The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

1618 to 1772

	The Thirty Years War: An Overview
	The Bohemian Phase
	The Danish Phase
	The Swedish Phase
	The French Phase and the Treaty of Westphalia
	England's Political Experiment
	Sweden at its Peak
	The Sun King
	The War of the Spanish Succession
	Statistics on Population and Religion for the Early Eighteenth Century
	Scientific, Literary and Military Revolutions
	Seventeenth-Century Economics
	The Wars of the Quadruple Alliance and the Polish Succession
	The War of the Austrian Succession
	The Seven Years War
	The First Partition of Poland
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Another factor in the war's devastation was that many soldiers were mercenaries. In the sixteenth century the medieval armies of knights and peasant levies went out of fashion, because a combined unit of musketeers and pikemen could beat them. However, such a unit required considerable discipline and drilling; a five-foot-long muzzle-loading musket was not very accurate, and the pikemen had to protect the musketeers while they reloaded. Most states did not know how to train competent musketeers and pikemen, so they resorted to hiring professionals, who saw war as a business and didn't care what nation or religion they were fighting for. Often the participating states did not have the money to pay their soldiers, so looting and pillaging became commonplace around every camp, and soldiers would torture helpless civilians who could not, or would not, supply their needs. A vicious circle developed; many civilians joined the army so that in this eat-or-be-eaten society they would be the looters, not the looted. As a result, even the presence of a friendly army on a ruler's land was a nightmare to him, and much of the war's strategy centered on finding a good place for a winter campsite. It got to the point that the arrival of an army in a neighborhood was always an unwelcome sight, and small groups of soldiers who strayed from the main body were likely to be attacked by peasants wielding pitchforks and shovels, no matter what side they were on.

Nobody in 1618 expected a big war to engulf Europe, but they expected many small conflicts. The truce between Spain and the Netherlands was due to expire in 1621, and since Spain had never recognized Dutch independence, King Philip III prepared for a rematch, to avenge this blow to Spanish pride. Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Russia all had grudges against one another, but a northern war didn't appear likely to spread beyond the Baltic. To the southeast, the Balkans were quiet after the most recent Balkan war ended in 1606; the Ottoman Empire now suffered through a series of mad sultans that were only a threat to their own subjects.

In France, Louis XIII had grown up, and quarreled with his mother Marie over French policy; Marie was pro-Catholic and favored peace with Spain, while Louis saw the Hapsburgs and the Papacy as threats. The scales tipped in favor of Louis in 1624, when he got a powerful chief minister, Armand Jean du Plessis--better known as Cardinal Richelieu--who saw things the same way as he did. Richelieu dedicated himself to strengthening France, and more than anyone else is responsible for the absolutism that characterized the French monarchy after Louis XIII. Seeing the Huguenots as a threat, Richelieu ordered an attack on La Rochelle, the main Huguenot stronghold, in 1628, but afterwards continued to allow the Huguenots freedom of worship. In 1630 he succeeded in banishing the queen mother; this made him the most powerful man in the country, and under him France now resumed an active foreign policy.

The Bohemian Phase

The spark that set the continent ablaze was lit in Bohemia, where memories of the Hussites were still strong. If there was one man who started it all, it was Christian von Anhalt, the chief advisor to Frederick V, elector of the Palatinate. The Bohemian Protestants wanted to be ruled by one of their own, and Anhalt saw this as a way, for the first time, to elect a Protestant emperor. The Holy Roman emperor who succeeded Rudolf, Matthias, was no friend of Protestantism; among other things, he was in the habit of putting Catholic priests in charge of Protestant churches. However, Matthias was also old, unambitious, and childless, so Anhalt and the Bohemians bided their time. If they could elect a Protestant king in Bohemia, he would cast the deciding vote in the next imperial election, since among the other electors, three were Catholic archbishops and three were Protestant princes.

Anhalt's plan began to go wrong when the Hapsburg family chose a nephew of Matthias, Ferdinand II, to be the king of Bohemia, dispensing with the expected election (Matthias had been elected previously, but now he said that was a special situation that did not need to be repeated). Even worse, the Bohemians gave Ferdinand II the benefit of the doubt, choosing not to oppose him at this time. Ferdinand, however, was a pious Catholic, who had already eradicated Protestantism from the estates he had ruled in Austria, and felt compelled to show who was in charge. During the next year his repressive anti-Protestant measures did more to unite his opponents than anything they did themselves. On May 23, 1618, a mob of enraged Protestants broke into the castle in Prague, seized two of Ferdinand's ministers and their secretary, and threw them out of a third-story window. This event was called "the Defenestration of Prague," and Catholics called it a miracle because the Hapsburg agents fell seventy feet without suffering serious injury (Protestants noted that they landed in a dungheap); in effect it was Bohemia's declaration of independence from Hapsburg rule.

Within four months of the Defenestration, two Hapsburg armies, one from Spain and one from Austria, entered Bohemia to crush the rebels. To oppose this the Bohemians had a hastily recruited force of 16,000 men--quite inadequate to face this threat. The day was saved, however, by the arrival of another Protestant army, 2,000 professional soldiers sent by Frederick of the Palatinate and Charles Emanuel, the Duke of Savoy; they were led by Ernst von Mansfeld, one of the greatest mercenary commanders of the day. With the arrival of this army, the imperial forces withdrew; the Bohemian crown was now offered to and accepted by Frederick. Meanwhile in Austria, Emperor Matthias died, and things didn't look good for Ferdinand to succeed him; a Bohemian army even besieged Vienna in early 1619.

We noted in previous chapters how the German princes were obsessed with their personal freedom, but they were even more obsessed with the idea that a prince could only earn his crown legally. Thus, when Frederick took over Bohemia, no Protestant prince wanted anything to do with him; moreover, Frederick was a Calvinist, so the Evangelical Union, which was largely Lutheran, didn't even see much in common with him on religion. When imperial elections were held (August 28, 1619), the vote was unanimous for Ferdinand II. The three Catholic archbishops voted for him automatically, and Ferdinand, as elector of Bohemia, cast his vote for himself, leaving the three Protestant electors (including Frederick) no choice but to do the same if they wanted to appear loyal. The man Bohemia had rejected as king was now the emperor! Overnight Frederick went from being the champion of Protestantism to a vassal rebelling against his master.

Ferdinand only had enough soldiers to keep the peace in Austria, but he managed to get cash from the Papacy and armies from Spain, Bavaria, and Saxony. Against this Frederick had Mansfeld's army, some troops from Transylvania (used to open a second front in Hungary) and a subsidy of 50,000 florins from the Netherlands. Before any battles took place, Mansfeld deserted Frederick, because his employer could no longer pay him; that act sealed Frederick's doom. While the Saxons overran Lusatia and Silesia, and Spanish troops invaded the Palatinate, the Bavarians under Johann, Count of Tilly, conquered Bohemia (1620). Tilly won a key battle at White Mountain, and for Frederick, the sight of his troops fleeing back into Prague was enough to make him throw in the towel; he fled with his queen to the Netherlands, where he spent the rest of his life dreaming of a new Protestant league (the Evangelical Union had dissolved itself), with fruitless schemes to regain his lost lands and titles. Back in Germany, Frederick's enemies called him "the Winter King," because his reign over Bohemia had only lasted for one season.

Mansfeld took his army to the Rhine, but failed to keep the rest of the Palatinate from falling into Catholic hands. Though he claimed he was continuing the war in Frederick's name, it was really an excuse for his troops to live off the land by pillaging, and they treated German Protestants in the west almost as badly as Catholic soldiers did. By 1623, most of the fighting appeared to be over, so Ferdinand handed out big rewards to his allies for their service, giving Lusatia to Saxony, Alsace to Spain, and half of the Palatinate to Bavaria; the prince of Bavaria also became one of the Empire's seven electors, taking his vote from the Palatinate. For himself, Ferdinand kept Bohemia and Silesia, and punished the Bohemians terribly. A new constition replaced the old-style feudalism with an absolutist government, half of the land belonging to Czech nobles was confiscated, and a wave of executions and forced conversions followed, causing 150,000 to emigrate, and beginning the traditional Czech hatred of the Germans.

The Danish Phase

To the east, the looting of Bohemia gave Ferdinand the resources he had lacked previously, and one of his dukes, Albrecht von Wallenstein, began to raise a new army which--unlike Tilly's--took orders from no one but the emperor. A clever general with great ambitions, Wallenstein looked at Mansfeld's methods, and saw in them a way to finance an army without costing the emperor a penny. Ferdinand agreed to let him try, if he thought he could raise ten thousand men that way, and Wallenstein said ten thousand was only the beginning: "If I have only ten thousand, we must accept what people choose to give us. If I have thirty thousand, we can take what we like." This strategy meant that no matter who won the war, the result wouldn't be a kinder, gentler Germany. Wherever Wallenstein's men marched, the local residents would have to pay for, feed and quarter them. If the locals were loyal, Wallenstein would take "contributions to the necessity of the empire"; if they opposed him, he would simply plunder them, with no words needed to justify his behavior. Just the promise of plunder was enough to recruit nearly fifty thousand men in the first three months.

By this time the second phase of the war, the Danish phase, was underway. Tilly advanced into northern Germany, to defeat the remaining Protestant forces, and the Protestants called for help. King Christian IV of Denmark gladly became the new Protestant champion, forming an alliance with England and the Netherlands in December 1625, before coming to the rescue. It didn't work; Tilly defeated the Danish king at Lutter, while Wallenstein defeated Mansfeld at Dessau and chased him to Hungary, where he soon died of a fever. By this time Wallenstein had 125,000 men in his force, an awesome number by early seventeenth-century standards.⁽¹⁾ Together Tilly and Wallenstein pushed Christian IV back into Denmark itself, defeating him again at Wolgast (September 1628), and devastating Jutland until he prayed for peace at any price. Then Wallenstein wasted the northern state of Mecklenberg, becoming the "Generalissimo of the Baltic and Ocean Seas." His only defeat came at Stralsund, in 1628; Sweden sent enough soldiers to keep that port in Protestant hands.

