The Short Oxford History of Europe
General Editor: T. C. W. Blanning
The Seventeenth
Century
Europe 1598-1715
Editedby Joseph Bergin
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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General Editor’s Preface
The problemsof writing a satisfactory general history of Europe are
many, but the most intractable is clearly the reconciliation of depth
with breadth. The historian who can write with equal authority about
every part of the continentin all its various aspects has not yet been
born. Two main solutions have been tried in the past: either a single
scholar has attempted to go it alone, presenting an unashamedly
personal view ofa period, or teamsof specialists have been enlisted to
write what are in effect anthologies. The first offers a coherent per
spective but unequal coverage, the secondsacrifices unity for the sake
of expertise. This new series is underpinned bythe belief that it is this
second way that has the fewest disadvantages and that even those can
be diminished if not neutralized by close cooperation between the
individual contributors under the directing supervision of the vol
ume editor. All the contributors to every volume in this series have
read each other’s chapters, have met to discuss problems of overlap
and omission, and have then redrafted as part of a truly collective
exercise. To strengthen coherence further, the editor has written an
introduction and conclusion, weaving the separate strands together
to form a single cord. In this exercise, the brevity promised by the
adjective ‘short’ in the series’ title has been an asset. The need to be
concise has concentrated everyone’s minds on what really mattered
in the period. No attempt has been madeto cover every angle of every
topic in every country. What this volume does provide is a short but
sharp and deep entry into the history of Europe in the period in all
its most important aspects.
T. C. W. Blanning
Sidney Sussex College
Cambridge
Contents
List of contributors x1
Introduction: the uncertain prospect 1
Joseph Bergin
1 The economy 1
R. C. Nash
Population and the economy 13
Agriculture and agrarian society 18
Industry and trade 36
Conclusion 48
2 Society 50
Thomas Munck
Social rank and social mobility 52
Peasants, serfs and subservience 58
Urbanization and social change 62
Poverty, vagrancy and crime 66
Riots and social control 70
Alternative ideologies: the world turned upside down? 75
Conclusion 78
3 Politics 80
Anthony Upton
Thepolitical structure of Europe in 1600 80
The problem of the Reformation 82
The pressures of war: Richelieu and Olivares 84
Protest, rebellion, revolution: a mid-centurycrisis? 88
The English revolution, 1640-60 90
The search for political stability 94
Alternative roads 103
viii | CONTENTS
4 War andinternational relations 112
David Parrott
The Thirty Years War and European conflict to 1634 112
Early seventeenth-century warfare and the
‘military revolution’ 117
Peace deferred 120
Malplaquet and military change in Europeafter 1660 125
The wars of French expansion, 1667—97 127
The Spanish succession 135
Conclusion 141
5 The age of curiosity 145
Laurence W. B. Brockliss
The Augustinian landscape 145
Curiosity, observation and measurement 152
The disenchantment of nature 160
The sun-centred and infinite universe 167
The ascent of man 172
Towardsthe Enlightenment 180
6 Europe and the wider world 185
Anthony Pagden
Contexts 185
The meanings of‘discovery’ 188
Nature andits laws 191
Mare liberum? 194
Competing for empire 202
Therise of slavery 204
Religion and civilization 209
Conclusion 215
Conclusion: the ancient and the modern 217
Joseph Bergin
Further reading 229
Chronology 233
CONTENTS ix
Maps 244
Europe in 1600 244
Europe in 1660 246
Europein 1715 248
Index 251
List of contributors
JOSEPHBERGIN is Professor of History at the University of Manches
ter and a Fellow ofthe British Academy. He has published extensively
on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, including two
studies
of Richelieu: Cardinal Richelieu—power and the pursuit of wealth
(1985), The Rise of Richelieu (1991),and a large-scale study of France’s
bishops, The Making of the French Episcopate 1589-1661(1996). Heis
currently working on the French churchin the age of Louis XIV.
