PROMETHEAN SPIRITUALITY AND THE EMERGENCY OF THE MODERN STATE

The pressure on seventeenth-century European states to increase their military capability resulted largely from the competitive nature of the European state system. The insecurity attendant from the inability of any power to establish a hegemonic position in Europe was particularly acute between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The nearly constant warfare of that period reflected the impact of successive bids to achieve dominance, first by Spain and then by France, as well as the political rivalries and religious tensions generated by the splitting of the Roman church into three major confessions. Still another, at first less obvious source of conflict was the growing international economic rivalry, which increasingly compelled European states to defend with force lucrative assets such as colonies or trading privileges in which they themselves had heavily invested. But despite often spectacular increases in the size of armed forces achieved by seventeenth-century European states, as we have seen in the case of the German princedoms, the states were usually able to acquire the resources to pay for their armaments through an intensification of traditionalistic forms of rule, without having to initiate fundamental social changes within their territories.