Europe

1 Empires, 1453–1648

At last, empire has been conferred on me by the single consent of Germany, with God, as I deem it, willing and commanding . . . [T]he Spanish imperium, with the Balearics and Sardinia, with the Sicilian kingdoms, with a great part of Italy, Germany and France and with another, as I might say gold-bearing world [the Indies] . . . [a]ll these are hardly able to exist, or be maintained, unless I link Spain with Germany, and add the name of Caesar to that of King of Spain.

Emperor Charles V, 1520¹

[T]he crown of Sweden had to pay close attention to Germany and protect itself, because it was a temperate and populous part of the world and a warlike people, that there was not a country under the sun in a better position to establish a universal monarchy and absolute dominion in Europe, than Germany . . . now, if one potentate wielded absolute power in this realm, all the neighbouring realms would have to apprehend being subjugated.

Johan Adler Salvius, Swedish negotiator at Westphalia, 1646²

The year 1453 marked the start of modern European geopolitics, with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in the east, followed shortly afterwards by that of the English empire in France. These two events had profound consequences for Europe as a whole, and especially for the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation – usually known to contemporaries as ‘The Empire’ – which lay at its heart. The triumph of France over England soon led to increased French pressure on the western flank of Germany and an aspiration to control or at the very least influence the politics of the Empire. Further east, the Ottomans resumed their relentless advance into south-eastern and central Europe, which eventually took them twice to the gates of Vienna. The task of dealing with these threats fell to the Habsburg dynasty, which at the height of the reign of Charles V came to rule not only much of central, southern and north-western Europe, but large swathes of the New World as well. Crucial to the maintenance of that power was the imperial crown, through which a universal claim to lead Europe could be articulated, and which potentially provided a decisive voice in Germany. In the eyes of their opponents, on the other hand, the ambitions of Charles and his Spanish and Austrian Habsburg successors were part of a sinister plan to erect a ‘Universal Monarchy’ in Europe. The struggle of the Habsburgs to make good their imperial claims, and the determination of their rivals to deny them control of the Holy Roman Empire, dominated European geopolitics for the next 200 years.

The fall of Constantinople and the English defeat in France led to profound domestic changes across Europe. Over the next two centuries two different types of government, both of them direct responses to international challenges, began to emerge. On the one hand, there were the consultative systems of England and the Dutch Republic, whose remarkable resilience enabled both states not only to surmount all challenges but to maintain the European balance. On the other, there were the monarchical systems, ranging from straightforward despotisms such as the Ottoman Empire and Muscovy, to more mixed forms of government in France and Spain, in which representative assemblies continued to play an important role, but royal power was clearly in the ascendant. Meanwhile, the Empire, which lay in the middle both geopolitically and governmentally, struggled to give itself a constitutional structure capable of defusing internal tensions and keeping external predators at bay.

The first challenge came from the Ottomans. In the summer of 1453, Constantinople – capital of what was left of the Orthodox Christian Byzantine state – fell to the Turks after a long siege.3 A brutal sacking followed, marked by thousands of murders and rapes, as well as the desecration of the city’s ancient churches. Worse still from the Christian point of view, Mehmed II now adopted the title of ‘Sultan I Rum’ – ruler of Rome. He not only moved his capital to Constantinople – which the prophet Muhammed had thought the centre of the world – but retained the name of the city with all its European and imperial connotations.4 It was now only a matter of time before the Ottomans launched a fresh offensive across the Mediterranean, or into the Balkans towards central Europe, in order to make good this claim to the Roman Empire, to achieve world domination through control of Europe, and to vindicate their universal mission to promote the spread of Islam. For this reason, the fall of Constantinople provoked a panic across Christendom.⁵ Even in far-off Denmark and Norway, King Christian I declared that ‘the grand Turk was the beast rising out of the sea described in the Apocalypse’.⁶

