The Peace of Westphalia considerably strengthened Sweden's position in Scandinavia and the Baltic. To the earlier conquests in the east—Ingria, Estonia and Livonia—were added western Pomerania, Bremen, Verden and Wismar in the Empire; the total population amounted to about 2,500,000 people, half of whom were Swedish. The peace did not, however, solve Sweden's problems at home and abroad, but created fresh problems. The new German provinces made Sweden a member of the Empire and she became more deeply involved in the intrigues and negotiations between the princes and the Emperor. Moreover, the new provinces were coveted by others. Brandenburg remained discontented because she failed to gain western Pomerania. Denmark and the Lüneburg princes wanted Bremen and Verden. In the east the fear persisted that Russia—after the ‘Time of Troubles’—would renew her attempts to break through to the Baltic.

Furthermore, Swedish successes in the Thirty Years War had not terminated the struggle for hegemony in the north between Sweden and Denmark, which dated from the fourteenth century. By the Peace of Brömsebro (1645) Denmark ceded to Sweden freedom from customs dues in the Sound as well as the Baltic islands of Gotland and Ösel, Jämtland, Härjedalen and Halland (the latter for thirty years). The gains of 1648 also meant that Sweden could attack Denmark from the south; but even so Denmark still constituted the greatest threat to Sweden's position. Denmark was eager to reconquer the provinces lost in 1645 and—since the struggle was fundamentally one over hegemony in the north—she necessarily considered it a fight for existence. Thus the Scandinavian countries, during the whole period to the outbreak of the Great Northern War in 1700, attempted to isolate each other by concluding alliances with each other's enemies among the European powers.

When the Peace of Westphalia was signed on 24 October 1648 and the warring parties finally laid down their arms, a settlement was reached which, in its essential features, was to last until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. For a century and longer civil war had been endemic in Germany, and there were to be many minor upheavals in the future; but until 1740, when Frederick II of Prussia chose to invade Silesia and to break the peace of the Empire, that peace was not disturbed by any major internal war. Yet, while the conditions of the Empire were settled by the peace of 1648, the same did not apply to the conditions of Europe. Wars continued in the west and in the east, against France and against the Turks; and Louis XIV found it easy to find allies among the German princes and to use them against the Empire which he was fighting. Internally, however, an equilibrium was reached between the Emperor and the princes, between Protestants and Catholics, between the centrifugal forces and those aiming at more centralisation. A compromise solution was found which, by its very durability, proved that it was not unsatisfactory.

In practice the Empire now consisted of Germany and the Habsburg hereditary lands: its frontiers had contracted; but Switzerland and the Netherlands had long ceased to be parts of the Empire, and the official recognition of this fact was an advantage, and not a loss. It was much more important that parts of Alsace were ceded to France, and western Pomerania with Stettin, Wismar and the duchies of Bremen and Verden to Sweden.

In the history of philosophy the seventeenth century is associated with the names of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Locke. The doctrines of these philosophers mark a momentous turning-point in European thought: they were developed in close interrelation with the contemporary ‘scientific revolution’; they introduced new basic concepts and methods of knowledge; they also had a profound effect upon the course of modern philosophy as a whole.

The process which led to the Cartesian interpretation of the world had two main aspects. In the first place, the conception of nature as an organism, characteristic of the early phase of Renaissance thought, gave way to the view that all phenomena are to be conceived on the analogy of the movements of a machine. Accordingly, on this view, causes were antecedent motions and, as such, efficient causes: all physical change was explained as the effect of the motions and impacts of matter in space and time. In proportion as the mechanistic view prevailed, the appeal of the traditional doctrine of final causes, namely the doctrine that processes in nature are directed by a tendency to attain a specific end, diminished. The new method of explanation was also attractive because it seemed particularly successful. It enabled a scientist not only to interpret but, in Francis Bacon's phrase, to dominate nature. The underlying assumption was that, if it is known how phenomena are generated, it is possible to predict them on any particular occasion and in this sense to gain power over nature.

