In 1688 the most powerful European navies were the French, English and Dutch. Spanish and Portuguese sea power had suffered a serious decline in the seventeenth century. The Ottoman, Algerine, Venetian and Maltese fleets, though no longer limited to galleys, did not count outside the Mediterranean (ch. XVII) and none of them dominated it. Denmark-Norway and Sweden maintained larger and more efficient fleets than did any of the Mediterranean states except France, but neither was able to win hegemony in the Baltic or forbid the intervention of outside navies there. By 1721 decisive changes had taken place. The Danish and Swedish navies were weaker, and Russian warships were cruising in the Baltic for the first time (ch. XXI). The Ottoman fleet had undergone the reforms of Mezzomorto (ch. XIX). The great tradition of Spanish naval shipbuilding had been revived by Admiral Antonio de Gastañeta and Josef Patiño. As was shown in 1718 by the battle of Cape Passaro, however, Britain had the will and the means to delay the recovery of Sicily and Naples, which had made Spanish warships and galleys an undeniable nuisance to the French in the 1690s. Her new control of Gibraltar and Minorca signified Britain's status as the predominant European naval power. The Dutch, who in 1689 had contested English command of the combined sea forces, were hard-pressed to get eight ships together in 1714 as an escort for King George I: their contribution to the confederate line of battle had fallen from a third to a fifth between 1702 and 1710, from which year they could no longer afford a North Sea squadron at all.

The long series of negotiations which led to the Peace of Utrecht had no distinct starting-point and no single concluding date. The Congress at Utrecht, with its sequels at Rastatt and Baden, was but the open avowal of the intention to make peace, a useful clearing-house for the ratification of decisions arrived at by much more devious processes. Much of the difficulty which beset the path to a settlement resulted from differences between the Allies as to how the rather vague objectives of the Grand Alliance would best be secured. Discussion was often as bitter and prolonged between them as with their enemies. Peace was to be made only by common consent, but there was nothing to prevent a party to the Alliance from discussing proposals directly with an enemy, and in fact negotiations of one sort or another were virtually continuous from 1706.

The first significant movements towards peace came in the double approach of France and Spain to the Dutch and English, separately, in July 1706, two months after Ramillies had removed the direct military threat from the Dutch and brought out Allied differences over the administration of the south Netherlands. Louis XIV was ready to dismember the Spanish inheritance if he could so dissolve the coalition against him. Bergeyck approached Bruno van der Dussen, the pensionary of Gouda, with a suggestion that Spain and the Indies should go to Charles III and the Spanish possessions in Italy to Philip V. The Spanish Netherlands should pass to the Dutch.

The two great conflicts which ushered in the eighteenth century added up to a real world war. Yet they developed without ever fundamentally influencing each other. Only on rare occasions, as in 1707, were the two European storm-centres in danger of merging. The belligerents of the Succession War stayed neutral in the war against Sweden, as did the Baltic belligerents in the war against France, although Denmark supplied the Maritime Powers with subsidy troops. Prussia joined in the western war even though the Great Northern War really concerned her much more.

The Grand Alliance of 7 September 1701 united the three powers which primarily waged the last and decisive war against the hegemony of Louis XIV: Austria, Britain and the United Provinces. In principle, Emperor Leopold I claimed the whole Spanish inheritance for the House of Habsburg. Without waiting till the treaty was signed, without even declaring war, he had sent an army into north Italy to try to occupy Milan, an Imperial fief which in his view reverted automatically to the Holy Roman Empire upon the death of Carlos II; the French troops acted in Lombardy only as auxiliaries of Philip V. The Maritime Powers, however, were not prepared in 1701 to fight for the strictly legitimist Habsburg claim. They undertook to assist the Habsburgs only to acquire ‘a just and reasonable satisfaction’ in Italy, the Spanish Mediterranean islands and the Spanish Netherlands, subject in this last case to the provision of ‘a dyke, rampart and barrier to separate and keep off France from the United Provinces’.