In the early sixteenth century, the Ottoman advance resumed under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. His aim was nothing less than Universal Monarchy: an inscription above the entrance to the Grand Mosque in Constantinople later proclaimed him ‘Conqueror of the lands of the Orient and the Occident with the help of Almighty God and his victorious army, possessor of the Kingdoms of the World’.⁷ Liaising closely with disaffected Spanish Moors and their exiled associates along the North African coast, he struck in the Mediterranean. After turning Algeria into an Ottoman vassal, crushing the Knight Hospitaller garrison at Rhodes, and securing most of the Black Sea littoral, the Sultan crashed into central Europe. In 1521, Suleiman took the great fortress of Belgrade, and five years later he shattered the Hungarian army at the battle of Mohacs. A huge swathe of south-eastern Europe, including nearly the entire fertile Danube Basin, fell under Ottoman control. Hungary – whose nobles had described themselves as the ‘shield and rampart of Christianity’ – was no more. In his self-proclaimed capacity as ‘Distributor of Crowns to the monarchs of the world’, Suleiman made his satellite John Zapolya ‘King’ of Hungary. The Sultan, the Greek historian Theodore Spandounes warned, was ‘preparing an innumerable force to make war upon the Christians by land and sea’, with ‘no other thought but to devour’ them ‘Like a dragon with his gullet wide open’.⁸ It was only with great difficulty that the Habsburgs repulsed a Turkish assault on Vienna itself in 1529.

In the late 1550s, Suleiman’s successors pressed forward again. By 1565, the Turks had appeared before the strategically vital island fortress of Malta, which they very nearly captured. In the summer of 1570, Turkish troops landed on Cyprus, capturing the island a year later. As the Turks advanced in the late 1550s and early 1560s, Corsair and Morisco raids on the Spanish eastern seaboard, often penetrating far inland, mounted. At the same time, the Ottomans pushed further into Hungary, threatening the Holy Roman Empire. There was heavy fighting throughout the 1550s and 1560s, which resumed in the 1590s after a long truce. It was only in 1606, with the Peace of Zsitva, that the Ottoman threat to central Europe receded, at least for the time being.

If the Habsburgs were the main target of Ottoman schemes for Universal Monarchy, they soon developed ambitions of their own; indeed, they based their claim to leadership in Christendom partly on the need for western unity against the Turks. The election of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 determined the shape of European geopolitics for the next three decades.9 He ruled not only over Spain, Naples, the Low Countries, Austria and Bohemia, but also a growing empire in the New World. A Spanish bishop therefore pronounced Charles ‘by God’s grace . . . King of the Romans and Emperor of the world’. A Universal Monarchy under Charles V, in which the Habsburgs ruled over a united and once again uniformly Catholic Christendom, seemed a realistic possibility.¹⁰ It was only after some thirty years of campaigning against the Turks, France, the German princes and even England that Charles was forced to abandon his ambition to dominate Europe.

Within a few decades, however, his son, Philip II of Spain, showed himself to be every bit as formidable. He defeated the Turks at the sea battle of Lepanto, took control of Portugal and her overseas empire, colonized the Philippines, greatly increased the extraction of bullion from the New World, and was even the King-Consort of England for a while. Puffed up by success, Philip began to speak more and more openly about his European and global ambitions. The back of a medal commemorating the union of crowns with Portugal was inscribed with the words ‘Non sufficit orbis’ – ‘the world is not enough’. A Spanish triumphal arch carried a legend suggesting that the king was ‘lord of the world’ and ‘lord of everything in east and west’.¹¹ Like his father, Philip ultimately failed, worn out by the battle against Dutch rebels in the Low Countries and winded by the disastrous Armada expedition against England. The Habsburg ambition to control Europe was no means over, however. During the Thirty Years War in the early and mid seventeenth century, it required the combined efforts of France, Sweden, the German princes and ultimately England to see off an Austro-Spanish attempt to dominate the continent.

At the heart of this struggle for mastery lay the Holy Roman Empire. Germany was weak – not quite a vacuum but never strong enough to resist being sucked into almost every major European conflict. Severe divisions between the component parts of the Empire – the emperor, the princes, the cities and the clergy – meant that Germans were unable to stop their territory from being marched over almost at will by foreigners. This mattered because the area corresponding roughly to present-day Germany, northern Italy and the Low Countries was the strategic centre of Europe. At some point or other, the interests of all the major protagonists intersected there.