LAURENCEBROCKLISSis Reader in ModernHistory at the University
of Oxford, and Fellow of Magdalen College. His most important
works include French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eight
eenth Centuries (1987) and, with Colin Jones, The Medical World of
Early Modern France (1997). He has published extensively on early
modern medicine, philosophy and learning generally,and is currently
working on a study ofthe diffusion of enlightenmentideas in south
ern France.
THOMASMUNCK is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of
Glasgow. He is the author of The Peasantry and the Early Absolute
Monarchy in Denmark (1979), Seventeenth-Century Europe 1598-1700
(1990) and most recently The Enlightenment, a comparative social
history (1999). He has published essays on enlightened reform in late
eighteenth-century Denmark andis preparing a study of publishing
and public opinion in late eighteenth-century Copenhagen.
R. C. NASH is Lecturer in Economic History at the University of
Manchester. He has researched and published on English trade in the
later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His current work focuses
on financial and commercial links between Britain and its colonies,
especially the West Indies and the Carolinas, in the eighteenth
century.
ANTHONYPAGDEN, formerly Reader in Intellectual History and Fel
low of King’s College, Cambridge, is now Harry C. Black Professor
of History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He has
researched and published extensively on the cultural and intellectual
dimensions of Europe’s encounter with other societies since the
xii | LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
sixteenth century, notably The Fall of Natural Man (1982), Spanish
Imperialism and the Political Imagination (1989), European encounters
with the New World (1992), and Lords of All the World (1995).
DAVIDPARROTT
is a Fellow of New College, Oxford. His research has
mainly focused on French political and military history, and heis
author of a forthcoming book, Richelieu’sArmy. He has published
essays on aristocratic politics in seventeenth-century France, and has
explored the diplomatic, dynastic and military history of northern
Italian states in the sameperiod.
ANTHONYUPTONis Professor Emeritus of Nordic History at the Uni
versity of St Andrews. He has written on Baltic politics in the twen
tieth century, but more recently his work has been on early modern
Swedish history, especially in the later seventeenth century. He is the
author of Charles IX and SwedishAbsolutism (1998), and of a general
history of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
(forthcoming).
Introduction: the
uncertain prospect
Joseph Bergin
Most people with a smattering of historical knowledge can still read
ily associate certain centuries with a series of events or a process—
usually if not alwaysof a vaguely positive kind—whichthey feel have
some underlying historical significance. Equally, other centuries fare
much less well in this competition for attention. So the sixteenth
century is instinctively yoked to the Protestant Reformation, the
eighteenth to the Enlightenment, since both phenomena loom large
in most explanations of how the modern world took the shapeit did.
But what, one may ask, about the century in between, separating or
connecting—depending on one’s point of view—these two great
‘peaks’ of early modern history? In the Anglo-Saxon world atleast,
seventeenth-century Europe’s place in historical memoryis insecure,
doubtless because of the absence of any defining characteristic
resembling the Reformation or the Enlightenment. Relativelyfew his
torical surveys of the century have succeeded in finding a title that
encapsulates a widely-shared view of the century’s essence. Interest
ingly, this lack of an overarching‘identity’ applicable to seventeenth
century Europeas a whole coincides with the use in different parts of
the continentof a variety of captions with which to label the century,
in whole or in part. Their very proliferation, as much as their diver
sity of meaning, may be one reason why it is so difficult to clearly
identify the century for Europe as a whole! A few examples should
suffice to make the point. Sweden’s ‘age of greatness’ undoubtedly
spanned the entire seventeenth century, with the Dutch ‘golden age’
not far behind. The Spanish siglo de oro, as the tag suggests, also
10 | THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Germany in the 1630s and 1640s as a gigantic racket perpetrated by
those under armsagainst the rest of society. And the engravings of
Jacques Callot, a Lorrainer whose native land experienced the full
horrors of the same war and military occupation, depict the grue
some human dimension of seventeenth-century war, with summary
executions and hangings of men and women whoseoffences ranged
from refusing to pay protection moneyor to provide food, to simply
defending themselves against marauding soldiers. Even if we should
guard against facile generalization from such texts and images to the
effect that seventeenth-century wars were onesof escalating brutality
at every level, the widening geographicalscale of the conflicts, begin
ning with the Thirty YearsWaritself, clearly brought the horrors of
war closer to the population across much of the continent, from
Burgundy, Lorraine and the Netherlands to Poland and Russia, not
forgetting the Empire and northItaly, traditionally the military cock
pits of Europe. In fact, with so much of the fighting still done by
military enterprisers and volunteer, mercenarysoldiers, whose discip
line wasvastly superior to that of unwilling press-ganged recruits, the
brutality of war may have been rather more contained than wethink,
and instances of wholesale massacre of soldiers and civilians were
probably not everyday occurrences. Yet Callot’s depictions of the
miseries of war for soldiers and civilians alike will surely remain at
least as emblematic of the century as the untroubled landscapesof his
fellow Lorrainer, Claude Gellée, alias Le Lorrain, or the historical
allegories of their more famous contemporary, the Norman Nicolas
Poussin.
