The Age of Religious Wars (1559 - 1715)

During the years covered in this volume, Europe experienced a tumultuous period of civil wars and rebellions. The common thread running through the upheavals was strife between adherents of the Catholic and Protestant churches. But in this new edition Richard S. Dunn shows that there were more lasting developments in Euro­pean history that can be traced to this period. It was an age that witnessed new centralization of political and economic power in the state—the rise of absolutism and the spread of the mercantilist doctrine. And it was a golden age of intellectual achievement climaxed by a great scientific revolution and a burst of creativity in the arts and literature.

By Richard S. Dunn

Professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Introduction

Symbol of a new era—the Protestant Archbishop Cranmer burned at the stake in 1556 by the Catholic Queen Mary of England. This woodcut is from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), the most popular English book—next to the Bible—for a century, and the Protestant counterpart to a Catholic Lives of the Saints.

DURING the century and a half between 1559 and 1715, Europe was in a nearly constant state of war. There were fewer than thirty years of inter­national peace, and more than a hundred years of major combat, in which all or most of the leading European states were simultaneously engaged. Warfare has of course been endemic throughout European history, but the fighting in these years had its distinctive features. For nearly a century, from 1559 to 1648, the common denominator was Protestant-Catholic religious strife. This confessional conflict was passionate and highly dis­ruptive. After the mid-seventeenth century, combat reverted to a more secular and orderly pattern. Thus our period marks the apogee and the decline of religious warfare in Europe.

The battles fought between Protestants and Catholics in the late six­teenth and early seventeenth centuries were tumultuous and anarchic because they characteristically took the form of civil war and rebellion. Luther had inaugurated the ideological controversy in 1517, but Luther was not a political activist. Confessional conflict intensified in the mid­ sixteenth century when a new breed of militant Protestant and Catholic champions came to the fore. The French civil wars of 1562-1598, the Dutch revolt against Philip II, the Scottish rebellion against Mary Stuart, the Spanish attack on England in 1588, the Thirty Years’ War in Ger­many between 1618 and 1648, and the Puritan Revolution of 1640-1660 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 in England were all religious conflicts, though of course they had other causes as well. This was an age of crusaders and martyrs, of plots and assassinations, of fanatic mobs and psalm-singing armies. The most militant crusaders proved to be the dis­ciples of John Calvin and of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The Calvinists gained control of Scotland and the Dutch republic, temporarily seized power in England, and tried to take over in France, Germany, Poland, and Hungary. The Catholics, revitalized in the mid-sixteenth century, kept try­ing until the late seventeenth century to restore the seamless unity of the Christian Church. In France, Flanders, Austria, and Bohemia, at least, they successfully suppressed Protestantism. Both sides in this extraordinary contest were able to attract a high percentage of articulate, prosperous, and socially powerful people into their ranks. Both sides gradually lost their crusading zeal.

After 1648, and particularly after 1689, religion was no longer the com­mon denominator—though it remained a disruptive factor—in European international conflict. The great wars that wracked western Europe from 1688 to 1713 and eastern Europe from 1683 to 1721 were larger in scale than the earlier civil wars and rebellions, but they were far less alarming to the established order, because they were managed from above by kings and generals rather than plotted from below by rebels and crusaders. The effect of these wars at the close of our period was to repudiate the con­fessional turmoil of 1559-1648 and to restore a more stable balance of power among the chief European states.

Such is the bald outline of the story that follows. But there is far more to it. The period from 1559 to 1715 is remembered for a wide array of political, economic, social, and intellectual developments, subject to sharply conflicting interpretations. Some historians label this period the age of absolutism; some call it the age of mercantilism; others focus on the growth of bourgeois enterprise or the rise of constitutional, representative government. For government, For intellectual historians, this is preeminently a time of scientific revolution; for art historians it is the era of the Baroque; for literary historians, the golden age of the drama. Social historians, on the other hand, are inclined to find the years between the Reformation and the Enlightenment a dark time of famine, plague, poverty, slavery, and belief in witchcraft. The diversity of opinion recalls the story of the blind men who encountered an elephant and disagreed about what they had found. But the analogy is faulty, for those who study early modern Europe are neither blind nor wrongheaded. Interpretations are necessarily diverse because sixteenth- and seventeenth-century developments were so richly complex. To make sense out of the events between 1559 and 1715, we must observe the continuous interaction between contradictory forces: confessional strife, political absolutism, bourgeois enterprise, mercantilist regulation, peasant malaise, cultural innovation, and social repression. We can then appreciate the way in which the age of religious wars left a permanent impress upon nearly every aspect of European life: on con­cepts of liberty and toleration, on party politics, the art of kingship, busi­ness enterprise, the social structure, science, philosophy, and the arts.

EUROPE IN 1559

What were the most distinctive features of European society in the mid-sixteenth century?

Examination of the map of Europe in 1559 shows a state system that looks partly familiar and partly strange to the modern eye. Politically, Europe was divided into three zones—western, central, and eastern—and this division remained a basic fact of political life for the next century or more. The section of the map showing the eastern zone, where the Otto­man Empire, Poland-Lithuania, and Muscovite Russia were the chief states, looks unfamiliar because the Polish-Russian border stood much farther eastward than it does today and the Ottoman Empire embraced all of the Balkans. The Ottoman Turks and the Muscovites were isolated from the rest of Europe by religion and culture, and the whole eastern region was hobbled by a primitive economy, thinly dispersed population, loose political organization (except for the Ottomans), and deep internal ethnic divisions. In the central zone, by contrast, the Italians and Germans had long been the business and cultural leaders of Europe. But events in the early sixteenth century had devastated the central European political structure. The Italian state system had been wrecked by French, Spanish, and German invaders between the 1490’s and the 1520’s, and the Holy Roman Empire had been paralyzed by civil war, lasting from 1520 In 1555 and unresolved by the Augsburg peace settlement of 1 555. The section of the map showing central Europe in 1559 looks especially sli.mp because the Holy Roman Empire incorporated what is now West and East Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and much of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Italy, as well as the Low Countries in the western zone. This empire was not a cohesive state; it consisted of three hundred separate political units, none of them very large, joined bv a system of alliances. Thus central Europe was politically particularistic and divided. In the western zone, however, the leading Atlantic states—Spain, France, and England—had gained notably in cohesion and power during the preceding century. The section of the map showing this region appears much as it does today, except that France’s eastern border is more circumscribed, and the Nether­lands have not yet been divided into modern Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg. By 1559 the Atlantic states had developed considerable na­tional identity; they were political units in which kings had sovereign authority over extensive, populous territories, with coherent linguistic or ethnic consciousness.

The significance of this three-zone division is that the political center of gravity lay in western Europe. Spain and France were the two most powerful states, by far, in 1559. And during the ensuing religious wars the English and the Dutch developed new political effectiveness, while the chief central and eastern empires and kingdoms remained disorganized and weak. Economically, too, the Atlantic states occupied the first rank. Their merchants were by far the most successful businessmen of the day, developing a prosperous and expanding commercial capitalist economy, while the older trade and industrial centers of Germany and Italy atrophied, and the agriculture of eastern Europe stagnated. Success in politics and economics was mirrored in artistic and intellectual expression; here too the Atlantic peoples became the cultural leaders of Europe. In­evitably, therefore, our focus must be on western Europe.

Even the most prosperous regions of western Europe were shackled in 1559 by primitive production techniques. There was far from enough wealth for all to share. In consequence, society was everywhere organized along profoundly undemocratic lines. The disparity between the upper and the lower classes, the propertied and the propertyless, was tremendous. At the top of the social scale, a small number of aristocratic landlords monopolized most of the political power, social privileges, and wealth. At the bottom of the social scale (the submerged six sevenths of the iceberg, so to speak), millions of peasants eked out a bare subsistence, excluded from schools, skilled jobs, property ownership, and creature comforts. Hut this hierarchical system was not immobile. In the populous cities and towns of western and central Europe, the merchants and lawyers competed with the landed elite for wealth and position, while the humbler shopkeepers and artisans scrabbled for smaller stakes. As we shall see in most of the Atlantic states these urban classes gained appreciably in num­bers and strength during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Germany and Italy they lost ground. In eastern Europe they remained inconsequential. But even in western Europe the social gulf between an upwardly mobile merchant and an established landed gentleman was very striking. A gentleman did not work. He had numerous servants to work for him. He spent his time at play, fighting, or hunting. He spent his money on ostentatious luxuries. Everything about his life style differed so radically from that of the lower orders that he seemed to represent a higher biological species. Since land was everywhere scarce and especially valuable, the gentleman landowner deliberately squandered part of his acreage on a deer park and pleasure gardens. And he sustained his privi­leged status by bequeathing hereditary titles and possessions to his children.

The hereditary hierarchical principle was equally conspicuous in politics. Aristocrats almost everywhere dominated the political scene and passed their power from generation to generation. In every large state, a divinely ordained prince, king, or emperor presided over the aristocratic establish­ment. In three monarchies—the Holy Roman Empire, the papacy, and Poland—the ruler was elected by lesser princes. Elsewhere, royal titles were hereditary—a species of property, to be conveyed by the reigning fam­ily from one generation to the next. Obviously this system did not guar­antee continuous talent: a strong king might be succeeded by his strong son, as happened in Spain in 1556; or an inept queen might be succeeded by her brilliant sister, as happened in England in 1558; or a mediocre king might be succeeded by his even feebler son, as happened in France in 1559.

There was also another significant political tendency, illustrated by the most prominent princely family of the day, the house of Habsburg. A conspicuous feature of the 1559 map is the extraordinarily diverse collec­tion of territories governed by the Habsburgs. Philip II, of the Spanish Habsburgs, was hereditary ruler of twelve separate European territories, several North African outposts, and a vast New World empire. His uncle Ferdinand I, of the Austrian Habsburgs, was hereditary ruler of thirteen territories, besides being the elected Holy Roman emperor. Between them, Philip and Ferdinand ruled possessions incorporated today into fourteen European and three North African nations. The Habsburgs were dynastic princes par excellence; they aimed at family power more than state power, and their style of rule inhibited national development. Col­lecting their princely titles like pearls on a necklace through inheritance, marriage, war, and diplomacy, they handled each possession independently, mainly through deputies. The other chief princely families—Valois, Guise, Bourbon, Orange, Tudor, Stuart, Wittelsbach, Hohenzollern, Vasa, and Romanov—followed the Habsburg model, pursuing dynastic ambitions and staging dynastic wars that often held no benefit for the peoples they ruled. In the political system of early modern Europe, there was constant unresolved tension between state building and family building.

The old familiar political problems were compounded by strange new religious problems. In the forty years since Martin Luther had launched his revolt, the people of western and central Europe had gradually arrayed themselves into warring Protestant and Catholic camps. Furthermore, the Protestants were themselves split into rival denominations—Lutheran, Calvinist, Zwinglian, Anabaptist, and Anglican—which were bitterly an­tagonistic toward one another. By 1559 the religious map was exceedingly confused. The Catholics had firm control of Portugal, Spain, and Italy; the Protestants had firm control of Scandinavia. Everywhere else, the struggle continued. The Catholics held the upper hand in France, Ireland, the Netherlands, southern Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, but faced a powerful Protestant challenge. The Protestants held the upper hand in England, Scotland, most of Germany, and Switzerland, but faced a powerful Catholic challenge. Fluid as the situation was, neither Prot­estants nor Catholics were in the least willing to compromise—or to coexist. Everyone agreed that religious toleration was intolerable. Every prince strove for religious uniformity, and insisted on the right to impose one particular interpretation of Christian faith upon every subject. But as we shall sec, convinced Protestants tended to rebel against their Catholic princes, and convinced Catholics against their Protestant princes.

Nor was this the only new problem. From the mid-sixteenth century on, most regions of Europe were buffeted by population pressure, rapid in­flation, and eroding living standards for the laboring poor. Overall, the population had been rising for the past century, so that by 1559 the catastrophic losses caused by the Black Death two hundred years earlier had finally been made up. The demographic expansion of 1460-1559 had stimulated agricultural expansion, industrial production, and commerce: there had been a century of general prosperity. But after 1559, the picture darkened. Population continued to climb, and with all available land under cultivation, peasants were forced to work smaller and smaller plots, while the landless were driven to seek work in the cities and towns. Un­employment increased, the supply of food fell behind the demand for it, the price of bread rose faster than the income of wage workers, and beg­gars proliferated. Those who lived close to the margin—the vast majority of the population—were terribly exposed to famine and plague. Famine struck with devastating effect whenever the harvest failed. The bubonic plague, endemic since the Black Death two centuries earlier, repeatedly thinned out the crowded urban slums. As we shall see, it was no accident that the great witchcraft hysteria, one of the most distinctive phenomena in the age of religious wars, began in the 1560’s. For 1 lie witch-hunters of the late sixteenth century were not merely intensely religious – preoccupied with heresy and sin, and fascinated by the Devil and by black magic. They also had a desperate need for scapegoats to meliorate the impact of social disasters for which they had no remedy: poverty, disease, crime, famine, plague, wartime carnage, and Revolutionary upheaval, all characteristic of the troubled society we are about to examine.

One final, ironic point. In a world full of dispute and uncertainly, there was at least one proposition that every sixteenth-century male, whether Catholic or Protestant, gentleman or peasant, could agree upon; this was the fixed inferiority of the female sex. Women were spiritually frail, physically passive, socially subordinate, economically dependent. Needless to say, they had no voice in politics. But in 1558-1561 three women assumed great political power. Elizabeth I became queen of England, Mary Stuart became queen of Scotland, and Catherine dc Medici became queen mother and effectual ruler of France. John Knox summed up the male reaction in his famous pamphlet, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). A fe­male ruling over men, said Knox, is repugnant to nature and contrary to God’s revealed will. In public affairs a woman’s sight is blindness, her counsel foolishness, and her judgment frenzy. Despite Knox’s fulminations, the three queens held center stage for the next thirty years. It was indeed a novel age!

Chapter 1

Calvinism Versus Catholicism in Western Europe

John Calvin. This woodcut shows the stern reformer in old age.

St. Ignatius of Loyola. Engraving by Vosterman. This portrait ro­manticizes Loyola somewhat, but catches his psychological intensity and robust zed.

Philip II. Painting by Coello. The king, true to his character, looks gravely dignified and is austerely dressed in black. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

The Escorial. Painting by an unknown artist. The isolated setting, huge bulk, gridiron design, and monastic severity of Philip II’s retreat are dearly shown. Standing in the center of the complex is the domed church.

The St. Bartholomew Massacre. By Francois Dubois d’Amiens. This gory Par­isian panorama shows the Catholics pushing Coligny out a win­dow and then (in the street below) flaying his corpse, while Guise displays the admiral’s severed head. Catherine de Medici inspects a pile of bodies. Other Huguenot victims are seen gibbeted, stabbed, clubbed, or float­ing in the Seine, while their more fortunate colleagues escape the city through a gate on the left bank. Museum Arland, Geneva.

The assassination of Henry, duke of Guise, in 1588. The pro-Guise artist shows the assassins drawing their weapons as they converge on the unsuspecting duke, stab him, and drag his body behind a tapestry as Henry III looks on.

The sea beggars capture Brielle, 1 572. This was the first coastal town taken by the Dutch rebels, who are shown using artillery, musketeers, and pikemen to break in at the town gate.

The Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I. The queen is shown as she liked to be portrayed, in fantastic cos­tume, standing on a map of her beloved England, impervious to thunder­storms. National Portrait Gallery, London.

The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. This con­temporary drawing shows (upper left) the queen en­tering the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle, and then (center) standing on the execution platform by the chopping block, attend­ed by her ladies and watch­ed by guards and neighbor­hood gentry.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada. An old English print showing the crescent­shaped Spanish fleet in flight and one struggling Spanish ship (lower left) being hunted down. The English ships display the red cross of St. George on their ensigns. The Spanish oared galley (lower right) was better suited to the Medi­terranean than the Atlantic.

The Surrender of Breda. This famous painting by Velazquez celebrates one of Spain’s few seventeenth-century victories. In 1625, after an eight-month siege, a Spanish army took the Dutch frontier town of Breda. In 1637, shortly after Velazquez commemorated this triumph, the Dutch recaptured Breda. Museo del Prado, Barcelona.

In the spring of 1559, envoys from Philip II of Spain and Henry II of France met on neutral ground in the bishop’s palace at Cateau-Cambresis, a little town on the French-Netherlands border, to arrange a peace treaty between their respective masters. Philip and Henry were the two strongest princes in Europe, but they both needed peace. Their rival dynastic houses, the Habsburgs and the Valois, had been dueling inconclusively for half a century, and their treasuries were exhausted. Furthermore, the Catholic King of Spain and the Most Christian King of France had a common enemy to deal with. The Protestant heresy was spreading from central Europe into Spanish and French territory, and Philip and Henry were determined to stamp it out. Accordingly, the diplomats at Cateau-Cambresis worked out a peace settlement which could be expected to last for many years. The French abandoned their efforts to wrest Italy and the Low Countries from Spain; the Spaniards abandoned their efforts to dismember France. The Peace of Cateau-Cambresis was more a Habsburg than a Valois victory, since France remained encircled by Habsburg territory. But Valois France in 1559 was rich, populous, and powerful. Surely this settlement was mutually advanta­geous to Philip and Henry. The reconciled Habsburg and Valois monarchs would now be able to crush Protestantism within their territories and join forces to restore the seamless unity of the Christian Church.

But to their surprise and dismay, the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis ushered in a strange new era of civil wars and rebellions which the Habsburg and Valois kings were quite unable to cope with. The religious conflict which had racked central Europe from 1517 to 1555 moved with a new revolutionary force into western Europe between 1560 and 1600. In Germany the fighting had come to a temporary halt. The truce between the Protestants and the Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire, established in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg, lasted into the early seventeenth century. But in western Europe, Dutch Calvinists rebelled against Spanish Habsburg control of the Netherlands, while French Calvinists, or Huguenots, rebelled against the Valois monarchy and plunged France into forty years of civil war. At the same time in England and Scotland, Calvinists, Catholics, and Anglicans were vying for political mastery. In essence, western Europe became a giant battleground fought over by two crusading armies, Calvinist and Catholic.

The Calvinists employed the dogma and discipline of Geneva to challenge the political status quo in France, the Low Countries, and the British Isles. They proved to be effective rebels, for though few in number, they were drawn .chiefly from the upper and middle classes, and were zealous and self-assured. The Catholics, led by Philip II, employed all the resources of the mighty Spanish empire to crush the’ French Huguenots and restore Britain and the Netherlands to Rome. Calvinists and Catholics alike can be labeled “conservative” in the sense that they clung to the traditional medi­eval belief that no diversity could be tolerated within Christendom. There was just one interpretation of God’s commands, just one road to salvation; only by vanquishing the forces of Satan could Christ’s rule on earth be achieved. Yet what gave the Calvinists and Catholics such dynamic power was their active involvement in the world. Both sides recognized the new secular forces which were transforming western civilization—overseas expan­sion to Asia and America, commercial capitalism, dynastic rivalry, national­ism, and state sovereignty—and they harnessed these forces to the service of God. The Calvinist-Catholic struggle was in one sense the last medieval crusade, in another the first modern war between nation-states. Nothing like it has ever been seen before or since.

RELIGION AND POLITICS

From the day Martin Luther first posted his ninety-five theses in 1517, the religious controversy between Protestants and Catholics was embroiled in politics. This was inevitable. The spiritual crisis affected men’s attitudes toward this world as well as the next. The Church possessed vast political and economic resources, and when the Protestants repudiated the basic doctrinal tenets of Rome, they necessarily also attacked the Church’s exist­ing institutional fabric. Protestant and Catholic reformers alike looked to the secular authorities for help, and kings and princes gained political and economic advantage from participating in the conflict.

At mid-century, subtle—but crucial—religious and political changes took place. With the death of John Calvin in 1564, the initial creative work of the Protestant reformers was completed. Correspondingly, with the death of St. Ignatius of Loyola in 1556, and the termination of the Council of Trent in 1563, the Catholic internal reform program was fully spelled out. The ideological battle lines became frozen. But as the Protestants and Catholics lost their initial spiritual creativity, they developed a new political creativity.

The Protestants and Catholics of the late sixteenth century quarreled over predetermined issues. The central spiritual and intellectual questions had all been explored, debated, and formulated between 1517 and 1564. No Protestant theologian remotely comparable to Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin emoted during the second half of the century. The Protestants had long since fragmented into a spectrum of mutually jealous churches and sects, each with its well-defined doctrinal, ritualistic, and institutional idiosyncrasies. ()n the Catholic side, the cumulative effect of the internal reform program launched in the 1 530’s had been to stiffen resistance to all major Protestant tenets. The Council of Trent had declared that every existing Catholic ritual or practice was spiritually efficacious. Far from decentralizing the Church, the Trentine reforms magnified the hierarchical authority of pope, cardinals, and bishops. The Jesuits, most effective of the new reforming orders, took a special vow of obedience to the pope. The Roman Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books helped to protect the faithful from Protestant propa­ganda, just as the Consistory in Geneva shielded orthodox Calvinists from wicked external influences. After 1560, Protestants and Catholics had no interest in spiritual or intellectual reconciliation, and had nothing fresh to say to each other. Each side sought to convert the other by sheer brute force.

If the religious dimension of the quarrel became frozen, the political dimension was in a state of flux. In the early days, particularly between the 1520’s and the 1550’s, the kings and princes of central and western Europe had been able to shape and stage-manage the Protestant-Catholic conflict to a very great degree. The German princes who protected Luther from the pope and the emperor had embraced the new religion with possessive enthusiasm. The national Protestant churches of Sweden, Denmark, and England, established in the 1520’s and 1530’s, had all been founded by kings who eagerly assumed most of the perquisites they stripped from the pope. “The Reformation maintained itself wherever the lay power (prince or magistrates) favoured it; it could not survive where the authorities decided to suppress it.” Even the Catholic rulers had profited from the crisis up to the mid-sixteenth century. The German Catholic princes, the Habsburgs in Spain, and the Valois in France all had exacted papal concessions which tightened their hold over their territorial churches. They were very suspi­cious of any revival of papal power. Charles V’s soldiers sacked Rome, not Wittenberg, in 1527, and when the papacy belatedly sponsored a reform program, both the Habsburgs and the Valois refused to endorse much of it, rejecting especially, those Trentine decrees which encroached on their sovereign authority. In refusing to cooperate with Rome, the Catholic princes checked papal ambitions to restore the Church’s medieval political power. By patronizing the Protestant reformers, the Protestant princes made sure that their reforms did not go too far.

After 1560 the rulers of western Europe were no longer able to blunt the revolutionary force of the religious crisis. Both Calvinists and militant Catholics began to rebel against the political status quo. They organized effective opposition against rulers who did not share their religious convic­tions. In the name of God they launched a wave of civil wars and rebellions against constituted authority. Mary, Queen of Scots, lost her throne and her life. Catherine de Medici of France got caught between Huguenot and ultra-Catholic crusaders. Under her management, the Valois dynasty col­lapsed and the French central government crumbled. Philip II of Spain was a far more heroic figure than Mary or Catherine, and was the prime champion of the Church among sixteenth-century princes. His motives were mixed, for he hoped to extend his dynastic power by crushing the heretics, but at the same time, no other political leader risked so much for his faith. He risked too much, as events proved, and instead of gaining territory, he lost some. He provoked a Calvinist rebellion in the Netherlands which could not be suppressed; his intervention in the French religious wars backfired; and he failed to conquer Protestant England. It is instructive that the two western European rulers who best survived the religious crisis behaved much more circumspectly than Philip. Both Elizabeth I of England and Henry IV of France pursued policies of moderation and compromise which eventually disarmed their Calvinist and Catholic critics. But even Elizabeth and Henry were thrown on the defensive most of the time.

The Calvinists, who caused so much trouble to these princes, were never very numerous. Calvin himself had had a restricted base of operations: his little city-state of Geneva on the French border of Switzerland had only thirteen thousand inhabitants. But Calvin’s teachings and his Presbyterian church structure proved to be highly exportable to larger centers of population and power. Before lie died in 1564, he had gained an elite following in France, the Netherlands, Scotland, and England. The movement attracted recruits from the privileged classes: noblemen, landowners, merchants, and lawyers. Persons from the unprivileged classes, peasants and urban wage laborers, were less likely to join. Today Calvinism has the reputation of being a misanthropic, repressive creed. How could it win such aristocratic and prosperous adherents, let alone fire up a crusade? The best answer, perhaps, is that it offered a harsh but immensely exhilarating challenge. One had to accept Calvin’s concept of God’s absolute and all-pervading power and of Man’s utter depravity, which renders him incapable of fulfilling God’s law as revealed in the Bible. One had also to believe that God chooses to save some few persons, not on their merits (they have none), but solely by His grace. The person who accepted these premises, who abased himself before God’s will and experienced God’s irresistible grace, knew that he was among the predestinated “elect” or “saints,” the only true Christians. As Calvin himself explained, “when that light of divine providence has once shone upon a godly man, he is then relieved and set free not only from the extreme anxiety and fear that were pressing him before, but from every care.”² Despite Calvin’s stress on human worthlessness, his church was an exclusive brother­hood which separated the saints from the sinners, the wheat from the chaff. Far from being fatalistic, the saints were intensely active.

It has been recently argued that the sixteenth-century Calvinists organized themselves into the first modern radical political party, analogous to the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks in more recent revolutionary times.³ Of course, their chief goal was to reach the next world, not to remake this one. Yet the saints felt stifled by their unregenerate neighbors, and supposed that God wished them to master and reconstruct their corrupt environment. Their fellowship was bound to be socially and politically disruptive, for Calvinism was a total way of life. Their social model was Geneva: a homogeneous little city, rigidly self-disciplined, zealously self-righteous, and independent of any external authority. When Calvin’s disciples began proselytizing in large and complex states like France, the Netherlands, and England, they gathered the saints into communities of Genevan purity and Genevan self-sufficiency. In France, for example, the Huguenots established congregations on the Gene van model, with pastors who preached and administered the Lord’s Supper, teachers who educated the young, deacons who looked after the poor and unemployed, and ciders who watched for immorality and disorder. The Huguenots united these congregations under a countrywide discipline, with local consistories and a national synod of the chief clergy and laymen. Every member of a Calvinist congregation swore to obey and help enforce God’s law, and this covenant, or contract, to which all agreed, easily came to serve as a kind of constitution binding the Calvinists in a political or military confederation against their worldly enemies. Armed with the Genevan virtues of asceticism, industry, practical education, and moral responsibility, these people were hard to suppress or silence.

Calvin himself always preached obedience to the Christian prince. But in 1558, as we have seen in the Introduction, John Knox (1505-1572), the leading Scottish Calvinist, denounced female rulers in his First Blast of the Trumpet. Elizabeth I took great offense at this pamphlet, and was not mollified when Knox lamely explained to her that he objected only to Catholic queens. By the 1570’s the Huguenots in France had moved well beyond Knox’s position, and were arguing that resistance to tyrants, male or female, was divinely ordained. This sentiment was very attractive to the great noblemen within the Calvinist movement, who hoped by rebelling against their tyrannical kings to undermine monarchical government and restore the good old days of feudal decentralization. But significantly, many Calvinists were professional and business men or small landowners, tra­ditional proponents of strong kingship and effective central government. These men from the middle ranks were by no means trying to turn back the clock and weaken the national sovereign power of the western European states. Quite the contrary. But they refused to tolerate ungodly kings and magistrates, and they were prepared to fight for the right to participate in or even control the state.

On the Catholic side, the Society of Jesus, an order of priests founded in 1540 by St. Ignatius of Loyola, was almost equally disruptive. Calvin spoke contemptuously of “the Jesuits and like dregs,” but the resemblance between Calvinist and Jesuit is a fascinating one. Working from diametrically oppo­site religious principles, Loyola and Calvin each built a select, cohesive, extroverted band of zealots. St. Ignatius devised a systematic emotional and intellectual discipline for the members of his society, and a highly autocratic, semimilitaristic organization, directly responsible to the pope. There were a thousand Jesuits by the time of Loyola’s death in 1556, and sixteen thousand by 1624. But their influence far transcended their numbers. They established hundreds of schools to teach boys, especially upper-class boys, how to define and defend the authoritative dogmas of the Church. They excelled as preachers, and in order to engage the secular authorities in the counterattack on heresy, they made a specialty of serving as confessors to Catholic princes. Jesuit militance, autonomy, and busy intervention in all phases of Church work aroused deep hostility among many Catholics. To the Protestants, “Jesuitical” meant the same thing as “Machiavellian,” a curse word for the crafty intrigues and immoral tactics sponsored by these devilish priests.

The role of the Jesuits was of particular importance because they were supporters of papal supremacy. The late sixteenth-century popes, though able and energetic men, could exert little direct pressure on the Catholic rulers of western Europe. But the Jesuits, through their schools and confes­sionals, exercised considerable indirect influence. Jesuit confessors excelled at casuistry, the art of resolving difficult cases of conscience. The Protestants liked to believe that they winked at evil conduct, that their credo was, the end justifies the means. In fact, the Jesuits were successful at persuading others to fight for the Church because they fought so courageously them selves. Jesuit missionaries fearlessly penetrated into Protestant England and hatched a series of plots to depose Queen Elizabeth. Jesuit pamphleteers in France boldly called for the assassination of the lukewarm Catholic Henry III and the Huguenot Henry IV. Despite these inflammatory proceedings, the Jesuits had a generally conservative concept of the social order. Cardinal Bellarmine (1542-1621), the most eminent Jesuit writer in the late six teenth century, presented a nostalgic view of the Christian commonwealth presided over by the pope. But Bellarmine, like the Calvinists, was no friend to absolute monarchy. In his view, heretical princes were liable to deposition, and even Catholic secular authority was distinctly limited.

