In the history of the events which changed the face of Europe around 1500, we must distinguish two interlocking developments. Besides the cultural transformation from which the term ‘Renaissance’ has been borrowed to describe the whole period, there was the emergence of the states-system of modern Europe. During the last decades of the fifteenth century, England, France, and Spain, after long and complex preparation, had attained national unification under strong monarchies. In addition, a bilingual state had grown up in the rich border-lands of France and Germany—the State of the dukes of Burgundy. Since France, with an estimated fifteen million inhabitants, was potentially far superior to any of her competitors and, indeed, represented a type of Great Power not yet realised elsewhere (there were only about three million inhabitants in England, six million in Spain, and hardly more than six million in the State of Burgundy with the inclusion of industrial Artois, Flanders, and Brabant), France's neighbour-states of necessity combined their resources. The German empire, France's only equal in population, could not serve as a piece on the new European chess-board because it was a loose federation of territorial states and half-independent cities under the Habs-burgs, who had little power as German emperors. In its Austrian and Alpine dominions, however, this house possessed the largest and strongest of the territorial states, and so the anti-French counterpoise was built upon a system of princely marriage alliances, first (1477) between Habsburg and Burgundy, and subsequently (1496) between Habsburg-Burgundy and Spain.

The so-called Saxon period of Polish history, from 1697 to 1763, was after 1717 one of uneasy peace, illusory prosperity and bad leadership, an era of decline during which Poland degenerated into Sarmatia—an earthly paradise for a minority of its inhabitants and a wild benighted squirearchy in the eyes of the outside world. The term ‘Gentry Democracy’ (demokracja szlachecka), sometimes used to describe Poland's Constitution between 1572 and the second half of the eighteenth century, is a complacent and self-contradictory misnomer, especially when applied to the years 1697–1763. This system at the best of times had never been a democracy but an aristocracy disguised as an elective monarchy which, in the second half of the seventeenth century, assumed the form of oligarchy and, in the first half of the eighteenth century, sank to the level of anarchy.

One of the principal defects and a distinctive feature of the Saxon period was the constant and fruitless attempt on the part of the leading families in the land to seize power for themselves. Their failure and the Crown's inability to subdue its enemies and enforce its own authority prolonged the struggle, absorbed the energy of the parties and finally brought the machinery of government to a standstill.

In the initial stages of the development of the Polish Republic, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the szlachta, although an aristocracy in relation to the country as a whole, enjoyed equality within their own class. By the beginning of the Saxon period, however, the szlachta were freer than ever but no longer equal.

Within twenty years of Charles VIII's invasion, Italians had begun to speak regretfully of the happy days which preceded the coming of the French. They looked back on the years before 1494 as an age of peace and prosperity, when endless opportunities were open to men of talent, and when life in court and city was marked by a round of novel and refined pleasures. Their view of the past was nostalgic, yet the second half of the fifteenth century may rightly be considered the heyday of Italian civilisation. During the forty years which lay between the Peace of Lodi (1454) and the French invasion, the rulers of Italy had done much to establish peace and order within their dominions and friendly relations with their neighbours. Quarrels between the various states were of less significance than the common interests which united them. Petty wars did not place serious hindrances in the way of the pursuit of wealth or the cultivation of the arts. Although the challenge to Italy's commercial supremacy was already formidable, the merchants had money to spend on pictures, books and building, whilst the princes used their earnings as mercenary captains to make their capitals centres of the art and learning of the Renaissance. The individual contribution to civilisation made by each state at a time when it was still independent and at peace bore fruit in the splendours of the early sixteenth century. A reverse side of the picture is the growing interest shown by foreign Powers in Italian affairs.