The economy
R. C. Nash’
Since the 1950s, historians have seen the seventeenth century as a
period of economic stagnation, decline and even of “general crisis’,
one that contrasts with the rapid economic growth characteristic of
the centuries on either side. Originally, such decline was explained by
the tailing off of silver imports from Spanish America after 1610,
monetary-fuelled growth thus giving way to deflation and recession.
The key problem with this explanation is that it now seems that the
fall in silver imports was restricted to the years from the 1630s to
the 1650sandthat, in fact, imports after 1660exceeded levels set at the
start of the century. Then, in the 1960sand 1970s,underthe influence
of Malthusian demographic theory, historians explained thecrisis of
the seventeenth century as the outcomeof the population growth of
the previous century. Population growth eventually outstripped the
supply of food which, given the failure to innovate in agriculture, led
to subsistence crises which, in turn, destabilized the wider economy.
A Marxist inflection of this theory stresses that this failure to inno
vate wasitself the product of the social limits on growth imposed by
a society of peasant farmers and urbancraftsmen, petty producers of
village and town whowere hostile to economic change.
The major problem with the idea of a ‘general crisis’ is that it is
impossible to identify a period in which all or most of the European
economy was simultaneously gripped by a depression. In Spain, for
example, economic and population decline wasat its worst from 1590
to 1630, a period in which, however, the Dutch ‘economic miracle’
reached its height. Likewise, when Spain embarked ona fragile eco
nomic recovery after 1670,the Low Countries, southern France and
' I wish to thank DrS. H. Rigby for his excellent comments on an
earlier draft of
this chapter.
14 | THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Table 1 Population of Europe byterritory and region, 1600-1700
(in millions).
1600 1650 1700
North and west
Scandinavia 2.0 2.6 2.8
England & Wales 4.4 5.6 5.4
Scotland 1.0 1.0 1.0
Ireland 1.4 1.8 2.8
The Netherlands 1.5 1.9 1.9
Belgium 1.6 2.0 2.0
Central
Germany 16.2 10.0 14.1
France 21.0 21.0 21.4
Switzerland 1.0 1.0 1.2
Mediterranean
NorthernItaly 5.4 4.3 5.7
CentralItaly 2.9 2.7 2.8
SouthernItaly 4.8 4.3 4.8
Spain 8.1 7.1 7.5
Portugal 1.4 1.5 2.0
Eastern
Austria-Bohemia 4.3 4.1 4.6
Poland 3.4 3.0 2.8
Region
North and west 11.9 14.9 15.9
Central 38.2 32.0 36.7
Mediterranean 22.6 19.9 22.8
Eastern 7.7 7.1 7.4
Total 80.4 73.9 82.8
Note: The figures given are approximate ones, especially those for Scandinavia, Germany, Portugal,
and Eastern Europe.
Source: Jan De Vries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 36. Additional
data for Scandinavia, Germany, France, and Portugal from, Jean-Pierre Bardet and Jacques
Dupaquier, Histoire des Populations de l'Europe (Paris, 1997).
registered in Germany and Mediterranean Europe, and then merely
regained its preceding levels by 1700.Consequently, historians regard
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as eras of economic expansion
while the seventeenth century is seen as one of economic stagnation
and crisis. Why, then, did population stagnate in the seventeenth
century, compared with the startling growth in the centuries on
either side?
