Early modern society
was not conceived in terms of class, which is a more recent invention, but in terms of social orders or ‘estates’—in Latin
status
, in German
Stände
, in French
état
. These basic social groups were defined by their function, by the legal restrictions and privileges which were imposed in order to facilitate that function, and by their corporate institutions. Wealth and income played only a secondary role. Heredity was the main criterion for determining to which estate (save the clergy) any particular family might belong.
The nobility, for example, descendants of medieval knighthood, were defined by their military function and by laws giving them special rights to landownership and to the government of their properties. With the growth of standing armies, their exclusive military function was somewhat diminished, but their position as the backbone of the ruling caste remained. Through their regional assemblies they ran local politics in the countryside, and they usually enjoyed full jurisdiction over the inhabitants of their lands. In most countries they were headed by an upper crust such as the peers of England or the grandees of Spain; or else they were divided, as in Germany, into numerous ranks. The burgher estate, built on the liberties of self-governing cities and of the city guilds, was also stratified between the patricians, the freemen, and the propertyless plebs. It was usually protected by royal charters, and enjoyed full jurisdiction within the city walls. The peasants consisted of an enserfed majority and a minority who remained free or who were emerging from serfdom. The status of the serfs could vary considerably depending whether they lived on church, crown, or noble land.
The existence of many fragmented jurisdictions was incompatible with state despotism, and hence with Muscovite Tsarism or Ottoman rule. Here was the
social base which rendered western absolutism rather different from eastern autocracy. It was built on a mass of practices inherited from the earlier period and, despite innovations, was still essentially medieval. In the West as in the East, the social constraints on individuals remained very onerous by modern standards. Everyone, and not just the serf, was expected to belong to a corporate body and to abide by its rules. Renaissance individualism used to be celebrated by historians like Burckhardt exactly because they welcomed the first frail attempts to break free from the prevailing social curbs and compartments. When an exception was made, as when Michelangelo was released from his guild of artisans, it took a Pope to make it.
31
The price revolution
, Europe’s first encounter with inflation, was initially attributed to the wickedness of usurers. From the 1550s, through the researches of the University of Salamanca, it was attributed to the influx of Spanish gold and silver. ‘What makes Spain poor’, wrote a commentator, ‘is her wealth.’
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Although the view of contemporaries was blurred by the wild fluctuation of prices and by governments’ repeated attempts to cope by debasing their coinage, it is perfecdy clear that the general trend throughout the sixteenth century was for a steady price rise. Grain prices in France, for example, where the supply of coin was relatively scarce, were over seven times higher in 1600 than in 1500.
The cost of living, especially in Western Europe, rose dramatically (see Appendix III, p. 1263). Explaining this, recent scholars have laid less emphasis on bullion and more on population growth, on land hunger, and on rising rents and taxation. In the sixteenth century, Europe’s five giant cities of 100,000 + rose to perhaps fourteen: Constantinople, Naples, Venice, Milan, Paris, Rome, Palermo, Messina, Marseilles, Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Moscow. Peasants flooded into the growing towns; wages lagged behind prices; beggars proliferated. Landowners maximized their profits; governments, constantly hit by the falling value of their income, raised taxes. There was little relief until the early seventeenth century.
The social consequences of the price revolution are the subject of immense controversy. The expansion of the money economy encouraged social mobility, especially in England and Holland. The commercial bourgeoisie was gready strengthened. Capitalism reached the point of take-off. Yet the growth of cities in the West was closely linked to the parallel growth of ‘neoserfdom’ in the East. The nobility of Germany, Poland, and Hungary strengthened their position whilst their counterparts further west were thrown into confusion. English historians of the period cannot agree whether the gentry was rising or falling. The English Civil War has been variously attributed to the self-assertion of a confident gentry against a ruined aristocracy and to the desperation of a gentry impoverished by the price revolution.
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[CAP-AG]
Particularly interesting are the links between economic and religious developments. The Protestant Reformation had always been explained in religious and political terms. But Marxists have not been alone in seeing a correlation between
‘the Protestant ethic’ and commercial enterprise. Max Weber’s
The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1904) and Richard Tawney’s
Religion and the
Rise of Capitalism
(1926), though much criticized in detail, have inspired a whole school of comment. Capitalism, after all, needed its ideologues as well as its technicians. In this, Protestant writers undoubtedly played an important role in opposing deep-seated attitudes about usury. But they did so at a rather later date than historians once supposed. Tawney relies heavily for evidence on the English Puritan Richard Baxter; Weber, anachronistically, on the eighteenth-century American Benjamin Franklin. It was not until 1658 that the state of Holland ruled that no banker should be denied communion for practising usury. Theory, therefore, lagged well behind practice,
[USURY]
In reality, capitalism thrived no less in Catholic than in Protestant cities. Fugger of Augsburg was no Puritan. He thrived because of expanding trade and industry, and because war, for all its destructiveness, stimulated demand for goods and for financial services. Protestant divines were less effective as advocates of capitalist techniques than the numerous refugee entrepreneurs who flooded into Protestant countries.
It was through these migrations that the seeds of medieval capitalism were scattered throughout Europe. The biggest businessman in Geneva, Francesco Turrettini (1547–1628), was a refugee from Lucca. Louis de Geer (1587–1652), financier and industrialist to Gustavus Adolphus in Sweden, came from Liege. Marcus Perez (1527–72), William the Silent’s original bankroller, was a Jewish
converso
from Spain.
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The military changes
of the era—which like most things are now classed as a ‘Revolution’—had far-reaching effects. In essence, they involved the introduction of new weaponry, principally the pike, the musket, and improved artillery; the establishment of systematic training, which required professional cadres and instructors; and the growth of standing armies, which only the richest princes could afford.
