Ninety years after the discovery of America ‘we of England could never have the grace to set fast footing in such fertill and temperate places, as are left as yet unpossessed’ by the ‘Spaniards and Portingales’. The Dutch too, still absorbed in their struggle for independence, had got no further than organized defiance of the Spanish trade monopoly. Their East India Company in 1609, as Pieter Both was ordered to acquire ‘a convenient place and, for our contentment, a fort which shall serve as a rendezvous for our whole Indian Navigation’, was still feeling its way towards unified control. More intent on trade than on possession of land, they had not yet staked a claim in the West. The French also, seeking fish and furs rather than colonies, had as yet but the most tenuous hold even on the lower St Lawrence. No country's colonies bore comparison with the Spanish settlements in the Caribbean and on the Spanish Main, or the Portuguese in the Atlantic islands and Brazil; and though the English and Dutch controlled an increasing share of the East Indies trade, and the English and French maintained two or three hundred ships on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Habsburg predominance had not been seriously challenged. But a challenging thesis had been formulated.

England had taken formal possession of ‘Virginia’—the whole of eastern America from 30° northwards—and Raleigh's Roanoke voyage had also seen the use of a jointstock organization which distributed the costs of establishing colonies among merchants and speculators. The Roanoke venture, moreover, was a definite attempt at settlement, and that purpose was then transferred from Virginia to Guiana (as it had previously been transferred from 'Norumbega' to Virginia).

The structures and activity of the international economy probably changed more substantially in the sixteenth century than in the century which followed. In the earlier period the opportunitities offered by a series of remarkable explorations and maritime discoveries progressively altered the volume of commerce and industry, and indeed the general perspectives of the world as then known. Vasco da Gama, during his notable voyage in 1497–8, managed to turn the southern cape of Africa and open a new way to the old riches of the Indies, to the pepper and spices, the silks, cottons and pearls, the perfumes, drugs and other merchandise which through the centuries had largely coloured the conspicuous consumption of Europe. In another direction the frail expedition of Christopher Columbus, touching land in the West Indies in October 1492, led the way for fleets of successors to a fresh continent across the Atlantic. This held forth immense stocks of precious metals and tropical produce, which Europe did not have but was eager to exploit. However, the arrival of these resources—sometimes new, often in abundance—did not find its full explanation in the wavering fortunes of discovery, conquest and plunder. As the new territories grew in stature, they disgorged materials which found their place as commodities in a highly developed market system. Europe received them, not free but at the cost of increased output from her economy. These international outlets came in the wake of territorial conquest and implied expanding export sectors beyond the natural growth of European trade. They helped to widen the outlook on a world of apparently unknown possibilities, encouraging a penchant for intrepid adventure, to which the only limit seemed to be the capacity for enterprise and endeavour. All this contributed collectively a massive human achievement.

The first half of the seventeenth century marks an important stage in the development of European drama. Inevitably greater heights were attained in one country than in another. In England Shakespeare was only the greatest among an extraordinary galaxy of talented playwrights active in this period, and if the years between his withdrawal from the stage and the closing of the London theatres by Parliament in 1642 are generally regarded as a period of decline, it was none the less an age of intense dramatic activity which bore within it the seeds of future developments. In Spain another summit of dramatic achievement was reached in the plays of Lope de Vega and his contemporaries, and this great age of the Spanish theatre was prolonged into the second half of the century by the works of Calderón.

Although in our period Italy produced no outstanding playwrights, not only did it continue to influence the drama of other European countries through the Commedia dell'Arte; it created the new genre of the opera which was gradually to spread to other lands, and in the sphere of theatre architecture, machinery and scenery it showed the way to the whole of Europe. In France the opening decades of the century form a strange contrast with the extraordinary flowering of drama in the age of Corneille, Molière and Racine from about 1630 to 1680: it was only with the triumphant success of Le Cid (1637) that France began to rival England and Spain in the drama.

