In a changing world, France, at the close of the fifteenth century, found herself faced with problems different from those of the past. These were to force her governments to take the necessary measures to adapt their policy and were to have repercussions throughout society. The Hundred Years War, whose outcome assured France of national independence, had already freed her from threats arising from the existence of a Flemish-Burgundian state. After the war, the kingdom, which had been partly reconstructed in the reign of Louis XI, had to shape a course for its policy among the new nations that were being established, to put the State into working order at a time when its functions remained ill-defined, to work out a definitive status for the Church, which was still shaken by the upheavals of the Great Schism, and to restore its economy, on which the fate of the various social classes depended.

Louis XI's political mistakes had been offset by a sometimes incoherent capacity for action and by almost miraculous strokes of chance. He was succeeded by kings of feeble intellect whose enterprises were inspired by foolish ambitions and who were bound to be mastered by the most skilful of their rivals. Except in rare cases, moreover, there was no statesman at the French court capable of taking over the reins of government. Such were the conditions under which French policy, already jeopardised by the mistakes made by Louis XI, was about to move in a direction which influenced the future of Europe for years to come.

Sultan Mehemmed II (1451–81) had striven throughout his reign to realise one dominant aim: the consolidation of the Ottoman State. In 1453 he had conquered Constantinople which, impoverished and greatly depopulated during the last years of Greek rule, was to become once more, under his guidance, the proud capital of an empire. The sultan repaired the ancient walls and peopled the empty spaces of the city with groups of Muslims, Christians and Jews taken from all parts of his realm. Public buildings were erected, like the great mosque which he founded, with its baths and hospital, its accommodation for travellers, and its colleges where students were trained in the law of Islam. Constantinople was transformed into Istanbul, an imperial city which, reflecting in itself the rich and complex character of the Ottoman State, bound together the provinces of Anatolia and the Balkan lands as Adrianople, the former capital of the empire, could not do.

Consolidation was also the objective behind the ceaseless campaigns of the sultan. In 1459 the last remnants of independent Serbia were converted into the Ottoman frontier province of Semendria, the strong bridgehead of Belgrade, besieged in vain by Mehemmed in 1456, being left however to the Hungarians. Bosnia was overrun in 1463–4. The Bosnian aristocracy largely embraced Islam and played henceforth a great role in the defence of the frontier and in the attacks launched against Hungary and Austria. In Greece, the principality of Athens, held by a Florentine family, the Acciaiuoli, and the Greek Despotate of the Morea, ruled by the Palaeologi, were subjugated in 1458–60; while in the Aegean Sea the islands of Thasos and Samothrace, Imbros and Lemnos were taken over in 1455–6, and Lesbos in 1462.

The settlement of Spanish America began with Columbus's second voyage. The first voyage had been a successful reconnaissance, carefully planned and ably executed. Making, by good fortune, the best of the North Atlantic wind system, Columbus had sailed from the Canaries to the Bahamas before the north-east trades, and back to the Azores in the zone of the westerly winds of winter. He had discovered the two largest islands of the Antilles, Cuba and Hispaniola. He claimed, and believed until his death, that he had found islands lying off the coast of eastern Asia, and possibly part of the mainland too. We cannot be sure whether these claims agreed with Columbus's original intentions and promises, nor whether Ferdinand and Isabella entirely accepted them—some intelligent contemporaries certainly did not. But beyond doubt Columbus had discovered an extensive archipelago of hitherto unknown islands which yielded some gold and were inhabited by a peaceful and tractable, though extremely primitive, people. Whether these islands were really within striking distance of the settled parts of Asia remained to be seen; but they were certainly worth careful investigation.

The first voyage, though successful, had been expensive. Columbus had lost his flagship and had been compelled to leave half his men behind in Hispaniola to face an uncertain fate. The plunder he had secured was negligible in proportion to the cost of the enterprise. It was now essential to follow up the discovery and to produce a return on the investment.

The economic activity of Europe in the Far East (excluding India) in the eighteenth century was mainly concentrated in China, Indonesia, and the Philippines, where the European nations had established their trading centres. Japan had withdrawn herself into almost complete seclusion under the Tokugawa Shogans since the fourth decade of the preceding century and was to remain thus isolated until the appearance of Commodore Perry's squadron in 1853. Meanwhile her one eye on the external world was the settlement of Deshima, a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki harbour, not more than 300 paces at its greatest extent, on which a few Dutch merchants lived a life of abject indignity, and which was the only channel of foreign trade. Therefore in this chapter it is in Canton, Batavia, Manila and their environs that our interest chiefly lies. One fact, at least, is common to these diverse areas of economic activity, and that is the independence of the natives of European manufactures and their indifference thereto at this period in their history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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