One thing followed from another. The 16-ft Swiss infantry pike provided the long-desired means for stopping cavalry charges. But it could only be effectively deployed in a mobile square of pikemen, who had to wheel and manoeuvre with precision to face the swirling line of attack. As the Spaniards discovered, it was best used in conjunction with muskets, whose firepower could actually bring the attackers down. The musket’s accuracy, however, and its reloading rate, left much to be desired. It was only effective when a body of musketeers were trained to fire in unison, moving smartly in and out of the pike square between salvoes. Though it first appeared in 1512 at Ravenna, it was only widely adopted from the 1560s in the wars of the Low Countries. The combination of pike and musket demanded elaborate drill techniques, together with the steadiness and
esprit de corps
of disciplined professionals.
An answer to the pike square was found in the development of massed artillery. The cannon, which was fast rendering medieval fortifications obsolete, now came
to be widely used on the battlefield for opening up gaps in the enemy line. Yet expanded artillery trains required complex technical support, an efficient iron industry, high-quality gunpowder, expensive transport, and professional gunners.
In naval warfare, the increased calibre of the cannon stimulated a rapid growth in the size, tonnage, and manoeuvrability of ships. Warships had to be turned into floating gun platforms. The increased range of ships stimulated the science of navigation, which depended in turn on precision instruments, on sound astronomical data and cartography, and on advanced mathematics.
On land, great thought was given to rescuing the art of fortification from the effects of artillery bombardment. The
trace italienne
, which appeared in the mid-sixteenth century, set out a sophisticated system of ditches, entrapments, and low, angled bastions, which denied the cannoneers easy targets and access, whilst exposing them to withering counterfire. Antwerp, fortified in this way by Italian engineers in 1568, started a trend which was to bring back the prevalence of siege warfare. By the time of the celebrated Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), the engineers had regained the advantage over the artillerymen (see p. 619). Cavalry never became obsolete, but was forced to adapt. It was increasingly divided into dedicated regiments; of light horse for reconnaissance and skirmishing; of lancers for battlefield offence; and of mounted dragoons for mobile firepower.
The military commanders who supervised these developments were faced with a welter of unfamiliar technological and organizational problems. Part-time gentlemen soldiers could no longer cope. The emergence of salaried career officers was accompanied by the consolidation of a professional military and naval caste. Military careers offered prospects not only for sons of the old nobility but for all talents. Rulers had to found military academies for their training.
Rulers also had to find new sources of income for their armies, and a new bureaucracy to administer them. Once they had done so, however, they found that they possessed an incomparable political instrument for reducing the power of the nobles and for forcing their subjects to obey. The modern state without the military revolution is unthinkable. The road from the arquebus to absolutism, or from the maritime mortar to mercantilism, was a direct one.
Yet the military revolution is another subject where would-be theorists have been tempted to use their localized studies from parts of Western Europe for making unwarranted generalizations about the whole continent. It is often implied that East European methods of warfare, in which the cavalry did not cede supremacy to the infantry, were somehow retarded. They were not. The armies of Poland or Muscovy needed no lessons from their Western counterparts. They were soon familiar with the latest technical and organizational developments; but fighting across the vast empty expanses of the East, in a harsh climate, they met logistical problems unknown in the battlegrounds of northern Italy or the Netherlands. When Poland’s wonderful winged hussars met Western-style infantry, as they did against the Swedes at Kirchholm in 1605, they wreaked terrible slaughter. They repeated the performance when they faced hordes of orientalstyle light horse at Klushino in 1610 or at Chocim in 1621 (see below). At the same
time, thanks to the flexible, cell-like structure of their units, the
towarzysze
or hussar ‘comrades’ were able to forage and skirmish and to sustain themselves in hostile country where all less adaptable armies were devoured. In their encounters with the Poles, the Muscovites experienced many decades of failure, often because of ill-conceived Western innovations. But they possessed first-class artillery from an early date; and it was the Russian artillery which finally broke Sweden’s military supremacy at Poltava.
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‘The nation-state’
and ‘nationalism’ are terms which are frequently applied, or misapplied, to the sixteenth century. They are more appropriate to the nineteenth, when they were invented by historians looking for the origins of the nation-states of their own day. They should certainly not be used to convey premature preoccupations with ethnic identity. What they can properly convey, however, is the strong sense of sovereignty which both monarchs and subjects assumed, as the unity of the Middle Ages disintegrated. Their overriding
raison d’état
had an economic dimension associated with mercantilism, as well as the purely political one.
II Principe
(The Prince), written in 1513, served as the handbook for all such rulers who wished to reach a position of untrammelled command. It is often judged to be the starting-point of modern political science. Its author, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), historian, dramatist, and Florentine diplomat, who had observed Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI, ‘the great deceiver’, at close quarters, wrote his book in the hope that it would inspire a prince to fulfil Dante’s old dream of a unified Italy. But its appeal was universal. By separating politics from moral scruples, it gave voice to the art of
Machtpolitik
or untrammelled power politics. At one level this ‘Machiavellianism’ caused grave scandal. Concepts such as
frodi onorevoli
(honourable frauds) or
scelleratezze gloriose
(glorious rascalries) became notorious. At a more serious level, if
The Prince
is read in conjunction with the
Discourses
on Livy, Machiavelli can be seen to have been a devoted advocate of limited government, of the rule of law and of liberty. His low view of human nature provides the ground base on which constitutional structures have to be built. But it is his cynical aphorisms that were best remembered. ‘The nearer people are to the Church of Rome,’ he wrote, ‘the more irreligious they are.’ ‘A prince who desires to maintain his position must learn to be good or not as needs may require.’ ‘War should be the only study of a prince. He should look upon peace only as a breathing space which … gives him the means to execute military plans.’ Machiavelli has had no shortage of disciples.