Changes in the distribution of sea-power among the states of Europe affected large areas outside Europe more directly than ever before. For Europe's sea communications had encompassed the world. Besides the regular trans-Atlantic routes, little-frequented ones went across the Pacific to the Philippines and from the East Indies to Macao, Formosa and Japan. Commercial exchanges with Europe might require a cycle of as long as five years, quantities were minute, in some of these cases only one ship a year reached the final destination, but a regular pattern of trade existed. Originally the Portuguese had established themselves in the East thanks to a margin of technical superiority in sea-fighting, but by the late sixteenth century they were accustomed to peaceful trading in almost unarmed ships. After 1600 both they and the native traders were to suffer from the competition and incursions of heavily armed Dutch and English ships. In particular the heavier armament, superior organization and better seamanship of the Dutch East India Company enabled them to establish a commercial supremacy in Indonesia by 1650, despite prolonged and sometimes effective resistance by the Portuguese and others. Europeans did not control the trade of the Indian Ocean or Indonesia, even the Dutch never held a completely effective monopoly of the spice trade. Nevertheless they dominated important and profitable trades, because ultimately their naval power was greater than that of the native states. If Iberian power was eclipsed in the East, their monopoly of trans-Atlantic trade, still virtually intact in 1600, was also broken.

In the first half of the seventeenth century two states established themselves for the first time as great powers. The one was the United Netherlands; the other, Sweden. The period of their greatness was almost equal, and for both it was brief; each expanded into an empire of sorts; and each, perhaps, reached its zenith about the year 1660.

As far as Sweden was concerned, this rise to greatness was certainly unexpected. At the opening of the century it would have seemed doubtful whether the country could maintain its independence, and most improbable that it should ever become the leading power in the north. With the waning of the political ascendancy of the Hanse towns in the sixteenth century, that position appeared likely to fall either to Denmark or to Poland. There had, indeed, been a moment, in the 1560s and 1570s, when it looked at least possible that Muscovy might emerge as a formidable challenger: in the political convulsions which followed the collapse of the Livonian state of the Order of the Knights of the Sword, Moscow for a time won great successes, and the tsars came near to securing an extensive coastline on the Baltic; but the anarchy of the Troublous Times postponed for more than half a century any resumption of the plans of Ivan IV. The major portion of the lands of the knights fell to Poland; while Sweden maintained a precarious hold upon Reval and the northern coastlands of Estonia. It was the first of Sweden's overseas possessions, a nucleus around which other possessions would gather, and the need to defend it led Sweden step by step to ever deeper commitments in the politics of this region; but if it turned out to be in fact the springboard for imperial expansion, this was a development probably unforeseen in Stockholm, and certainly unlooked-for in Europe: in the years around 1605 it must have seemed much more likely that Estonia would soon be reunited to Polish Livonia.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the states of the House of Habsburg stretched from the Vosges to the Carpathians. This vast domain lacked organic and political unity. In the west it began with fiefs scattered through southern Germany and continued eastwards with a group of compact but distinct principalities from Vorarlberg onwards. It included a great variety of geographical regions and climates and a diversity of peoples. Through it ran the Danube, rightly portrayed as the king of European rivers on Bernini's great fountain in the Piazza Navona in Rome. It ran through Habsburg territory from the bishopric of Passau to the Turkish frontier not far below Pressburg. Across it ferries and bridges linked the southern Alpine region with the Bohemian and Moravian plateaux, but the Danube was not yet the principal artery of a political complex. The Moldau (Vltava), separated from the Danube valley by a mountain ridge, flowed north through Bohemia to join the Elbe at Mělnik, unking the region with the river system of northern Germany.

These states belonged to one family and had one suzerain, but as a result of family compacts, as in Styria and the Tyrol, for administrative convenience as in Alsace, or to avoid the threat of secessions, cadet branches governed several of these countries. Moreover, the important kingdom of Hungary, whose lands by tradition and law were indivisible and inviolable, was split into three regions. In practice, the Habsburgs ruled over only a narrow strip of Croatia, the plain between the Drava and the Danube and the mountains of Upper Hungary.

A Spain without Philip II was difficult to imagine. For forty years every sudden alteration in the affairs of Europe had somehow seemed connected with the man who sat alone at his desk in the Escurial, surrounded by mountains of paper. ‘When he goes’, a Spanish noble had remarked a year before his death, ‘we shall find ourselves on another stage, and all the characters in the play will be different.’ In the event, not only was the cast changed, but the play itself turned to tragedy. The king died on 13 September 1598, leaving an aimless son and an empty treasury. In 1596, for the third time in his reign, the crown had repudiated its debts to the bankers. Financial exhaustion made peace essential: peace with France in 1598 and with England in 1604. As Spain slowly abandoned its militant imperialism, and the glorious pageant of notable victories slipped quietly from the memory, the grim reality could no longer be ignored. The nation which, for the extent of its empire and the reputation of its arms, ranked as the greatest power in the world, was visibly in a state of ruin, and its ruin demanded explanation. At once came a spate of books, questioning, analysing, suggesting remedies. All were devoted to explaining the paradox of Spain: the paradox that it was poor because it was rich, that it had gold and silver in abundance and yet it had none.

