At the end of the seventh decade of the nineteenth century two generations had passed since the continental American colonies of Spain and Portugal had won their independence. During these years these new states had maintained their independence, expanded their commercial and cultural relations with Europe and progressed toward political stability. The half-dozen larger Spanish American units, roughly coincident with the colonial viceroyalties and captaincies-general which had emerged from the struggle against the mother-country, had split into sixteen separate republics, and within each of these national feeling had grown and increasingly justified a political map which at the outset had not set off really separate peoples from each other. Portuguese America, in contrast, had successfully weathered centrifugal tendencies, and in 1870 the empire of Brazil was the largest, the most powerful, and the most stable state in Latin America. In the West Indies, the political pattern remained colonial: Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish control; the lesser Antilles were subject to their various European metropolises; and isolated Haiti and the precariously sovereign Dominican Republic alone represented the republican principle in the Caribbean.

After 1870 the chief source of changes in this area was the unprecedented development of its connections with the outside world. Expanding industry in Europe and in the United States required ever larger amounts of raw materials such as hides, cotton, and wool; the new chemical and electrical industries required more and more rubber, copper, zinc, lead, and other metals. New concentrations of urban population also needed increasing amounts of imported food: sugar, wheat, meat, coffee, and cacao.

In the first place and for a long time the increasing pressure for expanasion in the Pacific and China areas which was so prominent a feature of the last third of the nineteenth century did not come from the European governments. Before 1894 it came almost entirely from Asian governments and their foreign advisers or from European settlers and officials in Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific islands and Asia. For special reasons the latter received strong official support from Europe for a brief period between 1882 and 1885; but apart from this the European governments remained reluctant to extend their responsibilities and their rivalries to this area until the last few years of the century.

Among the earliest problems to arise in the area were those created by the expansion of European trade and settlement in some of the Pacific islands. Clashes between Europeans and between Europeans and natives were becoming serious as early as 1870 in consequence of the growth of trade and plantation agriculture, the improvement of communications and the effect of these developments in dislocating native social and political systems. In Fiji the British Colonial Office had already rejected, twelve years before, a suggestion from the British settlers, who were also afraid of annexation by France, that these problems should be solved by annexation by Great Britain. It had felt reluctant to risk a quarrel with France. Since then the number of settlers, predominantly British, engaged in trade and cotton production had continued to grow despite the lack of effective government and increasing disorder.

By 1870 it was plain that in the great area, at once a crossroads and a frontier, which is bounded by the waters of the Mediterranean, of the Red Sea, of the Arabian and Indian Oceans, of the Persian Gulf, and by those of the Caspian and the Black Seas, the influence of the European powers was becoming ever more widely extended.

The capitals of St Petersburg, Paris, and London, rather than those of Constantinople, Cairo, or Teheran, had of course long been the centres wherein Near and Middle Eastern policies were decided. If something unforeseen, something spontaneous and native to the area, actually happened, then steps had at once to be taken in those centres to bring the consequences of any such ‘untoward events’ under control. One concert of Europe had, in 1840–1, curbed one such disturber of the Levantine peace, the ambitious Mehemet Ali of Egypt. Another concert had, in 1854–6, taken the measure of a more formidable innovator, someone who was not supposed to be a native of the area at all—Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. In 1856, too, the British had sent gunboats into the Persian Gulf to stop the Shah of Persia from absconding with his Afghan neighbour's property of Herat. The existence of peculiar ‘spheres of interest’ was mutually recognised by the powers: it was their expansion that was objected to. No one went to the assistance of the Circassian leader Shamil in the Caucasus, or to that of Sher Ali in Kabul, of the Bey in Tunis, or of Ahmed Arabi in Egypt, although there have been causes worse.

The summer of the year 1870 in China saw two events which taken together have been recognised as marking the failure of the movement known to Chinese historians as the T'ung Chih Restoration, the rally of the dynasty which followed the successful suppression of the great T'ai P'ing Rebellion (1850–64). On 7 July 1870 the British Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs announced in the House of Commons that the government had decided not to ratify the Alcock Convention, an instrument which the British Minister to China, Sir Rutherford Alcock, and the Chinese plenipotentiaries had signed in Peking on 23 October of the previous year. On 21 June there had occurred in the treaty port of Tientsin a violent anti-foreign outbreak, in which several lives were lost, known as the ‘Tientsin Massacre’. The rejection of the Alcock Convention marked the failure of the foreign policy associated with the T'ung Chih Restoration; the Tientsin massacre equally emphasised the triumph of reactionary forces opposed to the cautious programme of modernisation which the Restoration statesmen had pursued. Both events were the product of popular ill-informed chauvinism, in the one case inspired by the pretensions and greed of the European merchant community in China, in the other by the ignorance, pride and xenophobia of the Chinese people.

