation in which republican and dynastic influences were nicely balanced. Nowhere was toleration accepted as a positive moral principle, and seldom was it granted except through political necessity.

There were occasions when the Wars of Religion assumed the guise of a supranational conflict between Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Spanish, Savoyard, and papal troops supported the Catholic cause in France against Huguenots aided by Protestant princes in England and Germany. In the Low Countries, English, French, and German armies intervened; and at sea Dutch, Huguenot, and English corsairs fought the Battle of the Atlantic against the Spanish champion of the Counter-Reformation. In 1588 the destruction of the Spanish Armada against England was intimately connected with the progress of the struggles in France and the Netherlands.

Behind this ideological grouping of the powers, national, dynastic, and mercenary interests generally prevailed. The Lutheran duke Maurice of Saxony assisted Charles V in the first Schmalkaldic War in 1547 in order to win the Saxon electoral dignity from his Protestant cousin, John Frederick; while the Catholic king Henry II of France supported the Lutheran cause in the second Schmalkaldic War in 1552 to secure French bases in Lorraine. John Casimir of the Palatinate, the Calvinist champion of Protestantism in France and the Low Countries, maintained an understanding with the neighbouring princes of Lorraine, who led the ultra-Catholic Holy League in France. In the French conflicts, Lutheran German princes served against the Huguenots, and mercenary armies on either side often fought against the defenders of their own religion. On the one hand, deep divisions separated Calvinist from Lutheran; and, on the other hand, political considerations persuaded the moderate Catholic faction, the Politiques, to oppose the Holy League. The national and religious aspects of the foreign policy of Philip II of Spain were not always in accord. Mutual distrust existed between him and his French allies, the family of Guise, because of their ambitions for their niece Mary Stuart. His desire to perpetuate French weakness through civil war led him at one point to negotiate with the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre (afterward Henry IV of France). His policy of religious uniformity in the Netherlands alienated the most wealthy and prosperous part of his dominions. Finally, his ambition to make England and France the satellites of Spain weakened his ability to suppress Protestantism in both countries.

In 1562, seven years after the Peace of Augsburg had established a truce in Germany on the basis of territorialism, France became the centre of religious wars which endured, with brief intermissions, for 36 years. The political interests of the aristocracy and the vacillating policy of balance pursued by Henry II’s widow, Catherine de Médicis, prolonged these conflicts. After a period of warfare and massacre, in which the atrocities of St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572) were symptomatic of the fanaticism of the age, Huguenot resistance to the crown was replaced by Catholic opposition to the monarchy’s policy of conciliation to Protestants at home and anti-Spanish alliances abroad. The revolt of the Holy League against the prospect of a Protestant king in the person of Henry of Navarre released new forces among the Catholic lower classes, which the aristocratic leadership was unable to control. Eventually Henry won his way to the throne after the extinction of the Valois line, overcame separatist tendencies in the provinces, and secured peace by accepting Catholicism. The policy of the Bourbon dynasty resumed the tradition of Francis I, and under the later guidance of Cardinal Richelieu the potential authority of the monarchy was realized.

In the Netherlands the wise Burgundian policies of Charles V were largely abandoned by Philip II and his lieutenants. Taxation, the Inquisition, and the suppression of privileges for a time provoked the combined resistance of Catholic and Protestant. The house of Orange, represented by William I the Silent and Louis of Nassau, acted as the focus of the revolt; and, in the undogmatic and flexible personality of William, the rebels found leadership in many ways similar to that of Henry of Navarre. The sack of the city of Antwerp by mutinous Spanish soldiery in 1576 (three years after the dismissal of Philip II’s autocratic and capable governor, the duke de Alba) completed the commercial decline of Spain’s greatest economic asset. In 1579 Alessandro Farnese, duke di Parma, succeeded in recovering the allegiance of the Catholic provinces, while the Protestant north declared its independence. French and English intervention failed to secure the defeat of Spain, but the dispersal of the Armada and the diversion of Parma’s resources to aid the Holy League in France enabled the United Provinces of the Netherlands to survive. A 12-year truce was negotiated in 1609, and when the campaign began again it merged into the general conflict of the Thirty Years’ War, which, like the other wars of religion of this period, was fought mainly for confessional security and political gain. John Hearsey McMillan Salmon The Thirty Years’ War The crisis in Germany

The war originated with dual crises at the continent’s centre: one in the Rhineland and the other in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Thirty Years' War.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

“The dear old Holy Roman Empire, How does it stay together?”

asked the tavern drinkers in Goethe’s Faust—and the answer is no easier to find today than in the late 18th, or early 17th, century. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was a land of many polities. In the empire there were some 1,000 separate, semiautonomous political units, many of them very small—such as the Imperial Knights, direct vassals of the emperor and particularly numerous in the southwest, who might each own only part of one village—and others comparable in size with smaller independent states elsewhere, such as Scotland or the Dutch Republic. At the top came the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, covering the elective kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, as well as Austria, the Tyrol, and Alsace, with about 8,000,000 inhabitants; next came electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bavaria, with more than 1,000,000 subjects each; and then the Palatinate, Hesse, Trier, and Württemberg, with about 500,000 each.

These were large polities, indeed, but they were weakened by three factors. First, they did not accept primogeniture: Hesse had been divided into four portions at the death of Landgrave Philip the Magnanimous, Luther’s patron, in 1567; the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs were partitioned in 1564 and again in 1576. Second, many of the states were geographically fragmented: thus, the Palatinate was divided into an Upper County, adjoining the borders of both Bohemia and Bavaria, and a Lower County, on the middle Rhine. These factors had, in the course of time, created in Germany a balance of power between the states. The territorial strength of the Habsburgs may have brought them a monopoly of the imperial title from 1438 onward, but they could do no more: the other princes, when threatened, were able to form alliances whose military strength was equal to that of the emperor himself. However, the third weakness—the religious upheaval of the 16th century—changed all that: princes who had formerly stood together were now divided by religion. Swabia, for example, more or less equal in area to modern Switzerland, included 68 secular and 40 spiritual princes and also 32 imperial free cities. By 1618 more than half of these rulers and almost exactly half of the population were Catholic; the rest were Protestant. Neither bloc was prepared to let the other mobilize an army. Similar paralysis was to be found in most other regions: the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had separated Germany into hostile but evenly balanced confessional camps.

The Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had put an end to 30 years of sporadic confessional warfare in Germany between Catholics and Lutherans by creating a layered structure of legal securities for the people of the empire. At the top was the right (known as cuius regio, eius religio) of every secular ruler, from the seven electors down to the imperial knights, to dictate whether their subjects’ religion was to be Lutheran or Catholic (the only officially permitted creeds). The only exceptions to this rule were the imperial free cities, where both Lutherans and Catholics were to enjoy freedom of worship, and the Catholic ecclesiastical states, where bishops and abbots who wished to become Lutherans were obliged to resign first. The latter provision, known as the reservatum ecclesiasticum, gave rise to a war in 1583–88 when the archbishop of Cologne declared himself a Protestant but refused to resign: in the end a coalition of Catholic princes, led by the duke of Bavaria, forced him out.

This “War of Cologne” was a turning point in the religious history of Germany. Until then, the Catholics had been on the defensive, losing ground steadily to the Protestants. Even the decrees of the Council of Trent, which animated Catholics elsewhere, failed to strengthen the position of the Roman church in Germany. After the successful struggle to retain Cologne, however, Catholic princes began to enforce the cuius regio principle with rigour. In Bavaria, as well as in Würzburg, Bamberg, and other ecclesiastical states, Protestants were given the choice of either conversion or exile. Most of those affected were adherents of the Lutheran church, already weakened by defections to Calvinism, a new creed that had scarcely a German adherent at the time of the Religious Peace of Augsburg. The rulers of the Palatinate (1560), Nassau (1578), Hesse-Kassel (1603), and Brandenburg (1613) all abandoned Lutheranism for the new confession, as did many lesser rulers and several towns. Small wonder that the Lutherans came to detest the Calvinists even more than they loathed the Catholics.

These religious divisions created a complex confessional pattern in Germany. By the first decade of the 17th century, the Catholics were firmly entrenched south of the Danube and the Lutherans northeast of the Elbe; but the areas in between were a patchwork quilt of Calvinist, Lutheran, and Catholic, and in some places one could find all three. One such was Donauwörth, an independent city just across the Danube from Bavaria, obliged (by the Peace of Augsburg) to tolerate both Catholics and Protestants. But for years the Catholic minority had not been permitted full rights of public worship. When in 1606 the priests tried to hold a procession through the streets, they were beaten and their relics and banners were desecrated. Shortly afterward, an Italian Capuchin, Fray Lorenzo da Brindisi, later canonized, arrived in the city and was himself mobbed by a Lutheran crowd chanting “Capuchin, Capuchin, scum, scum.” He heard from the local clergy of their plight and promised to find redress. Within a year, Fray Lorenzo had secured promises of aid from Duke Maximilian of Bavaria and Emperor Rudolf II. When the Lutheran magistrates of Donauwörth flatly refused to permit their Catholic subjects freedom of worship, the Bavarians marched into the city and restored Catholic worship by force (December 1607). Maximilian’s men also banned Protestant worship and set up an occupation government that eventually transferred the city to direct Bavarian rule.

These dramatic events thoroughly alarmed Protestants elsewhere in Germany. Was this, they wondered, the first step in a new Catholic offensive against heresy? Elector Frederick IV of the Palatinate took the lead. On May 14, 1608, he formed the Evangelical, or Protestant, Union, an association to last for 10 years, for self-defense. At first, membership remained restricted to Germany, although the elector’s leading adviser, Christian of Anhalt, wished to extend it, but before long a new crisis rocked the empire and turned the German union into a Protestant International.

The new crisis began with the death of John William, the childless duke of Cleves-Jülich, in March 1609. His duchies, occupying a strategic position in the Lower Rhineland, had both Protestant and Catholic subjects, but both of the main claimants to the inheritance were Protestants; under the cuius regio principle, their succession would lead to the expulsion of the Catholics. The emperor therefore refused to recognize the Protestant princes’ claim. Since both were members of the Union, they solicited, and received, promises of military aid from their colleagues; they also received, via Christian of Anhalt, similar promises from the kings of France and England. This sudden accretion in Protestant strength caused the German Catholics to take countermeasures: a Catholic League was formed between Duke Maximilian of Bavaria and his neighbours on July 10, 1609, soon to be joined by the ecclesiastical rulers of the Rhineland and receiving support from Spain and the Papacy. Again, reinforcement for one side provoked countermeasures. The Union leaders signed a defensive treaty with England in 1612 (cemented by the marriage of the Union’s director, the young Frederick V of the Palatine, to the king of England’s daughter) and with the Dutch Republic in 1613.

At first sight, this resembles the pyramid of alliances, patiently constructed by the statesmen of Europe 300 years later, which plunged the continent into World War I. But whereas the motive of diplomats before 1914 was fear of political domination, before 1618 it was fear of religious extirpation. The Union members were convinced of the existence of a Catholic conspiracy aimed at rooting out all traces of Protestantism from the empire. This view was shared by the Union’s foreign supporters. At the time of the Cleves-Jülich succession crisis, Sir Ralph Winwood, an English diplomat at the heart of affairs, wrote to his masters that, although “the issue of this whole business, if slightly considered, may seem trivial and ordinary,” in reality its outcome would “uphold or cast down the greatness of the house of Austria and the church of Rome in these quarters.” Such fears were probably unjustified at this time. In 1609 the unity of purpose between pope and emperor was in fact far from perfect, and the last thing Maximilian of Bavaria wished to see was Habsburg participation in the League: rather than suffer it, in 1614 he formed a separate association of his own and in 1616 he resigned from the League altogether. This reduction in the Catholic threat was enough to produce reciprocal moves among the Protestants. Although there was renewed fighting in 1614 over Cleves-Jülich, the members of the Protestant Union had abandoned their militant stance by 1618, when the treaty of alliance came up for renewal. They declared that they would no longer become involved in the territorial wrangles of individual members, and they resolved to prolong their association for only three years more.

Although, to some extent, war came to Germany after 1618 because of the existence of these militant confessional alliances, the continuity must not be exaggerated. Both Union and League were the products of fear; but the grounds for fear seemed to be receding. The English ambassador in Turin, Isaac Wake, was sanguine: “The gates of Janus have been shut,” he exulted in late 1617, promising “calm and Halcyonian days not only unto the inhabitants of this province of Italye, but to the greatest part of Christendome.” That Wake was so soon proved wrong was due largely to events in the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs over the winter of 1617–18. The crisis in the Habsburg lands

While the Cleves-Jülich crisis held the attention of western Europe in 1609, the eyes of observers farther east were on Prague, the capital of Bohemia. That elective kingdom (which also included Silesia, Lusatia, and Moravia), together with Hungary, had come to the Habsburg family in 1526. At first they were ruled jointly with Austria by Ferdinand I (brother of Emperor Charles V), but after his death in 1564 the inheritance was divided into three portions: Alsace and Tyrol (known as “Further Austria”) went to one of his younger sons; Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola (known as “Inner Austria”) went to a second; only the remainder was left for his successor as emperor, Maximilian II.

By 1609 fragmentation had advanced even further: Maximilian’s eldest son, Rudolf II (emperor, 1576–1611), ruled only Bohemia; all the rest of his father’s territories had been acquired, the previous year, by a younger son, Matthias. The new ruler had come to power not through strength or talent, however, but by the exploitation of the religious divisions of his subjects. During the 1570s the Protestants of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary had used their strength of numbers and control of local representative assemblies to force the Habsburgs to grant freedom of worship to their Protestant subjects. This was clearly against the cuius regio principle, and everyone knew it. In 1599 the ruler of Inner Austria, Archduke Ferdinand, began a campaign of forcible re-Catholicization among his subjects, which proved entirely successful. But, when Rudolf II launched the same policy in Hungary shortly afterward, there was a revolt, and the rebels offered the Hungarian crown to Matthias in return for guarantees of toleration. The Bohemians decided to exploit Rudolf’s temporary embarrassment by pressing him to grant similarly far-reaching concessions to the non-Catholic majority of that kingdom. The “Letter of Majesty” (Majestätsbrief) signed by Rudolf on July 9, 1609, granted full toleration to Protestants and created a standing committee of the Estates, known as “the Defensors,” to ensure that the settlement would be respected.

Rudolf II—a recluse who hid in a world of fantasy and alchemy in his Hradčany palace above Prague, a manic depressive who tried to take his own life on at least one occasion—proved to be incapable of keeping to the same policy for long. In 1611 he tried to revoke the Letter of Majesty and to depose the Defensors by sending a small Habsburg army into Prague, but a force of superior strength was mobilized against the invaders and the Estates resolved to depose Rudolf and offer their crown to Matthias. The emperor, broken in mind and body, died in January 1612. All his territories were then ruled by his brother, who also succeeded him as Holy Roman emperor later in the year. The alliance with the Protestant Estates that brought about Matthias’s elevation, however, did not long continue once he was in power. The new ruler sought to undo the concessions he had made, and he looked for support to his closest Habsburg relatives: his brother Albert, ruler of the Spanish Netherlands; his cousin Ferdinand, ruler of Inner Austria; and his nephew Philip III, king of Spain. All three, however, turned him down.

Albert had in 1609 succeeded in bringing the war between Spain and the Dutch Republic to a temporary close with the Twelve Years’ Truce. The last thing he wanted was to involve his ravaged country in supplying men and money to Vienna, perhaps provoking countermeasures from Protestants nearer home. Archduke Ferdinand, although willing to aid Matthias to uphold his authority (not least because he regarded himself as heir presumptive to the childless Matthias), was prevented from doing so by the outbreak of war between his Croatian subjects and the neighbouring republic of Venice (the Uskok War, 1615–18). Philip of Spain was also involved in war: in 1613–15 and 1616–17, Spanish forces in Lombardy fought the troops of the duke of Savoy over the succession to the childless duke of Mantua. Spain could therefore aid neither Matthias nor Ferdinand.

In 1617, however, papal diplomats secured a temporary settlement of the Mantuan question, and Spanish troops hastened to the aid of Ferdinand. Before long, Venice made overtures for peace, and the archduke was able to leave his capital at Graz in order to join Matthias. The emperor, old and infirm, was anxious to establish Ferdinand as his heir, and, in the autumn of 1617, the Estates of both Bohemia and Hungary were persuaded to recognize the archduke unconditionally as king-designate. On the strength of this, Ferdinand proceeded over the winter of 1617–18 to halt the concessions being made to Protestants. He created a council of regency for Bohemia that was overwhelmingly Catholic, and it soon began to censor works printed in Prague and to prevent non-Catholics from holding government office. More inflammatory still, the regents ordered Protestant worship to stop in towns on church lands (which they claimed were not included in the Letter of Majesty).