The Protestant rebellions and Catholic assassinations of the late sixteenth century forced the proponents of strong monarchy to develop counter arguments which would bolster the prince’s absolute sovereign power and make attacks upon him sacrilegious as well as treasonable. The political theory of the past was of little use on this point. Medieval theorists had generally denied that princely power was absolute, and the Renaissance theorists, like Machiavelli, who placed the prince above the law were too nakedly secular to suit the religious tastes of the late sixteenth century. It was necessary to devise a new quasi-religious doctrine of absolutism in order to answer the Jesuits and the Calvinists. The doctrine which resulted is known as the divine-right theory of kingship. According to this theory, God appoints the secular sovereign as His earthly lieutenant and invests him with absolute power over his subjects. The king has no obligation to obey the laws and customs of his state. He is answerable to God alone. Even if he rules tyrannically, he is still God’s lieutenant, for God has placed him on the throne to punish the people’s sins, and their only recourse is to pray for mercy. The subject has no right to rebel against his anointed king under any circumstances. This divine-right theory, absurd as it seems today, was very comforting during the religious wars to devout people who craved peace and order. It was eagerly adopted by Catholic and Protestant rulers alike, James I of England preached it; the French kings from Henry IV to Louis XIV practiced it. So did their Habsburg rivals, and most other seventeenth- century princes.

In the years of religious conflict and political upheaval between 1559 and 1689, politicians of every stripe invoked God’s will to suit their particular purposes. The aristocratic and bourgeois Calvinists found divine sanction for rebellion, constitutionalism, and limited government. The Jesuits found divine sanction for the deposition of heretical rulers and a return to papal suzerainty. The secular princes found divine sanction for absolute monarchy. Radicals found divine sanction even for republicanism, democracy, and communism. Such were the effects of religion on politics, and of politics on religion.

SPAIN UNDER PHILIP II                           

The sixteenth century was Spain’s time of power and glory. Four great rulers shaped its destiny. Ferdinand (king of Aragon, 1479-1516) and his wife Isabella (queen of Castile, 1474-1504) were the founders of modern Spain. Their grandson Charles I (ruled 1516-1556), better known by his German imperial title of Charles V, was the mightiest European prince in the early sixteenth century. His son Philip II (ruled 1556-1598) was the mightiest European prince in the late sixteenth century.

Under Ferdinand and Isabella, the crowns of Castile and Aragon were joined, the Spanish conquered Moorish Granada, and Columbus discovered America. Under Charles V, the conquistadores mastered the Aztecs and Incas and began to mine Peruvian and Mexican silver, while Spanish armies drove the French out of Italy and won a reputation as the best soldiers in Europe. During his forty-year reign, Charles was able to spend only sixteen years in Spain, because of his manifold obligations in Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries. But his paternalistic style of rule suited the Spam.ml ., and kept them internally peaceful and stable. In 1556 he bequeathed lo his son Philip the western half of his immense Habsburg patrimony: the Spanish kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre; the Balearic Islands; several North African outposts; Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, and Milan; the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Franche-Comte; and overseas, Mexico, Florida Central America, the West Indies, the entire coast of South America except for Brazil (held by Portugal) and lower Chile and Argentina (left lo the Indians), as well as the Philippine Islands and numerous smaller Pacific islands. Philip II was really fortunate not to inherit the eastern Habsburg lands—Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary—and the Habsburg claims to the Holy Roman imperial title, which Charles passed to the Austrian branch of the family. Though Philip’s domain was scarcely unified, it was much more manageable than his father’s had been. It was a Spanish empire, centered in Madrid, politically absolute, fervently Catholic, shielded by unbeatable armies, and fed by an apparently boundless supply of American bullion which Philip’s European rivals bitterly envied.

Sixteenth-century Spain was far from being a unified nation. Philip II was king of three distinct Spanish states—Castile, Aragon, and Navarre—each with its own separate institutions, customs, language, and culture. Philip governed each state independently, but he concentrated his attention on Castile, the biggest, richest, and most populous of them. Castile had about seven million inhabitants; Aragon and Navarre together had little more than one million. Furthermore, Castile was much easier to govern. The Castilian upper nobility were immensely rich and socially powerful, but politically harmless. The crown exempted the great magnates from taxation, and recognized their huge property holdings, and in exchange they refrained from contesting royal political authority. The lower nobility, or hidalgos, also exempted from taxation, were useful servants to the crown. Philip II’s corregidores, royal officials who inspected and regulated the conduct of the sixty-six principal Castilian town councils, were drawn from the hidalgo class. The Castilian Cortes, or parliamentary assembly, was very weak. Only eighteen towns sent representatives, and the nobility and clergy were ex­cluded. Philip summoned this body often, whenever he wished it to levy taxes, but did not permit the deputies to share in legislation. In Aragon, on the other hand, the nobility exercised considerable political power, and the Cortes was more independent. Philip let the Aragonese nobility alone, summoned the Aragonese Cortes rarely, and avoided asking for money. Little money could be squeezed out of Aragon in any case. Nor could Philip’s Italian subjects supply much revenue; and his subjects in the Low Countries refused to contribute. The king depended heavily on silver from America, but the brunt of Philip’s imperial administration was borne by the impoverished Castilian peasantry.

The sprawling Spanish empire was held together at the top by a remark­ably centralized bureaucracy. The king sent viceroys, generally great Castilian noblemen, to govern his distant territories, serving as his alter ego. Each viceroy reported to a supervisory council in Madrid: the Council of Italy, the Council of Flanders, or the Council of the Indies. Each council was staffed by six to ten professional civil servants (again mostly Castilians) vested by the king with sweeping jurisdiction over the executive, judicial, and religious affairs of their particular territory. There was also a Council of Castile, a Council of Aragon, and councils to handle matters of state, war, finance, and the Inquisition. The king himself seldom attended any of these council sessions, but he reviewed all council decisions and often reversed them. He alone had total information—or as total as the flood of dispatches, petitions, and memoranda from all parts of his domain would permit—on every aspect of affairs. Outsiders joked about the Spanish government’s grave and stately pace of operations, and it is true that Philip’s elaborate system of bureau­cratic checks and balances prevented quick decisions. But by playing his ministers and councillors off against one another, the king reduced the pos­sibilities for bribery and corruption, and also preserved his personal power. As far as any one man could be, Philip II was master of his empire.

He was certainly master of Italy, though he never visited his domains there after becoming king of Spain. Philip controlled half of the peninsula directly, and most of the other Italian states indirectly. Spanish garrisons in Milan, Naples, and Sicily kept order; the sole large-scale disturbance during his reign—a Neapolitan insurrection in 1585—was easily contained. ’ The Spaniards, it was said, nibbled in Sicily, ate in Naples, and devoured in Milan. From Philip’s perspective, Milan offered the best fare. This duchy, a major manufacturing center, was the strategic pivot in his far- flung military defense system and a key recruiting ground for troops to serve in Mediterranean or northern campaigns. Naples and Sicily, which were agrarian, were much poorer, without significant trade or exports. Hence Philip paid more attention to Milan than to his south Italian possessions. In all three places the Spaniards introduced few changes in local government, ruled in partnership with the local landed nobility, and enrolled the local peasantry for Mediterranean campaigns against the Turks. Beyond his own territories, Philip built political alliances with the dukes of Savoy and Tuscany, and a business alliance with the merchants of Genoa. In Rome, the nine pontiffs who ruled successively during Philip’s reign included some very able men who did all they could to re­build papal power—and incurred Philip’s hostility in the process. But these popes seldom dared to challenge the Spanish king directly. Only the Venetian republic maintained an independent course, and its status was slipping; in 1571 Venice lost the island colony of Cyprus to the Turks.

Though Spanish rule was not really burdensome, it had a generally blighting effect on Italian life. Philip’s policies did little or nothing to remedy the twin Italian disasters of the early sixteenth century: the political collapse of all the chief city-states save Venice, and the shill in trade routes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. For the Genoese, however, partnership with the Spanish king was profitable, since they managed the trade between Italy and Spain and became Philip’s principal bankers. The sumptuous palaces of the Genoese nobility were mostly built during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In Venice there was still great wealth and culture, but as the traditional spice trade slumped, the Venetian capitalists began to withdraw much of their money from risky foreign ventures in order to invest it in safe farm­land. Rome remained a mecca for pilgrims, artists, and fashionable tour­ists. The popes, most particularly Sixtus V (ruled 1585-1590), celebrated the Catholic reformation in stone and mortar by refurbishing their city on a heroic scale. The basilica of St. Peter’s, finished in the early seven­teenth century, was the largest and most majestic church in Christendom. But the traveller who ventured a few miles outside the Eternal City found the countryside infested with bandits. Florence under the Medici dukes of Tuscany had sadly lost most of its magnificent creativity, though life for the upper classes remained sophisticated and gallant. With eleven million inhabitants, Italy was a densely populated region, almost half again as populous as Spain. Five of the twelve European cities with populations of more than 100,000 in the late sixteenth century were Italian. But these cities lacked the business vitality of the Atlantic entrepreneurial centers. Politically and economically, Italy had lost its central importance in European life.

Looking westward, Philip II’s management of his New World colonies demonstrates again the powerful reach of Spanish royal government. Only a generation before he came to power, a band of tough and resourceful conquistadores led by Hernando Cortes (1485-1547) and Francisco Pizarro (c. 1470-1541) had conquered Mexico and Peru, acquired personal for­tunes, and harnessed millions of docile Indians to work for them. But Charles V and Philip II managed to prevent the conquistadores and suc­ceeding Spanish colonists from developing political autonomy, carving up the country into giant feudal estates, or crippling royal power in America. To control the colonists, the crown sent out Castilian grandees as viceroys of Peru and New Spain (Mexico). Lest they grow too strong, the crown encouraged the audiencias, or courts of justice, in the colonies to challenge the authority of the viceroys. Back in Madrid, the Council of the Indies kept tabs on both the viceroys and the audiencias. The Church, in part­nership with the crown, protected the Indians from total enslavement by the colonists. The crown received one fifth of the bullion mined in America, and earned this royalty by protecting the treasure fleets from attack by French, English, and Dutch marauders. Philip II’s military power kept his North Atlantic rivals from establishing permanent colonies in the Indies until after 1600. Sir Francis Drake could raid the Caribbean audaciously in the 1 570’s, when lie caught the Spaniards by surprise, but in 1595 he was beaten off Puerto Rico and Panama; Spanish fortifications there were now too strong for him. No Spanish treasure fleet was captured until 1628.

The Spanish government insisted on closing its colonies to outside settlers or traders. Charles V had wanted to open the Indies to any inhabitant of his Habsburg domain, but this policy was speedily reversed. Castilians insisted that America—discovered by a Genoese—was their monopoly. All American commerce had to be funneled through the single Castilian port of Seville, where it was closely supervised by royal officials in the Casa de Contratacion (“House of Trade”). Every merchant ship in the American fleet had to be licensed by the Casa. All incoming and outgoing cargo was registered with Casa officials, whose most important job was to receive and distribute the incoming silver and gold. Not only Italian or Flemish merchants but also Catalan merchants, from eastern Spain, were denied licenses to trade. Moors and Jews, so unwelcome in Spain that a half million or more were expelled from the Iberian peninsula between 1492 and 1609, found themselves rigorously excluded from asylum in America.

Spain’s great weakness, which Philip II did nothing to correct, was its lopsided economy. The country was, as it still is, mountainous, barren, and parched. With a rapid rise in population during the sixteenth century, Spain did not produce enough grain to feed its people and had to import wheat from the Mediterranean and Baltic areas. The nobility, who owned almost all the land, preferred raising sheep to cultivating crops, and merino wool was Spain’s chief export. The Spanish exported raw wool to Flanders at a low price and imported finished Flemish cloth at a high price, giving Flemish entrepreneurs most of the profit. There were no industries to speak of in sixteenth-century Spain; most manufactured goods had to be imported. The Castilians had always valued business well below fighting and praying, and much of their commerce and banking was handled by outsiders. Within Philip’s empire there were three principal trade routes: between Spain and Italy, between Spain and the Low Countries, and between Spain and the Americas. The first route was dominated by the Genoese and the second by Netherlanders; only the American trade was a closed Castilian preserve, and even here, much of the cargo shipped to America was non Spanish in origin. In the late sixteenth century, as many as two hundred ships a year sailed between Seville and the Americas, making this far and away the busiest single route of European overseas commerce. Bullion shipments into Seville reached their peak between 1580 and 1620 In 1594, silver and gold accounted for 96 percent of the value of American exports to Spain. Unfortunately for the Spaniards, little of this treasure stayed in Spain. Because of the deficiencies in the Spanish economy, it had to be paid out to foreign farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and bankers.

Philip II’s military power was handicapped by Spain’s unbalanced eco­nomic and social structure. He could not raise enough money to pay for his large standing armies and his elaborate military campaigns. Throughout his reign the royal exchequer was in a virtual state of bankruptcy. Philip inherited large debts from his father, and when he suspended payment to his creditors in 1557 and again in 1575, he found it harder than ever to float new loans. He was unable to tap the wealth of his richest Spanish subjects, for the members of the nobility were exempt from taxes. Three hundred magnates owned more than half the land in Castile, and the rent-rolls of the thirteen Castilian dukes and thirteen marquises totaled nearly a million ducats a year—more than the king’s annual share of American bullion until the 1580’s. But this money was untouchable. Nor could Philip squeeze much from the Spanish merchant and professional class, which was notably smaller than that of other western European states. The only class which he could and did tax with impunity was the one least able to pay, the impoverished peasantry. In addition, of course, he spent his American silver as fast as it came in and even mortgaged future treasure shipments. But Philip’s soldiers consumed all the American bullion and all the peasant taxes that could be scraped together. When their pay still fell into arrears, they mutinied and rioted uncontrollably. An unpaid army is worse than no army at all, as Philip found to his cost.

The Spanish ardor for fighting and praying had an old-fashioned flavor, being still largely directed against the traditional Moorish enemy. One of Philip IPs major taxes was the cruzada, or crusade subsidy, authorized by the papacy to encourage continued Spanish warfare against Islam. Spaniards could not understand the general Catholic agitation for ecclesiastical reform, since the Spanish church had experienced its own reform movement in the fifteenth century, well before Luther. The Spanish Inquisition, dating from 1478, had been designed to root out heresy among converted Moslems and Jews. These conversos were generally hated and feared, and by the time of Philip II a racist campaign had been launched to bar anyone from public office whose blood was impure. The Inquisition was the one institution common to Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, and once the Protestant revolt broke out, the inquisitors went to extraordinary lengths to keep the new heresy out of Spain. Anyone deviating in the slightest particular from Catholic orthodoxy was branded a Lutheran by the Holy Office, subjected to torture and secret trial, and if found guilty and obdurate, handed over to the secular authorities for public execution at an auto-da-fe. Erasmus’ supporters in Spain were hounded into silence. St. Ignatius of Loyola was twice imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition on suspicion of heresy. Even the archbishop of Toledo, the primate of Spain, was held prisoner by his enemies in the Inquisition from 1559 to 1576 on trumped-up heresy charges. 1 )cspilc this repressive atmosphere, two late sixteenth-century Spanish mystics, Si Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and St. John of the Cross (1542 1591), sparked a new ardor well illustrated in the rapturous paintings of El Greco (c. 1548-1614). Spanish rapture did not extend to the papacy. Relations between Madrid and Rome were continually strained. Like every other prince of his day, Philip was jealous of outside interference with his territo­rial church, and besides, “in his heart he considered religion too serious a matter to be left to the Pope.”

What sort of man was Philip II? He was outwardly retiring and reserved, yet inwardly secure in his Catholic faith and his royal majesty. He was slim, sober, and dyspeptic in appearance, spoke slowly and softly, rarely smiled, was bookish and artistic rather than athletic, and was happiest when at his desk reading memoranda. He never personally led his troops on the bat­tlefield. He disliked traveling or mingling with people, and after 1559 he never left the Iberian peninsula. But he avidly absorbed all the data his officials could collect. He was a file clerk on a heroic scale. Every day he sifted through masses of papers, many of them ludicrously trivial, and wrote voluminous marginal comments, sometimes correcting errors of grammar and spelling. The king, as some of his subjects complained, tried to govern the world from a chair. He deeply venerated his father, but he had none of Charles’s cosmopolitan and ecumenical temper.

Philip II bore more than his share of private sorrows. He outlived four wives, all married for dynastic expediency, as illustrated by the fact that at the age of twenty-seven he chose a bride of thirty-eight, and when she died he married at the age of thirty-two a girl of thirteen. Six of his nine children died young. His first son, Don Carlos (1545-1568), was physically deformed and mentally unbalanced. Don Carlos passionately hated his father, and when the Dutch rebellion began, he tried to escape to the Netherlands to join the rebels. One night in 1568 the king broke into his son’s bedchamber with a party of councillors, seized the startled prince’s weapons and papers, and placed him under armed guard. Philip never saw Don Carlos again. Six months later, the prince died mysteriously, most likely a suicide. Philip’s enemies to the north were scandalized by this episode. They called the king a cruel and secretive murderer. Ever since, Anglo-Saxon Protestant historians have generally pictured Philip in very dark colors. Spaniards, on the other hand, affectionately remember him as their Prudent King and prize his dignified, methodical, and conscientious statecraft. The Spanish view is obviously closer to the truth, yet Philip’s crusade against Protestantism turned out to be far from prudent.

Philip II established his court at Madrid, in the center of Spain. But he craved a solitary retreat where he could escape from the elaborate court ceremonial and the tiresome audiences with suppliants and envoys. So he built the Escorial, a vast gray granite structure rising out of the bleak foothills of the sierras north of Madrid. The building, which took twenty years to construct, perfectly expresses Philip’s taste and temper. Behind its severe facade one finds a combination of palace, church, tomb, and monas­tery. It is laid out in the shape of the gridiron on which the king’s patron saint, Lawrence, was supposedly toasted alive. Under the great dome of the church—one of the first copies of St. Peter’s in Rome—the king buried various members of his family and prepared his own grave. He found peace and privacy by going into retreat with the cloistered monks he installed in one section of the building. There are splendid public chambers in the Escorial, and a fine library and picture gallery. But Philip’s favorite place was a meanly furnished little room from whose window he could peep out at the high altar of his church while Mass was being sung.

Despite his love of solitude and circumspection, the Prudent King was driven by his zeal and by the military strength at his disposal to play a strong hand in international affairs. The first half of his reign was dominated by warfare in the Mediterranean against Islam, the second half by warfare in the North Atlantic against the Protestants. On the Mediterranean front, Philip

did very well. Here he sent his army and navy against the traditional Mohammedan foe. When the Moors in Granada rose in rebellion in I SM(, royal troops crushed the revolt and forced 150,000 Moorish prisoner, In resettle in other parts of Spain. Philip fought an inconclusive series of engagements against the Barbary pirates of North Africa. He could not slop their raids against the Spanish coast and Spanish shipping, but lie did strengthen Spanish naval protection for commerce in the eastern Mediterranean. Behind the Barbary pirates stood the mighty Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Empire, like the Spanish, was at its peak in the early years of Philip’s reign. The Turks occupied three quarters of the Mediterranean shoreline, from the Adriatic to Algeria, and they were still on the move. They almost took Malta in 1565 and did take Cyprus in 1571. To save the situation, Philip joined Venice and the papacy in a Holy League against the terrible Turk.

In October, 1571, a fleet of three hundred ships and eighty thousand sailors and soldiers (predominantly Spanish) sailed into the Gulf of Lepanto off the Greek coast to fight an Ottoman navy which had even more ships and men. The Battle of Lepanto was the biggest naval battle of the century, a showdown between Europe’s western and eastern giants. Both fleets con­sisted of galleys propelled by oarsmen, and they fought in the old-fashioned close-range style, the men of each galley trying to ram, grapple, and board an enemy ship. When the Christian fleet closed for action, a crucifix was displayed in every galley, and all the warriors knelt in adoration as the Turks came up screaming and trumpeting. After a few hours of ferocious hand-to- hand combat, the Turkish fleet was annihilated. Three quarters of the Turkish ships, with their crews, were sunk or captured. Cautious as always, Philip did not follow up the smashing victory by trying to storm Constanti­nople. But he had stopped Turkish expansion, and he had proved who was king of the Mediterranean. Among the many Spanish soldiers wounded at Lepanto was a young man named Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). Many years later, in the prologue to his Exemplary Novels, Cervantes proudly described his sacrifice: “In the naval battle of Lepanto he lost his left hand as the result of a harquebus shot, a wound which, however unsightly it may appear, he looks upon as beautiful, for the reason that it was received on the most memorable and sublime occasion that past ages have known or those to come may hope to know.”

Philip II’s greatest success came in 1580, when he annexed Portugal and the Portuguese empire. Philip’s mother had been a Portuguese princess, and when the king of Portugal died in 1580 without a direct heir, Philip had ;is good a claim to the vacant throne as anyone. Portugal and Castile had long been bitter political and economic rivals, and the Portuguese people were strongly anti-Castilian. But by the judicious distribution of silver and promises of future rewards, Philip’s agents won the Portuguese nobility mid upper clergy to his candidacy; and more important, the Spanish king sent in an army to secure the country. In four months his soldiers overran Portugal, and Philip was soon crowned at Lisbon. His new kingdom was a small state with only a million or so inhabitants, but by joining the crowns of Portugal, Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, Philip had seemingly completed the unifica­tion of the Iberian peninsula. Furthermore, the Portuguese empire overseas was very valuable, second only to the Spanish empire in size and importance. Philip now had possession of Brazil, the Azores and other mid-Atlantic islands, slaving stations in Africa, trading posts in India, and spice islands in Malaysia. Portugal’s Asian spice trade perfectly complemented Spain’s American silver mines. The Portuguese had no silver of their own, and they needed Spanish bullion in order to buy spices in Asia. The Spanish colonists in America wanted slaves from Portuguese Africa, and the Spanish home government needed Lisbon (a far better Atlantic port than Seville or Cadiz) and the Portuguese navy and merchant marine.

But the promise of 1580 was never realized. Philip’s annexation of the Portuguese crown was purely personal and dynastic. To conciliate the Portuguese, he promised to preserve the country’s independent institutions and independent commerce and to appoint only Portuguese officials. No effort was made to break down frontiers nor even to coordinate Spanish and Portuguese economic policy. Initially, the Portuguese accepted their new Habsburg ruler without much complaint, but as the years passed, they saw less and less advantage to the union, especially when the Spanish were unable to protect the Portuguese colonies from Dutch attack. Thus what might have been a fruitful permanent partnership lasted for only sixty years.

The annexation of Portugal helped to direct Philip II’s attention west and north rather than east. Portugal, much more than Spain, faced onto the Atlantic, and for the first time Philip possessed adequate naval forces to deal with his Protestant adversaries in the North Atlantic—England and the Netherlands. Furthermore, in the 1580’s, bullion imports from America suddenly doubled. Philip was now receiving two million ducats in silver ingots each year. This chronic fiscal problems seemed less pressing, and he felt that he could afford more ambitious military adventures than in the past. Now was the time to deal decisively with a situation which, from Philip’s viewpoint, had been steadily deteriorating ever since 1559. As we shall see, the Spanish government had long been trying to suppress heresy and rebellion in the Netherlands. English privateers had been raiding the Span­ish Indies with rising impudence. The French religious wars had entered a critical stage. Accordingly, in the 1580’s Philip launched his grand design to solve all these problems by an overwhelming display of military power. His soldiers and sailors would quell the Netherlands revolt, invade and conquer England, and end the French religious wars. The Catholic-Calvinist conflict was reaching its climax.

THE FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION, 1562-1598

In striking contrast to Spain, which enjoyed internal peace and unity during the second half of the sixteenth century, France was nearly torn apart by forty years of agonizing, destructive civil war. The French collapse was many-faceted. Huguenots battled Catholics, aristocratic factions joined together to oppose the crown, the bourgeoisie strove for new political and religious rights, the Paris mob went wild, and the outer provinces reverted to their medieval autonomy. Religion was by no means the only source of trouble, but religion triggered the crisis with explosive force. The French wars exposed all the latent flaws in sixteenth-century European civilization. The French, despite their rich cultural resources, their well-balanced econ­omy, and their impressively centralized governmental institutions, seemed to lose all sense of social community. The trouble was partly caused by the size of the country. France was a difficult state to administer, with a popula­tion that climbed during the sixteenth century to nearly twenty million, more than double the population of Spain. Yet the French state was cer­tainly more closely knit than the worldwide Spanish empire. A more obvious trouble in the late sixteenth century was poor royal leadership. The four Valois kings who followed Francis I (ruled 1515-1547) were all mediocre, to say the least. Between 1559 and 1589 the queen mother, Catherine de Medici, was the central figure. Catherine had political talent, but not for the situation at hand. She tried to play the Huguenots and Catholics against each other; the result was disastrous for the house of Valois and for France.

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the French state had the characteristic attributes of a “new monarchy.” Francis I exercised sovereign authority through his network of royal officials, through his permanent mercenary army, through his power to levy direct and indirect taxes. The French representative assembly, the Estatcs-Gcncral, did not meet between 1484 and 1560. In the outer regions of the country, the crown negotiated with the provincial estates, much easier to browbeat than the Estates- General. In central France, where there were no provincial estates, royal agents annually assessed and collected the gabelle, or salt tax, and the taille, an income tax levied mainly on the peasants. The king was master of his territorial church. In the Concordat of Bologna (1516), the papacy had agreed that all French bishops and abbots were to be nominated by the crown. Ambitious members of the nobility served as officers in the royal army, fighting Francis’ frequent wars against Charles V. This activity not only kept them busy but kept them out of the country as much as possible. Clearly the tendency under Francis I was toward absolute, centralized monarchy.

But the king was not all-powerful. The parlements, or state courts, in Paris and the provinces insisted that he obey the established laws and to some extent substituted for the Estates-General as a brake on arbitrary royal power. Border provinces such as Brittany and Burgundy, only recently annexed to the crown, enjoyed special privileges and exemptions. The great French magnates had all the rights of the Spanish nobility, including tax exemption, and they exercised considerable political control over the lieutenants du roi, or royal administrators, at the local level. The crown was handicapped by lack of money, despite its taxing power. One sixteenth century money-making device, the sale of royal offices, tended to hamper the king’s control over his own bureaucracy; office holding became hereditary and semifeudal in character. A further complication was introduced when the religious controversy began to stir men’s minds and emotions. One morning in 1534, good Catholics were horrified to find placards promi­nently posted in all the chief French cities, seurrilously denouncing the sac­rament of the Mass. Some daring reformer had even nailed a placard onto the king’s bedchamber door while he slept in the chateau of Amboise.

Opposition to centralized royal power began to mushroom during the reign of Henry 11 (1547-15 59). This king was interested only in hunting and in his elderly mistress, Diane de Poitiers, a lady twenty years his senior. He was ashamed of his Florentine queen, Catherine de Medici, (1519-1589), because she came from a “bourgeois” family. At Henry’s court three rival aristocratic factions—the Guises, the Montmorencys, and the Bourbons— began to jockey for control of royal policy. All three wanted to return to the feudal particularism of the good old days, when the great noble fami­lies ruled the various regions of France, and the king was just a figurehead. But they were bitterly jealous of each other’s efforts to manipulate the king. The duke of Montmorency, constable of France, had immense landhold­ings and a personal retinue of several hundred knights. The Bourbons were princes of the blood, with the best claim to the French throne should Henry’s sons leave no heirs. The Bourbon leaders were Louis, prince of Conde, and his brother King Anthony of Navarre, whose kingdom in the Pyrenees was mostly in Spanish hands. But the Guise faction was the strong­est of the three. Francis, duke of Guise, was Henry II’s most brilliant gen­eral, and his brothers Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, and Louis, cardinal of Guise, led the French church. They married their niece (the future Mary, Queen of Scots) to the royal dauphin, and they persuaded Henry to continue his father’s dynastic war with the Habsburgs. The heavy war taxes stirred his subjects and sent Henry deeply into debt. When he finally made peace with Spain in 1559, he had to renounce all pretensions to Italy. The nobility who had fought in this losing cause were unpaid and restless. But Henry did not have time to worry about this problem, for while jousting in a tournament during the celebrations following the Peace of Catcau Cambresis, he was killed when a splinter from his opponent’s lance pierced his eye.

The French throne passed successively to three of Henry II’s sons: Francis II (ruled 1559-1560), Charles IX (ruled 1560-1574), and Henry III (ruled 1574—1589). All three were feeble and neurotic. All three were dominated by their mother. But though Queen Catherine de Medici could rule her sons, she could not rule France. The country dissolved into anarchy and from anarchy into downright war. The war was ignited by the spread of Calvinism into France. The Huguenots not only spread heresy but challenged the power and profits of the crown. They were well organized for political subversion. Working at first in secret, they established a network of congregations throughout France. Even when Henry II organized a special court to try Huguenots and have them burned at the stake, they continued to proliferate. In 1559 they held their first national synod. They attacked convents and desecrated Catholic churches by smashing the holy relics and statuary. In 1561 there were 2,150 Huguenot congregations worshiping openly, with roughly two million adherents—something like 10 per cent of the population. Their impact was disproportionately great, however, because most French Catholics were apathetic. Besides, the Huguenots were elite in character and strategically concentrated in the autonomous fringe provinces: Dauphine, Languedoc, and Gascony in the south, Poitou and Britanny in the west, Normandy in the north. Merchants and lawyers, rulers of the provincial towns who were tenacious of their local privileges, joined in large numbers. Especially in the south and west, scores of walled towns became Huguenot bastions. Even more striking was the high percentage of  converts among the noblesse. About two fifths of all the French nobility joined tin Huguenot cause. Why should so many of these proud feudal magnates become smitten with a belief in original sin and predestination? In truth, few of them had authentic conversions, but they saw a wonderful chance to reverse the trend toward absolute royal power by patronizing the new religion. They wanted an arrangement in France similar to that established in Germany by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, with each nobleman con trolling the church in his own lands. When Admiral Coligny, of the Montmorency faction, and the Bourbon prince of Conde were converted to the new religion, the Huguenots became a really dangerous political threat.