For both Catholics and Protestants, the Peace of Westphalia was a bitter disappointment. Recourse to the sword, instead of bringing final victory as the extremists of each confession had hoped, had merely ensured the perpetuation of religious division; and now Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists had to accept co-existence in a Europe where ideas, and the institutions embodying those ideas, were markedly changing. But the forty years after the peace were not characterised only by interdenominational hatred and attempts to end it; they were also years of tension between Church and State in several countries of western and southern Europe. In some the conflict was a simple one between the secular authority and one officially recognised Church; in others the situation was complicated by the existence of religious minorities, either Catholic, or Protestant, or both.

At first sight there might appear to be little reason in this period for an intensification of, or even a notable alteration in, this endemic problem of the relationship of Church and State. The mid-seventeenth century was not shaken by an acute and general crisis, such as the Reformation. Yet important if not spectacular changes were taking place. One of the most significant was the tendency in several countries, Protestant as well as Catholic, for government to become more absolute and thus less inclined to tolerate rival or extraneous authorities, of which the churches, with their claim to men's deepest loyalties, were the most important. Louis XIV put the case for the State thus: ‘Kings are absolute seigneurs, and from their nature have full and free disposal of all property both secular and ecclesiastical, to use it as wise dispensers, that is to say, in accordance with the requirements of their State’; and again, ‘those mysterious names, the Franchises and Liberties of the Church… have equal reference to all the faithful whether they be laymen or tonsured, who are all equally sons of this common Mother; but… they exempt neither the one nor the other from subjection to Sovereigns, to whom the Gospel itself precisely enjoins that they should submit themselves’.

The year 1660 was notable in the annals of French civilisation. Molière's Les Précieuses Ridicules was performed in the presence of the young Louis XIV, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry published the tenth and final volume of her Clélie, thus ending the four years of expectancy and suspense in which her many readers had been held. In the following year, France, disillusioned by civil wars and emancipated from the dominion of an unpopular minister, Mazarin, eagerly welcomed her young, energetic king, who gave promise of providing, in abundant measure, that military glory and national prestige which were the best antidotes to the national malady of l'ennui. In literature, a brilliant school of writers, endowed with intelligence and wit and supported by royal patronage, was to discredit the more prolix and sententious of their predecessors and to confer an enduring lustre on a court, the most magnificent in modern times.

Yet the glory was to prove short-lived. Thirty years later most of the great men had gone or had retired into obscurity. Molière died in 1673; Racine, who survived until 1699, was unproductive in the last decade of his life; Boileau, on retirement to his suburban house at Auteuil in 1685, could look back on his best achievements; La Fontaine, having lost his patroness in 1693, sought refuge in repentance and theological studies; even Madame de Sevigne wrote few letters after 1691, for in that year she joined her beloved daughter in Provence. At court, the buoyancy and vivacity of earlier years were replaced by a régime of sombre pietism, and France seemed to follow the mood of her king. There was still, it is true, much intellectual activity in France—who could prevent Frenchmen from thinking?—but the lead was no longer taken by Versailles.

During the two years that followed his election as Emperor in 1519 Charles V handed over to his brother Ferdinand all the hereditary Habsburg lands in central Europe. By securing his own election to the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary in 1526 Ferdinand I completed the Habsburg Empire. His was the cadet branch of his House and his dominions were remote from the Atlantic seaboard, economically backward, riven by social and domestic strife, devastated and crippled by the Turks. During the Thirty Years War, except for Wallenstein's brief heyday, Austria played only a secondary part and emerged from that war maimed, depopulated and impoverished. But by the end of the century the Habsburg monarchy became one of the great powers, hailed as the saviour of Christendom in the last and only permanently successful crusade, wooed as an ally by the maritime powers, feared as a rival by France. It is true that the Habsburgs climbed to this position of power by destroying the Bohemian nation and abrogating the liberties of Hungary, but the means and the persons engaged in this achievement make the history of the Habsburg lands in the second half of the seventeenth century an important and illuminating chapter in the history of European society.

Few dynasties have bred more truly to type than the Habsburgs. The three rulers whose reigns, uninterrupted by dynastic disputes or debilitating minorities, extended from 1619 to 1705 all exhibited the virtues and weaknesses typical of their line; they were conscientious, convinced of the dignity, rights and responsibilities of the office to which they devoutly believed themselves to be divinely appointed; they were sincere Christians and devoted Catholics; their private morals were impeccable.