The Defensors created by the Letter of Majesty expressed strong objection to these measures and summoned the Estates of the realm to meet in May 1618. When the regents declared the meeting illegal, the Estates invaded the council chamber and threw two Catholic regents, together with their secretary, from the window. Next, a provisional government (known as the Directors) was created and a small army was raised.

Apart from the famous “defenestration,” the events in Prague in May 1618 were, superficially, little different from those in 1609 and 1611. Yet no 30-year struggle arose from those earlier crises. The crucial difference lay in the involvement of foreign powers: in 1609 and 1611 the Habsburgs, represented by Rudolf and Matthias, had given in to their subjects’ demands; in 1618, led by Ferdinand, they did not. At first his defiant stance achieved nothing, for the army of the rebels expelled loyal troops from almost every part of the kingdom while their diplomats secured declarations of support from Silesia, Lusatia, and Upper Austria almost at once and from Moravia and Lower Austria shortly afterward. In May 1619 the rebel army even laid siege to Ferdinand in Vienna. Within weeks, however, they were forced to withdraw because a major Spanish army, partly financed by the pope, invaded Bohemia.

The appearance of Spanish troops and papal gold in eastern Europe immediately reawakened the fears of the Protestant rulers of the empire. To the government of Philip III, led by the former ambassador in Vienna, Don Balthasar de Zúñiga, the choice had seemed clear: “Your Majesty should consider,” wrote one minister, “which will be of the greater service to you: the loss of these provinces [to the house of Habsburg], or the dispatch of an army of 15 to 20 thousand men to settle the matter.” Seen in these terms, Spain could scarcely avoid military intervention in favour of Ferdinand; but to Protestant observers the logic of Spanish intervention seemed aggressive rather than defensive. Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador to the Dutch Republic, observed that the new emperor “flatters himself with prophesies of extirpating the Reformed religion and restoring the Roman church to the ancient greatness” and accurately predicted that, if the Protestant cause were to be “neglected and by consequence suppressed, the Protestant princes adjoining [Bohemia] are like to bear the burden of a victorious army.”

This same argument carried weight with the director of the Protestant Union, Frederick V of the Palatinate, parts of whose territories adjoined Bohemia. So, when in the summer of 1619 the Bohemians deposed Ferdinand and offered the crown to Frederick, he was favourably disposed. Some of the elector’s advisers favoured rejecting this offer, since “acceptance would surely begin a general religious war”; but others pointed out that such a war was inevitable anyway when the Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic expired in April 1621 and argued that allowing the Bohemian cause to fail would merely ensure that the conflict in the Netherlands would be resolved in Spain’s favour later, making a concerted Habsburg attack on the Protestants of the empire both ineluctable and irresistible.

Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown and in so doing rekindled the worst fears of the German Catholics. The Catholic League was re-created, and in December 1619 its leaders authorized the levy of an army of 25,000 men to be used as Maximilian of Bavaria thought fit. At the same time, Philip III and Archduke Albert each promised to send a new army into Germany to assist Ferdinand (who had succeeded the late Matthias as Holy Roman emperor). The crisis was now apparent, and, as the Palatine diplomat Count John Albert Solms warned his master,

If it is true that the Bohemians are about to depose Ferdinand and elect another king, let everyone prepare at once for a war lasting twenty, thirty or forty years. The Spaniards and the House of Austria will deploy all their worldly goods to recover Bohemia.

The underlying cause for the outbreak of a war that would last 30 years was thus the pathological fear of a Catholic conspiracy among the Protestants and the equally entrenched suspicion of a Protestant conspiracy among the Catholics. As a Bohemian noblewoman, Polyxena Lobkovic, perceptively observed from the vantage point of Prague: “Things are now swiftly coming to the pass where either the papists will settle their score with the Protestants, or the Protestants with the papists.” The triumph of the Catholics, 1619–29

Frederick V entered Prague and was crowned king by the rebel Estates in October 1619, but already the Catholic net was closing around him. The axis linking Vienna with Munich, Brussels, and Madrid enjoyed widespread support: subsidies came from Rome and Genoa, while Tuscany and Poland sent troops. Equally serious, states favourable to Frederick’s cause were persuaded to remain neutral: Spanish diplomacy kept England out of the war, while French efforts persuaded the Protestant Union to remain aloof from the Bohemian adventure of their leader. The Dutch Republic also did nothing, so that in the summer of 1620 a Spanish army was able to cross from the Netherlands and occupy the Rhine Palatinate. Meanwhile, the armies of the emperor and League, reinforced with Spanish and Italian contingents, invaded the rebel heartland. On November 8, in the first significant battle of the war, at the White Mountain outside Prague, Frederick’s forces were routed. The unfortunate prince fled northward, abandoning his subjects to the mercy of the victorious Ferdinand.

This was total victory, and it might have remained the last word but for events in the Low Countries. Once the Twelve Years’ Truce expired in April 1621, the Dutch, fearing a concerted attack by both Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, decided to provide an asylum for the defeated Frederick and to supply diplomatic and, eventually, military assistance to his cause. In 1622 and again in 1623, armies were raised for Frederick with Dutch money, but they were defeated. Worse, the shattered armies retreated toward the Netherlands, drawing the Catholic forces behind them. It began to seem that a joint Habsburg invasion of the republic was inevitable after all.

The emperor’s political position, however, weakened considerably in the course of 1623. Although his armies won impressive victories in the field, they were only able to do so thanks to massive financial and military support from the Catholic League, controlled by Maximilian of Bavaria. Ferdinand II, thanks to the Spanish and papal subsidies, maintained some 15,000 men himself, but the League provided him with perhaps 50,000. Thus, Maximilian’s armies had, in effect, won Ferdinand’s victories and, now that all common enemies had been defeated, Maximilian requested his reward: the lands and electoral title of the outlawed Frederick of the Palatinate. Don Balthasar de Zúñiga, chief minister of Ferdinand’s other major ally, Spain, warned that the consequences of acceding to this demand could be serious, but in October 1622 he died, and no one else in Madrid—least of all his successor as principal minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares—had practical experience of German affairs; so in January 1623 the emperor felt able to proceed with the investiture of Maximilian as elector Palatine.

Zúñiga, however, had been right: the electoral transfer provoked an enormous outcry, for it was clearly unconstitutional. The Golden Bull of 1356, which was universally regarded in Germany as the fundamental and immutable law of the empire, ordained that the electorate should remain in the Palatine house in perpetuity. The transfer of 1623 thus undermined a cornerstone of the Constitution, which many regarded as their only true safeguard against absolute rule. Inside Germany, a pamphlet war against Maximilian and Ferdinand began; outside, sympathy for Frederick at last created that international body of support for his cause which had previously been so conspicuously lacking. The Dutch and the Palatine exiles found little difficulty in engineering an alliance involving France, England, Savoy, Sweden, and Denmark that was dedicated to the restoration of Frederick to his forfeited lands and titles (the Hague Alliance, Dec. 9, 1624). Its leader was Christian IV of Denmark (1588–1648), one of the richest rulers in Christendom, who saw a chance to extend his influence in northern Germany under cover of defending “the Protestant cause.” He invaded the empire in June 1625.

The Protestants’ diplomatic campaign had not gone unnoticed, however. Maximilian’s field commander, Count Tilly, warned that his forces alone would be no match for a coalition army and asked that the emperor send reinforcements. Ferdinand obliged: in the spring of 1625 he authorized Albrecht von Wallenstein, military governor of Prague, to raise an imperial army of 25,000 men and to move it northward to meet the Danish threat. Wallenstein’s approach forced Christian to withdraw; when the Danes invaded again the following year, they were routed at the Battle of Lutter (Aug. 26, 1626). The joint armies of Tilly and Wallenstein pursued the defeated forces: first they occupied the lands of North German rulers who had declared support for the invasion, then they conquered the Danish mainland itself. Christian made peace in 1629, promising never again to intervene in the empire. His allies had long since withdrawn from the struggle.

The White Mountain delivered the Bohemian rebels into the emperor’s grasp; Lutter delivered the rebels’ German supporters. After the victories, important new policies were initiated by Ferdinand which aimed at exalting the Catholic religion and his own authority. In the Habsburg provinces there was widespread confiscation of land—perhaps two-thirds of the kingdom of Bohemia changed hands during the 1620s—and a new class of loyal landowners—like Wallenstein—was established. At the same time, the power of the Estates was curtailed and freedom of worship for Protestants was restricted (in some territories) or abolished (in most of the rest). Even a rebellion in Upper Austria in 1626, provoked principally by the persecution of Protestants, failed to change Ferdinand’s mind. Indeed, fortified by his success in the Habsburg lands, he decided to implement new policies in the empire. First, disloyal rulers were replaced (the Palatinate went to Maximilian, Mecklenburg to Wallenstein, and so on). Next, serious steps were taken to reclaim church lands that had fallen into Protestant hands. At first this was done on a piecemeal basis, but on March 28, 1629, an Edict of Restitution was issued which declared unilaterally that all church lands secularized since 1552 must be returned at once, that Calvinism was an illegal creed in the empire, and that ecclesiastical princes had the same right as secular ones to insist that their subjects should be of the same religion as their ruler. The last clause, at least, was clearly contrary to the terms of the Peace of Augsburg, which Protestants regarded as a central pillar of the Constitution. There was, however, no opportunity for argument, for the imperial edict was enforced immediately, brutally, by the armies of Wallenstein and Tilly, which now numbered some 200,000 men. The people of the empire seemed threatened with an arbitrary rule against which they had no defense. It was this fear, skillfully exploited once again by Protestant propagandists, which ensured that the war in Germany did not end in 1629 with the defeat of Denmark. Ferdinand may have won numerous military victories, but in doing so he had suffered a serious political defeat. The pens of his enemies proved mightier than the sword. The crisis of the war, 1629–35

If Maximilian of Bavaria desired the title of elector as his reward for supporting Ferdinand, Spain (for its part) required imperial support for its war against the Dutch. When repeated requests for a direct invasion by Wallenstein’s army remained unanswered (largely due to Bavarian opposition), Spain began to think of creating a Baltic navy, with imperial assistance, which would cleanse the inland sea of Dutch shipping and thus administer a body blow to the republic’s economy. But the plan aborted, for the imperial army failed in 1628 to conquer the port of Stralsund, selected as the base for the new fleet. Now, with Denmark defeated, Madrid again pleaded for the loan of an imperial army, and this time the request was granted. In the end, however, the troops did not march to the Netherlands: instead, they went to Italy.

The death of the last native ruler of the strategic states of Mantua and Montferrat in December 1627 created dangers in Italy that the Spaniards were unable to ignore and temptations that they were unable to resist. Hoping to forestall intervention by others, Spanish forces from Lombardy launched an invasion, but the garrisons of Mantua and Montferrat declared for the late duke’s relative, the French-born duke of Nevers. Nevers lacked the resources to withstand the forces of Spain alone, and he appealed to France for support. Louis XIII (1610–43) and Cardinal Richelieu (chief minister 1624–42) were, however, engaged in a desperate war against their Calvinist subjects; only when the rebels had been defeated, early in 1629, was it possible for the king and his chief minister to cross the Mount Cenis Pass and enter Italy. It was to meet this threat that the emperor was asked by Philip IV of Spain (1621–65) to send his troops to Italy rather than to the Netherlands. When Louis XIII launched a second invasion in 1630, some 50,000 imperial troops were brought south to oppose them, reducing the war for Mantua to a stalemate but delivering the Dutch Republic from immediate danger and weakening the emperor’s hold on Germany.

Gustav II Adolf of Sweden (1611–32) had spent most of the 1620s at war with Poland, seeking to acquire territory on the southern shore of the Baltic. By the Truce of Altmark (Sept. 26, 1629), with the aid of French and British mediators, Poland made numerous concessions in return for a six-year truce. Gustav lost no time in redeploying his forces: on July 6, 1630, he led a Swedish expeditionary force ashore near Stralsund with the declared intention of saving the “liberties of the empire” and preserving the security of the Baltic.

Despite the defeat of the German Protestants and their allies, Sweden’s position was far more favourable than that of Denmark five years earlier. Instead of the two armies that had faced Christian IV, Gustav was opposed by only one, for in the summer of 1630 the emperor’s Catholic allies in Germany—led by Maximilian of Bavaria—demanded the dismissal of Wallenstein and the drastic reduction of his expensive army. It was an ultimatum that Ferdinand, with the bulk of his forces tied down in the war of Mantua, could not ignore, even though he thereby lost the services of the one man who might conceivably have retained all the imperial gains of the previous decade and united Germany under a strong monarchy.

The emperor and his German allies, nevertheless, did remain united over the Edict of Restitution: there were to be no concessions in matters of religion and no restoration of forfeited lands. As a result, the German Protestants were driven reluctantly into the arms of Sweden, whose army was increased with the aid of subsidies secured from France and the Dutch. In September 1631 Gustav at last felt strong enough to challenge the emperor’s forces in battle: at Breitenfeld, just outside Leipzig in Saxony, he was totally victorious. The main Catholic field army was destroyed, and the Swedish Protestant host overran most of central Germany and Bohemia in the winter of 1631–32. The next summer they occupied Bavaria. Although Gustav died in battle at Lützen on Nov. 16, 1632, his forces were again victorious and his cause was directed with equal skill by his chief adviser, Axel Oxenstierna. In the east, Sweden managed to engineer a Russian invasion of Poland in the autumn of 1632 that tied down the forces of both powers for almost two years. Meanwhile, in Germany, Oxenstierna crafted a military alliance that transferred much of the cost of the war onto the shoulders of the German Protestant states (the Heilbronn League, April 23, 1633). Swedish ascendancy, however, was destroyed in 1634 when Russia made peace with Poland (at Polyanov, June 4) and Spain sent a large army across the Alps from Lombardy to join the imperial forces at the Battle of Nördlingen (September 6). This time the Swedes were decisively beaten and were obliged to withdraw their forces in haste from most of southern Germany.

Yet Sweden, under Oxenstierna’s skillful direction, fought on. Certainly its motives included a desire to defend the Protestant cause in Germany and to restore deposed princes to their thrones; but more important by far was the fear that, if the German Protestants were finally defeated, the imperialists would turn the Baltic into a Habsburg lake and might perhaps invade Sweden. The Stockholm government therefore desired a settlement that would atomize the empire into a jumble of independent, weak states incapable of threatening the security of Sweden or its hold on the Baltic. Furthermore, to guarantee this fragmentation, Oxenstierna desired the transfer to his country of sovereignty over certain strategic areas of the empire—particularly the duchy of Pomerania on the Baltic coast and the electorate of Mainz on the Rhine.

These, however, were not at all the goals of Sweden’s German allies. They aimed rather at the restoration of the prewar situation—in which there had been no place for Sweden—and it soon became clear that they were prepared to make a separate settlement with the emperor in order to achieve it. No sooner was Gustav dead than the elector of Saxony, as “foremost Lutheran prince of the Empire,” put out peace feelers toward Vienna. At first John George (1611–56) was adamant about the need to abolish the Edict of Restitution and to secure a full amnesty for all as preconditions for a settlement; but the imperial victory at Nördlingen made him less demanding. The insistence on an amnesty for Frederick V was dropped, and it was accepted that the edict would be applied in all areas recovered by Catholic forces before November 1627 (roughly speaking, this affected all lands south of the Elbe, but not the Lutheran heartland of Saxony and Brandenburg). The elector might have been required to make even more concessions but for the fact that, over the winter of 1634–35, French troops began to mass along the borders of Germany. As the papal nuncio in Vienna observed: “If the French intervene in Germany, the emperor will be forced to conclude peace with Saxony on whatever terms he can.” So the Peace of Prague was signed between the emperor and the Saxons on May 30, 1635, and within a year most other German Lutherans also changed their allegiance from Stockholm to Vienna. The European war in Germany, 1635–45

This partial settlement of the issues behind the war led many in Germany to look forward to a general peace. Certainly the exhaustion of many areas of the empire was a powerful incentive to end the war. The population of Lutheran Württemberg, for example, which was occupied by the imperialists between 1634 and 1638, fell from 450,000 to 100,000; material damage was estimated at 34 million thalers. Mecklenburg and Pomerania, occupied by the Swedes, had suffered in proportion. Even a city like Dresden, the capital of Saxony, which was neither besieged nor occupied, saw its demographic balance change from 121 baptisms for every 100 burials in the 1620s to 39 baptisms for every 100 burials in the 1630s. Amid such catastrophes an overwhelming sense of war-weariness engulfed Germany. The English physician William Harvey (discoverer of the circulation of blood), while visiting Germany in 1636, wrote:

The necessity they have here is of making peace on any condition, where there is no more means of making war and scarce of subsistence.…This warfare in Germany…threatens, in the end, anarchy and confusion.

