Political situation in Europe in the first half of the XVII century

A generation of Germans grew up knowing nothing but war, and the weary population longed for peace. Apparently, peace would have been possible were it not for the conflicting political interests of the rulers. Politics came more and more to the fore as the war lost its religious character and became increasingly secular. Ironically, one man who promoted this change was a high official of the Catholic Church.

Cardinal Richelieu Wields the Scepter

The official title of Armand-Jean du Plessis was Cardinal de Richelieu. He was also the prime minister of France from 1624 to 1642. Richelieu aimed to make France the major power in Europe. To that end, he tried to erode the power of his fellow Catholics, the Habsburgs. How did he do this? By financing the Protestant armies of the German estates, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, all of which were fighting against the Habsburgs.

In 1635, Richelieu sent French troops into the war for the first time. The book vivat pax—Es lebe der Friede! (Long Live the Peace!) explains that in its final stage, “the Thirty Years’ War ceased to be a conflict between religious parties. . . . The war became a struggle for political supremacy in Europe.” What started as a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants ended with Catholics fighting alongside Protestants against other Catholics. The Catholic League, already weakened in the early 1630’s, was disbanded in 1635.

Peace Conference in Westphalia

Europe was ravaged by plunder, murder, rape, and disease. Gradually, a yearning for peace was intensified by a realization that this was a war that no one could win. The book vivat pax—Es lebe der Friede! remarks that “toward the end of the 1630’s, the responsible princes finally recognized that military power would no longer help them to achieve their goal.” But if peace was what everyone wanted, how was it to be achieved?

Emperor Ferdinand III of the Holy Roman Empire, King Louis XIII of France, and Queen Christina of Sweden agreed that a conference should be held where all parties to the war should assemble and negotiate peace terms. Two sites were selected for the talks—the towns of Osnabrück and Münster in the German province of Westphalia. They were chosen because they were midway between the capitals of Sweden and France. Starting in 1643, about 150 delegations—some with large teams of advisers—descended on the two towns, Catholic envoys gathering in Münster, Protestant delegates in Osnabrück.

First, a code of behavior was laid down to establish such matters as title and rank of the envoys, seating order, and procedures. Then peace talks began, with proposals being passed from one delegation to the next through mediators. After almost five years—while the war continued—peace terms were agreed upon. The Treaty of Westphalia consisted of more than one document. One agreement was signed in Osnabrück between Emperor Ferdinand III and Sweden, another in Münster between the emperor and France.

As news of the treaty spread, celebrations got under way. What began with a deadly spark ended with literal fireworks. They lit up the sky in various cities. Church bells rang, cannons roared in salute, and people sang in the streets. Could Europe now expect lasting peace?

Is Lasting Peace Possible?

The Treaty of Westphalia recognized the principle of sovereignty. This meant that each party to the treaty agreed to respect the territorial rights of all other parties and not to interfere in their internal affairs. Modern Europe as a continent of sovereign states was thus born. Among those states, some gained more from the treaty than did others.

France was established as a major power, and the Netherlands and Switzerland each attained independence. For the German estates, many of which had been ruined by the war, the treaty had its drawbacks. Germany’s destiny was to a degree decided by other nations. The New Encyclopædia Britannica reports: “The gains and losses of the German princes were determined by the convenience of the principal powers: France, Sweden, and Austria.” Instead of being drawn together and united into one nation, the German estates were divided just as before. Moreover, some territory was handed over to the control of foreign rulers, as were sections of Germany’s main rivers—the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Oder.

Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist religions were granted equal recognition. This did not please everyone. Pope Innocent X was vehemently against the treaty, declaring it null and void. Nevertheless, the religious frontiers that were drawn up remained largely unchanged for three centuries. Although religious freedom for the individual had not yet arrived, it came one step closer.

The treaty concluded the Thirty Years’ War, and with it most of the hostilities ended. This was the last major religious war in Europe. Wars did not cease, but their underlying cause shifted from religion to politics or commerce. That is not to say that religion lost all influence in European hostilities. In World Wars I and II, German soldiers wore on their belt buckle an inscription with a familiar ring: “God Is With Us.” During those horrendous conflicts, Catholics and Protestants once again lined up on one side to fight against Catholics and Protestants on the opposing side.

Clearly, the Treaty of Westphalia did not bring lasting peace. However, such peace will soon be experienced by obedient mankind. Jehovah God will bring everlasting peace to mankind through the Messianic Kingdom of his Son, Jesus Christ. Under that government, the one true religion will be a force for unity, not division. No one will go to war for any reason, religious or otherwise. What a relief it will be when Kingdom rule holds sway over the earth and “to peace there will be no end”!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Political situation in Europe in the first half of the XVII century 

The Seventeenth Century

Its first half of the 17th century is marked by the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics, especially the Thirty Years War, which raged within Germany or, as it was then called, The Holy Roman Empire from 1618 to 1648. More than a religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics, it was also a power struggle within and between kingdoms. France under its new, Bourbon dynasty became the most powerful state in Europe replacing the Habsburgs in both Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (Germany). The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended this long war, marks the beginning of the Modern State System.

The ideal of the Middle Ages had envisioned a universal empire and a universal church.  This ideal dated back to memories of the Carolingian Empire and further back to Rome.  This ideal was never a reality.  The reality of the Middle Ages was based on feudalism and manorialism.  Europe was divided politically into many locally governed principalities, free cities, duchies, and feudal kingdoms;  but it was united religiously.  Western Christendom was a unity under the Holy Roman Catholic Church and the Pope.  Under Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, that dream of one Empire and one Church had  still been a possibility  After the Thirty Years War and the end of the 17th century, that dream had been given up.  Religious unity had been shattered by Martin Luther and the other reformers.  Political unity had become impossible with the creation of the modern state system based on sovereignty.

By 1648, Europe had divided into a system of sovereign, independent states governed largely by absolute monarchs.

Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, was fractured during the Thirty Years War into more than 300 separate states. The Catholic, Austrian Habsburgs were the big losers during the Thirty Years War. Any hope of centralizing Germany under their rule was lost. Germany was divided on the basis of religion into Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists. The religion of the ruler determined the religion of the people. Catholic Austria and Lutheran Prussia emerged as the two most important states within the loose Confederation called the Holy Roman Empire.

 

England experienced the rise and fall of militant Calvinistic Puritanism. Despite internal conflict, it kept building up its naval power and started on the road toward overseas empire. It gradually replaced Spain and the Netherlands as the greatest sea power. The Glorious Revolution of 1689 set England on the path of limited, constitutional, and, ultimately, democratic government. It became the most liberal country in Europe and the model for Enlightenment thinkers on the Continent to imitate in the eighteenth century.

The second half of the century was dominated by Louis XIV of France. The Sun King’s effort to dominate Europe failed but he succeeded in crushing the Protestant Huguenots and consolidated absolutism in France.

But, perhaps most importantly, the seventeenth century marked the beginning of an intellectual revolution. It marked the birth of modern ideas about nature, man, and government. What went by the name of the Scientific Revolution was really a paradigm shift in all areas of knowledge, including religion.

The 17th century was the century that lasted from January 1, 1601, to December 31, 1700, in the Gregorian calendar. The 17th century falls into the Early Modern period of Europe and in that continent was characterized by the Dutch Golden Age, the Baroque cultural movement, the French Grand Siècle dominated by Louis XIV, the Scientific Revolution, and The General Crisis. This last is characterised in Europe most notably by the Thirty Years' War, the Great Turkish War, the end of the Dutch Revolt, the disintegration of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the English Civil War.

Some historians extend the scope of the General Crisis to encompass the globe, as with the demographic collapse of the Ming Dynasty, China lost approximately 30% of its population. It was during this period also that European colonization of the Americas began in earnest, including the exploitation of the fabulously wealthy silver deposits of Potosí in Upper Peru and Mexico, which resulted in great bouts of inflation as wealth was drawn into Europe from the rest of the world.

The 17th century fish market of Batavia (now Jakarta).

City hall of Batavia in 1682 (during the time of Dutch East India Company), later renovated in the 18th century to current form.

In the midst of this global General Crisis, there were victory and triumph: In the Near East, the Ottoman, Safavid Persian and Mughal empires grew in strength and the Sikhs began to rise to power in the Punjab. Farther east in Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu established the Edo period at the beginning of the century, starting the isolationist Sakoku policy that was to last until the 19th century. In China, the collapsing Ming Dynasty was challenged by a series of conquests led by the Manchu warlord Nurhaci, which were consolidated by his son Hong Taiji and finally consummated by his grandson, the Shunzi Emperor, founder of the Qing Dynasty.

European politics during the Crisis were dominated by the France of Louis XIV, where royal power was solidified domestically in the civil war of the Fronde, in which the semi-feudal territorial French nobility was weakened and subjugated to the power of an absolute monarchy through the reinvention of the Palace of Versailles from a hunting lodge to a gilded prison in which a greatly expanded royal court could be more easily kept under surveillance. With domestic peace assured, Louis XIV caused the borders of France to be expanded to include, among other regions, Rousillon, Artois, Dunkirk, Franche-Comté, Strasbourg, Alsace and Lorraine. It was during this century that England's political system became unique in Europe - by the end of the century, the monarch was a symbolic figurehead and Parliament was the dominant force in government - a stark contrast to the rest of Europe, in particular Louis XIV's France.

By the end of the century, Europeans were also aware of logarithms, electricity, the telescope and microscope, calculus, universal gravitation, Newton's Laws of Motion, air pressure and calculating machines due to the work of the first scientists of the Scientific Revolution, including Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Galileo Galilei, René  Descartes, Pierre Fermat, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and William Gilbert among other luminaries.

Early modern

In history, the early modern period of modern history follows the late Middle Ages. Although the chronological limits of the period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late portion of the Middle Ages (c. 1500) through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions (c. 1800) and is variously demarcated by historians as beginning with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, with the Renaissance or the Age of Discovery and ending with the French Revolution in 1789. From a global standpoint, the most important feature of the early modern period was its globalizing character — it witnessed the exploration and colonization of the Americas and the rise of sustained contacts between previously isolated parts of the globe. The historical powers became involved in global trade. This world trading of goods, plants, animals, and food crops saw exchange in the Old World and the New World. The Columbian exchange greatly affected almost every society on Earth.

In the world, capitalist economies and institutions became more sophisticated and globally articulated. This process began in the medieval North Italian city-states, particularly Genoa, Venice, and Milan. The early modern period also saw the rise and beginning of the dominance of the economic theory of mercantilism. It also saw the European colonization during the 15th to 19th centuries, which spread Christianity around the world.

The early modern trends in various regions of the world represented a shift away from medieval modes of organization, sometimes politically and other-times economically. The period in Europe witnessed the decline of feudalism and includes the Reformation, the disastrous Thirty Years' War, the Commercial Revolution, the European colonization of the Americas, and the Golden Age of Piracy. By the 16th century the Ming economy was stimulated by trade with the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch. The Azuti-Momoyama period in Japan saw the Nanban trade after the arrival of the first European Portuguese.

Other notable trends of the early modern period include the development of experimental science, the reduction of relative distances through improvements in transportation and communications, increasingly rapid technological progress, secularized civic politics and the early authoritarian nation states in various regions of the world.

Dutch Golden Age

The Dutch Golden Age (Dutch: Gouden Eeuw [ˈɣʌudə(n) ˈeːw]) was a period in Dutch history, roughly spanning the 17th century, in which Dutch trade, science, military, and art were among the most acclaimed in the world. The first half is characterized by the Eighty Years' War till 1648. The Golden Age went on in peace time during the Dutch Republic until the end of the century.

Causes of the Golden Age

In 1568, the Seven Provinces that later signed the Union of Utrecht (Dutch: Unie van Utrecht) started a rebellion against Philip II of Spain that led to the Eighty Years' War. Before the Low Countries could be completely reconquered, a war between England and Spain (the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604)) broke out, forcing Spanish troops to halt their advances and leaving them in control of the important trading cities of Bruges and Ghent, but without control of Antwerp, which was then arguably the most important port in the world. After a siege, on August 17, 1585 Antwerp fell, and the division of the Northern and Southern Netherlands (mostly modern Belgium) was defined.

The United Provinces (roughly today's Netherlands) fought on until the Twelve Years' Truce, which did not end the hostilities. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War, brought the Dutch Republic formal recognition and independence from the Spanish crown.

Migration of skilled workers to Netherlands

Under the terms of surrender of Antwerp in 1585 the Protestant population (if unwilling to reconvert) were given four years to settle their affairs before leaving the city and Habsburg territory. Similar arrangements were made in other places. Protestants were especially well-represented among the skilled craftsmen and rich merchants of the port cities of Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp. More moved to the north between 1585-1630 than Catholics moved in the other direction, although there were also many of these. Of those moving north, many settled in Amsterdam, transforming what was a small port into one of the most important ports and commercial centres in the world by 1630.

In addition to the mass migration of natives from the Southern Netherlands, there were also significant influxes of non-native refugees who themselves had previously fled from religious persecution, particularly Sephardi Jews from Portugal and Spain and, later, Huguenots from France. The Pilgrim Fathers also spent time there before going to the "New World."

Cheap energy sources

Several other factors also contributed to the flowering of trade, industry, the arts and the sciences in the Netherlands during this period. A necessary condition was the supply of cheap energy from windmills and from peat, easily transported by canal to the cities. The invention of the sawmill enabled the construction of a massive fleet of ships for worldwide trading and for defense of the republic's economic interests by military means.

Birth and Wealth of Corporate Finance

In the 17th century the Dutch - traditionally able seafarers and keen mapmakers - began to trade with the Far East and as the century wore on, they gained an increasingly dominant position in world trade, a position previously occupied by the Portuguese and Spanish.

In 1602 the Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) was founded. It was the first-ever multinational corporation, financed by shares that established the first modern stock exchange. This company received a Dutch monopoly on Asian trade and would keep this for two centuries. It became the world's largest commercial enterprise of the 17th century. Spices were imported in bulk and brought huge profits, due to the efforts and risks involved and seemingly insatiable demand. To finance the growing trade within the region, the Bank of Amsterdam was established in 1609, the precursor to, if not the first true central bank.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Principles of the state system

 

The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War, which had caused catastrophic human and material losses in central Europe, especially Germany. Millions had died, and Europe would not see a larger general war until the Napoleonic conflicts at the end of the 18th century and the First World War (1914-1918). The Thirty Years' War had been fought partly over the rival ambitions of dynastic families, and partly over religion. It originated as a conflict over the balance of Protestant and Catholic states in the Holy Roman Empire - an issue dating from the adoption, almost a century prior, of the principle that the local ruler could determine which religion should be practiced. Over time, as ruling dynasties changed or died out through marriage, succession, or death, Protestant areas were threatened with re-Catholicization.

The war also involved an effort to contain the power of the Hapsburg dynasty in central Europe and its claim to universal monarchy. Hapsburg generals had won major victories in the early part of the war, but Swedish intervention on the Protestant side turned the tide for a time, until the pendulum swung in the other direction and the Protestant princes, exhausted by war, concluded a compromise peace with the empire in 1635. However, it was at this point that France directly intervened in order to roll back, or at least contain, Hapsburg gains. The war dragged on, stripped of its initial religious justification, for another 13 years. The Peace of Westphalia, a massive and complex diplomatic achievement, ushered in a new era in international relations.

The Peace of Westphalia was itself an innovation. For the first time, a peace treaty was written by representatives from all parties, rather than just a few. Thousands of diplomats helped draft it. The Peace of Westphalia thus established the precedent of a diplomatic congress, which has remained a model for diplomacy until today. After 1648, a new state system emerged in Europe (as well as a new constitutional structure in the Holy Roman Empire). The principles that governed this state system predominated until the late-18th century. There were two primary kinds of states in this period - republics and absolute monarchies - but virtually all states accepted the principles of the new state system. Two principles were particularly important: the principle of sovereignty and that of raison d'état, or "reason of state." (Are present-day international relations governed by diplomatic congresses? What are the strengths and weaknesses of such a system?)

What Did These Principles Mean?

Sovereignty meant the state was the ultimate authority over a given territory and all its inhabitants. State power could be represented by a king, by a parliament, or by a bureaucracy of state officials. The state itself had come to represent a public legal power that existed apart from the person of the king.

Closely linked to the principle of sovereignty was the principle of reason of state, which placed the interests of the state above all other considerations, even morality or religion (recall Catholic France's intervention against the Hapsburgs on behalf of Protestant Germany). Both the internal warfare of the state, and its fortunes in the outside world, became paramount. Reason of state was often a concept used to justify territorial expansion. (Can you think of examples where "reason of state" is invoked today?)

The Prussian king, Frederick the Great (1712-1786) is a good example of a ruler who governed according to the new reason-of-state principle. Frederick was a polished intellectual and political writer. His Anti-Machiavel (1740) was a work that advocated morally inspired politics. But Frederick did not hesitate to become a ruthless conqueror when it was in the interest of Prussia. In 1740, for instance, he invaded the neighboring province of Silesia and cited reason of state to justify his conquest. Such ruthless acts of aggression were common in the era of the new state system.

International affairs in the 18th century, however, were not without restraining principles. The state system was governed by the idea of a balance of power, which held that international order could only be maintained if all of the major European states were kept in equilibrium. But the idea of the balance of power also suggested that if a clearly dominant power arose - "hegemonic" was the traditional term used to describe such a power - other countries would form a coalition to restrain it. Different observers have noted that sometimes the balance of power functioned like an automatic machine: through self-interest countries would seek out allies to prevent any one power from becoming dominant. Other interpreters have suggested that preserving the balance required considerable effort. Some commentators implied that the balance of power acted as a deterrent to prevent war, but others accepted that it might require war to restore the balance of power.