The British government had yielded against their better judgement to the clamour raised by the merchants of Shanghai and other ports in China, an agitation directed not merely against the fact that the stillborn Alcock Convention made some modest changes in the treaty relations between the two countries in favour of China, but even more against the policy which inspired the author of this diplomatic initiative.

The literature of the late nineteenth century shows unmistakable symptoms of decadence. What is decaying is a literary tradition which dates back to the Renaissance, when its basic genres, its conventions for representing the world and giving a valid picture of human experience, were laid down anew. The tradition was largely founded on a belief that the artistic imagination truly mirrors nature, and this belief persisted through all later changes in theme and expression. The great distinction between realism and romanticism, which accounts for most of the major variations in the literature of the earlier nineteenth century, still did not break the tradition. It rather enriched it with a subtler sense of the difference between the world as mirrored in poetry and the world as mirrored in prose, and indicated a fuller awareness of the interesting role played by specifically subjective adventures in thought and feeling. Confidence in the power of art to reflect the true sense and shape of these richer possibilities remained unshaken. Towards the end of the century, however, the reliability, indeed the responsibility, of the imagination in discovering the way things ‘really’ are and in knowing what they mean began to be seriously questioned. It seemed possible to write about anything in almost any way, to enjoy literally almost any number of views, but this gain in literary scope and freedom was accompanied by a loss of creative certainty about the true image and status of man. Amidst the bewildering assortment of styles and schools, which sprang up at this period, it is possible to find only one common feature; the search for an authentic form of expression.

Since the nineteenth century began, the Europeans had been strengthening their hold over those parts of the world selected during the era of mercantilism. Australasia, India, South-east Asia, above all the Americas—they were either temperate regions peopled with white immigrants or tropical countries already under white rule. Step by step the mode of white expansion had altered: liberalism and industrial growth shifted the emphasis away from colonies of formal empire to regions of informal influence. But whatever the form it had taken, the groundwork of European imperialism had been truly laid long before the cartographical exercises in partition at the end of the century. Africa was the last continent to win the interest of the strategists of expansion; it seemed to them that here they were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Dividing Africa was easy enough for the Europeans. They did it at that moment in history when their lead over the other continents was at its longest. Economic growth and technical innovation gave them invincible assurance and force. Their culture and political organisation gave them a carrying power to match their iron ships and high-velocity guns. That Europe had the capacity to subjugate Africa was self-evident; but had her rulers any firm wish to do so?

Twenty years were enough to see the continent carved into symmetries devised by the geometers of diplomacy. By the end of the century only Morocco and Ethiopia were still independent, and their turn was coming. But the statesmen who drew the new frontier lines did not do so because they wanted to rule and develop these countries. Bismarck and Ferry, Gladstone and Salisbury, had no solid belief in African empire; indeed they sneered at the movement as something of a farce.

It is impossible to understand the following pages if it is not first realised that the French in 1871 were dominated by memories of the peculiarly eventful three-quarters of a century since 1789. The peasants, who remained by far the largest social group, only slowly absorbed new ideas. They still feared the re-establishment of an aristocratic and clerical regime that would reimpose feudal dues and tithes on them; conversely, they had acquired a very acute sense of their property rights and, particularly since 1848, it had become easy to rouse in them an irrational fear of ‘the Reds’ or the partageux (redistributionists), by whom they meant the politically more advanced town-dwellers who would come and take away their land or at least their savings (kept in the famous woollen stockings). Undoubtedly the landed nobility, still very important in certain regions, and the upper middle class did not dream of challenging, yet again, either the freedoms proclaimed in 1789 or even the civil equality consecrated by the Code Napoléon; but they remembered with dread the Terror of 1793–4, the rising which brought in the July Monarchy, the February Revolution of 1848 and the rising of June 1848. They consequently refused all compromise with the new ideas and the popular aspirations of the nouvelles couches, in which they were incapable of seeing anything other than purely destructive forces. As for the convinced republicans (industrial workers, artisans, and many in commerce and the liberal professions), their ideal was 1793: the Constitution of the Year One, which had provided for a very liberal, very democratic, very decentralised regime, but also the supremacy of the convention and the great committees ; in other words an all-powerful assembly acknowledging no limit to its power.