In the middle of the seventeenth century Poland-Lithuania (that is, the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania) covered some 350,000 square miles and was, after Muscovite Russia, the largest State in Europe. It extended from the basin of the Warta to the most westerly tributaries of the Volga and probably had about 10 million inhabitants, of whom less than half were Poles. To the east of the Polish Bug and the San there lived Lithuanians, White Russians and Ukrainians, each settled in separate regions. The Poles in this eastern territory were chiefly resident in the towns, but elsewhere they were scattered throughout the country. Poles were strongly represented among the nobility of the eastern regions, owing partly to the Polonisation of the native Lithuanian, White Russian and Ukrainian nobility in the seventeenth century. Of the remaining non-Polish nationalities only the Jews and the Germans were of numerical significance. The Jews, estimated at 5 per cent of the total population of Poland-Lithuania at that time, were predominantly to be found in the eastern regions of the country; the Germans, on the other hand, resided chiefly in the western districts, particularly in Greater Poland and Polish Prussia. The German element in the population increased during the seventeenth century as a result of further immigration from Germany. The ratio of the nationalities corresponded by and large to that of the creeds. Apart from an insignificant percentage, the Poles and Lithuanians were members of the Roman Catholic Church, whilst the White Russians and Ukrainians belonged partly to the Uniate and partly to the Orthodox Church. Amongst the Germans Lutheranism had a strong following.

To the year 1648 belongs one of the dramatic experiments of the scientific revolution. F. Perier, brother-in-law of Blaise Pascal by whom the experiment had been proposed to him, climbed the Puy-de-Dôme in Auvergne bearing some glass tubes and a quantity of mercury. He found as he ascended the mountain that at each successive station the height of the mercury in his barometer was less, until at the summit it stood at only 23 inches. This was ocular testimony to the truth of the view that the column of mercury within the barometric tube was supported by the pressure of the atmosphere outside the tube: the column fell as it was carried higher in the ocean of air, so reducing that pressure. The phenomenon itself had been discovered in Italy; there was nothing very original in Pascal's prediction that the height of the mercury would decrease above sea-level; the experiment to test it was simple in the extreme. Yet it had not been made before, it was made in France, and it was widely publicised. It was characteristic of the time that it should be so, for this was the peak of one of the great creative periods in French science. The transformation of science had been first undertaken in Italy and in Germany; religious fanaticism had stultified the promising renaissance of the sciences in the Paris of the mid-sixteenth century and postponed to the reign of Louis XIII the development of anti-Aristotelian philosophy, the pursuit of the great Copernican debate, and the introduction of experimental inquiry. From this time, however, as in politics, manners and the arts of civilisation Paris became the arbiter of Europe, so in science France rose to a commanding position, to retire in turn before the challenge of English empiricism.

Rome was the centre where Baroque art originated and from where it spread. The great non-Italian artists of the first half of the seventeenth century, Rubens and Rembrandt, Velasquez and Poussin, could not have developed as they did without direct or indirect contact with the artistic events in Rome. Even though conditions radically changed after 1650, Rome must be given a large share in any consideration of European art during the second half of the century.

All the great artists of the first generation of the Baroque—Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Caravaggio (1573–1610), Guido Reni (1575–1642), and the architect Carlo Maderao (1556–1629)—died long before 1650. The Fleming Rubens (b. 1577) died in Antwerp in 1640. Most of the great masters of the next generation, those mainly born in the last decade of the sixteenth century, were still alive, among them Alessandro Algardi (1595– 1654), Andrea Sacchi (1599–1661), Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), the Neapolitan sculptor and architect Cosimo Fanzago (1591–1678), the Venetian architect Baldassare Longhena (1598–1682), and the greatest of all, Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). Of the non-Italians of this almost unbelievably strong generation Velasquez (b. 1599) died in 1660, Poussin (b. 1593) in 1665, Frans Hals (b. 1580), the oldest of this group, in 1666, Rembrandt (b. 1606) in 1669, and Claude Lorrain (b. 1600) in 1682. All these artists reached their full maturity in the fourth and fifth decades and only few lived through the third and into the fourth quarter of the century.