As early as 1560, Conde and Coligny hatched a plot to capture the boy king Francis II and “liberate” him from his Guise advisers. Conspirators converged on Amboise, where the king was staying. Here in the Loire Valley hunting country, the Valois kings and their courtiers spent as much time as possible, and here they built their great chateaux, fortress-palaces with massive battlements and gorgeously fanciful ornamentation in the Italian style, the finest Renaissance buildings in France. The Guises foiled the coup d’etat at Amboise and festooned the crenellations of the chateau with the corpses of the conspirators. But Queen regent Catherine de Medici prevented the execution of the chief instigators, Conde and Coligny. The Guises were too powerful to suit her, and she needed the Bourbons as a counterweight.

Catherine hoped to reduce the tension in the situation by arranging a settlement which would bury the Huguenot-Catholic conflict, and in 1561 she actually got Calvinist and Catholic theologians to attend a joint conference, the Colloquy of Poissy, and tried to make them subscribe to a common body of doctrine. Having no real religious principles herself, Catherine supposed that she could paper over the dogmatic dispute. Her plan, as we shall see, was not far different from the English religious settlement which Elizabeth I was devising just at this time. But it worked much less well. In France there was no chance for a latitudinarian church or for religious toleration as long as both factions believed that they could win total victory.

The queen’s overtures to the Huguenots shocked the more fervid French Catholics into taking up arms against Protestantism. The Guises had always been fiercely anti-Huguenot, and the religious crisis gave their faction a much wider popularity and a much greater driving force than it had possessed before. Under Guise leadership, the ultra-Catholics developed into a power bloc (like the Huguenots) very dangerous to the Valois monarchy and to the French state. They had the loyalty of Paris, far and away (lie biggest and most important city. They controlled large sections of northern and northwestern France, where they could recruit and pay for large armies. They were backed by the papacy, by the Jesuits, and by Philip II, who had no love for the Guises but welcomed the chance to exploit French factionalism to his own advantage. Correspondingly, Elizabeth I of England supported the Huguenots.

In I 562 the duke of Guise, passing the little town of Vassy with his troopers, was infuriated to see a congregation of Huguenots worshiping in a ham, and ordered his men to kill them. This incident triggered the French religious wars. Once started, the fighting was almost impossible to stop. The Huguenots formed far too small a minority to conquer France, but their armies became so expert at defensive campaigns that they could not be disbanded. Noncombatants suffered more than the soldiers: for every pitched battle there were numerous forays, Sieges, lootings, and massacres. Peace treaties were repeatedly arranged only to be quickly broken. The original commanders on both sides were soon killed, not in battle but by assassins—the duke of Guise in 1563 and the Bourbon prince of Conde in 1569. These murders launched a blood feud in which the Catholic and Huguenot zealots strove for retaliation by ambushing and slaughtering the remaining leaders. Both sides were able to keep troops in the field for years at a time, their operations financed largely by tax money diverted from the royal treasury, and led by vagabond aristocrats who loved fighting and freebooting.

After ten years of inconclusive combat, the Huguenots seemed to be gaining the upper hand. In August, 1572, during an interval of peace, the cream of the Huguenot nobility gathered in Paris to celebrate the marriage of their chief, the young Bourbon prince Henry of Navarre (1553-1610), to the sister of King Charles IX. Admiral Coligny was among the cele­brants. He had just about persuaded the pliable king to undertake a major shift in royal policy, to declare war against Spain and support the revolt of the Calvinists in the Netherlands against Philip II. As a French patriot, Coligny hoped by this stratagem to end the civil wars and divert the nobility into fighting their old Habsburg enemies. As a Protestant, he hoped to secure Calvinism in France and the Netherlands. But Coligny’s plan was too transparently partisan to attract many non-Huguenots. Obvi­ously young Henry, duke of Guise (1550-1588), could never agree. Nor was the plan acceptable to Catherine de Medici, who reckoned that a Franco-Spanish war would produce victory for Philip II and destroy the Valois monarchy. So Catherine felt forced to ally temporarily with the Guise faction in order to stop Coligny. Just what happened next, and why, will always be disputed, for the evidence is murky and open to diverse interpretations. Someone hired an assassin to murder the admiral. On August 22, four days after the wedding, the assassin shot Coligny but merely wounded him. The enraged Huguenots immediately threatened Charles and Catherine with reprisals, and the wounded Coligny pressed the king yet again to initiate war with Spain at once, as the only way to prevent fresh civil turmoil. But Catherine and the Guises had another solution. Someone—most likely the queen mother—convinced Charles IX that Coligny and the Huguenots were about to kill him and seize power; the only escape was to ambush all the traitorous Huguenots immediately and wipe out the rebel leadership.

Shortly after midnight on August 24, St. Bartholomew’s Day, armed squads broke into the houses where the Huguenots lodged. The duke of Guise personally killed Coligny, in revenge for the murder of his father. Prince Henry of Navarre managed to save his life by promising to turn Catholic. By dawn the whole hysterical city was taking up the bestial cry, “Kill! Kill!” Women and children were senselessly hacked to death and dumped into the Seine. The great scholar Petrus Ramus was cut down while he knelt at prayer, and his pupils dragged his body through the streets. Debtors murdered their creditors. Looting continued for days. Such was the St. Bartholomew massacre, in which at least three thousand Huguenots were killed in Paris. As word spread throughout the country, another ten thousand were killed in the provincial towns. Some modern historians, numbed by gas chambers for the Jews and napalm for the Vietnamese, dismiss the episode as just another atrocity. But this will hardly do. The St. Bartholomew massacre should be remembered as mass murder in Europe’s greatest city, plotted by the leaders of the state, and trigered by religious hatred. When the news reached the pope, he was so delighted that he gave a hundred crowns to the messenger. Catherine de Medici laughed exultantly when she saw Henry of Navarre attending his first Mass. Charles IX, on the other hand, sickened with guilt at having abused his royal responsibilities. Charles was wiser than his mother, for the massacre discredited the Valois monarchy without breaking the Huguenots or ending the conflict.

When Charles died in 1 574, he was succeeded by his even more neurotic brother, Henry III. The new king was quickly hated for the money and affection he lavished on his mignons, effeminate court dandies, to say noth­ing of the degenerate royal ballets and masquerades, where (according to a scandalized Paris lawyer) the king “was usually dressed as a woman, with a low-cut collar which showed his throat, hung with pearls.”⁶ Henry’s feck­less extravagance was inherited from his mother, but not his sudden spasms of religiosity, during which he took up the hermit’s life or walked barefoot on penitential pilgrimages. Under this last Valois king, the Catholic-Hugue - not conflict reached its climax. Ultra-Catholics and Huguenots alike saw Henry as a dissembling hypocrite. They repudiated his efforts at peace­making, and did their utmost to dismantle the French state. The Hugue­nots, despite their loss of many aristocratic leaders in the St. Bartholomew massacre, still held important western towns, such as La Rochelle. They were strongest in the south, and Languedoc became virtually independent. The ultra-Catholics formed a Holy League in 1576 and vowed to extermi­nate heresy and to seat a Catholic champion, such as Henry, duke of Guise, on the French throne. Leaders of both religions preached rebellion. In the most famous Huguenot tract, the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, (1578) Cal­vin’s political theory was rewritten to show that a tyrannical king has vio­lated his contract with the people and should be overthrown. Jesuit writers argued the League position that a king who betrays the Church must be overthrown. Both sides had strong commanders. For the League, Henry of Guise was a perfect bandit captain, brave, dashing, and arrogant, with a saber scar etched across his cheek. But the Huguenots could boast the heir apparent to the throne, Prince Henry of Navarre, who quickly renounced his forced St. Bartholomew conversion. Henry of Navarre was an easygoing ex­trovert with one priceless virtue: he was the only late sixteenth-century French political leader who honestly tried to serve his country as well as himself.

The turning point in the French crisis came in 1588-1589, with the War of the Three Henries: Guise versus Valois versus Navarre. The conflict began when the duke of Guise made his supreme bid to capture the monarchy. He had to move carefully, for he was in the pay of Philip II, who had his own claim to the French throne! (Philip’s third wife had been a Valois princess.) In 1588 the Spanish king directed Guise to stage a revolt in Paris in order to prevent Henry III from interfering with the Spanish Armada when it attacked England. Accordingly, Guise entered Paris against Henry Ill’s express orders. He incited the city mob to disarm the king’s guards and besieged him inside the Louvre palace. Before Guise could summon the nerve to assault the Louvre and kill the king, his intended victim fled the city. Nevertheless, Guise now had virtual control. He forced Henry III to make him chief minister, he dictated policy, and he managed the Estates-General which convened at Blois in 1588. The only trouble was that by this time Guise’s patron, Philip II, had been badly beaten by the English and was unable to protect his French agent.

The royal chateau at Blois was Henry Ill’s last retreat. This rambling palace, with its famous open staircase, myriad paneled rooms, and secret passageways, lies in the heart of the Loire Valley. Nearby are Amboise, where Henry’s brother escaped conspiracy, and Chenonceaux, where his mother squandered a fortune on new construction. Catherine de Medici could no longer intervene, for she lay mortally ill. Imitating Catherine’s role in the SI Bartholomew massacre, Henry III plotted to murder Guise. “He does not dare,” said the duke contemptuously, but for once he underestimated the Valois. On December 23, 1588, the king’s bodyguard closed in on Guise and cut him clown. The old queen mother could hear the uproar as the dying duke dragged his assassins through the royal chambers above her sickbed.

Henry III now joined the Huguenots in an all-out effort to crush the Catholic League. He threw himself into an alliance with Henry of Navarre, whom he recognized as his heir, and the two men marched together against Catholic Paris. But retribution for Guise’s murder came fast: in July, 1589, Henry III was himself assassinated, by a fanatical monk who had secreted a dagger in the sleeve of his habit. Only one of the three Henries was left. Could the French Catholics be induced to accept this heretical prince as King Henry IV?

The new king’s strongest asset was the mounting popular revulsion against anarchy. Many Frenchmen, derisively called politiques because they preferred merely political goals to spiritual ones, had long craved for peace and stability. The skeptical essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was a politique, disgusted with cannibalism in the name of divinity. So was the profound political theorist Jean Bodin (1530-1596), whose Six Books of the Republic (1576) pleaded for the establishment of centralized sovereign authority in the hands of a purposeful prince. In Henry IV, the politiques saw at last a French prince who could be trusted with sovereign authority, who was a statesman of humanity and honesty (unlike Catherine de Medici), with a suitably jocose, pragmatic temper. Yet it took Henry IV a full decade to end the war. With Guise dead, the Catholic champion became Philip II, who intended once lie had conquered Henry IV to put a Spanish infanta on the throne. In the early 1590’s, Spanish troops repeatedly swept down from Flanders and blocked Henry IV’s efforts to occupy his capital city. The Parisians continued to believe their League priests, who taught that a good Catholic would eat his own children rather than submit to a heretic. In 1593, Henry concluded that he must undergo the humiliation of abjuring Protestantism. “Today I talk to the Bishops,” he told his mistress. “Sunday I take the perilous leap” (that is, attend Mass). Henry’s politically motivated conversion scandalized the ultra-Catholics even more than the Huguenots, but the pope felt compelled to grant him absolution. Paris opened its gates to the king who, hat in hand, saluted all the pretty ladies in the windows as he entered the city.

In 1598, Henry IV and Philip II finally made peace, restoring the terms of 1559. Spain had gained nothing. In this same year, Henry bought off the last of the Catholic League nobility with grants of money and titles and conciliated the Huguenots with the Edict of Nantes. With this edict, Henry established a lasting religious truce. He declared Catholicism the official French religion and prohibited the reformed worship within five leagues of Paris. Yet any nobleman who chose to do so could practice the reformed religion in his own household, and bourgeois and lower-class Huguenots could also worship in certain specified places. The Huguenot residents of some two hundred towns, mostly in the south and along the Bay of Biscay, were granted full religious freedom, including the right to set up schools and printing presses. About half of these towns were fortified and garrisoned by the Huguenots at royal expense. In addition, Huguenots throughout the country were promised “perpetual and irrevocable” liberty of conscience, full civil rights, and eligibility for public office. The king appointed special courts (half Catholic, half Huguenot) to adjudicate breaches of his edict.

The close of the French religious wars, with the Edict of Nantes, was to some extent a Catholic victory. France was henceforth a Catholic country with a Catholic king. Yet Henry IV temporarily expelled the Jesuits and repudiated the fanaticism of the ultra-Catholic League. At the same time, his edict was to some extent a Protestant victory, since it granted the Huguenots an entrenched position within the country. Yet the Huguenots had lost their leader; toleration was a gift of the king. In most ways, the compromise of 1598 signalized the triumph of political expediency over religion. The chief lesson of the French religious wars was a political one, that strongly centralized government was the only possible alternative to rebellion and social chaos. Upon this foundation would be built the magnificent seventeenth-century absolute monarchy of Louis XIV.

THE REVOLT OF THE NETHERLANDS

In the mid-sixteenth century, the people of the Low Countries had a style of life all their own, distinctly different from both the Spanish and the French. Theirs was a business society of towns and merchants, with the highest per-capita wealth in Europe. The Netherlanders were polyglot, particularistic, and cosmopolitan. Their country was divided into seventeen autonomous provinces, of which the most important were Flanders, Brabant, and Holland. Most of the people spoke Low German (Flemish or Dutch), but the Walloons, who lived in the southern border provinces, spoke a dialect of French. The Netherlanders lived at the crossroads of northwestern Europe, where the North Sea coast is intersected by a great river system feeding into Germany and France. The chief Flemish cloth-manufacturing towns, Bruges and Ghent, were no longer as prosperous as they had been in the late Middle Ages, but by the sixteenth century the enterprising Netherlanders were cultivating a more variegated commercial and industrial pattern. Antwerp was now the biggest city in the Low Countries and the chief financial and distribution center for western Europe. English cloth merchants, Portuguese spice merchants, Spanish wool merchants, German metalware merchants, French wine merchants, Italian silk merchants, and Baltic grain merchants congregated in Antwerp to exchange northern and southern products. Antwerp and other Netherlands towns were also leading industrial centers, and sailors from Zeeland and Holland dominated the North Sea herring fishery.

The hereditary ruler of the Low Countries was the duke of Burgundy. From 1506 to 1556, the emperor Charles V had held this title. The Netherlanders had had little to complain of during Charles’s long administration, for thanks to the persistence of local customs and privileges, they had been able to manage their own affairs. The emperor had drawn heavily on the wealth of his Netherlands subjects in financing li is wars, I Mil he had left the central administration (such as it was) in the hands of the high nobility, and the government of the towns in the hands of tin rich merchants. These merchant oligarchs controlled the provincial estates and the States-General as well. They refused to grant taxes unless their grievances were redressed, and they did their own tax collecting, keeping any surplus for their own purposes. The Netherlands States-General was particularly hard to handle, because the delegates from all seventeen provinces had to give their consent before anything could be done. Charles V had been unable to prevent the influx of Protestantism. Netherlanders were receptive to new religious opinions; their attitude—as exemplified in their great Christian humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam—was tolerant and latitudinarian. Starting in the 1520’s, Lutheran and Anabaptist doctrines spread widely despite savage heresy-hunting by Charles’s government.

When Philip II inherited the dukedom of Burgundy from his father in 1556, he regarded the Low Countries as vital to his Spanish empire. Antwerp was the chief outlet for Spanish wool and wine, and the Netherlanders supplied Spain with grain, timber, textiles, armaments, and mercury for Philip’s silver mines. But Philip soon discovered that the Netherlands was much harder to govern from a long distance than Milan or Mexico. He personally disliked the place and never visited there after 1559. He could speak no Dutch, and had no trusted native advisers. And when he at­tempted to correct the atomistic political structure of the Netherlands, he encountered massive resistance. The people of the Low Countries had seen Charles V as a fellow Netherlander, but his son was an outsider. The high nobility found that their power was short-circuited by Castilian bureaucrats in Brussels and Madrid. Philip was so annoyed by the obstructionist tactics of the States-General that he vowed as early as 1559 never to convene it again. But the most explosive issue was religious. By the 1550’s Calvinism was spreading from France into the Walloon provinces and Flanders. Antwerp became a Calvinist stronghold. When Philip found that his inquisitors could not eradicate this new heresy, he summarily reorganized the Netherlands church in 1561 by increasing the number of bishops from four to eighteen, nominating them all himself.

Philip II’s Spanish absolutism had a traumatic effect upon the Netherlanders. Shopkeepers turned into soldiers; cosmopolites turned into patri­ots; latitudinarians turned into Calvinist fanatics. But as we shall see, in the end the revolt of the Netherlanders was only half successful. The seven northern provinces became independent and Protestant; the ten southern provinces (half Low German and half Walloon) remained loyal to Spain and to Catholicism. This division was largely accidental; in the 1560’s the southern provinces were more Protestant and more rebellious against Philip II than the northern provinces. But accidental or not, the division became permanent. Between 1560 and 1600 the modern nations of Holland and Belgium were born.

The revolt against Spain was initiated by the Netherlands nobility. Three of the highest nobles, the prince of Orange and the counts of Egmont and Horn, all members of the Council of State, tried repeatedly to persuade Philip to alter his policy. When they failed, a group of the lesser nobility petitioned the king in 1566 to abolish the Inquisition in the Netherlands and to stop persecuting the Protestants. “Why be afraid of these beggars?” asked a courtier contemptuously, as several hundred gentry solemnly presented their petition to Philip’s regent in Brussels. And “Long live the beggars!” suddenly became the rebel cry. Calvinist preachers sprang up everywhere in the Netherlands and whipped their excited auditors into a rage not only against the bishops but against all the outward trappings of Catholicism. In the summer of 1566 hundreds of churches were ravaged by iconoclasts. Some were converted into conventicles, or meetinghouses, of the Genevan type. This “Calvinist fury” shocked many Netherlanders and stung Philip into brutal reprisals. The duke of Alba arrived in 1567 with ten thousand picked Spanish troops, and lie came very close to crushing all Netherlands resistance to Spanish absolutism. Alba executed Egmont and Horn, tortured and killed several thousand suspected heretics, and confiscated their property. He canceled all meaningful self-government and levied fantastically heavy new taxes. Only a forlorn band of exiles under the banner of the prince of Orange maintained active opposition to Philip.

From 1567 on, the Spanish maintained a formidable standing army in the Netherlands. Warfare in this region of fortified towns required dis­ciplined, seasoned troops who could handle long sieges and surprise skir­mishes. Alba and his successors mobilized 65,000 men (and sometimes more) for the campaigns; theirs was the finest fighting force of its day. Spanish and Italian infantry units were brought north along the “Spanish road”—the military corridor from Genoa and Milan through Savoy, Franche-Comte, and Lorraine—to form the core of this army. German soldiers recruited from the Tyrol, Alsace, and the Rhine Valley, along with local Netherlands troops, filled out the ranks. Alba’s new taxes by no means paid for an army of this size, so Philip had to supply most of the funding from Spain. Between 1567 and 1576 the Spanish spent the equivalent of Elizabeth I’s total revenue on this army every year, and still many of the soldiers were unpaid. Here was the fatal flaw in Philip’s military system. Between 1572 and 1607, units within the Netherlands army staged over forty-five separate mutinies. They expelled their officers, holed up in fortified towns, lived off the surrounding countryside, and haggled for months with the Spanish authorities, until they finally got their back pay. These mutinies repeatedly paralyzed Philip’s battle plans and stiffened the resolve of the Netherlands rebels.

These rebels lacked cohesion at first. Like the French Huguenots, they were initially more destructive than constructive. They were not trying to mold a Netherlands nation-state; each of the seventeen provinces wanted to preserve its cherished autonomy. Nobility and merchants, Calvinists and moderate Catholics, could agree only in their distaste for Philip II. From 1567 to 1584 the rebel chief was Prince William of Orange (1533-1584), a man with many of the same character traits as the Huguenot chief, Henry of Navarre. Nicknamed William the Silent because of his skill at masking his intentions, Prince William was actually a gregarious extrovert who lived grandly and expensively. As a rebel leader he displayed alarming deficiencies. He was a mediocre general and so personally mired in debt that merchant creditors refused to lend him enough money. William was a religious opportunist who changed from Lutheran to Catholic to Calvin­ist as the circumstances warranted. In the 1560’s he appeared to be a frivolous figure. But as he called upon his countrymen to stand up against Spanish tyranny, he revealed great courage and patriotism. Prince William appealed to the common people over the heads of the town oligarchs and his fellow nobles, yet scrupulously avoided grabbing dictatorial power. Al­most single-handedly he strove to harmonize religious, sectional, and class differences, and weave the Netherlands into a nation. Thanks largely to William, the rebellion progressed, but it did not culminate in the achieve­ment of his dream, a unified Netherlands nation-state. Instead, during the 1570’s and 1580’s the seventeen provinces split into two sections, the rebel north versus the Spanish south. Religion, which William wore so lightly, proved to be the great divider.

The decisive point came in 1572. In April of that year, fugitive rebel ships (self-styled “sea beggars”) staged commando landings in the prov­inces of Zeeland and Holland, and captured a number of ports. These sea-beggar rebels had to overcome determined local opposition, because they were fiery Calvinists invading an area which was still predominantly Catholic. Having got possession of the territory bordering the Zuider Zee, the beggars had a permanent base of operations. The Spanish were never able to recapture Holland and Zeeland, for in this low-lying country the dikes could be opened to flood an invading army. If Coligny had brought France into the Netherlands war at this point, and if the English—who later supported the rebels—had also intervened in force, it is possible that William the Silent and the sea beggars might have expelled the Spanish from the Low Countries. But the St. Bartholomew massacre took France out of the picture, and Elizabeth I—well aware that she lacked money and soldiers—stayed cautiously on the sidelines. Within the Netherlands, religious and political refugees from the south moved into the rebel Zuider Zee area in large numbers, and Calvinism became the established religion. Here was the beginning of the partition of the Netherlands into two separate states.

In the late 1570’s, William the Silent had his last real chance to unite all seventeen provinces. In 1576 the Spanish garrison in the still-loyal southern provinces ran amuck because the soldiers had been unpaid for two years. They sacked the city of Antwerp and murdered upwards of eight thousand inhabitants. This frightful “Spanish fury” persuaded the people of Brabant and Flanders that they must ally themselves with the rebel north. In 1577 all of the provinces joined the Union of Brussels, shelving religious disputes and pledging to fight Spain until Philip restored their privileges and withdrew his troops. William was recognized as their military commander. Yet the rebels were not effectively united. In 1578 a new Spanish commander, the duke of Parma, Philip II’s ablest general, appeared on the scene with fresh troops and new funding based on the rapidly escalating Spanish bul­lion imports from America. As soon as Parma began scoring military vic­tories in the south, he detached the French-speaking Walloon provinces from the rebel federation. Parma appealed to these southern Netherlander not so much on linguistic as on religious grounds. How could good Catholics as­sociate with Calvinists? In 1579 he organized the loyal south into the Union of Arras and forced William to regroup the Calvinist north into the Union of Utrecht. In 1581 the States-General of the rebel provinces deposed Philip II as their prince and declared the independence of the United Provinces, or Dutch republic.

In the 1580’s, each side tried to conquer the other, with the Spanish nuclei Parma keeping the rebels very much on the defensive. After Parma had taken the chief Flemish towns in 1584, and Brussels and Antwerp in 1 585, lie held almost everything south of the Rhine River. A new wave of religious and political refugees fled north. Philip II hoped that the seven remaining rebel provinces would surrender if he could eradicate their leader. He declared William of Orange an outlaw and offered twenty-five thousand crowns as a reward for his assassination. Several efforts were made to earn this money, and in 1584 a Catholic fanatic gained entry to the prince’s house in Delft, stood among a crowd of petitioners, and murdered him at point-blank pistol range.

With the death of its great founder, the Dutch republic was truly in desperate plight. The Dutch had so far received little help from Germany and France, and almost none from England. Now Queen Elizabeth grudgingly sent a small army under the incompetent earl of Leicester. For two years (1585-1587), the Anglo-Dutch force precariously held the Rhine River line against Parma. Philip II, in the Escorial, remembering his mighty naval victory against the Turks at Lepanto, calculated that another such blow could crush the Dutch, the English, and the French Huguenots. Accordingly he prepared a huge new fleet, the “Invincible Armada,” designed to clear the English Channel and North Sea of Dutch and English shipping, end the revolt of the Netherlands and the Hugue­nots, dethrone the heretic queen of England, and eradicate North Atlantic Protestantism.

ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

The British Isles which Philip II prepared to invade in 1588 offered three strikingly varied scenes. In England, under “good Queen Bess,” there was peace and prosperity as never before. The English people, by some alchemy beyond the historian’s analysis, were transforming their backwater island into a magnificently dynamic society. Scotland, by contrast, was still half wild. The Scots managed their affairs with crude abandon. This was the era of the sex-driven Mary, Queen of Scots, and the hot-gospeling John Knox. Ireland, barely on the edge of civilization, was a land of perpetual blood feuds and cattle raids, with no real government and no defense against invaders. During the late sixteenth century, the Irish slowly fell victim to English conquest and exploitation. Yet in their different styles, all three peoples experienced the western European religious crisis. Protestants and Catholics were everywhere vying for control.

When Queen Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) ascended the English throne, religion was unquestionably the great issue. Back in the 1530’s, when her father, Henry VIII (ruled 1509-1547), had so easily separated from Rome, the atmosphere had been worldly and cynical. Henry had invited the nobility and gentry who sat in Parliament to legislate the break with the papacy, giving them a larger share of power, and had then sold the confiscated Church lands to them cheap. In those days only a few English­men, such as Sir Thomas More, had been willing to die for the old universal Church. Only a few Englishmen, such as William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English, had been outspoken proponents of Luther’s new doc­trines. But by the 1550’s the atmosphere was much changed. During the reign of Elizabeth’s feeble brother Edward VI (1547-1553), radical Protes­tants had overhauled the doctrine and ritual of the English church. In the succeeding reign, Elizabeth’s fervidly Catholic sister, Queen Mary Tudor (1553-1558), had forcibly reunited the English church with Rome and burned at the stake the several hundred persons who dared to protest. This short period of violent fluctuation, reminiscent of the period of Valois rule in France, aroused deep religious passions in the English people. Would Elizabeth follow Edward’s example, or Mary’s?

She did neither. Queen Elizabeth I was the only ruler in western Europe in the late sixteenth century who was able to handle the religious issue. Despite the loud fulminations of Calvinists and the conspiracies of Catholics, she unerringly pursued a policy of peace and compromise, and got away with it. This achievement alone is good reason for nominating Elizabeth the ablest politician of her time. Certainly she was more attractive as a queen than as a human being. She had a temper to match her red hair and a tongue to match her sharp features. Superficially, she was vacillating, evasive, and vague, but she was willfully stubborn underneath. Her un­fortunate councillors had to take the blame for whatever went wrong. She was frugal, not to say mean, in her expenditures; though she paid plenty for clothes and cosmetics, she allowed her devoted courtiers to buy her en­tertainment, without offering in return the royal pageantry supplied by Catherine de Medici or public monuments like Philip II’s Escorial. In an age when government was reckoned to be strictly a man’s job, Elizabeth refused to marry because she would not share power, but kept the bachelor princes of western Europe dangling as her suitors. In an age when women were reckoned to be fit chiefly for childbirth, and queens for the production of male heirs, Elizabeth made a virtue of her spinsterly virginity, while be­having with ever more outlandish coquetry the older she got. And yet, she was one of the greatest rulers In English history.

Elizabeth’s I’s first and most important work was her religious settlement, achieved between 1559 and 1563. The new queen was confronted with a church staffed by her sister Mary’s Catholic appointees, with the clamors for reinstatement of her brother Edward’s ousted Protestant clergy (many of whom had returned from exile in Geneva and other Calvinist centers), and with a Parliament divided between the Catholic House of Lords and a Protestant House of Commons. Queen and Parliament worked out a com­promise reorganization of the Church of England so as to combine an exter­nal Catholic structure with a broadly Protestant dogma. The intention was to satisfy as wide a spectrum of religious tastes as possible. All English­men were required to attend public worship in the national church, but no man’s inner conscience was publicly scrutinized. Under the Elizabethan sys­tem, there was no heresy-hunting, no Inquisition, no burnings, only a system of fines for those who stayed away from church. Less than 5 per cent of the clergy resigned (they were replaced, of course, by Protestants); the re­mainder docilely subscribed to the required Thirty-nine Articles of belief, a formula closer to Luther than to Calvin, which listed numerous “errors” in the Roman Church. The queen hand picked her bishops and sometimes kept bishoprics vacant for years in order to tap the revenues: the Elizabethan church was decidedly subordinate to the state. Men of strong con­viction were of course offended by the expediency of a church which in its prayer book could describe the pivotal Communion service both as a miracle and as a memorial ceremony. But only the most radical Calvinists and the most committed Catholics refused to tolerate the dignified beauty of the Anglican liturgy, and soon many Englishmen were deeply loyal to their via media.

