AP European History
AP European History
The period from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to the French Revolution in 1789 was truly the age of the absolute ruler. Powerful monarchs ruled all the nations and principalities of Europe. They believed in the doctrine of the divine right of kings.
Certain conditions were necessary to maintain a strong central monarchy. The monarch must control the aristocracy, ensure the loyalty and obedience of the army, run the administration efficiently from the seat of government, and pursue a clear foreign policy.
In the past, struggles for thrones had been common. Members of royal families had been known to murder one another or engage in civil wars in their desire for power. Once a monarch had power, he or she could never feel secure. One of the best ways to protect the throne was to keep control over the nobles, the most likely and most powerful source of any conspiracy against the monarch.
During the Middle Ages and beyond, armies were made of small, localized units. These troops usually remained loyal to the lord for whom they fought. The seventeenth century saw the birth of the national standing army, which owed its loyalty to the monarch as the head of state. A loyal army would not support an uprising among the common people or the nobility; instead, the monarch would use the army to crush the rebellion.
Ancient Rome had existed as a centrally controlled empire with a vast bureaucracy. In the seventeenth century, European states began to pattern themselves on the Roman model. The civil service was essential to control all the territory outside the capital city. It was responsible for collecting taxes, settling court cases, and so on. No central government could maintain control over the people without having an efficient civil service.
Defending the national borders was an important aspect of maintaining power. No ruler could remain secure on his throne without a clear foreign policy. Monarchs had to maintain defensive alliances and strive to maintain the balance of power among nations; they also had to take steps to avoid being overwhelmed by hostile neighbors.
In 1643, a five-year-old child was crowned Louis XIV of France. He would reign until his death in 1715. Known to the world as the Sun King, Louis was perhaps the most absolute of the absolute European monarchs of the seventeenth century. He chose the sun for his symbol because it was the source of all light and life on earth.
Like all the monarchs of his era, Louis believed in the divine right of kings. This was not a theory to him, but a reality by which he lived and ruled. Louis considered that he and the state of France were one entity. He had no intention of ceding any of his power to the aristocracy, the Church, or the common people of France.
King Louis XIII’s chief minister of state, the highly able Cardinal Richelieu, had believed in a strong central monarchy. Jules Mazarin, also a cardinal, succeeded Richelieu in 1642 and became Louis XIV’s chief minister. He espoused the same policies as Richelieu; like his predecessor, he discouraged representative institutions. France had no equivalent of the English Parliament. It had a body called the Estates General, which consisted of three groups of deputies representing the hereditary nobility, the clergy, and the commoners. Louis never once convened the Estates General. He and Mazarin preferred to govern without their advice or interference. During Louis’ reign, opposition to the king was considered treason; even had the Estates General met, the deputies would have had no power to do anything other than agree with whatever the king wanted. After the death of Mazarin in 1661, Louis served as his own chief minister rather than summon the Estates General.
The reign of Louis XIV saw numerous construction projects. The building of the Canal du Midi (1665-1681), which connected the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, was important for trade and an impressive feat of engineering for the time. The crown also pursued an aggressive tariff policy that discouraged imports and bolstered French luxury industries such as the textile industry. Louis hired architects to oversee the restoration and remodeling of the Louvre and the building of Versailles, the king’s “retreat” fourteen miles outside of Paris. An enormous palace with endless corridors of mirrors, marble, and gold leaf, Versailles became a major symbol of the king’s absolute power; it also symbolized the dominant role France played in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
To exercise as much control as possible over the hereditary nobility, Louis XIV required all of them to spend part of each year at Versailles. In the short term, this policy prevented the nobles from hatching any conspiracy against the crown. In the long term, it weakened the all-important bond between estate owners and their tenants. Instead of living on their estates and managing their land and their people, the nobles spent half their time at Versailles; the money that should have been spent on maintaining and improving their estates was wasted on court finery and travel expenses. Louis did not know it, but he was helping to lay the groundwork for the French Revolution. (See Chapter 9.)
Louis XIV also helped to lay the groundwork for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The crown was the most important patron of arts and letters in France. Investigation, learning, and publication in the arts and sciences flourished under official state sponsorship, with the establishment of the French academies of letters, science, and the arts. Not since the Renaissance had artists enjoyed such a degree of official protection. This helps to explain why the Enlightenment was centered in France. (See Chapter 8.)