Christian IV avoided losing any Danish territory by signing the treaty of Lübeck (1629) and dropping out of the war. Ferdinand was now master of most of Germany, and he used his new power to strengthen Catholicism: he issued a decree ordering the return of all Church-owned lands confiscated by Protestants since the Treaty of Augsburg (the Edict of Restitution), and outlawed all Protestant denominations except Lutheranism. Wallenstein received a conquered state as his duchy, and he declared that his master should now govern Germany as a unitary state like France or Spain, with no more reliance on princely councils. All this alarmed the German princes; they had opposed Charles V when he tried to become a strong emperor, and even Catholic states like Bavaria didn't want Ferdinand to succeed where Charles had failed. Concerned about losing their "liberties," the Catholic electors met with Ferdinand at Regensburg in 1630, where they warned him that if he didn't want to run the risk of having the Hapsburgs lose the imperial crown, he would have to fire Wallenstein. Ferdinand reluctantly complied, and Wallenstein, to everyone's relief, accepted his dismissal quietly. A believer in astrology, Wallenstein said that he had seen a horoscope which predicted that evil men would get between him and his master, but they would not cause the end of his career.

The Swedish Phase

War was the hobby of Gustavus Adolphus, the "Lion of the North," and because he was good at it, he rushed from one campaign to the next, using the spoils of his victories to keep the Swedish treasury full. Early in his reign he enlarged the army with conscription, rather than relying on an all-volunteer force, and brought it up to date by adding two tactical innovations: a mobile field artillery and flintlock muskets. Most armies of the day used bombards, huge cannon that consumed gunpowder, metal and gunners (when they blew up) at a frightful rate, took up to half an hour to reload, and were difficult to aim at anything smaller than a fortress. By contrast Gustavus used only light cannon, mounted on carriages with trunnions; he realized that several small, well-placed shots could get better results than one big shot. The flintlocks were a vast improvement over the match-lit guns most soldiers used at this point, allowing the musketeer to reload faster and aim without worrying about the blast singeing his eyebrows. In fact, speed was the most important element in Gustavus' strategy.

He soon got a chance to test the new tactics and equipment. In 1617 the war between Sweden and Poland resumed, and this time the advantages were with the Swedes. Gustavus personally led the 16,000-man force that besieged and took Riga; by the end of 1621 all of Livonia and Kurland had been conquered. In 1626 he opened a new front with an amphibious assault on Prussia, which had come under Polish rule after the dissolution of the Teutonic Knights. He cleared the Poles out of Prussia with the help of reinforcements in the following year, and the war became a stalemate between the Swedish and Polish cavalry, on the Polish frontier. They agreed to a new truce in 1629; Sweden returned Prussia but gained all of modern Latvia. The Swedes also got the right to use the Prussian ports, except for Danzig, Konigsberg, and Puck (on the Vistula); the tolls collected from those ports greatly increased the Swedish government's income. Gustavus Adolphus was now the unquestioned master of the Baltic.

While fighting the Poles, Gustavus watched the situation in Germany, and grew increasingly alarmed. In 1627 he compared the Catholic advance to a rising tide: "As one wave follows another in the sea, so the Papal deluge is approaching our shores." After the treaty of Lübeck was signed, he predicted that the next war would be between the Germans and the Swedes, and did everything he could to make that happen. He cooperated with the envoys Richelieu sent to negotiate an end to the war with Poland; then he landed at Peenemünde with 4,000 men on June 6, 1630. He spent the rest of the year conquering Pomerania and recruiting Germans into his force, before he felt strong enough to strike into Germany's interior.

The discipline of the Swedish army was remarkable. Gustavus forbade his troops to attack churches, hospitals or schools, and they obeyed him. The only time they looted, raped or killed was on his command, not when they felt like it. They were loyal because of the king's personal qualities. His kingdom was the best administered in Europe, and he followed his men into every battle, sharing their hardships and infecting them with his self-confidence. One observer commented that "He thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him."

German Protestants, who now viewed Gustavus as their protector, welcomed him, but the princes felt otherwise. The emperor expected Gustavus to be no tougher than his other northern opponents, remarking that: "Another of these snow kings has come against us. He, too, will melt in our southern sun." The rulers of the two largest Protestant states in Germany, John George I of Saxony and George William of Brandenburg, weren't thrilled either. George William was particularly mad at the Swedes; he couldn't defend Prussia because of the war at home, and consequently saw Poland and Sweden fight over land and money that really belonged to him.⁽²⁾ John George didn't want anything to do with an anti-Catholic crusade, despite being from the state that was the birthplace of the Reformation; he had gained Lusatia by serving the emperor. In early 1631 John George and George William presided over a conference of Protestant princes at Leipzig, and they raised an army of their own, led by Hans George von Arnim, a former officer of Wallenstein who had resigned in disgust after the Edict of Restitution.

The anti-imperial campaign was delayed for several months because it wasn't clear that the French, the Swedes and the German Protestants would be able to work together. Richelieu got the Swedes to cooperate by having Gustavus sign the treaty of Barwalde in January 1631; in return for full Swedish cooperation with French foreign policy for the next four years, France would pay 1 million French livres (about $9.4 million in today's money) a year. Then Gustavus bullied Brandenburg into joining him by marching on Berlin. As for the Saxons, Tilly made up their mind for them. In May Tilly besieged and captured Magdeburg, an important city near Saxony which Wallenstein had avoided when he marched through the area; 20,000 civilians were killed in the fires which destroyed the city. Tilly followed this up with an invasion of Saxony itself, arguing that the elector of Saxony had shown his disloyalty to the emperor, by not enforcing the Edict of Restitution in his territory, and by allowing the formation of a rebel army. Leipzig fell in September, leaving John George no choice but to join Gustavus. On September 17, Tilly's troops met the Swedes and Saxons at Breitenfeld, a suburb of Leipzig. The Saxons fled at the first charge, exposing Gustavus' left flank and nearly costing him the battle, but he regrouped his forces and demolished the imperial army with a counterattack of his own. Breitenfeld was the most brilliant Protestant victory of the war; with one stroke, Sweden had become the dominant nation of northern Europe.

Gustavus Adolphus at Breitenfeld.

After Breitenfeld the two partners separated; the Saxons invaded Bohemia and captured Prague, while Gustavus marched to the Rhineland, occupying the Lower Palatinate and the bishoprics of Mainz, Bamberg and Wurzburg. Gustavus now treated Germany as if it were part of Sweden, making Mainz his second capital and appointing his prime minister, Count Axel Oxenstierna, governor-general over all conquered German territory. Even Richelieu grew concerned about Sweden's growing power, and offered French protection to any prince who asked for it, but only the Archbishop of Trier took him up on the offer.

Gustavus spent the winter building up his forces. By the spring of 1632, he commanded seven armies totaling 80,000 men, and when he talked about recruiting 120,000 more, many felt he could do it. When Gustavus broke from winter camp, Tilly had to fall back to Bavaria; Gustavus pursued, and Tilly was mortally wounded by a cannonball, at the battle of the Lech River. As the Swedes plundered Bavaria, Ferdinand knew that Austria would be next, and that only Wallenstein could save him. Wallenstein, who had been living like a king on his Bohemian estates since we last heard from him, rejected several pleas from the desperate emperor, until he got incredible terms: He would be the second most powerful man in the Empire, and wholly independent of his former master, making war or peace without any interference from the Hapsburg family; he even received some Austrian provinces to hold as a guarantee of the emperor's good faith.

Wallenstein reconquered Bohemia in May and June, and then cautiously entered Bavaria to challenge the Swedes. In September Gustavus attacked Wallenstein's force, which had placed itself in a very strong position near Nuremberg--and suffered his first defeat. Wallenstein chased Gustavus through Franconia and Swabia for the next six weeks; Gustavus tried to draw him into a formal battle without success. Then the campaign season ended, and Wallenstein marched to Saxony so he could spend the winter on enemy territory. Gustavus followed, and on November 16th, 1632, he reached Wallenstein's campsite at Lützen, and launched an immediate attack. Timing wasn't on his side; Wallenstein wasn't surprised, and the emperor's most daring cavalry general, Gottfried Heinrich Pappenheim, was less than a day's march away with his own force. Pappenheim arrived in time to take part in the battle, and soon was killed; a heavy fog on that autumn day added to the confusion, causing the three armies to march around each other in a full circle before they realized it. Galloping in front of his army, Gustavus was knocked off his horse by a shot (it may have been a case of "friendly fire," as it came from his German allies), and then was surrounded and finished off by a band of enemy cavalry. The Swedes stayed together and charged to avenge their leader; at the end of the day the Wallensteiners fled to Bohemia.

Though the Swedes had won Lützen, the death of their king was a critical loss, and neither the Swedes or the Germans could find a charismatic leader to take his place. Gustavus was succeeded by a six-year-old daughter, Christina, and since she obviously could not lead armies, Duke Bernard of Weimar and Sweden's Count Horn took charge of the troops, while control of the government went to Prime Minister Oxenstierna⁽³⁾. However, the advantage of speed and offensive power remained in the Swedish camp. The Catholic coalition had its own leadership problem--Wallenstein was no longer trustworthy. He didn't do much campaigning in 1633, preferring to negotiate with the Saxons and Swedes instead, going so far as to exchange captured Swedish generals for some fortresses in Silesia. In addition, he was ill with gout and depression, and this may have prompted him at a banquet to make his leading officers sign an oath promising to stand by him in whatever he did. Finally, there were rumors that he was about to make himself king of Bohemia, and/or begin negotiations with the French. All this looked like treason to Ferdinand, and in February 1634 he had Wallenstein murdered through a conspiracy among his officers. Then Ferdinand appointed his son, Ferdinand III, as the new commander of the Catholic forces.

The Protestants had an easier time of it in 1633; in Bavaria they captured Regensburg, which had escaped Gustavus a year earlier. However, the younger Ferdinand got along well with his Spanish relatives, and together they worked out a plan: Spain had just raised a new army in Italy to use against the Dutch, and it would assist Ferdinand on its way through Germany. In September 1634 the Spanish and Austrian armies met at the Bavarian town of Nördlingen, and the Protestant army, despite being outnumbered nearly 2 to 1, attacked, in an effort to split the Catholic force into small, easily eliminated units. Instead, it was a disaster; the Spaniards stood their ground through repeated assaults until the attackers were worn out. Then the Catholics took the offensive; Count Horn was captured, and the elite force of Gustavus was annihilated.⁽⁴⁾

The French Phase and the Treaty of Westphalia

Unfortunately, you can only have peace if all parties agree to it, and Richelieu didn't want anything to do with the deal the Germans had worked out. As early as 1632 he had begun moving French troops into Alsace and Lorraine; if he let the war end now, it would leave the Hapsburgs in control of most of Germany, with Ferdinand II as the first real German emperor in 400 years. The only allies remaining on his side were the Swedes and Bernard of Weimar (who commanded a German Protestant army in Alsace); if he was going to keep his enemies from winning, he would have to enter the war himself. By doing so, he transformed the war from a religious dispute into a struggle for supremacy between the Bourbon and Hapsburg royal houses. Within days of the Peace of Prague (May 1635), France declared war.