Having worked out a formula for English religious stability and peace, Elizabeth I spent the rest of her long reign trying to keep the status quo. She was a political conservative, and with good reason. England, after all, was a small state with a population of less than four million and a predominantly agrarian economy. The income of the royal government was very modest by Spanish or French standards. The queen could afford neither a standing army nor an elaborate civil service. She depended on the cooperation of the nobility and the landed gentry. The English nobility were less wealthy than their Spanish or French counterparts and enjoyed fewer privileges; they even paid taxes. Henry VII and Henry VIII had done a great deal to domesticate the feudal magnates who had controlled England in the late Middle Ages. But under Elizabeth the nobility still exercised great power: they com­manded small armies of retainers, they sat in the House of Lords and got their adherents elected to the House of Commons, and they formed aristocratic factions at court dangerously similar to the Guise and Bourbon factions in Valois France. Like earlier Tudor monarchs, Elizabeth tried to bolster her position with respect to the nobility by patronizing the upper middle class: country squires and London merchants. She chose her two chief advisers—Sir William Cecil (1520-1598) and Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1530-1590)—from this class, and on the local level appointed deserving squires as justices of the peace. The justice of the peace received no pay, but. he had dignity, responsibility, and control over neighborhood affairs. When his interests coincided with those of the royal government, he served the queen very well.

The most obvious brake on English royal authority was Parliament. Elizabeth could neither tax nor legislate except through Parliament. Unlike the Castilian Cortes and the French Estates-General, Parliament gained power steadily throughout the sixteenth century. Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth all worked through Parliament in their attempts to shape the English church. Much more legislation was enacted by Parliament during the Tudor era than in the Middle Ages. Parliamentary taxes were vital to the crown, and Elizabeth (unlike Philip II in Castile) had great difficulty in wheedling tax levies from Parliament even in emergencies.

In the early sixteenth century the lower house, the House of Commons, had been more tractable than the House of Lords, citadel of the nobility, but under Elizabeth, the Commons became the more independent and aggres­sive of the two houses. Ambitious and well-connected country gentlemen actively sought election to the Commons. Elizabethan parliamentary elec­tions bore little resemblance to modern ones. There were no parties or platforms. Most elections were uncontested. Only candidates of high social standing, wealth, and influence presumed to stand, and they were dutifully accepted by a few hundred subservient voters. But if the electorate was subservient, the members of Parliament were not. Elizabeth was hard pressed to cope with the opinionated, self-confident gentry who crowded into the Commons chamber in St. Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster, just outside the city of London, in order to question her policies and advocate their own. The queen summoned Parliament as infrequently as possible, convoking it for a session of a couple of months every three or four years. Her ministers carefully stage-managed every bit of business, but they could not prevent rude speakers in the Commons from urging Her Majesty to marry or to crush popery. Even though the government introduced legislation, mem­bers of the Commons freely debated and amended bills in committee and introduced new bills of their own. The queen became adept at seeming to surrender to Parliament, while still preserving her prerogative.

There was always a Puritan bloc in Parliament. Puritans were the English species of Calvinist. They wanted to cleanse the English church of its popish ceremonies and ritual, to abolish Elizabeth’s episcopal church government, to erect a preaching ministry and a national Geneva discipline. The Puritans were less rebellious against the government than were their compeers in France and the Netherlands. Much as they disliked the queen’s lukewarm Protestantism, they accepted membership in the Church of England and aimed at purifying it from within. Hence the Puritans were less easy to identify than were the Huguenots and the Dutch Calvinists. Indeed, many Anglican clergymen, including several bishops, were Puritans. The move­ment was attractive to articulate, educated laymen, and an increasing num­ber of landed gentlemen and London merchants became Puritans. Cam­bridge University was the intellectual headquarters of the Puritans. Eliza­beth intensely disliked Puritan criticism of her church. She took special pains to gag Puritan polemicists and kept the movement relatively small. But even Elizabeth could not stop the prolific Puritan pamphleteers from formulating belligerent protests against prayer books, bishops, and godless rulers, develop­ing a line of argument which would lead—a generation after the queen’s death—to the Puritan Revolution of 1640.

In the short run, the biggest challenge to the status quo came not from the radicals in religion, but from the conservatives. The Catholics had a very active claimant to the English throne in Mary Stuart, better known as Mary, Queen of Scots, who was everything Elizabeth was not: beautiful, alluring, passionate, and rash. Mary’s reign in Scotland (1561-1567) was brief and turbulent, and suggests the chaos that might have engulfed England had she been able to take her cousin Elizabeth’s place. To be sure, sixteenth-century Scotland was not an easy place to govern. The wildly beautiful countryside was economically underdeveloped. The few small towns were frequently overrun by marauders despite their grim gray stone walls. The Scots nobility were untamed tribal chieftains, continually feuding and fighting among themselves. Roughly half the people were Catholics; the other half, Calvin­ists. The Calvinist leader was John Knox, a brass-tongued preacher whose “Reformed Kirk” was patterned after the Genevan presbyterian system. The General Assembly of the Reformed Kirk was a more powerful body than the Scots parliament, for it was quite independent of royal control. Mary Stuart had been queen of Scotland since she was an infant, but she had spent her girlhood at the French Valois court, her mother governing Scotland as regent until she died in 1560. One foggy, dismal day in 1561 the nineteen- year-old queen returned from France to Holyrood Palace, in Edinburgh, to be greeted by a serenade of psalms sung out of tune. She was already a widow; her first husband, the boy king Francis II of France, had died the previous year. Mary established as gay a court as possible at Edinburgh and won over many of the Protestant nobility. But her charms cast no spell on John Knox. Mary reportedly told Knox, “1 will defend the kirk of Rome, for it is, I think, the true kirk of God.”

“Your will, madam,” came the reply, “is no reason: neither doth your thought make that Roman harlot to be the true and immaculate spouse of Jesus Christ.”

Mary had no desire to settle permanently in dour Scotland. She immedi­ately pressed Elizabeth to recognize her as heir to the English throne, and when Elizabeth procrastinated, she married her cousin Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, who had the next-best claim to the English throne. But Mary soon lost interest in the empty-headed Darnley and adopted a court musician named David Rizzio as her paramour. Early in 1566 the jealous Darnley gathered a band of conspirators who surprised Mary and Rizzio at supper in Holyrood Palace and hacked Rizzio to death as he clung to the queen’s skirts. Mary shortly got her revenge. When Darnley contracted smallpox, she installed him in a lonely house outside the walls of Edinburgh, and one night someone strangled Darnley and blew up his house with gunpowder. Who did it can never be proved, but most Scotsmen at the time suspected the earl of Bothwell, Mary’s latest lover. Their suspicions became firmer when Mary married Bothwell three months after Darnley’s murder. The question of Mary’s guilt or innocence in this lurid affair has been endlessly debated. One fact is plain. By marrying Bothwell she lost control of Scotland. The nobility revolted against the lady and forced her to abdicate. In 1568 she fled to England, and Elizabeth imprisoned her.

Mary was still young, still bewitching. In 1569 a band of Catholic lords led an abortive rebellion on her behalf in northern England. The 1570’s and 1 580’s were marked by a series of Catholic plots to assassinate Elizabeth and enthrone Mary—all discovered (and some perhaps planted) by Elizabeth’s spies. The pope had excommunicated Elizabeth, and resolute Jesuit missionaries, such as Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons, were encouraging the remaining English Catholics to stand firm in their faith. The queen and her ministers felt compelled to crack down: during Elizabeth’s reign, over two hundred priests and Catholic laymen were executed on the technical charge of treason. In 1586, government spies uncovered Mary’s complicity in a new assassination plot. This time she was tried and found guilty. With a great show of reluctance, partly real and partly feigned, Elizabeth signed the death warrant. In 1587, Mary Stuart was released from her nineteen years of imprisonment by the executioner’s axe. Catholics naturally saw her as a martyr and denounced the Protestant Jezebel for murdering an anointed queen.

Religion was one of the causes of mounting friction between Elizabethan England and Philip II’s Spain. Another was Elizabeth’s support of the Dutch rebels. A third cause, perhaps the most decisive, was English intrusion into the Spanish empire in America. Until the mid-sixteenth century, English sailors had taken practically no part in the exploration and exploita­tion of the New World, and English merchants were perfectly content with the traditional Flemish wool trade. By the 1560’s, however, even Englishmen were becoming interested in the possibility of finding wealth in the New World. Elizabeth I encouraged private investment in overseas enterprises and offered token investments herself. Sailors from Plymouth and other southwestern ports began to reconnoiter the Atlantic. Some, such as Martin Frobisher and John Davis, searched the still unclaimed North American coastline, looking fruitlessly for a passage to Cathay, and panning fruitlessly for gold. Others ventured into the Spanish Caribbean. Between 1562 and 1568 John Hawkins sold African slaves to the Spanish planters with some success. Between 1571 and 1581 Francis Drake (c. 1540-1596), a fiery Protestant, made three piratical raids on Spanish America with much greater success. On his third voyage, Drake took his ship, the Golden Hind, through the Strait of Magellan, captured a Spanish treasure ship off the Pacific coast of South America, then sailed up to California and from there to the South Pacific spice islands and to the Cape of Good Hope; thus, when he returned to Plymouth after an absence of three years, he had circumnavigated the globe. The queen knighted Drake in 1581, and no wonder; his cargo of Spanish treasure was worth twice Elizabeth’s annual revenue. In 1585-1586, with the official backing of his government, Sir Francis took a big fleet of thirty ships once more into the Caribbean, where he vandalized the Spanish more than lie plundered them. Certainly the Elizabethan sea dogs were doing all they could to provoke the Prudent King.

So it was that the two most cautious leaders in Christendom, both fearful of change and sensitive to the burdens of war, faced each other in dramatic conflict. In 1586, Philip II began to plan his invasion of England. A Spanish fleet, powerful enough to hold the English navy at bay, was to sail from Lisbon to the Flemish coast, rendezvous with Parma’s army, assembled on barges, and cross the English Channel, landing at the month of the Thames. Even with the best of luck this plan would have been extremely difficult to execute, and one misfortune after another compounded the difficulty. In 1587, Sir Francis Drake daringly raided Cadiz, Spain’s chief Atlantic port. He sank enough ships to delay Philip’s enterprise by a year and destroyed the Spaniards’ precious store of seasoned barrel staves, thereby condemning the Armada crew to a diet of stinking water and spoiled food as a result of storage in casks made of green timber. Then, on the eve of embarkation, Philips admiral died. His replacement, the duke of Medina-Sidonia was brave but inexperienced.

The Invincible Armada that finally neared the English coast in July, 1588, was a majestic fleet of 130 ships and thirty thousand men. The English sailed out from Plymouth with an equally impressive force. They had as many ships as the Spaniards, their seamanship and their guns were better, and they had Sir Francis Drake. This was not the biggest naval showdown of the century. Twice as many ships and men had fought at Lepanto in 1571. But the Battle of Lepanto was a land battle transferred to sea, with soldiers swarming across oared galleys which had locked together. The Anglo-Spanish confrontation in 1588 was altogether, different, a mariners’ duel between sailing ships armed with cannon. The Armada fight inaugurated the classical age of naval warfare, which stretched from the sixteenth into the nineteenth century, from Drake to Nelson.

The Spanish and English fleets met off Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of England. Both sides were reluctant to attack. The duke of Medina-Sidonia was dismayed to see how nimbly the English could sail around his ships. The English were baffled by the tight Spanish crescent formation, designed to force them to grapple at close quarters, to fight in the style of Mediterranean galleys, by ramming and boarding, at which the Spanish excelled. For nine days the two fleets drifted slowly up the length of the Channel, the English buzzing around the Spanish crescent, neither side doing much damage. Medina-Sidonia was approaching his rendezvous with Parma, but so far he had been continuously outmaneuvered, and he saw that if he tried to convoy Parma’s men in barges from Flanders across the Channel to England, the English navy would lacerate them. He anchored off Calais, trying to think of some way to join forces with Parma. All at once, disaster struck the Armada. At midnight the English sent eight blazing fire ships into the Spanish fleet. The Spanish ships scattered to sea, their crescent formation broken. Drake and his comrades pounced on them, sank some of the ships, and pounded the rest until ammunition gave out. Then a gale swept the battered Armada into the North Sea. Medina-Sidonia had lost all hope of joining with Parma or invading England. With the English fleet chasing him north, toward Scotland, he sailed his limping, leaky galleons around the British Isles. A number of ships and thousands of men were lost off the stormy Irish coast. About half the fleet eventually straggled back to Spain. So ended the first modern naval battle. So ended Philip’s plan to dethrone Elizabeth.

THE DECLINE OF SPAIN

The defeat of the Spanish Armada was a decisive event. It exposed the limitations of sixteenth-century military power. It stamped Philip IPs over­weening international policy with failure. It tipped the religious struggle, which underlay all western European politics during the late sixteenth century, in favor of the Protestant minority. And it closed Spain’s golden century of power and glory.

After 1588, nothing went right for Philip II. The Spanish king received the news of the Armada’s defeat with his customary sober stoicism—and kept on trying to conquer England and put down the Dutch rebels. In the 1590’s, as has been mentioned, he took on a new opponent, invading France in an attempt to dethrone Henry of Navarre. The French, English, and Dutch formed an alliance against him, fought him to a standstill on land, and bested him at sea. The Spanish infantry was still superlative, and in northern France the duke of Parma campaigned with his usual brilliance against Henry IV. But his successes roused French patriotism against the Spanish invaders. Unwittingly, Philip II helped Henry IV to reunite his country and restore the centralized power of the French monarchy. In 1598, just a few months before his death, Philip reluctantly made peace with Henry. Though this peace treaty restored the status quo of 1559, psychologically it was a French victory, the first of a long series of Bourbon victories over the Habsburgs. Within a few years the agony of the French religious wars became only a memory, as Bourbon France rapidly eclipsed Habsburg Spain in political and military power.

Philip II never made peace with England. The Anglo-Spanish war contin­ued until 1604, with the English inflicting more damage than they received. Despite the failure of the Armada, Philip doggedly kept trying to invade Britain. His last great fleet, headed for Ireland, was dispersed by storms in 1596. Through the years, the English countered by launching a series of armadas against Spain but never came close to achieving a knockout blow. In 1589, Sir Francis Drake failed to capture Lisbon; in 1596, he died while leading an abortive attack against the Spanish West Indies. The English did score some victories. In 1596, they sacked Cadiz and pillaged the surround­ing Spanish countryside. Throughout the war, English privateers mercilessly plundered Spanish commercial vessels. On the whole, the long war cast a damper on the buoyant Elizabethans. They were spending too much blood and money for too little glory. Yet England emerged from this conflict in far better shape than Spain and with new ambitions for an empire of its own to rival the Spanish empire.

Philip II’s bitterest legacy was the Netherlands rebellion. In the mid- 1580’s, Parma seemed close to reconquering the northern provinces, but his participation in the Armada fiasco and in campaigns in France against Henry IV between 1589 and 1592 killed Spanish momentum in the Netherlands. Lack of sea power was also very damaging. When the Flemish farmers had three poor harvests in a row, the Anglo-Dutch naval blockade stopped all grain imports and triggered the worst famine of the century in the southern provinces. After 1590 every Spanish campaign was crippled by mutinies. The fighting continued until 1609, with neither side able to pene­trate far beyond the Rhine River line which divided the seven Calvinist United Provinces from the ten Catholic provinces in Spanish hands. The Dutch commander, Prince Maurice of Nassau, son of William the Silent, hoped to reunite the northern and southern provinces, but many of his Cal­vinist supporters did not wish to join with Catholics, and the burghers of Holland and Zeeland did not wish to share their business prosperity with the towns of Flanders and Brabant. The northern provinces flourished mightily during the war; the south was in economic collapse. After Parma captured Antwerp in 1585, Amsterdam, the chief northern port, quickly became the leading entrepot in the Low Countries. The Amsterdam businessmen did not want Antwerp’s old primacy restored. Accordingly, even after the Spanish and Dutch arranged a twelve-year truce in 1609, the Dutch in­sisted on blockading the Scheldt River, Antwerp’s avenue to the sea. The war reopened in 1621, and this time the Dutch clearly gained the ad­vantage. Prince Frederick Henry, the youngest son of William the Silent, was now the Dutch general, and he pushed the Spaniards well south of the Rhine. But the great Dutch successes were at sea. The purpose of the Dutch West Indies Company, founded in 1621, was to plunder Spanish America. Company ships captured the Spanish silver, fleet in 1628. By 1636, they had taken 547 enemy vessels. In 1648, Spain capitulated, and after trying for eighty years to overcome the Dutch, finally recognized the independence of the United Provinces.

By this time, Spain and its empire had sadly decayed in wealth and vigor from the great days of the sixteenth century. The decay could be found at all levels of Spanish society. Philip IPs successors—Philip III (ruled 1598— 1621), Philip IV (ruled 1621-1665), and Charles II (ruled 1665-1700) —were feckless kings, unable or unwilling to sustain the Prudent King’s grasp on the central institutions of government. The population shrank, and there was a severe slump in the production of wool, Spain’s chief export. The peasants were less able than ever to pay the high taxes their government demanded. The merchant marine never recovered from the shipping losses inflicted by English and Dutch privateers. Apathy set in, extending even to the New World. American silver production fell pre­cipitously, until by 1660, bullion shipments to Seville were only 10 per cent of what they had been in 1595. In Spanish America, the Indian population decreased, towns decayed, and the colonists fell back on a subsistence agricultural economy closely parallel to that of the mother country. Old Spain and New Spain no longer had much to contribute to each other. Though the empire remained technically closed to outsiders, the home government was helpless to prevent the intrusions of foreign traders. It is estimated that during the second half of the seventeenth century, two thirds of the European goods sold to Spanish Americans were smuggled in by Dutch, English, or French interlopers. These illicit traders did not plunder the Spanish Main as the Elizabethan sea dogs had once done. Instead, by punctiliously bribing the local Spanish officials, they gained permission to offer their wares to the colonists, who bought eagerly because the smugglers (having evaded Spanish customs taxes) undersold the Seville monopoly. Economically, the Spanish empire had disintegrated.

The Spaniards remained as proudly autocratic, devout, and introspective as ever. Indeed, as their political power evaporated, they became ever more sensitive to questions of status and honor. And war remained the chief field of honor.. There were only twenty-eight years during the seventeenth century when Spain did not have armies in combat. It fought five wars with France alone. The net result of all this fighting was that Spain had to cede territory in the southern Netherlands, the Pyrenees, and Franche-Comte to the French, and yield a number of small Caribbean islands to the English, French, and Dutch. The strain of war precipitated a chain of mid-seven teenth-century rebellions within the Spanish empire. Portugal rose up in revolt in 1640, and after long years of fighting, Spain recognized its in­dependence in 1668. Rebellions in Catalonia, Naples, and Sicily were sup­pressed with difficulty. This cumulative tale of defeat and decay is not easy to explain. A formula which had worked well in the sixteenth century stopped working in the seventeenth. Philip II can be blamed for overstraining the Spanish system, but he can hardly be blamed for his people’s collective loss of vitality. Spaniards were no longer swashbuckling conquistadores; some­how, after 1588 they lost the knack of remaking the world.

Philip IPs defeat and Spain’s decline signalized the collapse of the Catholic crusade against Protestantism in western Europe. The ancient unity of western Christendom had been smashed beyond redemption. Yet the Calvin­ist crusaders had not won an outright victory. By the time Philip died in 1598 it was apparent that neither side could conquer the other. The French religious wars resulted in a compromise: king and country remained Cath­olic, while the Huguenots enjoyed political autonomy and religious liberty. The Netherlands revolt also resulted in a compromise: the north became predominantly Calvinist and politically independent, while the south re­mained Catholic and Spanish. In England, yet another kind of compromise emerged, with both Calvinists and Catholics forced to accept a state-con­trolled latitudianarian church. These compromise settlements can be interpreted as moral triumphs for the Calvinists, since they had fought the Catholics, despite their far greater political and military resources, to a standstill. But the Calvinists in France and England had not achieved their Genevan ideal, and in the Dutch republic the Calvinist zeal of the 1560’s was already turning by 1600 into a secular zeal for making money. Except in England, Calvinism had passed its most militant phase by the end of the century. The most effective leaders of the late sixteenth century—Henry IV, William the Silent, and Elizabeth I—were all politiques who did their best to bury the religious issue and keep the church subordinate to the state.

It would be a great mistake, however, to dismiss the Calvinist-Catholic conflict as unimportant because neither side won. Though the religious ideals of Calvin and of Loyola were quickly diluted in practice, the impact left by these sixteenth-century crusaders was strong and lasting. They strengthened the moral purpose and community spirit of every western European state. For the Spanish people, the sixteenth century was the golden age, illuminated by a fusion of missionary zeal, military prowess, and artistic creativity which they were never afterward able to match. For the French, Dutch, and English, the greatest days lay ahead. In the seventeenth century these three peoples would dominate Europe and give the world new definitions of individual liberty and public order, of individual prosperity and public power.

Chapter 2

Political Disintegration in Central and Eastern Europe

Rudolf II. Vegetable por­trait of the emperor by Guiseppe Arcimboldi. Ru­dolf, a patron of the arts, is said to have admired this painting. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

St. Michaelskirchc, Munich. The architect has boldly em­ployed Renaissance statuary, arches, columns, and entabla­tures to achieve a vigorous yet balanced ensemble. This is the Mannerist style, prefiguring the Baroque. In the right rear is seen one of the Gothic Frauenkirche’s capped towers.

Service in a German Reformed Church. Note the disciplined Calvinist aus­terity of this scene, set in a bare hall, with the women (center) segregated from the men (right and left), the elders seated forward by the communion table, and all attention riveted onto the open Bible and the preacher in his pulpit. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

Palm Sunday in Moscow. This seventeenth-century engraving shows a religious procession emerging from the Kremlin. St. Basil’s Cathedral, with its spectac­ular display of nine onion domes, is to the left.

Ivan the Terrible. This old print presents evidence that the prince was well named.

Gustavus Adolphus. Pencil sketch by Strauch, drawn in the year of the Swedish king’s death. Nationalmuseum, Stock­holm.

Catholic reentry into Augsburg, 1629. The Protestant cartoonist shows two devils vomiting parish priests (left) and Jesuits (right) into the city.

Caricature of the Swedish army which invaded Ger­many in 1630. Gustavus Adolphus’ soldiers are rep­resented as barbarians from Lapland, Livonia, and Scot­land, bent on rape and plunder. The Livonian is mounted on a reindeer.

Soldiers pillaging a farmhouse. By Callot. Some of the troopers torture the farmer over his kitchen fire to find where the money is hidden, while others rape the houshold women and steal food.

The Treaty of Munster in 1648 between Spain and the Netherlands. Painting by Ter Borch. This treaty, in which Spain finally recognized the independence of the Dutch Republic, was part of the general peace settlement of 1648. In the painting, the Dutch delegates swear the oath of ratification with hands upraised, while the Spanish delegates (right center) place their hands on a Bible.

Leopold I of Austria. Engrav­ing by van Dryweghen. This Hahsburg emperor looks less than handsome because of his protruding jaw, a common trait in his family, caused by generations of inbreeding within the Habsburg dynasty.

The Prussians swearing homage to the Great Elector at Konigsberg, 1663. The Prussian estates long refused to admit that the Elector had sovereign power over them, but finally in 1663 he persuaded them to pledge allegiance to him as overlord.

The wars of religion engulfed Latin Christendom, central and eastern as well as western Europe. Germany, birthplace of the Protestant Reforma­tion, was a battleground between the 1520’s and the 1640’s. Switzerland, Bo­hemia, Poland, Hungary, and Transylvania were all religiously divided, with Catholics, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, and Anabaptists pitted against one another. The Austrian Habsburgs, like the Spanish Habsburgs in the west, were Catholic champions; Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was the chief Protestant leader. Yet the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Germany, and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe, took on quite a different style from the crusading ardor of the Atlantic peoples. East of the Rhine, the motives for fighting were less “religious,” indeed in every sense less ideological. Protestants and Catholics exhibited less sense of moral regeneration, less missionary zeal, than did their counterparts in the west, and a stronger preoccupation with territorial aggrandizement. The Thirty Years’ War, biggest of all the wars of religion, was fought for more obviously secular objectives than were the French and Dutch religious wars. It was also more destructive of life, property, and social vitality. How ironic that Luther’s compatriots should suffer more damage, to less purpose, in the name of Protestant-Catholic rivalry than any other European people!

Political, social, and cultural factors help explain why the religious crisis of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries worked out so differently east of the Rhine. In central and eastern Europe, the concept of state sovereignty at the national level had not yet developed as it had in France, England, and Spain. Political units were simultaneously larger and smaller than in the west. The Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and. Russia were each much larger than any western national state, but within these large units the most effective authority was generally held by the local mag­nates—the landgrafs, beys, szlachta, and boyars. The average inhabitant owed indirect allegiance to a distant emperor or king who had no personal control over him, and direct allegiance to an aristocratic landlord whose power was real but petty. No central or eastern European prince could match Philip II or Elizabeth I in sovereign strength. That is, no eastern European prince could expect several million reasonably cooperative subjects (like those in Castile and England) to pay burdensome taxes, obey complex instructions, perform patriotic military service, and participate intelligently in civil obligations. Only Gustavus Adolphus could muster from his people the kind of strong community spirit which animated the Spanish, English, Dutch, and French. Community spirit or national consciousness was hard to achieve in central and eastern Europe, for the population was ethnically diverse. Some fourteen major languages were spoken, as against five in western Europe, and most of the ethnic groups were intermingled. Every large eastern state was multilingual. The Holy Roman Empire alone in­cluded eight rival ethnic groups. Ethnic rivalries cut across religious rivalries. Protestants and Catholics staged their family quarrel hemmed in by alien creeds—Islam and Greek Orthodoxy south of the Danube, and Russian Orthodoxy east of the Dnieper.

Between 1559 and 1648, during the era of the religious wars, the disparity between eastern and western Europe widened steadily. In the mid-sixteenth century this disparity had been disguised by the immense size of Charles V’s empire, straddling Spain and Germany. The division of Charles’s empire in 1556 into Spanish and German sections symbolized the new era. In the west, as we have seen, the religious crisis stimulated the evolution of an articulate urban capitalist class, as well as the development of national spirit and of a genuine state sovereignty. In the east the effect was almost the opposite. Political organization was splintered more than ever, commerce stagnated, and only the semifeudal class of agricultural magnates emerged as the true victor. The gains of these local landlords were made at the expense of the emperors and kings above them and of the burghers and peasants below. By the close of the seventeenth century, the largest central and eastern units— the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the kingdom of Poland —were in obvious decline. New power centers—the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian monarchies—were rising. But they were as yet far inferior to France and England in strength, wealth, and cultural vitality. In short, the religious wars accelerated the political disintegration of central and eastern Europe at the very time when the Atlantic states were consolidating their sovereign national power.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, 1555-1618

When Charles V divided his Habsburg empire in 1556 between his son Philip and his brother Ferdinand, he arranged Ferdinand’s election as Holy Roman emperor and gave him the family lands (known collectively as the Austrian Habsburg lands) within the southern and eastern borders of the empire: the Tyrol, Carinthia, Carniola, Styria, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, as well as Hungary and other territories beyond the eastern imperial border. Theoretically, Emperor Ferdinand was a very strong prince. His was an empire with a population of twenty-five million, three times the population of Philip II’s Spain. Actually, his power was severely limited. The Holy Roman Empire was divided into three hundred autonomous political units, of which at least three dozen had some importance. The real rulers of Germany were the local princes. During the late sixteenth century the Habsburg emperors were only nominally in charge of the Holy Roman Empire. They were only barely able to govern their own family lands and played a far more passive role in international politics tlian did their Spanish cousins. However, they were spared the religious warfare which engulfed western Europe; the Religious Peace of Augsburg, which Ferdinand nego­tiated with the German princes in 1 555, preserved an uneasy truce between German Protestants and Catholics until 1618. Peace allegedly breeds prosperity, but the late sixteenth century was a period of stagnation not only for the German Habsburgs but for their subjects within the Holy Roman Empire.

The Peace of Augsburg confirmed the sovereign authority of the local princes within the empire, its guiding principle being cuius regio, eius religio (“he who rules a territory determines its religion”). Catholic princes were permitted to impose Catholicism upon all their subjects, and Lutheran princes to impose Lutheranism. This recognition of territorial churches within the empire was a religious compromise, but not a political one. The German princes, Catholic and Lutheran, had in effect ganged up against the Habsburgs. They had observed, correctly enough, that Charles V had been trying not only to crush Protestantism but to increase Habsburg power and check the centrifugal tendencies within the empire. They had noticed how he confiscated Lutheran princely territory much more readily than he en­larged Catholic princely territory, and how he showed real favor only to members of his own family. The princes, both Lutheran and Catholic, had also been trying to turn the Reformation crisis to their personal advantage, by asserting new authority over their local churches, tightening ecclesiastical patronage, and squeezing more profit from church revenues. In 1552-1553 the Lutheran princes, allied with Henry II of France, had beaten the imperial forces while the Catholic princes stood by, neutral. The Habsburgs were forced to accept the Peace of Augsburg, which effectively squelched any hopes for a German state with a single religion and administration.

As a device for pacifying Protestant-Catholic strife, the Peace of Augsburg was closer in spirit to Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes in France than to Elizabeth I’s religious settlement in England. The Augsburg negotiators re­fused to let Catholics and Lutherans live together, except in those German cities where the population already included members of both groups. The sharp delineation of the two competing confessions was in strong contrast to the deliberately amorphous character of the Anglican establishment. Calvin­ists, Zwinglians, and Anabaptists were not recognized, though a good many Germans belonged to these churches. In 1555, a large majority of the German population was Protestant, but the ruling Habsburg dynasty and four of the seven electors who chose each new emperor were Catholic. T he old religion was largely confined to the western German Rhineland and to such south German states as Bavaria. Protestants controlled almost all of northern and central Germany, and Wiirttemberg, Ansbach, and the Pa latinate in the south. Even within the Habsburg family lands, Protestantism was very strong. Most Bohemians and Moravians were Protestants, as were the nobility and burghers in Austria. How long this prccaiious Protestant-Catholic balance would last depended very much on the princes.