Most of the changes in the political structure of Europe between 1688 and 1721 arose in connection with five great wars: the Nine Years War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Turkish wars of 1683–99 and 1714–18, and the Great Northern War. That these wars never merged into one European conflict suggests a tripartite division of Europe into west, north and south-east. Of course there were no hard and fast partitions between these regions. A number of States belonged to two or more: for example, Hanover and Brandenburg to both west and north, the Habsburg monarchy and Venice to west and south-east, Russia and Poland to the north and south-east. Nor was it uncommon for countries of one region to get involved in the affairs of another—almost always to redress the balance of forces in it or prevent innovations deemed harmful: as examples we can cite William III's rôle in the Altona settlement of 1689, Charles XII's in the Empire in 1706–7, the Habsburg intervention in the Turco-Venetian war in 1716. Yet attempts to call in the forces of another region in order positively to upset the existing order elsewhere, or to break a military deadlock nearer home, usually miscarried. The decline of French influence in Sweden and Brandenburg, Poland and Turkey, amounting to a breakdown of the classical ‘eastern barrier’ in the 1680s, indeed tended to sharpen the tripartite division of Europe. In the Nine Years War Louis XIV was no longer able to summon his northern allies to fight on his side, while William III was not strong enough to secure more than a few auxiliary troops from them.

Louis XIV, in his conflicts with Spain, the United Provinces, the emperor, and the German princes, had to consider England as a possible factor in them. His relations with Charles II ranged from open hostility to alliance; generally Charles was benevolently neutral. But this was the king's policy: as the reign advanced, English public opinion became increasingly opposed to France. This difference of out look was linked with an enduring subject of constitutional dispute, the relations between king and parliament. The accession of James II brought to England a further and inescapable subject of dispute, the mutually hostile views—on what was the matter of greatest importance to all thinking men—of a Roman Catholic king and a Protestant nation. The religious advanced the constitutional dispute to a point where only force or abject submission could provide a settlement. Nor was it only for England that the outcome would be decisive. The settlement of the dispute was therefore a matter not only of pre-eminent interest to Continental governments, but also in varying degrees for their participation. What was achieved was more than the transfer of a crown from one prince to another, or a decisive change in the grouping of the European powers, or the emergence of Great Britain as a major power in world politics, or a new polarization of European culture. It was also the permanent establishment of effective constitutional government, and of the general principle that government exists for the governed.

When Charles died unexpectedly on 16 February 1685 the kingly power appeared to have attained a preponderance in the State such as it had not held since the coming of the Stuarts. This was in part due to Charles's efforts to provide efficient government. For the work of administration, so far as it then extended, he had brought together a body of able men; he had also built up a standing army strong enough to protect the government in all ordinary emergencies. These were advances such as any government must have desired. Charles, however, went much further.

The Mediterranean is unique among the seas of Europe. Its position as the meeting-place of three continents, which it at once joins and separates, has not only given it a commanding strategic and economic importance but made of it a world somewhat apart. Some of its distinctive features are of all time, others appear only at certain critical periods. Both must be kept in mind if we are to understand how the region influenced and was in turn influenced by the Turkish and European wars between 1683 and 1718. Although its climate, roughly the same throughout, produces the harmony of sea and sky and landscape which delighted Homer, it also results in a certain leanness of agricultural resources which has forced people to look to the sea for a livelihood. But these physical similarities are contradicted by an exceptional diversity of culture and political style. In the course of its long history as a centre of civilization States of many kinds have grown up along its shores, with complex and often conflicting interests. Overshadowing all at this time was the great divide between the eastern Mediterranean, dominated politically by the Ottoman empire, and the western Mediterranean, a primary theatre of war in the struggle against Louis XIV, in which the leading role was played by the rising sea power of a non-Mediterranean nation.

By far the greater part of the sea was a watery desert, traversed only by an occasional long-distance convoy and by isolated vessels making all the running they could in fear of corsairs. Since astronomical navigation had not yet been generally adopted here and its seamen still liked to hug the coasts—relying on compass and plane chart, or simple cross-bearings on landmarks—there was a tremendous contrast between the empty expanses of open sea and the coastal lanes, which swarmed with traffic.