For the Ottomans, the Holy Roman Empire was the main objective of their advance into central Europe. It was there that their main enemy, the Habsburgs, and the German princes who supported them, could be dealt a decisive blow. Moreover, it was only by occupying Germany that Suleiman could vindicate the Ottoman claim to the legacy of the Roman Empire.12 The Holy Roman Empire was also the focus of Suleiman’s ‘leapfrog diplomacy’, through which he exploited the hostility of the German princes to Charles V.¹³ He even sent an agent to the Dutch rebels in Flanders. ‘Since you have raised your sword against the papists,’ he wrote, ‘and since you have regularly killed them, our imperial compassion and royal attention have been devoted in every way to your region.’¹⁴

The Empire also lay at the core of Habsburg grand strategy. Charles V used his position there to box in his French rivals and provide a springboard for the recovery of Burgundy.¹⁵ Increasingly, however, his authoritarian manner alienated the German princes. They were horrified to hear him announce in April 1521 that ‘It is not my desire and will that there be many lords, but one lord alone, as is the tradition of the Holy Roman Empire’.¹⁶ When Charles forced through the election of his brother Ferdinand as his nominated successor, these critics formed the Schmalkaldic League (1531), led by Hesse and Saxony, to oppose him. The emperor now began to pay more and more attention to Germany, turning his back on the Mediterranean.¹⁷ By the early 1540s, Charles had all but crushed France, forcing her to renounce Milan and the Low Countries at the Peace of Crépy in 1544, and thus excluding them from Germany.18 In 1546, he drew up plans to turn Germany, Milan, Savoy, the Low Countries and perhaps even Naples into a federation for mutual defence under his leadership, directed against both France and the Ottoman Empire.¹⁹ A year later, Charles won a crushing victory in Germany at the battle of Mühlberg in April 1547. All this, however, provoked such furious resistance in the Empire and across Europe that the emperor was forced to back down and to divide his inheritance into a Spanish and an Austrian Habsburg line.²⁰ Charles might have won the battle for Germany militarily, but he lost it politically.

His successors as King of Spain, Philip II and Philip III, remained intensely engaged with the Empire, because it was the political framework within which the struggle against the Dutch unfolded, and because it encompassed or bordered the ‘Spanish Road’ by which Philip’s armies in Flanders were supplied and reinforced. This lifeline ran from Spain, via north Italy, and across the Alpine passes, skirting the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire before reaching the Low Countries. Most of the route ran through Habsburg or Habsburg-controlled territory in the Mediterranean, Lombardy and Burgundy, but the last stretch through western Germany was vulnerable to attack. Moreover, Flanders could not be held unless Spain retained control of the river crossing points of the Rhine and Meuse. Without them, the early-seventeenth-century Spanish chief minister Gaspar de Guzmán, Count Olivares feared, Spanish Flanders would be ‘locked in a cage’. Germany was thus the centrepiece of a precarious Spanish geopolitical edifice, the collapse of any part of which would trigger an unstoppable ‘domino’ effect. These priorities were reflected in seventeenth-century Spanish military expenditure, over half of which went on the Low Countries and Germany.²¹

Conversely, for France, a strong position in the Empire was vital in order to loosen the Habsburg ‘encirclement’ through the Low Countries to the north, the Free Duchy of Burgundy to the east, Milan to the south-east and Spain to the south. There were two mutually reinforcing strategies open to the French. The first was direct military intervention in the Empire. In August 1494, for example, Charles VIII led an army across the Alps with the avowed intention of vindicating his claim to Naples and thence to lead a pan-European crusade against the Turk. His real purpose was to seize the leadership of Christendom; to intimidate the pope into denying his Habsburg rival, Maximilian, an imperial coronation in Rome; and to break the ring of encirclement suffocating France. More than fifty years later, Henri II intervened militarily in Germany, carrying out a famous ‘March to the Rhine’ and capturing Metz, Toul and Verdun for France along the way. During the Thirty Years War, the French chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, intervened in Germany to curb the Habsburgs and to establish ‘gateways’ (portes) into the Empire.22 Towards the end of that conflict, the French finally captured the south German town of Breisach, cutting the ‘Spanish Road’ and thus, as the French plenipotentiaries told Richelieu’s successor, Cardinal Mazarin, ‘this dangerous communication of the forces of the house of Austria, which our fathers feared’.²³

