What caused the crisis of the seventeenth century?
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What caused the crisis of the seventeenth century?
I like to bring up the crisis of the seventeenth century with my students because it's really a great opportunity to show them how one's views of a complex historical event can be shaped by the kinds of questions that you ask. The crisis of the seventeenth century was a real crisis. Between 1550 and 1650 you had civil conflict, religious conflict, terrible religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in France and the Netherlands. You had a civil war in England that resulted in the execution of the king and, to top it all off, you had the devastation caused by the 30 Years War in central Europe, which involved all the major powers and was an extremely devastating war that decimated the population.
Religious historians will take the conflict of the seventeenth century and say that it tells us something about the power of ideas, religious ideas in particular. It was impossible for communities in early modern Europe to tolerate religious dissent in their midst, to tolerate religious difference because they believed that tainted the sacred nature of the world community that they possessed as Catholics or as Protestants. Any they might use this to explain the severity of violence, why a religious dissident or a witch would need to be expelled or burned or literally eliminated from the community with extraordinary violence.
Political historians would say that of course religion matters but there are all sorts of calculations of self interest that are going on here. When a German prince decides to side with Luther and break with Rome, there are calculations about finding some room to maneuver when it comes to the Holy Roman Empire or maybe some financial calculations. Most famously, of course, is Henry VIII who breaks with Rome and creates an Anglican church in England because he wants to divorce his wife, marry someone else, and produce a male heir.
Social historians look at this and say that they can explain a lot by asking why specific social groups in European society respond to one or the other religious idea. Why is it that artisans in German towns seem to be particularly attracted to some of the more radical forms of Protestant belief? Why is it that the aristocracy in southern France seems to be attracted to Protestantism? Why is it that the gentry in England, lower forms of the gentry, seem to be attracted to more austere forms of Calvinism?
Finally, social and demographic historians say that there is a deeper level to this. Politics and religion and social questions pertaining to the two are also influenced by a profound crisis that emerges from something much more basic: the relationship of the European population to the resources available to it to survive. They point out that by the late 1500's, the European population had increased from its low point after the Black Death and was really reaching its ecological limits. The increase in population meant that wages were going down because there were many more workers clamoring for work and competition was terrible. The slowness with which agricultural production could respond to these increases in population meant that food prices were going up. Then there was the coinciding factor, really just an accident of history, that just at this moment a large amount of silver was arriving from the Spanish colonies in the New World. This further devalued the currency and drove prices up and creates a crisis amongst the political regimes because in order to maintain their revenues, simply to keep them at the same level, they had to raise taxes even further.
This toxic mix of wage decreases, increasing prices, and increasing taxes creates tremendous tension in a society and has to be understood as a major contributing factor to the crisis of the seventeenth century.
Were the absolutist monarchs in Europe traditionalists or agents of change?
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Were the absolutist monarchs in Europe traditionalists or agents of change?
The question of whether absolutism is a modernizing force or that the monarchies of Europe are themselves modernizers, or whether these kings were defenders of some kind of traditional social order is in part a question about the absolutist monarchs' relationship to feudalism. Take the pure definition of a feudal society: a dominant member of a warrior caste makes an exchange of land, the fief, to some lesser member of the warrior caste who becomes his vassal and pledges loyalty and service in exchange. In this structure, one of these warrior leaders might emerge and claim kingship but, in fact, most kings under this structure are relatively weak.
What happens across the space of the middle ages is that the monarchs begin to develop quite extraordinary powers and an ability to collect taxes from a broader realm, to exert real control over a vast territory, and in doing so forcibly and necessarily created the kinds of institutions that look modern: bureaucratic forms of government, established standards of taxation, etc. Of course, it was a difficult process and there were often many reversals but in doing this, the monarchy had to get this power from somewhere. And from where does it get this power? It gets it from other elites.
In that sense, the absolutist monarchs are modernizers. They are taking power away from local elites, drawing that power to the capitol in Paris, and in that system they are somehow rationalizing, modernizing, building up bureaucratic forms of government that are recognizable to us as the institutions of the modern state.
On the other hand, the monarchs couldn't destabilize the social order. They needed the support of those local elites. In many ways, and historians have really emphasized this in recent years, we can overstate the case for a modernizing monarchy. At many moments in this period of history, the monarchy is working very closely to shore up those traditional elites, to collaborate with them, to invite their participation in order to extend and to hold on to power.
There is a kind of central contradiction between these two roles. Modernizing the state means building it up, building an army. And the pressures to do so were enormous. They also needed the money to do it. But the source of the money is the very traditional elites whose cooperation they needed. Somehow, that contradiction needed to be bridged or balanced by the monarchies. In Eastern Europe or in Prussia or in Peter the Great's reign in Russia, the monarchy does quite a good job of assimilating the aristocracy into the institutions of this state structure that it's building. In France, on the other hand, the conflict between the traditional elites and the monarchy grows ever more intense and many people see this as one of the factors leading to the French Revolution.