In the Great Northern War, Sweden and her young absolute king, Charles XII, had to meet a challenge which Swedish statesmen had long envisaged as a possibility but which hitherto, by good luck and good management, had been avoided: a simultaneous attack by a coalition of powers on the Swedish empire east and west. There had never been any false optimism in Stockholm as to the deep-rooted resentment aroused among her neighbours by Sweden's seemingly irresistible expansion since her secession from the Scandinavian Union of the later Middle Ages. The path of that expansion had been defined by strategic and economic necessities as well as by dynastic and religious considerations, but the whole dynamic process of empire-building had been conditioned nearly as much by the general Baltic and European situation, with its political tensions and local power-vacuums, as by Swedish initiatives. To throw off Denmark's stranglehold over Sweden's approaches to the west and to push Denmark out of the Scandinavian peninsula had been constant preoccupations ever since the War of Liberation, in the same way as border unrest, engendering trouble with the Muscovites in the duchy of Finland, had led to the search for a defensible frontier in the north-east. Yet it had been an appeal for help from the dying Order of the Sword—whose territory was coveted by Denmark, Russia and Poland—that had first precipitated Sweden into ventures south of the Gulf of Finland, and the accident of a Polish marriage that had involved her both in Polish affairs and in the internal conflicts of the Holy Roman Empire.

‘Whenever this war ceases,’ wrote the English pamphleteer Charles Davenant in 1695, ‘it will not be for want of mutual hatred in the opposite parties, nor for want of men to fight the quarrel, but that side must first give out where money is first failing.’ This was an opinion from which few statesmen, generals, administrators or contractors on either side during the wars of 1688–1714 would have dissented. At this time financial capacity, not economic capacity, was, in the last resort, the limiting factor which decided the length, and modified the intensity, of war. Because a bankrupt government, unable to coax or force its citizens' wealth into its exchequer, or to make financial innovations with speed and skill, would be compelled to make peace, the rival powers tended to count each others' losses from bad coin, internal revolt, unfilled loans, unfavourable exchanges, the flight or bankruptcy of important financial agents, and so on, rather than losses in lives or war materials. As Richard Hill, the English envoy at Turin, wrote to Lord Treasurer Godolphin in 1705:

Yet the financial side of war, so pressing to contemporaries, has been relatively neglected by historians. There are great difficulties in reconstructing it, partly because of the complexity and obscurity of surviving records, partly because their volume and utility vary considerably from one country to another. Only for England are the financial statistics reasonably certain. For other States the edges of the picture are blurred.

By the last decade of the seventeenth century the attitude of influential European opinion towards warfare was undergoing radical change. The intolerance that embittered the wars of religion had largely ebbed away, except in regions exposed to the Ottoman; and although the increasing scope of hostilities led to the ever deeper commitment of available national resources, only the desperate French war effort after 1708, and the Homeric sacrifices borne by the Swedes in their protracted struggle with Russia, looked forward in any way to that patriotic inspiration destined, from 1793, to produce the levée en masse and ‘total’ warfare. Between the eras of religious and national wars the conduct of military operations tended to become ‘limited’, less perhaps in the sense that objectives were restricted to dynastic or commercial ambitions as that the fighting itself was increasingly regarded as a relatively gentlemanly affair governed by firm conventions. In any case, the impact of war on the civilian populations of Europe was still restrained by poor communications, which tended to channel campaigns to certain well-fought-over areas. Although the economic consequences were widely felt, wars varied considerably in the amount of direct misery they inflicted. The Great Northern War earned a reputation for ferocity, whilst in the South-East Turkish atrocities were occasionally avenged by Austrian reprisals. In the West, the two sackings of the Palatinate by the French forces, in 1674 and 1688, and the Allies' ravaging of Bavaria in 1704 are often cited as examples of the horrors of war; but the widespread contemporary outcry about these excesses suggests that they shocked the conscience of the age.