The mid-eighteenth century was a period when much thought was devoted to the nature of government. Probably the best known of the commentators was Montesquieu, who produced his De l'esprit des his in 1748; but the same kind of problem occupied many other writers, including Bielfeld, who produced his Institutions politiques between 1759 and 1774, d'Argenson, who wrote his Considerations sur le gouvernement ancien et present de la France in 1765, and F. K. von Moser who discussed the duties of a prince in his Der Herr und der Diener in 1759. Yet the problems which interested these contemporaries are not always those which seem most important to later observers, who have to consider the political and administrative developments which have taken place in Europe since 1789. To the modern observer the most characteristic features of the governmental institutions of the period 1713-65 are the very general acceptance of more or less absolute monarchy, the increasing administrative specialisation at the centre and the increasing effectiveness of governmental control in the provinces.

The inspiration behind the very generally held eighteenth-century idea of monarchy was still the belief that kings ruled by a right derived from God himself. This view had found expression in the sixteenth century, when Bodin had described the king as the image of God on earth, and in the seventeenth century, when the Parlement of Paris assured Louis XIV that the seat of His Majesty represented the throne of the living God, and that the orders of the kingdom rendered honour and respect to him as to a living divinity, or when Bossuet had declared that princes were sanctified by their charge as being representatives of the divine majesty appointed by Providence to carry out its purposes. It was still familiar and acceptable in most of Europe until 1789. Even the Encyclopédistes, though they did not hesitate to question the authority of the Church, did not, for the most part, criticise the excellence of monarchy as a form of government.

One problem of government which much interested politically-minded observers of the early eighteenth century was posed by England. In Sweden the elected Diet had, since 1718, made good its claim to control the king, but Sweden had thereafter declined as a Power. Poland, where the Diet could block any unpopular royal policy, was a by-word for weakness and anarchy, but England, though the parliament shared the government with the king, was steadily increasing in wealth and prestige. At the end of the seventeenth century the English were not regarded as models of political wisdom, yet these turbulent and seditious people had proved themselves the most formidable opponents of Louis XIV, were fast becoming the world's greatest colonial Power, increased yearly in wealth and nourished such geniuses as Locke and Newton. Locke's Essay concerning Humane Understanding, published in 1690 and immediately translated into French, had a formative influence upon the thought of a generation which hovered between traditional Christian metaphysic and the outright scepticism of Bayle; Newton's European reputation was achieved more slowly, but at no distant time he would be hailed as the prophet who had revealed the harmony of rational law behind the mysterious and chaotic face of nature. The time could not be long delayed when men would ask whether there might not be some link between these achievements and the political institutions of the country which produced them. In a more superficial way curiosity was stimulated by the influence of British party politics upon European affairs during the War of the Spanish Succession, and by the arrival, after 1714, of a new crop of Jacobite exiles who had, nevertheless, accepted the principles of limited monarchy.

The period between the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 and the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 witnessed the decline of Muslim rule in India and the growth of semi-independent ‘country powers’ owing little more than a vague allegiance to the enfeebled descendants of the Great Moguls at Delhi. The resultant anarchy enabled the French and English trading companies to intervene in Indian affairs. Their struggles for commercial and territorial supremacy ended in the victories of Clive by means of which the French were ousted from the Carnatic and the English East India Company became the de facto ruler of Bengal. It would, however, be incorrect to suppose that the disintegration of the Mogul Empire began with the death of Aurangzeb, for the anarchy that ensued was merely the acceleration of a decline that had been taking place for at least half a century. This cannot be fully appreciated without some knowledge of Akbar's policy.

The wise and necessary policy of the great Mogul Emperor Akbar was reversed by his immediate successors, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. He had deliberately accepted compromise as the basis of his empire, and by his policy of sulh-i-kull (universal toleration) and his abolition of the jizya, the detested poll-tax on non-Muslims, he had striven to conciliate the subject Hindu population and to secure their loyalty to his rule. It was his successors' gradual departure from the main principles of his rule, culminating in the religious and political intolerance of Aurangzeb, that eventually produced a far-reaching Hindu reaction and provoked the Marathas of the Deccan and the Rajputs, Jats and Sikhs of northern India to raise the standard of revolt, from the Maratha principality of Tanjore in the south to the plains of the Panjab in the distant north.