The second French strategy was to form alliances with German princes against the emperor. Francis I, for example, was the earliest and most enthusiastic supporter of the Schmalkaldic League. Likewise, Henri II believed that the security of France depended on the defence of German ‘liberties’ – the independence of the German princes – against the emperor. In January 1552 he concluded the Treaty of Chambord in which he promised to prevent the princes ‘from falling from their ancient franchise and liberty into a bestial, insupportable and perpetual servitude’; the banner of the alliance spoke of him as ‘vindex germanicae et principus captivorum’ – ‘avenger of Germany and of the captive princes’.²⁴ In 1609, Henri IV, fearing a Habsburg annexation of the north-western German territory of Cleves as yet another link in the surrounding chain of Spanish outposts, announced that he would show support for his ‘ancient allies [in Germany] and for preventing the Emperor from augmenting himself at the expense of others’.²⁵ Weakening the Habsburg hold over the German princes was also the core of Cardinal Richelieu’s grand strategy.²⁶ Spain, Richelieu wrote in 1629, wanted to ‘make herself master of Germany and turn her into an absolute monarchy, overturning the former laws of the German Republic (république germanique) upon which the imperial authority is founded’. Like the two Henris, he believed that the French interest was to protect ‘German liberties’, the rights of the princes and representative assemblies, from the absolutist tendencies of the German emperor.²⁷ ‘Weakening the excessive power of the House of Austria, and establishing the liberty of the princes of the Empire,’ the French Secretary of State, Henri-Auguste de Lomenie, Count of Brienne, wrote in May 1645, after the Cardinal’s death, was ‘the main aim of the war’.²⁸ German freedoms and French security were thus inseparably linked.

Germany was also central to the security of the Dutch after they cast off Spanish rule in the late sixteenth century. The first priority of the new United Provinces was the defence of the ‘garden’ of Holland, a fenced-off area bounded by the North Sea to the west. But if the topography provided protection against attack from the north, south and west, the eastern border of the new republic, with the Holy Roman Empire, was extremely vulnerable. Here the Dutch strategy was to push outposts deeper and deeper into Germany, in order as the States General remarked in 1587 ‘to divert the war beyond the borders of our country’. From its very inception, therefore, the republic’s security was based on a strategy of forward defence in the Holy Roman Empire.29 Moreover, the rebel leader, William of Orange, was a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and as the words of the Dutch anthem put it – ‘of German blood’. There were nearly twice as many Dutch exiles in Germany as in England. It was to Germany that William fled in 1567, from there that William recruited most of his troops, and launched his principal attacks. His closest ally, John Casimir of the Palatinate, held lands in the strategically crucial area of western Germany. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch were once again alarmed by events in Germany, this time by Habsburg designs on nearby Cleves. They promptly intervened militarily against the imperialists. The fate of the Dutch, in short, was intimately bound up with that of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Empire was also of vital strategic importance to England. When Henry VIII joined the scramble to contain Charles V in the 1540s, he dispatched missions in search of ‘some league or amity with the princes and potentates of Germany’.³⁰ His short and disastrous fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves was primarily motivated by an interest in the Schmalkaldic League. Later, Germany took on a new significance as the outer defence works of the Low Countries, an area which Elizabeth I’s adviser William Cecil described as ‘the very counter-scarp of England’, that is, a defensive position just outside the inner perimeter.³¹ In 1572, Elizabeth paid John Casimir of the Palatinate to attack Spanish troops in Brabant.³² It was against this background that Elizabeth finally intervened militarily in the Netherlands in the mid-1580s in order to prevent this critical area from being over-run by Spain. In the early seventeenth century, England was once again roused to action by fear of Habsburg penetration in north-western Germany. A substantial English force was duly sent to Cleves. In short, English grand strategy was increasingly driven by the assumption that the security of the realm depended on keeping the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire in friendly hands.33

Sweden, too, became more and more concerned with events in Germany. King Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedish parliament, the Rijkstag, observed the Habsburg advance there during the early stages of Thirty Years War with growing alarm. If nothing was done, the king warned the Diet in December 1627, the imperialists ‘would soon be approaching our borders’. The Rijkstag agreed with Gustavus that it would be better to act pre-emptively in order to ‘transfer the seat and burdens of war to a place which is subject to the enemy’. Moreover, true security could only be achieved by holding the Baltic German ports from which an attack could be launched. As Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna later remarked, ‘if the emperor had once got hold of Stralsund the whole coast would have fallen to him, and here in Sweden we should never have enjoyed a moment’s security’.³⁴ So in 1630, Gustavus landed forces at Usedom on the Pomeranian coast to establish a bridgehead. Their mission, according to the manifesto drawn up by his councillor, Johan Adler Salvius, was to prevent the creation of a Catholic Universal Monarchy in Christendom by defending ‘the liberty of Germany’.³⁵ Not long afterwards, the Swedish king crushed an imperial force at Breitenfeld in September 1631. Swedish troops penetrated deep into southern Germany, even threatening Munich, capital of Ferdinand’s closest ally. Many speculated that the Swedish king might attempt to seize the imperial crown himself.³⁶ Elector Johan Georg of Saxony even accused Chancellor Oxenstierna of wanting to become ‘absolute master and dictator perpetuum in Germany’.³⁷