The phase of European experience studied in the present volume, and to some extent in its predecessor, has elastic chronological boundaries and no such recognizable identity as may be claimed for ages of reformation or revolution, though it contained features of both. Nor does a single figure bestride it. The conventional description which fixes on the decline of France is at best a half-truth, and then only for the West. Even in characterizing ‘The Age of Louis XIV’ from 1661, the editors of the ‘old’ C.M.H. were aware of ‘the long, and seemingly remote, history of the Ottoman Power in Europe’ as a main determinant of a period which lacked ‘the organic unity which belongs to our Napoleon volume’ and as soon as this ‘question of life and death’ had been settled at Carlowitz in 1699, ‘a large division of the canvas is filled by the great Swedish or “Northern” War’, formally closed at Nystad in 1721, six years after the Roi Soleil had gone to his grave but more than three before Peter, the great tsar, was to follow him.

If we consider the political geography of these years (ch. v), it is the changing map of eastern Europe which impresses us first. By 1716 Sweden was stripped of her trans-Baltic provinces, the basis of her great-power position (ch. XX(I)), with a commerce and revenues that had long been her answer to Danish control of the Sound and Dutch domination of the trade which passed through it.

The Ottoman empire attained its largest dimensions in Europe with the conquest in 1672 of the fortress of Kamenets in Podolia (Kamieniec Podolski), which extended the Domain of Islam as far as the middle course of the Dniester. To the south-west, between this river and the Danube, lay the two tributary principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, rich lowlands under palatine rulers chosen by the sultan. Divided from these by the Carpathian mountains, the prince of Transylvania stood in a similar relation to the Porte. The greater part of Hungary, only about a fifth of which lay under Habsburg rule, was divided into directly governed vilayets: Temesvár in the east; Nové Zamky (Neuhäusel), Kaniza, and Varasdin in the far west; Eger (Erlau) and above all Buda in the north. In the empire as a whole there were nearly forty vilayets, subdivided into departments (sanjaks), more or less on a uniform administrative plan but very variable in size, in which the sultan was normally represented by a resident pasha, the vali and sanjak-bey respectively. South of the Danube and the Drava, the grand vilayet (beyler-beylik) of Rumelia included all of what is now European Turkey, Bulgaria, Thessaly, most of Yugoslavia, and Albania; but Bosnia and the Morea had been formed into separate governments, while most of Croatia was ruled by Vienna and portions of the Dalmatian coast by Venice; the republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), like Salonica an important gateway to Balkan trade, merely paid tribute to the sultan. The Greek Archipelago, together with certain coastal districts of the Aegean (such as Gallipoli) and the sanjak of the Morea and Lepanto, was directly administered by the Kaptan Pasha of the imperial navy; Crete had been annexed to this vilayet, from Venice, as recently as 1670.

Any synthesis of the economic history of a continent over a short period is bound to be a somewhat arbitrary artifact, moulded by the historian's necessarily personal assessment of the relative claims to importance of the local vis-à-vis the general, of the shorter and the longer term, of spectacular versus less visible changes. This essay cannot do justice to all aspects of making and getting and consuming, even in Europe, between the death of Colbert and the end of the Great Northern War. It is focused on international aspects of European production and exchange, to the relative neglect of those that were merely local, not because the former were absolutely more important but because the latter, as our knowledge stands, are difficult to interpret on a continental scale. On the other hand, since it is important to suggest, above all, the distinctive character of a relatively short period of economic time, attention must be given to more immediate and conspicuous phenomena, notably to the effects of wars and to the business cycle, at the expense of the more slowly changing though in a sense more fundamental factors in economic life, such as population, patterns of consumption, technology, and economic institutions generally.

During the great wars men had as at other times to live. Far and some times not so far from the scenes of glory there were crops to be harvested, furnaces to be charged, bills to be collected, and that vast loom of transportation and communication kept working that wove into one fabric the economic life of Europe. Few were unaffected by the wars, if only in the price of their daily bread.