It is convenient to regard 1868 as marking a turning-point in the modern history of Japan. In January of that year a group of new leaders seized power in the then imperial capital of Kyoto, men who became, despite subsequent shifts in both policy and personnel, responsible for initiating changes which revolutionised the country's political, economic and social institutions and eventually raised it to a high level of international power and prestige.

Since the beginning of the seventeenth century government had been in the hands of a line of feudal rulers, the Tokugawa family. As shogun, nominally the emperor's military deputies, they had possessed the hereditary de facto authority of monarchs, exercising direct control over their own enormous domains and effectively subordinating the lords of the great feudal territories into which the rest of the country was divided. They sought, with remarkable success, to preserve their power by preventing change. After about 1640 Japan was by their decree almost entirely cut off from contact with the rest of the world, while at home political relationships were frozen in their seventeenth-century form, rigid social distinctions developed and were enforced for all classes of the population, and attempts were made to inhibit even economic change.

It was in its economic aspects that this policy was least successful. By the eighteenth century domestic commerce had expanded and the feudal class, the samurai, for the most part resident in castle-towns, had become accustomed to a higher standard of living. They had not, however, secured a commensurate increase in revenue or income. As a result, both domain governments and individual samurai became steadily more indebted to city rice-brokers and financiers.

By the time of the Civil War the first American expansive drive was over. The most obvious objectives of manifest destiny had been achieved, and the frontiers of the United States were logically satisfying. The country stretched from sea to sea. To the north lay Canada, a region which, it could be argued, must some day inevitably fall to the United States, but whose accession it was neither necessary nor desirable to hasten. To the south lay Mexico, arid and uninviting, and peopled by men whose stock, language, religion and traditions were suspect to most Americans.

Within the United States itself there was ample land to occupy the energies of a vigorous people. Even before the Civil War manifest destiny and the lure of the West had not been the only impulse to expansion. Competition between North and South for the control of the West, as a source of both economic and political strength, had been as important in determining the urgency of the rush to the Pacific. The genuine expansionists had hoped to divert Americans from their sectional quarrel by invoking the imperial dream; but their failure to do so did not slow an advance which the quarrel itself turned into a race. When the Civil War was won and lost, the most obvious goal of expansion had been achieved and the most impelling motive of expansion removed.

The Franco-German War of 1870–1 completed the political movement which had aimed at bringing the unity of a national state to both Italians and Germans. In both cases the state had had to gain control over a national revolutionary movement which had come to grief when it opposed the states in 1848. In Italy this movement had done more than in Germany towards consolidating the nation into a whole; but in Germany too, led politically by middle-class liberals, it had supplied the chief stimulus in the great cause, even though representatives of the liberal movement had been denied any appreciable share in the actual foundation of the empire. At decisive moments in his trial of strength with Austria even Bismarck had not hesitated to employ national revolution as a political means; in 1866, if arms had not brought quick results, he would have mobilised it with a call to the Germans—as also to the Czechs, Magyars and other nationalities—within the Habsburg monarchy. But the rapid and complete victory of Königgrätz meant that diplomatic and military activity largely obscured the share that national revolution had had in the founding of the empire. This had been precisely Bismarck's design: he meant to make use of liberal and democratic leanings only in so far as they helped him to overcome the conservative and particularist forces opposing him in Germany. The less Bismarck needed popular support, the more he could and indeed had to consider the principalities which in Germany, unlike in Italy, remained a constituent element of the national state.

Before the Peace of Westphalia Italy was an organic part of a vast network of European interests. It was the centre of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and one of the main bases of Spanish imperialism. Spanish-Catholic political interests were connected with widespread economic interests in which the shipping, banks, industry and merchants of Genoa, Milan, Tuscany, Naples and Sicily played an important part. The Peace of Westphalia maimed Spanish imperialism and halted the Counter-Reformation. As an indirect result, Italy was relegated to the margins of European history and confined to a very minor place among the countries of Europe. Thus the Peace of Westphalia was also a date of fundamental importance in the history of Italy, although its effects came to be seen only with the passage of time. It did not at once terminate the conflicts in which the peninsula and its States were involved, the war between France and Spain and the War of Candia between Venice and the Turks; nor did it change the political map of Italy, the essential features of which were settled by the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) and modified in some details by subsequent events, in particular by the Treaty of Cherasco (1631).