Attempts were made to convert the Peace of Prague into a general settlement. At a meeting of the electors held at Regensburg in 1636–37, Ferdinand II agreed to pardon any prince who submitted to him and promised to begin talks with the foreign powers to discover their terms for peace. But the emperor’s death immediately after the meeting ended this initiative. Efforts by Pope Urban VIII (1623–44) to convene a general conference at Cologne were similarly unavailing. Then, in 1640, the new emperor, Ferdinand III (1637–57), assembled the Imperial Diet for the first time since 1613 in order to solve at least the outstanding German problems of the amnesty question and the restitution of church lands. He met with little success and could not prevent first Brandenburg (1641) and then Brunswick (1642) from making a separate agreement with Sweden. The problem was that none of these attempts at peace were acceptable to France and Sweden, yet no lasting settlement could be made without them.

After the Peace of Prague, the nature of the Thirty Years’ War was transformed. Instead of being principally a struggle between the emperor and his own subjects, with some foreign aid, it became a war of the emperor against foreign powers whose German supporters were, at most times, few in number and limited in resources. Sweden, as noted above, had distinct and fairly consistent war aims: to secure some bases in the empire, both as guarantees of influence in the postwar era and as some recompense for coming to the rescue of the Protestants, and to create a system of checks and balances in Germany, which would mean that no single power would ever again become dominant. If those aims could be achieved, Oxenstierna was prepared to quit. As he wrote:

We must let this German business be left to the Germans, who will be the only people to get any good out of it (if there is any), and therefore not spend any more men or money, but rather try by all means to wriggle out of it.

But how could these objectives be best achieved? The Heilbronn League did not long survive the Battle of Nördlingen and the Peace of Prague, and so it became necessary to find an alternative source of support. The only one available was France. Louis XIII and Richelieu, fresh from their triumph in Italy, had been subsidizing Sweden’s war effort for some time. In 1635, in the wake of Nördlingen, they signed an offensive and defensive alliance with the Dutch Republic (February 8), with Sweden (April 28), and with Savoy (July 11); they sent an army into the Alps to occupy the Valtelline, a strategic military link between the possessions of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs (March); and they mediated a 20-year truce between Sweden and Poland (September 12). Finally, on May 19, 1635, they declared war on Spain.

The aims of France were very different from those of Sweden and its German allies. France wished to defeat Spain, its rival for more than a century, and its early campaigns in Germany were intended more to prevent Ferdinand from sending aid to his Spanish cousins than to impose a Bourbon solution on Germany—indeed, France only declared war on Ferdinand in March 1636. Sweden at first therefore avoided a firm commitment to France, leaving the way clear for a separate peace should the military situation improve sufficiently to permit the achievement of its own particular aims. The war, however, did not go in favour of the allies. French and Swedish forces, operating separately, totally failed to reverse the verdict of Nördlingen: despite the Swedish victory at Wittstock (Oct. 4, 1636) and French gains in Alsace and the middle Rhine (1638), the Habsburgs always seemed able to even up the score. Thus, in 1641 Oxenstierna abandoned his attempt to maintain independence and threw in his lot with France. By the terms of the Treaty of Hamburg (March 15, 1641), the two sides promised not to make a separate peace. Instead, joint negotiations with the emperor and the German princes for the satisfaction of the allies’ claims were to begin in the Westphalian towns of Münster and Osnabrück. And, while the talks proceeded, the war was to continue.

The Treaty of Hamburg had at last created a coalition capable of destroying the power both of Ferdinand III and of Maximilian of Bavaria. On the whole, France attacked Bavaria, and Sweden fought the emperor; but there was considerable interchange of forces and a carefully coordinated strategy. On Nov. 2, 1642, the Habsburgs’ army was routed in Saxony at the Second Battle of Breitenfeld, and the emperor was saved from further defeat only by the outbreak of war between Denmark and Sweden (May 1643–August 1645). Yet, even before Denmark’s final surrender, the Swedes were back in Bohemia, and at Jankov (March 6, 1645) they totally destroyed another imperial army. The emperor and his family fled to Graz, while the Swedes advanced to the Danube and threatened Vienna. Reinforcements were also sent to assist the French campaign against Bavaria, and on August 3 Maximilian’s forces were decisively defeated at Allerheim.

Jankov and Allerheim were two of the truly decisive battles of the war, because they destroyed all possibility of the Catholics’ obtaining a favourable peace settlement. In September 1645 the elector of Saxony made a separate peace with Sweden and so—like Brandenburg and Brunswick before him—in effect withdrew from the war. Meanwhile, at the peace conference in session in Westphalia, the imperial delegation began to make major concessions: Oxenstierna noted with satisfaction that, since Jankov, “the enemy begins to talk more politely and pleasantly.” He was confident that peace was just around the corner. He was wrong. Making peace, 1645–48

One hundred and ninety-four European rulers, great and small, were represented at the Congress of Westphalia, and talks went on constantly from the spring of 1643 until the autumn of l648. The outstanding issues of the war were solved in two phases: the first, which lasted from November 1645 until June 1647, saw the chief imperial negotiator, Maximilian, Count Trauttmannsdorf, settle most issues; the second, which continued from then until the treaty of peace was signed in October 1648, saw France try to sabotage the agreements already made.

The purely German problems were resolved first, partly because they were already near solution and partly because the foreign diplomats realized that it was best (in the words of the count d’Avaux, the French envoy)

to place first on the table the items concerning public peace and the liberties of the Empire…because if the German rulers do not yet truly wish for peace, it would be…damaging to us if the talks broke down over our own particular demands.

So in 1645 and 1646, with the aid of French and Swedish mediation, the territorial rulers were granted a large degree of sovereignty (Landeshoheit), a general amnesty was issued to all German princes, an eighth electorate was created for the son of Frederick V (so that both he and Maximilian possessed the coveted dignity), the Edict of Restitution was finally abandoned, and Calvinism within the empire was granted official toleration. The last two points were the most bitterly argued and led to the division of the German rulers at the Congress into two blocs: the Corpus Catholicorum and the Corpus Evangelicorum. Neither was monolithic or wholly united, but eventually the Catholics split into those who were prepared to make religious concessions in order to have peace and those who were not. A coalition of Protestants and pragmatic Catholics then succeeded in securing the acceptance of a formula that recognized as Protestant all church lands in secular hands by Jan. 1, 1624 (that is, before the gains made by Wallenstein and Tilly), and granted freedom of worship to religious minorities where these had existed by the same date. The Augsburg settlement of 1555 was thus entirely overthrown, and it was agreed that any change to the new formula must be achieved only through the “amicable composition” of the Catholic and Protestant blocs, not by a simple majority.

The amicable composition principle was finally accepted by all parties early in l648, thus solving the last German problem. That this did not lead to immediate peace was due to the difficulty of satisfying the foreign powers involved. Apart from France and Sweden, representatives from the Dutch Republic, Spain, and many other non-German participants in the war were present, each of them eager to secure the best settlement they could. The war in the Netherlands was the first to be ended: on Jan. 30, 1648, Philip IV of Spain signed a peace that recognized the Dutch Republic as independent and agreed to liberalize trade between the Netherlands and the Iberian world. The French government, led since Richelieu’s death (Dec. 4, 1642) by Jules Cardinal Mazarin (Giulio Mazzarino), was bitterly opposed to this settlement, since it left Spain free to deploy all its forces in the Low Countries against France; as a consequence, France devoted all its efforts to perpetuating the war in Germany. Although Mazarin had already signed a preliminary agreement with the emperor in September 1646, which conveyed parts of Alsace and Lorraine to France, in 1647–48 he started a new campaign in Germany in order to secure more. On May 17, l648, another Bavarian army was destroyed at Zusmarshausen, near Nördlingen, and Maximilian’s lands were occupied by the French.

Mazarin’s desire to keep on fighting was thwarted by two developments. On the one hand, the pressure of the war on French taxpayers created tensions that in June l648 erupted into the revolt known as the Fronde. On the other hand, Sweden made a separate peace with the emperor. The Stockholm government, still directed by Oxenstierna, was offered half of Pomerania, most of Mecklenburg, and the secularized bishoprics of Bremen and Verden; it was to receive a seat in the Imperial Diet; and the territories of the empire promised to pay five million thalers to the Swedish army for its wage arrears. With so many tangible gains, and with Germany so prostrated that there was no risk of any further imperial attack, it was clearly time to wriggle out of the war, even without France; peace was thus signed on August 6.

Without Sweden, Mazarin realized that France needed to make peace at the earliest opportunity. He informed his representatives at the Congress:

It is almost a miracle that…we can keep our affairs going, and even make them prosper; but prudence dictates that we should not place all our trust in this miracle continuing for long.

Mazarin therefore settled with the emperor on easy terms: France gained only the transfer of a bundle of rights and territories in Alsace and Lorraine and little else. Mazarin could, nevertheless, derive satisfaction from the fact that, when the ink dried on the final treaty of Oct. 24, l648, the emperor was firmly excluded from the empire and was under oath to provide no further aid to Spain. Mazarin settled down to suppress the Fronde revolt and to win the war against Philip IV. Problems not solved by the war

Some historians have sought to diminish the achievements of the Thirty Years’ War, and the peace that ended it, because not all of Europe’s outstanding problems were settled. The British historian C.V. Wedgwood, for example, in a classic study of the war first published in 1938, stated baldly:

The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous.…It is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.

It is true that the struggle between France and Spain continued with unabated bitterness until 1659 and that, within a decade of the Westphalian settlement, Sweden was at war with Poland (1655–60), Russia (1656–58), and Denmark (1657–58). It is also true that, in the east, a war broke out in 1654 between Poland and Russia that was to last until 1667, while tension between the Habsburgs and the Turks increased until war came in 1663. Even within the empire, there were disputes over the partition of Cleves-Jülich, still a battle zone after almost a half-century, which caused minor hostilities in 1651. Lorraine remained a theatre of war until the duke signed a final peace with France in 1661. But to expect a single conflict in early modern times to have solved all of Europe’s problems is anachronistic: the continent was not the single political system that it later became. It is wrong to judge the Congress of Westphalia by the standard of the Congress of Vienna (1815). Examined more closely, the peace conference that ended the Thirty Years’ War settled a remarkable number of crucial issues. Problems solved by the war

The principal Swedish diplomat at Westphalia, Johann Adler Salvius, complained to his government in 1646 that

people are beginning to see the power of Sweden as dangerous to the balance of power. Their first rule of politics here is that the security of all depends upon the equilibrium of the individuals. When one ruler begins to become powerful…the others place themselves, through unions or alliances, into the opposite balance in order to maintain the equipoise.

It was the beginning of a new order in Europe, and Sweden, for all her military power, was forced to respect it. The system depended on channeling the aggression of German princes from thoughts of conquering their neighbours to dreams of weakening them; and it proved so successful that, for more than a century, the settlement of l648 was widely regarded as the principal guarantee of order and peace in central Europe. In 1761 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in praise of the “balance of power” in Europe which, he believed, was anchored in the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire

which takes from conquerors the means and the will to conquer.…Despite its imperfections, this Imperial constitution will certainly, while it lasts, maintain the balance in Europe. No prince need fear lest another dethrone him. The peace of Westphalia may well remain the foundation of our political system for ever.

As late as 1866, the French statesman Adolphe Thiers claimed that

Germany should continue to be composed of independent states connected only by a slender federative thread. That was the principle proclaimed by all Europe at the Congress of Westphalia.

It was indeed: the balance of power with its fulcrum in Germany, created by the Thirty Years’ War and prolonged by the Peace of Westphalia, was a major achievement. It may not have lasted, as Rousseau rashly prophesied, forever, but it certainly endured for more than a century.

It was, for example, almost a century before German rulers went to war with each other again—a strong contrast with the hundred years before 1618, which had been full of armed neutrality and actual conflict. The reason for the contrast was simple: the Thirty Years’ War had settled both of the crises which had so disturbed the peace in the decades before it began.

In the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, there were now no powerful estates and no Protestant worship (except in Hungary), and, despite all the efforts of the Swedish diplomats at Westphalia, there was no restoration of the lands confiscated from rebels and others. The Habsburg Monarchy, born of disparate units but now entirely under the authority of the king-emperor, had become a powerful state in its own right. Purged of political and religious dissidents and cut off from its western neighbours and from Spain, the compact private territories of the Holy Roman emperor were still large enough to guarantee him a place among the foremost rulers of Europe. In the empire, by contrast, the new stability rested upon division rather than unity. Although the territorial rulers had acquired, at Westphalia, supreme power in their localities and collective power in the Diet to regulate common taxation, defense, laws, and public affairs without imperial intervention, the “amicable composition” formula prevented in fact any changes being made to the status quo. The originality of this compromise (enshrined in Article V, paragraph 52, of the Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugense) has not always been appreciated. An age that normally revered the majority principle sanctioned an alternative method—parity between two unequal groups (known as itio in partes)—for reaching decisions.

Looked at more pragmatically, what the itio in partes formula achieved was to remove religion as a likely precipitant of political conflict. Although religion remained a matter of high political importance (for instance, in cementing an alliance against Louis XIV after 1685 or in unseating James II of England in 1688), it no longer determined international relations as it once had done.

When one of the diplomats at the Congress of Westphalia observed that “reason of state is a wonderful animal, for it chases away all other reasons,” he in fact paid tribute to the secularization that had taken place in European politics since 1618. But when, precisely, did it happen? Perhaps with the growing preponderance of non-German rulers among the enemies of the emperor. Without question, those German princes who took up arms against Ferdinand II were strongly influenced by confessional considerations, and, as long as these men dominated the anti-Habsburg cause, so too did the issue of religion. Frederick of the Palatine and Christian of Anhalt, however, failed to secure a lasting settlement. Gradually the task of defending the Protestant cause fell into the hands of Lutherans, less militant and less intransigent than the Calvinists; and the Lutherans were prepared to ally, if necessary, with Anglican England, Catholic France, and even Orthodox Russia in order to create a coalition capable of defeating the Habsburgs. Naturally such states had their own reasons for fighting; and, although upholding the Protestant cause may have been among them, it seldom predominated. After 1625, therefore, the role of religious issues in European politics steadily receded. This was, perhaps, the greatest achievement of the war, for it thus eliminated the major destabilizing influence in European politics, which had both undermined the internal cohesion of many states and overturned the diplomatic balance of power created during the Renaissance. N. Geoffrey Parker The great age of monarchy, 1648–1789 Order from disorder

By the 17th century there was already a tradition and awareness of Europe: a reality stronger than that of an area bounded by sea, mountains, grassy plains, steppes, or deserts where Europe clearly ended and Asia began—“that geographical expression” which in the 19th century Otto von Bismarck was to see as counting for little against the interests of nations. In the two centuries before the French Revolution and the triumph of nationalism as a divisive force, Europe exhibited a greater degree of unity than appeared on the mosaic of its political surface. With appreciation of the separate interests that Bismarck would identify as “real” went diplomatic, legal, and religious concerns which involved states in common action and contributed to the notion of a single Europe. King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden saw one aspect when he wrote: “All the wars that are afoot in Europe have become as one.”

A European identity took shape in the work of Hugo Grotius, whose De Jure Belli et Pacis (1625; On the Law of War and Peace) was a plea for the spirit of law in international relations. It gained substance in the work of the great congresses (starting with those of Münster and Osnabrück before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) that met not only to determine rights and frontiers, taking into account the verdict of battle and resources of states, but also to settle larger questions of justice and religion. By 1700 statesmen had begun to speak of Europe as an interest to be defended against the ambitions of particular states. Europe represented an audience for those who wrote about the great issues of faith, morals, politics, and, increasingly, science: Descartes did not write only for Frenchmen, nor Leibniz for Germans. The use of Latin as the language of diplomacy and scholarship and the ubiquity, alongside local systems and customs, of Roman law were two manifestations of the unity of Christendom.

As a spiritual inheritance and dynamic idea greater than the sum of the policies of which it was composed, “Christendom” best represents Europe as envisaged by those who thought and wrote about it. The existence of vigorous Jewish communities—at times persecuted, as in Poland in 1648, but in places such as Amsterdam secure, prosperous, and creative—only serves to emphasize the essential fact: Europe and Christendom were interchangeable terms. The 16th century had experienced schism, and the development of separate confessions had shredded “the seamless robe,” but it had done so without destroying the idea of catholicism to which the Roman church gave institutional form. The word catholic survived in the creeds of Protestant churches, such as that of England. Calvin had thought in catholic, not sectarian, terms when he mourned for the Body of Christ, “bleeding, its members severed.” Deeper than quarrels about articles of belief or modes of worship lay the mentality conditioned by centuries of war against pagan and infidel, as by the Reconquista in Spain, which had produced a strong idea of a distinctive European character. The Renaissance, long-evolving and coloured by local conditions, had promoted attitudes still traceable to the common inheritance. The Hellenic spirit of inquiry, the Roman sense of order, and the purposive force of Judaism had contributed to a cultural synthesis and within it an article of faith whose potential was to be realized in the intellectual revolution of the 17th century—namely, that man was an agent in a historical process which he could aspire both to understand and to influence.