The Holy Roman Empire was of profound strategic importance for another reason. Its untapped resources were believed to be so large as to tip the balance between Habsburg and Valois, Christian and Turk. The Empire’s population in the early seventeenth century was 15 million, as compared to 8 million in Spain. Only France, with between 16 and 20 million inhabitants, was larger. In terms of sheer numbers alone, the manpower of Germany was an immense reservoir; qualitatively the skill of German mercenaries, especially heavy cavalry, was greatly prized. Germans formed the backbone of every army William of Orange had raised against Spain. By 1600, indeed, many Spaniards believed that the Dutch were more dependent on their German allies than on England.³⁸ Spain, too, relied heavily on the military resources of the Holy Roman Empire, which from the late sixteenth to the mid seventeenth century, supplied some three quarters of ‘Spanish’ infantry in Flanders. The Empire, at least its western half, was also an immensely rich area, with vibrant merchant communities in Cologne, Frankfurt and other cities. Such was the demographic, military and economic potential of the Empire, the Swedish negotiator warned towards the end of the Thirty Years War, that ‘if one potentate wielded absolute power in this realm, all the neighbouring realms would have to apprehend being subjugated’.39

The Empire was also of profound ideological importance in Europe and indeed beyond Christendom. The emperor outranked all other European monarchs, at least theoretically. For this reason, some of the most ambitious European potentates – Charles V, Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England – openly campaigned for the title; others, such as Henri II of France, did so implicitly. Even Ottoman rulers, such as Mehmed and Suleiman the Magnificent, laid claim to the imperial Roman heritage, further proof of their Eurocentricity. Most importantly of all, it was the emperor who was entitled to mobilize the resources of the Empire in conjunction with the imperial parliament, the Reichstag. Once again, therefore, European states were determined either to secure the imperial title for themselves or to prevent it from falling into hostile hands.

Despite his Muslim faith, Suleiman the Magnificent made a serious effort to appropriate the German imperial legacy. He pointedly stressed his monotheism, and adopted the western symbols of crown and sceptre in his iconography, with themes borrowed from Charles’s coronation as ‘King of the Romans’.⁴⁰ In the 1520s and 1530s a Venetian adviser helped Suleiman to organize western-style imperial displays in Hungary and occupied areas of Austria to impress the locals. To some extent, the Sultan succeeded: his sobriquet ‘the Magnificent’ was a European, not a Muslim honorific. Nor was Suleiman a completely implausible imperial contender. There were many German princes who thought that ‘German liberties’ would be better protected by the Turks than by the Habsburgs.⁴¹

To the Habsburgs, the imperial crown was a vital tool to hold their sprawling lands together. The emperor Maximilian used his position to mobilize Germany against France during the Italian wars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. His successor, Charles V, was also in no doubt about the value of the crown of Charlemagne. ‘It is so great and sublime an honour,’ he remarked before the election, ‘as to outshine all other worldly titles.’42 Conversely, in the hands of the French the imperial title would spell doom, leaving the Burgundian lands dangerously sandwiched in between Germany and France itself. The imperial title would also provide rivals with a decisive advantage in resources and manpower. As the Habsburg Grand Chancellor, Mercurino Gattinara, said, ‘if it were neglected, empire would be handed over to the French who by no means would reject such an opportunity but would pant for it with all their power and such would they be able to undertake with that empire that [Charles] would be able to preserve neither the lands of the Austro-Burgundian succession nor his Iberian kingdoms’.⁴³ For this reason, Charles threw huge resources – mainly bribes for the German princes – into the imperial election of 1519, and ultimately secured the title.⁴⁴

Thereafter, Charles’s claim to the leadership of Christendom rested on the German imperial crown, as did his hope of presiding over a Europe united and peaceful under his leadership. ‘God the creator,’ Gattinara announced in 1519, ‘has given you this grace of raising you in dignity above all Christian kings and princes by constituting you the greatest emperor and king who has been since the division of the empire, which was realized in the person of Charlemagne your predecessor, and by drawing you to the right of monarchy in order to lead back the entire world to a single shepherd.’ Time and again, Charles and his ministers would justify policies ‘as much on account of the Empire as on account of our kingdoms of Spain’.⁴⁵ Charles proved unable, however, to persuade or force enough German princes to elect his son Philip King of the Romans, and thus his designated successor. While Philip succeeded as King of Spain, the imperial title devolved to the Austrian branch of the family. The Spanish Habsburgs and the emperor continued to work closely together, all the same. One way or the other, the German imperial crown was to be an important component of Habsburg power in Europe.