The modern discussion of this issue has taken place in a neo
20 | THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
organization. Three key issues thus need to be addressed. Why did so
many western European regions experience prolonged agricultural
slumps in the seventeenth century? Are these crises best explained by
the persistence of peasant farming? Why wasagricultural improve
ment in this period limited to England and the Low Countries?
Agricultural stagnation andcrisis
In nearly every western European country the expansion of popula
tion and agriculture which had begun c.1500eventually gave way to a
sequence of agrarian crises, encompassing dramatic falls in agri
cultural output and profits. However, these crises varied greatly in
timing, duration and causes. The first and most importantcluster of
crises occurred from 1590to 1650,in a context of rising markets and
inflated agricultural prices [Figure 1]. In central Spain, the crisis
began with the harvest failures and plague epidemics of the 1590s.But
200 7
’
aA
’ 4 —— Wheat, England ------ Rye, The Netherlands
4
;
‘ 4
4
---- Wheat, France “‘~' Rye,Germany
‘ A
é
‘ A
4
é
150 4,’
A
4
r A
4
4
4
i
A
A
4
100 4
silver
hectolitre
Grams
of
per
50per er ‘2
Ne
Ne erm ~ff‘
* a \
\
sore ssf
0 t T { t C Lf T v T J t t
~. . v. <. WA v. <. x. CA < vA L. <
Ve Ww. yy yy Ve YY \2 Ve Ve \ Vy Vy VY
‘Sy0 “Oy,
© “Oy,
0 “Ge
0 “Oy
MO “Ge
% “Gy
0 “Oy
© “GrOo “Gy
0 “Gy
0 y © oO
Decade
Figure 1 Graph showing agrarian crises in gramsof silver per hectolitre in
Europe, 1581-1710.
THE ECONOMY | 25
—— Spain, Segovia ---- France, Beaune
---- Spain, T. de Campos France, Mediterranean
soceeeFrance, Cambrésis ---- Italy, Valpolicella
200 7
S 150
II
ON
oP
oO
(oe)
io
TD
3
=° 100
"3
YD
o
oO
qt
°
2©
= 50
0 t T t t c v T v T t t t
a, 2, BR,@,2,B, BB, %, @,%, BBQ
Fo “% “O ~o 9 Yo “Yo Yo Gp “> “So % ~% Yo
Decade
Figure 2 Graph showingindices of cereal output, 1580-1719.
Taxation providesthe best explanation for the timing and duration
of agrarian crises in the seventeenth century. Negative evidence for
this proposition is provided by England, where we see an absenceof
serious agrarian crises, the most consistent rates of agricultural
improvement, and levels of rural taxation which, except in the Civil
Waryears of the 1640s,were extremely light by continental standards.
Peasant farming andagrarian social change
The identification of the problems of peasant farming as the root
cause of seventeenth-century agrarian crises may seem to support
Brenner’s view that the tenacity of peasant ownership ofland acted as
THE ECONOMY | 37
industries of large towns and cities, which produced high-quality
textiles and other goods for well-to-do consumers in national and
international markets.
Industry and trade, 1600-50
The years 1600-20 were the Indian summer of the commercial and
industrial system established in the sixteenth century, when many
industries and trades reached peaklevels of activity. But the boom
ended in the trade crisis of 1619-22,a watershed in the development
of the European economy, when manyindices of trade and of indus
trial production took a downward turn and remained depressed
until 1650 or beyond [Figure 3]. This international economiccrisis
had its greatest impact in France, Germany, and in central and
Mediterranean Europe. In England and the Low Countries, com
mercial and industrial expansion was muchless interrupted, leading
therefore to a decisive shift of the core areas of trade and manufactur
ing to north-western Europe. The crisis was precipitated by the
30 A: European ships outward boundto Asia, 00s
of ships
B : Ships passing through Baltic Sound, east and
west combined, 000s of ships
C : Exports of Danish oxen,tens of 000s of oxen
D:Silver imported into Europe from America,
tens of millions of pesos
E : Cloth production Florence, in 000s of cloths
F : Cloth production in Venice, in 000s of cloths
G : Cloth productionin Lille,in 000s of cloths
1600-1700
Figure 3 Graph showing Europeantrade and industry, 1600-1700.