No matter what it cost, Ferdinand should have made a deal with the French and Swedes. However, he didn't see it this way; he was at the peak of his career, and Nördlingen made him think that he could beat anybody who tried to disrupt his settlement. The French soldiers were inexperienced, so once the decision had been made to fight, the Hapsburgs did better; a Spanish army captured Trier and its pro-French archbishop, and successfully defended Belgium from both the French and the Dutch. The Hapsburgs also enjoyed nationalistic support from those Germans who didn't want to see any part of the Empire fall under French rule. But then things started to go wrong. A three-pronged attack on France from Belgium, Germany and Spain was thrown back before it got to Paris, and the supposedly demoralized Swedes beat a combination of Saxons and Imperials at Wittstock in Brandenburg (both events occurred in 1636). A subsequent defeat at Torgau forced the Swedes back into Pomerania, but in 1638 they broke out again and in 1639 raided Bohemia as far as the suburbs of Prague. On the western front, the French-led coalition took the offensive; in December 1638, Bernard conquered Briesach on the east bank of the Rhine. For the new emperor, Ferdinand III (Ferdinand II had died in 1637), all the news must have looked bad.

Next, an unexpected string of calamities knocked Spain flat. In October 1639 a second Spanish armada, numbering 67 ships and 20,000 soldiers, set sail for the Netherlands; the Dutch fleet, led by Admiral Maarten Tromp, destroyed it in the Strait of Dover (the battle of the Downs). Three months later, the Dutch beat a combined Spanish and Portuguese fleet in the battle of Pernambuco, near the Brazilian port of Recife. Spain itself collapsed in 1640, when Catalonia and Portugal revolted. The Spanish government tried to get the Catalonians to supply taxes and conscripts at the same rate as Castile, and Catalonia--medieval Aragon--invited the French to take over the province (Barcelona had been part of Charlemagne's Spanish March); the Catalonians and French fought side-by-side when they defeated a Castilian army outside Barcelona in January 1641. The Portuguese had a different grievance; their empire had suffered from neglect and Dutch naval attacks since the union with Spain in 1580, and they expected to lose everything if they did not regain independence. King Philip IV fired the minister responsible for the tax reform, Gaspar de Guzmán, conde de Olivares, but he was unable to put down the rebellions. Nor could he use the Spanish armies in Belgium and Italy; they were needed to stop French incursions, and Richelieu would see the removal of either as a signal to conquer the territories they defended.

The army in Belgium was now under attack from two directions, but it could still help by creating a diversion big enough to draw French troops from Catalonia. That is what the local Spanish commander had in mind when he attacked Rocroi, a fort on the Franco-Belgian frontier. His French counterpart, twenty-two-year-old Louis II, Prince of Condé and Duke of Enghien, came to the rescue with 22,000 men. The Spanish force was slightly larger, at 25,000, and when they met on May 19, 1643, they drew themselves into similar formations, each putting its infantry in the center and the cavalry on the sides. The next moves were also identical, with the right cavalry wing of each side advancing. Personally leading the cavalry on the French right, Condé scattered the Spanish left, then went behind the Spanish infantry to hit the Spanish right cavalry in the rear, just in time to save the French left. Once the Spanish cavalry had fled, the entire French army surrounded the Spanish infantry. However, these foot soldiers were not mercenaries or conscripts, but the Tercios, Spain's finest force for more than a century; it took four combined assaults by cannon, cavalry and infantry to finish them off. Rocroi was more than just a tactical defeat for Spain; France had replaced Spain as the strongest nation in western Europe.

Meanwhile, the Austrian Hapsburgs were doing no better against the Swedes. The Austrians and Swedes met for a rematch at Breitenfeld in November 1642, with the same results as the first battle--a total Swedish victory. 1643 saw Denmark's Christian IV, who was envious of Sweden's success, re-enter the war, this time on the Hapsburg side. The Swedish general, Lennart Torstensson, had to call off a march on Vienna so he could beat up the Danes, but otherwise everything went in his favor. He quickly occupied Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland; by 1645 Christian was forced to sign a treaty that ceded the provinces of Jamtland and Halland to Sweden, along with the Baltic Islands of Gotland and Oesel. Back in Germany, the Swedes managed to win two more battles against imperial forces, at Jüterbogk and Magdeburg (both in 1644).

As early as 1640, at a session of the electors at Nuremberg, the opinion was expressed, that part of Pomerania should be given to the Swedes if this would satisfy them. Instead Ferdinand continued the war, so German princes began to grumble that they might have to make peace without him, since he was paying more attention to the needs of his Spanish cousins than to them. In 1641 the elector of Brandenburg signed a neutrality agreement with the Swedes, and the other princes followed suit, before Swedish soldiers could plunder their lands. It was Rocroi that convinced the emperor that he could not win. When he got the bad news, he immediately called for a peace conference (the first international peace conference in history), with no preconditions. Because Richelieu had died in 1642, the French no longer tried to keep the Germans from coming to some form of agreement.

The conference lasted four years (1644-48) and was held simultaneously in two cities of Westphalia, Münster and Osnabrück. The first six months were spent haggling over matters of protocol and etiquette. The question of whether the representative of the king of France should enter a room before the representative of the king of Spain might not seem like a question worth answering in the middle of a war that was killing thousands, but in a time when memories of chivalry and feudalism were still strong, it was. The 135 participating ambassadors and diplomats had not practiced this form of international politics before, and ground rules had to be established before any sort of settlement was possible. That was why the conference took so long and why it had to be held in two places; because the Swedes refused to concede superiority to the French, they ended up negotiating with the Hapsburgs separately, France in Münster, Sweden in Osnabrück. Altogether it is amazing that the conference succeeded.

While negotiations took place, the war went on; every battle changed the bargaining positions of the various parties. The French suffered a bad defeat at Tuttlingen, Germany, in November 1643, but the rest of the time it was the imperial position that eroded; the Hapsburgs lost every other battle that mattered. By the end of 1643, Condé had begun to occupy Belgium, taking the provinces of Hainault and Luxembourg. The Dutch seized the mouth of the Scheldt River in 1644, while France captured most of Flanders in 1645 and Dunkirk in 1646. The combined armies of Condé and another young general, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne, defeated the Bavarians at Freiburg in 1644, and they avenged the defeat of Nördlingen by mauling an Austro-Bavarian force on the same spot (August 3, 1645). Condé also won the last major battle of the war, at Lens, France. Two months after that, the conflicting claims of the various belligerents were reconciled and the treaty of Westphalia was signed (October 24, 1648).

The final score was that France and Sweden won and the German people as a whole (though not all the princes) lost. France got ten cities in Alsace, Breisach and Philippsburg on the opposite bank of the Rhine, and official recognition of the annexation of three Lorraine towns in the previous century (Verdun, Toul and Metz). This put all remaining German territory west of the Rhine in the French sphere of influence. Sweden got Hither (western) Pomerania, the port of Wismar, the bishoprics of Bremen and Verden, and a whopping cash sum worth $94 million in today's dollars.⁽⁵⁾ The other arrangements ensured that the Holy Roman Empire would remain a confederation from a bygone era; before long the philosopher Voltaire would remark that it wasn't holy, Roman, nor an empire! The borders of the Empire shrank so that the Netherlands, Switzerland and north Italy were no longer within it. Brandenburg got the rest of Pomerania, the bishoprics of Halberstadt, Kammin and Minden, and the right to appoint the archbishop of Magdeburg. Saxony kept Lusatia, and Bavaria kept the Upper Palatinate and its electoral vote. The Lower Palatinate was restored to Charles Louis, the son of Frederick, and he became the Empire's eighth elector, to make up for the vote that had been transferred to Bavaria. The Hapsburgs kept Bohemia, and Upper Austria, which had been occupied by Bavaria while the French and Swedes were threatening Vienna, was returned to them. Thus, from Ferdinand's point of view, things could have been a lot worse, because the only territories he lost, Lusatia and Alsace, had already been signed away by his father. Spain recognized Dutch independence once and for all, so the treaty of Westphalia also brought an end to the Eighty Years War between Spain and the Netherlands. Finally, religious toleration of Calvinists, Lutherans and Catholics was promised by everyone.

England's Political Experiment

Some have said that James I steered the ship of state straight toward the rocks, but left his son Charles I to wreck it. Like his father, he believed in absolutism, and in addition was pro-Catholic in his sympathies, petty and weak willed, and totally incompetent where foreign policy was concerned (somehow he managed to get England involved in a war with France before it could get out of its hopeless war with Spain). These wars left the royal purse empty, forcing him to turn to Parliament for more money. Parliament was now largely Puritan, and in return for financing the crown, it called for the elimination of "papist" practices from the Church of England. The first three times this happened, Charles dismissed Parliament and arrested the leaders. The fourth time he asked it for money, the religious question came up again, and he tried to dismiss it, but this time the opposition physically held the Speaker of Parliament (who favored the crown) in his chair while it passed three resolutions. The first declared that anyone who tampered with England's established Protestantism was an enemy of the state; the second declared that anyone who imposed taxes without Parliament's consent was also an enemy of the state; the third said that anyone who paid illegally imposed taxes was a traitor to England. Once it finished this resounding act of defiance, Parliament voted to adjourn.

For Charles this was too much, and he decided that if he could not get along with Parliament, he would get along without it. For the next eleven years (1629-40) he ruled on his own, not allowing Parliament to convene. The only thing that kept him from being an absolute monarch was the lack of money. With no Parliament to approve new taxes, the king became very clever at finding other ways to make money. He fined citizens eligible for knighthood who did not become knights, pawned the royal jewels, sold trading monopolies in various fields of commerce, and made the entire country (not just the ports) pay the "ship money" tax, which supported the Royal Navy.