This fact drove France’s preoccupation with the imperial title. In the late fifteenth century, Charles VIII lived in fear that the emperor Maximilian would tap into the resources of the German political commonwealth. He also sought to stake a claim to the imperial crown himself. To underline his aspirations, Charles minted coins with the unmistakable motto of ‘Carolus Imperator’ – ‘Emperor Charles’.⁴⁶ Two decades later, Francis I made an unsuccessful bid for the imperial crown when he ran against Charles in the 1519 election. As the true heir of Charlemagne, Francis claimed to be merely ‘regaining’ the title. Denying the Habsburgs the imperial crown was also essential to escape continuing encirclement. ‘The reason which moves me to gain the empire,’ Francis explained, ‘is to prevent the said [Habsburg] King from doing so. If he were to succeed, seeing the extent of his kingdoms and lordships . . . he . . . would doubtless throw me out of Italy.’ Moreover, Francis knew that possession of the imperial title would give him the right to lead Christendom, and therefore stressed his ‘intention . . . to make war on the Turks more effectively’.47 Some one hundred years later, Richelieu’s mentor, Père Joseph, wrote that the principal war aim was to prevent the Spaniards from making ‘the Empire hereditary in the House of Austria’ and thus to achieve their ‘pretensions of their monarchy over all Christendom [Europe]’.⁴⁸

England, too, was profoundly concerned with the imperial title. In 1519, Henry VIII threw his hat into the ring against Charles and Francis. His candidature reflected a determination to rebuild the English empire in France and to assert herself in Europe more generally. The king was deeply conscious of the traditional French argument that England was subject to the pope, whereas the crown of France was subject to no one. If Henry wished to reassert his own claim to the French throne, then imperial stature was essential, as was a strong diplomatic position in Germany, which would threaten the French on their eastern flank. The path back to France, in other words, went through Germany. Imperial status would also increase the chances of Henry’s (then) favourite, Wolsey, taking the papacy; for this reason, the king initially condemned Luther in the strongest terms.⁴⁹ There was some support for the English monarch in Germany, not least in the person of the emperor Maximilian, who was desperate to keep the French out, and not yet confident that a Habsburg candidate was viable. Henry’s bid failed, but it is fascinating to speculate what would have happened if the king had won the imperial crown – making him Henry VIII of Germany as well as Henry VIII of England – and if his successors had kept it: history would have been very different. English forms of government might have spread to the continent: Calais enjoyed parliamentary representation, and even Tournai in Flanders, briefly held by Henry, sent a delegation to Westminster.⁵⁰ There would have been a very different British Empire, and perhaps also a more British Europe.

These geopolitical patterns were moulded, but not fundamentally transformed, by the religious and political cross-currents which roiled Europe from the mid fifteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries. In 1517, the German monk Martin Luther pinned his ninety-five theses to the church door at Wittenberg, attacking the Roman Catholic Church for its corruption and errors.51 This ‘Reformation’ was not just a theological revolt, but a protest against internal disorder and external encroachments in the Empire. Luther, Ulrich von Hutten, Andreas Osiander and other reformers were profoundly concerned about the Ottoman advance and contributed several stirring calls to arms against the infidel.⁵² They sought to revive the German nation through spiritual transformation, a call to repentance and prayer which would purge the Empire of the impurities which had weakened it in the face of attacks from east and west. Luther’s message resonated not only among educated people, but also with the inhabitants of rural areas, especially in the south and west, who saw in the Reformation a chance to emancipate themselves from the control of the lords, and an opportunity to reform the Empire and restore German national ‘honour’ in Europe. The ‘Peasant War’ which erupted a few years later was thus no local jacquerie, but a popular demand to participate in the new Reich.⁵³ Many German princes, on the other hand, saw Protestantism as a shield against imperial encroachments and an instrument to extend their control over their subjects, emancipate themselves from the emperor and improve their finances by seizing Church property.