48 | THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
demandacted as a major stimulus to European manufacturing after
1650, this benefitted not Spain but the rural textile industries of
northern France, Flanders and the Rhineland. Spain had plenty of
laws to prevent this happening, for example those prohibiting the
export of bullion, the problem was that it did not enforce them.
Indeed, Spain did almost nothingto protectits native industry, trade
and shipping. Historians have been dubious about the benefits of
mercantilism, but they have also been unanimous in attributing
muchof Spain’sindustrial and commercial underdevelopmentto the
absence of such policies.
Conclusion
Recent research on the seventeenth-century European economyhas
sought to explain the three central features which distinguished it
from the economically expansive sixteenth and eighteenth centuries:
the stagnation of population; the slump in agricultural production,
associated with frequent subsistence crises; the decline of urban
manufacturing and therise of rural industry.
Demographic research has dismissed the role of famines as a major
factor in the seventeenth-century stagnation of Europe’s population,
emphasizing instead that it was epidemics which had exogenous or
non-economic causes and preventive checks on marriage andfertility
whichrestrained population growth in the period. The model works
well for the Netherlands and England, where subsistence crises were
unimportant, and where marriage ages and rates of non-marriage
shifted dramatically upwards from 1650.The recent attempt, however,
to extend the model to France, Spain, Italy and elsewhere is less
convincing. First, famines triggered all the major mortality crises
which beset these societies, albeit that the links between famine and
mortality took an indirect rather than a direct form. Second,the idea
that the weak preventive checks which operated in these countries in
the seventeenth century were sufficient to stop population growth is
undermined by comparisons with the eighteenth century, when such
checks were intensified greatly and yet proved quite incapable of
holding back the massive population growth which swept across
western Europe from c.1720.
Society
Thomas Munck
In 1690, a group of peasants from the village of Borre on Mon in
Denmark found themselves in open conflict with the bailiff in charge
of the estate. At issue was a sum of moneyallegedly due from the
peasants in lieu of labour services. The bailiff, claiming the payment
was overdue, seized somecattle as security, but without due process
of law. Whenthe peasants initiated legal proceedings he had all but
one of them arrested. The one whoescaped submitted a statement to
the local court: the sheriff declared the arrest illegal, fined the bailiff,
and insisted that the original dispute over labour payments could be
heard only when the men were freed. The bailiff now secured the
dismissal of the sheriff himself. The peasants did not recover their
freedom until six monthslater, and then only on condition that they
sign a statement (not read out to them) which was subsequently used
against them as evidence of insubordination. Thebailiff now threat
ened them with eviction and loss of tenure unless they paid up the
original disputed sum and formally apologized for their ‘unneces
sarylitigation. He also persuaded the district governor to have the
original court judgment annulled. The whole tale of abuse of power
did not come into the open until seven years later, when the accumu
lation of more than 200 individual and collective complaints finally
forced the crown to institute a formal enquiry. That enquiry
uncovered systematic falsification of records by the bailiff, misap
propriation of funds totalling at least 13000 thalers, abuse of power
by the governor, and (with specific reference to the case just cited)
perversion of the course of justice. Eventually the bailiff was charged
and his property sequestrated, the governor was removed andlater
arrested, and—fifteen years after the original dispute— compensation
payment made by the estate to some of the peasants.
78 | THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
a The
poorest
hethat
isinEngland
hath
lifetolive
asthe
greatest
he;
and
therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man thatis to live under a
government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that gov
ernment; and I do not think that the poorest man in England is notat all
a bound
instrict
sense
tothat
government
that
hehath
not
had
avoice
toput
himself under.