By 1600 the outcome of that process was the complex system of rights and values comprised in feudalism, chivalry, the crusading ideal, scholasticism, and humanism. Even to name them is to indicate the rich diversity of the European idea, whether inspiring adventures of sword and spirit or imposing restraints upon individuals inclined to change. The forces making for change were formidable. The Protestant and Roman Catholic Reformations brought passionate debate of an unsettling kind. Discoveries and settlement overseas extended mental as well as geographic horizons, brought new wealth, and posed questions about the rights of indigenous peoples and Christian duty toward them. Printing gave larger scope to authors of religious or political propaganda. The rise of the state brought reactions from those who believed they lost by it or saw others benefit exceedingly from new sources of patronage.

Meanwhile, the stakes were raised by price inflation, reflecting the higher demand attributable to a rise in the population of about 25 percent between 1500 and 1600 and the inflow of silver from the New World; the expansion of both reached a peak by 1600. Thereafter, for a century, the population rose only slightly above 100 million and pulled back repeatedly to that figure, which seemed to represent a natural limit. The annual percentage rate of increase in the amount of bullion in circulation in Europe, which had been 3.8 in 1550 and 1 in 1600, was, by 1700, 0.5. The extent to which these facts, with attendant phenomena—notably the leveling out from about 1620, and thereafter the lowering, of demand, prices, and rents before the resumption of growth about 1720—influenced the course of events must remain uncertain. Controversy has centred around the cluster of social, political, and religious conflicts and revolts that coincided with the deepening of the recession toward mid-century. Some historians have seen there not particular crises but a “general crisis.” Most influential in the debate have been the Marxist view that it was a crisis of production and the liberal political view that it was a general reaction to the concentration of power at the centre.

Any single explanation of the general crisis may be doomed to fail. That is not to say that there was no connection between different features of the period. These arose from an economic malaise that induced an introspective mentality, which tended to pessimism and led to repressive policies but which also was expressed more positively in a yearning and search for order. So appear rationalists following René Descartes in adopting mathematical principles in a culture dominated by tradition; artists and writers accepting rules such as those imposed by the French Academy (founded 1635); statesmen looking for new principles to validate authority; economic theorists (later labeled “mercantilists”) justifying the need to protect and foster native manufactures and fight for an apparently fixed volume of trade; the clergy, Catholic and Protestant alike, seeking uniformity and tending to persecution; witch-hunters rooting out irregularities in the form of supposed dealings with Satan; even gardeners trying to impose order on unruly nature. Whether strands in a single pattern or distinct phenomena that happen to exhibit certain common principles, each has lent itself to a wider perception of the 17th century as classical, baroque, absolutist, or mercantilist.

There is sufficient evidence from tolls, rents, taxes, riots, and famines to justify arguments for something more dire than a downturn in economic activity. There are, however, other factors to be weighed: prolonged wars fought by larger armies, involving more matériel, and having wider political repercussions; more efficient states, able to draw more wealth from taxpayers; and even, at certain times (such as the years 1647–51), particularly adverse weather, as part of a general deterioration in climatic conditions. There are also continuities that cast doubt on some aspects of the general picture. For example, the drive for conformity can be traced at least to the Council of Trent, whose final sessions were in 1563; but it was visibly losing impetus, despite Louis XIV’s intolerant policy leading to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), after the Peace of Westphalia. Puritanism, which has been seen as a significant reflection of a contracting economy, was not a prime feature of the second half of the century, though mercantilism was. Then there are exceptions even to economic generalizations: England and, outstandingly, the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Insights and perspectives gain from the search for general causes. But truth requires an untidy picture of Europe in which discrepancies abound, in which men subscribe to a common civilization while cherishing specific rights; in which countries evolved along distinctive paths; and in which much depended on the idiom of a community, on the ability of ruler or minister, on skills deployed and choices made.

Complementing the search for order and for valid authority in other fields, and arising out of the assertion of rights and the drive to control, a feature of the 17th century was the clarification of ideas about the physical bounds of the world. In 1600 “Europe” still lacked exact political significance. Where, for example, in the eastern plains before the Ural Mountains or the Black Sea were reached, could any line have meaning? Were Christian peoples—Serbs, Romanians, Greeks, or Bulgarians—living under Turkish rule properly Europeans? The tendency everywhere was to envisage boundaries in terms of estates and lordships. Where the legacy of feudalism was islands of territory either subject to different rulers or simply independent, or where, as in Dalmatia or Podolia (lands vulnerable to Turkish raids), the frontier was represented by disputed, inherently unstable zones, a linear frontier could emerge only out of war and diplomacy. The process can be seen in the wars of France and Sweden. Both countries were seen by their neighbours as aggressive, yet they were concerned as much with a defensible frontier as with the acquisition of new resources. Those objectives inspired the expansionist policies of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV and—with the added incentives of fighting the infidel and recovering a patrimony lost since the defeat at Mohács in 1526—the reconquest of Hungary, which led to the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699). The frontier then drawn was sufficiently definite—despite modifications, as after the loss of Belgrade (1739)—to make possible effective government within its perimeter.

Another feature of the period was the drawing into the central diplomatic orbit of countries that had been absorbed hitherto in questions of little consequence. Although Henry of Valois had been elected king of Poland before he inherited the French throne (1574) and James VI of Scotland (later James I of England, 1603–25) had married Anne of Denmark, whose country had a footing in Germany through its duchy of Holstein, it was still usual for western statesmen to treat the Baltic states as belonging to a separate northern system. Trading interests and military adventures that forged links, for example, with the United Provinces—as when Sweden intervened in the German war in 1630—complicated already tangled diplomatic questions.

Travelers who ventured beyond Warsaw, Kraków, and the “black earth” area of Mazovia, thence toward the Pripet Marshes, might not know when they left Polish lands and entered those of the tsar. The line between Orthodox Russia and the rest of Christian Europe had never been so sharp as that which divided Christendom and Islam. Uncertainties engendered by the nature of Russian religion, rule, society, and manners perpetuated former ambivalent attitudes toward Byzantium. Unmapped spaces, where Europe petered out in marshes, steppes, and forests of birch and alder, removed the beleaguered though periodically expanding Muscovite state from the concern of all but neighbouring Sweden and Poland. The establishment of a native dynasty with the accession of Michael Romanov in 1613, the successful outcome of the war against Poland that followed the fateful revolt in 1648 of the Ukraine against Polish overlordship, the acquisition of huge territories including Smolensk and Kiev (Treaty of Andrusovo, 1667), and, above all, the successful drive of Peter I the Great to secure a footing in the Baltic were to transform the picture. By the time of Peter’s death in 1725, Russia was a European state: still with some Asian characteristics, still colonizing rather than assimilating southern and eastern lands up to and beyond the Urals, but interlocked with the diplomatic system of the West. A larger Europe, approximating to the modern idea, began to take shape. The human condition Population

For most inhabitants of Europe, the highest aim was to survive in a hazardous world. They were contained in an inelastic frame by their inability to produce more than a certain amount of food or to make goods except by hand or by relatively simple tools and machines. In this natural, or preindustrial, economy, population played the main part in determining production and demand through the amount of labour available for field, mill, and workshop and through the number of consumers. Jean Bodin (writing toward the end of an age of rising population) stated what was to become the truism of the anxious 17th century when he wrote that men were “the only strength and wealth.” The 16th century had seen the last phase in recovery from the Black Death, which had killed about a third of Europe’s people. The 1590s brought a sharp check: dearth and disorder were especially severe in France and Spain. There were particular reasons: the effect of civil wars and Spanish invasion in France, the load placed on the Castilian economy by the imperialist policies of Philip II. France made a speedy, if superficial, recovery during the reign of Henry IV, but the truce between Spain and the United Provinces (1609) presented the Dutch with an open market from which they proceeded to drive out the native producers. Meanwhile, virulent outbreaks of plague had contributed to Spain’s loss of more than a million people.

A feature of the late 16th century had been the growth of cities. Those that had flourished most from expansion of trade or government offered sustenance of a kind for refugees from stricken villages. Meanwhile, peasants were paying the price for the intensified cultivation necessitated by the 16th century’s growth in population. The subdivision of holdings, the cultivation of marginal land, and the inevitable preference for cereal production at the cost of grazing, with consequent loss of the main fertilizer, animal dung, depressed crop yields. The nature of the trap that closed around the poor can be found in the statistics of life expectancy, averaging 25 years but nearer 20 in the larger towns. It took three times as many births to maintain the level of population as it did at the end of the 20th century.

There also were large fluctuations, such as that caused by the loss of at least 5 of Germany’s 20 million during the Thirty Years’ War. The “vital revolution” is an apt description of the start of a process that has continued to the present day. Until 1800, when the total European population was about 180 million, growth was modest and uneven: relatively slow in France (from 20 to 27 million), Spain (from 7 to 9 million), and Italy (from 13 to 17 million) and nonexistent in war-torn Poland until 1772, when the first of three partitions anticipated its demise as a political entity. Significantly, the rise in population was the most marked in Britain, where agriculture, manufacturing, and trade benefited from investment and innovation, and in Russia, which was technologically backward but which colonized near-empty lands. Among the causes were improvements in housing, diet, and hygiene. Climate

Given man’s dependence on nature, the deterioration of the climate during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century should be considered as a demographic factor. The absence of sunspots after 1645 was noted by astronomers using the recently invented telescope; the aurora borealis (caused by high-energy particles from the Sun entering the Earth’s atmosphere) was so rarely visible that it was thought ominous when it did appear; measurement of tree rings shows them to be relatively thin in this period but containing heavy deposits of radioactive carbon-14, associated with the decline of solar energy; snow lines were observed to be lower; and glaciers advanced into Alpine valleys, reaching their farthest point about 1670. All of these phenomena support plentiful anecdotal evidence for a period of unfavourable climate characterized by cold winters and wet summers. A decrease of about 1 percent in solar radiation meant a growing season shorter by three weeks and the altitude at which crops would ripen lowered by 500 feet. With most of the population living near subsistence level and depending upon cereal crops, the effect was most severe on those who farmed marginal land, especially on northerners for whom the growing season was already short. They were not the only ones who suffered, for freakish conditions were possible then as now. Around Toledo—where until the late 17th century the plains and sierras of New Castile provided a bare living from wheat, vines, and olives—disastrous frosts resulted in mass emigration. Drought also brought deprivation. During 1683 no rain fell in Andalusia until November; the cattle had to be killed, the crops were dry stalks, and thousands starved. In the great winter of 1708–09, rivers froze, even the swift-flowing Rhône, and wolves roamed the French countryside; after late frosts, which killed vines and olive trees, the harvest was a catastrophe: by December the price of bread had quadrupled.

Less spectacular, but more deadly, were the sequences of cold springs and wet summers. From the great mortalities such as those of 1647–52 and 1691–95 in France the population was slow to recover; women were rendered infertile, marriages were delayed, and births were avoided. They were times of fear for masters and shameful resort to beggary, abortion, and infanticide for the common people. It was also a hard time for the government and its tax-collectors. The disastrous harvest of the previous year was the direct cause of the revolt of the Sicilians in 1648. The connection between the outbreak of the Fronde in the same year and harvest failure is less direct: some revolt would probably have occurred in any case. There is a clear link, however, between the wet Swedish summer of 1649 and the constitutional crisis of the following year. War

The period between the revolt of Bohemia (1618) and the peace of Nystad (1721), which coincides with the check to growth and subsequent recession, also saw prolonged warfare. Developments within states and leagues between them made possible the mustering of larger armies than ever before. How important then was war as an influence on economic and social conditions? The discrepancy between the high aspirations of sovereigns and the brutal practice of largely mercenary soldiers gave the Thirty Years’ War a nightmarish character. It is, however, hard to be precise about the consequences of this general melee. As hostilities ended, rulers exaggerated losses to strengthen claims for compensation; refugees returned, families emerged from woods and cellars and reappeared on tax rolls; ruined villages were rebuilt and wastelands were tilled; a smaller population was healthier and readily procreative. The devastation was patchy. Northwestern Germany, for example, was little affected; some cities, such as Hamburg, actually flourished, while others, such as Leipzig and Nürnberg, quickly responded to commercial demand. The preindustrial economy proved to be as resilient as it was vulnerable. Yet the German population did not rise to prewar levels until the end of the 17th century.

The causes of this demographic disaster lie in the random nature of operations and the way in which armies, disciplined only on the battlefield, lived off the land. Casualties in battle were not the prime factor. In the warfare of the 17th and 18th centuries, mortal sickness in the armies exceeded death in action in the proportion of five to one. Disease spread in the camps and peasant communities deprived by pillage of their livelihood. The cost to the home country of operations abroad could be comparatively small, as it was to Sweden, at least until 1700 and the Great Northern War, which developed into a struggle for survival. Special factors—notably naval and commercial strength, the ability to prey on the enemy’s commerce and colonies, and immigration from the occupied south—enabled the United Provinces to grow richer from their wars against Spain (1572–1609 and 1621–48). By contrast, those living in the main theatres of war and occupation were vulnerable: the Spanish southern provinces of the Netherlands, Lorraine (open to French troops), Pomerania and Mecklenberg (to Swedish troops), and Württemberg (to Austrian and French) were among those who paid the highest bills of war.

The ability of states to bring their armies under control meant that operations after 1648 were better regulated and had less effect on civilians. Lands were ravaged deliberately to narrow a front or to deprive the enemy of base and food: such was the fate of the Palatinate, sacked by the French under Marshall René Tessé in 1689. Meanwhile, warfare in the north and east continued to be savage, largely unrestrained by conventions that were gaining hold in the west. The war of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) ran parallel with the Great Northern War (1700–21) and the war of Austria (allied with Venice and sometimes Poland) against the Turks, which had begun with the relief of Vienna in 1683 and continued intermittently until the peace of Passarowitz in 1718. In brutal campaigning over the plains of Poland and Hungary, the peasants were the chief sufferers. For the Hungarians, long inured to border war, liberation by the Habsburgs meant a stricter landowning regime. In one year, 1706, the Swedes gutted 140 villages on the estates of one of Augustus II’s followers. The Russians never subscribed to the stricter rules that were making western warfare look like a deadly game of chess. The later years of Frederick the Great were largely devoted to the restoration of Prussia, despoiled during the Russian occupation of 1760–62.

Such exceptions apart, it seems that most people were little affected by military operations after 1648. The Flemish peasant plowed the fields in peace within miles of Marlborough’s encampments; his uniformed troops received regular pay and looting was punished. That was the norm for armies of the 18th century. This improvement was a factor in the rise of population in that century, but not the main one. At worst, war only exacerbated the conditions of an underdeveloped society. Health and sickness

By the dislocation of markets and communications and the destruction of shipping, and by diverting toward destructive ends an excessive proportion of government funds, war tended to sap the wealth of the community and narrow the scope for governments and individuals to plan and invest for greater production. The constructive reforms of the French statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert in the 1660s, for example, would have been unthinkable in the 1640s or ’50s; they were checked by the renewal of war after 1672 and were largely undone by the further sequence of wars after his death. War determined the evolution of states, but it was not the principal factor affecting the lives of people. Disease was ever present, ready to take advantage of feeble defense systems operating without the benefit of science. The 20th-century French historian Robert Mandrou wrote of “the chronic morbidity” of the entire population. There is plenty of material on diseases, particularly in accounts of symptoms and “cures,” but the language is often vague. Christian of Brunswick was consumed in 1626 “by a gigantic worm”; Charles II of Spain, dying in 1700, was held to be bewitched; men suffered from “the falling sickness” and “distemper.”

There are no reliable statistics about height and weight. It is difficult even to define what people regarded as normal good health. The average person was smaller than today. Even if courtiers flattered Louis XIV, deemed to be tall at 5 feet 4 inches (1.6 metres), the evidence of portraits and clothes shows that a Frenchman of 6 feet (1.8 metres) was exceptionally tall; the same goes for most southern and central Europeans. Scandinavians, Dutch, and North Germans were generally larger; protein in meat, fish, and cheese was probably as important as their ethnic stock. Even where there were advances in medicine, treatment of illness remained primitive. The majority who relied on the simples or charms of the local wise woman may have been no worse off than those for whom more learned advice was available. Court doctors could not prevent the death of the duke de Bourgogne, his wife, and his eldest son in 1712 from what was probably scarlet fever; the younger son, the future Louis XV, may have been saved by his nurse’s removing him from their ministrations.