In the treaties signed at Ryswick the clauses which formally terminated the war show differences of phraseology. Between the French and the Dutch there was to be a good, firm, fruitful and inviolable peace; between Louis XIV and William III as king by the grace of God of Great Britain, a universal and perpetual peace was to be inviolably, religiously and sincerely observed. The peace made by France with Spain was to be good, firm and durable; that with the emperor Christian, universal and perpetual. Whatever significance these variations may have had, none of them implied any reservation. None of the leading contemporaries seems to have suggested, at least in writing or in reported conversation, that the official phrases were hypocritical or over-optimistic, or that this peace of exhaustion was a mere armistice. Yet less than four years later the French were fighting the Austrians in Lombardy, and in the spring of 1702 the emperor, Queen Anne and the States-General declared war against France. This was the result of two processes. The first and more difficult to trace was the economic and administrative recovery which enabled the powers to take the field again. Such recovery was a normal concomitant of peace; it was usually quicker than seemed possible at the moment when peace was made, and statesmen were liable to miscalculate when they estimated how far it had proceeded in their own or in other countries. The other process was the building-up of antagonisms, some inveterate and others new.

In September 1683 the Turks fled from Vienna, in August 1684 the Emperor Leopold I returned there, and the elaborate mechanism of his court and government settled back into its traditional framework. In many ways this altered very little in the next 35 years. Several households, of the emperor, empress, the dowager empress or the emperor's sons, each with a corps of officials, had normally to coexist in the cramped accommodation of the Hofburg. In his private apartments, the retirata, the ruler discussed affairs in confidence: here was the ultimate source of authority. In a series of antechambers he dined publicly, held council, granted investitures and audiences: here that authority was formally displayed. Adjoining the Hofburg was an old irregular cluster of buildings and courtyards where most of the chanceries and councils had premises. Their archives were growing enormously as they recorded judgments or instructions which flowed out to the Empire and the hereditary Habsburg lands of Austria and Bohemia, to Hungary and (after 1700) to Italy, as well as to the ambassadors at foreign courts; but only gradually, from the early eighteenth century onwards, was a real distinction drawn between posts in the ‘court’ and in the ‘government’ Then also, in 1723, Charles VI began his splendid and spacious reconstruction of the Imperial Chancery.

A little further from the Hofburg, the government of the Lower Austrian duchy had its administrative headquarters and the Estates their place of assembly. Elsewhere in the city, tightly surrounded by walls and bastions, the Vienna municipality was in control; but just as the common burghers had long lost their power to a small council of oligarchs, so this council elected its own members to office under the eye of the court.

In 1688 a Spanish octogenarian could have remembered when Spain was the first nation of Europe. Although in his youth the royal finances were already in ruinous state, no Spaniard at that time need reasonably have dreaded the future. Yet the octogenarian would have lived his remaining years amid disasters. From 1620 until the Truce of Ratisbon Spain was at war, with one or many nations, for 58 of the 65 years. By 1684 she had lost critical areas in Europe and much that she claimed in the Americas. Her naval reputation had perished at the Dunes and her infantry never recovered from the humiliation of Rocroi. Her economy now lay in ruins. Only her culture retained vestiges of its former vitality. Disillusioned by the success of the Neapolitan Luca Giordano at court, the last great painter of the Madrid school, Claudio Coello, was to die in 1693; but native architecture flourished in the ornate work of the Churriguera family. Except for the works of the Mexican nun-poetess, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who died in 1695, few books of great literary worth were published in Spain during the last decades of the century, when political satire, significantly, was the liveliest manifestation of Spanish ingenuity. From 1685 to 1693 Francisco Bances Candamo wrote subtle political plays for the court, striving to revive the drama which, as he saw, had declined since the death of Calderón in 1681. The greatest of Spanish bibliographers, Nicolás Antonio, died in 1684, but his Bibliotheca hispana vetus was not published till 1696.