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.

No matter what aspect of the condition of France in these years we consider, it cannot be understood apart from the behaviour of the machinery of state. The present survey may usefully begin, therefore, by summarizing the strong and the weak elements in the monarchical government about the year 1688. Colbert died in September 1683, Louvois in July 1691. The disappearance of these two ministers left a real void. Admittedly the king had taken control of affairs in 1661, but for the first thirty years of his personal rule, in practice, many important decisions, and a fortiori most laws and ordinances, had been the work of one or other of his councillors. It was only from 1691, in effect, that Louis XIV became effectively his own first minister. Even then, however, anything affecting war or foreign policy retained a special interest for him; in these two fields his routine labour involved him in every detail, and he had acquired undisputed ability in handling them. Questions of justice, finance and commerce, to which he attended as in duty bound, certainly occupied his mind a great deal less. The organization of power at the centre corresponded with these personal inclinations. The Conseil d'en haut, an extremely restricted cabinet, dealt with scarcely more than those ‘foreign’ affairs of which the king had made a kind of speciality. The other councils had far less effective importance: as a rule, they merely ratified decisions taken elsewhere. Responsibility for home affairs was, on the one hand divided geographically between the four secretaries of state—each, as of old, having a fraction of the kingdom in his department—and, on the other hand, was more or less systematically divided between the various ever-encroaching departments of the Controller-General of Finance.

In 1678 Giant Pope did not greatly affright the celestial pilgrims: but eight years later, Protestants trembled. The emperor was bringing the Calvinist nobles of Hungary under Catholic domination, an aggressive papist was on the throne of England, a Catholic elector had succeeded to the Palatinate, Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes and persuaded the duke of Savoy to march once again into the valleys of the Vaudois. There were those who feared that the morale of the disunited forces of Protestantism would be unequal to the trial. ‘If God have yet any pleasure in the Reformation’, wrote Burnet from his exile in Holland in 1686, ‘He will yet raise it up again, though I confess the deadness of those Churches that own it makes me apprehend that it is to be quite laid in ashes.’ This pessimism was soon confounded and Burnet proceeded to an Anglican bishopric, though for long he remained apprehensive on the score of popery.

It is true that the years 1688–1715 saw the completion of an intolerant Catholic domination in France and Poland. After some vacillation, Louis XIV reaffirmed his ruthless policies in a declaration of March 1715 by which Protestants were deprived of all legal status, the mere fact of continued residence in France being taken as ‘proof that they have embraced the Roman, Catholic and Apostolic religion’. Five months later, as Louis lay dying, nine men, practically all that was left of the Calvinist pastorate, met in a quarry in Languedoc to hold the first synod since the Revocation and to initiate the secret and painful rebuilding of the churches of the ‘desert’.

‘Eclipsis Poloniae’ was a phrase used by a leading statesman of the time, Stanislas Szczuka, vice-chancellor of Lithuania, to describe the condition of the Polish Commonwealth at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It would have been hard yet to talk of the ‘collapse’ of a State which still had a place in every European constellation, and whose favours were still courted by powers which themselves were facing great internal changes. This was not yet the period when Poland, narrowly controlled by powerful neighbours, would be the helpless butt of other people's politics. On the other hand, increasing anarchy was already preventing the Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) from exploiting such political opportunities as came its way. Contemporaries held that this was only the temporary eclipse of a State which until recently had been powerful. If by 1721 the long years of war were a thing of the past in this part of Europe, so too was the former balance of power between its various States. The Habsburgs were immensely strengthened by their control of Hungary and by their succession in Italy and the Low Countries. Russia, following the Petrine reforms and her conquests on the Baltic coast, had grown into the leading power in the North. In Prussia rigorous government was building the foundations of militarism. At the same time, Sweden had ceased to count and Turkey was capable of active policy only by fits and starts. Poland, restricted in scope for diplomatic manoeuvre and penalized by the interference of dominant neighbours, sank into the deepest gloom of the so-called Saxon era.

The Russia into which the Tsarevich Peter was born in 1672, and of which he became joint ruler ten years later, was a poor, thinly populated and backward country. She had few towns of any size, no large-scale industry; her economic life was based on the production of timber, furs and salt, and on an inefficient agriculture. Vast areas were still undeveloped and virtually uninhabited. The only direct geographical outlet to the West was the port of Archangel, frozen for half the year; from the Baltic Russia was severed by Sweden's possession of Finland, Ingria, Estonia and Livonia; her frontiers were as yet several hundred miles from the Black Sea, the Crimea being a tributary state of the Ottoman empire and the raids of its Tatar inhabitants still a serious menace to the security of south Russia and the Ukraine. From the second half of the fifteenth century, however, soldiers, doctors and skilled workers of many kinds from western Europe had been active in Russia, and western ideas and techniques slowly taking root there. In the, seventeenth century this process was accelerating, but even in its last decades Russia was far from being a part of Europe in any true sense. She was isolated not merely by geography but also by her distinctive and in many respects unfortunate history, by a national pride so intense and arrogant as to attract the comment of almost all foreign visitors, and above all by deep-rooted religious differences. The Orthodox Church, her wealthiest and most powerful institution, had inherited from Byzantium a profound feeling of superiority to western Christendom and was in general a most formidable opponent of foreign influence.