The political context was also a decisive factor in the English Reformation of the 1530s. A male heir was crucial not so much for the stability of England – where women could succeed – as for Henry’s claim to France and the Empire, where they were disbarred by the Salic Law. When the pope refused to grant him a divorce to marry Anne Boleyn, Henry broke with Rome. Thereafter, Henry’s despoliation of Church lands not only enabled him to buttress his rule at home, but provided a much needed boost to war-financing. His large-scale fortification of the south coast in response to the Franco-Habsburg Catholic threat, paid for by despoiling the secularized monasteries, and actually constructed from their stones taken from their ruins, epitomized the close link between the English Reformation and the security of the realm.

The Reformation encouraged the emergence of a ‘culture of persuasion’ and thus of European national and transnational publics concerned with religion, diplomacy and the common good.54 The peoples of central, northern and north-western Europe were preached to, sung at, showered with printed pamphlets and bombarded with images, mainly cheap woodcuts. Over the next decades, varieties of Protestantism were embraced by rulers in all parts of Germany, but principally the north and east, in the Low Countries, in England and Scotland, in all of Scandinavia, and by many communities in Poland, Hungary and Bohemia. New fronts now opened up not merely within polities – where they could be exploited by their neighbours – but between states. To the existing solidarity between Christians against the Turk, and republics against princely tyrants, there was now added the fraternity of Protestants against Catholics and vice versa.

Nowhere were these divisions more keenly felt than in Germany, which was split down the middle by the Reformation.⁵⁵ There Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism faced each other in grand array. In the 1590s, Calvinist diehards rallied around the Elector Palatine, determined to vindicate ‘German liberty’ against the emperor, and to achieve parity in imperial institutions.⁵⁶ They looked for help to their brethren abroad – the ‘Calvinist International’ in England and the Low Countries and they in turn strained every nerve to defend the cause in the strategically crucial German area.⁵⁷ The Dutch, the English and the Protestant German princes thus believed themselves to be tied together in a strategic community of fate. Elizabeth’s principal adviser and effectively chief minister, William Cecil, for example, called for ‘a conjunction with all princes Protestants for defence’, especially with ‘the princes Protestants of the [German] Empire’. So long as the Empire did not fall into hostile hands, in other words, the Dutch rebels, and thus England itself, would be safe.⁵⁸ Shortly after the turn of the century, the Calvinists went on the offensive. They repeatedly disrupted the imperial Diets culminating in the establishment of the Evangelical Union under the Elector Palatine. In 1609, the Duke of Bavaria responded by establishing the Catholic League, whose activities were subsidized by King Philip III of Spain. That same year, the Calvinists finally walked out of the Diet, precipitating a constitutional crisis.⁵⁹

The critical issue was the future of the imperial crown, which had now become the subject of religious, as well as strategic, rivalry. The most plausible candidate, the Habsburg Ferdinand of Styria, was a nightmare for all Protestants. His absolutist pretensions and Jesuit training posed a direct threat to the Lutheran and Calvinist princes. Some of the more radical among them sought to pre-empt this danger by securing the election of a Protestant emperor.60 This scheme was anathema, however, not just to the Austrian Habsburgs and German Catholics generally but also to Spain.⁶¹ ‘If the forces of a Protestant emperor were ever to be united with those of the [Dutch] heretics,’ the senior Spanish adviser Don Baltasar de Zúñiga warned in September 1613, ‘then the obedient provinces in Flanders will be lost, and with them the Duchy of Milan and the rest of Italy.’ ‘It is certain,’ the Spanish diplomat Inigo Velez de Guevara, Count Onate, Spanish envoy to the Austrian Habsburgs, warned in 1618, ‘that one would lose Flanders and Italy, upon which the whole monarchy rests, if one loses Germany.’⁶²

Matters came to a head in May 1618 when the Bohemian nobility elected the Protestant Frederick of the Palatinate as their king, with the expectation that he would also bid for the imperial crown.⁶³ In March 1619, however, Ferdinand of Styria was elected emperor. He quickly moved to re-establish Habsburg control, defeating the Bohemian nobility at the battle of the White Mountain in 1620. Spanish troops occupied the Palatinate itself. Frederick was forced to give up his electoral title to Ferdinand’s closest German ally and leader of the Catholic League, the Duke of Bavaria, thus copper-fastening the Habsburg grip on the imperial crown.⁶⁴ The balance of power within Germany had now shifted decisively to the Catholic side, and consequently was threatening to unhinge the whole European equilibrium.⁶⁵ As the Dutch States General wrote in February 1621, the final fall of the Palatinate would see ‘the true religion extirpated, the universal liberty of Germany trampled under foot and, of greatest consequence, the imperial crown transported to the house of Spain’.