Charles might have gotten away with this indefinitely had he not insisted on imposing his religious views on everyone. In 1637 he and the Archbishop of Canterbury decided to make everyone in Scotland join the Church of England. The Presbyterian Scots swore to resist to the death. Charles decided to raise an army against Scotland, but this would cost more than a million pounds, a sum of money that could only come from Parliament. He allowed Parliament to convene for this purpose in 1640, but it insisted on talking about eleven years of grievances, so three weeks later the king dismissed this; this was called the Short Parliament. A few months later a Scottish army invaded the northern counties of England, so Charles, now desperate, allowed Parliament to meet again. This was the beginning of the Long Parliament, which held a nearly continuous series of sessions for the next thirteen years.

The Long Parliament permanently destroyed the power of the king. It took away his right to dissolve Parliament, passed an act requiring the king to call a session of Parliament at least once every three years, and declared all taxation without its consent invalid. The king accepted these measures, but balked when the religious question came up again; Parliament also wanted to do away with the Church of England's bishops and the Book of Common Prayer.

By 1642 relations between the king and Parliament were so bad that the king, fearing for his safety, moved the royal court from London to York. Parliament voted to raise an army, and Charles called upon his loyal followers to join him. That marked the beginning of the English Civil War. The king's followers, mostly aristocrats, were called Cavaliers because of their fancy hairstyles and clothing, and a dashing, "devil-may-care" attitude; they believed in a strong monarchy and the Church of England. Parliament's champions were called "Roundheads" because they had short hair and simple helmets; they wanted to limit or destroy the monarchy, and favored either a Presbyterian-style church running the whole country, or independent Puritan congregations.

The first two years of the war saw both sides evenly matched, with neither gaining a clear advantage over the other. By the end of 1643 the king's forces controlled three quarters of the country, but Parliament offset this in early 1644 with a treaty that brought Scottish arms to its side. The balance changed when a Puritan member of Parliament, a country gentleman named Oliver Cromwell, turned out to be a military genius. He organized and trained an army in his native East Anglia so effectively that it got the nickname "Ironsides," because as Cromwell said, it could not be "broken or divided." When this unit won a major victory (the battle of Marston Moor, July 1644), Cromwell was promoted to command all Parliamentary forces, so he could convert them into "Ironsides," too. He succeeded, and one year later the Roundheads were unstoppable.

The secret behind Cromwell's success was a remarkable combination of humility, arrogance, tolerance and firmness. He always believed he was doing the Lord's will, and that God knew it. At another battle he won, the battle of Naseby (June 1645), he showed the same kind of faith expressed by the heroes of the Old Testament. Afterwards he wrote, "I can say this of Naseby: that when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order toward us, and we a company of poor, ignorant men . . . I could not . . . but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would, by things that are naught, bring to naught things that are. Of which I had great assurance. And God did it." His sense of divine mission forged an army that fought for a cause, rather than pay or spoils, but he never expressed to the common soldiers his own tolerance for other men's beliefs, so his army also became an army of fanatics; this would be Cromwell's great tragedy.

Oliver Cromwell.

After Naseby, King Charles surrendered, but he surrendered to the Scots, thinking that he would be treated better in the country of his ancestors. Then the Puritans started arguing; moderates in Parliament wanted a (limited) king and a national Presbyterian Church, while radicals in Cromwell's army wouldn't stand for either. Seeing his enemy divided, Charles made a deal with the Scots, promising to make England join the Scottish Presbyterian Church if they would take up his cause, but Cromwell crushed the Scottish army at the battle of Preston in August 1648. This second war only served to destroy the compromise which many still believed was possible. Now Cromwell started the country on a course which could not be halted until it had reached its conclusion. When the victorious soldiers returned to London they expelled 140 Presbyterian members from Parliament, leaving only a "Rump Parliament" of 60 Puritans. Then they put Charles on trial for his life, knowing that if the king had won he would have shown no mercy toward them. They beheaded him on January 30, 1649, and he went to his execution with a dignity rarely seen in his 24 years on the throne. All was not lost for the Stuarts, though; Charles left a faithful Ireland to his son, and Scotland inclined the same way.

At Charles' trial, Cromwell declared, "We will cut off the king's head with the crown on it," so for the next eleven years England had no king. Instead it was a Puritan "commonwealth," run by a military junta in which Cromwell was the dominant figure. The force that ultimately made this government fail was the intolerance of those who ran it. Determined to destroy all ungodliness, they established what they called a "rule of the saints," based on the Biblical laws of Moses. These men had no patience with checks & balances or secular laws, and put in their place a tyranny of the saints.

Cromwell did everything he could to control them. In 1653 he persuaded Parliament to adopt a constitution, called the Instrument of Government. It declared Cromwell to be the state's Lord Protector, and under him was an executive body called the Council of State. It also guaranteed religious freedom to all Christians except Anglicans and Catholics. The Puritan-run Parliament, however, refused to abide by its terms, and Cromwell had to rule as a dictator, using military force to get things done.

Oliver Cromwell died on a stormy day in 1658. His son Richard took over, and he couldn't get along with either the army or Parliament; after eight months he resigned. Nowadays, if history books mention Richard Cromwell at all, they call him by the nicknames given to him by his enemies: "Tumbledown Dick" or "Queen Dick." By this time England was tired of revolution and Puritanism, and when Charles II, the son of the executed king, promised to rule as a limited monarch, he was invited to return from exile in France.

The twenty-five-year reign of Charles II (1660-85) was the most successful of the Stuart dynasty. Under him the whole tone of English life changed. The young king brought to England the extravagant art and lifestyle of the French court (we are now up to the time of Louis XIV). The drab, serious clothes of the Puritan era gave way to elegant fashions and enormous wigs, and Charles imitated Louis by keeping a series of mistresses.⁽⁷⁾ He went too far with this, though; Charles actually refused to share the bed of his wife the queen, so he had no official heir to the throne. In a deal worked out with Parliament, Charles arranged to have his Catholic and not-too-bright brother, James, the Duke of York, become his successor.

Even the physical appearance of London changed; after two thirds of it was destroyed in the great fire of 1666, it was rebuilt fancier than before, with 52 churches, including St. Paul's Cathedral. The theaters, once banned as sinful and godless places, reopened. Occasionally there was a voice from the Puritan past (John Bunyan and John Milton wrote their great Christian novels, Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost, during this time), but it was seldom heard in the constant party at the court of Charles II.

Charles II, like the previous kings and queens, believed in a moderate Church of England with himself in charge of it, but he also had the diplomatic and political skills the other Stuarts lacked. He succeeded where his father and grandfather had failed in doing two things: living with Parliament and living without it. He accomplished the first by making sure a bunch of men who agreed with him were always in Parliament, and organized them into the first modern political party--the Tories. Getting along without Parliament was more difficult, since it meant getting along without Parliament's money (Charles had a reputation for spending more than he should), but he figured out a way to do this, too. Louis XIV of France wanted to see Parliament as inactive as possible, since an active Parliament full of Protestants was likely to start a war with France. In 1670 Louis and Charles signed a secret treaty which gave the English king an annual subsidy of Ł100,000 in return for a promise from Charles to never call Parliament to session except when required to by law. Charles also promised English non-interference in French foreign policy (Parliament wouldn't let him keep this), and to turn Catholic, which he finally did on his deathbed.

Long before Charles II died, rumors of his treaty with the French leaked out, and enough people were afraid of the prospect of an absolute, Catholic monarch to form England's second political party, the Whigs. The Whig platform promised both limited government and toleration of all Christians except Catholics, who were considered foreign agents. They saw their worst fears realized when the next king, James II, announced that he would make England a Catholic country and run the government without Parliament's interference. At first the Tories thought they could live with the monarchy, because James was old and didn't have a male heir, but on June 10, 1688, James became father to a son. The unthinkable had happened--England had a hereditary Catholic ruler! Protestant England united against this threat, and invited William of Orange, the current Dutch leader and husband of James' Protestant daughter Mary, to become the next king of England. William accepted, and when he arrived, the king's army and government deserted him, forcing James to flee to France. Englishmen called this event the Glorious Revolution, because they won it without firing a shot. Thus, Protestantism was saved in both England and America.

However, the revolution wasn't so "glorious" in Ireland. Because they were mostly Catholic, the Irish had always preferred the Stuarts, so in 1689 James II sailed to Ireland, bringing with him French money and soldiers. After going to Dublin, where he was hailed as king by an Irish parliament, James marched on the Protestant stronghold of Londonderry in the north, which had sworn allegiance to William and Mary. The city was besieged for fifteen weeks, but the invaders were not equipped to take it; for much of the time they only had one working cannon! Then in 1690 William led a relieving force to Ireland, and won a battle at the River Boyne, causing James to return to France. The rest of 1690 and 1691 were spent in a mopping up operation, before William of Orange could declare that the Irish portion of his kingdom had been pacified. Because of King William's success, Irish Protestants adopted the color orange as their symbol, and have called themselves "Orangemen" ever since.

Sweden at its Peak

Rather than simply accept her Lutheran faith, Christina constantly questioned it, and eventually converted to Catholicism. This was against Swedish law, so she had to abdicate in 1654. She was succeeded by a cousin, Charles X. Christina doesn't seem to have missed the crown much; she spent the rest of her life in Italy as a swashbuckling adventurer, in the manner of the Three Musketeers and Cyrano de Bergerac.

Eastern Europe had been quiet for most of the Thirty Years War. That ended in 1648, when the Cossacks of the Dnieper River declared their independence from Poland. The Poles won the first battles, until the Cossack leader, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, transferred his allegiance to Russia. The Russian Tsar Alexis invaded with more than 100,000 men, overwhelmed the smaller Polish armies, and occupied much of Lithuania; in 1655 Alexis proclaimed himself the grand duke of Lithuania, reviving a title that nobody had held for nearly a century. The same year saw Sweden declare war on Poland, for Charles X was tired of hearing the Polish king, John II Casimir, tell everyone that he was the rightful heir to the Swedish throne. Two Swedish armies quickly overran Poland; one army took Warsaw and Cracow, while the other occupied the rest of Lithuania. In response, Alexis attacked Sweden in 1656, but failed to make any headway.

Next came one of those frequent political rearrangements that characterized Europe in this era. Frederick William, the elector of Brandenburg, signed an alliance with Sweden in January 1656, but broke it in the fall of 1657, when the Polish king promised to let him have East Prussia with no strings attached and Denmark, encouraged by Austria and Holland, entered the war on Poland's side. Pulling out of Poland, Charles took the fight to Denmark; the winter of 1657-58 froze the sea around Denmark, allowing Charles to invade the island of Fyn after he occupied Jutland. Because Copenhagen was now unprotected and threatened, the Danes sued for peace. The Treaty of Roskilde gave the Swedes all Danish provinces in modern Sweden, the island of Bornholm, and central Norway (the area around Trondheim).

