Europe: A History (130 page)

At the time, the British government was blind to even the most immediate implications. John Hancock was right to sign the Declaration of Independence (1776) in large letters, so that King George could read it ‘without his spectacles’. For Britain’s Continental rivals, the American revolt provided an opportunity for short-term meddling. France and Spain assisted a cause which they would never have tolerated among their own colonists. Yet for all Europeans of conscience it raised issues of fundamental political principle, challenging the very foundations of the monarchies by which almost all of them were ruled. The seven articles of the Constitution to which it gave rise contain the clearest and most practical formulations of the ideals of the Enlightenment. They are short, secular, democratic, republican, rational; firmly grounded in the contract theory of Locke, in English legalism, in Montesquieu’s thoughts on the division of powers, in Rousseau’s concept of the general will. The Constitution was written in the name of’We, the people of the United States’, and has proved remarkably durable. Its irony lies in the fact that many of its leading authors, including Thomas Jefferson and George
Washington, were slave-owners, and that it was wrested from a country which was one of the most free and best-governed of the day.

Prior to the eighteenth century, Savoy had been a frontier province of the Holy Roman Empire. It straddled the ridge of the western Alps between the kingdom of France and the plain of Lombardy. Its ruling house, which claimed to be Europe’s oldest ruling dynasty, was descended from the eleventh-century Count Umberto Biancamano, ‘Humbert of the White Hand’, whose family secured possession of territory on either versant of the Mont Cenis and the Grand St Bernard passes. Its western region—the francophone county of Savoy, including Chambéry, Annecy, and the massif of Mont Blanc—reached to the shore of Lake Geneva. Its eastern region, the Italian-speaking principality of Piedmont, including Aosta, Susa, and Turin, extended as far as the Ligurian riviera. After the rise of the Swiss Confederation the province was cut off from the main body of the Empire, and its rulers in Turin, when raised to the status of imperial dukes, were able to pursue a virtually independent existence. Like his predecessors, Duke Victor Amadeus II (r. 1675–1730) trod a delicate path between his powerful French and Habsburg neighbours. However, by deserting his alliance with Louis XIV at a critical point of the War of the Spanish Succession, he was rewarded by the Emperor with royal status, and the island of Sicily to boot. In 1720 he was obliged by the Austrians to exchange Sicily for the island of Sardinia, thereby ending his reign on the throne of a composite ‘Kingdom of Sardinia’ made up of Savoy, Piedmont, and Sardinia itself. This strange conglomerate, an archetypal product of dynastic politics, a ‘Prussia of the south’, was to turn a century later into the unlikely leader of the movement for Italian unification (see Chapter X).

Spain headed the long procession of countries which were fast losing their former political and economic standing. Under the Bourbon kings—Philip V (r. 1700–46), Ferdinand VI (r. 1746–59), Charles III (r. 1759–88), and Charles IV (r. 1788–1808)—it lost all pretensions to be a great power. Stripped of its Continental possessions except for Parma and Piacenza, and tied to a vast American empire of doubtful value, it stayed under the domination of the grandees, the Church, and the Inquisition. In Philip’s reign alone, 700
autos-da-fé
were staged. Some success was achieved in reorganizing the administration on French lines, in embellishing Madrid, and in encouraging cultural life through the Academy (1713).
[BASERRIA] [PRADO]

Portugal likewise vegetated under the rule of indifferent monarchs and a militant Church. John V (r. 1706–50), known as ‘The Faithful’, was a priest-king, ‘one of whose sons by an abbess became Inquisitor-General’. The reign of his successor, Joseph I (r. 1750–77), was shattered by the Lisbon earthquake, and restored by the energetic but short-lived reforms of Portugal’s latter-day Colbert, Sebastão, Marquis of Pombal (1699–1782). Pombal probably never uttered the words most frequently attributed to him—’Bury the dead, and feed the living’—but from 1750 he dominated the country for a quarter of a century, reorganizing finance, education, navy, commerce, and colonies. Maria I (r. 1777–1816), like her British contemporary, lapsed into insanity, and Portugal, like Britain, was to pass the whole of the revolutionary period under a regency,
[QUAKE]

Eighteenth-century Italy was still divided, even if the lines of division were somewhat altered. The main rivalry now lay between the House of Savoy in Turin, the Austrian Habsburgs, holding Milan, and the Duchy of Tuscany. The re-establishment in 1738 of an independent Bourbon kingdom in Naples added some balance. All these territories benefited from the sound management of enlightened despots. Elsewhere, the old contrasts prevailed between the city republics such as Venice and the divine autocracy of the Papal States. The Vatican lost much of its room for political manœuvre when the Catholic powers were disunited in everything except their demand to suppress the Jesuits (see pp. 593–4). Three long papacies, those of Clement XI (1700–21), Benedict XTV (1740–58), and Pius VI (1775–99), could not check the Vatican’s political effacement. Secular culture saw a marked revival; Italian language and literature were promoted by official academies in Florence and Rome. Science and scholarship flourished. Names such as that of L. A. Muratori the archivist (1672–1750) at Ferrara, Antonio Genovesi the economist (1712–69) at Naples, Cesare Beccaria the criminologist (1738–94) at Milan, or Alessandro Volta the physicist (1745–1821) at Pavia gained continental fame. They undoubtedly strengthened the bonds of a growing national cultural community,
[TORMENTA]