The Fronde was a series of uprisings and rebellions in the Paris-Bordeaux region over the issue of new taxes Mazarin levied on the people to pay for debts run up during the Thirty Years’ War. Since the state controlled the army, which had greatly expanded during the war, the rebels were doomed from the start. The Fronde was crushed in 1652.
Louis XIV conducted a series of wars in the hope of strengthening France’s position in Europe. They included the War of Devolution (1667-1668), the Dutch War (1672-1678), the War of League of Augsburg (1689-1697), and the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1713).
Louis’ foreign wars included both successes and failures. He expanded French territory on the northern front, with the annexation of Flanders and Strasbourg. However, he supported the losing side in the power struggle for England between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians. The worst effect of Louis’ wars was that they drained the French treasury of money. This damage to the domestic economy would have serious consequences under Louis’ successors.
The most important of Louis’ wars was the War of Spanish Succession, which pitted France and Spain against the Netherlands, England, and the Holy Roman Empire. The war began after Louis’ grandson was crowned Philip V of Spain in 1700; the idea of a close alliance between France and Spain, or perhaps even a union of the two kingdoms, made the rest of Europe unite in alarm to prevent it. A United Kingdom of Spain and France would be by far the largest nation in Europe, and would disrupt the balance of power. The war was ultimately settled by the Treaty of Utrecht. In exchange for remaining on the throne, Philip V agreed that the crowns of Spain and France would never be united .
The Netherlands became a parliamentary republic after gaining its independence from Hapsburg rule in the Treaty of Westphalia. It consisted of several provinces, each of which sent deputies to the national assembly, the States General, which met in The Hague, at the mouth of the Rhine River on the North Sea. This was also the residence of the hereditary ruler of the Orange family, known as the stadholder. In 1688, stadholder William of Orange became William I of England, thanks to his marriage to the Stuart princess Mary.
Because the Dutch provinces were small and the population was culturally homogeneous, the provincial deputies of the States General tended to work effectively together rather than bickering. They controlled all foreign policy decisions, subject to the approval of the provincial legislatures, called “estates.”
Peter Romanov was born in 1672. When Peter was ten, he and his brother Ivan were named dual monarchs of Russia; their older sister Sophia would serve as regent until the boys grew old enough to rule. In 1689, the nobles ousted Sophia from power. On Ivan’s sudden death, Peter became Czar Peter I of Russia. Known to history as Peter the Great, he would rule Russia until his death in 1725.
Peter was characterized by genuine intellectual and scientific curiosity. He also had a strong, dominant personality and believed in absolute rule with a very heavy hand. These two qualities of the czar’s character had a decisive effect on Russia’s development during the early eighteenth century.
Peter was fascinated by European culture. In 1697, he left his homeland to tour Europe in disguise. Given that the czar was six feet, six inches tall – a true giant in an era when people were much smaller than they are today – his disguise fooled no one. However, he enjoyed his ability to speak directly with commoners of all types, and even share their heavy manual labor, as he could not easily have done had he traveled in a more ceremonious style.
When Peter returned to Russia, he made plans to turn it into a modem nation that would take its place beside the great states of Europe. Western influence was soon apparent everywhere in Moscow. At the court and elsewhere, Peter began requiring Western administrative practices and Western efficiency. During Peter’s reign, many French, English, and German books were translated into Russian for the first time; Peter himself acquired an impressive personal library. He introduced Western-style dress to replace the traditional Russian costumes; the most famous innovation in personal style was a law against beards, since European fashion dictated a clean-shaven face for a man. Many nobles and gentlemen opposed this law with surprising vigor, for two reasons: first, Orthodox doctrine required believers to wear full beards, and second, a beard was welcome protection against frostbite during the bitter Russian winters. In the end, Peter exempted priests from the no-beard policy.
Peter kept up a constant state of warfare during his reign; the standing army reached a new high of two hundred thousand troops under his rule. By 1721 he had moved Russia’s border far to the west, acquiring Estonia, Livonia, and part of Switzerland. In 1703, Peter founded a new capital city at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, naming it St. Petersburg after himself Peter would use this beautiful city much as Louis XIV used Versailles; he required the boyars to attend him there during part of every year and forced them to pay for its construction.
Peter the Great died in 1725. Since he named no successor, a period of some chaos ensued. At first, his widow assumed power, ruling as Catherine I; after her death, various factions struggled for power. The situation was resolved in 1762 when Peter II became czar; however, mental and emotional instability made him incapable of ruling. His German wife, Catherine, assumed power when he died suddenly; historians agree that she either murdered him or ordered her followers to do so.