Charles wanted more than this, but the Danes were unwilling to give it, so he renewed the war six months later, in August 1658. What he didn't realize was that Sweden had now reached its limits. Fifty years of aggressive behavior had made enemies of almost everybody, and now those enemies were united against further Swedish expansion. Charles didn't have to worry about most of them (the Danes and Poles needed to recover from the devastations they had suffered, the Austrians were too far away, and the Russians were still in the Middle Ages), but the Netherlands and Brandenburg could be dangerous. Sure enough, the Dutch fleet transported an army of Danes and Brandenburgers to Copenhagen, allowing the Danish capital to successfully defend itself. Nothing else went right for the Swedes after that; the Poles drove them out of Schleswig-Holstein, a Danish-Norwegian army recovered Trondheim, and at the battle of Nyborg (November 1659), the Danes captured Sweden's best troops. Then Charles died suddenly, while trying to raise the funds for a new campaign. His son Charles XI was only four years old, so a regency government took charge and immediately made peace. The 1660 Treaty of Oliva settled most of the sources of conflict in the Baltic: the Polish and Swedish kings gave up their claims to each other's land and throne, while Swedish rule over Livonia and Brandenburg's rule over East Prussia were officially confirmed. The Swedes had to return Bornholm and Trondheim, but French diplomats at the conference made sure their old ally didn't lose anything else.

Sweden calmed down until Charles XI came of age, but Poland and Russia continued to fight for a few more years. The Poles drove the Russians out of Lithuania and Ukraine in a series of battles, until a revolt from a local noble (Lubomirski's Rebellion) disrupted the Polish government. The result was that in 1667 Russia was able to impose a favorable peace treaty that gave the Russians nearly everything east of the Dnieper River, and the cities of Smolensk and Kiev west of it. Kiev was supposed to go back to Poland after a "temporary occupation" of two years, but the Russians amended the treaty, giving back a strip of border territory instead of their ancient capital, so Kiev has been under Russian rule for most of the time since.

The Sun King

Normally that would have made for a happy ending, but now Louis II, Prince de Condé, the hero of Rocroi and Lens, switched sides because he had led the royalist forces in 1649 and not received a sufficient reward for his service. The government arrested him, but then released him after a series of provinical uprisings, and he escaped to Spain. A second Fronde, that of the princes, formed to back Condé, and in 1652 he led a mercenary army to occupy Paris, with Turenne, the other French hero of the Thirty Years War, opposing him. However, that was the high-water mark of the rebellion. The aristocrats, as always, didn't want to promote anybody's interests but their own, and the Parisian bourgeoisie ("city-dwellers") soon decided that royal autocracy was better than feudal anarchy. Before 1652 was over, Condé fled to Belgium, and the crown returned to Paris, followed the king's ministers a year later.

Once the War of the Fronde was over, France was able to take care of business with Spain; the key battle took place in 1658, when Turenne captured Dunkirk. Still, the French required some help from the English navy to win, and when the treaty ending the war was signed in 1659, Spain got off easier than expected; she lost Artois in the north and Roussillon in the south, but got to keep the rest of Belgium and Burgundy, and Catalonia was returned. Thus the Franco-Spanish frontier returned to its natural geographic line, the Pyrenees mts.⁽⁹⁾

Meanwhile, England was trying to find a middle ground between anarchy and absolutism, and it was not yet clear that it would succeed. A perceptive Englishman named James Harrington warned his countrymen that taking too long to find a solution could spell trouble, if a nation on the Continent worked it out first:

"Look you to it, where there is tumbling and tossing upon the bed of sickness, it must end in death, or recovery . . . If France, Italy and Spain were not all sick, all corrupted together, there would bee none of them so, for the sick would not be able to withstand the sound, nor the sound to preserve their health without curing the sick. The first of these nations (which . . . will in my minde bee France) that recovers the health of ancient Prudence, shall assuredly govern the world . . . I do not speak at randome."

Harrington was remarkably accurate; recovery for the French began in 1661, when Cardinal Mazarin died and Louis XIV began to rule on his own.⁽¹⁰⁾ The recently concluded troubles put both Louis and his subjects in the mood for absolute monarchy. His efficient finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, conducted a drastic overhaul of the government, commerce and industry to make them more productive, and Louis used the new revenue for the glorification of himself, his court and his country--in that particular order.⁽¹¹⁾ To start with, he packed the government with yes-men. In the past, major posts had been staffed by nobles who came to see these jobs as theirs by hereditary right, whether or not they were loyal to the king. Now when they had their first meeting with the king (on March 9, 1661), the record declared that the king "assembled all those whom he customarily called--and dismissed them most civilly with the statement that, when he had need of their good advice, he would call them." After that he hardly called them at all; in their place he appointed advisors from middle-class backgrounds, who had no power except that which the king gave them. These were loyal because they knew that the privileges the king gave to them could just as easily be taken away.

The activities of the central government also increased dramatically. Previously many of the duties of government--like administering justice, maintaining order and collecting taxes--were not handled by the king, but by local nobles, guilds, or minor law courts. In fact, as recently as under Henry IV, the central bureaucracy was so small that it often went with the king on his travels. Now Louis increased the number of public servants at his court from 600 to 10,000. In addition a new class of royal agents, called intendants, traveled all over France, gathering information for the king and making sure his decrees were enforced. These eyes, ears and hands of the king brought a new kind of order to France.

To get away from Parisians who expressed their political opinions too loudly, the court moved to Versailles, a small castle twelve miles west of Paris which Louis XIII had built as a retreat. A vast new building program commenced and went on for the rest of the king's long reign, eventually involving as many as 30,000 laborers at a time. The palace they produced was the grandest in Europe; just providing water for the garden's 1,400 fountains was the engineering marvel of the century.⁽¹²⁾ The industries involved in the creation of luxuries (sculpture, ceramics, painting, elegant printing, furniture manufacturing, fine cooking and wines, wood, metal and leather work) flourished. All this went to serve a strange race of "gentlemen" who wore powdered wigs, outfits made of silk and lace, high red heels and amazing canes; the women had costumes that were even less practical, with their towering hairdos and elaborate dresses made of silk and satin on a wire framework.

Here the "Sun King" moved like the star in a never-ending glorious play. Even the rising and setting of the sun was surrounded by rigid etiquette; to witness the king getting up or going to bed was viewed as a great privilege, and someone's career could be made or broken by the king's personal whim at such a time. Late in his reign all this publicity and ritual got to be too much for even the king, so he built a little palace in the gardens of the big one, the Trianon--a hideaway from the grandeur that he had created. Humorist Will Cuppy once wrote that if you find the social life of today rather demanding, at least you don't have to leave home at 7:30 AM to help Louis XIV put on his pants.

The pomp of Versailles was not simply egotism carried to extremes; it was the king's policy for keeping peace at home. His reign had begun with turbulence, and that stamped into his young impressionable mind a burning desire to make sure that nothing ever threatened the crown again. Thus he created a court that dazzled the nobility, forced them to stay around him (cut off from their estates and most of their income), and encouraged them to outdo one another in extravagance; the end result of all this was to impoverish them and make them dependent on the king's favor. And woe to the noble who was not present when the royal eye scanned the court; if the king casually remarked about such an absentee, "We have not seen him," it meant the end of a courtier's career and social life. In all this Louis succeeded. Where the king was, France was; where he was not, there could only be ruin and oblivion.

Actually life in Versailles left much to be desired, because the palace was designed for show rather than comfort. The courtiers and servants were crowded into tiny, dark, unventilated rooms, and they had to walk through miles of corridors to do a typical day's work; the kitchens were so far from the halls of state that the king's meals usually arrived on his table cold, though 498 servants were employed in preparing them. Plumbing and privies were inadequate and inconvenient; even the most fastidious resorted to urinating on the stairs. Personal cleanliness was abysmal, and since hardly anybody bathed in those days, men and women doused themselves with perfume.⁽¹³⁾ Boredom led many to indulge in every kind of vice, like intrigue, gambling and sexual promiscuity. Men of high rank plotted to get their daughters, nieces, and even their wives into the royal bed, for the king showered all kinds of gifts and prestige on the families of his mistresses. Those who had only sons sought similar favors from the king's homosexual brother, Philippe d'Orléans.

Versailles came with a heavy price tag. It was said that out of every ten francs raised in taxes by the French government, six went to Versailles. The French were making the same mistake that the Spaniards had made in the previous century: they spent most of their wealth, instead of investing it. And since two of the three "estates" of France--the nobility and the clergy--could pass laws making them exempt from most of the taxes, the commoners were stuck with the bill. The country at large was so impoverished that France did not recover during the reigns of Louis XV and XVI, and this helped to pave the way for the French Revolution. Even while Louis XIV was alive the need for belt-tightening became apparent. For example, many districts were left high and dry because there wasn't enough water to supply both Paris and the king's fountains, and because Paris was home to the king's bankers, who were no longer willing to lend him money without hesitation, the Sun King dropped the hint of a compromise to one of his ministers. After that, Louis XIV strolled in his gardens to view the fountains only at a regular hour; the engineers opened the jets just before the king came within view of them, and shut them off right after the royal presence passed. Louis knew better than to change his schedule, or to turn around for another glance.⁽¹⁴⁾

Louis also caused an unnecessary amount of trouble in religious affairs. Since Protestants by nature tend to question authority, he tried to mend relations with the Papacy, which had been hostile to France on account of the Thirty Years War. In 1685 he revoked the Edict of Nantes, and thousands of Huguenots fled the country to escape a new round of persecution, taking arts and industries with them. (e.g., the English silk industry was founded by French Protestants) Those who chose to stay were ordered to give their children a Catholic education or none at all. They gave it, no doubt with a sneer and an air of sarcasm that destroyed all faith in it. Consequently France became the first nation of non-practicing Catholics. The next generation produced that supreme mocker of Christianity, Voltaire (1694-1778), who lived in an age when all Frenchmen conformed to the Roman Church and hardly anyone believed in it.