The German peasantry and urban working class, scarred by memories of the debacle of the peasants’ revolt in 1524-1526, were inclined to follow orders inertly on the religious issue, and switch from Lutheran to Catholic, or vice versa, as their masters required.

The emperors Ferdinand I (ruled 1556-1564), Maximilian II (ruled 1564-1576), Rudolf II (ruled 1576-1612), and Matthias (ruled 1612-1619) were all far less energetic men than Charles V or Philip II. Their highest aim was to hold off the Turks in Hungary and to administer their family holdings along the Danube. These Austrian Habsburg territories look compactly organized on the map, but they were split into a dozen distinct governments, and incorporated almost as many language groups. The greatest source of internal friction W'as religion. During the late sixteenth century, the Habs­burg emperors’ treatment of the Protestants within their Danubian lands was very gingerly, compared with Philip II’s treatment of his Protestant subjects in the Netherlands. Only Rudolf II made much effort to enforce the Augsburg formula: in the Tyrol, Carinthia, Carniola, and Styria, he managed to convert or deport practically all the Protestants. Some ten thousand emigrants fled from these provinces between 1598 and 1605. In Austria the task was more difficult, because the nobility and townspeople were mainly Protestant. To enforce the Trentine reform decrees, Rudolf II appointed a Jesuit bishop of Vienna and expelled all Protestant preachers from the city. He could not cow the Protestant nobility and burghers, however, nor the Austrian diet or assembly. The Austrian Protestants lost some strength, but in 1609 the diet extracted a pledge guaranteeing considerable liberty of worship.

In Bohemia, the Habsburgs faced even stronger opposition. The kingdom of Bohemia was the most populous, prosperous, and cultivated possession of the Austrian Habsburgs, and like the Netherlands for the Spanish Habs­burgs, the most troublesome. The Czech people were proudly Slav and overwhelmingly Protestant. They boasted two entrenched native strains of evangelical Protestantism, the Utraquists (analogous to Lutherans) and the Bohemian Brethren (somewhat analogous to Calvinists), both stemming back to the Hussite movement of the early fifteenth century and hence quite separate from the sixteenth-century Reformation. For two hundred years the Czechs had stubbornly maintained their independence from Catholic orthodoxy and German culture. Rudolf II was hardly the man to bring them into line. Melancholic and unbalanced, the king-emperor sequestered him­self in the Hradschin castle in Prague, enveloped by his art collection, dabbling in science and magic. Intermittently, he tried to restore Catholi­cism in Bohemia by appointing Catholic officials, encouraging Jesuit mis­sionary work among the Utraquists, and issuing edicts against the Brethren. But in 1609 the Bohemian diet rose up in rebellion. In order to conciliate the rebels, Rudolf granted his Letter of Majesty, the fullest guarantee of religious freedom to be found anywhere on the continent. Obviously the Habsburgs had not yet accomplished much in Bohemia.

In the German heart of the Holy Roman Empire, the late sixteenth century was a time of prolonged economic depression. The Hanseatic League of north German cities, which had once dominated commerce in the Baltic and North seas, was quite unable to compete against Dutch, Danish, and English merchants. The old overland route to Italy had lost its central importance. In southwestern Germany, where the cities had been especially wealthy and enterprising in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, political fragmentation was most extreme, and the economy suffered as a result. Each prince, striving for sovereign power within his petty state, levied taxes and tolls which clogged commerce and reduced manufacturing output. The Fuggers of Augsburg, the leading bankers in Europe in the mid- sixteenth century, with control of Tyrolese silver and Hungarian copper production, overstrained themselves with loans to the Habsburgs toward the end of the century, and their business empire rapidly fell apart. As the Fug­gers and the other leading German entrepreneurs lost their wealth and the German cities declined in population, the princes dominated the scene more than ever.

The princes, both Protestant and Catholic, were growing dissatisfied with the religious truce they had worked out in 1555. One source of trouble was Calvinist expansion. In 1559 Elector Frederick III of the Palatinate (1515-1576) had introduced a modified version of Calvin’s church or­ganization into his central Rhineland territory. The elector’s fellow princes, Catholic and Lutheran, vainly protested this clear violation of the Augsburg treaty. Heidelberg, the Palatine capital, became the Geneva of Germany. Scholars at the university formulated the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563 as a creed for the German Reformed (or Calvinist) churches. Within a genera­tion the princes of Nassau, Hesse, and Anhalt had swung their central German states from Lutheranism to the German Reformed church. In 1613 the elector of Brandenburg announced his conversion also, though he abandoned the cuius regio, eius religio formula of Augsburg by letting his Lutheran subjects retain their religion. Two of the three Protestant imperial electors were now Calvinists; only the elector of Saxony remained Lutheran. The German Reformed princes acted more aggressively than their Lu­theran colleagues, because they were not included in the Lutheran-Catholic compromise of 1 555. Frederick III and his Palatine successors assumed leadership of the Protestant cause within the empire, and finding the other German Protestant princes to be torpid or hostile, looked abroad to the French Huguenots and Dutch Calvinists for help in times of crisis. Yet the German Reformed church lacked dynamism. Unlike the Calvinism of western Europe it was not a spontaneous force among German merchants and gentry; it depended upon princely sponsors and was state controlled. Its growth was strictly limited. Although it made inroads into Lutheranism, it had little impact among Catholics, and it could not by itself re-ignite religious warfare.

A second, and more important, source of rising tension was the spread of the Catholic reformation within the empire. The south German state of Bavaria became the nucleus of renewed Catholic zeal and political power. Duke Albert V of Bavaria (ruled 1550-1579) enthusiastically enforced the reform decrees of the Council of Trent. He stamped out all traces of Protestant heresy by having his ecclesiastical agents inspect every Bavarian church annually, revamp the schools systematically, and censor all books. Jesuits were invited to take charge of the Bavarian schools and universities, and the duke’s subjects were forbidden to study abroad. The new style of dogmatic Catholicism facilitated political autocracy in Bavaria. When Protes­tant nobles and burghers tried to protest, Albert excluded them from the Bavarian diet, thereby effectively emasculating that assembly. By the close of the sixteenth century, the duke of Bavaria was governing in a more absolute fashion than any other German prince.

Elsewhere in Germany, the Catholics began to win back converts. Be­tween 1580 and 1610, Protestants were driven out of a whole series of cities, among them Cologne, Aachen, Strasbourg, Wiirzberg, Bamberg, Munster, Paderborn, and Osnabriick. Everywhere, the Jesuits were in the forefront of the campaign. They established schools and universities in key German cities and made a specialty of educating young Catholic princes. Peter Canisius (1521-1597) is the best known of these sixteenth-century German Jesuit missionaries. The striking Jesuit Michaelskirche (Church of St. Michael) in Munich, built by the dukes of Bavaria, is a symbol of the Catholic reforma­tion. This church was erected in the 1580’s, when St. Peter’s was nearing completion in Rome, and it introduced to Germany the sumptuous classical architecture of the reformed papacy. The Munich tourist today need only visit two churches a block apart, built a century apart—the fifteenth-century Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) and the sixteenth-century Michaels kirche—to catch the immense psychological distance between pre- and post-reformation German Catholicism. The Gothic Frauenkirche rises in awkward vertical bulk, austere and homely, her round capped towers reflect ing the native Bavarian style, and her soaring nave expressing a quest inr. spirit. By contrast, the Michaelskirche is international in style, harmonious in scale and proportion, and lavishly decorated to proclaim the certitude, symmetry, and power of the new Church Militant.

By 1609 all signs pointed to the end of the Augsburg truce. The imperial Diet, the one vestige of collective German government, collapsed in 1608 when the Protestant representatives boycotted its proceedings. In 1609 the most aggressive German Protestant states formed a Protestant Union for self-defense, headed by the Elector Palatine, whereupon the most aggressive Catholic states immediately formed a rival Catholic League, headed by the duke of Bavaria. Yet it must be emphasized that the German princes in their two armed camps still dreaded Armageddon. The Protestant Union was ineffectual because the Lutheran elector of Saxony would not ally himself with the Calvinist Elector Palatine. Nor was the Catholic League much stronger, thanks to hostility between the Austrian Habsburgs and the Ba­varian Wittelsbachs. Both sides had pretext for war in 1609 when two Rhenish principalities, Jiilich and Cleve, were contested by rival Protestant and Catholic claimants. Eventually, in 1614, a compromise was worked out by which Jiilich went to the Catholic claimant and Cleve to the Protestant. But when the next crisis came in Bohemia in 1618, it could not be patched up.

The problems of these years become easier to visualize if we think of the Holy Roman Empire as being something like the mid-twentieth-century world in microcosm. The inhabitants of the empire were culture-bound to their own cities or provinces as modern man is culture-bound to his own nation. People refused to admit, then as now, that their fate depended upon cooperation with strangers who spoke and thought differently, but lived uncomfortably close by. Politicians waged ideological cold war, their motiva­tion ostensibly religious instead of political or economic. Protestant and Catholic imperial states formed alliance systems to maintain the balance of power. Whenever a Lutheran prince converted to Catholicism or vice versa, diplomacy was required to keep the conflict local. When delegates from the various states convened in the imperial Diet, the only institution effectively embracing their whole community, they raised issues without attempting to solve them, just as the members of the United Nations do today. Gradually even this meager spirit of imperial community disappeared. The cold war grew inexorably warmer. Leaders on both sides, sick of the stalemate, began supposing that they could solve issues simply by unilateral action. And when they did take unilateral action, in 1618, they plunged the empire into thirty years of civil war.

EASTERN BORDERLANDS: THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, POLAND, RUSSIA, AND SWEDEN

To the east of the Holy Roman Empire, in the late sixteenth century, three extremely large states filled the map—the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and Russia. North of the Baltic Sea lay the extensive kingdom of Sweden. These states, particularly the Ottoman Empire and Muscovite Russia, seemed profoundly alien to western and central Europeans. Travelers found the Turks and Russians almost as barbaric and exotic as the Indians of America, and infinitely more dangerous because of their large armies, equipped with modern weapons. English merchants, venturing to trade with the Turks and Russians in the late sixteenth century, wrote home to describe the amazing Mohammedan and Greek Orthodox religious practices they had witnessed, the bizarre architecture, food, and dress, the stark contrast between an opulent ruling caste and an impoverished peasantry, the vast extent of these eastern lands and the herculean scale of their armies. “We arrived at the great and most stately city of Constantinople,” one traveler reported, “which for the situation and proud seat thereof, for the beautiful and commodious haven, for the great and sumptuous buildings of their Temples, which they call Mosques, is to be preferred before all the cities of Europe. And there the Emperor of the Turks kept his Court and residence, at least two miles in compass.” Yet no westerner forgot that the Turks were infidels. Their lavish oriental ceremonies seemed tedious and empty. Their eunuchs and seraglios evoked incredulous contempt. Turkish warriors had an unrivaled reputation for cruelty and deceit.

As for Muscovy, the few westerners who penetrated into this land told tales of a climate too extreme for civilized man to endure. In the sub-zero Russian winter, “you shall see many drop down in the streets, many travelers brought into the towns sitting stiff and dead in their sleds. The bears and wolves issue by troops out of the woods driven by hunger, and enter the villages, tearing and ravening all they can find.” The Russians, it was said, besot themselves with kvass and mead. They had strange smoky complexions because they took too many steam baths. Their primitive wooden buildings were constantly burning down. When the invading Tartars set fire to Moscow in 1571, they largely wiped out Russia’s chief city within four hours. The Muscovite tsar, for all his jewels and ornate skirted garments and his giant feasts on plates of gold, seemed semicivilized at best. An English poet who visited Moscow in 1568 summed up in jogging verse the westerner’s easy disdain for these eastern borderlands of European civilization:

The cold is rare, the people rude, the prince so full of pride,

The realm so stored with monks and nuns, and priests on every side,

The manners are so Turkey like, the men so full of guile,

The women wanton, Temples stuft with idols that defile The seats that sacred ought to be, the customs are so quaint,

As if I would describe the whole, I fear my pen would faint.

Wild Irish are as civil as the Russies in their kind,

Hard choice which is the best of both, each bloody, rude and blind.

Fortunately for the west, the Turks, Poles, and Russians were all politically weak in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Size was deceptive in these sprawling eastern states. The Turkish sultan, the Polish king, and the Muscovite tsar were all less effectual rulers than western observers supposed. Their armies were much smaller than westerners thought them to be, and in any case generally faced east in order to cope with the Persians and Tartars. Hence, despite the near paralysis of the Holy Roman Empire, its eastern neighbors did not intervene effectively in German affairs between 1 555 and 1618. Nor (except for Sweden) did they participate in the Thirty Years’ War. How is this uniform political softness in eastern Europe to be explained?

The Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire had been anything but soft before the middle of the sixteenth century. Suleiman the Magnificent (ruled 1520-1566), the Iasi of the great Turkish warrior sultans, held the whole Balkan peninsula and most of Hungary. He had thirty million subjects, a revenue greater than that of Charles V, and a much more efficient military system, including i permanent standing army of over ten thousand infantry (janissaiics), over  ten thousand cavalry (spahis), and at least a hundred thousand auxiliary cavalry available for annual campaigns. The janissaries were Moslem con­verts, mainly drawn from the conquered Greek Orthodox peoples of the Balkans. Taken captive as boys by the sultan’s forces, they were rigorously trained to fight for Islam and to administer the Ottoman Empire. They formed an enslaved elite, permanently dependent on the sultan, given a professional schooling, never allowed to marry or to inherit lands and titles, yet freely promoted on the basis of talent and merit to the highest imperial posts. They made superb soldiers.

After the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Turkish fighting ma­chine lost much of its fearsome power and its expansive drive. In 1571 the Spanish Habsburgs smashed the Turkish fleet at Lepanto. In the 1590’s the Austrian Habsburgs tried to capture Hungary and Transylvania, and did keep the Ottoman armies mostly on the defensive, though the peace terms of 1606 left the Balkan frontier unchanged. Ottoman passivity gave the Habs­burgs freedom to concentrate on German affairs after 1618, and when the Thirty Years’ War went badly for the Habsburgs, the Turks failed to capitalize on a golden opportunity for further western expansion.

The key to Turkish success had always been strong military leadership by the sultan. After Suleiman came a long line of feckless sultans who abandoned Mars for Venus. They ceased to conduct military campaigns, ceased even to emerge from the Constantinople harem. Back in the days of tough, ruthless leadership, each new Ottoman sultan had stabilized his ac­cession by killing his younger brothers (they were strangled with a silken bowstring so as not to shed exalted blood). Now, with the sultans’ amo­rous proclivities resulting in numerous progeny, this custom was turning the seraglio into a slaughterhouse. In 1595 the new sultan had forty-six brothers and sisters, and he thought it necessary to strangle his nineteen brothers and fifteen pregnant harem women. In the seventeenth century this systematic fratricide was stopped, but by then the sultan himself had become a puppet, frequently deposed in palace revolutions. With no new lands to conquer and little war booty to enjoy, the Turkish soldiery became preoccupied with status and intrigue. The janissaries changed radically, becoming in the seventeenth century a closed, self-perpetuating caste. They now married, passed their jobs on to their sons, agitated for new perqui­sites, and engineered palace coups. As the economy stagnated and tax levies dwindled, bribery and corruption greatly increased.

In the 1650’s, a drastic administrative shake-up in Constantinople tem­porarily revived the old militancy and efficiency. In the 1660’s the Turks captured the island of Crete from Venice. They tightened their grip over Hungary and resumed their drive up the Danube into Austria. In 1683 they laid siege to Vienna. But in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, Ottoman expansion was once again stopped, this time decisively. The Turks were forced to surrender Hungary in 1699, and their huge em­pire began to shrink. This shrinkage continued for nearly 250 years. In the early nineteenth century the Turks still held half of Suleiman’s European territory and all of his North African and Near Eastern possessions. The First World War marked the final stage: the Turks were confined at last to Anatolia, and the Ottoman Empire was dissolved. Seldom, if ever, has a decaying state disintegrated so slowly. In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire had by no means yet become the Sick Man of Europe. Buttressed by total intellectual isolation from the new currents in European culture, the Turks still retained their profound contempt for the West. “Do I not know,” the grand vizier told the French ambassador in 1666, “that you are a Giaour [nonbeliever], that you are a hog, a dog, a turd eater?”

Ottoman Europe—that is, the Balkan peninsula—was something of a cultural no-man’s-land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: only superficially Turkish, cut off from Latin Christendom, and with a very rudimentary native peasant style of life. The Turks had wiped out the native ruling class when they conquered the Balkans, but they never migrated into the area in large numbers, nor did they try to assimilate the local peasantry, which they preferred to keep as permanently unprivileged agricultural labor­ers. From the Turkish viewpoint, the Balkan peasants were fairly easy to subjugate as long as they remained divided into six rival language groups: Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians, Serbo-Croatians, Rumanians, and Magyars.

Instead of imposing Mohammedanism upon the subject peoples, the Turks encouraged the perpetuation of the Greek Orthodox Church, largely to keep the Balkan population hostile to western Christianity. This Ottoman policy did indeed effectively curb Balkan defection to the Catholic Habsburgs or Poles. The Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople repaid his Turkish patrons by teaching his people to submit docilely to Ottoman rule. Certainly the Ottoman Empire was more tolerant of all sorts of alien cultures and customs than any contemporaneous state in western Europe. French, English, and Dutch merchants were granted their own trading enclaves in Turkey, gov­erned by western law. Jews flocked from Spain to enjoy Turkish freedom. The few towns in the Balkans were inhabited mainly by Turks and Jews; minarets and bazaars gave these towns an oriental atmosphere. In the Balkan countryside, the Christian peasants were confined to the lowest rung of the Ottoman social ladder; illiterate, ignorant, and silent, they paid extortionate taxes and tributes. In the sixteenth century their young sons were frequently levied as janissaries, and in the seventeenth century their farms were often pillaged by brigands. Even so, they probably fared no worse than any other peasants in eastern Europe.

Poland

North of the Ottoman Empire and cast of the Holy Roman Empire lay the extensive kingdom of Poland, stretching from the Oder to the Dnieper River and from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. Poland had no natural frontiers except for the Baltic coast to the north and the Carpathian Mountains to the south. Its six million widely scattered inhabitants raised grain and cattle. In the eastern part of the kingdom agricultural development was hindered by the attacks of wild Cossack raiders and by vast stretches of marshland. Cracow and Danzig, both on the western border, were the two chief towns. Poland did possess considerable human and natural resources, yet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it played only a feeble international role, and in the eighteenth century the Polish state completely disappeared. There were ethnic and religious reasons for Poland’s failure, but by far the biggest problem was political disorganization.

The dominant Polish social class was the szlaclita, the landed gentry. Its members—like twelfth-century feudal knights in the west—were absolute masters of their rural domains; they forced the peasantry into serfdom, extracted unpaid labor from the serfs, disdained the burghers who huddled behind the town walls, and frustrated every effort by the Polish kings to consolidate power. The szlachta formed a numerous class—8 per cent of the total population. A typical sixteenth-century Polish landlord owned a village and its surrounding grain fields. His serfs labored for him two or three days a week, and loaded his harvested grain into river barges to be shipped to the Baltic for export west. He tried and punished his serfs in his own court, without fear of appeal to the king, for the szlachta had virtual immunity from arrest and trial. The landlord paid few taxes, saw occasional military service, sat in the local seym, or diet, sent delegates to the national Diet, and helped to elect the king. Poland was called a royal republic because the gentry voted their king into office and handcuffed him with constitutional limitations. It is said that fifty thousand szlachta assembled at Warsaw in 1573 to elect asking the French prince Henry of Valois—this was an unusually bad choice, and the Poles were lucky that he skipped the country after six months in order to take the French throne as Henry III (see p. 36). The Polish gentry were so suspicious of dynastic power that they almost always elected foreigners. Between 1548 and 1668 the winning candidates were Lithuanian, French, Hungarian, and Swedish. These kings lacked the royal lands, budget, army, and bureaucracy of western monarchs. The Polish serfs had less individual freedom than the Balkan peasantry under Turkish rule. When romantic Polish historians talk of their country’s sixteenth-century “gentry democracy,” one should remember that they are using a pretty special definition of democracy.

Like other eastern European states, Poland was ethnically divided, a sit­uation which compounded its political difficulties. Poles occupied the west, Lithuanians the northeast, White Russians the east, and Ruthenians the south, and Germans and Jews congregated in the towns. Of all these peo­ples, only Poles and Lithuanians were admitted to the ruling landlord class. Since 1386, the members of the Lithuanian nobility had shared a common king with the Polish gentry but in most ways had run their own affairs. In 1569 the Lithuanian nobility became so frightened by Tsar Ivan the Terrible of Russia that they surrendered their autonomy and in the Union of Lublin merged with the Polish ruling caste. Henceforth the Polish-Lithuanian landlords had a single king, a single Diet (meeting at Warsaw, near the Polish-Lithuanian border), and a single foreign policy. But the union was always superficial, for the Lithuanians continued to manage their White Russian peasants in their own fashion and kept their own laws and language. Indeed, each ethnic group had its own language. Since the szlachta sneered at the Polish dialect spoken by their serfs, they adopted Latin as the religious, political, and literary language of the ruling class. The szlachta sneered also at the German-speaking townspeople, who were ex­cluded from the Diet and from political power. The Yiddish-speaking Jewish community was despised by everyone.

The Christians in Poland were doubly divided in the mid-sixteenth century. The people were predominantly Latin Christians, except in the south and east, where they were largely Greek Orthodox; this division was only papered over in 1596, when the Ruthenian Orthodox church agreed to obey the pope and accept the Roman dogma while retaining its Slavonic rites and practices. The second religious division was among Latin Chris tians—Catholic versus Protestant. In the 1550’s, Polish Catholics found themselves in a very precarious majority, for about half the szlachta were Calvinist, and the German burghers were largely Lutheran. Even Unitarian, or anti-Trinitarian, ideas were circulating, possibly inspired by contact with Jewish and Moslem teachings. In 1555 King Sigismund Augustus (ruled 1548-1572) and the Polish Diet agreed to allow individual freedom of worship to Protestants. The heresy-hunting power of Catholic church courts was suspended. More than the contemporaneous Augsburg formula in Germany, this Polish policy weakened ecclesiastical discipline and sapped what little cultural unity there was. But the Protestant Reformation was not well rooted in Poland. The szlachta had adopted Calvinism as a weapon against centralized monarchy, and once assured of political victory, they lost interest in the new doctrine. During the late sixteenth century the Catholics—their efforts spearheaded by Jesuit upper-class missionary work— regained control. Numerous Jesuit schools were opened for the sons of the gentry. By the mid-seventeenth century, with Catholicism securely reestab­lished, education stagnated even for the upper class. Proud and touchy, the Polish gentry cultivated long mustachios and oriental sashed costumes as their badge of immunity from Italian or French standards of civility. Poland in the seventeenth century became almost as isolated as Ottoman Turkey from the intellectual currents of western Europe.

Between 1559 and 1715, Poland faced east and north rather than west in all its wars and diplomacy. It fought the Turks intermittently without per­manently winning or losing any territory. It fought the Swedes constantly and generally got beaten. In 1629 it ceded the province of Livonia to Sweden, and had to accept Swedish control of the Baltic. Poland’s most menacing neighbor was Russia, and the Poles were lucky that internal Muscovite turmoil in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries delayed effective Russian westward expansion. In 1667 Poland ceded Smo­lensk, Kiev, and the eastern Ukraine to Russia.

These sizable territorial losses were less alarming than Poland’s rising political anarchy, which paralyzed the state and invited further foreign encroachment. The gentry were so suspicious of centralized royal power that in the Diet legislation could not pass without the unanimous consent of the szlachta deputies. In the sixteenth century the majority of deputies could generally persuade or coerce the minority into accepting a policy. But in 1652, for the first time, an individual deputy declared his total opposition, his liberum veto against the legislative proceedings, and left the chamber— forcing the Diet to disband. Henceforth, 90 percent of the Polish Diets were “exploded” in this way, by use of the individual liberum veto. It became possible for the French, Prussians, or other foreign powers, by bribing refractory members of the gentry, to veto Polish tax laws or stymie Polish military preparations. To many observers, Poland’s “gentry democracy” proved the folly of constitutional self-government 'and the necessity for absolute monarchy. To the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians, Poland’s governmental paralysis offered an excellent excuse for partitioning the state in the eighteenth century.

Russia

East of Poland lay the vast tsardom of Muscovy, or Russia. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was an open question whether Russia was part of European civilization, for in scale and temper, life there differed profoundly from life in the rest of Europe. To begin with, the country was gigantic. In 1533, when Ivan the Terrible inherited the throne, Muscovy stretched 1,200 miles, from Smolensk to the Ural Mountains, and covered five times the area of France. Ivan nearly doubled his European holdings by annexing the Don and Volga river basins to the south, and launched the Russian eastward trek across the Urals into Siberia. By the time Peter the Great became tsar in 1682, the Russians had annexed further European land along the Dnieper and Ural rivers, and their Asian settlements were strung along the Siberian river system for five thousand miles, right to the Pacific. Russia then covered thirty times the area of France.

The climate throughout this continental sweep of territory was savage by European standards, with arctic winters, blazing summers, and a short growing season. Population estimates for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russia are pure guesswork, but whether one accepts the lowest, four million inhabitants, or the highest, seventeen million, it is evident that settlement was far less dense than in western and central Europe. The huge reservoir of empty land encouraged hit-and-run agricultural techniques. The peasants were extremely mobile, sometimes voluntarily migrating long distances to find better land and working conditions, sometimes forcibly transported by their landlords or the tsar. In contrast with western Europe, where people habitually tilled the same ancestral land, lived in the same village, and even occupied the same buildings for centuries, no human enterprise seemed lasting in Russia. The average wooden peasant’s hut was built to last four years. An English traveler between Yaroslavl and Moscow in 1553 was impressed by the numerous villages he passed through; thirty-five years later another English visitor found the same region deserted and gone back to forest. Tartar raiders periodically swept into Muscovy from the Crimea, as Viking, Saracen, and Magyar raiders had pillaged western and central Europe in the ninth century. The Tartars carried hundreds of thousands of Russians off into slavery. Belief in the individual dignity of man—fragile enough in the sixteenth-century west—was an unobtainable luxury for Muscovites. Tsars, nobles, priests, and peasants all accepted physical bru­tality—flogging and torture—as staple features of society.

Russia’s contact with western Europe was minimal between 1559 and 1682. Blocked by Sweden from an outlet on the Baltic during most of these years, and by Turkey from an outlet on the Black Sea, Russia had only one port—Archangel, on the White Sea—from which to trade directly with western Europe. Its commerce with the Middle East was more important Strange as it seems, western Europeans had built closer commercial and diplomatic contact with Russia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries than they did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Muscovites found it far easier to spread eastward into empty Siberia than to reconquer from Poland the White Russian and Ukrainian lands which had oncc belonged to their ancestors. Not until the reign of Peter the Great did the Russians learn how to beat a crack European army.

P.ussia’s most meaningful tie with the west was Christianity. Yet the Russian Orthodox clergy viewed Latin Christendom with the darkest suspi­cion. For centuries they had accepted as spiritual overlord the Greek Ortho­dox patriarch at Constantinople, and when Byzantium fell to the Ottomans, the Russian Orthodox naturally supposed that the metropolitan of Moscow' had inherited the role of the patriarch of Constantinople as the leader of true Christianity. In 1588 the patriarch of Constantinople grudgingly accepted the metropolitan’s elevation to patriarch of Moscow. The Russians called Moscow the third Rome. They believed that Old Rome had fallen into heresy under the popes, and that New Rome (Constantinople) had become a pawn of the infidel Turks; Moscow was the third and greatest capital of the Christian world. Because of their hostility to the papacy, the Muscovites were better disposed toward Protestant merchants and diplomats from England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Germany than toward Catho­lics. But the Russians wanted no Reformation in their own church, nor even any discussion over the smallest details of Orthodox belief and practice.

The Russians settled Tobolsk, beyond the Urals, in 1587, two years after Sir Walter Raleigh first tried to found an English plantation at Roanoke Island, North Carolina. The Russians reached the Pacific in 1643, a few years after the English Puritans had founded Massachusetts. It would be hard to find a stronger social contrast than that between the Russian folk movement across Eurasia and the contemporaneous English folk movement into North America. Both peoples held an enormous reservoir of empty land, but while the Americans methodically inched their way inland, taking nearly three centuries to span the continent, the Russians lightly spanned Siberia in two generations. Frontier America was a paradise for the self-reliant, egalitarian free farmer, disdainful of government, unencumbered by taxes. But in Russia, frontier expansion fostered the sharpest possible social stratification, and Europe’s most autocratic, oppressive government. The members of the Muscovite nobility, who held great estates in European Russia, were deter­mined not to let their agricultural laborers move off to free land in Siberia. So they introduced new regulations which tied the laborer and his descen­dants to his master’s soil or (better yet) to his master’s person—in short, turned the peasant into a serf, virtually indistinguishable from a slave. At the same time, the tsars were determined not to let their nobility carve up the land into autonomous feudal principalities, or perpetrate political anarchy in the fashion of the Polish szlachta. So they ruthlessly killed all aristocratic troublemakers, confiscated their large properties, and divided them into smaller parcels suitable for the pomeshchik, a loyal dependent employed in the royal army or administration. Since the members of this service nobility could not own land outright, but held it from the tsar only as long as they served him, they tended to squeeze the peasants hard in order to make short-run profits. Peasants ran away from pomeshchik estates with special frequency. By the seventeenth century, the landlords and the tsar had reached a tacit understanding. The landlords accepted the principle that they must serve the tsar, and in return the tsar agreed that the peasants—90 per cent of the population—were legally defined as serfs, bound to their master and subject to his will.