In 1610 Philip III, Rex Hispaniarum et Indiarum, claimed sovereignty over two great empires in America, one governed from Madrid as part of his crown of Castile, the other governed from Lisbon as part of his crown of Portugal. Together the claimed dominions of the two empires covered all of America, stretching from the yet unknown lands that lay between the Gulf of Mexico and the mysterious Arctic, southward to the equally unknown lands of Tierra del Fuego on the far side of the Straits of Magellan. The territories of the crown of Castile were divided into two viceroyalties: that of New Spain, with its capital at Mexico City, comprised all of the Iberian possessions to the north of Panama, including the islands of the Caribbean and the territory of present-day Venezuela; that of Peru, with its capital at Lima, governed the Castilian possessions from Panama to Chile and Buenos Aires. The American Empire of the crown of Portugal was Brazil, then defined as all land east of the north–south line of demarcation set by the Treaty of Tordesillas, running from the eastern stretches of the Amazon delta to the Island of Santa Catarina on the coast of the present-day Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. This territory was governed by a captain-general at Bahia.

Effective occupation in the form of domination of the native population or direct settlement by Iberian subjects fell far short of Iberian claims, as other European governments did not fail to point out. Nevertheless, the area under effective occupation constituted immense territories. In North America, Spanish dominion touched the present areas of the United States and Canada at two points. In Florida, a small settlement at St Augustine, refounded permanently in 1597, attempted to keep foreign intruders away from the Bahama Channel and the return route of the Spanish fleets, and served as a base for missionary work among the Indians of Florida and Georgia.

At the close of the sixteenth century the Portuguese Empire in Asia, the Estado da India, had reached a climax of prosperity. The state balance-sheet showed that expenditure upon the salaries of officials, the stipends of the clergy and the upkeep of guard fleets and garrisons was much more than met by income from customs dues and land revenues. Everyone knew, moreover, that the recorded salaries of captains and factors, weighmen and clerks were more than matched by their income from perquisites, graft and extortion. For the soldier and the sailor life between campaigns might be hard, but he could hope for a prize or sack and, if deserving or fortunate, for a minor office or grant of land. The state had encouraged European colonization by the grant of estates to the casadas, the married men available for local military service, in Goa, in the new conquests northwards to Damão and now in Ceylon. Furthermore, everyone, high or low, lay or cleric, who could raise the capital busily engaged in trade. The crown was only interested in a small number of monopoly products, pepper, cinnamon and the finer spices, destined for Europe and in such grand lines of trade as Goa to Mozambique, or to Malacca and Macau. There was ample scope for local licensed trade and, since control was lax, for infringement of monopoly too. Finally many Portuguese merchants, shipmasters and soldiers of fortune, whose activities might shade through commerce to piracy, were to be found in parts of Asia not under jurisdiction of the crown.

For the military historian, the main feature of what is usually called the modern period is that it is dominated by the professional soldier, hired at home or abroad. In the early part of the period, troops were recruited abroad to serve for a limited period only: these were the mercenaries or ‘hired troops’ in the strict sense, of whom the purest example were the Lansquenets, troops completely unattached to any one state or government, who sold their services to the highest bidder on terms mutually agreed and laid down in a deed of engagement. Mercenaries, however, came to be replaced by troops of home origin, engaged by the state for an indefinite period of time and organized into regiments or companies which were permanent sections of the military forces; that is, by a standing or national professional army. In practice, such standing armies also comprised a varying number of foreigners, either grouped into separate regiments or spread among the various sections of the army. Naturally, the process of transition from the one method of raising an army to the other differed from country to country, but in general it can be said to have taken place in the first half of the seventeenth century. This was closely bound up with the development of the modern state and with the evolution of absolute monarchy, the most powerful weapon of which the standing army proved to be.

The use of hired troops can be traced far back into the Middle Ages and predominated from before the beginning of the sixteenth century. But, obviously, governments forced to take hired troops into their service could not close their eyes to the danger of entrusting their own and their subjects' interests to foreign adventurers, nor to the thieving, plundering, extortion and other outrages which made these bands the terror of friend and foe alike—not only in the field, but also after they had been disbanded.

The first decades of the seventeenth century played a special role in the evolution of religious thought. They were neither the seedtime of new ideas about the relationship of God to man nor a time of the discarding of old beliefs, but rather the age in which some of the great issues of religious history were fought out anew. The chief concern of religious thought was one which had never lost interest since the beginnings of Christianity, that of man's free will and of his freedom to arrive at his own religious experiences. This problem was reflected in the controversies over free will and predestination which rent both Calvinism and Catholicism in our period. On another level, it was reflected in the quest for religious individualism against a religious orthodoxy which had become dominant in both Protestantism and Catholicism.

