Chapter 15 - State Building and the Search for Order in the Seventeenth Century

Chapter 15.1 - Social Crises, War, and Rebellions

• The inflation-fueled prosperity of the sixteenth century showed signs of slackening by the beginning of the seventeenth.
• Economic contraction was evident in some parts of Europe in the 1620s.
• Population trends of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also reveal Europe’s worsening conditions.
• The sixteenth century was a period of expanding population, possibly related to a warmer climate and increased food supplies.
• It has been estimated that the population of Europe increased from 60 million in 1500 to 85 million by 1600, the first major recovery of the European population since the devastation of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century.
• Records also indicate a leveling off of the population by 1620, however, and even a decline by 1650, especially in central and southern Europe. Only the Dutch, English, and French grew in number in the first half of the seventeenth century.
• After the middle of the sixteenth century, another ‘‘little ice age,’’ when average temperatures fell, affected harvests and caused famines.
• These problems created social tensions that came to a boil in the witchcraft craze.
• Hysteria over witchcraft affected the lives of many Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
• Witchcraft trials were held in England, Scotland, Switzerland, Germany, some parts of France, and the Low Countries, and even in New England in America. Witchcraft was not a new phenomenon.
• Its practice had been part of traditional village culture for centuries, but it came to be viewed as both sinister and dangerous when the medieval church began to connect witches to the activities of the devil, thereby transforming witchcraft into a heresy that had to be wiped out.
• After the establishment of the Inquisition in the thirteenth century, some people were accused of a variety of witchcraft practices and, following the biblical injunction ‘‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’’ were turned over to secular authorities for burning at the stake or, in England, hanging.
• By the seventeenth century, war played an increasingly important role in European affairs.
• The use of firearms required adjustments to the size and shape of the massed infantry and made the cavalry less effective.
• It was Gustavus Adolphus, the king of Sweden, who developed the first standing army of conscripts, notable for the flex-ibility of its tactics.
• The infantry brigades of Gustavus’s army were composed of equal numbers of musketeers and pike-men, standing six men deep.
• They employed the salvo, in which all rows of the infantry fired at once instead of row by row.
• These salvos of fire, which cut up the massed ranks of the opposing infantry squadrons, were followed by a pike charge, giving the infantry a primarily offensive deployment.
• Gustavus also used his cavalry in a more mobile fashion. Naturally, the success of Gustavus Adolphus led to imitation.
• Before, during, and after the Thirty Years’ War, a series of rebellions and civil wars stemming from the discontent of both nobles and commoners rocked the domestic stability of many European governments.

Chapter 15.2 - The Practice of Absolutism: Western Europe

• Bossuet argued first that the government was divinely ordained so that humans could live in an organized society.
• Since kings received their power from God, their authority was absolute.
• Because God would hold a king ac-countable for his actions, Bossuet believed that kings faced serious responsibilities as well as real limits on their power.
• There was also a large gulf between the theory of absolutism as expressed by Bossuet and the practice of absolutism.
• A monarch’s absolute power was often limited greatly by practical realities.
• At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Spain possessed the most populous empire in the world, controlling almost all of South America and a number of settlements in Asia and Africa.
• To most Europeans, Spain still seemed the greatest power of the age, but the reality was quite different.
• Spain continued to play the role of a great power, but appearances were deceiving.
• During the reign of Philip III , many of Spain’s weaknesses became apparent. Interested only in court luxury or miracle-working relics, Philip III allowed his first minister, the greedy duke of Lerma, to run the country.
• The reign of Philip IV seemed to offer hope for a revival of Spain’s energies, especially in the capable hands of his chief minister, Gaspar de Guzman , the count of Olivares .
• This clever, hardworking, and power-hungry statesman dominated the king’s every move and worked to revive the interests of the monarchy.
• A flurry of domestic reform decrees, aimed at curtailing the power of the Catholic Church and the landed aristocracy, was soon followed by a political reform program whose purpose was to further centralize the government of all Spain and its possessions in monarchical hands.
• At the same time, most of the efforts of Olivares and Philip were undermined by their desire to pursue Spain’s imperial glory and by a series of internal revolts. Spain’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War led to a series of frightfully expensive military campaigns that incited internal revolts and years of civil war.
• Unfortunately for Spain, the campaigns also failed to produce victory.
• The defeats in Europe and the internal revolts of the 1640s ended any illusions about Spain’s greatness.
• The actual extent of Spain’s economic difficulties is still debated, but there is no question about its foreign losses.

Chapter 15.3 - Absolutism in Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe

• During the seventeenth century, a development of great importance for the modern Western world took place in central and eastern Europe, as three new powers made their appearance: Prussia, Austria, and Russia.

• By gaining Milan, Mantua, Sardinia, and Naples, Austria supplanted Spain as the dominant power in Italy.

• A new Russian state had emerged in the fifteenth century under the leadership of the principality of Moscow and its grand dukes .