The United Provinces, like Portugal once a jewel in the Spanish crown, were still left with an overseas empire but with little influence over events nearer to home. At sea they had lost their maritime pre-eminence to the British; on land they were surrounded on all sides by the Habsburgs. The long-standing tug-of-war between the republican oligarchy and the House of Orange continued until 1815, when a hereditary monarchy was finally created,
[BATAVIA]

Eighteenth-century Scandinavia entered centre-stage on only one occasion. Sweden’s last throw for greatness under Charles XII (r. 1697–17) was an anachronism which ended in disaster (see below). With that exception, the Scandinavian countries settled down to an existence of inoffensive obscurity. In Denmark-Norway the four Oldenburg kings—Frederick IV (r. 1699–1730), Christian VI (r. 1730–46), Frederick V (r. 1746–66), and Christian VII (r. 1766–1808)—went some way to modernizing the country on enlightened lines. A zealous experiment in this direction, with 2,000 decrees passed in two years, ended abruptly in 1772 when the King’s chief minister, J. F. Struensee, a Prussian, and presumed father of the Queen’s child, was beheaded for
lèse-majesté
. In Sweden a long and strong reaction against royal absolutism gave prominence to a Diet whose stormy proceedings were given over to the laborious workings of its four estates, and the rivalry of the factions of ‘Hats’ and ‘Caps’. The monarchy was greatly weakened
by the abdication of Charles XII’s sister, Ulrica Leonora, in favour of her hapless German husband, Frederick I (r. 1720–51), and in 1756 by the Prussian-inspired intrigues of his successor, Adolphus Frederick (r. 1751–71) of Holstein-Gottorp-Eutin. Its successful reassertion after the royal
coup d’état
of 1772 under Gustavus III (r. 1771–92) brought Sweden closer to the mainstream of contemporary politics and culture. This patriotic and accomplished young king, who had once stormed the salons of Paris, was to be assassinated in 1792 whilst trying to organize a league of princes against the French Revolution,
[ELDLUFT]

Whilst Western Europe was preoccupied with the supremacy of France, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe had major preoccupations of their own. Within the lifetime of Louis XIV, Central Europe experienced two unexpected developments which seriously affected the history of the German states. One was the last great surge of the Ottomans, who in 1683 returned to the siege of Vienna. The other was provided by a further dramatic stage in the rise of Prussia, whose ambitions now stood to disrupt the entire region. Eastern Europe witnessed the decisive stage in the emergence of the Russian Empire, henceforth a military and political power of the first rank. Trapped in the middle of these rapid shifts, the old Republic of Poland-Lithuania first rallied to the rescue of Vienna, then slowly sank beneath the blows of her rapacious neighbours. Before the eighteenth century was out, the traditional power structure of Central and Eastern Europe had been transformed out of all recognition.

The Ottoman surge of the late seventeenth century was associated with an extended political crisis, which for thirty years put the grand viziership in the hands of the Köprülüs, a family of Albanian origin. It began in the 1650s amidst recriminations over Crete and the Venetian blockade of the Dardanelles, and was fuelled after 1660 by a disputed succession in Transylvania which placed the Porte in direct opposition to the Habsburgs. The Köprülüs saw war as a means for diverting the intrigues and resentments of the army, especially the corps of janissaries, against whom they had taken such drastic disciplinary measures. In 1672 they attacked the Polish province of Podolia, seizing the fortress of Kamieniets on the Dniester, until checked at Chocim by the Crown Hetman, John Sobieski. In 1681–2, in Hungary, they took the side of rebels led by Count Tököli and, after declaring Hungary to be an Ottoman vassal, advanced up the Danube towards Vienna.

The Siege of Vienna lasted for two months, from July to September 1683. It saw the poorly provisioned Austrian capital invested by a powerful army of 200,000 men equipped with a large siege train of heavy artillery. At a juncture when the German princes were fixated by the encroachments of Louis XIV on the Rhine, the Emperor had great difficulty responding to the danger on the Danube. As it was, the most effective assistance came from Poland, where Sobieski, now King and weaned from his early alliance with France, saw a Turkish war and Austrian subsidies as a solution to his own domestic problems. Having taken command of the relief force in early September, he prayed in the chapel on the heights of the Kahlenberg in the Vienna Woods. Then, in the mid-afternoon of the 12th, he ordered the attack: his winged hussars charged down the hill and rode straight for the centre of the Ottoman camp. At half-past five he was galloping through the enemy ranks amid scenes of panic, confusion, and slaughter. The following evening, he found time to write to his wife, Queen Marie-Louise, from the Grand Vizier’s tent: