The Short Oxford History of Europe GeneralEditor:T.C. W. Blanning The Seventeenth Century Europe 1598-1715 EditedbyJoseph Bergin OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Thisbookhasbeenprinted digitallyandproducedinastandard specification inordertoensureitscontinuingavailability OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS GreatClarendon Street,OxfordOX26DP OxfordUniversityPressisadepartmentoftheUniversityofOxford. ItfurtherstheUniversity’sobjectiveofexcellenceinresearch,scholarship, andeducationbypublishingworldwidein Oxford NewYork Auckland CapeTown Dares Salaam HongKong Karachi KualaLumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity Nairobi NewDelhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto Withofficesin Argentina Austria Brazil Chile CzechRepublic FranceGreece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan SouthKorea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxfordisaregistered trade mark ofOxfordUniversityPress inthe UKandincertain other countries Publishedinthe UnitedStates byOxfordUniversity PressInc.,NewYork ©OxfordUniversity Press,2001 Themoralrightsofthe author havebeenasserted Databaseright OxfordUniversityPress(maker) Reprinted 2008 Allrightsreserved.Nopart ofthispublication maybereproduced, storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted, inanyformorbyanymeans, without thepriorpermissioninwriting ofOxfordUniversityPress, orasexpresslypermitted bylaw,orunder terms agreedwiththeappropriate reprographicsrightsorganization.Enquiriesconcerningreproduction outsidethe scopoef the aboveshouldbesentto theRightsDepartment, OxfordUniversityPress,atthe addressabove Youmustnotcirculatethisbookinanyotherbindingorcover Andyoumust imposethis sameconditiononanyacquirer ISBN978-0-19-873167-2 General Editor’s Preface The problemsof writing asatisfactorygeneralhistory ofEurope are many,but the most intractable isclearlythe reconciliation of depth withbreadth.Thehistorianwhocanwritewithequalauthority about everypart ofthe continentin allitsvarious aspectshas not yetbeen born. Twomain solutions havebeen tried in the past: either asingle scholar has attempted to go it alone, presenting an unashamedly personalviewofa period, orteamsof specialistshavebeenenlistedto write what are in effectanthologies. The first offers a coherent per­ spectivebut unequal coverage,the secondsacrifices unity forthe sake ofexpertise.Thisnewseriesisunderpinned bythe beliefthat itisthis secondwaythat hasthe fewestdisadvantages and that eventhose can be diminished if not neutralized by close cooperation between the individual contributors under the directing supervision of the vol­ ume editor. Allthe contributors to everyvolume in this serieshave read each other’s chapters, have met to discuss problems of overlap and omission, and have then redrafted as part of a truly collective exercise.Tostrengthen coherence further, the editor has written an introduction and conclusion,weavingthe separate strands together to form a single cord. In this exercise,the brevity promised by the adjective ‘short’ in the series’title has been an asset.The need to be concisehas concentrated everyone’sminds on what reallymattered intheperiod.Noattempt hasbeenmadeto covereveryangleofevery topic in everycountry. What thisvolume doesprovide isashort but sharp and deep entry into the history ofEurope in the period in all itsmost important aspects. T.C.W.Blanning Sidney SussexCollege Cambridge Contents Listofcontributors x1 Introduction: the uncertain prospect 1 JosephBergin 1 The economy 1 R. C.Nash Population and the economy 13 Agriculture and agrarian society 18 Industry andtrade 36 Conclusion 48 2 Society 50 ThomasMunck Socialrank and socialmobility 52 Peasants,serfsand subservience 58 Urbanization and socialchange 62 Poverty,vagrancyand crime 66 Riotsand socialcontrol 70 Alternativeideologies:theworldturned upsidedown? 75 Conclusion 78 3 Politics 80 Anthony Upton Thepolitical structure ofEuropein1600 80 Theproblem oftheReformation 82 Thepressures ofwar:Richelieuand Olivares 84 Protest,rebellion,revolution: amid-centurycrisis? 88 The Englishrevolution, 1640-60 90 Thesearchforpoliticalstability 94 Alternative roads 103 viii | CONTENTS 4 Warandinternational relations 112 DavidParrott The Thirty YearsWar and European conflict to 1634 112 Earlyseventeenth-century warfareandthe ‘military revolution’ 117 Peacedeferred 120 Malplaquet and military change inEuropeafter 1660 125 The wars of French expansion, 1667—97 127 The Spanish succession 135 Conclusion 141 5 The ageofcuriosity 145 Laurence W.B.Brockliss The Augustinian landscape 145 Curiosity,observation and measurement 152 Thedisenchantment ofnature 160 Thesun-centred and infinite universe 167 The ascent ofman 172 Towardtshe Enlightenment 180 6 Europe and the wider world 185 AnthonyPagden Contexts 185 The meanings of‘discovery’ 188 Nature andits laws 191 Mare liberum? 194 Competing forempire 202 Therise ofslavery 204 Religionand civilization 209 Conclusion 215 Conclusion:the ancient and the modern 217 JosephBergin Further reading 229 Chronology 233 CONTENTS ix Maps 244 Europe in1600 244 Europe in1660 246 Europein 1715 248 Index 251 List of contributors JOSEPHBERGiIsN Professor ofHistory at the University ofManches­ ter and aFellowofthe BritishAcademy.Hehaspublished extensively on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century France,includingtwsotudies of Richelieu: Cardinal Richelieu—powerand the pursuit of wealth (1985),TheRiseofRichelieu(1991),and alarge-scale study ofFrance’s bishops, TheMaking ofthe French Episcopate1589-1661(1996).Heis currently working on the Frenchchurchin the ageofLouisXIV. LAURENCEBROCKLISSisReader in ModernHistory at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Magdalen College. His most important works include FrenchHigher Education in theSeventeenthand Eight­ eenth Centuries (1987)and, with Colin Jones, TheMedical World of Early Modern France (1997).He has published extensively on early modern medicine,philosophy andlearninggenerally,andiscurrently workingon astudyofthe diffusionofenlightenmentideas insouth­ ern France. THOMASMUNCisK Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow.He is the author of The Peasantry and the Early Absolute Monarchy in Denmark (1979),Seventeenth-Century Europe1598-1700 (1990) and most recently The Enlightenment, a comparative social history(1999).Hehas published essayson enlightened reform in late eighteenth-century Denmark andis preparing astudyofpublishing andpublicopinion inlateeighteenth-century Copenhagen. R. C. NASHis Lecturer in Economic History at the University of Manchester.Hehasresearched and published on Englishtrade inthe later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hiscurrent work focuses on financial and commercial links between Britain and its colonies, especially the West Indies and the Carolinas, in the eighteenth century. ANTHONYPAGDENfo,rmerly Reader in Intellectual History and Fel­ low of King’sCollege,Cambridge, is now Harry C. BlackProfessor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He has researched and published extensivelyon the cultural and intellectual dimensions of Europe’s encounter with other societies since the xii | LISTOFCONTRIBUTORS sixteenth century, notably The Fall ofNatural Man (1982),Spanish Imperialism and thePoliticalImagination (1989),European encounters with theNew World(1992),and LordsofAllthe World(1995). DAVIDPARROTisT aFellow of New College, Oxford. His research has mainly focused on French political and military history, and heis author of a forthcoming book, Richelieu’sArmy.He has published essayson aristocratic politics in seventeenth-century France,and has explored the diplomatic, dynastic and military history of northern Italianstatesinthe sameperiod. ANTHONYUPTONisProfessor Emeritus ofNordic History atthe Uni­ versity of StAndrews. He has written on Balticpolitics in the twen­ tieth century,but more recentlyhiswork hasbeen on earlymodern Swedishhistory, especiallyin the later seventeenth century. He isthe author of CharlesIXand SwedishAbsolutism(1998),and of ageneral history of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (forthcoming). Introduction: the uncertain prospect Joseph Bergin Mostpeoplewitha smattering ofhistoricalknowledgecasntill read­ ily associate certain centuries with a series of events or a process— usuallyifnot alwaysofavaguelypositivekind—whichthey feelhave some underlying historical significance.Equally,other centuries fare much less well in this competition for attention. So the sixteenth century is instinctively yoked to the Protestant Reformation, the eighteenth to the Enlightenment, sinceboth phenomena loom large inmostexplanationsofhowthemodern worldtooktheshapeit did. Butwhat, one may ask,about the century in between, separating or connecting—depending on one’s point of view—these two great ‘peaks’of early modern history? In the Anglo-Saxon world alteast, seventeenth-century Europe’splaceinhistoricalmemoryis insecure, doubtless because of the absence of any defining characteristic resemblingtheReformation ortheEnlightenment. Relativelyfewhis­ torical surveys of the century have succeeded in finding a title that encapsulates awidely-shared viewofthe century’s essence.Interest­ ingly,this lackofan overarching‘identity’ applicableto seventeenth­ century Europeas awholecoincideswith theuseindifferentparts of thecontinentof avarietyofcaptionswithwhictho labelthecentury, inwhole or in part. Their veryproliferation, asmuch astheir diver­ sity of meaning, may be one reason whiyt is so difficult to clearly identify the century for Europe as a whole! A fewexamples should sufficeto make the point. Sweden’s‘ageof greatness’ undoubtedly spanned the entire seventeenth century,with the Dutch ‘goldenage’ not far behind. The Spanish siglo de oro, as the tag suggests, also