The work of William Harvey, concerning the circulation of the blood; of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, observing through his microscope blood circulating in minute capillaries or spermatozoa in water; of Francesco Redi, developing by experiment (in a book of 1668) Harvey’s principle that “all living things come from an egg”; or of Hermann Boerhaave, professor of chemistry, medicine, and botany at Leiden, carrying out public dissections of human bodies, reveals the first approaches to modern knowledge and understanding. A striking example of what could be achieved was the efficacy of vaccine against the rampant smallpox after the discoveries of Edward Jenner and others, but vaccination was not much used until the beginning of the 19th century. As in other scientific fields, there was a long pause between pioneering research and regular practice. Trained by book, taking no account of organic life, envisaging illness as a foreign element lodged in the sick person’s body, even tending to identify disease with sin, doctors prescribed, dosed, and bled, leaning on pedantic scholarship blended with primitive psychology. Therapy was concerned mainly with moderating symptoms. For this purpose mercury, digitalis, ipecac root, and, especially, opium were used; the latter was addictive but afforded relief from pain. The wisest navigators in this frozen sea were those who knew the limitations of their craft, like William Cullen, an Edinburgh physician who wrote: “We know nothing of the nature of contagion that can lead us to any measures for removing or correcting it. We know only its effects.”

To peer in imagination into the hovels of the poor or to walk down streets with open drains between houses decayed into crowded tenements, to visit shanty towns outside the walls, such as London’s Bethnal Green or Paris’s Faubourg Saint-Marcel, to learn that the latter city’s great open sewer was not covered until 1740, is to understand why mortality rates among the poor were so high. In town and country they lived in one or two rooms, often under the same roof as their animals, sleeping on straw, eating with their fingers or with a knife and spoon, washing infrequently, and tolerating lice and fleas. Outside, dung and refuse attracted flies and rodents. Luckier people, particularly in the north, might have had glass in their windows, but light was less important than warmth. In airless rooms, thick with the odours of dampness, defecation, smoke, and unwashed bodies, rheumatic or bronchial ailments might be the least of troubles. Deficient diet in childhood could mean rickety legs. Crude methods of delivery might cause permanent damage to both mothers and children who survived the attentions of the local midwife. The baby who survived (one in four died in the first year of life) was launched on a hazardous journey.

Some diseases, such as measles, seem to have been more virulent then than now. Typhus, spread by lice and fleas, and typhoid, waterborne, killed many. Tuberculosis was less common than it was to become. Cancer, though hard to recognize from contemporary accounts, was certainly rare: with relatively little smoking and with so many other diseases competing for the vulnerable body, that is not surprising. There were few illnesses, mental or physical, of the kind today caused by stress. Alcoholism was less common, despite the increase in the drinking of spirits that debauched city dwellers: cheap gin became a significant social problem in William Hogarth’s London. Abnormalities resulting from inbreeding were frequent in mountain valleys or on remote coasts.

Syphilis had been a growing menace since its introduction in the 16th century, and it was rife among prostitutes and their patrons: it was a common cause of blindness in children. Women, hapless victims of male-dominated morality, were frequently denied the chance of early mercury treatment because of the stigma attached to the disease. Scrofula, a gangrenous tubercular condition of the lymph glands, was known as “the king’s evil” because it was thought to be curable by the king’s touch: Louis XIV practiced the ceremony conscientiously. Malaria was endemic in some swampy areas. Though drainage schemes were taken up by enlightened sovereigns, prevention awaited inexpensive quinine. Nor could doctors do more than let smallpox take its course before the general introduction of vaccines. The plague, chiefly an urban disease that was deadliest in summer and dreaded as a sentence of death, could be combated only by measures of quarantine such as those enforced around Marseille in 1720, when it made its last appearance in France. Its last European visitation was at Messina in 1740. Deliverance from plague was not the least reason for Europeans of the Enlightenment to believe that they were entering a happier age. Poverty

Though its extent might vary with current economic trends, poverty was a constant state. It is hard to define since material expectations vary among generations, social groups, and countries. If those with sufficient land or a wage large enough to allow for the replacement of tools and stock are held to be above the poverty line, then at least a quarter of Europe’s inhabitants were below it. They were the bas peuple whom the French engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban observed in the 1690s, “three-fourths of them…dressed in nothing but half-rotting, tattered linen”; a century later the philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet described those who “possess neither goods nor chattels [and are] destined to fall into misery at the least accident.” That could be illness or injury to a breadwinner, the failure of a crop or death of a cow, fire or flood, or the death or bankruptcy of an employer. Sometimes poverty showed itself in a whole community demoralized through sickness—as by malaria in Italy’s Pontine Marshes and goitre in Alpine valleys—or through the sapping of vitality when the young left to find work. Factors could be the unequal struggle with a poor soil or the exactions of a landowner: so the agricultural writer Arthur Young, at Combourg, wondered that the seigneur, “this Monsieur de Chateaubriant, …has nerves strung for such a residence amidst such filth and poverty.” Many were victims of an imprisoning socioeconomic regime, such as Castilian latifundia or Polish serfdom. A trade depression, a change of fashion, or an invention that made traditional manufacturing obsolete could bring destitution to busy cities such as Leiden, Lyon, Florence, or Norwich or to specialized communities such as the silk weavers of 18th-century England’s Spitalfields.

Taxes, on top of rents and dues, might be the decisive factor in the slide from sufficiency to destitution. A member of the Castilian Cortes of 1621 described the results: “Numerous places have become depopulated and disappeared from the map. …The vassals who formerly cultivated them now wander the roads with their wives and children.” Some had always been beyond the reach of the collector of taxes and rents, such as the bracchianti (day labourers) described by a Mantuan doctor as “without a scrap of land, without homes, lacking everything except a great brood of children…with a humble train of a few sheep and baggage consisting of a tattered bedstead, a mouldy cask, some rustic tools and a few pots and pans.”

Moneylenders were pivotal figures in village society. In southern Italy, merchants advanced money on wheat in contratti alla voce (oral agreements). The difference between the arranged price and that at harvest time, when the loan was repaid, represented their profit. Throughout Europe, land changed hands between lender and borrower: foreclosure and forfeit is an aspect of primitive capitalism often overlooked in the focus on trade and manufacturing. Society, even in long-settled areas, revealed a constant flux. As the 20th-century French historian Marc Bloch pointed out, hierarchy was always present in some degree, even in districts where sharecropping meant dependence on the owner’s seed and stock. In the typical village of western Europe, there were gradations between the well-to-do farmer, for whom others worked and whose strips would grow if he continued to be thrifty, and the day labourer, who lived on casual labour, hedging, ditching, thatching, repairing terraces, pruning vines, or making roads.

Urban poverty posed the biggest threat to governments. The situation became alarming after 1750 because the rise in population forced food prices up, while the employers’ advantage in the labour market depressed wages. Between 1730 and 1789, living costs in France rose by 62 percent; in Germany the price of rye for the staple black bread rose by up to 30 percent while wages fell. In Italian cities the poor depended on the authorities’ control of markets, prices, and food supplies. The riots of Genoa in 1746 show what was liable to happen if they failed. The causes of riots varied. In England, in 1766, grievances included the Irish, Roman Catholics, the press-gang, and gin taxes. The source was almost invariably poverty measured against a vague conception of a “fair wage,” fanned by rumours about hoarding and the creating of false prices. Paris was not uniquely dangerous. Before 1789, when the fury of the mob acquired political importance, the Gordon Riots (1780) had shown the way in which London could be taken over by a mob. The problem originated in rural poverty. Improvements in agriculture, such as enclosure, did not necessarily provide more work. Where there were no improvements or old abuses continued—such as the short-term leases of southern Italy, which encouraged tenants to over-crop and so exhaust the soil—the city provided the only hope. Naples, with the greatest profusion of beggars in the streets, was the most swollen of cities: at 438,000 in 1797, the population had risen by 25 percent in 30 years.

The typical relationship of mutual support was between poor hill country and large town; Edinburgh or Glasgow provided support for the Scots Highlanders, Vienna or Marseille for the Alpine poor. In Marseille a settled population of 100,000 supported 30,000 immigrants. Younger sons from the European fringes went for bread to the big armies: Croats to the Austrian, Finns to the Swedish, Scots and Irish everywhere. Women were usually left behind with the old men and children to look after the harvest in areas of seasonal migration. Domestic service drew many girls to towns with a large bourgeois population. Certain other occupations, notably lacemaking, were traditionally reserved for women. Miserably paid, young Frenchwomen risked their eyesight in fine work to earn enough for dowry and marriage. In a society where contraception was little known, except through abstinence, and irregular liaisons were frowned upon, the tendency to marry late was an indication of poverty. Almost half the women of western Europe married after 25; between 10 and 15 percent did not marry at all. The prevalence of abortion and infanticide is painfully significant: it was clearly not confined to unmarried couples. In 18th-century Brussels, more than 2,000 babies were abandoned annually to be looked after by charitable institutions. Repairs to a drain in Rennes in the 1720s revealed the tiny skeletons of 50 babies. Every major city had large numbers of prostitutes. There were approximately 20,000 in Paris, and, more surprisingly, in staid, episcopally governed Mainz, it was estimated that a third of the women in the poorer districts were prostitutes. Victims and outcasts, with the beggars and derelicts of crowded tenements, they helped create the amoral ambience in which criminals could expect tolerance and shelter.

Naturally associated with poverty, crime was also the product of war, even the very maintenance of armies. Desertion led to a man’s living an outlaw’s life. Despite ferocious penalties (having the nose and one ear cut off) the Prussian army lost 30,000 deserters between 1713 and 1740. The soldier’s life might not equip a man for settled work. It was hard, in unsettled times, to distinguish between overtly treasonous acts, as of leaders in revolts, and the persistent banditry that accompanied and outlasted them. Another gray area surrounded the arbitrary actions of officials—for example, billeting troops, sometimes, as in the dragonnades employed by Louis XIV against the Huguenots, for political reasons. Tax collection often involved violence and chicanery. The notorious Mandrin, whose prowess Tobias Smollett recorded, had also been a tax collector. Leader of a gang of some 500, he used his knowledge of the system to construct a regime of extortion. Eventually betrayed and broken on the wheel, he remained a local hero.

Banditry was a way of life on the Cossack and Balkan marches, but it was not only there that roads were unsafe. Barred by magistrates from the towns, gangs of beggars terrorized country districts. Children, pursuing victims with sorry tales, were keen trainees in the school of crime, picking pockets, cutting horsetails, soliciting for “sisters,” and abetting smuggling. The enlargement of the role of the state, with tariffs as the main weapon in protectionist strategies, encouraged evasion and smuggling. Just as few country districts were without robbers, few coasts were without smuggling gangs. A Norman seaman could make more by one clandestine Channel crossing than by a year’s fishing. Only the approval of the poor could make romantic figures of such criminals as Dick Turpin or Marion de Fouet.

The savagery of punishments was in proportion to the inadequacy of enforcement. To traditional methods—hanging, dismemberment, flogging, and branding—the possession of colonies added a new resort toward the end of the 18th century, that of transportation. By then, notably in the German and Italian lands of the Habsburg brothers Joseph II and Leopold II, who were influenced by arguments of reason and humanity, crime was fought at the source by measures to liberate trade, moderate punishments, and increase provision for the poor.

A central theme in Christian teaching was the blessed state of the poor. Holy poverty was the friars’ ideal; ardent reformers ensured that some returned to it. The ascetic Father Joseph, personal agent of Cardinal Richelieu, and Abraham Sancta Clara, preacher at the court of Leopold I, were representative figures. With the acceptance of poverty went awareness of a Christian’s duty to relieve it. Alms for the poor figured largely in wills and were a duty of most religious orders. Corporate charity had a larger place in Counter-Reformation Catholicism than in the thinking of Protestants, who stressed private virtues and endowments. The secularization of church property that accompanied the Reformation reduced levels of relief. However, meticulous church elders in Holland and parish overseers in England were empowered to raise poor rates. In Brandenburg a law of 1696 authorized parishes to provide work for the deserving poor and punishment for others. In Denmark the government pronounced in 1683 that the pauper had the legal right to relief: he could work in land reclamation or road building. Different was the approach of Vincent de Paul (1581–1660), whose instructions to the Sisters of Charity, founded to help “our lords the poor,” were both compassionate and practical. His idea of the hôpital général, a privately funded institution for the aged, crippled, and orphaned, was taken over in 1662: an edict commended the institution of hôpitaux throughout the land. Care for the poor was tinged with concern for their souls: beggars and prostitutes were carefully segregated.

With emphasis on the rights of the individual, the French Revolution did not lead to improvement in poor relief but to the reverse. Nor was the record of the Enlightenment impressive in this area. Impatient with tradition and anticlerical, the philosophes tended to be more fluent in criticism of existing systems than practical in proposals for better ones. The new breed of economists, the physiocrats, were opposed to any interference with the laws of nature, especially to any support that did not show a productive return. The threat of social disorder did alarm the upper class, however, and contributed to the revival in Britain of Evangelical religion, which stressed elementary education for the poor, reform of prisons, and abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Meanwhile, the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II had harnessed new funds for orphanages, hospitals, medical schools, and special institutions for the blind and the insane. In 1785 the Vienna General Hospital had 2,000 beds. There was provision for deprived children of all sorts. Graduated charges and free medical care for paupers were among features of a policy that represented the utilitarian spirit at its most humane. The organization of society Corporate society

The political history of Europe is inevitably the history of privileged minorities. In states of the eastern and northern fringes, “the political nation”—comprising those individuals who had some notion of loyalties beyond the parish and civil duties, if only at a local level, at the occasional diet, or in the army—hardly extended beyond the ranks of the gentry. Where they were numerous (a tenth of the population in Poland, for example), many would maintain themselves as clients of a magnate; even when theoretically independent, they would be likely to envisage the state in terms of sectional interest. The political life of England and Holland and the growing administration of France, Spain, and some German states opened doors to more sophisticated citizenship. Generally, however, political concerns were beyond the ken of peasants or ordinary townspeople for whom the state existed remotely, in the person of the prince, or directly, in that of the tax collector or billeting officer. It does not follow that it is futile to portray the people as a whole. First, however, it is necessary to identify certain characteristics of their world.

It was a Christian society which accepted, in and over the animist world where magic held many in thrall, the sovereignty of God and his laws. A priest might use folklore to convey the Christian message and expect allegiance so long as he endorsed paramount loyalties to family and parish. He might lose them if he objected too strongly to vendetta, charivari, and other forms of collective violence or simply to his parishioners’ preference for tavern over church. Catholic or Protestant, he might preach against superstition, but he was as likely to denounce the witch as to curb her persecutors. He might see no end to his war against ignorance and sin; and he might falter in assurance of the love of God for suffering humanity. No more than any layperson was he immune to doubt and despair. But the evidence is unambiguous: the framework was hardly shaken. It was Christian doubt or Christian pessimism, all under the judgment of God. The priest in the confessional or the Protestant minister, Bible in hand, could look to that transcendent idea to support his vision of heaven’s joys or hell’s torments, of the infinite glory of God and the angels as portrayed by artists in the new Baroque style and of the machinations of the Devil and his minions.

The churches were the grandest expression of the corporate ideal, which shaped life at all levels and which can be seen in the Christian rites invariably used to enforce rules and cement fellowship. It also informed the guilds, corporations, and colleges that served the needs of craftsmen and tradesmen, inhabitants of cities, and scholars. The idea that society was composed of orders was given perhaps excessively precise form by the lawyer Charles Loyseau in his Traité des Ordres (1610), but it serves to stress the significance of precedence. It was assumed that society was hierarchical and that each order had divine sanction. Wherever man found himself, at prayer or study, under arms or at work, there were collective rights and duties that had evolved as a strategy for survival. With them went the sense of belonging to a family of mutual obligations that had been a civilizing aspect of feudal society.

Feudalism, as a set of political arrangements, was dead by 1600. But aspects of feudal society survived, notably in the countryside. Various forms of personal service were owed by peasants to landowners and, in armies and courts, assumption of office and terms of service reflected the dealings of earlier times when power lay in the ownership of land. At the highest, providing cohesion in the intermediate phase between feudal and bureaucratic regimes, the patron-client relationship contained an idea of service that was nearer to medieval allegiance than to modern contract. Liveries might be out of use, but loyalty was owed to “my lord and master”: a powerful man such as Richelieu could thus describe his service to a greater patron, Louis XIII, and would expect the same from his dependents. Envisaging such a society, the reader must dismiss the idea of natural rights, which was not current until the last decades of the 18th century. Rights accrued by virtue of belonging, in two ways: first, as the subject of a prince or equivalent authority—for example, magistrates of a free town or the bishop of an ecclesiastical principality; second, as the member of a community or corporation, in which one had rights depending on the rank into which one was born or on one’s craft or profession. Whatever the formula by which such rights were expressed, it would be defended with tenacity as the means of ensuring the best possible life.