Neither the social nor the political implications of such a contract
between state and subject were worked out for more than a century—
and we can understand why, after the Restoration of 1660,John Locke
and the Dissenters were more careful about what they said, and how
they said it. But the very fact that such words were spokenat all, in the
16408,gives us a brief glimpse of what lay beneath what others would
have preferred to see as a calm surface.
Conclusion
Social change is nearly always slow, and the seventeenth centuryis in
this respect no exception. Because of the political and economic
instability especially of the period up to 1660,we may be tempted to
look for a crisis of the aristocracy, the emergence of a ‘second serf
dom’ in east-central Europe, or the emergence of a new capitalist
society in the north-west. We may point to the growing bureaucracy
of the military state to explain the blurring ofsocial barriers between
nobles and wealthy non-nobles, or we may attribute the vitality and
fluidity of urban growth to governmental non-interference andpolit
ical autonomy. Each of these ideas has generated lively discussion
amongst historians in recent years, and has added somethingto our
understanding of the period; but each has also succumbed to a host
of qualifications that illustrate how difficult it is to generalize con
a vincingly
onsuch
vast
scale.
Inreality
neither
the
basic
assumpt
of hierarchical social inequality, nor the deep and pervasive polarity
between rich and poor changed significantly between the Reforma
tion and the late Enlightenment. What did change was the economic
balance within Europe—against east-central Europe and the Medi
terranean, towards the north-west—and,withit, the pattern of social
expectations and relationships within each community. When such
changes coincided with major political upheavals, as was the case in
sociETY | 79
much of Europe in the 1640s and 1650s, the outcome could be
dramatically revealing.
As the Neapolitan revolt of 1647shows, riots and civil unrest were
often inspired by fairly traditional expectations. But the truly extra
ordinary social demands brought out by the extreme conditions of
the English civil war remind us that a few contemporaries were
capable of thinking the unthinkable. Equally, the reaction in 1660
indicates that change on such a scale was premature, and far beyond
the limits of what those in power could countenance—the urgencyof
political restoration and reconstruction a clear sign of a closing of
ranks amongst those with somethingto lose.
The return to order was almost certainly broadly welcomed by the
vast majority of the European population, for whom stability was the
best hope. The traditional order depended on a large pool of cheap
labour, and resigned itself to recurrent crises of acute poverty and
unemployment which seemed impervious either to charity or to
remedial administrative action. It also depended on the recognition
of mutual self-interest at the top, and effective exercise of control
further down. Traditional religious beliefs continued to provide
plenty of material with which to reinforce social deference and sub
servience, all the more so in a society accustomed to conformity,
intolerance and the overt use of force. Where necessary, the ties of
family and kinship, the orderly functioning of a neighbourhood or
parish, and respect for traditionally defined vertical and horizontal
loyalties could help defuse conflicts. The absolutist tax state emerging
as the norm in Europe during the second half of the century, in so far
as it had much impactat all on society as a whole, seems to have had
enough fiscal, military and institutional strength to offer reasonably
plausible incentives to those elements in society whose co-operation
and consensus ultimately mattered.
Politics
Anthony Upton
The political structure of Europe in 1600
The outstanding characteristic of the European political system in
1600wasdiversity. Politically it was a collection of independentpolit
ical entities in a state of permanent competition. This was driven by
the dominant military culture, which had made Europe’s history one
of incessant warfare. The acquisition of additional lands by making
war had always been the main preoccupation of Europe’s rulers.
Europe was also an old and maturesociety built round a common
religious culture, and still commonly defined by contemporaries as
Christendom. The world was perceived as God’s creation, following
an historical course mapped out from the beginning in the mind of
the Creator. The original Garden of Eden had beenlost by the sin of
Adam,whichtainted all his descendants, so that all men and women
were sinners and deserved damnation. Thesacrifice of Christ for the
sins of mankind gave a hopeof salvation, which would be resolved at
Judgement Day. God hadordained civil society, and provided thatit
be ruled by kings, priests and magistrates, so that the natural wicked
ness of mankind should be restrained and the work of salvation
proceed. All lawful authority derived from God and was exercised by
divine right. God’s order was hierarchical, a favourite metaphor was
‘the Great Chain of Being’, and patriarchal, the model of authority
wasthat of absolute powerof a father over those entrustedto his care.