In the sixteenth century the Portuguese changed the course of the Asian trade with Europe, but did not significantly alter its content; they broke in upon the profitable port-to-port trade in the East, but did not fundamentally alter its pattern. From the end of that century their Dutch and English competitors more radically rearranged the Asian carrying trade, promoting the sale of Bengal silk in Japan and of Javanese sugar in Persia. They also put more Asian wares upon the European market, supplementing Malabar with Sumatran pepper, introducing indigo and sugar, opening a trade in that useful ballast commodity, saltpetre. The Portuguese had found coarse Indian cottons saleable in Africa and their Brazilian colonies; the newcomers found such cottons suitable for Europe—plain for sheets, towels and napkins, coloured for hangings, quilts and furnishing fabrics.

A still more dramatic expansion in the flow of Asian goods to Europe took place after 1650. Pepper and spices shared in that expansion, though they no longer dominated the sales in Amsterdam and London. Saltpetre continued to be important because in Bihar were found new sources of supply, capable of meeting the demand caused by the growing scale and intensity of war in Europe. A similar discovery, that of cheap raw silk in Bengal, also came to be exploited, as a succession of able Mughal governors progressively cleared the province of Arakanese and Portuguese pirates. The supply of Persian raw silk to north Italy and France had been partially diverted by the Dutch and English in the 1630's; the arrival of cheaper silk from Bengal further upset the old pattern. The cheaper and more plentiful supply, together with the influx of skilled refugees and the temporary protection caused by war in Italy, fostered the growth of a considerable English silk industry.

The last fifty years of the seventeenth century were so eventful and saw such alterations in the outward appearance of western and central European life that prima facie this may be regarded as a significant period in the development of social classes and in the related development of institutions. This presumption may be tested by tracing some of the major changes and their connections, and it will be convenient to begin with the most obvious, the changes in the social aspects of war. It has been written, and it may be accepted as established, that from somewhere about 1560 to somewhere about 1660 Europe underwent a ‘military revolution’. Armament, tactics and strategy had changed. They now required new kinds of discipline, a new organisation of fleets and standing armies, new and more intensive applications of technical and general knowledge. The financial and administrative machinery of supply, the systems of political control and the social composition of the armed forces were all remodelled.

The effects of the military revolution were shown by a salient fact of social history: armies and fleets were much larger than before. Leaving out of account the armies of the Turks, we may say that the largest force ever previously united under a single command had been the 175,000 men under the orders of Gustavus Adolphus in 1632, but this was a momentary combination which was not maintained, whereas, in his navy and his army, Louis XIV kept more than double that number in service for years together. There were some countries, such as Spain, which were unable to enrol as many men as they had done before; but there were new military powers, such as Brandenburg-Prussia, which had 2000 men after it made peace in 1640 and 30,000 when it was at peace in 1688.

The second half of the seventeenth century, which in many European countries witnessed rapid developments in the social, economic and political fields, was in the Dutch Republic a period of consolidation rather than change. The institutional, economic and social framework virtually remained what it had been in the early seventeenth century. The great statesmen who dominated the scene, John de Witt and William III, did not reorganise the political system, and even the issues which divided the Dutch political parties (the republican party and the party of the Orangists) differed only slightly from those which had separated Olden-barnevelt and Maurice of Orange in 1618, Amsterdam and William II in 1650. There were, no doubt, vehement political conflicts in the second half of the century, but on the whole these were conflicts between rival cliques and personalities within the governing class rather than between social groups and important political principles. It is not difficult to explain this situation. By 1650 the Dutch Republic had reached a point in its economic expansion beyond which it could not easily develop, but it had been unable to eliminate the uncertainties and tensions in its political system which had already caused dangerous clashes.

The complexity of Dutch life makes it very difficult to describe the social structure of the country. The differences between the various provinces were so fundamental that no broad generalisations can do justice to the facts. The interests, the power, even the language of the cattle-breeding gentlemen-farmers of Friesland, or of the nobility of Guelderland with its important feudal privileges, are hardly comparable with those of the urban patricians of Holland.