• In the sixteenth century, Ivan IV the Terrible , who was the first ruler to take the title of tsar , expanded the territories of Russia eastward after finding westward expansion blocked by the powerful Swedish and Polish states.

• Ivan also extended the autocracy of the tsar by crushing the power of the Russian nobility, known as the boyars .

• Ivan’s dynasty came to an end in 1598 and was followed by a resurgence of aristocratic power in a period of anarchy known as the Time of Troubles.

• It did not end until the Zemsky Sobor , or national assembly, chose Michael Romanov as the new tsar, beginning a dynasty that lasted until 1917.

• In the seventeenth century, Muscovite society was highly stratified.

• At the top was the tsar, who claimed to be a divinely ordained autocratic ruler.

• Russian society was dominated by an upper class of landed aristocrats who, in the course of the seventeenth century, managed to bind their peasants to the land.

• In the seventeenth century, merchant and peasant revolts as well as a schism in the Russian Orthodox Church created very unsettled conditions. In the midst of these political and religious upheavals, seventeenth-century Moscow was experiencing more frequent contacts with the West, and Western ideas were beginning to penetrate a few Russian circles.

• At the end of the seventeenth century, Peter the Great noticeably accelerated the westernizing process.

  The Ottoman Empire

• After conquering Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Turks tried to complete their conquest of the Balkans, where they had been established since the fourteenth century .

• From 1480 to 1520, internal problems and the need to consolidate their eastern frontiers kept the Turks from any further attacks on Europe.

• The reign of Sultan Suleiman I the Magnificent , however, brought the Turks back to Europe’s attention.

• Advancing up the Danube, the Turks seized Belgrade in 1521 and Hungary by 1526, although their attempts to conquer Vienna in 1529 were repulsed.

• At the same time, the Turks extended their power into the western Mediterranean, threatening to turn it into a Turkish lake until the Spanish destroyed a large Turkish fleet at Lepanto in 1571.

• Despite the defeat, the Turks continued to hold nominal control over the southern shores of the Mediterranean.

• Although Europeans frequently spoke of new Christian Crusades against the ‘‘infidel’’ Turks, by the beginning of the seventeenth century European rulers seeking alliances and trade concessions were treating the Ottoman Empire like another European power.

• The Ottoman Empire possessed a highly effective governmental system, especially when it was led by strong sultans or powerful grand viziers .

• In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire was a ‘‘sleeping giant. Repulsed by a mixed army of Austrians, Poles, Bavarians, and Saxons, the Turks retreated and were pushed out of Hungary by a new European coalition.

• Although they retained the core of their empire, the Ottoman Turks would never again be a threat to Europe.

Chapter 15.4 - Limited Monarchy and Republics

• The dynastic union of Jagiello , grand prince of Lithuania, with the Polish queen Jadwiga resulted in a large Lithuanian-Polish state in 1386, although it was not until 1569 that a formal merger occurred between the two crowns.

• The union of Poland and Lithuania under the Jagiello dynasty had created the largest kingdom in Christendom at the begin-ning of the fifteenth century.

• As a result, Poland-Lithuania played a major role in eastern Europe in the fifteenth century and also ruled much of Ukraine by the end of the sixteenth century.

• Poland-Lithuania had a rather unique governmental system in that assemblies of nobles elected the king and carefully limited royal power.

• To be elected to the kingship, prospective monarchs had to agree to share power with the Sejm in matters of taxation, foreign and military policy, and the appointment of state officials and judges.

• The power of the Sejm had disastrous results for central monarchical authority, for the real aim of most of its members was to ensure that central authority would not affect their local interests.

• The acceptance of the liberum veto in 1652, whereby the meetings of the Sejm could be stopped by a single dissenting member, reduced the government to virtual chaos.

• Poland, then, was basically a confederation of semi-independent estates of landed nobles.

  England and the Emergence of Constitutional Monarchy

• Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the Tudor dynasty became extinct, and the Stuart line of rulers was inaugurated with the accession to the throne of Elizabeth’s cousin, King James VI of Scotland , who became James I of England.

• Although used to royal power as king of Scotland, James understood little about the laws, institutions, and customs of the English. ’’

• Parliament expressed its displeasure with James’s claims by refusing his requests for additional monies needed by the king to meet the increased cost of government.

• Parliament’s power of the purse proved to be its trump card in its relationship with the king.

• Some members of Parliament were also alienated by James’s religious policy.

• In 1628, Parliament passed the Petition of Right, which the king was supposed to accept before being granted any tax revenues.

• This petition prohibited taxation without Parliament’s consent, arbitrary imprisonment, the quartering of soldiers in private houses, and the declaration of martial law in peacetime. In 1629, Charles decided that since he could not work with Parliament, he would not summon it to meet.

• From 1629 to 1640, Charles pursued a course of personal rule, which forced him to find ways to collect taxes without the cooperation of Parliament.

• One expedient was a tax called ship money, a levy on seacoast towns to pay for coastal defense, which was now collected annually by the king’s officials throughout England and used to finance other government operations besides defense.