Christian, corporate, feudal: each label goes only some way to defining elusive mentalities in preindustrial society. The elements of organization that they represent look artificial unless the domestic basis is taken into account. The family was the lifeblood of all associations, giving purpose and identity to people who were rarely in crowds and knew nothing like the large, impersonal organization of modern times. To stress the family is not to sentimentalize it but to provide a key to understanding a near-vanished society. The intimacies of domestic life could not anesthetize against pain and hunger: life was not softened and death was a familiar visitor. Children were especially vulnerable but enjoyed no special status. Valued as an extra pair of hands or deplored as an extra mouth to feed, the child belonged to no privileged realm of play and protection from life’s responsibilities. The family might be extended by numerous relations living nearby; in Mediterranean lands it was common for grandparents or brothers and sisters, married or single, to share a house or farm. Especially in more isolated communities, inbreeding added genetic hazards to the struggle for life. Everywhere the hold of the family, and of the father over the family, strengthened by laws of property and inheritance, curtained life’s narrow windows from glimpses of a freer world. It affected marriage, since land, business, and dowry were customarily of more weight than the feelings of the bride and groom. But into dowries and ceremonies long saved for would go the display required to sustain the family name. Pride of family was one aspect of the craving for office. Providing status as well as security in a hierarchical society, it was significantly weaker in the countries, notably the United Provinces and England, where trading opportunities were greatest. Nobles and gentlemen

Between persistent poverty and the prevailing aristocratic spirit several connections can be made. The strong appeal of noble status and values was a force working generally against the pursuit of wealth and the investment that was to lead, precociously and exceptionally in Britain, to the Industrial Revolution. In France a nobleman could lose rank (dérogeance) by working, which inhibited him from engaging in any but a few specified enterprises. The typical relationship between landed gentleman and peasant producer was still feudal; whether represented by a range of rights and dues or by the more rigorous form of serfdom, it encouraged acceptance of the status quo in agriculture. Every state in Europe, except some Swiss cantons, recognized some form of nobility whose privileges were protected by law. Possession of land was a characteristic mark and aspiration of the elites.

The use of the two terms nobleman and gentleman indicates the difficulty of definition. The terms were loosely used to mark the essential distinction between members of an upper class and the rest. In France, above knights and esquires without distinctive title, ranged barons, viscounts, counts, and marquises, until the summit was reached with dukes and princes of the blood. In Britain, by contrast, only peers of the realm, whether entitled duke, marquess, earl, or baron, had corporate status: numbering under 200, they enjoyed few special privileges beyond membership of the House of Lords. The gentry, however, with assured social position, knighthoods, armorial bearings, and estates, were the equivalent of Continental nobles. With the nobility, they owned more than three-quarters of the land: in contrast, in France by 1789 the nobility owned barely a third. In northern and eastern Europe, where the social structure was generally simpler than in the west, nobles—dvoriane in Russia, szlachta in Poland and Hungary—were numerous. In these countries, many of those technically noble were in reality of little importance and might even, like the “barefoot szlachta,” have no land.

Such differences apart, there were rights and privileges that most Continental nobles possessed and values to which most subscribed. The right to wear a sword, to bear a crested coat of arms, to retain a special pew in church, to enjoy such precedence on formal occasions as rank prescribed, and to have if necessary a privileged form of trial would all seem to the noble inherent and natural. As landowner he enjoyed rights over peasants, not least as judge in his own court. In France, parts of Germany, Italy, and Spain, even if he did not own the land, he could as lord still benefit from feudal dues. He could hope for special favours from his sovereign or other patron in the form of a pension or office. There were vital exemptions, as from billeting soldiers and—most valuable—from taxation. The effectiveness of governments can be measured by the extent to which they breached this principle: in France, for example, in the 18th century by the dixième and vingtième taxes, effectively on income; belatedly, in Poland, where nobles paid no tax until the chimney tax of 1775. Generally they could expect favourable treatment: special schools, privileges at university, preferment in the church, commissions in the army. They could assume that a sovereign, while encroaching on their rights, would yet share their values. Richelieu’s policy exemplifies such ambivalence. A noble himself, Richelieu sought to promote the interests of his class while directing it toward royal service and clipping the wings of the over-powerful. Frederick II the Great of Prussia was not concerned about faction. Since “most commoners think meanly,” he believed that nobles were best suited to serve in the government and the army. Such admiration for noble virtues did not usually extend to the political role. The decline of Continental estates and diets, with the growth of bureaucracies, largely recruited from commoners, did not mean, however, even in the west, that nobility was in retreat before the rise of the bourgeoisie. Through social preeminence, nobles maintained—and in the 18th century even tightened—their hold on the commanding heights in church and state.

Within all countries there was a distinction between higher and lower levels within the caste: in some, not only between those who were titled and the rest but, as in Spain and France, between titulos and grandees, a small group upon which royal blood or the achievement of some ancestor conferred privileges of a self-perpetuating kind. “The grandeeship of the counts of Lemos was made by God and time,” observed the head of the family to the new Bourbon king Philip V. No less pretentious were the Condés or the Montmorencys of France. There was a tendency everywhere to the aggrandizement of estates through arranged marriage, a sovereign’s favour, or the opportunities provided by war, as in Bohemia after the suppression of the revolt of 1618 or in England with the rise of the Whig families of Russell and Cavendish. In Britain, the principle of primogeniture ensured succession to the eldest son (promoting social mobility as younger sons made their way in professions or trades). Peter I the Great of Russia legislated for the entail (1714), but without success: it was abandoned by Anna (1731) in favour of the traditional law of inheritance. However, mayorazgo in Castile and fideicommissum in parts of Italy kept vast estates together. Where the colonization of new lands was not restrained by central government, families like the Radziwiłłs and Wiśniowieckis of Poland acquired huge estates. The szlachta of Hungary also cherished privileges as descendants of warriors and liberators. There, Prince Miklós Esterházy, patron of a private orchestra and of Joseph Haydn, excelled all by the end of the 17th century with his annual revenue of 700,000 florins. In Russia, where wealth was measured in serfs, Prince Cherkanski was reckoned in 1690 to have 9,000 peasant households.

Status increasingly signified economic circumstances. In France, where subtle nuances escaped the outsider, one trend is revealing. The old distinction between “sword” and “gown” lost much importance. Age of title came to mean more for antiquarians and purists than for men of fashion who would not scorn a mésalliance if it “manured the land.” Most daughters of 18th-century tax farmers married the sons of nobles. The class was open to new creations, usually through purchase of an office conferring nobility. When, in a regulation of 1760, the year 1400 was made a test of antiquity, fewer than 1,000 families were eligible. The tendency was toward the formation of a plutocracy. Nobles came to dominate the church and the army, even to penetrate government, from which it had been the policy of the early Bourbons to exclude them. The noble order numbered about 120,000 families by 1789. By then the nobles, particularly those of the country who seldom came to court, had brought their rearguard action to a climax to preserve their privileges—for example, by Ségur’s ordinance of 1781, reserving army commissions to nobles of at least four generations. This “feudal reaction” contributed to the problems of government in the years before the Revolution. In Russia, at the height of the conservative reaction that had already secured the abolition (1762) of the service obligation imposed by Peter I, Catherine II the Great was forced to abandon liberal reforms. The Pugachov rising (1773–74) alerted landowners to the dangers of serfdom, but it was reckoned that three-fifths of all landowners owned fewer than 20 serfs. The census of 1687 showed that there were half a million nobles in Spain. But hidalguia might mean little more than a Spaniard’s estimation of himself. Without a substantial señorio (estate), the hidalgo was insignificant.

When “living nobly” meant not working and hidalgos or szlachta attached themselves to a great house for a coat and a loaf, faction became more dangerous and aristocratic interests more resistant to change. It took courage for a sovereign to tackle the entrenched power of nobility in diets, as did the Habsburg queen Maria Theresa (1740–80) in her Austrian and Bohemian lands. Nowhere in Europe did nobles take themselves more seriously, but they were the readier to accept curtailment of their political rights because they enjoyed a healthy economic position. Vienna’s cosmopolitan culture and Baroque palaces were evidence of not only the success of the regime in drawing nobles to the capital but also the rise in manorial rents. Nobles played a decorative role in the most ceremonious court in 18th-century Europe. Charles VI (1711–40) had provided 40,000 posts for noble clients. Maria Theresa, concerned about expense, reduced the number of chamberlains to 1,500. It was left to her son Joseph II to attack noble privileges at every point, right up to the abolition of serfdom. There was a correlation between the advance of government and the curtailment of noble privilege. Inevitably it was an uneven process, depending much on the resolution of a ruler. In Sweden it was to the poor gentlemen, a high proportion of its 10,000 nobles, that Charles XI had appealed in his successful promotion of absolutist reforms in the 1680s. After 1718 the same conservative force militated against royal government. The aristocratic reaction of the age of liberty saw the reassertion of the traditional principle that the nobility were the guardians of the country’s liberties. So the Swedish upper class arrived at the position of their British counterparts and obtained that power, not divorced from responsibility, which was envied and extolled by the philosophes who regretted its absence from France and sought consolation in the works of Montesquieu. A central idea of his L’Esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of Laws) was that noble privilege was the surest guarantee of the laws against despotism. That could not be said of Prussia, although a Junker’s privilege was wedded to a subject’s duty. In exchange for the loss of political rights, Junkers had been confirmed in their social and fiscal privileges: with the full rigour of serfdom (Leibeigenschaft) and rights of jurisdiction over tenants went a secure hold over local government. Under the pressure of war and following his own taste for aristocratic manners, Frederick II taught them to regard the army or civil service as a career. But Frederick disappointed the philosophes who expected him to protect the peasantry. The nobles meanwhile acquired a pride in militarism that was to be potent in the creation of the 19th-century German state. The class became more numerous but remained relatively poor: Junkers often had to sell land to supplement meagre pay. Frederick’s working nobility sealed the achievements of his capable predecessors. The price paid indicates the difficulties inherent in any attempt to reconcile the interests of the dominant class to the needs of society.

Nobility also had a civilizing role. Europe would be immeasurably poorer without the music, literature, and architecture of the age of aristocracy. The virtues of classical taste were to some extent those of aristocracy: splendour restrained by formal rules and love of beauty uninhibited by utilitarian considerations. There was much that was absurd in the pretensions of some patrons; illusions of grandeur are rarely the best basis for the conceiving of great art. The importance of bourgeois patronage should not be overlooked, otherwise no account would be taken of Holland’s golden age. Where taste was unaffected by the need for display (as could not be said of Louis XIV’s Versailles) or where a wise patron put his trust in the reputedly best architect, art could triumph. Civilizing trends were prominent, as in England, where there was a free intellectual life. New money, as lavished by the duke of Chandos, builder of the great house of Canons and patron of the composer George Frideric Handel, could be fruitful. Also important was the fusion of aristocratic style with ecclesiastical patronage, as could occur where noblemen enjoyed the best preferment and abbots lived like nobles: the glories of the German Baroque at Melk, Ottobeuren, and Vierzehnheiligen speak as much of aristocracy as of the Christian Gospel.

In contrast with Sweden, where, in the 18th century, talent was recognized and the scientists Carolus Linnaeus and Emanuel Swedenborg were ennobled, or France, where the plutocracy encountered the Enlightenment without discomfort, the most sterile ground for aristocratic culture was to be found where there was an enforced isolation, as in Spain or Europe’s poor marches and remotest western shores. Visitors to Spain were startled by the ignorance of the men and the passivity of the women. Life in Poland, Hungary, and Ireland resolved itself for many of the gentry into a simple round of hunting and carousing. The urban aspect of noble culture needs stress, which is not surprising when its Classical inspiration is recalled. Even in England, where educated men favoured country life and did not despise the country town, society would have been poorer without the intense activity of London. All the greater was the importance of the capital cities—Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Budapest, and Dublin—in countries that might not otherwise have generated fine art or architecture.

The aristocratic spirit transcended frontiers. For the nobleman Europe was the homeland. Italian plasterers and painters, German musicians, and French cabinetmakers traveled for high commissions. There were variations reflecting local traditions: the Baroque style was interpreted distinctively in Austria, Italy, Spain, and France. But high style reveals certain underlying principles and convictions. The same is true of the intellectual life of Europe, reflecting as it did two main sources, French and English. It was especially to France that the two most powerful rulers of eastern Europe, Frederick II and Catherine II, looked for mentors in thought and style. The French language, deliberately purified from the time of Richelieu and the foundation of the Academy, was well adapted to the clear expression of ideas. The salons stimulated the discussion of ideas and engendered a distinctive style. Feminine insights there contributed to a rational culture that was also responsive to the claims of sensibility. The bourgeoisie

The European bourgeoisie presents faces so different that common traits can be discerned only at the simplest level: the possession of property with the desire and means to increase it, emancipation from past precepts about investment, a readiness to work for a living, and a sense of being superior to town workers or peasants. With their social values—sobriety, discretion, and economy—went a tendency to imitate the style of their social superiors. In France the expectations of the bourgeoisie were roused by education and relative affluence to the point at which they could be a revolutionary force once the breakdown of royal government and its recourse to a representative assembly had given them the voice they had lacked. Everywhere the Enlightenment was creating a tendency to be critical of established institutions (notably, in Roman Catholic countries, the church), together with a hunger for knowledge as a tool of progress.

Such dynamic characteristics, conducive to social mobility, should not obscure the essential feature of bourgeois life: conservativism within a corporate frame. In 1600 a town of more than 100,000 would have been thought enormous: only London, Paris, Naples, Sevilla (Seville), Venice, Rome, and Constantinople came into that class. Half in Asia but enmeshed in the European economic system, Constantinople was unique: it was a megalopolis, a gigantic consumer of the produce of subject lands. London’s growth was more significant for the future: it was a seaport and capital, but with a solid base in manufacturing, trade, and finance. Like Naples, it was a magnet for the unemployed and restless. In 1700 there were only 48 towns in Europe with a population of more than 40,000; all were regarded as important places. Even a smaller city might have influence in the country, offering a range of services and amenities; such was Amiens, with 30,000 inhabitants and 36 guilds, including bleachers, dyers, and finishers of the cloth that was woven in nearby villages but sent far afield. Most towns had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, and a fair number only about 1,000; most towns remained static or declined. Some grew, however: between 1600 and 1750 the proportion of the population living in towns of more than 20,000 doubled from 4 to 8 percent, representing about half the total urban population.

A universal phenomenon was the growth of capital cities, which benefited from the expansion of government, particularly if, as was usual, the court was within the city. Growth could acquire its own momentum, irrespective of the condition of the country: besides clients and servants of all kinds, artisans, shopkeepers, and other providers of services swelled the ranks. Warsaw’s size doubled during Poland’s century of distress to stand at 120,000 by 1772. St. Petersburg, in 1700 a swamp, acquired 218,000 inhabitants by 1800. Berlin, the simple electoral capital of some 6,000 inhabitants in 1648, rose with the success of the Hohenzollerns to a population of 150,000 by 1786. By then the population of Vienna—home of the imperial court, a growing professional class, a renowned university and other schools, and hospitals—had reached 220,000. The population of Turin, capital of relatively small Savoy, also doubled in the 18th century. Rome did not suffer too obviously from the retreat of the popes from a leading political role, but the Holy City (140,000 inhabitants in 1700) was top-heavy, with little in the way of manufacturing. All these cities owed their growth to their strategic place in the government rather than to their economic importance.

Other cities grew around specialized industries or from opportunities for a wider trade than was possible where markets were limited by the range of horse and mule. Growth was likely to be slow where, as in Lyon, Rouen, and Dresden, production continued to be along traditional lines or, in ports such as Danzig, Königsberg, or Hamburg, where trading patterns remained essentially the same. Enterprise, by contrast, brought remarkable growth in Britain, where Manchester and Birmingham both moved up from modest beginnings to the 100,000-population mark during the 18th century. Atlantic ports thrived during the same period with the increase in colonial trade: into this category fall Bordeaux, Nantes, Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Marseille recovered quickly from the plague of 1720 and grew on the grain import trade; more typical of Mediterranean cities were stagnant Genoa, Venice, and Palermo, where Austrian policy in the 18th century, favouring Milan, was an adverse factor.

A typical urban experience, where there was no special factor at work, was therefore one of stability. The burgher of 1600 would have felt at home in the town of his descendant five generations later. There might have been calamities along the way: at worst, siege or assault, plague, a particularly serious recession, or a fire, such as destroyed Rennes in 1720. Some building or refacing of houses would have occurred, mainly within the walls. In more fortunate cities, where there was continuing economic stability or strong corporate identity—as in the siege victims La Rochelle (1628) or Magdeburg (1631)—recovery even from the worst of war experiences could be rapid. The professions, notably the church and law, were tough, having large interests in the town and in the property in and around it. Guild discipline, inhibiting in fair years, was a strength in foul ones. Not all towns were so resilient, however. Some Polish towns never recovered from the effects of the Great Northern War; others throughout northern and eastern Europe were victims of the rise of the self-sufficient estate, which supplied needs such as brewing that the town had previously offered. Some Italian and Spanish towns, such as Cremona, Toledo, and Burgos, were affected by the decline of manufacturing and the shift of trade to the Atlantic economies.