Abroad, Louis faced a political situation that could hardly have been better. France was growing in wealth and strength; Spain was not; the Dutch were ready to discuss a partition of Belgium. However, this was not Louis' way--no one could share his glory--so in 1667 and 1668 he sent invading armies to capture all of Belgium for himself. The Dutch forced a truce with an ultimatum that had to be taken seriously because it was backed by England and Sweden. Louis soon broke up this "triple alliance" by buying out the Swedes and the English. Then he launched his army down the Rhine and raced for Amsterdam (1672). The French army looked overwhelming, but it had to withdraw when the Dutch flooded the country. Louis never campaigned in person again, and the only really lasting result of the invasion was that the Dutch entrusted their government to William III of Orange, a man who dedicated himself to thwarting Louis. Moreover, the English, whose Protestant bias in favor of the Dutch was usually balanced by trade rivalry, came to agree that stopping France was a matter of utmost importance. Louis could buy the English king but not the English people, and soon Parliament renewed good relations with the Dutch (1674). In the same year both Austria and Brandenburg sent troops to fight on the Dutch side. Louis retaliated by setting Sweden against Brandenburg and won more often than not on the battlefield in the Low Countries. At the truce of 1678-9 he got all of Spanish Burgundy, a French protectorate over Lorraine and a bridgehead across the Rhine. His diplomatic position was strong enough to make Brandenburg disgorge most of its Pomeranian conquests (the Swedish attack there had misfired badly).

Brandenburg's involvement showed how far it had come since the Thirty Years War. It had been a minor participant previously, and did not show much promise of ever becoming a major power. It was a small realm, divided into several pieces, with a sparse population and no important natural resources (its capital, Berlin, was built in a swamp). However, under Frederick William (1640-88), the "Great Elector," Brandenburg was transformed. He did it by building the state around a standing army, making this army the most important branch of government. By 1678 the army numbered 45,000 men, and the state had a splendid civil administration. To bring in revenue, he got involved in the wars of Louis XIV, selling his services to first Louis, then his opponents. Thus Brandenburg, soon to be renamed Prussia under Frederick William's son (Frederick III), rose to challenge Austria's supremacy over the Holy Roman Empire and became one of the most important states of Europe.

In 1689 Louis XIV attempted to renew the expansion of France; opposing him was a "Grand Alliance" that included just about every other major power in Europe. His generals did well enough in an inching struggle of siege and counter-siege on the Belgian frontier, but the coalition stood firm--its Anglo-Dutch backbone was unbreakable after William of Orange also became king of England (1688). In the end Louis could not sustain the struggle; at the treaty of Ryswick (1697, also spelled Rijswijk), Louis recognized William's right to the English throne, gave some trade concessions to the Dutch, and both sides surrendered most of their small territorial gains since 1679.⁽¹⁵⁾ Thus, Louis was back to where he had started from, when dynastic chance offered him an opportunity to make some really spectacular gains.

The War of the Spanish Succession

"Charles II of Spain, the most grotesque monarch of the 17th century, had been a travesty of a king. Generations of royal intermarriage had culminated in Charles a creature so defective in mind and body as to be scarcely even a man. He was born in 1661, the product of his father's old age, and his brief life consisted chiefly of a passage from prolonged infancy to premature senility. He was not weaned until he was five, could not walk until he was ten, and was considered to be too feeble for the rigors of education. In Charles, the famous Hapsburg chin reached such massive proportions that he was unable to chew, and his tongue was so large that he was barely able to speak. Lame, epileptic, bald at the age of 35, Charles suffered one further disability, politically more significant than all the rest: he was impotent."⁽¹⁶⁾

For 35 years the kings of Europe waited for Charles II to die, so they could give Spain to somebody else. Since both Louis XIV of France and Leopold I of Austria were first cousins of the Spanish king (Louis was from the family of Charles' mother, Leopold from the family of his father), they put forth claims to his crown. But Spain was such an awesome prize that nobody was going to let either king get the whole thing, so they tried to do it by proxy: Louis nominated his grandson, Philippe d'Anjou, while Leopold gave his claim to his son, the Archduke Charles. England's William III proposed a compromise, so in 1698 all parties agreed to make a Bavarian prince, Leopold's grandson Joseph Ferdinand, the next king of Spain.

The problem was that Joseph died in the following year, forcing the Hapsburg and Bourbon houses to come up with Plan B. This time France, England and the Netherlands sent representatives to draw up a second treaty, in which the result was a partition: France would receive the Spanish possessions in Italy, while Austria would get the rest of the Spanish Empire (Belgium, Spain itself and the overseas colonies). Louis showed amazing generosity when he agreed to these terms, and Leopold showed amazing greed when he rejected them.

No one paid much attention to the Spanish people, who were understandably livid at the thought of foreigners carving up their empire, so it came as a complete shock when Charles II made a deathbed will which left everything to the French candidate (1700), if he promised to never become the king of France. Even Louis did a double take when he heard the news. However, the complete inheritance was too big a catch to pass up, and though Louis knew it meant war, he accepted.⁽¹⁷⁾ French troops marched forth to occupy Belgium and (with the cooperation of Savoy) Milan.

At first Leopold was the only enemy Louis faced; England and Holland had accepted Philippe as king of Spain, and were likely to stay out of the conflict if nobody threatened their territory or trade. Instead, Louis acted as if he wanted to provoke those two naval powers. His army in Belgium took over a string of forts garrisoned, according to a previous treaty, by the Dutch; he said this was only temporary until a Spanish army could arrive, but everyone saw this as the first step in a French annexation of the Spanish Netherlands. Worse than that, Louis tried to claim for France the trading privileges England had enjoyed in the Spanish Empire previously, like the slave trade between Africa and Spanish America. In June 1701 Louis formed an alliance between France, Spain and Portugal that threatened to exclude England and Holland from the entire Mediterranean; this was more than those two seagoing nations could bear.

The Grand Alliance (England, Holland, Hanover, and Austria at first) quickly got together to stop Louis. September of 1701 saw Austria's Prince Eugene⁽¹⁸⁾ leading an army through the Tyrol to contest the French occupation of Milan. Meanwhile England's general, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, organized an anti-French coalition on the banks of the Lower Rhine. Soon Brandenburg joined the Alliance, and so did Savoy in 1703.⁽¹⁹⁾

Since Louis's troops were in possession of all the territory he wanted to keep, he began the war with a strong strategic advantage; tactically his army had a fifteen-year record of victories behind it. Louis had every reason to be confident. William of Orange saw the war as a second War of the Grand Alliance--an attritive struggle in which he would use the Alliance's superior numbers to wear down the French until Louis agreed to make peace. William's death in 1702 gave the Allies a chance to try another strategy. A determined but mediocre general who insisted on heading the Allied armies himself, his passing left the way clear for the Duke of Marlborough to lead the Anglo-Dutch forces.

The opening campaigns may have made Louis think twice; both Marlborough in the Low Countries and Eugene in Italy outwitted the local French commanders, while the English navy captured Gibraltar. However, French losses were marginal and when the Bavarian elector teamed up with the French, Louis found an ally to keep the Austrians busy. Then Louis made a characteristic move--he tried to strike at the heart of Austria. The French moved through the Black Forest, picked up a Bavarian force, and together they marched on Vienna, forcing both Marlborough and Eugene to rush to the defense. At Blenheim on the Upper Danube (August 13, 1704) the armies of both sides came together and had it out. From the first shot Marlborough and Eugene dominated the field. Ruthlessly pressed attacks on both flanks forced the French commander to reinforce them by weakening his center; Marlborough's main force then split the Franco-Bavarian army in two, pinned the southern half against the river and compelled it to surrender. The myth of French invincibility was broken.

Blenheim was the turning point, and for the next few years everything went wrong for the French. Portugal, never a willing member of the Bourbon alliance, switched sides in 1703. The worst year was 1706, when Marlborough won the battle of Ramillies and chased them out of the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium), while Eugene won the battle of Turin and chased them out of Italy. Louis now only held France and Spain, and Marlborough's follow-up victory at Oudenard (in Belgium, 1708) made sure that he stayed there. And after nearly twenty years of continuous warfare, France was on the verge of economic collapse. In 1708 the Allies handed out some harsh terms for peace, and Louis agreed to most of them: he recognized Anne as the rightful queen of England, dropped his support of a Stuart pretender, and said he would surrender all claims to the Spanish Empire and destroy the French naval base at Dunkirk. Most remarkable, he agreed to recognize Leopold's son as the king of Spain, but negotiations broke down when the Allies ordered him to help drive his grandson out of Spain, so the war resumed. Louis called on the French people to increase their support of the war effort, men flocked to join the army, and money flowed in to replenish the royal treasury. To resist a humiliating peace, the French stood with their king.

An Allied invasion of Spain failed, but since Louis was ready to declare that Philip V would never inherit the French crown, this should not have been a major obstacle to peace. In fact it was. In September 1709 the two alliances sent armies into Belgium and had a rematch at Malplaquet. Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy won the battle, but 40,000 men were killed or wounded in an area of ten square miles. Both sides were so horrified by the slaughter that they started talking peace again. This time Louis' enemies demanded even stiffer terms; they insisted that France should not only support, but actually lead the campaign to get Philip V out of Spain.

The Sun King refused again, and the arrogance of the Grand Alliance finally backfired. In 1710 the British government was voted out of office, partly because of revulsion to what happened at Malplaquet. A conservative (Tory) pro-peace faction came to power in Parliament and recalled Marlborough. A year later Leopold died and Archduke Charles succeeded him as Holy Roman emperor--but he didn't drop his claims to Spain. This put the Allies in an indefensible position; if they continued to support Austria, the result would be precisely what they had been trying to prevent--the union of the Spanish empire with another great power in Europe. That and a French victory at the battle of Denain (1712) caused the Allies to listen to reason, and negotiations got underway. At the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) Austria got ex-Spanish Belgium (now renamed the Austrian Netherlands), Milan, Naples, Sardinia, the island of Elba and two small tracts of land on the nearby Tuscan coast. Savoy got Sicily. The British⁽²⁰⁾ kept the bases they had seized at Gibraltar and Minorca, the French territories of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in Canada, and the coveted rights to the slave trade.