The concept made sense because it corresponded with the reality of
most men’slives (see chapter 5). The patriarchal values were learned
in daily life, preached in the churches, emphasized by public cere
monial, built into the educational processes. No alternative world
view was presented publicly. The society was indoctrinated into a
88 | THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
of Olivares’ proposals. Still he could claim in 1626 that in principle
the idea had been accepted.
The war had gone well for the Habsburgsat first, concealing how
seriously their resources were over-extended. This was dramatically
exposed in 1628 when the Dutch captured or destroyed the year’s
treasure fleet, which had carried the security for the bankers advances
that paid the Spanish armies. From that point the situation for
Olivares steadily deteriorated. He was trapped, there was no way the
commitments could be reduced without humiliating admissions of
defeat. In the late 1630she sought to revive the Union of Arms and
makea reality of it. This time he was preparedto use force to driveit
through andfailed. The outcomewas the twin revolts of 1640,when
first Catalonia and then Portugal renounced their allegiance to the
Habsburgs, and added internal warfare within Iberia to all the other
existing war fronts. The attempt to force modernizing reforms on the
communities from above hadfailed.
Protest, rebellion, revolution: a
mid-centurycrisis?
Occasional popular protests, accompanied by some degree of vio
lence, were endemic in European societies. These were generally
directed at specific local problems, and did notchallenge the legiti
macy of the established order. They could be settled by concessions,
which were commonly reneged on later, with some symbolic execu
tions of selected ringleaders if they could be found. In the 1630sand
1640s,whenthe pressures of war drove rulers to make new demands
on their subjects, popular protests rose to unusual levels, as in the
provincial revolts in France which dogged the ministries of Richelieu
and Mazarin.
Historians have attempted to see in the wave of unrest a ‘general
crisis’, and the debate on this continues. The main factors arguing
against linkage are the reality that the disorders remainedspecific to
local circumstances, even where they coincided in time: they did not
coalesce into broader movements. Above all, the demands of the
rebels did not challenge the legitimacy of rulers, but sought restora
tion of customary norms, which was true even of the Portuguese
102 | THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
answerable only to God. The council oligarchs submitted. The
reforms could then proceed, the first element being the maximum
possible recovery of alienated public assets. The result of this resump
tion was a massive transfer of assets from the nobility back to the
crown. A Budget Office wasset up to establish a fixed state budget, in
which all the regular public expenditure was met by the recovered
revenues. By 1693,the king could announce that the budget wasbal
anced. The complementary part of the reform was the establishment
of a large standing army and navy which was funded by the budget
reform. The officer corps and the cavalry were settled on properties
made available by the resumption. The property provided their
accommodation and basic salary. The infantry and seamen for the
navy were raised by direct contracts with local taxpayers. The
inducement wasthe abolition of conscription, a burdenrightly feared
by the peasantry on whom itfell, for its disruptive impact on the
labour force. The result of these measures was to create a standing
military establishment, permanently funded from local revenues, yet
also integrated into the communities, so that the manpower
remained available for employment and could contribute to, instead
of being a drain upon,the local economies.
Charles XI had got the stability he sought. He had a sustainable
military establishment, considerable enough to deter potential
enemies, and attract allies. The absolutism was clearly based on a
broad measure of consent. The nobility suffered heavy loss of prop
erty, and some felt aggrieved, but their status as the leading Estate
remained unchallenged, and in compensation, they could enjoy rea
sonably paid careers in state service. The commonerscarried a heavy
load of taxation and services, but the lottery of conscription was
lifted, and their obligations were legally fixed forall time. Further the
public service was meritocratic, and able commoners could enter and
rise into the nobility, while the majority who remained in subordi
nation, never lost sight of the reality that the alternative to royal
absolutism was aristocratic oligarchy, and they knew what they
preferred—the old common wisdom, ‘better one master than a
hundred’.