It was possible for a town that had a special importance in the sphere of church or law (Angers, Salzburg, or Trier, for example) to enjoy a quiet prosperity, but there was a special kind of deadness about towns that had no other raison d’être than to be host to numerous clergy. Valladolid contained 53 religious houses “made up principally of consumers” according to a report of 1683. Most numerous were the quiet places that had never grown from their basic function of providing a market. England’s archaic electoral system provided graphic evidence of such decay, leaving its residue of “rotten boroughs.”

Between these extremes lay the mass of towns of middling size, each supervised by a mayor and corporation, dignified by one large church and probably several others serving ward or parish (and, if Catholic, by a religious house of some kind), and including a law court, guildhall, school, and, of course, market. With its bourgeois crust of clerics, lawyers, officials, merchants, and shopkeepers and master craftsmen catering for special needs—fine fabrics, clothing, hats, wigs, gloves, eyeglasses, engravings if not paintings, china, silver, glassware, locks, and clocks—the city was a world apart from the peasant. The contrast was emphasized by the walls, the gates that closed at night, the cobbles or setts of the roads, the different speech and intonation, the well-fed look of some citizens, and above all the fine houses, suggesting as much an ordered way of life as the wealth that supported it. The differences were blurred, however, by the pursuits of the urban landowners; by ubiquitous animals, whether bound for market or belonging to the citizens; by the familiar poverty and filth of the streets and the reek of the tannery and the shambles.

It is easier to recreate the physical frame than the mentalities of townspeople. Letters, journals, government reports and statistics, wills, and contracts reveal salient features. The preference for safe kinds of investment could be exploited by governments for revenue, as notably by the French: in 1661 Colbert found that, of 46,000 offices of justice and finance, 40,000 were unnecessary. There was an inclination to buy land for status and security. Around cities like Dijon, most of the surrounding land was owned by the bourgeois or the recently ennobled. Custom and ceremony were informed by a keen sense of hierarchy, as in minutely ordered processions. The instinct to regulate was stiffened by the need to restrain servants and journeymen and to ensure that apprentices waited for the reward of their training. Religion maintained its hold more firmly in the smaller towns, while the law was respected as the mainstay of social order and the road to office in courts or administration even where, as in Italy, it was palpably corruptible. There were certain communal dreads, military requisitioning and billeting high among them. There was generally a resolve to ward off beggars, to maintain grain stores, to close the gates to the famished when crops failed, and to enforce quarantine.

Within towns, popular forms of government were abandoned as power was monopolized by groups of wealthy men. This process can be studied in the Dutch towns in the years after 1648 when regents gained control. Everywhere elites were composed of those who had no business role. Among other labels for this period, when a profession seemed to be more desirable than trade, “a time of lawyers” might be appropriate. Trained to contend, responsive to new ideas, at least dipping into the waters of the Enlightenment, those lawyers who were cheated, by sheer numbers, of the opportunity to rise might become a dissident element, especially in countries where political avenues were blocked and the economy was growing too slowly to sustain them. Sometimes the state moved in to control municipal affairs, as in France where intendants were given wide powers toward the end of Louis XIV’s reign. In Spain, towns came into the hands of local magnates.

A more serious threat to the old urban regime lay in another area where discontents bred radicalism: the guilds. Not until the French Revolution and the radical actions of Joseph II of Austria were guilds anywhere abolished. They had long displayed a tendency to oligarchic control by hereditary masters. They became more restrictive in the face of competition and growing numbers of would-be members and so drove industries, particularly those suited to dispersed production, back to the countryside. For this reason, such cities as Leiden, Rouen, Cologne, and Nürnberg actually lost population in the 18th century. To compensate for falling production, masters tended to put pressure on the relatively unskilled level, where there were always more workers than work. Journeymen’s associations sought to improve their situation, sometimes through strikes. The building trade was notorious for its secret societies. The decline of the guilds was only one symptom of the rise in population. Another was the rise in urban poverty, as pressure on resources led to price increases that outstripped wages. In late 18th-century Berlin, which was solidly based on bureaucracy, garrison, and numerous crafts, a third of the population still lacked regular work. The plight of the poor was emphasized by the affluence of increasing numbers of fellow citizens. However class conflict is interpreted, it is clear that its basic elements were by that time present and active. The peasantry

In 1700 only 15 percent of Europe’s population lived in towns, but that figure concealed wide variations: at the two extremes by 1800 were Britain with 40 percent and Russia with 4 percent. Most Europeans were peasants, dependent on agriculture. The majority of them lived in nucleated settlements and within recognized boundaries, those of parish or manor, but some, in the way characteristic of the hill farmer, lived in single farms or hamlets. The type of settlement reflected its origins: pioneers who had cleared forests or drained swamps, Germans who had pressed eastward into Slav lands, Russians who had replaced conquered Mongols, Spaniards who had expelled the Moors. Each brought distinctive characteristics. Discounting the nomad fringe, there remains a fundamental difference between serfs and those who had more freedom, whether as owners or tenants paying some form of rent but both liable to seigneurial dues. There were about one million serfs in eastern France and some free peasants in Russia, so the pattern is untidy; but broadly it represents the difference between eastern and western Europe.

The Russian was less attached to a particular site than his western counterparts living in more densely populated countries and had to be held down by a government determined to secure taxes and soldiers. The imposition of serfdom was outlined in the Ulozhenie, the legal code of 1649, which included barschina (forced labour). One consequence was the decline of the mir, the village community, with its fellowship and practical services; another was the tightening of the ties of mutual interest that bound tsar and landowner. Poles, Germans (mainly those of the east and north), Bohemians, and Hungarians were subject to a serfdom less extreme only in that they were treated as part of the estate and could not be sold separately; the Russian serf, who could, was more akin to a slave. Russian state peasants, an increasingly numerous class in the 18th century, were not necessarily secure; they were sent out to farm new lands. Catherine the Great transferred 800,000 serfs to private ownership. The serf could not marry, move, or take up a trade without his lord’s leave. He owed labour (robot) in the Habsburg lands for at least three days a week and dues that could amount to 20 percent of his produce. The Thirty Years’ War hastened the process of subjection, already fed by the west’s demand for grain; peasants returning to ruined homesteads found that their rights had vanished. The process was resisted by some rulers, notably those of Saxony and Brunswick: independent peasants were a source of revenue. Denmark saw an increase in German-style serfdom in the 18th century, but most Swedish peasants were free—their enemies were climate and hunger, rather than the landowner. Uniquely, they had representation in their own Estate in the Riksdag.

Through much of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal there was some form of rent or sharecropping. Feudalism survived in varying degrees of rigour, with an array of dues and services representing seigneurial rights. It was a regime that about half of Europe’s inhabitants had known since the Middle Ages. In England all but a few insignificant forms had gone, though feudal spirit lingered in deference to the squire. Enclosures were reducing the yeoman to the condition of a tenant farmer or, for most, a dependent, landless labourer. Although alodial tenures (absolute ownership) ensured freedom from dues in some southern provinces, France provides the best model for understanding the relationship of lord and peasant. The seigneur was generally, but not invariably, noble: a seigneury could be bought by a commoner. It had two parts. The domaine was the house with its grounds: there were usually a church and a mill, but not necessarily fields and woods, for those might have been sold. The censives, lands subject to the seigneur, still owed dues even if no longer owned by him. The cens, paid annually, was significant because it represented the obligations of the peasant: free to buy and sell land, he still endured burdens that varied from the trivial or merely vexatious to those detrimental to good husbandry. They were likely to include banalités, monopoly rights over the mill, wine press, or oven; saisine and lods et ventes, respectively a levy on the assets of a censitaire on death and a purchase tax on property sold; champart, a seigneurial tithe, payable in kind; monopolies of hunting, shooting, river use, and pigeon rearing; the privilege of the first harvest, for example, droit de banvin, by which the seigneur could gather his grapes and sell his wine first; and the corvées, obligatory labour services. Seigneurial rule had benevolent aspects, and justice in the seigneurial court could be even-handed; seigneurs could be protectors of the community against the state’s taxes and troops. But the regime was damaging, as much to the practice of farming as to the life of the peasants, who were harassed and schooled in resistance and concealment. To identify an 18th-century feudal reaction—as some historians have called the tendency to apply business principles to the management of dues—is not to obscure the fact that for many seigneurs the system was becoming unprofitable. By 1789 in most provinces there was little hesitation: the National Assembly abolished feudal dues by decree at one sitting because the peasants had already taken the law into their own hands. Some rights were won back, but there could be no wholesale restoration.

Besides priest or minister, the principal authority in most peasants’ lives was that of the lord. The collective will of the community also counted for much, as in arrangements for plowing, sowing, and reaping, and even in some places the allocation of land. The range of the peasant’s world was that of a day’s travel on foot or, more likely, by donkey, mule, or pony. He would have little sense of a community larger than he could see or visit. His struggle against nature or the demands of his superiors was waged in countless little pockets. When peasants came together in insurgent bands, as in Valencia in 1693, there was likely to be some agitation or leadership from outside the peasant community—in that case from José Navarro, a surgeon. There needed to be some exceptional provocation, like the new tax that roused Brittany in 1675. After the revolt had been suppressed, the parlement of Rennes was exiled to a smaller town for 14 years: clearly government understood the danger of bourgeois complicity. Rumour was always potent, especially when tinged with fantasy, as in Stenka Razin’s rising in southern Russia, which evolved between 1667 and 1671 from banditry into a vast protest against serfdom. Generally, cooperation between villages was less common than feuding, the product of centuries of uneasy proximity and conflict over disputed lands.

The peasant’s life was conditioned by mundane factors: soil, water supplies, communications, and above all the site itself in relation to river, sea, frontier, or strategic route. The community could be virtually self-sufficient. Its environment was formed by what could be bred, fed, sown, gathered, and worked within the bounds of the parish. Fields and beasts provided food and clothing; wood came from the fringe of wasteland. Except in districts where stone was available and easy to work, houses were usually made of wood or a cob of clay and straw. Intended to provide shelter from the elements, they can be envisaged as a refinement of the barn, with certain amenities for their human occupants: hearth, table, and benches with mats and rushes strewn on a floor of beaten earth or rough stone. Generally there would be a single story, with a raised space for beds and an attic for grain. For his own warmth and their security the peasant slept close to his animals, under the same roof. Cooking required an iron pot, sometimes the only utensil named in peasant inventories. Meals were eaten off wood or earthenware. Fuel was normally wood, which was becoming scarce in some intensively cultivated parts of northern Europe, particularly Holland, where much of the land was reclaimed from sea or marsh. Peat and dried dung also were used, but rarely coal. Corn was ground at the village mill, a place of potential conflict: only one man had the necessary expertise, and his clients were poorly placed to bargain. Women and girls spun and wove for the itinerant merchants who supplied the wool or simply for the household, for breeches, shirts, tunics, smocks, and gowns. Clothes served elemental needs: they were usually thick for protection against damp and cold and loose-fitting for ease of movement. Shoes were likely to be wooden clogs, as leather was needed for harnesses. Farm implements—plows (except for the share), carts, harrows, and many of the craftsman’s tools—were made of wood, seasoned, split or rough-hewn. Few possessed saws; in Russia they were unknown before 1700. Iron was little used and was likely to be of poor quality. Though it might be less true of eastern Europe where, as in Bohemia, villages tended to be smaller, the community would usually have craftsmen—a smith or a carpenter, for example—to satisfy most needs. More intricate skills were provided by traveling tinkers.

The isolated villager might hear of the outside world from such men. Those living around the main routes would fare better and gather news, at least indirectly, from merchants, students, pilgrims, and government officials or, less reputably, from beggars, gypsies, or deserters (a numerous class in most states). He might buy broadsheets, almanacs, and romances, produced by enterprising printers at centres such as Troyes, to be hawked around wherever there were a few who could read. So were kept alive what became a later generation’s fairy tales, along with the magic and astrology that they were not reluctant to believe. Inn and church provided the setting for business, gossip, and rumour. Official reports and requirements were posted and village affairs were conducted in the church. The innkeeper might benefit from the cash of wayfarers but like others who provided a service, he relied chiefly on the produce of his own land. Thus, the rural economy consisted of innumerable self-sufficient units incapable of generating adequate demand for the development of large-scale manufactures. Each cluster of communities was isolated within its own market economy, proud, and suspicious of outsiders. Even where circumstances fostered liberty, peasants were pitifully inadequate in finding original solutions to age-old problems but were well-versed in strategies of survival, for they could draw on stores of empirical wisdom. They feared change just as they feared the night for its unknown terrors. Their customs and attitudes were those of people who lived on the brink: more babies might be born but there would be no increase in the food supply.

In the subsistence economy there was much payment and exchange in kind; money was hoarded for the occasional purchase, to the frustration of tax collectors and the detriment of economic growth. Demand was limited by the slow or nonexistent improvement in methods of farming. There was no lack of variety in the agricultural landscape. Between the temporary cultivation of parts of Russia and Scandinavia, where slash-and-burn was encouraged by the extent of forest land, and the rotation of cereal and fodder crops of Flanders and eastern England, 11 different methods of tillage have been identified. Most common was some version of the three-course rotation that Arthur Young denounced when he traveled in France in 1788. He observed the subdivision and wide dispersal of holdings that provided a further obstacle to the diversification of crops and selective breeding. The loss of land by enclosure pauperized many English labourers. But the development in lowland England of the enclosed, compact economic unit—the central feature of the agrarian revolution—enabled large landowners to prosper and invest and small farmers to survive. They were not trapped, like many Continental peasants, between the need to cultivate more land and the declining yields of their crops, which followed from the loss of pasture and of fertilizing manure. Without capital accumulation and with persisting low demand for goods, economic growth was inhibited. The work force was therefore tied to agriculture in numbers that depressed wage rates, discouraged innovation, and tempted landowners to compensate by some form of exploitation of labour, rights, and dues. Eighteenth-century reformers condemned serfdom and other forms of feudalism, but they were as much the consequence as the cause of the agricultural malaise. The economic environment Innovation and development

Every country had challenges to overcome before its resources could be developed. The possession of a coastline with safe harbours or of a navigable river was an important asset and, as by Brandenburg and Russia, keenly fought for; so were large mineral deposits, forests, and fertile soil. But communications were primitive and transport slow and costly even in favoured lands. Napoleon moved at the same speed as Julius Caesar. By horse, coach, or ship, it was reckoned that 24 hours was necessary to travel 60 miles. In one area, however, innovation had proceeded at such a pace as to justify terms such as “intellectual” or “scientific” revolution; yet there remained a yawning gap between developments in theoretical science and technology. In the age of Newton the frontiers of science were shifting fast, and there was widespread interest in experiment and demonstration, but one effect was to complete the separation of a distinctive intellectual elite: the more advanced the ideas, the more difficult their transmission and application. There was a movement of thought rather than a scientific movement, a culture of inquiry rather than of enterprise. Only in the long term was the one to lead to the other, through the growing belief that material progress was possible. Meanwhile, advances were piecemeal, usually the work of individuals, often having no connection with business. Missing was not only that association of interests that characterizes industrial society but also the educational ground: schools and universities were wedded to traditional courses. Typical inventors of the early industrial age were untutored craftsmen, such as Richard Arkwright, James Watt, or John Wilkinson. Between advances in technology there could be long delays.

As those names suggest, Britain was the country that experienced the breakthrough to higher levels of production. The description “Industrial Revolution” is misleading if applied to the economy as a whole, but innovations in techniques and organization led to such growth in iron, woolens, and, above all, cotton textiles in the second half of the 18th century that Britain established a significant lead. It was sustained by massive investment and by the wars following the French Revolution, which shut the Continent off from developments that in Britain were stimulated by war. Factors involved in the unique experience of a country that contained only 1 in 20 of Europe’s inhabitants expose certain contrasting features of the European economy. The accumulation of capital had been assisted by agricultural improvement, the acquisition of colonies, the operation of chartered companies (notably the East India Company), trade-oriented policies of governments (notably that of William Pitt during the Seven Years’ War), and the development of colonial markets. There existed a relatively advanced financial system, based on the successful Bank of England (founded 1694), and interest rates were consistently lower than those of European rivals. This was particularly important in the financing of road and canal building, where large private investment was needed before profit was realized. Further advantages included plentiful coal and iron ore and swift-flowing streams in the hilly northwest where the moist climate was suited to cotton spinning. The labour force was supplemented by Irish immigrants. A society that cherished political and legal institutions characteristic of the ancien régime also exhibited a free and tolerant spirit, tending to value fortune as much as birth. Comparison with Britain’s chief rival in the successive wars of 1740–48, 1756–63, and 1778–83 is strengthened by the consequences of those wars: for France the slide toward bankruptcy, for Britain a larger debt that could still be funded without difficulty.

