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.

The Peace of Westphalia, concluded in the year with which this volume begins, not only brought to an end one of the most devastating wars in the history of Europe; it also terminated one of the most decisive periods of European history, that of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Although religious events and motives continued to be of vital importance in the history of many European countries— such as France, England and the Habsburg territories—there were no further changes in the religious frontiers: the European countries and principalities retained the religion which was established there in 1648. Only religious minorities—such as the Austrian Protestants and the French Huguenots—might be forced to leave their native countries; or they might receive official recognition—as the Non-Conformists did in England. It is true, of course, that the rule of Islam was broken in southeastern Europe during the period covered by this and subsequent volumes, but this was a political change; it freed the Hungarians and other Balkan Christians from Turkish overlordship, but did not change the religious loyalties of the population. Even in much-divided Germany the religious frontiers remained stable after the peace of 1648. Although several German princely houses changed their faith during the subsequent decades—mainly from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism—their subjects did not follow this example, but kept their religion. Very slowly— perhaps only through mutual exhaustion after many years of fighting— the religious conflicts began to subside and religious hatred started to recede: to be fanned into new flames by the dragonnades and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685).

In Portugal in the second half of the seventeenth century a population of nearly two million occupied, as it had done since the mid-thirteenth century, an area of 34,000 square miles (55 to the square mile). Portugal's demographic position was thus stronger than that of Spain, whose density of population was only about 31–4 to the square mile (with a total of under six millions), and did not compare badly with that of the United Provinces, whose population was not much larger than that of Portugal. Yet, because of the injuries inflicted by war, there was no increase of population until the end of the century. Lisbon, the capital, had at least 165,000 inhabitants, a figure comparable to that of Amsterdam. Four towns had between 16,000 and 20,000 inhabitants: the university city of Coimbra, the great northern port of Oporto, and Évora, the grain centre of the south. A newcomer to this group was Elvas, the vital stronghold of the War of Independence. There were another thirty towns with more than a thousand houses each, most of them in the south.

The Portuguese Empire stretched from South America to China. In the vast territory of Brazil, which was being mapped by the bandeiras, the population, which had increased rapidly in the first third of the seventeenth century, later suffered seriously from the Dutch wars and the sugar slump and resumed a slow increase only towards the end of the century. The most densely populated areas were the north-east, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the Amazon basin and the Maranhã. Europeans, Indians and Negroes together totalled half a million, about one-fifth of these being Europeans.

The seventeenth century has been called the heroic age of rationalism in Western Europe, and the term does indeed accurately express the three essential features of the thought of the period. These were, first, the alliance between the traditions of Galileo and of Descartes— between the new mathematico-mechanical science and the idea of natural law—second, the divorce of political thought from theology, and finally, the capacity of its great minds for creative thought. For there are few centuries so rich in creative philosophic ability, or in which political theory so boldly aspires to the utmost heights of intellectual speculation. But the spell cast by the great philosophers of the period presents a danger to the historian of its thought. He tends much too easily to confuse their originality with their influence, their future importance with their authority among their contemporaries. Many of their most important ideas are far ahead of their time—ideas which could not be fully developed in the intellectual climate of the age and did not leave their full mark on the history of thought until much later. The importance of Spinoza was first fully revealed by Goethe, that of Leibniz by the German idealists. That is why, more than in any other period since then, the history of ideas cannot be considered in vacuo, but must be related to the changing conditions of an age in which the basic problems of political life constantly take on new forms.

The restoration of Charles Stuart to the thrones of England and Scotland in 1660 nearly coincided with the assumption of regal power by his cousin, Louis XIV of France. In each case, this meant the end of an interregnum and the beginning of an era of personal, monarchic rule. The two kings started with very different problems, for their countries were strikingly contrasted in temper and institutions; but, by 1685, the year of Charles's death, France and England showed an apparent approximation, since Stuart rule was no longer parliamentary in the true sense of the word; in both countries Protestants were subjected to active persecution, and there even seemed a possibility that England might become little more than a dependency of France. How that state of things was reached is the subject of this chapter; how it was averted by revolution is the subject of another.

Cromwell's death in September 1658 had been followed by a period of about twenty months during which the army leaders, Fleetwood, Lambert and Monck, struggled for supremacy; until in January 1660 Monck, the most astute and secretive man of his age, marched into England at the head of the army of occupation of Scotland. Having left this army at nearby Finsbury, the general proceeded to ‘countenance’ (that is, extend unasked-for protection to) the remnants of the Rump at Westminster, now reduced to about forty members, who represented the elderly survivors of that Long Parliament which had initiated a great rebellion. Monck, who was perceptive enough to see that monarchy could be peaceably restored only by the civil power, brought back to the Commons (in February 1660) the survivors of the Presbyterians who had been expelled by Pride's Purge in December 1648, thereby completely swamping the small residue of republicans and visionaries to which the House had been reduced.

In France, the sequel to the revolution of 1848 seemed to mean more than the disappointment of the hopes of republicans. It seemed to mean, as well, an undoing of much of the progress towards liberal government that France had made prior to the outbreak of the revolution. For the coup d'état of 2 December 1851 inaugurated a more autocratic rule than France had known since the overthrow of Charles X, and inasmuch as one of the main purposes of this new absolutism was to safeguard the propertied classes and the church, its inception had the appearance of a return to the familiar pattern of political and social conservatism. Nevertheless, the Second Empire was not a mere retrogression, and the amiable adventurer who became Napoleon III was to earn the execration of reactionaries no less than of republicans. To the chagrin of both, time was to show that he was not insincere when he professed that the broad aim of his regime was to reconcile those whose watchword was ‘progress’ with those whose motto was ‘order’. His success was to prove meagre, since this schism was to persist throughout his reign, and it was to issue again in bitter internecine strife when ultimately the Second Empire disappeared. Yet the endeavour was not quite vain. The empire was to endure as long as any regime in France since 1789, and in this period the nation was to experience a remarkable economic advance. Moreover, whatever the original intention of the emperor, France was to witness a gradual return to the practices of representative government, which were to be more firmly established at the close of his reign than ever before.

In the perspective of military history the Civil War is the first modern war. It marked a transition from the older warfare, which involved principally the fighting forces, to the modern which affects in varying degree every group of society and which would demand ultimately a totalisation of national life. The Civil War was a war of material as well as of men. It witnessed the innovation or employment of mass armies, railroads, armoured ships, the telegraph, breech-loading and repeating rifles, various precursors of the machine-gun, railway artillery, signal balloons, trenches, and wire entanglements. It was a war of ideas and therefore of unlimited objectives. One side or the other had to win a complete victory: the North to force the South back into the Union, the South to force the North to recognise its independence. There could be no compromise, no partial triumph for either. In contrast to the leisurely, limited-objective wars of the eighteenth century, the Civil War was rough, ruthless and sometimes cruel.

It was the first great military experience of the American people and their greatest historical experience. The drama, the agony, the valour of the years 1861–5 became a permanent part of the national consciousness. So did a profound realisation of its significance. In American history the Civil War is the great pivotal event, comparable to the revolution of 1789 in France. It settled certain differences, and it settled them permanently. It destroyed slavery, and assured the ascendancy of industrial capitalism. Furthermore, it preserved the Union and stabilised, if it did not indeed create, the modern American nation.