Until the beginning of the seventeenth century the Electorate of Brandenburg—stretching from the Old Mark (west of the Elbe) to the New Mark (east of the Oder)—was one of the largest German principalities and, as one of the seven Electorates, possessed a certain influence in German and Imperial affairs. But it was situated in the most backward corner of the Empire, the ‘colonial’ north-east, thinly populated and cut off from the sea and all important trade routes. Its towns were small and declining, had lost all contacts with the Hanseatic League, and had been reduced to obedience by the Hohenzollern Electors in the fifteenth century. The country had no natural resources; its soil was proverbially poor, much of it being either sandy or water-logged. The peasants had been reduced to serfdom; and on the ruins of their freedom and of the towns' wealth the nobility had established its rule, not only over the peasants, but also over the Electors and the towns. This rule was exercised, as elsewhere in Germany, through the Estates which dominated the financial administration, the domestic, and even the foreign policy of the Electorate. The east-German—and the Polish—noblemen were interested in demesne farming and in the sale of their produce, especially corn and beer, hence opposed to any ventures in the field of foreign policy and to any military duties. Because of their trading interests, they were in favour of the maintenance of peace and good relations with their neighbours. They constituted a kind of squirearchy which treated the Elector as primus inter pares—as the Polish nobility treated their king. Within the Estates, the towns were much too weak to render any effective opposition to the ruling nobility, the prelates having disappeared as an Estate with the introduction of the Reformation.

The domestic history of the restored Stuarts cannot be understood without an appreciation of the influence of the French and of the Dutch on English politics. This was equally true of the colonies in North America. There the French colony of Canada, if thinly peopled, was firmly established and vigorous. Indian alliances, the necessities of the fur trade, and the adventurous characters of the French missionaries and fur-traders, led the French towards expansion inland, while the character of the English settlers, their social and economic pattern, and the position of their colonies near open navigable water emphasised their tendency to settle in rigid communities. The English looked towards the Atlantic for trade and supplies, and when they spread inland it was a slow but possessive movement, taking Indian lands for settlement where the French were content to explore, to trade and to intermingle.

By comparison with the Canadian population of about 2000 in 1660, the English colonies were strong and populous. The New England group (Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Haven, Maine and New Hampshire) had reached a population of about 20,800 by 1640, and the southern (Chesapeake) colonies of Virginia and Maryland about 17,300, while the British West Indies already had a total of about 38,000. But there were serious differences between the New England colonies, there was little in common between the New England colonies and the southern plantations, and even the English position on the coast was broken by the French colony of Acadia and by the Dutch colony of New Netherland, commanding the fine harbour of New Amsterdam.

With the death of Cardinal Mazarin in March 1661 began the personal rule of the young Louis XIV. During the eighteen years which had passed since, as a boy of five, he had succeeded to the throne, effective power had been in the hands of the cardinal, first during the regency of Anne of Austria, and then for ten more years after the king had attained his legal majority in 1651. The opening years of Mazarin's rule, down to the collapse of the Fronde in 1653, had been a period of disorder, culminating in civil war. Not only had Mazarin been twice compelled to leave the country, but the absolute form of government established by Louis XIII and Richelieu had been gravely threatened; there had been barricades in Paris, and with the hostility to absolutism of the great nobles and the Parlements, the fate which had befallen the Stuart monarch on this side of the Channel seemed for a time to hang over his young French nephew.

Yet, thanks in part to the guile of Mazarin, the French monarchy emerged from the Fronde stronger than ever before; five years of civil war had brought nothing but devastation to considerable areas of France, and the great mass of the population longed only for peace. The opponents of Mazarin were too disunited to continue the struggle; within eight years of the collapse of the Fronde France entered upon the most absolute reign in her history. In foreign affairs Mazarin had brought to an end the war with the Emperor, begun by Richelieu, by the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; two years before his death he had concluded with Spain the Treaty of the Pyrenees which not only put an end to a quarter of a century of war between the two countries, but marked the end of Spanish hegemony in Europe and of the threat of encirclement to France through the alliance of the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs.