Whatever its ultimate origins, it is undisputed that the intellectual movement which eventually blossomed into the Renaissance began to be first noticeable in Italy during the fourteenth century. Its real development occurred, however, during the fifteenth century. By 1450 humanism had already been dominating Italian culture for some time, and during the second half of the century it began to penetrate north of the Alps. Outside Italy, however, humanist development followed different lines from those pursued in its country of origin. This was only natural, since whereas in Italy humanism had gradually grown out of medieval learning, in the other countries of western Europe it was suddenly brought to bear upon the structure of different traditions. Inevitably, there were occasional clashes between the followers of the new ideas and the upholders of the older ones. Humanism was to prevail, and by 1520 it had considerably changed the intellectual life of western Europe.

The political structure of Italy made humanism take pronounced local characteristics in its various centres. At Naples, Urbino, Mantua, Ferrara, and Milan, humanism assumed a courtly complexion. In Rome humanism naturally found inspiration in the ancient ruins, showed little interest in Greek before the days of Leo X, and gravitated towards the papal court, just as in Florence the patronage of the Medici drew the leading scholars within their orbit. In Venice, on the other hand, the pursuit of the humanities, which incidentally showed a strong bias in favour of Greek studies, was confined to some members of the nobility, to some scholars engaged in school teaching, and to the learned men assisting Aldus with his publications.

The end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth saw Europe at a crossroads, cultural as well as political and religious. The medieval traditions were failing, though not yet dead, and for many years ‘modern’ literature was still to feel influences which had informed the writings of the Middle Ages. The most striking of these were the spirit of free and often licentious realism embodied in fabliau, novella or farce, a realism which in one or other of its many forms was to enliven the work of a Machiavelli, a Folengo, a Rabelais and a Cervantes; the spirit of chivalry, courtesy and gallantry which, although chivalry itself was dying or dead, continued to find an increasingly artificial expression in lyric and romance until it was given new life by the influx of Platonic notions; and the moralising spirit with its inescapable concomitants of allegory and symbol. But other phenomena which were appearing in different parts of Europe deserve notice. Not unconnected, at any rate as a parallel mental tendency, with the decline of the scholastic philosophy into formalism was the reduction of poetry to conformity with highly complex rules. In some countries poetry was frankly regarded as a ‘second rhetoric’ and hence subject to similar rules; the ideal became the skilful and ingenious manipulation of words to fit a complicated structure of phrase, metre and rhyme which all but killed poetry. This formalism was to be seen not only in the lesser Petrarchans of Italy, the Grands Rhétoriqueurs of France and the Netherlandish Rederijkers, but also in the decaying Minnesang and the developing Meistergesang of Germany and the bardic developments of later fifteenth-century Wales.

For the thirty-five years before its transformation under the effects of the battle of Mohács, Europe east of the frontiers of the Empire and north of the lines reached at that date by the Turkish armies fell into two parts, sharply distinguished politically and even psychologically: on the one hand, the Russian lands which the grand dukes of Moscow were welding into a compact, disciplined and self-regarding world on its own; on the other, the vast and complex area comprising the kingdoms of Poland-Lithuania, Hungary and Bohemia—for the connection between Bohemia and the Empire was during this period purely technical, whereas it was intimately joined with Hungary and in close relationship with Poland. These three kingdoms were linked together, albeit loosely and, as the future was to prove, transiently, by dynastic ties; the Crowns of Hungary and Bohemia were united, and that of Poland held by brothers or uncles of the Hungarian king, all these rulers belonging to the Polish-Lithuanian house of Jagiello. The principality of Moldavia alternated between semi-independence and vassalage, now to the Porte, now to Hungary, now to Poland.

It is permissible to confine our account of the easternmost of these two divisions to a very few words, for the rise of Moscow and the growth, round the Muscovite nucleus, of the Russian State, in which the whole history of this area resides, were processes which had begun long before 1490 and were not completed until long after 1526: the period described here constitutes only a term in a steady progression. It was, indeed, a brilliant one.