Ivan IV (ruled 1533-1584), better known as Ivan the Terrible, was the principal author of the Muscovite formula: absolute power for the tsar, state service for the nobility, thralldom for the peasantry. Far less evidence has survived about the details of Ivan’s reign than about the reigns of his western contemporaries, Philip II and Elizabeth I, but we know enough to tell that his style of rule differed utterly from theirs. As a young prince, Ivan amused himself by tossing animals from the palace tower and watched them die in agony. In 1547 he had himself crowned Tsar (that is, “Caesar”) of All the Russians, the first Muscovite ruler to do so. His behavior toward his subjects could be described as mad in a half dozen distinct senses—raging, frantic, foolish, visionary, giddy, lunatic. He deci­mated the boyar class, the hereditary Russian aristocracy, by killing hun­dreds, probably even thousands, of its members. He pitilessly sacked Novgorod, the second city in his realm, because of a rumor of disloyalty.

His deep piety did not prevent him from flogging and torturing priests or killing his victims in church during Mass. He once had an archbishop sewn into a bearskin and tossed to the dogs. He struck his oldest son and heir so hard with a pointed stick that he killed him, and it is supposed that his melancholic brooding over this crime hastened his own demise. Most of the time there was method in Ivan’s madness. His wholesale confiscation and redistribution of land was economically catastrophic, depopulating much of central Russia, but it broke the boyar power and bolstered that of the new service nobility. The more Ivan bullied the Russian Orthodox Church, the more the clergy preached abject reverence to God’s lieutenant, the tsar. Uncivilized Ivan certainly was, but he magnetized the Russian landlords and peasants alike with his awesome God-given power. The tsar of Russia had far greater psychological appeal for the mass of the people than did the elected monarchs of Poland or the seraglio sultans of T urkey.

Ivan the Tcrrible’s successor, Fedor (ruled 1584-1598), was mad in a less complicated way than his father; he was a simpleton who chiefly delighted in ringing church bells. Fedor’s reign inaugurated Muscovy’s “Time of Trou­bles,” the period of aristocratic rebellion against tsarist autocracy, which lasted from 1584 to 1613. Among the tsars in this anarchic period was Boris Godunov (ruled 1598-1605), more famous thanks to Mussorgsky’s opera than his statecraft deserves. During these years the Russian landlords tried to run the country as the szlachta ran Poland. A national assembly, the zemsky sobor, assumed the authority to choose each new tsar. Marauding armies, led by would-be tsars, ransacked the countryside. During the Time of Troubles, the church was the one institution which held Russia together. People gathered in the fortresslike monasteries for protection, and left their land and wealth to the church. Gradually, the political role of the clergy be­came stronger than it had been under Ivan IV.

In 1613, the zemsky sobor chose Michael Romanov (ruled 1613-1645) as the new tsar because he was a youthful mediocrity—dubious accreditation for the dynasty which would rule Russia for the next three hundred years. But this first Romanov had other assets. He was a grandnephew of Ivan the Terrible, and the son of an able priest-politician named Philaret, who became patriarch of Moscow soon after Michael ascended the throne. Philaret made himself the real ruler of Russia, and the patriarchs who succeeded him after his death in 1633 were equally ambitious for secular power. The church’s obtrusive political role during this period distressed many Russian clergy and laity. A crisis developed during the patriarchate of Nikon (1652-1666), for Nikon not only ruled in the name of the tsar but claimed a theoretical supremacy over the tsar, since the spiritual realm is higher than the temporal. Nikon was deposed, and the tsars regained control over the Russian church. But Nikon’s policies left a bitter legacy. In order to bring Russian Orthodoxy into closer conformity with Greek Orthodoxy,

Nikon had introduced certain technical revisions in ecclesiastical practice, such as making the sign of the Cross with three fingers rather than two, and spelling Christ’s name Iisus rather than Isus. Many Russians supposed that these innovations blasphemed God and imperiled their immortal souls. These people, styled the Old Believers, felt that Nikon had disastrously corrupted the third Rome. We are told that twenty thousand Old Believers burned themselves alive in despair at the impending end of the world.

The first Romanov tsars, those ruling between 1613 and 1682, were much less forceful monarchs than Ivan the Terrible. But they maintained the partnership with the church and they won the cooperation of the landlords. The zemsky sobor faded away, though not before it ratified the final codification of serfdom. The great problem now was how to stop the serfs from running away. A decree of 1664 required that any serf owner who was caught receiving a fugitive serf must compensate the master with four peasant families of his own. Tsar and landlord aided each other in taking away the peasant’s freedom and in saddling him with taxes. The cost of warfare and of government-sponsored colonization fell squarely on the people least able to pay. It is estimated that the peasant tax rate in 1640 was a hundred times what it had been in 1540!¹ In the mid-seventeenth cen­tury a major epidemic drastically depleted the Russian labor force, making the tsar and the landlords more eager than ever to exact taxes and work from the serfs, and making the serfs more eager than ever to join the floating population of runaways and bandits. Many serfs yearned to join the Cossacks on the southern frontier, and take up a nomadic life as hunters, fishermen, and guerrilla warriors against the Tartars, Turks, and Persians.

Between 1667 and 1671 Russia was the scene of the largest European folk rising of the century, a peasant rebellion led by Stephen Razin in the Volga basin. Razin was a Cossack who had operated as a river pirate on the Volga and then had sailed into the Caspian Sea to raid the Persians. Word spread that when he returned with his Persian loot to Astrakhan, he passed through the bazaars, dressed in oriental magnificence, distributing silks and jewels among the people. Suddenly he was a lib­erating folk hero to the Russian masses, a Robin Hood with the magical powers of the tsar. As disciples flocked to him, Stephen Razin moved along the Don and the Volga, proclaiming that he was rescuing the tsar from the wicked boyars so that all could live in freedom and equality. In villages and towns throughout the middle Volga region, huge numbers of serfs rose against their lords and formed into rebel bands. But Razin had no organization, and his followers had no military discipline. The tsar’s soldiers beat Razin in pitched battle and chased him into the Don marshes. His magical authority evaporated. He was captured and executed.

Meanwhile, the tsar and the nobility smashed one rebel band after an­other, and terrorized the peasantry into submission by dismembering the rebels they caught alive, or impaling them on stakes, or nailing them onto gibbets. Razin’s rebellion accomplished nothing. A hundred thousand serfs may have died in their vain struggle for liberty. Such was the starkly strati­fied and deeply insular society on which Peter the Great forcibly imposed western technology and cultural mores in the years following 1682.

Sweden

West of Russia and north of Poland lay the kingdom of Sweden. Seven- teenth-century Sweden was a Baltic empire, double its twentieth-century size; it incorporated modern Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, and extensive Russian, Polish, and German coastal land. Sweden held 2,500 miles of Baltic shoreline. Nonetheless, its resources were puny compared with those of Turkey, Poland, or Russia. Sweden’s was a simple society of a million or so peasants, who subsisted on porridge, turnips, coarse bread, and home-brewed beer. Stockholm was the one town of any size; commerce was mainly con­ducted by foreigners; and specie was so scarce that wages, taxes, and debts were paid in kind. The king of Sweden was the only European monarch who found it necessary to build warehouses to store his revenue of butter, fish, and hops. Sweden had always been on Europe’s cultural periphery: it boasted a medieval university, but the Renaissance had scarcely touched its shores. Swedish political structure was rudimentary by western standards. Yet Sweden was the only one of the borderland states to play a vigorous international hand in the years between 1559 and 1700.

Under the leadership of a young nobleman named Gustavus Vasa, Sweden had secured independence from Denmark in the early sixteenth century. Gustavus Vasa established himself as king of Sweden and ruled purposefully from 1 523 to 1560. But his three sons, who reigned between 1560 and 1611, squabbled among themselves and alienated their subjects. When sixteen- year-old Gustavus Adolphus inherited the throne in 1611, Sweden was in acute crisis. It was at war with Denmark, and the war was going so poorly that the Danes appeared likely to reconquer the country.

Gustavus Adolphus (ruled 1611-1632) shaped Sweden almost overnight into a major power. He had some good material to work with. For one thing, the Protestant Reformation had infused the early seventeenth-century Swedes with crusading ardor. As in England, the Swedish Reformation had begun in the 1520’s and 15 30’s as a cynical maneuver to grab Church land and wealth, and only slowly did Luther’s gospel cry stir the people. By the 1620’s, however, Sweden’s warfare with Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia for control of the Baltic was having much the same galvanizing effect as Elizabethan England’s warfare with Catholic Spain. Calvinism made small headway in Sweden; the country was solidly Lutheran. Gustavus Adolphus’ clergy were more truculent than their brethren in Germany. The king’s chaplain dared to reprove him publicly for his sexual laxity, where­upon Gustavus Adolphus (who deserved this reproof far less than most contemporary monarchs) gave "the chaplain the next vacant bishopric— surely a commendable way to avoid hearing further sermons. Another Swedish asset was the sturdy independence of the peasant farmers. In Sweden, society was not polarized into a landlord master class and an en- serfed peasantry, as in Turkey, Poland, and Russia. There were no serfs in Sweden. The peasants owned 50 per cent of the arable land. They had their own chamber in the Riksdag, or national assembly. The nobility were cor­respondingly less rich and privileged than in the great eastern European states. To be sure, they assumed political leadership, possessed large farms, hired tenant laborers, and exhibited family pride. But in style of life the Swedish noblemen were none too distant from the peasants. From this comparatively undifferentiated, homespun, God-fearing society, Gustavus Adolphus drew a peerless army of self-reliant soldiers, militant chaplains, and officers eager to invade and plunder Sweden’s wealthier neighbors.

Gustavus Adolphus is best known as a warrior, the Protestant hero in the Thirty Years’ War. He began his reign by making peace with Denmark, but he soon took advantage of the internal weakness of his neighbors, wresting territory along the Gulf of Finland (the future site of St. Petersburg) from the Russians and Livonia (modern Latvia) from the Poles. The tolls he levied upon captured southern Baltic ports enabled him to finance further military operations without overtaxing the Swedish people. Swedish copper and iron mines supplied added revenue and metal for armaments. But Gustavus Adolphus was much else besides a soldier. He was easily the most creative administrator in Swedish history. Paunchy, jocose, explosive, this roughhewn Nordic figure with big blue eyes and blond Vandyke beard obviously bulged with manly energy, but he had deep reserves of religion and culture as well. He recruited the Swedish nobility, led by the extremely able Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna (1583-1654), into administrative service. He charmed the burghers and peasants in the Riksdag. He bolstered his doughty Lutheran clergy, and they in turn mixed patriotism with religion, performing such thankless civil jobs as collecting the local taxes. Ashamed of Sweden’s backward school system, the king founded many new schools and reorga­nized the faltering University of Upsala.

Not being a magician, Gustavus Adolphus failed to transform Sweden into a lasting great power. When he led his army into Germany in 1630, to battle the Catholic Habsburgs, he committed his country to aims beyond its resources. After Gustavus Adolphus was killed in 1632, the crown passed to his five-year-old daughter Christina (ruled 1632-1654). During her minority, Chancellor Oxenstierna doggedly kept Sweden in the endless German war. Swedish armies won more often than they lost, and by peace treaties in 1645, 1648, and 1658 the Swedes gained considerable Danish and German territory. Internally, however, the country lost its cohesion. Queen Christina was partly responsible, for she was a selfish lady who grew bored with statecraft, abdicated her throne, and shocked her people by converting to Catholicism. The late seventeenth century saw a swift eclipse of Sweden’s great-power status. Between 1700 and 1809 it lost the whole of its Baltic empire to Russia. Sweden’s age of greatness was thus short—but decisive. To see how pivotal Gustavus Adolphus’ Lutheran crusade was in the 1630’s, let us return to the Holy Roman Empire and the international power struggle which devastated Germany.

THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR, 1618-1648

Other wars have lasted as long, have caused as much damage, and have settled as little. But the Thirty Years’ War, which opened in Bohemia in 1618 and convulsed central Europe for a generation', had one peculiar fea­ture. The chief combatants (after the first few years) were non-German, yet their combat took place almost entirely on German soil. The most pop­ulous provinces of the Holy Roman Empire became a playground for the invading armies of Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and France. How and why did the German people suffer this indignity?

In 1618, the Habsburg heir apparent to the imperial throne was Ferdinand of Styria (1578-1637), a cheerful, bustling little man of forty. Ferdinand was a rabid Catholic, educated and counseled by the Jesuits. He was frankly unwilling to tolerate Protestantism among his subjects. Clearly, this man was going to make a more energetic Holy Roman emperor than anyone since Charles V, but the Protestant imperial princes were none too alarmed. Not even the great Charles V had been able to exercise much power as emperor. Within the Austrian and Bohemian provinces held directly by the Habs­burgs, however, the situation was different. Here Ferdinand did have real power. As soon as he was crowned king of Bohemia in 1617, he began to rescind the religious toleration guaranteed to the Bohemian Protestants by his cousin, Rudolf II, in 1609. The Bohemians were in much the same predicament as the Netherlanders had been in the 1560’s—alienated from their autocratic Habsburg prince by language, custom, and religion. As in the Netherlands, the nobility engineered rebellion. On May 23, 1618, a hundred armed Bohemian noblemen cornered Ferdinand’s two most hated Catholic advisers in the council room of the Hradschin castle, in Prague, and tossed them out the window into the castle ditch some fifty feet below. The victims survived the fall, perhaps (according to the Catholic view) becausc they were rescued in mid-flight by guardian angels, or perhaps (according to the Protestant view) because they landed on a dung heap. At any rate this “defenestration of Prague” put the rebels in charge of the Bohemian capital. Their announced aim was to preserve ancient Bohemian privileges and to rescue King Ferdinand from the wicked Jesuits. But they were really repu­diating Habsburg rule.

The crisis quickly spread from Bohemia to the entire empire. The aged emperor, Matthias, died in 1619, giving the German Protestant princes a golden chance to join the rebellion against Habsburg rule. Seven electors had the exclusive right to choose Matthias’ successor: the three Catholic arch­bishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne; the three Protestant princes of Sax­ony, Brandenburg, and the Palatinate; and the king of Bohemia. If the Protestant electors denied Ferdinand’s right to vote as king of Bohemia, they could block his election as Holy Roman emperor. But only Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate (1596-1632) turned out to be willing to do this, and he backed down. On August 28, 1619, at Frankfurt, the electors unanimously cast their votes for Emperor Ferdinand II. A few hours after his election, Ferdinand learned that the Bohemian rebels in Prague had deposed him as their king and elected Frederick of the Palatinate in his place! Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown. A general war was now inevitable. Emperor Ferdinand prepared to crush his rebel subjects and lo punish the German prince who had dared to usurp his hereditary 1 labsburn lands.

The Bohemian rebellion was poorly conceived from the start. The rebels sorely missed a folk hero equivalent to John Huss (c. 1369-1415) who had led the great Bohemian religious revolt two centuries before. The members of the Bohemian nobility did not trust one another. The Bohemian assembly hesitated to levy special taxes or build an army. Having no native candidate to replace Ferdinand, the rebels had turned to the German Calvinist Elector Palatine. But Frederick was a very poor choice. A simple young fellow of twenty-three, he had no feeling for the Slavic evangelical religion he was being asked to champion, nor could lie supply men and money with which to fight the Habsburgs. The Bohemians counted on the other German princes to support King Frederick’s cause, but very few did so. Frederick’s foreign friends, such as his father-in-law, James I of England, also stayed neutral.

The rebels’ best hope lay in the weakness of Ferdinand II. The emperor had no army of his own and little means of raising one; in the Austrian Habsburg lands, most of the nobility and the provincial estates were in league with the rebel Bohemians. But Ferdinand was able to buy the services of three allies. Maximilian (1573-1651), duke of Bavaria and the most powerful German Catholic prince, sent an army into Bohemia on the promise that the emperor would cede him Frederick’s electoral dignity and some of his Palatine land. Philip III of Spain likewise sent his Habsburg cousin an army, in return for the promised cession of the remaining Palatine land. More surprising, the Lutheran elector of Saxony also helped reconquer Bohemia, his reward being the Habsburg province of Lusatia. The result of these shabby bargains was a quick military campaign (1620-1622) in which the rebels were utterly defeated. The Bavarian army easily routed the Bohemians at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. From the Alps to the Oder, throughout the Habsburg lands, the rebels capitulated and were left to Ferdinand’s tender mercies. The Bavarian and the Spanish armies next conquered the Palatinate. Foolish Frederick was dubbed the Winterkonig (“king of one winter”). By 1622, he had lost not merely his Bohemian crown but all his German territories as well.

The war did not end in 1622, though the original issues had now been resolved. One cause of continuing conflict was the emergence of private armies led by soldiers of fortune. Ernst von Mansfeld (1580-1626) was at first the most prominent of these mercenary captains. By birth a Belgian Catholic, Mansfeld had fought for the Spanish before turning Calvinist and selling his services to Frederick and the Bohemians. He subsequently switched sides several times, always working for the highest bidder. Since Mansfeld supported his army by looting the towns and villages through which he passed, he preferred to keep moving into fresh territory. After Frederick’s defeat in 1622, Mansfeld—a law unto himself, less bent on fighting than on plundering—took his army into northwestern Germany. Maximilian of Bavaria kept his army in the field against Mansfeld. His troops did not subdue the captain, but they harried the German Protestant civilian population of the area ruthlessly. Maximilian was doing well from the war: he had snatched much of Frederick’s land, and his seat as an elector, and the emperor owed him large sums of money; so Maximilian was none too anxious for peace. Foreign Protestant princes, who had stayed neutral in 1618-1619, now started to intervene in imperial affairs. In 1625, King Christian IV of Denmark (ruled 1588-1648), whose province of Holstein was within the Holy Roman Empire, entered the war as protector of the Protestants in northern Germany. Christian was anxious to prevent a total Catholic conquest of the empire, but he also hoped to profit as Maximilian had done from the fluid situation. He was an abler leader than Frederick and had a better army, but he could find no German allies. The Protestant electors of Saxony and Brandenburg wanted the war to end, and they declined to join the Protestant cause. In 1626 Maximilian’s veterans crushed Christian at the Battle of Lutter and drove him back into Denmark.

So far, Emperor Ferdinand II had gained the most from the war. The capitulation of the Bohemian rebels gave him a free hand to suppress Protestantism, redistribute land, and revamp the administration of his dynastic Habsburg possessions. The expulsion of Frederick permitted him to tinker with the imperial constitution: by shifting the Palatine electoral vote to Bavaria, Ferdinand obtained an unbreakable Catholic, pro-Habsburg majority. The spread of the war into northern Germany enabled him to eject additional rebel Protestant princes and to parcel out their territories among his family and friends. By 1626' Ferdinand envisioned what had been inconceivable in 1618, the transformation of the Holy Roman Empire into an absolute, sovereign, Catholic, Habsburg state.

Obviously, Ferdinand’s war aims were not quite compatible with those of his ally Maximilian. The emperor needed a more pliant instrument than the Bavarian army. Yet he was deeply in debt to Maximilian and could not subsidize an army of his own. This situation explains his curious partnership with Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583-1634), a soldier of fortune par excel­lence. A Bohemian Protestant by birth, Wallenstein had sided with the Habsburgs during the Bohemian revolt, and built a fabulous private fortune in the process. Of all the leading participants in the Thirty Years’ War, Wallenstein was the most enigmatic. A tall, baleful figure, he exhibited most of the unpleasant personality traits one expects in an impatient parvenu. He was unscrupulous, greedy, reckless, cruel, quarrelsome, and superstitious. A promoter on the grandest scale, Wallenstein evidently set no limits to his ambitions. All of his contemporaries feared and distrusted the man; it is impossible for a modern analyst to be sure just what he was up to. In 1625 he contracted to field an imperial army at his own expense and was authorized by Ferdinand to requisition food and shelter from the unfortunate districts he occupied. Wallenstein once asserted that he could maintain an army of fifty thousand more easily than an army of twenty thousand, because the larger force could more thoroughly squeeze the land off which it was living. For a while Wallenstein cooperated with the Bavarian general Tilly. But he preferred to campaign independently. lie chased Mansfeld out of the empire, and occupied much of Denmark and much of the German Baltic coast. By 1628, he commanded 125,000 men. The emperor made him duke of Mecklenburg, one of the newly conquered Baltic provinces. Neutral princes, such as the elector of Brandenburg, were powerless to stop Wallen­stein from occupying their territory. Even Maximilian, belatedly aware of the emperor’s new power, pleaded with Ferdinand to dismiss his overmighty general.

By 1629, the emperor felt the time had come to issue his Edict of Restitu­tion, perhaps his fullest expression of autocratic power. Ferdinand’s edict out­lawed Calvinism within the Holy Roman Empire, and required the Lutherans to disgorge all Church properties they had confiscated since 1552. Sixteen bishoprics, twenty-eight cities and towns, and over one hundred and fifty mon­asteries and convents scattered throughout northern and central Germany were ordered restored to Rome. Ferdinand acted unilaterally, without re­course to an imperial Diet. The Catholic princes felt almost as menaced as the Protestant princes by the Edict of Restitution, for the emperor was tram­pling their constitutional liberties and enhancing his centralized authority. Wallenstein’s soldiers soon occupied the cities of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Bremen, and Augsburg, which had been predominantly Protestant for many years, and forcibly converted them to Catholicism. There seemed to be no reason why, with the help of Wallenstein’s army, Ferdinand could not soon abrogate the whole Augsburg formula of 1555 and transform the empire into a Catholic absolute monarchy.

It was at this crucial moment in 1630 that Gustavus Adolphus thrust his Swedish army into Germany. He announced that he was coming to protect German Protestantism and constitutional liberties from Ferdinand II’s attacks, but he was also obviously looking for conquest and profit. The Swedish king suffered from the same handicap as the previous would-be Protestant champion, King Christian of Denmark: he was a foreigner without German allies. Luckily for Gustavus Adolphus, Ferdinand II played into his hands. Feeling securely in command of Germany, Ferdinand called upon the imperial Diet in 1630 to recognize his son as heir to the imperial throne and to help the Spanish Habsburgs against the Dutch and the French. The emperor’s plans were recklessly ambitious, and he underesti­mated the German princes’ hostility toward him. The princes refused both of his requests, even after he tried to placate them by dismissing Wallenstein from command of the imperial army. All that Ferdinand had accomplished was to remove his best general. Meanwhile, Gustavus Adolphus had a second stroke of luck. The French government, headed by Cardinal Richclicu, agreed to subsidize his invasion of Germany. Obviously, the French cardinal had no interest in Gustavus Adolphus’ Protestant crusade. Nonetheless, he agreed to pay the Swedes a million livres a year to maintain an army of thirty-six thousand in Germany, because he wanted to harass the Habsburgs, paralyze the empire, and stake out French claims to Rhenish territory. All that Gustavus Adolphus now needed was enough German support so that he could play the role of avenging hero. It was no easy task, but he finally badgered the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony into signing alliances witli Sweden. Now he could take action.

In 1631 Gustavus Adolphus smashed the imperial army at Breitenfeld; this was probably the most decisive battle of the Thirty Years’ War, for it wiped out at a stroke most of the Catholic gains of 1618-1629. During the next year he systematically occupied the heretofore unspoiled Catholic regions in central Germany. Bavaria was sacked with special thoroughness. The Swed­ish king prepared to invade Habsburg Austria and acted more and more as if he intended to usurp Ferdinand's place as Holy Roman emperor.

Gustavus Adolphus’ intervention was pivotal because he saved German Protestantism and defeated Habsburg imperial centralization, but his per­sonal triumph was very brief. In 1632 Wallenstein came out of retirement to fight him. Emperor Ferdinand had already begged his general to resume command of the imperial forces, and when Wallenstein finally took the field, his army was more than ever a personal instrument. On a dark, foggy November day in 1632 the two great commanders met at Liitzen, in Saxony. Their armies locked savagely, blindly. Gustavus Adolphus galloped into the fog on a cavalry charge, and shortly his horse careered back, wounded and riderless. The Swedish troops, maddened at the loss of their king, drove Wallenstein’s army from the battlefield. In the darkness and the mud they finally found Gustavus Adolphus’ bullet-riddled corpse, stripped to the shirt by scavengers. “O,” cried one of his grieving soldiers, “would to God I had such a leader again to fight such another day; in this old quarrel!”²

Old quarrel indeed, by 1632—and after Liitzen a hopeless deadlock. None of the combatants was strong enough to win, or weak enough to surrender. Wallenstein, once again the most feared soldier in Germany, had a brief chance to engineer a compromise peace settlement. Unencumbered by religious passion or by loyalty to the house of Habsburg, he was ready to deal with anyone who would pay handsomely for his services. In 1633 he campaigned as little as possible for the emperor, while dickering simulta­neously with all of Ferdinand’s enemies: the German Protestants, the Bohemian rebels, the Swedes, and the French. But Wallenstein was by now too sickly and irresolute to play this dangerous game. In February, 1634, Ferdinand II dismissed him from command, and instructed his new general to capture Wallenstein dead or alive. Wallenstein was in winter quarters at Pilsen, in Bohemia. He appealed to his officers to fight for him rather than for the emperor, but they mutinied against him. With a few companions, he fled from Pilsen, but they were quickly cornered. The final scene was sordid enough: an Irish mercenary captain kicked open Wallenstein’s bedchamber door, speared his unarmed chieftain, rolled the bloody body in a carpet, and dragged it unceremoniously down the stairs.

For the moment, Ferdinand II scarcely missed Wallenstein’s military talents. In 1634 imperial forces decimated the Swedes at Nordlingen, and the following year the emperor made peace with Sweden’s German allies, Saxony and Brandenburg. Yet the war was far from over. In 1635 France under Richelieu poured fresh men and money into Germany to compensate for Swedish reverses. The combatants were now France and Sweden versus Spain and the emperor. The war had become a Habsburg-Bourbon dynastic struggle, with the original religious, ethnic, and constitutional issues laid aside. Very few Germans wanted to continue fighting after 1635; most of them tried to stay neutral. Their lands, however, continued to be the bat­tlefields, and their property continued to be pillaged.

The final thirteen years of the war, from 1635 to 1648, were the most destructive. The Franco-Swedish armies generally maintained the upper hand, but their objective was to keep the war going rather than to strike a knockout blow against their Habsburg opponents. It is noticeable that the French and the Swedes rarely invaded Habsburg Austria and never sacked the emperor’s personal lands the way they sacked central Germany and Bavaria. Troops on both sides expended far more energy in looting than in fighting. One eyewitness, Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1625-1676), drew on his own experience to write a graphic account of the closing years of combat. In The Adventures of a Simpleton, Grimmels­hausen follows a naive peasant boy through one disaster after another; soldiers and civilians routinely torture and kill one another, with the civilians always getting the worst of it. In this style of warfare, every army had its train of camp followers—women and children—who kept the troops comfortable enough so that they were willing to campaign in­definitely. Except for the plague epidemics at many campsites, military life in mid-seventeenth-century Germany was definitely more safe and pleasant than civilian life. The numerous German towns were prime tar­gets: Marburg was occupied eleven times; Magdeburg was besieged ten times. But at least town dwellers could sometimes withstand sieges be­hind their walls or buy off a conquering army. The exposed peasantry, on the other hand, had no defense except to run away. Agricultural collapse triggered famine. The total population loss was staggering, even when one discounts the estimates of contemporaries who exaggerated their figures wildly in order to claim damages or plead tax exemption. The German cities lost one third of their population, and the rural areas two fifths of their population, during the course of the war. The empire had seven or eight million fewer inhabitants in 1648 than in 1618. Not until the twentieth century could any other European conflict boast such human butchery.

Peace negotiations opened in 1644, but four years passed before the multitude of diplomats congregated in Westphalia finally settled on terms and ended the war. After all this haggling, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) turned out to be essentially a confirmation of the long-scorned Peace of Augsburg. The Holy Roman Empire remained politically fragmented, di­vided into three hundred autonomous, sovereign princely states, most of them very small and weak. The emperor, now Ferdinand II’s son, Ferdinand III (ruled 1637—1657), had meager executive authority beyond his own family lands. The imperial Diet, in which all the sovereign princes were represented, continued to be moribund. Thus the Habsburg hope of welding the empire into a single, absolute state was dashed once again, this time permanently. The Peace of Westphalia also reaffirmed the Augsburg formula of territorial churches. Each prince kept the right to establish Catholicism, Lutheranism, or Calvinism (prohibited in 1555) within his state. A greater effort was made now than in 1555 to guarantee private liberty of conscience to Catholics living in Protestant states and vice versa, but in fact most Germans docilely accepted the creed of their ruler. Anabaptists and mem­bers of other sects excluded from the Westphalia formula continued to suffer persecution. Thousands of them emigrated to America, especially to Pennsylvania, in the eighteenth century. After 1648 the northern half of the empire was pretty solidly Lutheran, and the southern half pretty solidly Catholic, with important pockets of Calvinism along the Rhine. In no other part of Europe did Protestants and Catholics achieve such a state of balanced deadlock.