Spain remained mistress of her traditional domains, Milan, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia. By means of a series of strategic points she retained control of the Tyrrhenian Sea, which was vital to imperial communications, and of the States along its coast. The Genoese republic, with its own territories of Liguria and Corsica, continued to be a pawn of Spanish policy; it was watched over by the strategic strongholds of the Marquisate of Finale (on the Ligurian coast and under direct Spanish rule) and of the Lunigiana valley (between the Po valley and the Tyrrhenian, an area dotted with fiefs of the Malaspina family, who were theoretically vassals of the Empire, but in practice dependants of the Spanish governor at Milan).

Sultan Mehmed IV who ascended the throne in 1648 inherited a vast empire which had been conquered by the sword of his ancestors and stretched over three continents. In Europe the frontier of the Ottoman Empire was a mere eighty miles from Vienna; in North Africa only Morocco did not belong to it; it included Upper Egypt and extended to Aden; the Black Sea and the Red Sea were Turkish lakes; in the east it stretched to the shores of the Caspian and of the Persian Gulf. It is impossible to give the exact figure of its population, but in the seventeenth century it amounted to approximately 25 or 30 millions. The Turks, although the dominant race, were only a minority. Probably the Muslims —Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Bosnians, Albanians, Circassians, Crimean Tatars and Turkic peoples of the Caucasus—were stronger than the Christians—Greeks, Serbs, Hungarians, Bulgars, Wallachians and Moldavians. Outstanding among the Turks of this period were the famous historian, geographer and bibliographer Kâtib Tchelebi (1609– 57) and the renowned traveller Evliya Tchelebi (1611–78), who described the cities, customs and peoples of the Ottoman Empire in his huge ten volumes. Its heart was the city of Constantinople (Istanbul), the seat of the military and administrative institutions of the empire, the centre of commerce and culture as well as amusement and pleasures. It was inhabited by more than half a million people, Muslims, Christians and Jews, all living side by side for centuries, observing their own customs. The city contained the palace of the sultans, the Serail, the splendid mosques of Sultan Ahmed, Suleymaniye, Bayezid, Selimiye and Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, many Medresse's (colleges), libraries, public baths, hospitals, inns and food distribution centres, maintained by pious endowments.

The period between 1648 and 1688 was one of acute crisis for Spain: demographic, economic, social, political and spiritual. In 1648 the economic depression of the seventeenth century was in one of its most serious phases, while by 1688 recovery was already perceptible, especially in the eastern parts. This change, which reflected the general European development, operated also in demography, with a rise in population on the coasts, and stability or even decline in the interior. This was also a period during which the outlying areas, especially Catalonia, asserted themselves, and centralising tendencies suffered a setback. When the Catalan rising was put down in 1652, Philip IV (1621–65), instead of imposing the full authority of the absolute monarchy, re-established the special position of Catalonia. This was in accordance with the new legalism which can be noticed in the Spanish State of Philip IV and Charles II (1665–1700) and parallel with the demographic and economic importance of the periphery.

In the international sphere, the Peace of Westphalia marked the collapse of the Spanish plan for a Habsburg hegemony. Spain abdicated her position as a great power and withdrew within herself. She was concerned only with defending her colonies, and especially her own territory, from the imperialism of Louis XIV, while Charles II's lack of an heir drew the covetous eyes of all western Europe towards Spain. This change had a powerful effect on intellectual life, stimulating meditation on the meaning of Spanish history, and rousing controversy between those who welcomed new ideas and those who remained faithful to the spirit of the sixteenth century.

It is sometimes said that the landmarks of political history, such as those which serve to delimit the period to which this volume is devoted, have little or no relevance to economic history. This is a half-truth. And it is especially mischievous if it leads to the supposition that the economic history of nations can somehow be written without reference to the actions of governments, as though economic life existed in a vacuum, emptied of political contamination. It remains true that in certain aspects of economic life political events and personalities made no real mark. In the day-to-day or year-to-year life of English husbandman or Spanish peasant it mattered little then that Charles of England should lose his head or Charles of Spain his empire. In the forty years between the Peace of Westphalia and the English Revolution, no innovation significantly altered costs, output, or methods of production in any of the main economic activities of Europe. It was not always for want of effort: what science does today, the State tried vainly to stimulate then. This is not to say that economic life remained wholly static; it is simply to stress both that continuity and change have to be carefully balanced, and that if at certain levels a slow evolution paid little heed to the explosions of political history, at others those explosions were real enough. And for all the inventions of ingenious men, there is no set of historical laws to guide us.

The first section of this chapter consists of a broad survey of the main trends in population, agriculture, industry, trade, and finance. Here the impact of State policy is virtually ignored. The second section examines the nature of certain economic and social problems as they presented themselves to the governments of the time, and the efforts made to solve those problems.

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.