• This use of ship money aroused opposition from middle-class merchants and landed gentry, who objected to the king’s attempts to tax without Parliament’s consent.

• The king’s religious policy also proved disastrous.

• His marriage to Henrietta Maria, the Catholic sister of King Louis XIII of France, aroused suspicions about the king’s own religious inclinations.

• Charles might have survived unscathed if he could have avoided calling Parliament, which alone could provide a focus for the many cries of discontent throughout the land.

• But when the king and Archbishop Laud attempted to impose the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on the Scottish Presbyterian Church, the Scots rose up in rebellion against the king.

• Financially strapped and unable to raise troops to defend against the Scots, the king was forced to call Parliament into session.

• Eleven years of frustration welled up to create a Parliament determined to deal the king his due.

• In its first session, from November 1640 to September 1641, the so-called Long Parliament took a series of steps that placed severe limitations on royal authority.

• By the end of 1641, one group in Parliament was prepared to go no further, but a group of more radical parliamentarians pushed for more change, including the elimination of bishops in the Anglican Church.

• When the king tried to take advantage of the split by arresting some members of the more radical faction in Parliament, a large group in Parliament led by John Pym and his fellow Puritans decided that the king had gone too far.

• The army, composed mostly of the more radical Independents, who opposed an established Pres-byterian church, marched on London in 1647 and began negotiations with the king. Enraged by the king’s treachery, Cromwell and the army engaged in a second civil war that ended with Cromwell’s victory and the capture of the king.

• This time, Cromwell was determined to achieve a victory from the army’s point of view.

• The Presbyterian members of Parliament were purged, leaving a Rump Parliament of fifty-three members of the House of Commons who then tried and condemned the king on a charge of treason and adjudged that ‘‘he, the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of this nation, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body.

• After the death of the king, the Rump Parliament abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords and proclaimed England a republic or commonwealth .

• This was not an easy period for Cromwell. At the same time that Cromwell was dealing with the Levellers, he also found it difficult to work with the Rump Parliament and finally dispersed it by force.

• As the members of Parliament departed , he shouted after them, ‘‘It’s you that have forced me to do this, for I have sought the Lord night and day that He would slay me rather than put upon me the doing of this work.

• ’’ With the certainty of one who is convinced he is right, Cromwell had destroyed both the king and Parliament .

• Executive power was vested in the Lord Protector and legislative power in a reconstituted Parliament.

• Cromwell found it difficult to work with Parliament, especially when its members debated his authority and advocated once again the creation of a Presbyterian state church.

• In 1655, Cromwell dissolved Parliament and divided the country into eleven regions, each ruled by a major general who served virtually as a military governor.

• To meet the cost of military government, Cromwell levied a 10 percent land tax on all former Royalists.

• Unable to establish a constitutional basis for a working government, Cromwell had resorted to military force to maintain the rule of the Independents, ironically using even more arbitrary policies than those of Charles I.

Chapter 15.5 - The Flourishing of European Culture

• Although it was resisted in France, England, and the Netherlands, eventually the Baroque style spread to all of Europe and to Latin America. Baroque artists sought to bring together the Classical ideals of Renaissance art with the spiritual feelings of the sixteenth-century religious revival.
• The Baroque painting style was known for its use of dramatic effects to arouse the emotions.
• In large part, though, Baroque art and architecture reflected the search for power that was so important to the seventeenth-century ethos.
• Baroque churches and palaces were magnificent and richly detailed. Baroque painting was known for its use of dramatic effects to heighten emotional intensity.
• This style was especially evident in the works of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens , a prolific artist and an important figure in the spread of the Baroque from Italy to other parts of Europe.
• In his artistic masterpieces, bodies in violent motion, heavily fleshed nudes, a dramatic use of light and shadow, and rich, sensuous pigments converge to express intense emotions.
• In England and Spain, writing reached new heights between 1580 and 1640.
• The greatest age of English literature is often called the Elizabethan era because much of the English cultural flowering of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries occurred during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
• Elizabethan literature exhibits the exuberance and pride associated with England’s international exploits at the time.
• Of all the forms of Elizabethan literature, none expressed the energy and intellectual versatility of the era better than drama.
• And of all the dramatists, none is more famous than William Shakespeare .
• Shakespeare was the son of a prosperous glove maker from Stratford-upon-Avon. William Shakespeare was a ‘‘complete man of the theater.
• Shakespeare has long been recognized as a universal genius.
• A master of the English language, he was instrumental in codifying a language that was still in transition.
• As the great age of theater in England and Spain was drawing to a close around 1630, a new dramatic era began to dawn in France that lasted into the 1680s.
• Unlike Shakespeare in England and Lope de Vega in Spain, French playwrights wrote more for an elite audience and were forced to depend on royal patronage.
• French dramatists cultivated a style that emphasized the clever, polished, and correct over the emotional and imaginative.
• Many of the French works of the period derived both their themes and their plots from Classical Greek and Roman sources, especially evident in the works of Jean-Baptiste Racine.

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