From the beginning of modern European history the antagonism of France and the house of Habsburg had been axiomatic. The reconciliation of these Powers is therefore usually regarded as the greatest of all diplomatic revolutions. Austria broke off her entente with Britain while France renounced her alliance with Prussia in 1756. During the War of the Austrian Succession the old alliances had not run smoothly. Britain and Austria had agreed that the Dutch had let them down, but had agreed in nothing else. Britain complained that the Austrians had demanded extortionate subsidies, had never kept their contingents up to the stipulated strength, and had concentrated on the war in Germany. Austria retorted that Britain had never given her adequate support, had forced her by threats to make territorial concessions to her enemies, had broken Carteret's promises to secure compensation for Austrian losses and had finally deserted her altogether. A new element had however appeared during the war which was to modify Anglo-Austrian relations. Prussia had emerged with startling suddenness as a Great Power and the era of ‘dualism’ had begun in Germany. This did not merely make Austria a less powerful and efficientally, but gave Britain what she had not hitherto had—an alternative to the Austrian alliance against France. All through the war some British politicians had advocated the substitution of alliance with Prussia for alliance with Austria. Even those who did not go so far as this admitted the ‘lameness’ of the old system, caused by Prussian desertion, and made frantic and unavailing efforts to bring about a genuine reconciliation between the two German Great Powers.

The half century which ended at the Treaty of Utrecht had been a formative and decisive period in the history of world trade. An analysis of the structure of seaborne commerce in the mid-seventeenth century would have revealed that it was preponderantly European in character and that a large part of the total volume was handled by the Dutch. The prosperity of Amsterdam derived primarily from the exchange of bulk commodities from northern Europe—timber, naval stores, and corn—against the produce of southern and western Europe—the salt of Biscay, the wool and silver of Spain, the herrings caught by Dutch fishermen off the British coasts, the wines and textiles of the Mediterranean. On the firm foundation of these bulk trades the Dutch had built up a vast entrepôt trade, served by a merchant fleet which was calculated in one contemporary estimate to be double that of England and nine times that of France. To this entrepôt were drawn other commodities—the cloths of England and France in particular—as well as an increasing flow of colonial wares—the spices brought from the East by the Dutch East India Company, and the tobacco, sugar and dyes of the Caribbean. Throughout the century an economic organisation was steadily built up to deal with the unprecedented scope and variety of the entrepôt trade. The Bourse, a central banking system, and a money-market together constituted its financial apparatus. The merchants themselves were divided into broad groups corresponding to the nature of their operations. The so-called ‘Second-Hand’ merchants specialised in dealings in imported goods which they stored until they were sold, sorted and graded them, or arranged for them to be processed or refined by local industries.

The original Cambridge Modern History, to which the present series of volumes is the successor, was planned by the first Lord Acton in the year 1896, and its publication was completed when the atlas volume appeared in 1912. It has been familiar ever since as a standard work, both a book of reference and a book to read, and it was the most influential survey in the English language of the history of the five previous centuries as they appeared to the scholars of that time. In British universities history, as a subject for examinations, was then attracting considerable, and growing, numbers of candidates. The same interest spread downwards into the schools and outwards through the ranks of educated men and women, bringing with it a demand for historical books and for new kinds of historical books. This change in the content of education was due to many changes in the public mind. One body of educational reformers promoted the teaching of history, while another promoted that of natural science, as alternatives to the more established subjects, especially the Greek and Latin classics; but the propaganda within the educational world echoed opinions which were current outside it. There was a utilitarian demand for more knowledge of history, appropriate enough at a time when British governments were assuming new functions at home and becoming more closely involved in international politics, so that the public had to discuss many issues which could scarcely be explained except in their historical setting.

In the early eighteenth century the western Mediterranean and Italy were dominated by Spain, where the new Bourbon dynasty, galvanised into activity by the ambition of Elizabeth Farnese, achieved a remarkable revival. From 1714, when she arrived in Spain as the second wife of Philip V, till 1746, when the death of her husband removed her from the centre of Spanish political life, Elizabeth and a series of able advisers acted with an energy and daring that gave Spain the initiative in the diplomatic negotiations affecting the Mediterranean region. Because of her family connections with Parma, Piacenza and Tuscany Elizabeth's ambitions were focused on those territories, and Italy was thus affected by the newly revived Spanish diplomacy. Portugal, on the contrary, though it gave a queen to the second effective Bourbon king of Spain, was little concerned in the Mediterranean diplomacy of the period. Portugal was satisfied to have regained her independence. Her colony of Brazil was providing her with a very large income and until 1750 she was content to enjoy independence and prosperity, taking very little part in European diplomacy and making very little contribution to European civilisation. After that date, with the advent of Pombal, Portugal suddenly outstripped Spain in reforming activity.

It was a very remarkable achievement by Elizabeth Farnese and her husband's chief ministers to gain the diplomatic initiative for Spain in the early eighteenth century, for at the end of the reign of Charles II Spain's economic resources had been in a state of almost total ruin. In 1692 the Crown had for the third time declared itself bankrupt although during the seventeenth century the weight of taxation had been increased considerably. The alcabala tax on all sales had been increased to 11 per cent in 1639 and to 14 per cent in 1663.

The settlements signed in Utrecht left Spanish America intact, but there were three main causes of dispute between the European Powers in the Caribbean. The first was between Spain and the rest, arising from the determination of the Spaniards to uphold a strict monopoly of the trade of their own possessions, and to take all necessary measures to defend the monopoly against other maritime traders. English, French, Dutch and Danes, on the other hand, were equally determined to break into the monopoly, either by extracting concessions from the Spanish Government, or by smuggling, or by a combination of the two. It is surprising that open conflict was not more frequent. The obvious inability of the Spaniards to maintain their monopoly in its entirely gave rise to the second dispute; that between the other Caribbean Powers over which of them should profit by Spain's commercial weakness. In this dispute England and France were the chief contenders, and their distrust of one another partly explains why neither of them quarrelled seriously with Spain for a generation. England and France were the principal rivals also in the third dispute, or group of disputes, over the possession of West Indian islands not occupied by Spaniards.

The immense importance attached to these disputes throughout the eighteenth century is at first sight hard to explain. The wealth of Spanish America was traditionally exaggerated, of course, and when buccaneering ceased to be a semi-respectable profession, trade seemed the only obvious way of securing a share of that wealth.

This picture of the art of war and the social foundations of the armed forces in the eighteenth century has been drawn from a study of the conditions in England, France, and Prussia: conditions in the Austrian, Russian and other armies, though different in detail, were not different in essence.

A note of leisure characterised eighteenth-century warfare, both on land and at sea, until the Revolutionary wars, first of America, then of France, introduced a sense of energy such as the preceding years had never known, and began that ideological warfare characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas in modern times the function of generals is to win campaigns by decisive battles, in the eighteenth century few would have questioned a saying of the great duke of Alva, quoted with approval by Lord Hardwicke to the duke of Newcastle in September 1760: ‘It is the business of a general always to get the better of his enemy, but not always to fight, and if he can do his business without fighting, so much the better.’

At sea, Clarendon's views in his verdict on Blake, written in the preceding century, also still held good. Blake, according to Clarendon, was ‘the first man that declin'd the old track…and despised those rules which had been long in practice, to keep his ship and his men out of danger; which had been held in former times a point of great ability and circumspection; as if the principal art requisite in the captain of a ship had been to be sure to come home again’. Armies and navies were expensive necessities for the limited resources of eighteenth-century governments; military forces and ships represented a heavy investment in time and money, and if lost in action could not be easily replaced.

The period of Italian art with which these pages are concerned is usually called ‘High Renaissance’. In the course of the fifteenth century a long chain of ‘Early Renaissance’ artists, mainly of Florentine descent, had concentrated on a visual as well as theoretical conquest of nature. Their work formed the basis for a great idealistic style which began to emerge from about 1490 onwards and was nearing its end at the time of Raphael's death in 1520. It was given fullest expression during the decade 1500 to 1510, and the names of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante, Giorgione and Titian, round which legions of minor stars of considerable brilliance revolve, indicate its climax. Modern interpreters have excellently analysed the truly classical qualities of this style which combines, like Greek art of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., a spiritual and formal dignity, harmony and equipoise never before or after equalled in the history of post-classical art. It is easier to describe this phenomenon than to explain it; nor can an explanation be offered here. But while older writers regarded it mainly and too simply as a revival of the pagan art of antiquity, more recent studies have begun to throw light on the complexities of the style by investigating the intentions of its creators. In following this line of approach, stylistic appreciations, biographical details and chronology have on the whole been dispensed with in what follows.