Under the impact of the theological quarrels which centred on these issues, the orthodox and their challengers, as well as those believing either in free will or predestination, took ever more radical positions. Thus some important ideas became re-emphasized. Rationalism penetrated to the very heart of religious thought, bringing the formulation of an explicit rational religion. This period also witnessed a growing trend towards deism and even unbelief. At the other end of the religious spectrum, religious individualism led to pietism and to a renewed mysticism. Beneath the issues raised by such religious thought coursed the piety of the ordinary people. We know almost nothing about this popular piety; yet it cannot be omitted from this account since modes of popular religious expression posed problems which theologians had to meet.

On the death of Sultan Ahmed I in 1617 the problem of the succession to the throne assumed a particular importance. The Ottoman custom had been that the sons of a reigning sultan should be sent out, while still young, to rule over provinces in Asia Minor. A prince thus sent out with the rank of sanjaq begi, that is, governor of a sanjaq or province, would now receive, under the guidance of the dignitaries composing his household and of the officials controlling the local administration, a long and elaborate education in the 'adet-i 'othmaniyye—the mores and the culture distinctive of the Ottomans. It was an education which embraced language and literature, physical training and the practice of arms and which inculcated, moreover, a close and practical knowledge of how the empire was run—in short, an education designed to fit a prince for the responsibilities of rule, if ever he should come to the throne.

At the same time it had been the custom of the Ottomans that a new sultan should order forthwith the execution of all his brothers and their male children. The pressures imposed on princes of the blood through the operation of this ‘law of fratricide’ were acute. Aware that to win the throne or to die was the ultimate choice offered to them, the princes strove with all the means at their command to strengthen their resources in expectation of the evil hour which would mark the death of their father. Each of them sought to create in his particular province a nucleus of armed force and, in addition, to establish at the Porte, amongst the high dignitaries and the troops of the imperial household, a faction committed to this cause.

At the death of Henri IV, his son Louis XIII was not yet nine years old. Kings of France came of age at thirteen and a day, so a regency was necessary. On 15 May 1610 the young king, from his lit de justice in the Parlement of Paris, appointed his mother, Marie de Medici, regent, according to his father's wishes. Periods of regency were always difficult for France and seemed to threaten the kingdom's dissolution. Jurists, political theorists and members of the government had a clear concept of the state, not shared by others, least of all by the nobility. They preferred a simpler concept of greater emotional force, loyalty between man and man, inherited from the feudal or remoter past. With the king dead and a child on the throne, it seemed as if every man had regained complete freedom, as if laws no longer existed, as if social obligations, society and the state had died with the king. On hearing of Ravaillac's attack, some nobles took to their fortified chateaux, while others roamed the countryside in bands, plundering, holding men to ransom and seizing the money in the royal coffers. The princes and magnates summoned their followers. In town and country tumult and sedition were rife.

The princes and magnates dreamed of regaining the independence they had enjoyed under Hugues Capet, both in their own domains and in the provincial governorships to which they were appointed by the king (which sometimes became hereditary), and in the apanages granted by the king to the princes and princesses of the royal blood and to queens-dowager.

Germany in the early seventeenth century was a land of contrasts. It was a great and on the whole a prosperous country, even if it no longer led Europe in either mining or industrial technique or in financial expertise. In political structure, it was ‘the Roman empire of the German nation’—briefly, the German Reich—at whose apex was enthroned the Kaiser Rudolf II (1576-1612), the senior representative of the Austrian branch of the Habsburg arch-house. In 1606 his envoys had concluded at Sitvatorok in Hungary a peace with the Turkish sultan doubly unprecedented, alike in its terms and its duration. Further territories had to be ceded to the Turk, but the Christian prince was for the first time admitted by the Muslim as a monarch of equal status, and over half a century elapsed before formal war was resumed between them. Although the chronic threat of Turkish invasion did not immediately disappear, the internecine struggles which were soon to devastate much of central Europe were in fact conducted without interference from the infidel. Yet despite the aura of partly successful achievement that might in retrospect seem to surround the Sitvatorok agreement, it had been made only because Turkish government was as incapable as the Austrian. The plight of the Habsburgs in Germany was never so desperate as in the early seventeenth century. The kaiser was an elderly and half-demented recluse, the Reich constitution was being eroded almost to the point of disappearance, political and religious antagonisms within Germany had been mounting towards the point of crisis for a generation and more, while the lack of a firm central government was a grave disadvantage to the economic development of the country and made it possible for foreign armies to prey upon the inhabitants in frontier regions.