The accession to the throne of the second tsar of the Romanov dynasty, the sixteen-year-old Alexis Michailovich, took place without any incident. At home the dynasty was firmly established. In her foreign relations Russia maintained, during the first years of Alexis's reign (1645–76), the peace so dearly bought by Michael Feodorovich: in 1617 Moscow had resigned the Baltic littoral to Sweden, and in 1634 had ceded to Poland the districts of Smolensk and Novgorod-Seversk, the key to the Dnieper basin. Peace with the Ottoman Empire, overlord of the Tatars, had been assured by the abandonment of Azov (1642). Though Moscow endeavoured to utilise the Don Cossacks as a shield against Tatars and Turks, she was ever ready to disavow their actions in Constantinople, to avoid a serious attack upon her southern borderlands. With the exception of the region of the Don Cossacks, the European frontiers of Russia remained essentially the same as at the death of Ivan IV (1584).

In Siberia, on the other hand, the area under Russian sway had been greatly extended: in 1645 Poyarkov reached the Amur; in 1648 Okhotsk was founded on the Pacific shore and Dezhnev sailed around the northeastern tip of Asia. A few fortified strongpoints sufficed to maintain Russian rule over the sparse nomad population. In the remoter areas Moscow's actual authority was of course weak, but such political organisation as existed was from the start highly centralised; from 1637 onwards Siberia was governed from a special office in Moscow. The Russian settlers enjoyed neither political nor judicial autonomy, nor did they have any special colonial status. Siberia was treated as an Imperial province whose political structure evolved only gradually.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the United Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) was the most powerful European institution in Asia. The strength of the company was based on its seapower, but in the territorial sense its activities in Asia had their centre at Batavia, in West Java. From Batavia and the fortress of Malacca (captured from the Portuguese in 1641) the Dutch were able to dominate the Straits of Sunda and Malacca and the seas between Borneo and Sumatra, through which shipping moving from the Indian Ocean into the Eastern Seas, or coming from the Moluccas or the China Sea to the west, had to pass. From this centre they were able to prevent their Portuguese and English rivals from maintaining any significant trading connections with the Indonesian Archipelago, and were themselves well placed to develop a commercial system with factories stretching from Japan to Persia. In the eyes of the company's servants the most important part of this commercial system was the Moluccas, the fabulous ‘spice islands’. The company's hold on the Banda Islands gave it a monopoly of the supply of nutmeg and its by-product mace, whilst Amboina, Ceram and its smaller neighbours in the southern Moluccas provided it with an ample supply of cloves. In the northern Moluccas the Dutch sought by agreements with the Sultan of Ternate, and by punitive military expeditions, to extirpate the cultivation of cloves on islands which they were not themselves exploiting, so as to obtain an effective monopoly of the product.

The age of Louis XIV was not a time of great novelty in international relations and international law. It cannot be compared, from this point of view, with the Renaissance. Permanent embassies, for example, were first established during the sixteenth century, and it was then that the idea of an equilibrium in certain parts of Europe—later called the ‘balance of power’—originated in Italy, and more particularly in Venice. For a long time sovereigns had been content to exchange ambassadors only on important occasions when, for instance, they wished to conclude a series of negotiations or to sign a treaty, the sovereign reserving to himself the right to ratify or to repudiate the decisions taken. But gradually, as ambassadors increased in number, it became common practice to send them for unlimited periods to permanent posts in the most important foreign capitals. On the death or the resignation of one of these ambassadors a successor would be immediately appointed, and in this way diplomacy became a career in which the greatest nobles sought to distinguish themselves. As ambassadors were usually loaded with honours there was no lack of candidates. The principal capitals were naturally the most sought after. Such posts called for no exceptional ability, but rather for listening, usually in silence, and only from time to time for speaking up, with a word of truth or falsehood as might be dictated by the circumstances. Yet many ambassadors became useful observers, and their despatches to their governments constitute for the historian of today one of the most important sources for the history of international relations. It was the Italians, especially the Venetians, who from the end of the fifteenth century began to appoint permanent ambassadors.