As for Louis, he got his pre-1700 frontiers and the prestige of having a member of his family ruling Spain. In fact, a descendant of Louis is still on the Spanish throne today, three hundred years later. The price was high. Arrogance had isolated France diplomatically; defeat had tarnished her arms. The country was so exhausted and impoverished that it took a whole generation to recover. At the beginning of Louis's reign everyone in Europe watched him; half a century later the Sun King still held court in the same grand style, always making sure that the show went on, while the world went another way.⁽²¹⁾

Statistics on Population and Religion for the Early Eighteenth Century

After Ireland, with its growth rate of 150%, came Russia with about 75%; this does not include the gains made when the tsars annexed the Ukraine and Siberia. Russia's rate was a healthy one because the cause was peasants colonizing the underpopulated steppe. The rest of Europe was closer to the average rate of 30%, except for misgoverned Spain and the exploited Balkans. Islam continued to stagnate; the Ottoman Empire's population rose from 27 to 31.5 million, a 16% increase, and most of that was lost around the turn of the century, when the Austrians regained Hungary and the Barbary states of North Africa became independent. As a result the Turks still had the highest population in Europe, but the eighteenth century would see Russia surpass them and France and Austria catch up.

In terms of religious demography Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Moslems still held nearly the same territories in 1715 that they had held in 1600. On the outside the biggest change was the expansion of Russian Orthodoxy; Russia annexed eastern Poland and most of Siberia during the period covered in this chapter, and even staked a claim to Alaska. A tendency to create religious uniformity in every state was the main trend of the time. Everywhere pressure was put on those groups who subscribed to a different faith from that of their rulers; this pressure ranged from simple discrimination in laws and taxes (the Ottoman formula) to active persecution. The less sure and the less concerned changed their habits; the faithful either moved to a friendlier country or were expelled outright. As the minorities were exchanged the Dutch steadily became more Calvinist, the Belgians more Catholic. The same thing happened between the Protestant and Catholic areas of Germany. This continuing process was more important than the dramatic persecutions: a quarter of a million Moslems expelled from Spain (1600-16), 200,000 Jews killed in the Polish-Cossack war (1648-67), and 200,000 Huguenots expelled from France (1685).

While the Netherlands was the most tolerant country in western Europe, Poland was the most tolerant country in the east. Although this was very commendable of the Poles, they did it out of political necessity; Poland had some awfully large religious minorities to deal with. In addition to the four million ethnic Poles, who were still Catholic, the king of Poland ruled 750,000 Lutheran subjects in the Baltic territories, and two and a half million Orthodox in the areas that had once belonged to Russia. On top of that, Poland now had the world's largest Jewish community. Jews flocked there after they had been expelled from the rest of Christian Europe, because the Poles never mistreated them (though the Cossacks did). During the period covered by this chapter, their numbers grew from less than 200,000 to 750,000. A great deal of Yiddish literature was composed in Poland, and the Hasidic sect was founded here in the eighteenth century.

Making a list of religious statistics gives the impression that religion was playing as large a role in European life as ever. This was probably true in the first half of the seventeenth century, when the increasingly effective machinery of the state was frequently employed to support bigotry, and a king or queen's choice of religion often decided if he or she was fit for the throne. However, it was a different story after 1650. The Thirty Years War made Europeans sick of the idea of killing in the name of God, and the treaty of Westphalia put mutual tolerance of Catholicism and Protestantism in writing, making sure that religious wars would go from current events to just a bad memory. Gradually tolerance spread to include Jews and the not-so-religious; the fear of God, religious fervor and institutions of the Church entered a definite decline; from this time on the proportion of behavior determined by religion has decreased with every generation. The eighteenth century produced its own equivalent of John Huss and Martin Luther in the person of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, but nowhere could it produce someone with sufficient passion to burn him. Royal politics was the sole cause of the conflicts described in the second half of this chapter, not differences in faith. In the late eighteenth century, ideology would emerge as just a potent force for starting wars as the name of God had once been.

Scientific, Literary and Military Revolutions

As knowledge increased, the centers of higher learning moved from the ancient colleges of Italy to Amsterdam, Paris and London. This happened because the continent's economic center had also moved north and west since the Renaissance. Here was the most wealth, here were the largest cities, here were the workers who needed advanced skills. Above all, here were the largest concentrations of literate people. Surplus wealth, and abundant books, are necessary if education is to be widely available; northern Europe now had the most of both. The equation is not literacy = scientific genius, though many Protestants would dearly like to think so; it is literacy = a progressive society and more responsible government. Protestantism emphasized the need for every believer to have a Bible in his own language and to study the scriptures, so they considered literacy important, and the Protestant third of Europe was more literate than the remainder. Even so, the north was probably richer and more literate at the beginning of the Reformation. The Reformation, scientific revolution and the move from divine-right monarchy to representative government are all products of Gutenberg's printing press.⁽²⁴⁾

Since figures for the actual numbers of adults who can read at this time are unreliable--like our economic figures--the best way we have to measure the growing literacy of Europe is by following the growth of the book trade. The number of titles published per year, which was around a thousand in 1500, had more than doubled by 1600. By 1815 it was more than ten times as much, with about 20,000 titles coming off the presses every year. By contrast, look at the figures for non-progressive states, like the Ottoman Empire. Constantinople got its first printing press in 1726, and over the course of the eighteenth century the number of titles published in this, Islam's premier city, was only 63. Since it was closed down from 1730 to 1780 and again after 1800 it was really active for only 24 years, meaning that it turned out less than three new titles a year. It also meant that not only was the Turkish literacy rate much lower (5% as opposed to 50% in Europe), but that the Turks did not even see much need for a press. This shortsightedness would contribute to the Ottoman Empire's decline in the centuries that followed.

Most history books covering this period have a lot to say about revolutions. A proper history of the modern world includes a religious revolution (the Protestant Reformation), the scientific revolution, and industrial and political revolutions (in the 18th century). One which you might not have heard of is the military revolution of 1550-1650. It involved many changes in how wars were fought: the first widespread use of gunpowder weapons, a revolution in tactics as arquebusiers and pikemen learned to cooperate, a revolution in recruitment (because the skills involved were uncommon enough to make any skilled fighter, including mercenaries, an asset worth having), and a revolution in scale. The changes caused by firearms, tactics, and recruitment have already been covered, but the change in scale hasn't been explained, so let us look at it now.

In medieval Europe every fit, adult male was expected to take up whatever arms he could afford to repel an intruder, and then go back to his civilian occupation when hostilities ended. What this meant was that in times of peace most kings only had a few hundred professional soldiers. These knights guarded the king and his most important castles. With the appearance of weapons and tactics that required a professional level of skill, the feudal levy became useless. However, because the state had not yet figured out how to pay for a professional standing army, it fielded only 15-30,000 men in wartime and became almost defenseless in peacetime. This was so painfully obvious that every state looked for a solution. Over the course of the seventeenth century, tax collectors grew more efficient at finding revenue, and the standing army began to grow at a phenomenal rate. In France, for example, this increase was from the few hundred of the early 16th century to 150,000 under Louis XIV. This comes out to a figure of about 8 soldiers per 1,000 civilians. Allowing for population growth, Europe's standing armies have remained the same size for most of the time since then.

It was also a change of surprisingly little significance. Ancient empires like Assyria and Rome had standing armies; in fact, France's achievement represented little more than a recovery to the level of administrative competence possessed by the Roman Empire (Rome could field an estimated 7 legionaries per 1,000 civilians). Thus, maintaining a large standing army was possible for reactionary societies as well as progressive ones.

Today an army is the very symbol of rigid organization. Yet in the seventeenth century the idea of a chain of command was regarded as an innovation. A military command was a noble's right, or a commodity that could be bought and sold--along with the army under that command. The typical semi-feudal leader of this time could sit out a battle if he felt like it, and since wars at this time were often sparked by personal interests, he fought against his king almost as often as for him. Such a system is not likely to produce either an effective organization or skilled officers. Here, as in recruitment and financing, Louis XIV's ministers made the necessary changes. They set up a pyramidal structure, led by the Secretary of State for War, an appointed civil servant rather than a military officer. Under him ranked the marshals of the armies, and under them the generals. Below these were the captains and colonels, and these were the most troublesome because they "owned" their commissions. Because the sale of commissions was an important source of state revenue, and because these officers were likely to oppose any attempt to dismiss them, the war ministers chose to go around them, by placing under them junior officers who were more likely to carry out the commands of the state. Consequently each colonel got a lieutenant colonel, and each captain got a lieutenant; lieutenant in French means one who acts in lieu of another. These trained, professional officers ended up directing the troops most of the time, leaving the colonels and captains free to enjoy their empty hours.

The revolution in land warfare had its parallel at sea. In the course of the seventeenth century the need to protect merchantmen from pirates increased (we are now in the golden age of the buccaneers), and the number of warships, led by England, increased proportionately, from a handful of men-of-war that guarded convoys of galleons in wartime to permanent fleets with dozens of ships. In this instance the reason is clearly visible. England's shipping tonnage was steadily mounting, and the Merchant Marine was growing more essential to the English economy. The creation of the Royal Navy was an event, but the growth of seaborne trade was a constant trend of the modern era, so in the long run the latter was more important.

It is worth noting that since 1970, our society reversed its course on standing armies again. The Vietnam War was probably the last conflict where a recruiter would accept anyone who could walk and breathe. Since that time the price of ironmongery has jumped by leaps and bounds so that the typical tank costs more than $1 million, jet fighters and bombers can cost hundreds of millions, and an aircraft carrier costs so much in construction and maintenance that choosing its home port can decide whether a portside community will see prosperity or unemployment. In the age of electronic warfare weapons are getting fewer in number as they grow increasingly sophisticated, and that means only the most competent, best trained personnel will be retained to use them. To keep military budgets affordable, the United States and several other nations have "downsized" their armed forces; a figure of 5 per 1,000 citizens is the current count of US military personnel, and even smaller figures may be possible as the twenty-first century progresses. That is probably the main reason why the US Army has succeeded as an all-volunteer force, despite the predictions of nay-sayers when the draft was abolished in 1973. We are now returning to a situation like that at the dawn of the modern era where the largest armies are fielded by the nations least able to equip them (e.g., China and North Korea, to name some present-day examples).

Seventeenth-Century Economics

If it was English belligerence that forced the Dutch to share the sea lanes, the development of the purpose-built battleship and the appearance of a professional English navy set the seal on the Republic's decline. When the French and English began an arms race to build more men-of-war, the Dutch dropped out of the race. Their ships had to earn their bread and if an East Indiaman could no longer take its place in the line of battle, then the Royal Navy of their English ally (for we have now reached the war between Louis XIV and the Grand Alliance) would have to do the fighting for them.