Almost all of the major combatants in the Thirty Years’ War gained some territory at the Peace of Westphalia. France annexed parts of Alsace and Lorraine. Sweden annexed western Pomerania, on the Baltic coast. Bavaria kept part of the Palatine territory and the electoral scat it had grabbed at the beginning of the war. Saxony kept Lusatia. Brandenburg, considering its passive role in the war, did exceptionally well in annexing eastern Pomerania and Magdeburg. Even the son of Frederick V, the would-be king of Bohe­mia, was taken care of: he was restored to his father’s Palatinate (considera­bly reduced in size) and given a new eighth seat in the electoral college. The Swiss Confederation and the Dutch republic were recognized as indepen­dent of the Holy Roman Empire. Neither the Spanish nor the Austrian Habsburgs gained any territory in 1648, but the Austrian Habsburgs still had much the largest bloc of imperial land, and Ferdinand III exercised far firmer political and religious control over Austria and Bohemia than had his father before the Bohemian rebellion. It is hard to argue that anyone gained enough at the Peace of Westphalia to justify thirty years of fighting. But the settlement of 1648 did prove to be unusually stable. Except for some details, the intricate German political boundaries were not redrawn thereafter until the time of Napoleon. The religious boundaries lasted into the twentieth century.

The Peace of Westphalia ended the wars of religion in central Europe and left Germany a mere geographical expression. Ever since 1648, the Thirty Years’ War has had a continuously bad reputation. Statesmen of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries looked back on it as a model of how not to conduct warfare. In their view, the Thirty Years’ War demonstrated the dangers of religious passion, and of amateur armies led by soldiers of fortune. The philosophers and kings of the age of reason, having discovered a controlled style of warfare with armies professional enough to reduce bri­gandage and defection, and objectives limited enough to negotiate with minimum bloodshed, scorned the uncivilized, inefficient seventeenth-cen- tury wars of religion. To observers in the nineteenth century, the Thirty Years’ War seemed calamitous for a different reason: because it blocked for so long the national unification of Germany. Twentieth-century observ­ers may no longer feel so certain of the virtues of national unification, but they still criticize the Thirty Years’ War for its ideological posturing and civilian atrocities. One historian has summed up her feelings about this conflict as follows: “Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless con­flict.”³ This judgment may be unduly harsh. But for most Germans the war must indeed have been a miserable, profitless experience.

THE RISE OF AUSTRIA AND BRANDENBURG-PRUSSIA

During the second half of the seventeenth century, the Holy Roman Empire was a phantom state, a much revered and very elaborate constitu­tional mechanism which no longer worked. The princes’ final victory over the emperor at Westphalia confirmed the imperial government’s inability to enforce orders, pass laws, raise taxes, mount armies, or conduct foreign policy. Sovereignty could be found only at the local level, in the three hundred princely states and imperial cities. In these petty states (the average population was only forty thousand), there was a prevailing late seven-teenth-century tendency toward political absolutism. Each prince wanted to have his own small standing army, in case another general war should break out. Many princes suppressed or restricted their representative assemblies. Many built expensive Baroque palaces, gaudy symbols of power, and sur­rounded themselves with courtiers and ceremonial functionaries in conscious imitation of Louis XIV at Versailles. Armies and courts cost money, which the imperial princes collected through a variety of crude taxes—excises, tariffs, and river tolls. These taxes impaired commerce. A cargo shipped four hundred miles down the Rhine from Basel to Cologne had to pass through thirty political jurisdictions and was subject to so many tariffs and tolls that the shipment was impractical. Because of the handicaps imposed upon business, German towns suffered continuing losses in population, wealth, and importance. Just as the princes exercised sovereign power in regulating (or overregulating) domestic commerce, so they exercised sovereign power in conducting international relations. The treaty of 1648 recognized their right to make alliances with foreign states. In the latter half of the seven­teenth century, France was always able to buy allies among the imperial princes while she was attacking imperial territory. Thus in the 1670’s, when Louis XIV invaded the Rhineland, twenty thousand Germans served in his army. Though the emperor induced the imperial Diet to declare war against France, many west German states refused to contribute to the imperial war effort, and six of the eight electors remained clients of Louis XIV.

With the empire a hollow facade, interest focuses on the several German states which were large enough after 1648 to function in the international power structure. Two German states, Austria and Brandenburg, developed vigorously during the second half of the century. The Habsburgs trans­formed their dynastic Austrian possessions into a great new Danubian monarchy, while in northern Germany the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg laid the foundations for another great new state, the eighteenth-century kingdom of Prussia. Three other German states, Bavaria, Saxony, and the Palatinate, seemingly had as much chance as Brandenburg to build their strength during the late seventeenth century, but all three failed to do so. The Elector Palatine was peculiarly unlucky, for no sooner did his people begin to recover from the Thirty Years’ War than the Palatinate was twice overrun and devastated by Louis XIV. The elector of Saxony dissipated his energy and his country’s wealth in trying to secure election as king of Poland. The elector of Bavaria, who had earlier played a key role in the Catholic reformation and in the Thirty Years’ War, now poured all his resources into his Munich court; in international affairs, Bavaria became a French satellite. The relative failure of these western and central German states, and the success of Austria and Brandenburg, meant among other things that German and imperial leadership would henceforth come from east of the Elbe. Both the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns ruled over territories situated on the eastern border of the empire; both faced east during the late seventeenth century and built their new states at the expense of the Ottoman Turks, Poland, and Sweden.

Austria

The rise of Austria was the most striking phenomenon in eastern Europe during the late seventeenth century. It was a story of luck as much as skill. The Habsburg dynasty which built the new Danubian monarchy—Ferdi­nand II (ruled 1619-1637), Ferdinand III (ruled 1637-1657), and Leopold I (ruled 1658-1705)—was not remarkable for talent. Habsburg Austria was a unique creation, a crossbreed between a centralized western nation state like France and an old-style dynastic empire like Charles V’s miscellaneous collection of territories. The reigning Habsburg prince, besides being Holy Roman emperor, was simultaneously archduke of Upper and Lower Austria, margrave of Styria, duke of Carinthia and Carniola, count of Tyrol, king of Bohemia, margrave of Moravia, duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, king of Hungary, Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, and prince of Transylvania— though in fact the last five of these territories were mainly possessed by the Turks until the end of the century. The Habsburgs managed each of these provinces separately. Every province had its individual native customs and institutional patterns. Several, notably Bohemia and Hungary, boasted long, proud histories of resistance to foreign rule. The Habsburgs’ subjects spoke some ten languages and practiced at least eight religious creeds. No part of Europe was more heterogeneous ethnically and culturally. Though the Habsburg lands were physically contiguous, their peoples shared little except the accident of common allegiance to one ruling dynasty. It was the Habsburg ambition to secure absolute control over each and every province, to chase the Turks out of Hungary and adjoining areas, and to cultivate certain cultural and social uniformities which would make their subjects easier to handle. But the Habsburgs did not want to weld these diverse peoples into a single political unit equivalent to France or England. On the contrary, they preferred to play one.province against another. The Danubian monarchy was an atomistic congeries, each province separate from its neigh­bors, each province bound as tightly as possible to the Habsburg crown.

This new Danubian monarchy began to take shape as early as the 1620’s, when Ferdinand II reorganized Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria in the wake of the abortive Bohemian rebellion. Since the rebellion had been initiated by the nobility in these provinces, Ferdinand confiscated the huge estates of the rebel nobles and redistributed the forfeited lands among loyal Habsburg supporters. Many mercenary captains of the Thirty Years’ War (Wal­lenstein was among them) became members of an acquisitive new landlord class in Bohemia and Moravia. Ferdinand also expelled all Protestant clergy­men and school teachers, replacing them as far as possible with Jesuit missionaries. He had remarkable success in making almost all the Bohemian people rejoin the Catholic Church. Bohemia, bastion of the Hussite move­ment for more than two centuries, was the only thoroughly Protestantized community to be reconverted to Rome during the wars of religion.

The Austrian Habsburgs held rather fixed ideas about the good society. Devotion to the dynasty and to the Virgin Mary was supposed to give their subjects spiritual and moral strength. A big standing army provided the muscle. A small educated class provided the priests and civil servants. The German language was considered superior to the Slavic languages; hence German culture was mandatory for the ruling elite. Yet the Habsburgs were cosmopolitan enough to attract men of every European nationality into their employ. Agricultural landlords were encouraged to exploit the peasantry but were discouraged from taking active part in governmental administration or legislation. Thus in Bohemia and Moravia the once-powerful estates met seldom in the middle and late seventeenth century, and did little except to legislate the imposition of serfdom on the peasant population. The new landlords, perhaps more businesslike than their rebel predecessors, saw that they could farm very profitably if they could get free agricultural labor. Despite peasant revolts, the Habsburg government required of each Bo­hemian peasant three days of unpaid compulsory service (robota) for his lord every week. Like the Polish landlords, the Bohemian and Austrian agricultural magnates produced for export. They raised grain and timber for the western European market, and meat, grain, and fish (bred in elaborate fishponds) for the Habsburg army. In this overwhelmingly rural, stratified society the Czech and Austrian towns served few functions, and during the seventeenth century they decayed even more completely than the towns of western Germany.

The Habsburgs needed outside help in order to reconquer Bohemia in the 1620’s, and again to regain control of Hungary in the 1680’s and 1690’s. The Habsburg-Turkish demarcation line in Hungary had been fairly stable since the mid-sixteenth century. The Turkish frontier garrisons were only eighty miles east of Vienna, the Habsburg capital. In the 1660’s, the Turks renewed their efforts to conquer Austria. Though the Habsburgs beat back an invading Ottoman army in 1664, Leopold I was so alarmed at the Turks’ military strength that he paid the sultan a tribute of 200,000 florins in order to secure a truce. As soon as the truce expired in 1683, another huge Turkish army advanced through Hungary, crossed the Austrian border, and laid siege to Vienna. Leopold fled his capital. For two months the Viennese hung on desperately. In the nick of time a relief army of Austrians, Germans, and Poles commanded by King John Sobieski of Poland (ruled 1674— 1696) routed the Ottomans, and sent the dreaded janissaries reeling back down the Danube. This great victory opened Hungary to reconquest. In sixteen years of hard fighting, the forces of the Austrian Habsburgs, the papacy, Poland, and Venice, in a coalition known as the Holy League, drove the Turks south of the Danube and east of the Carpathians. The League armies were led at various times by Polish, Italian, Rhenish, Bavarian, and Saxon commanders. At the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699, the Turks surrendered a huge belt of territory to the Habsburgs: Hungary, Transylvania, Slavonia, and Croatia. The Danubian monarchy had doubled in size since 1648.

The Habsburgs’ efforts at reorganization were not quite so successful in Hungary as they had been in Bohemia. The Hungarians, or Magyars, had long resented Habsburg overlordship, partly because the dynasty was foreign, partly because the Habsburgs had done little to rescue Hungary from the Turks, and partly because the Habsburgs’ absolutist, Catholic program encroached upon Hungarian “liberties.” These liberties were strictly confined to the nobility. Like their counterparts everywhere in eastern Europe, the Magyar landlords kept their serfs in thralldom while demanding total freedom for themselves. In Royal Hungary, the western strip which the Turks had never conquered, the nobility counted among their liberties the right to elect their king (as in Poland) and to govern themselves through their estates. In Transylvania, the eastern province which the Turks had only nominally conquered, the nobility operated an independent republic, which was staunchly Calvinist to boot. The Habsburgs had their best chance to reshape the society in central and southern Hungary, the area which had been directly under Turkish rule for 150 years. When they expelled the Turks in the 1680’s and 1690’s, the Habsburgs sold or gave as much as possible of the newly acquired land to their army officers and to others presumably dependent on the crown. But these new landlords quickly melted into the Magyar nobility. It was quite impossible for the Habsburgs to govern this frontier country without the cooperation of the local mag­nates. Because they had to convince the Magyar nobility that Austrian rule was at the very least preferable to Turkish, they dared not impose absolutism or Catholicism too nakedly. In 1687 Leopold did get the Magyars to surrender their elective monarchy; thereafter, the Hungarian crown was a hereditary Habsburg possession. But the Hungarian estates retained real power, and the Protestant nobility kept their religion. As commercial farm­ing developed in Hungary, the peasants (many of whom were Slovaks and Croats) sank deeper into serfdom. They had to fulfill heavy obligations to their Magyar masters and pay heavy taxes to the Austrian government as well—taxes from which the landlord class was exempt. Habsburg Hungary, with its autocratic Austrian ruler, its selfish Magyar aristocracy, its down­trodden Slavic peasantry, its few small towns inhabited by Germans and Jews, was a melting pot in which nothing melted.

Brandenburg-Prussia

Compared with the growth of Habsburg Austria, the development of Hohenzollern Brandenburg during the late seventeenth century was modest. The key figure here was Frederick William, elector of Brandenburg from 1640 to 1688, who is known as the Great Elector. Frederick William was the shrewdest ruler of his day in eastern Europe, but his contemporaries may be pardoned for failing to notice his ability, since he governed a small state and did nothing spectacular during his reign. The Great Elector was an institutional innovator whose policies bore fruit long after his death. Because the later Hohenzollern princes followed his recipe in building the eigh­teenth-century kingdom of Prussia and the nineteenth-century German em­pire, the Great Elector’s reign is of special historical interest.

In 1640 Frederick William inherited the Hohenzollern family’s scattered collection of underdeveloped north German territories, devastated by the Thirty Years’ War. He was a Calvinist; his subjects were mainly Lutherans. Brandenburg was his chief possession, a flat country with unproductive sandy soil, cut off from the Baltic coast, whose several hundred thousand in­habitants raised grain and brewed beer. Berlin, the chief town in Bran­denburg, was a small place. More than a hundred miles east of Branden­burg, beyond the imperial border and enveloped by Poland, lay Prussia, the Elector’s second most important province. Here was a region of forests and lakes, its chief center the commercial town of KSnigsberg. More than a hundred miles west of Brandenburg, near the Dutch frontier, lay the Elector’s remaining small outposts, Cleve, Mark, and Ravensburg. These provinces all had their own autonomous estates, and being widely sepa­rated from each other and only recently joined under the Hohenzollern dynasty, they shared no common interests. Brandenburg and Prussia were both completely dominated by the Junkers, the noble landlords. Like the landed gentry in England and the szlachta in Poland, the Junkers had climbed to power and prosperity by extracting concessions from the ruler above them while squeezing the peasantry below. The Junkers had a reputation for being shrewd, tough, and boorish. During the period of rapid inflation in the late sixteenth century, they had pushed the sale price of their rye up 247 per cent while paying their laborers wages which

had risen only 86 per cent. But by 1640 even the Junkers were in poor shape, for their Baltic grain trade was disrupted by the Thirty Years’ War.

Frederick William set out to build an effective state with these un­promising materials. His basic decision was to create a permanent stand­ing army. All his other political, social, and economic innovations stemmed from the army’s role in centralizing the Hohenzollern state. Dur­ing the closing stage of the Thirty Years’ War, Frederick William fielded eight thousand efficient troops, a lilliputian display by great-power stan­dards, but enough to clear the foreign soldiers from his land and to give him a voice at the peace conference at Westphalia. In 1648 the Great Elector rather surprisingly gained more territory than any other German prince: eastern Pomerania and several secularized bishoprics, including Magdeburg. So far so good. Naturally, the several estates of Brandenburg, Prussia, and Cleve-Mark wanted the army disbanded once the war was over, but instead Frederick William kept on fighting. In the 1650’s he first joined Sweden against Poland and then joined Poland against Sweden. He fought for purely opportunistic reasons and changed sides whenever he seemed likely to benefit as a result. In the 1670’s and 1680’s he outdid himself by switching between the Dutch and the French three times. Frederick William was at war about half the time during his long reign. By 1688 he had thirty thousand professional troops.

Who was going to pay for this army? The Elector knew that he could not let his soldiers live off the land in the manner of Wallenstein’s mercenaries. Nor could he pay for them himself, though his large private landholdings produced enough income to cover the ordinary expenses of civil government. Foreign subsidies would help, but the cost would have to be met chiefly through taxes, which the several estates adamantly refused to approve. In 1653 the Elector worked out a compromise with the Bran­denburg estates whereby he recognized the special economic and social privileges of the Junker landlords in return for what turned out to be a permanent tax to maintain his army. The Elector acknowledged that only Junkers could own land, that Junkers could freely evict peasants (who were all assumed to be serfs) from lands they occupied, and that Junkers were immune from taxation. On the other hand, he severely curtailed the political privileges of the Brandenburg Junkers. After the army tax expired, he kept right on collecting it and soon imposed an additional excise tax on the towns, without the consent of the estates. In his Rhineland territories, the Elector bullied the estates into levying army taxes by threatening to send his soldiers to collect the money by force. In Prussia, resistance was stouter. To force the estates to levy his taxes, Frederick William imprisoned the two chief leaders of the opposition and executed one of them; he billeted his troops in Konigsberg until the taxes were collected.

Frederick William’s subjects paid twice as much per capita in taxes as Louis XIV’s much richer subjects; in a state with little surplus wealth, and with the only affluent class—the Junkers—exempted from taxation, the burden of supporting the army was truly crushing. However, the Elector’s military exactions did produce some side benefits. To collect his army taxes, Frederick William created a new bureaucratic institution, the Generalkriegs- kommissariat, or military commissariat, which also disbursed army pay and equipment, and soon supervised all phases of the state economy. The commissariat officials, zealous servants of the Elector, worked hard to pro­mote new state-supported industry, especially the manufacture of military supplies. Some twenty thousand persecuted Calvinist textile workers from France and the Palatinate emigrated to Brandenburg, to the great benefit of the Elector’s uniform-manufacturing industry. By the close of the century, the Hohenzollern lands had recovered economically from the terrible dam­age of the Thirty Years’ War, and the population had climbed back to its early seventeenth-century level of about 1.5 million persons.

The Great Elector’s standing army could not make Brandenburg-Prussia into a great power overnight. His wars brought him one paltry acquisition after 1648, a thirty-mile sliver of Pomeranian territory. But Frederick William built enduring strength into his north German society. The Elector’s army gave him and his heirs absolute political control. It encouraged the people in habits of discipline and obedience. It con­tributed to the unity of the state, for peasants from all the Hohenzollern provinces were recruited into the rank and file, while Junkers from Bran­denburg and Prussia staffed the officer corps. It facilitated the growth of an efficient bureaucracy. And it enabled Frederick William to capitalize upon the existing rigid social stratification, the separation between privileged Junkers and unprivileged serfs. To the aspiring Junker squire, an officer’s commission became the proudest badge of his membership in the master class. The Elector’s whole policy rested on partnership with the landlords. As for the serfs, a clergyman observed in 1684, “the peasants are indeed human beings,” but he went on to advise that they be treated like the stockfish, which is “best when beaten well and soft.”⁴

The Great Elector’s son, Frederick III (ruled 1688-1713), was a much less effective ruler. He acquired the royal title of King in Prussia (con­sidered less honorific than King of Prussia) in 1701, but played a secondary role in the great wars that filled his reign. The first Hohenzollern ruler to take center stage in European affairs was Frederick the Great, in the mid-eighteenth century. Eventually, under Bismarck’s guidance, the Hohenzollerns would annex all the territory between Cologne and Konigs- berg, and they would rule after 1871 as emperors of Germany. Compared with Frederick the Great or Bismarck, the Great Elector is a small-scale figure. But he started the fateful process by which Germany became politically united.

At the close of the seventeenth century, Brandenburg-Prussia and Austria were obviously organized along somewhat differing lines. The Great Elector had worked to make his state homogeneous; the Habsburgs cultivated heterogeneity. Brandenburg-Prussia was the more militaristic and bureaucratic. Austria could not, or did not, extract from its subjects as much money and service per capita as did Brandenburg-Prussia, but since the Austrian population was much larger, Austria was nevertheless a far greater power. Brandenburg-Prussia was Protestant, Austria was Catholic— but this difference was decidedly less significant than it once would have been. The two states gradually turned into strategic rivals, because both were headed by German dynasties hoping to expand eastward. But this Austro-Prussian rivalry should not obscure the fact that the two societies exhibited some striking similarities in their parallel climbs to power in the seventeenth century.

For one thing, both Austria and Prussia (as Brandenburg-Prussia came to be called) divorced sovereignty from nationality, unlike contem­poraneous western states. To be sure, Prussia was not multinational, as Austria was. But in the eighteenth century Prussia annexed more Polish territory than German, and before the French Revolution demonstrated no Pan-German desire to embrace the whole German-speaking population. Prussia and Austria were dynastic states, congeries of territories their rulers happened to have inherited or conquered. Both the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs achieved absolute, centralized political power by 1700. Both managed to break the power of the representative estates, or diets. This absolutism, however, could only be maintained at the cost of tacit partner­ship with the landed magnates. The serf-owning lords everywhere east of the Elbe, in Poland and Russia as in Austria and Prussia, consolidated their immense social and economic privileges during the seventeenth century. The whole of eastern Europe was profoundly agrarian. The town- dwelling merchants and lawyers, who had often turned Calvinist in the sixteenth-century west and fought their kings in the seventeenth-century west, had always been comparatively weak in Austria and Prussia and lost strength steadily throughout the century. Thus by the close of the century, though political disintegration had at last been arrested, the social and economic disparity between east and west had by no means been eliminated.

Chapter 3

The Psychology of Limited Wealth

A plague hospital in Vienna. The civic authorities tried unsuccessfully to con­tain plague epidemics by congregating the sick and burying the dead in pest- houses such as this.

Coinmaking. This six­teenth-century print shows the primitive character of early modern industrial­ism. Workers equipped with rudimentary tools pound metal into thin sheets, cut the sheets into coins, and stamp and mill the coins—all by hand. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Harvesters. Painting by Pieter Brueghel (the Elder). Note the total re­liance on hand labor, the employment of women and children, and the noon­time picnic to speed the field work. The harvesters are cutting and stacking the ripe grain as fast as they can, to prevent spoilage by rain. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Dutch East India Company warehouse and timber wharf in Amsterdam. 7 his engraving by Muider shows a company ship under construction, and lumber stockpiled for future shipbuilding.

Amsterdam harbor in 1663. Engraving by Dapper, showing dozens of merchant ships moored outside the city because the interior docks are jammed to capacity. Note the church steeples and windmills silhouetted against the flat Holland countryside. Scheepvart Museum, Amsterdam.

European businessmen in the years between 1559 and 1715 faced problems and developed policies characteristic of a society quite well off but very far from affluent. No longer did everyone have to concentrate on the struggle for bare survival, as in the agrarian subsistence economy of the early Middle Ages. The so-called ^commercial revolution was in full swing, with the merchant the key figure, distributing more goods than ever before to a ¹ Worldwide market. The putting-out system of domestic manufacturing was producing a rising volume and variety of consumer commodities, especially textiles. A dramatic sixteenth-century increase in the circulation of bullion spurred purchasing power. Refinements in credit facilitated international commerce. Innovations in banking encouraged private investment and public loans. The development of specialized commercial agriculture, com­bined with improvements in the long-distance shipment of bulk cargo, made it possible for big cities and densely populated regions to be fed from distant farmlands. On the other hand, Europe did not yet have the economic techniques to produce as much as its people needed for comfort, to say nothing of abundance. Agriculture was still by far the largest occupation, and farming methods were crude; the agrarian populace still had to expend most of its energy in meeting its own needs rather than producing for the market. Manufacturing was still done by hand rather than by machine. Transporta­tion remained slow and difficult. Commerce was extremely risky. Business enterprises were typically small-scale. After about 1590, the population stopped growing. Small wonder that in this era of rising yet limited wealth many Europeans clung to the attitudes appropriate in a subsistence economy.

Europe’s.wealth, such as it was, was unevenly distributed geographically. The commercial west held a vastly larger share than the agrarian east. Within western Europe, the Atlantic ports were the chief capitalist centers, Wealth was also very unevenly distributed among the various social classes; indeed it was scarcely distributed at all. Everywhere in Europe the distance between the propertied and the propertyless was widening. Great property holders such as kings and landed magnates luxuriated in unprecedented conspicuous consumption. Small and middling property holders, independent farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, members of the learned professions, and the like, typically got only a taste of wealth but hoped to acquire more by copying the habits of the beaver and the squirrel. The propertyless bottom half (or more) of society, the wage laborers, serfs, unemployed, and unem­ployables, got nothing—and were told to expect nothing—beyond bare sur­vival. In most of Europe the laboring classes had somewhat harder working conditions and lower living standards in 1715 than in 1559.

Also noteworthy is the fact that in this period the politically consolidated national state clearly replaced the city-state as the most effective business unit. The mercantilist policies of Spain, France, and England—politically belligerent, but economically conservative and protectionist—most fully ex­press the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European psychology of limited wealth.

POPULATION

Our understanding of the most fundamental aspect of life in the six­teenth and seventeenth centuries—the population pattern—is sadly defi­cient and likely to remain so. No government in this era took a compre­hensive census of its inhabitants. In some western states the local clergy kept parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and deaths. Tax collectors occasionally enumerated households. But statistical data of this sort is spotty, inexact, and difficult to interpret, and for much of Europe—the eastern regions in particular—there is really no quantifiable information at all. Such fragmentary evidence as we do have indicates that Europe's population, which had been severely depressed for a century after the Black Death, began to grow in the mid-fifteenth century and continued on a strong upward curve for more than a hundred years. By the late Sixteenth century the total count was probably somewhat over a hundred million—or about a sixth of the present figure. Around 1590 the popula­tion seems to have stopped growing in most parts of Europe. Throughout the seventeenth century the overall picture is one of demographic oscilla­tion. Most states experienced sudden, sharp population losses, followed (though not always) by gradual recovery. The pattern varied significantly from place to place. Germany, as we have seen, lost close to 40 per cent of its population during the Thirty Years’ War, but recovered rapidly in the late seventeenth century. The Spanish population dropped about 25 per cent between 1590 and 1665, and then leveled off. The French popula­tion fell and rose irregularly without much net loss or gain between 1590 and 1715. In England, the population grew some 30 per cent during this time. But overall, as far as we can tell, Europe’s population in 1715 was no larger, and probably somewhat smaller, than it had been in 1590.

Why did the population grow in the sixteenth century? Why did it stop growing around 1590? Why did it fluctuate during the seventeenth century? Demographers have no agreed-upon answers to these questions, but the key variable they point to is the death rate, which rose and fell wildly during our period. The birthrate was much more regular. Wherever it has been measured in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rate of births was high: 35 to 40 per thousand, far above the modern western rate. In “good” times, without demographic crisis, the birthrate in early modern Europe was sufficiently higher than the death rate to double the population every century. Through the 1580’s, though growth was fre­quently checked by war, pestilence, and famine, it was not stopped. There­after, demographic catastrophe struck frequently and massively.

The 1590’s mark a watershed. From Scandinavia to Spain, and from Hungary to Ireland, harvests were poor all through this decade. We can pinpoint weather conditions with surprising precision. In the Alpine val­leys the glaciers advanced rapidly in the 1590’s, a sign of very cold winters. During the years 1591-1597, French winegrowers harvested their grapes very late, a sign of wet, cold summers.¹ In western Europe, wartime con­ditions intensified the famine by blocking emergency food distribution. The Dutch and English fleets stopped grain shipments to the Spanish Netherlands. Henry IV’s army stopped grain shipments to Paris. The price of wheat rose fivefold in France between 1590 and 1593. It is esti­mated that the French population suddenly dropped by three million—a 15-per-cent loss.

Comparable demographic crises occurred in the 1620’s, the 1640’s, the 1690’s, and the 1710’s. We know the most about the French harvest failure and famine of 1693-1694. Parish registers for this time are much fuller than those for the earlier years, so it is possible to measure the im­pact of the famine in striking detail. For example, the parish registers for villages in the region of Beauvais, in northwestern France, show two to four times the usual number of deaths in the twelve months following this harvest failure. Furthermore, whereas in a normal year two thirds of those dying were young children or old people, the registers show that in 1693-1694 over half were adults of prime working age. In other words, the subsistence crisis crippled the labor force, maimed family structure, and impeded procreation. If we check the registers for babies conceived during the famine year, we find less than half the usual number.² There are several reasons for this sudden drop in fertility. Some sex partners died, some were too weak to procreate, and some may have aborted their children in despair. It is also probable that the semistarved women who survived the famine experienced such extreme nutritional losses that they were temporarily unable to menstruate or ovulate. This sort of famine- induced infecundity has been observed among slave women on West Indian plantations in the eighteenth century, and among both civilians and concentration-camp inmates during the Second World War. In the case of the seventeenth-century French peasant women, recovery of fer­tility was rapid. The registers show that in 1695-1696 they bore more children than in a normal year. Yet the demographic impact of this famine obviously lingered for years.

Even in times of desperate hunger people seldom literally starve to death. More generally they become too weak to resist common diseases such as influenza or dysentery. In the sixteenth and seventeenth cen­turies, there were the added perils of typhus and the bubonic plague— diseases that killed the strong as well as the weak and struck the crowded, unsanitary cities with special frequency and force. Every European city was repeatedly thinned by the plague. To cite a few extreme examples, Hamburg lost one quarter of its population in 1565, Venice one third in 1575-1577, Naples nearly half in 1656. In London, some deaths were attributed to the plague every year, and nine major episodes killed approxi­mately 200,000 people between 1563 and 1665. Like all urban centers at the time, London had a well-deserved reputation as an unhealthy place. Yet London kept growing rapidly. Population pressure in the countryside continually pushed landless, rootless, and adventurous migrants into the cities. In consequence, Europe was considerably more urbanized in 1715 than in 1559.

By the late seventeenth century the plague had nearly disappeared. Why this happened was not understood at the time, and is still a subject of dispute by medical experts. The key may have been a revolution among the rodents that infested all urban areas. The long-established black rat, whose fleas transmit the plague bacillus to humans, was ousted during the course of the century by the brown rat, whose fleas do not spread the disease. At any rate, the last major plague epidemics in western Europe took place in Marseilles in 1720 and in Messina in 1743.