Renaissance architecture is usually described as a ‘rebirth’ of ancient architecture. This statement finds support in the writings of contemporary architects themselves, who all professed that they were returning to the ‘ancient manner of building’, after a long period of decline. However, if one compares a Roman temple with the highest class of centrally-planned Renaissance church such as Bramante's design for St Peter's (1505), S. Maria della Consolazione at Todi (1508 ff.), perhaps also designed by him, or Antonio da Sangallo's Madonna di S. Biagio at Montepulciano (1518 ff.), it needs real sophistication to discover points of contact between these buildings.

It was not strange that the unexpected death of Charles VI in October 1740 led to a war. Though the Pragmatic Sanction had been guaranteed by most European Powers, respect for treaties seemed an inadequate safeguard of a State that was ill-prepared to resist aggression. Maria Theresa inherited an empty treasury and a weak and demoralised army. Her father's ministers, whom she continued in office, were old and incompetent. She herself had received no political training, and her husband Francis was an unpopular mediocrity. What made her position worse was that she could not count on the loyalty of her subjects. Many of the nobles in Austria and Bohemia were ready to submit to a rival claimant, Charles Albert, elector of Bavaria. The Magyar nobility appeared more likely to be eager to weaken Habsburg authority in Hungary than to defend Maria Theresa. Charles Albert, on his part, had made no secret of his intention to claim to be the heir of Charles VI; bad though that claim was, he genuinely believed in it. But by himself he could do nothing: he was in debt; his forces were weak; his generals and ministers incapable. His dependence was on French support, and of that he had good hope.

By a treaty made in 1727 France had pledged herself to support such just claims as the elector might have to any of the Habsburg dominions on the death of Charles VI without male heirs. In 1735, however, France had guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction; but it could be contended that this guarantee was without prejudice to the right of a third party, and this should have been realised in Vienna, since during Charles's last years France had proffered, though without response, her good offices for a settlement of the Bavarian claim.

The War of the Spanish Succession and the Peace of 1713 showed how negligible in the common political concerns of Europe the Papacy had become. In Sicily and Sardinia territories which the popes had long claimed as their fiefs were disposed of without reference to Rome. The Treaty of Utrecht registered a great increase in the power of Britain, head of the Protestant interest. Every growth in the strength of Prussia meant extra weight on the Protestant side. The extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs was in its political consequences unfavourable to the Holy See. The Most Catholic King, the Most Christian King, the Holy Roman Emperor, even the Most Faithful King of Portugal, decorated with this title only in 1748, seemed to have but cupboard love for their Church. They were all interested that no one should be made pope who might be too independent, or under hostile influence.

In these circumstances, another Gregory VII, or another Innocent III, was hardly to be expected. Clement XI (1700–21) was ‘timorous and undecided’. Innocent XIII (1721–4) owed his election partly to his great age, as the princes were determined that the long pontificate of Clement XI should not be repeated by another begun by a young man. Old, ill, and difficult of access, so far from emulating his thirteenth-century namesake, he maintained only a respectable level of diplomatic competence. The pious Orsini, the Dominican Benedict XIII (1724–30), was an austere and exacting ritualist, but administratively gullible and incompetent. Clement XII (1730–40), a Corsini, an experienced curial administrator and good with money, had first to undo much that Benedict XIII had done, whom he as a cardinal had steadily opposed; or that Benedict XIII had permitted to be done, by corrupt favourites like the cardinal Coscia, who paid for his misdeeds until the next conclave with seven years in the Castel Sant' Angelo.