France's attempt to build a first-class navy was organized by Colbert. He put tariffs on Dutch imports and used the revenue generated to build a fleet that, on paper, was as good as what the English had. He encouraged trade in the Mediterranean until French commerce in that area overtook the Dutch.⁽²⁵⁾ He also kept France in the running of those overseas activities that brought the quickest profit: the slave trade and the Caribbean sugar business. But in the end the preoccupation of Colbert's king with European aggression ruined his plans. Louis XIV treated the tariffs as a bargaining chip the next time he negotiated with the Dutch, and soon bargained them away; as his wars progressed from sterile victory to ruinous defeat his armies began to absorb all the men and money he had to spare, leaving the French navy to rot in port. During the War of the Grand Alliance, the French navy defeated the Anglo-Dutch fleet at the battle of Beachy Head (1690), but two years later it was wiped out in the disastrous battle of battle of La Hogue. For the next two and a half centuries after La Hogue, Britain was master of the high seas.

In 1600 London, Naples and Constantinople all had populations around 250,000; by 1700 London had reached half a million, making it at least twice the size of any other European city. This metropolitan expansion increased the demand on key industries that would help the entire economy to grow. English coal production rose from about 700,000 tons in 1600 to 3,000,000 in 1715 (about 85% of total European production).⁽²⁶⁾ To pump water from the deepest coal mines, Thomas Newcomen built the first practical steam engine; a version of it was operating on Tyneside by 1708. A year later Abraham Darby began the first in a series of long drawn-out series of attempts to smelt iron ore with coke. A process of this type was badly needed, for deforestation had reduced charcoal supplies to the famine point.

Some of the states of Europe increased their revenues dramatically in the seventeenth century; others suffered a decline in income. In 1990s dollars the 1715 figures are roughly as follows: France $700m; Britain $550m; Austria and the Dutch Republic $250m each; Russia and Spain $160m each; Venice, Portugal and the Ottoman Empire each got $130m; $120m for Prussia.⁽²⁷⁾ Austria's income came in roughly equal portions from Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Milan, and Naples, meaning that it had quadrupled as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession. The Dutch continued to have the highest per capita income but now were severely straining their resources. Though it was a tribute to the Republic's credit-worthiness that its debt rose to $9 billion during the wars it took part in (nearly twice the size of the British debt), its insistence on making at least the minimum payment on this huge sum every time it came due placed a crippling burden on the national economy. Louis XIV ended his career with a national debt of $12 billion, which was bigger in absolute terms but smaller in proportion to the resources of France; moreover the French cheerfully inflated away half of it in the next decade.

An amusing story illustrates the poverty of most Frenchmen during Louis XIV's reign, and the Sun King's attitude toward it. In 1683 famine struck the province of Anjou, and Father Grandet, the director of a local seminary, singlehandedly led the relief efforts. First he ordered every bourgeois family to adopt and feed a peasant family, then he sent cartloads of bread into the countryside, but these measures weren't enough. His pleas for royal assistance got no results, and soon the starving peasants resorted to making bread out of ferns. Grandet took one of these green loaves and sent it to Versailles as a sample. When the king got it, his courtiers watched with amazement as he tried a piece--and spat it out. C'est terrible; medieval tortures were still often practiced at this date, but then, as now, the French felt that being forced to eat bad food was intolerable. The next day wagonloads of food, enough to instantly end the famine, were on the way to Anjou from the rest of France.

One will note from the above figures that the economies of the absolute monarchies did not shine for long. Louis XIV's initiatives were either aborted (like Colbert's tariffs) or impractical (like the tapestry and mirror factories set up to supply the royal palaces). His government did best in terms of public transport; he bequeathed to Europe the finest road-system in Europe as well as the first lock-canal of any length--the 148-mile Canal du Midi, which connected Toulouse and the Garonne River to the Mediterranean. Peter the Great began his single-handed modernization of Russia by touring Western Europe to learn what made the modern world tick, and upon his return forced an iron industry on the Russians that would soon become an important export-earner. But the improvements imposed by autocracy did not have the self-multiplying quality that made English and Dutch free enterprise so special.⁽²⁸⁾

The War of the Quadruple Alliance

The War of the Polish Succession

The reader at this point may glance back to the above title and wonder, "What has Poland got to do with this?" There's a long story involved in that. From 1700 to 1721 Russia, Poland, Denmark and Saxony were locked in a long struggle with Sweden called the Great Northern War (for details, read Chapter 2 of my Russian history). In 1706 the Swedes defeated Augustus, who in the Hanoverian fashion was both elector of Saxony and king of Poland at the same time. In his place they installed a pro-Swedish puppet, Stanislas Lesczynski. However, after the battle of Poltava (1709), which crushed Swedish power for good, Peter the Great was able to return Augustus to the Polish throne.

Poland remained a Russian satellite for the rest of his reign, a fact that the Russian-hating Poles resented. When the Polish nobles had a chance to elect a new king in 1733 they didn't choose the Saxon (pro-Russian) candidate but voted instead to bring back the native-born Lesczynski. Sweden was out of the game now, but since Lesczynski's daughter had married Louis XV there was hope that the French would intervene to keep the Russians out. This idea ignored geography. A year later a Russian army marched into Poland and called for a new election which revealed an astonishing swing in favor of the Saxon candidate; he was duly installed on the throne.

France saved face by making the fugitive Lesczynski duke of Lorraine. This tied eastern politics to western hostilities and allowed historians to give the three main conflicts of the early 18th century artificially matching titles: Spanish (1701-13), Polish (1731-35), and Austrian (1740-48) Succession.

Because of Lesczynski, the French did not claim Lorraine as part of France until his death in 1766. Francis, the original Duke of Lorraine, was given Tuscany and married to Austrian heiress Maria Theresa. Parma went back to Austria after Don Carlos moved to his new kingdom in the south (1738).

The War of the Austrian Succession

In 1740 Charles VI of Austria died, and the crown passed to his daughter, Maria Theresa. Letting a woman inherit the conglomerate Hapsburg empire created a lot of legal problems; most of the Holy Roman Empire's states had laws against female rulership. Charles expected this, so in 1713 he issued the Pragmatic Sanction, which decreed that Maria Theresa would be his heir if he did not have a son. Then he spent the rest of his reign persuading European leaders to accept Maria Theresa. By the time Maria Theresa succeeded to the throne of Austria, her right to it was acknowledged by just about every head of state. However, Charles VI couldn't do anything about the imperial crown; the elector of Bavaria, Charles Albert, promptly claimed it; so did Philip V of Spain and Augustus III, the current ruler of Saxony and Poland.

Outside the Empire, no major power thought this was an issue worth fighting over. However, in the same year that Maria Theresa became empress of Austria, Frederick II became king of Prussia. Determined to make full use of the army and war chest painfully collected by his father, Frederick marched into Silesia and declared that province a part of the Prussian state.⁽³⁰⁾ The legal case he advanced was dubious to say the least; the victory his troops won at Mollwitz provided a more convincing argument.

Because it looked like Frederick was going to beat Austria, the other major powers stepped into the ring. France and Bavaria teamed up to attack Austria, while the British, Hanoverians and Dutch joined forces to stop a French invasion of the Austrian Netherlands (Britain got involved because it was already fighting Spain elsewhere). Spain and France attacked the Austrians and Savoyards in Italy. Because so many countries participated, the war's course was a complicated one, with twenty important battles (five of them large-scale) scattered across central Europe. Hostilities were on-and-off rather than continuous and though a peace treaty wasn't signed until 1748, the only leaders who distinguished themselves were France's Marshal Saxe and Prussia's Frederick. Saxe won some convincing victories against the Anglo-Hanoverian-Dutch coalition on the Belgian front and eventually conquered all of the Austrian Netherlands. Frederick's military career got off to an undistinguished start at Mollwitz (where he ran away, even though his troops won), but soon he developed a skill for tactics, becoming both aggressive and quick-thinking. When the fighting ended he was the biggest winner, for though most pre-war frontiers were restored, Prussia kept Silesia.⁽³¹⁾

In the middle of it all, Prague fell to the French and Bavarians, allowing Charles Albert to become the king of Bohemia (1741). A year later the long-delayed imperial election finally took place, and the electors unanimously voted for Charles, making him Emperor Charles VII. Thus, the Hapsburgs lost control of the Empire for the first (and only) time since the early fifteenth century. They didn't lose it for long, though; Maria Theresa's soldiers overran both Bohemia and Bavaria before 1742 was over, leaving Charles with no base of power. Frederick marched into Bohemia and reinstated Charles in October 1744, but Charles died just a few months later. For the 1745 imperial election, Charles' son Maximilian gave up his claim so that he could get Bavaria back for his family, and Maria Theresa's husband, Francis of Lorraine, became the next emperor. He ruled until 1765, and since the German princes still wouldn't accept a Holy Roman empress, Joseph II, the son of Francis and Maria Theresa and the future patron of Mozart, got the crown. Joseph also became king of Austria on Maria Theresa's death in 1780, which brought the Hapsburg organization back to where it was before 1740.

The Seven Years War

Although the main reason for the Seven Years War was the antagonism between Maria Theresa and Frederick, the first shots were fired across the Atlantic, in Pennsylvania (1754), and for a while all the fighting took place between two older rivals, Britain and France.⁽³²⁾ In fact, the Seven Years War was really a world war because it saw major battles on three continents (Europe, North America and India), but we don't call it that because it took place 160 years before World War I. Overseas Britain got off to a shaky start, and France won the first battles, culminating in the capture of the British base at Minorca in 1756. But the same year saw a new prime minister come to power in London, William Pitt the Elder. Pitt saw that since France had a stronger army but a weaker navy, Britain must come up with a strategy that made the most of this difference; he did it by paying the Prussians to tie down the French in Europe ("Canada will be won in Silesia"), while using the navy to concentrate British power overseas. Results came quickly. As the Royal Navy tightened its blockade of France's Atlantic ports, French overseas strength wilted. In India the decisive victory was won by Robert Clive at the battle of Plassey (1757), which conquered Bengal and gave him the resources needed to uproot the French outposts on the subcontinent. In 1759 a British expedition sailed up the St. Lawrence River and took Quebec, the heart of French Canada. Other expeditions picked off France's Caribbean islands and West African slaving posts. Piece by piece, the French colonial empire was removed from the board.

Back in Europe Frederick did not wait for his enemies to come to him. While Ma