Yet the French enjoyed an eightfold growth in colonial trade between 1714 and 1789, considerably larger than that of the British. The Dutch still had the financial strength, colonies, trading connections, and at least some of the entrepreneurial spirit that had characterized them in the 17th century. Enlightened statesmen such as the Marquês de Pombal in Portugal, Charles III of Spain, and Joseph II of Austria backed measures designed to promote agriculture and manufacturing. The question of why other countries lagged behind Britain leads to consideration of material and physical conditions, collective attitudes, and government policies. It should not distort the picture of Europe as a whole or obscure the changes that affected the demand for goods and the ability of manufacturers and traders to respond.

The mercantilist theory—which still appealed to a statesman like Frederick the Great, as it had to his great-grandfather—was grounded on the assumption that markets were limited: to increase trade, new markets had to be found. Mobility within society and increased spending by common folk, who were not expected to live luxuriously, were treated as symptoms of disorder. Mercantilists were concerned lest the state be stripped of its treasure and proper distinctions of status be undermined. The moral context is important: mercantilism belongs to the world of the city-state, the guilds, and the church; its ethical teaching is anchored in the medieval situation. By 1600 the doctrine that usury was sinful was already weakened beyond recovery by evasion and example. Needy princes borrowed, but prejudice against banks lingered, reinforced by periodic demonstrations of their fallibility, as in the failure of John Law’s Banque Générale in Paris in 1720. Productive activity was not necessarily assumed to be a good thing. Yet it is possible, throughout the period, to identify dynamic features characteristic of capitalism in its developed, industrial phase. Early capitalism

Two broad trends can be discerned. The shift from the Mediterranean and its hinterlands to the Atlantic seaboard continued, although there was still vigorous entrepreneurial activity in certain Mediterranean regions; Venice stood still, but Marseille and Barcelona prospered. More striking was the growing gap between the economic systems of the east, where capital remained largely locked up in the large estates, and the west, where conditions were more favourable to enterprise. With more widespread adoption of utilitarian criteria for management went a sterner view of the obligation of workers. Respect for the clock, with regular hours and the reduction of holidays for saints’ days (already achieved in Protestant countries), was preparing the way psychologically for the discipline of the factory and mill. Handsome streets and squares of merchants’ houses witnessed to the prosperity of Atlantic ports such as Bordeaux, Nantes, and Bristol, which benefited from the reorientation of trade. Above all, Amsterdam and London reflected the mutually beneficial activity of trade and services. From shipbuilding, so demanding in skills and raw materials, a network of suppliers reached back to forests, fields, and forges, where timber, iron, canvas, and rope were first worked. Chandlering, insurance, brokerage, and credit-trading facilitated international dealing and amassing of capital. Fairs had long counteracted the isolation of regional economies: Lyon on the Rhône, Hamburg on the Elbe, and Danzig on the Vistula had become centres of exchange, where sales were facilitated by price lists, auctions, and specialization in certain commodities. Retailing acquired a modern look with shops catering to those who could afford coffee from Brazil or tobacco from Virginia; unlike earlier retailing, the goods offered for sale were not the products of work carried out on the premises. The dissemination of news was another strand in the pattern. By 1753 the sale of newspapers exceeded seven million: the emphasis was on news, not opinion, and price lists were carried with the news that affected them. Seamen were assisted by the dredging of harbours and improved docks and by more accurate navigational instruments and charts. In 1600 there were 18 lighthouses on or off the shores of Europe; in 1750 there were 82. The state also improved roads and made them safe for travelers; by 1789 France had 7,500 miles of fine roads, built largely by forced labour. By 1660 nearly every Dutch city was linked by canals. Following their example, Elector Frederick William in Brandenburg and Peter the Great in Russia linked rivers to facilitate trade. In France Colbert’s plan for the Languedoc canal (completed 1682) involved private as well as state capital. England’s canal builders, notably the duke of Bridgewater, had to find their own resources: consequently, capital was applied to the best effect to serve mines and factories. The general survival of tolls and the resistance of interested parties to their removal imposed constraints on most governments. The abolition of internal customs was therefore a priority for enlightened reformers such as Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in France and Joseph II in Austria. Germany’s many princes had taken advantage of weak imperial authority to impose the tolls, which produced revenue at the cost of long-distance trade. Numerous external tariffs remained an obstacle to the growth of trade. Radical action, however, could be dangerous. Turgot’s attempt to liberate the grain trade in France led to shortages, price rises, and his own downfall. The free trade treaty of 1786 of the French foreign minister, the count de Vergennes, also had unfortunate consequences: France was flooded by cheap English textiles, peasant weavers were distressed, and the ground was prepared for the popular risings of 1789.

One important development was the adoption in western Europe of the existing Italian practice of using bills of exchange as negotiable instruments; it was legalized in Holland in 1651 and in England in 1704. Bankers who bought bills, at a discount to cover risk, thereby released credit that would otherwise have been immobilized. The other aspect of the financial revolution was the growth of banking facilities. In 1660 there had been little advance in a century, since princes and magnates, after raising money too easily, had reneged on debts and damaged the fragile system. Great houses, such as the Fuggers, had been ruined. The high interest rates demanded by survivors contributed to the recession of the 17th century. There were some municipal institutions, such as the Bank of Hamburg and the great Bank of Amsterdam, which played a crucial part in Dutch economic growth by bringing order to the currency and facilitating transfers. They provided the model for the Bank of England, which was founded in 1694 as a private company and was soon to have a relationship of mutual dependence with the state. The first state bank was that founded in Sweden in 1656; to provide a substitute for Sweden’s copper currency, it issued the first bank notes. Overproduced and not properly secured, they soon lost value. Law’s ambitious scheme for a royal bank in France foundered in 1720 because it was linked to his Louisiana company and its inflated prospects. After its failure tax farmers resumed their hold over state finance, and as a result interest rates remained higher than those of Britain because there was no secure central agency of investment. Law’s opponents were shortsighted: in Britain, where a central bank was successful, a large expansion of private banking also took place.

Meanwhile silver, everywhere the basic unit of value, remained in short supply. One-sided trade with the east meant a continuous drain. Insufficient silver was mined; declining imports from the New World did not affect only Spain. Governments tried to prevent the clipping of coins and so revalued. The deficiency remained, providing evidence for mercantilist policies. Negotiable paper in one form or other went some way to meet the shortage of specie. Stock exchanges, commercial in their original function, dealt increasingly in government stocks. Joint-stock companies became a common device for attracting money and spreading risk. By the mid-18th century the operations of commerce, manufacturing, and public finance were linked in one general system; a military defeat or economic setback affecting credit in one area might undermine confidence throughout the entire investing community. The old industrial order

Operations of high finance represented the future of capitalist Europe. The economy as a whole was still closer in most respects to the Middle Ages. Midland and northern England, a belt along the Urals, Catalonia, the Po valley, and Flanders were scenes of exceptionally large-scale operations during the 18th century. The mines, quarries, mills, and factories of entrepreneurs such as Josse van Robais, the Dutch industrialist brought in by Colbert to produce textiles in Abbeville, only emphasized, by contrast, the primitive conditions of most manufacturing enterprise. Technology relied on limited equipment. Peter the Great saw it at its most impressive when he visited Holland in 1697. In villages along the Zaan River were lumber saws powered by 500 windmills and yards equipped with cranes and stacked with timber cut to set lengths to build fluitschips to a standard design.

The typical unit of production, however, was the domestic enterprise, with apprentices and journeymen living with family and servants. The merchant played a vital part in the provision of capital. When metalworkers made knives or needles for a local market, they could remain their own masters. For a larger market, they had to rely on businessmen for fuel, ore, wages, and transport. In textiles the capital and marketing skills of the entrepreneur were essential to cottagers. This putting-out system spread as merchants saw the advantages of evading guild control. When the cotton industry was developed around Rouen and Barcelona, it was organized in the same way as woolen textiles. In the old industrial order, output could be increased only in proportion to the number of workers involved. In England the new order was evolving, and ranks of machines in barracklike mills were producing for a mass market. The need to produce economically could transform an industry, as in Brabant, where peasants moved into the weaving side of the linen trade and then established bleaching works that ruined traditionally dominant Haarlem. It also altered the social balance, as in electoral Saxony where, between 1550 and 1750, the proportion of peasants who made most of their living by industry rose from 5 to 30 percent of the population. With such change came the dependence on capital and the market that was to make the worker so vulnerable.

Inevitably the expansion of domestic manufactures brought problems of control, which were eventually resolved by concentration in factories and by technical advances large enough to justify investment in machinery. Starting with the Lombe brothers’ silk mills, their exploitation of secrets acquired from Italy (1733), and John Kaye’s flying shuttle, British inventions set textile production on a dizzy path of growth. Abraham Darby’s process of coke smelting was perhaps the most important single improvement, since it liberated the iron founder from dependence on charcoal. The shortage of timber, a source of anxiety everywhere except in Russia and Scandinavia, proved to be a stimulus to invention and progress. Technical development on the Continent was less remarkable. The nine volumes of the Theatrum Machinarum (1724), Jakob Leupold’s description of engineering, records steady development reflecting the craftsman’s empirical outlook. Improvement could be modest indeed. A miller could grind 37 pounds (17 kilograms) of flour each day in the 12th century; by 1700 it might have been 55 pounds. In some areas there were long intervals between theoretical advances and technological application. Galileo, Evangelista Torricelli, Otto von Guericke, and Blaise Pascal worked on the vacuum in the first half of the 17th century, and Denis Papin later experimented with steam engines; however, it was not until 1711 that Thomas Newcomen produced a model that was of any practical use despite the great need for power. Mining, already well advanced, was held back by difficulties of drainage. In the Rohrerbuhel copper mines in the Tyrol, the Heiliger Geist shaft, at 2,900 feet (886 metres), remained the deepest in the world until 1872; a third of its labour force was employed in draining. Increases in productivity were generally found in those manufacturing activities where, as in the part-time production of linen in Silesia, the skills required were modest and the raw material could be produced locally.

Specialized manufacturing, evolving to meet the rising demand generated by the enrichment of the upper classes, showed significant growth. Wherever technical ingenuity was challenged by the needs of the market, results could be impressive. Printing was of seminal importance, since the advance of knowledge depended on it. Improvements in type molds and founding contributed to a threefold increase between 1600 and 1700 in the number of pages printed in a day. The Hollander, a pulverizing machine (c. 1670), could produce more pulp for paper than eight stamping mills. The connection between technical innovation and style is illustrated by improvements in glassmaking that made possible not only the casting of large sheets for mirrors but also, by 1700, the larger panes required for the sash windows that were replacing the leaded panes of casements. Venice lost its dominant position in the manufacture of glass as rulers set up works to save expensive imports. A new product sometimes followed a single discovery, as when the Saxons Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus and Johann Friedrich Böttger successfully imitated Chinese hard paste and created the porcelain of Meissen. A way of life could be affected by one invention. The pendulum clock of the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens introduced an age of reliable timekeeping. Clocks were produced in great numbers, and Geneva’s production of 5,000 timepieces a year was overtaken by 1680 by the clockmakers of both London and Paris. With groups of workers each responsible for a particular task, such as the making of wheels or the decoration of dials, specialization led to enhanced production, and in these elegant products of traditional craftsmanship the division of labour appeared. Absolutism Sovereigns and estates

Among European states of the High Renaissance, the republic of Venice provided the only important exception to princely rule. Following the court of Burgundy, where chivalric ideals vied with the self-indulgence of feast, joust, and hunt, Charles V, Francis I, and Henry VIII acted out the rites of kingship in sumptuous courts. Enormous Poland, particularly during the reign of Sigismund I (1506–48), and the miniature realms of Germany and Italy experienced the same type of regime and subscribed to the same enduring values that were to determine the principles of absolute monarchy. Appeal to God justified the valuable rights that the kings of France and Spain enjoyed over their churches and added sanction to hereditary right and constitutional authority. Henry VIII moved further when he broke with Rome and took to himself complete sovereignty.

Rebellion was always a threat. The skill of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) helped prevent England being torn apart by Roman Catholic and Puritan factions. Philip II (1555–98) failed to repress the continuing rebellion of what became a new state formed out of the northern Burgundian provinces. Neither Charles IX (1560–74) nor Henry III (1574–89) could stop the civil wars in which the Huguenots created an unassailable state within France. The failure of Maximilian I (1493–1519) to implement reforms had left the empire in poor shape to withstand the religious and political challenges of the Reformation. Such power as Charles V (1519–56) enjoyed in Germany was never enough to do more than contain schism within the bounds confirmed by the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555. Most of Hungary had been lost after the Turkish victory at Mohács in 1526. Imperial authority waned further under Maximilian II (1564–76) and Rudolf II (1576–1612). The terms of Augsburg were flouted as further church lands were secularized and Calvinism gained adherents, some in restless Bohemia. In these ways the stage was set for the subsequent wars and political developments.

With the tendency, characteristic of the Renaissance period, for sovereigns to enlarge their authority and assume new rights in justice and finance, went larger revenues, credit, and patronage. Princes fought with as little regard for economic consequences as their medieval precursors had shown. Ominously, the Italian wars had become part of a larger conflict, centring on the dynastic ambitions of the houses of Habsburg and Valois; similarly, the Reformation led to the formation of alliances whose objectives were not religious. The scale and expertise of diplomacy grew with the pretensions of sovereignty. The professional diplomat and permanent embassy, the regular soldier and standing army, served princes still generally free to act in their traditional spheres. But beyond them, in finance and government, what would be the balance of powers? From the answer to this question will come definition of the absolutism that is commonly seen as characteristic of the age.

The authority of a sovereign was exercised in a society of orders and corporations, each having duties and privileges. St. Paul’s image of the Christian body was not difficult for a 17th-century European to understand; the organic society was a commonplace of political debate. The orders, as represented in estates or diets, were, first, the clergy; second, the nobility (represented with the lords spiritual in the English House of Lords); and, third, commoners. There were variations: upper and lower nobles were sometimes divided; certain towns represented the Third Estate, as in the Castilian Cortes; in Sweden, uniquely, there was an estate of peasants, whose successful effort to maintain their privilege was one component of Queen Christina’s crisis of 1650. When, as in the 16th century, such institutions flourished, estates were held to represent not the whole population as individuals but the important elements—the “political nation.” Even then the nobility tended to dominate. Their claim to represent all who dwelled on their estates was sounder in law and popular understanding than may appear to those accustomed to the idea of individual political rights.

In the empire, the estates were influential because they controlled the purse. Wherever monarchy was weak in relation to local elites, the diet tended to be used to further their interests. The Cortes of Aragon maintained into the 17th century the virtual immunity from taxation that was a significant factor in Spanish weakness. The strength of the representative institution was proportionate to that of the crown, which depended largely on the conditions of accession. The elective principle might be preserved in form, as in the English coronation service, but generally it had withered as the principle of heredity had been established. Where a succession was disputed, as between branches of the house of Vasa in Sweden after 1595, the need to gain the support of the privileged classes usually led to concessions being made to the body that they controlled. In Poland, where monarchy was elective, the Sejm exercised such power that successive kings, bound by conditions imposed at accession, found it hard to muster forces to defend their frontiers. The constitution remained unshakable even during the reign of John Sobieski (1674–96), hero of the relief of Vienna, who failed to secure the succession of his son. Under the Saxon kings Augustus II (1697–1733) and Augustus III (1734–63), foreign interference led to civil wars, but repeated and factious exercise of the veto rendered abortive all attempts to reform. It required the threat—and in 1772, the reality—of partition to give Stanisław II August Poniatowski (1764–95) sufficient support to effect reforms, but this came too late to save Poland.

At the other extreme were the Russian zemsky sobor, which fulfilled a last service to the tsars in expressing the landowners’ demand for stricter laws after the disorders of 1648, and the Estates-General of France, where the size of the country meant that rulers preferred to deal with the smaller assemblies of provinces (pays d’états) lately incorporated into the realm, such as Languedoc and Brittany. They met regularly and had a permanent staff for raising taxes on property. With respect to the other provinces (pays d’élection), the crown had enjoyed the crucial advantage of an annual tax since 1439, when Charles VII successfully asserted the right to levy the personal taille without consent. When Richelieu tried to abolish one of the pays d’état, the Dauphiné, he met with resistance sufficient to deter him and successive ministers from tampering with this form of fiscal privilege. It survived until the Revolution: to ministers it was a deformity, to critics of the régime it provided at least one guarantee against arbitrary rule. The zemsky sobor had always been the creature of the ruler, characteristic of a society that knew nothing of fundamental laws or corporate rights. When it disappeared, the tsarist government was truly the despotism that the French feared but did not, except in particular cases, experience. When, in 1789, the Estates-General met for the first time since 1614, it abolished the privileged estates and corporations in the name of the freedom that they had claimed to protect. The age of natural human rights had dawned.