In the early years of the seventeenth century, the Holy Roman Empire of the German people had the misfortune to be the centre of intense internal and international rivalries. The authority of the emperor, Diet and imperial courts had broken down, and there could be no settlement by peaceful means of conflicting claims to territory and title. Protestant princes feared the loss of church lands secularized after 1552; the return to the Roman Catholic church of bishoprics, abbeys, cloisters and countless parishes also meant the enforced re-Catholicization of the populations involved. Since the Donauwörth affair of 1608, not even an imperial city could feel safe in the worship of its choice. The very existence of a defensive Protestant Union confronted by an armed Catholic League was a menace to peace. While the great majority of German princes were peace-loving, sometimes at the risk of their security, a few were ready to seize any opportunity to increase their territories and to enhance their prestige.

If there was danger of chaos and civil war, foreign entanglements posed an even greater threat. England and the United Provinces (the Dutch) were members of the Protestant Union. The marriage of the Elector Palatine of the Rhine to the daughter of James I added to England's interest in Germany. In the north there were further foreign involvements. The king of Denmark was also duke of Holstein, a prince of the empire with claims on secularized bishoprics. His ambition to control the Baltic coast was, in turn, challenged by the king of Sweden.

The seasonal rhythm of warfare and politics in Europe at this period was rarely broken. Year after year armies had to wait for the thaw to dry out, and the earth to grow fresh forage, before they could move. The great majority of battles and sieges took place in summer and autumn. If in Spain fighting paused in the July heat, if in Poland Swedish commanders manoeuvred with remarkable speed across snow-covered plains in winter, the normal timetable nevertheless repeated itself in most areas with monotonous punctuality. By late November armies were going into winter quarters. The political season now began, of diplomatic and financial preparation for the next campaign. In the English House of Commons detailed estimates of the cost of land and sea forces for the following year—a new device in 1690—were introduced in November or December. In a dozen assemblies of Estates in the Habsburg lands, the ritual bargaining over war-taxation took place between December and March. At the same time, the size of the forces to be hired from smaller States by the principal belligerents was with more or less difficulty settled. Many French officers returned to Paris where Louis XIV's quartermaster-general, the marquis de Chamlay, set about his annual task of drafting Bourbon plans for the next year's campaign.

Equally, winter was the main recruiting season. From the widely scattered quarters of many armies, often from each troop or company in a regiment, an officer or two came home to find recruits; they were due back punctually in the spring with contingents of fresh manpower. By then, in the Spanish Succession War, Scotsmen had joined the Scots brigade in Dutch employ, Brandenburgers had reached Frederick I's troops in Flanders or Italy, and more Englishmen were expected in Spain.

In the seventeenth century the Portuguese imperial economy revolved round sugar, tobacco and salt; in the eighteenth, without completely forsaking its old staples, it came to be based on gold, leather and wine. Its position, pivoted on the great entrepôt of Lisbon, lay somewhere between Anglo-Dutch capitalism, which dominated it in part, and the colonial economies which it was itself shaping and out of which a new national entity, Brazil, was slowly emerging. The dynamics of this profound structural transformation can most rapidly be grasped, and its phases demarcated, if we begin by looking at the course of prices.

Until the peace of 1668 with Spain, some Portuguese prices had been rising gently while others remained stable. The very gradual increase in wheat prices levelled off at Evora from 1667, and in the Azores from 1670, until 1693; and this also happened at Viana do Castelo, though there the prices of rye and maize fell between 1680 and 1693. After 1693, prices in all three markets, as well as in Braganza—in the extreme north, beyond the mountains and isolated from imports—rose to a peak in 1710–11, home-grown cereals ahead of imported. There followed a cyclical decline which reached its lowest point in 1718—three years later in Braganza—and the long-term trend continued very slightly downwards or level until 1740. The price of rice—almost entirely imported, from Valencia, Genoa, Venice—fell in 1680–90, rose to a peak in 1709, then continued to fall until after 1728. What happened to the major export commodities of metro politan Portugal? The price of olive oil in Lisbon, after remaining constant until 1670, went down until about 1692 and then rose steadily to a peak in 1712 (apart from a cyclical depression about 1708, also affecting cereals, though more briefly); after 1712, a really marked downward trend set in until after 1728.