Plague and famine acted as crude safety valves to release excessive population pressure. In most regions of Europe, inelastic production and rudimentary distribution made it impossible to feed or employ the whole population when it rose above a certain ceiling. The western and central regions could support much denser populations than the eastern or northern regions, but nearly every state reached its tolerable maximum during the late sixteenth century. In France this maximum seems to have been around twenty million, in Italy around eleven million. Except in times of unusually bountiful harvests, the French and Italians were certain to encounter subsistence crises whenever their populations climbed far beyond these limits. Once the population dropped, the high birthrate soon built it back up again. Just why the Spanish experienced a net population loss in the seventeenth century, rather than the kind of demographic oscillation found in France and Italy, is not clear. It appears that the Spaniards so mismanaged their economic resources that population density was forced downward. The German population pattern was also excep­tional. The Thirty Years’ War—with deaths resulting not only from combat but from pestilence and from agricultural cutbacks, transportation breakdowns, and consequent famine—had the demographic impact of the Black Death. But in Germany, as in France and Italy, the high birthrate acted to restore population losses; a strong demographic upswing occurred here after 1648.

In a few places there was net population growth during the seventeenth century. It is not surprising that England’s population increased, for density was not as great here as in sixteenth-century France, Germany, or Italy, and the English had the resources to feed and employ more people. The Dutch case is more instructive. The Dutch had no apparent room for population growth, yet they did expand, supported by the highest per- capita agricultural and industrial output and the most vigorous commercial system in Europe. This development pointed the way to the future. Over­all, significant changes were beginning to take place that would make possible a new demographic pattern. Though Europe’s total population was not growing in the seventeenth century, productive capacity was cer­tainly rising. A shrinking farm population was raising enough food to sustain a rising urban population. After 1715, the birthrate continued high, the plague ended, a long series of good harvests ensued, and people were living longer; they had broken through the seventeenth-century popula­tion ceiling. And in the late eighteenth century, Europeans revolutionized their whole production system by introducing scientific livestock breeding, soil chemistry, steam power, and manufacturing by machine. In conse­quence, they could afford to abandon traditional psychological restraints.

But during our period, people were closely hemmed in by demographic restrictions. They had to accept extreme brevity of life. One quarter of their newborn babies died within the first year. One half died before reaching adulthood. Peasant couples in the region of Beauvais produced five living children on average, yet the population level was only barely sustained. The poets of the day feasted on the bittersweet theme of brief young love, embellished by fading roses, drying dewdrops, and passing spring. In the most popular English lyric of the seventeenth century, Robert Herrick’s song “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” the poet urges shy maidens to:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today,

Tomorrow will be dying.

In actual fact, the young people tended to gather their rosebuds at a surprisingly slow pace. There is very little evidence of bastardy or of premarital intercourse. The women in seventeenth-century France and England married in their mid-twenties, the men in their late twenties. When life was so short, why this delay in procreation and marriage? Few young people had much practical choice. A couple could scarcely marry until one or both drew a living wage, and most adolescents and post­adolescents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries labored for ten years or more after puberty as dependent servants or apprentices, learning their jobs but receiving little or no income. To understand why such a system developed, we must look more closely into the economic and social struc­ture of early modern Europe.

AGRICULTURE AND INDUSTRY

Basic production methods remained throughout our period much as they had been in 1500—indeed, as they had been in 1300. To be sure, the Dutch made some important changes in farming practices, and the English developed some new techniques for heavy industry, but these could not begin to compare with the innovations of the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century. In the age of religious wars, manu­facture still retained its Latin meaning: “to make by hand.” Economic enterprise was still shackled by manual labor.

It is not easy to generalize about developments in agriculture. Broadly speaking, European food production became more commercial and capitalis­tic between 1559 and 1715. Farmers grew cash crops for the urban market on land they owned or rented. In western Europe, landlords could make money in several ways. They might cultivate their estates with wage labor, or lease out small plots to peasants, or take half of the tenant’s crop in lieu of rent—this sharecropping system was called metayage in France. Sharecrop­ping was also common on the great Italian latifundia, or estates, and on the latifundios of Spain. In Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Prussia, landlords were less likely to bother with money wages or rent; generally they required their serfs to farm their estates three days a week without pay. The expand­ing agricultural market thus turned some western European peasants into wage laborers, some into tenant farmers, and others into small free farmers, while the eastern European peasants were driven deeper into serfdom. Everywhere, the market economy was eroding traditional agrarian habits of local self-sufficiency and cooperation within a close-knit community.

Many legacies from medieval agriculture nevertheless remained. Villagers still divided their arable land into three great fields to be planted with different crops in successive years. For example, the English village of Wigston Magna was surrounded by three fields of some nine hundred acres each, called Mucklow, Goldhill, and Thythorn Hill. In a given year, Mucklow might be planted with peas and beans, and Goldhill with barley, wheat, and rye, while Thythorn Hill was left fallow. These open fields were subdivided into hundreds of individual holdings: narrow strips of land, identifiable to their owners by the plow ridges along the edges. As in the Middle Ages, each Wigston farmer held a number of these strips, but by the seventeenth century some held many more than others. A half dozen entrepreneurs had accumulated a hundred acres or more. The majority worked ten to thirty acres, just enough to support a family. The poorest cottagers had no land and hired out to their propertied neighbors. Yet these Wigston farmers, great and small, still plowed and harvested in the communal rhythm of the open-field system, as their fore­bears had been doing for a thousand years.

Wigston Magna’s time-honored but wasteful three-field system of crop rotation prevailed through much of England, France, and Germany. Plowing and harvesting techniques had not improved much since the twelfth century. The yield per bushel of seed remained wretchedly low. The traditional, undiversified crops were grown, mainly cereals and legumes, with little in the way of meat, dairy produce, fruit, or leafy vegetables. The staples were still bread and beer in the north, bread and wine in the south. Corn and potatoes had been introduced from the New World, but were not yet widely cultivated in Europe. Consumers were very grateful for the spices, sugar, tea, and coffee which were imported from Asia and America.

It is interesting to compare conditions in Spain, where agricultural produc­tion declined during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with condi­tions in England, where production increased. In both Spain and England, large-scale wool raisers were converting grain fields into sheep runs. In Spain, an estimated 3 per cent of the population held 97 per cent of the land, so it was comparatively easy for the landlord class to increase the percentage of land devoted to sheep pasturage. The members of the Mesta, or sheep ranchers’ association, owned some three million Merino sheep in the early sixteenth century. To graze this many animals, a tremendous proportion of Castile’s barren land was required. The Spanish government granted the Mesta special privileges; in 1501, their migratory flocks were given exclusive possession of huge belts of pasture land which had formerly been used to raise grain for the Castilian towns. In consequence, the countryside was depopulated as the dispossessed fanners moved to the towns, wheat produc­tion fell, and Spain was faced with famine. Ironically, in the seventeenth century the Mesta flocks dwindled in size and value. During the same period, aggressive English landlords evicted their tenants from a half million acres of land and “enclosed” much of this land into great sheep pastures. But the English enclosure movement did not assume major proportions until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In England the aristocracy and gentry controlled less of the land than in Spain. At the close of the seventeenth century, nearly half of the English rural population consisted of small farmers who either owned their own land or held it on long leases. A more important difference between England and Spain was that the English farmers, large and small, worked their land more efficiently. Some enterpris­ing farmers created rich new farmland during the seventeenth century by draining the fen district near Cambridge. Others cut down large forest tracts and learned how to till areas which had hitherto been wasteland. Not only did wool production rise in seventeenth-century England, but grain and cattle production more than kept pace with the expanding population. By the close of the century, the English farmers exported a good deal of wheat.

The Dutch were probably the most enterprising agriculturists in Europe. They had to be, for they had very little farmland on which to support a dense population. Their low-lying fields were periodically inundated by the North Sea, and the soil was soggy. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Dutch reclaimed huge tracts, known as polders, from the sea. They built dikes and drainage canals to keep the water out, and windmills to pump the land dry. They farmed the new lands intensively, planting orchards and truck gardens as well as grainfields and pasture. Raising tulips—the colorful bulbs were introduced from Turkey in the sixteenth century—became a Dutch specialty. They experimented with clover and turnips, which improved the soil yield and fattened the cattle. The Dutch were able to produce butter and cheese for export, whereas the English dairy farmers were hampered by their practice of slaughtering most of their animals every fall for lack of winter fodder. Spain, with its parched and rocky soil, badly needed some Dutch-style agricultural experiments. But all efforts to irrigate the Spanish fields were blocked by inertia. In the seventeenth century, Spanish clerics rejected a canal project which was designed to improve inland transport; if God had wanted Spain’s waterways to be navigable, they reasoned, He would have made them so.

A good example of seventeenth-century agrarian enterprise is the develop­ment by grape growers in the French county of Champagne of a method for making superlative sparkling wine. French wines were already well es­tablished as the best in Europe, but Champagne was not among the great wine-producing regions. Its chalky soil grew stunted vines with small quanti­ties of particularly sweet white and black grapes. Its northerly climate delayed the harvest season and slowed the crucial fermentation process by which the grape juice was converted into alcohol. The standard method of making wine was (and is) to harvest the grapes in September or October and press them into a mush, which fermented. Before the fermented liquid turned into vinegar, it was poured into great wooden casks. The liquid was then piped from cask to cask in order to remove the sediment and filtered to achieve a clear color. The standard seventeenth-century practice was to drink wine young, but it could be casked for several years, until it matured into old wine. A blind monk named Dom Pierre Perignon (1638-1715), the cellarer of a Benedictine abbey, is supposed to have been the man who invented a new vintage process which turned the still red wine of Champagne into a sparkling white wine. First, Dom Pierre achieved a perfect blend by combin­ing in the winepress grapes from various different vines (he had a famous nose for the bouquet of the grapes). Next, before the mush had completed its fermentation, Dom Pierre poured the liquid into bottles instead of casks, and stored it in the cool chalk cellars of Reims, the chief town in Cham­pagne. The fermentation process continued inside the bottles, giving the wine a bubbly effervescence. Dom Pierre needed very strong bottles; in the early days of champagne making, a great many of the bottles exploded. He needed strongly wired cork stoppers instead of the oil-soaked wads of hemp which people had been using for bottle stoppers. The development of a fool­proof technique took many years. Since bottled wine could not be piped or filtered, the producers of champagne had to find another way of removing the sediment from their wine. They set the bottles upside down in racks, and slightly twisted each bottle every day for many months, until the sediment had settled on the cork. Then they had to open each bottle, wipe off the sediment, hastily insert a pinch of sugar to give the wine its sweet-dry flavor, and recork it before the effervescence was lost. Seventeenth-century cham­pagne may not have tasted very much like the modern beverage, but it was already the toast of kings. Louis XIV drank it Copiously, and Charles II was so pleased with the bubbly stuff when he visited France as a young man that he introduced it into England.

Turning from food and drink to manufacturing, we once again find regional divergences and a prevailing tendency toward the large-scale capital­istic organization of production. In the seventeenth century, industrial production was geared to elementary consumer needs. Cloth is the most basic manufactured commodity, and in seventeenth-century Europe, as in the Middle Ages, textile manufacturing was by far the largest industry. Textile-production techniques had not changed since the early sixteenth century. Utilitarian wool cloth, from which most garments were made, was produced all over western Europe by the rural putting-out system. Large- scale clothiers hired peasants to spin, weave, and finish their cloth. Many clothiers did not attempt to dye the cloth, for dyeing required skill; half the price of the finished cloth was in its color. Dutch clothiers had the best formu­las for wool dyeing (which they kept as secret as possible), and they imported much “white” cloth from England and dyed it. The enterprising clothier might buy raw wool from various strains of sheep, and experiment with various mixtures and various weaves to get a cloth which struck the public’s fancy. He might employ hundreds of men and women, and when he controlled every stage by which the raw wool was converted into finished cloth, his organization of production resembled that of the modern assem­bly-line factory. But the actual work was performed under extremely primi­tive conditions, by semiskilled hand labor.

Luxury fabrics, such as silk, were produced in towns rather than in the countryside, because the work required a delicate coalition between highly skilled laborers, costly materials, and rather elaborate machinery. Only the rich could afford to buy silks and velvets, and the silk merchant strove for quality rather than quantity. Lucca had been the biggest Italian silk center since the thirteenth century; cities farther north, such as Lyons and Amster­dam, developed the craft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Natur­ally, the skilled silk weavers and dyers of Lucca were better organized and better paid than the semiskilled wool weavers and dyers of an English village. But they too were pieceworkers in a large-scale enterprise.

The tailors who sewed the finished cloth into garments were the most tradition bound of the textile workers. These small, self-employed craftsmen were to be found in every European town. They were organized, as they had been for centuries, into guilds. The tailor sewed his garments according to prescribed guild standards and offered his wares to the consumer at pres­cribed guild prices. The wool clothier and the silk merchant abominated such protectionist, restrictive business procedures. Yet the clothier himself expected the state to protect and promote all phases of his textile produc­tion. The English government, like other governments, obligingly prohibited English farmers from selling their wool abroad. It laid heavy duties on all imported woolens. It bought domestic worsteds and serges for military uniforms, and required that every English corpse be buried in a woolen shroud. Actually, the seventeenth-century woolen industry had more in common with the medieval tailoring craft than with the cotton industry which was going to develop in England during the eighteenth century. Not only would cotton be cheaper and more practical than wool, not only would cotton cloth be made by machine rather than by hand, not only would cotton textile production be concentrated in great factories rather than scattered in rural cottages, but the cotton magnates would be so self-reliant that they could disdain all regulation and protection, national as well as local. The textile manufacturers of the seventeenth century, for all their aggressive organization, did not dare to risk free competition. They thought they were living in a subsistence world.

There was not much spare capital or labor, or much technical skill, for heavy industry. England was the most industrialized society during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The coal mines along the Tyne River in northern England were big affairs, with elaborate machinery for draining the shafts, though not for cutting the coal. The colliers mined and carted the coal by hand. English coal production increased from approximately 200,000 tons a year in the 1550’s to 3,000,000 tons by the 1680’s. During the same span of years English iron production rose fivefold. Because of these impres­sive gains, Professor John Nef, the chief authority on the early British coal industry, argues that the English achieved an “industrial revolution” be­tween 1540 and 1640 comparable in importance to the better-known ma­chine age which began after 1760.⁴ But “revolution” seems too strong a term for the industrial developments in Tudor and Stuart England. The volume of seventeenth-century English coal and iron output remained very modest, so modest that it could not greatly affect techniques of production. The English did use coal fires in their dyehouses, brick and glass kilns—and breweries, despite the cry that the smell of coke gas tainted the beer. But they had not yet discovered how to smelt iron ore with coal; this was still done by charcoal. Londoners consumed much of the new coal in place of wood to heat their houses; the new iron supply was turned into pots, grates, knives, pins, and other domestic articles. England in the 1640’s produced 1/250 as much coal as the United States in the 1950’s, and 1/2500 as much iron and steel. The English did not yet produce enough coal and iron to substitute coal-powered, iron machinery for handicraft manufacturing—as they would start doing in the cotton mills of the late eighteenth century.

Whether or not England experienced an industrial revolution in the seventeenth century, continental Europe certainly did not. The overall European output of iron and steel remained pretty steadily at the low figure of 150,000 tons a year from the 1530’s into the early eighteenth century. While English production was rising during these years, iron and steel production in Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary was declining. War is supposed to stimulate heavy industry, but the wars of religion probably had the opposite effect. They disrupted mining and metalworking more than they encouraged new enterprises. Weapons were still simple enough to be largely handmade. The muskets and cannon which Gustavus Adolphus used in the Thirty Years’ War were manufactured in Swedish state factories, but the gunpowder was made in peasants’ cottages.

Transportation improved somewhat, facilitating the distribution of mar­ket commodities from one European region to another. Horse-drawn car­riages and wagons were equipped for the first time with spoked wheels and springs, which greatly eased overland travel and transport. The pony-express postal couriers of the elector of Brandenburg carried mail the six hundred miles from Konigsberg to Cleve in only a week. But the narrow, rutted, muddy roads hindered the overland conveyance of bulk cargo, as did the prevalence of highwaymen and toll collectors. It was calculated in 1675 that coal could be shipped three hundred miles by water as cheaply as fifteen miles by road. Merchant ships were not much bigger or faster in 1715 than in 1559, but there were many more of them. The cheaply built, easily handled Dutch flute, or flyboat, was particularly well designed for carrying awkward cargoes like coal, timber, salt, or grain. Thus seaports and riverports received goods from many parts of the world, while interior villages still had to be nearly self-sufficient. The peasant who depended upon country fairs and itinerant peddlars to supply his wants had to have modest tastes indeed.

By and large, the seventeenth-century economy suffered from chronic problems of underproduction, as our own economy now suffers from chronic problems of overproduction. Almost the entire seventeenth-century labor force was tied up in inefficient manual labor, required to provide the bare necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter. Seven or eight out of every ten members of the labor force were agricultural workers, yet the people of seventeenth-century Europe were none too well fed or dressed. Now, less than one out of ten members of the late twentieth-century American labor force is an agricultural or textile worker, yet our farms and mills glut the market. Of the 450 occupational categories listed by the United States Bureau of the Census in 1970, at least two hundred (mostly of the white- collar type) did not exist in any form three hundred years ago. A seven­teenth-century entrepreneur would hardly believe that in our mechanized society almost as many laborers are engaged in transportation as in agri­culture.⁵ Or that we have to create consumer “wants” by sales and advertis­ing, and persuade customers to discard merchandise long before it wears out. The seventeenth-century bourgeois virtues of thrift, abstinence, and restraint have become vices in our era of built-in obsolescence.

DUTCH COMMERCIAL CAPITALISM

The Dutch were the most enterprising businessmen in seventeenth-cen­tury Europe. Their success did not stem from their superiority in agricul­tural and industrial production, though they were indeed good farmers and skilled manufacturers. Primarily, they were middlemen: they bought, sold, and carried other people’s products. They bought great quantities of spices, tea, china, and cotton in Asia, and of sugar, tobacco, and furs in America. They bought even greater quantities of lumber, grain, cattle, and copper in northern Europe, and of wool, wine, silk, and silver in southern Europe. With their ample fleet of merchant ships, the Dutch transported all these commodities to Amsterdam and other Dutch towns, and sold them to the buyers from all over Europe who congregated there. Whenever possible, they enhanced their profits as middlemen by converting the raw materials they imported into finished goods. The Dutch textile mills, dyehouses, breweries, distilleries, tanneries, sugar and salt refineries, tobacco-cutting factories, and soap works all depended on imported materials. By gearing their whole society to foreign trade, the Dutch overcame their lack of natural resources, manpower, and military strength. As Dutch prosperity proved, the merchant middleman was the prime catalyst in the seventeenth-century economy.

The rise of Dutch commercial capitalism is a remarkable story. When the Netherlander began their revolt against Philip II in the 1560’s, the northern provinces (the future Dutch republic) were decidedly less prosperous than the southern provinces. Amsterdam stood far behind Antwerp as a commer­cial entrepot. But the inhabitants of Holland and Zeeland, the two northern provinces bordering on the North Sea, had long been seafaring folk and possessed many ships of all sizes. They already dominated the North Sea fisheries and the Baltic grain and timber trade. Once the “sea beggars” had captured ports in Holland and Zeeland in 1572, the Dutch could ward off the Spanish army by opening the dikes when necessary; and they could outsail the Spanish fleet and plunder the Spanish merchant marine. All through the years between the Dutch declaration of independence in 1581 and the final peace settlement with Spain in 1648, Dutch commerce boomed. Dutch merchants aggressively developed old avenues of trade and opened new ones. Despite the war, they kept on buying Spanish wool and selling grain to the Spaniards. They even sold military stores to the Spanish army! They capital­ized on Portugal’s weakness during the Portuguese union with Spain (1580— 1640) by seizing the most valuable Portuguese colonies and trading posts. When the duke of Parma captured Antwerp in 1585, Amsterdam quickly replaced that city as Europe’s greatest shipping center, commodity market, and financial exchange. The Dutch insisted on blockading the mouth of the Scheldt River, Antwerp’s entrance to the North Sea, to guarantee that Antwerp could never regain her old commercial primacy.

The Dutch republic in the mid-seventeenth century was very small, with an area about the size of the state of Maryland and a population of two million. The eighty-year war with Spain had not caused any appreciable modernization of its particularistic political structure. The seven sovereign provinces—Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Groningen, Overyssel, and Friesland—continued to cherish their separate identities. Cynics called them the Disunited Provinces. Wealthy, crowded, cosmopolitan Holland had few economic, social, or cultural bonds with backwater, feudal, cattle-raising Gelderland. The central government, such as it was, functioned by means of negotiations among the seven autonomous provinces. Each prov­ince sent ambassadors to The Hague to meet in the States-General, a body which rarely acted energetically because its decisions required the consent' of all seven constituencies. But in a crisis the other six provinces deferred to Holland, since the Hollanders contributed over half the union’s financial support. Political control in Holland was vested in the merchant oligarchs who ruled Amsterdam and the other towns. There was no central executive in the Dutch republic, though William the Silent’s house of Orange developed some of the attributes of a ruling dynasty. The prince of Orange was normally the commander of the federal army and navy, and stadholder, or chief administrator, in five of the seven provinces. The Dutch federation looked fragile and impractical—but it worked. Dutch politics became a tug of war between the house of Orange and the merchant oligarchs in Holland. Except in times of acute military emergency, the merchant oligarchs pre­vailed. They wanted international peace, which would facilitate the develop­ment of Dutch trade throughout the world.

Seventeenth-century Dutch commercial capitalism produced no individ­ual titans to compare with Jacques Coeur, Cosimo de Medici, or Jakob Fugger. Nevertheless, by pooling their resources the Dutch merchants were able to undertake ventures which would have been too expensive and risky for the solitary giants of the past. Great numbers of investors, big and small, organized themselves into companies chartered by the state, in order to tackle large commercial projects. The grandest of these companies, the Dutch East India Company, was founded in 1602 with an initial capital of 6,500,000 florins. It was a joint-stock enterprise; hundreds of investors from all over the Dutch republic pooled their money to give the company working capital. The seventeen directors who operated the East India Company were drawn from among the biggest shareholders, but the small shareholders had little to complain about. The pepper, cloves, and nutmeg which the com­pany brought to Amsterdam netted an average annual dividend of 18 per cent.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch had created a worldwide empire which differed in every way from the Spanish empire. It was a trad­ing network owned and operated by private enterprise, with minimal gov­ernment supervision. Two joint-stock companies, the East India Company and the West India Company (founded in 1621), divided the globe between them. Each of these companies had sovereign authority to possess and govern overseas territory, to negotiate treaties, and to wage war. The East India Company was the more important. In the early seventeenth century the company’s soldiers and sailors drove the Portuguese out of the spice islands, the Malay Archipelago, and Ceylon, and kept the English from moving into these places. The Dutch thus secured virtually complete control over Sumatran pepper, Ceylonese cinnamon, and Moluccan nutmeg, mace, and cloves. The company also maintained a post on an island off Nagasaki, where the suspicious Japanese government gave the Dutch a monopoly on all European trade with Japan. The company shipped home tea and porcelain from its Chinese trading posts, cotton from its Indian trading posts, silk from Persia, and coffee from Arabia. In 1652 the company established a way station at the Cape of Good Hope to break the long sea voyage between Amsterdam and Asia. The Dutch West India Company, operating in the western hemisphere, had less success because other European states were too well entrenched there. It could not capture any major Spanish colonies, and in the 1640’s and 1650’s the Portuguese reconquered Brazil and Angola from the Dutch. In North America, the Dutch never got much profit out of their fur-trading posts at Manhattan and Albany, and lost them to the English in 1664. However, the West India Company did get good returns from the lucrative African slave trade, and its island outposts of Curasao and St. Eustatius proved to be useful bases for raiding and trading in the Caribbean.

The East India and West India companies were dazzling symbols of Dutch commercial capitalism, but they were actually less vital to the Dutch economy than the North Sea fishing industry and the western European carrying trade. The fisheries employed several hundred thousand Dutchmen. Many workers were needed to build, equip, and repair the fishing smacks. Others manned the North Sea fleets which fished for herring, haddock, and cod. Others manned the Arctic whaling fleets. Others pickled, smoked, and barreled the catch for export. Still others fetched from Portugal and France the salt needed to cure the herring, and from Norway the timber needed in constructing the ships and the barrels. Despite the fact that they had to import all their lumber, the Dutch built a great fleet of merchant ships. Contemporaries guessed that the Dutch possessed sixteen thousand mer­chant vessels in the mid-seventeenth century, something like half the Euro­pean total. Danish toll records indicate that two thirds of the ships which entered the Baltic Sea during this period were Dutch. At times there were more Dutch than Spanish ships off Spanish America, and more Dutch than English ships off English America. In 1619, the first cargo of Negro slaves to Virginia was carried in a Dutch ship. This carrying fleet enabled the Dutch to collect middleman profits on nearly every branch of waterborne com­merce, and caused Amsterdam to develop into the busiest trading center in Europe.

During the century following the outbreak of the Dutch revolt in 1566, the population of Amsterdam climbed from 30,000 to 200,000. The harbor was shallow and inconveniently inland from the North Sea, but the city was the most northerly and the most defensible of the Dutch ports, and was therefore safe from the Spanish. Amsterdam lay athwart the Baltic Sea, Rhine River, and English Channel shipping routes. Nobody but nobody could undersell the Amsterdam merchants because they dealt in volume. They would sail a fleet of flyboats into the Baltic laden with herring (which Dutch fishermen had caught off the English coast) and return with all of the grain surplus from a Danish island, or with twenty thousand head of lean cattle to be fattened in the Holland polders. They would buy a standing forest in Norway for timber, or contract before the grapes were harvested for the vintage of a whole French district. They would buy shiploads of undyed cloth, crude Barbados sugar, and Virginia leaf in England; have the cloth dyed, the sugar refined, and the tobacco cut and wrapped by Amsterdam craftsmen; and sell the finished commodities all over northern Europe at prices the English could not match. Foreign merchants found it worth their time to shop in Amsterdam because there they could buy anything from a precision lens to muskets for an army of five thousand. The exchange bank eased credit; marine insurance policies safeguarded transport. And no mer­chant could feel a stranger in a city where the presses printed books in every European tongue, and the French- and English-language newspapers were more lively and informative than the gazettes printed back home.

The Dutch republic was a Calvinist state, but John Calvin would not have felt at home in mid-seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The great Dutch merchants did not permit the Dutch Reformed clergy to interfere in politics or business. Catholics, Anabaptists, Jews, and unbelievers were tolerated in Amsterdam. The religious zeal which had stirred the Dutch into rebellion against Philip II, and nerved them into continuing the fight in the 1580’s when all seemed hopeless, had turned into a secular zeal for making money. Indeed, the Dutch had lost more of their mid-sixteenth-century crusading impetus than had their old adversaries, the Spaniards. This loss of Dutch religious zeal is particularly evident if one compares seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish mission work among the heathen overseas. Thousands of Spanish priests and monks proselytized vigorously in the Philippines, India, Siam, and China, and maintained an elaborate network of Catholic churches, schools, seminaries, and universities. The Dutch East India Com­pany sent a good many Calvinist ministers and schoolteachers into Asia, but their missionary efforts were singularly feeble. “Nay,” lamented a Dutch Calvinist in 1683, “while the Jesuits and other locusts of the whore of Babylon apply so patiently their blind zeal to promote the Kingdom of Darkness, we do so little to make the Kingdom of Mercy come!

The moneymaking ethos was certainly more pervasive and powerful in Amsterdam than it had been in such earlier capitalist centers as Florence, Venice, Augsburg, and Antwerp. We should not, however, exaggerate the modernity of seventeenth-century Dutch commercial enterprise. Amster­dam’s business structure—its bank, exchange, insurance companies, and joint-stock companies—was based on sixteenth-century models. The charac­teristic Amsterdam business firm continued to be a simple partnership. The Dutch joint-stock companies resembled medieval guilds in their protection­ist policies. The East India Company had a monopoly 0n the eastern trade and forbade any Dutch merchant not a shareholder from trading in the spice islands. The company did more than just resist external competition; it deliberately destroyed some of its own Sumatran pepper plantations and Molucca nutmeg cargoes in order to keep the supply limited and the price high. Furthermore, Dutch commercial prosperity was strictly limited to the upper and middle classes. The paintings of Jan Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, with their scenes of well-fed, well-dressed burghers living in spot­lessly clean, comfortably furnished brick houses, illustrate only one side of seventeenth-century Dutch life. Half the inhabitants of Amsterdam lived under slum conditions, in squalid shanties or cellars. The Dutch wage laborer worked twelve to fourteen hours a day when he was lucky enough to have a job and subsisted on a diet of beans, peas, and rye bread. For all their enterprise, not even the Dutch could achieve an economy of abundance in the seventeenth century.

PROPERTY AND PRIVILEGE

Europe’s relatively low productivity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped keep its social structure sharply stratified. Class lines were formalized to an extent hard for us to credit. While there was more social mobility than in the Middle Ages, people were no less self-conscious about their proper station in life. Every rank in the social order, from princes and! , aristocrats at the top to serfs and beggars at the bottom, had its own distinct style of dress, diet, habitation, and entertainment; its own training, customs, and mental attitudes. The value systems of the aristocrat, the bourgeois, and the peasant differed profoundly. A person’s vocabulary and accent, even his physical posture, instantly identified his social station, which helps explain why it was still exceptional for anyone born into a given rank (especially at the bottom or top of the scale) to climb up or down. Ilicr archy was considered a measure of civilization. Social gradations might be rough and ready in frontier areas, such as Ireland, Sweden, Russia, and America, but in France, the center of civility, they were elaborated to the fullest extent. Ulysses’ oft-quoted soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida perfectly expresses the prevailing contemporary belief that social hierarchy preserves political order and economic well-being.