On the other hand, though religion often accentuated existing geopolitical divides, it did not always transcend them. To the Catholic French, for example, hatred of their fellow-Catholic Habsburgs trumped all other considerations. Francis I did not hesitate to ally with the Turks against Charles V. ‘I cannot deny,’ Francis remarked, ‘that I keenly desire the Turk to be powerful and ready for war, not for himself, because he is an infidel and we are Christian, but to undermine the emperor’s power, to force heavy expenses on him and to secure all other governments against so powerful an enemy.’⁶⁶ Nor did Francis’s successors show any inhibitions about using the Protestant German princes to undermine the Habsburg emperor. Likewise, Cardinal Richelieu intervened in the Empire during the Thirty Years War in support of the Protestant princes and the Swedes, and against his Habsburg coreligionists. Sultan Suleiman, for his part, urged his Muslim supporters in Spain to coordinate their actions with the ‘Lutheran sect’ in the Low Countries and the Empire.

The struggle for mastery in Europe, and especially in the Holy Roman Empire, profoundly shaped domestic politics. It stimulated the emergence of a public sphere, mainly in the individual polities, but also on a pan-European basis. Argument about grand strategy was at the forefront of these debates, for which two illustrative examples will have to suffice. In the aftermath of the fall of their empire in France in the mid fifteenth century furious Englishmen wanted to know what had gone wrong, and who was to blame.67 The resulting debate raged well beyond the confines of parliament in widely circulated hand-written texts.⁶⁸ Articles of impeachment drawn up against William de la Pole, the Duke of Suffolk, who was the Lord High Steward and King Henry VI’s principal counsellor, which ultimately led to his execution, were dominated by allegations of betraying the English cause in France. In Kent, a band of agrarian rebels advanced on London complaining not only of local grievances but that the king ‘has had false counsel, for his lands are lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost’.⁶⁹ Partisans of the house of York charged that royal ineptitude had led to the fall of France, questioned the readiness of the remaining English bases such as Calais, and accused their Lancastrian rivals of planning to surrender them to the French.⁷⁰ For most of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, therefore, English debate was focused on recovering the lost empire across the Channel. Over time, however, the attention of the English public sphere shifted to the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire. The Dutch rebels and the Protestant German princes were widely celebrated as bulwarks against Habsburg Catholic domination. At the start of the seventeenth century, many Englishmen condemned peace with Madrid as a capitulation to tyranny and an abandonment of the Dutch and continental Protestants generally.⁷¹ Soon after, outrage at the treatment of German Protestants, the dynastic marriages with Spain and the failure of the Stuart monarchy began to dominate English political debate.⁷²

In Germany, political discussion was greatly stimulated by the invention of the printing press by the publisher Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s. Here the growth of Renaissance humanism drove the emergence of a proto-nationalist public sphere. It was primarily concerned with the decline of the imperial commonwealth and thus of the reputation of Germany in Europe. Germans saw themselves as the heirs to a universal Roman Empire in which they were the leading, though not the only, people; they were fully conscious of the fact that their polity contained a substantial Slav and Romance (Welsch) population. This imperial patriotism and nationalism defined itself through antagonism to the Burgundian and French encroachments in the west, and Hungarian and Turkish depredations to the south-east.73 It was also expressed through increasing participation in imperial institutions, and the demand of humanists such as Johannes Avertinus that there should be greater efforts to defend ‘German liberties’ against the despotism of France and other predators.⁷⁴ There was a determination to tackle corruption in the German Church and a condemnation of endemic lawlessness, which was seen not just as a social scourge but a standing invitation to outside interference. In short, there was still plenty of life in the old Holy Roman Empire.⁷⁵

Foreign policy also determined courtly politics throughout Europe, and sometimes even the rise and fall of whole dynasties. The issues varied from state to state, but by the early seventeenth century the common preoccupation was the situation in the Holy Roman Empire. Across the continent, failure or perceived failure in Germany during the Thirty Years War led to internal political change. Francisco Gomez de Sandoval, Duke of Lerma, Spanish chief minister, fell from power in Madrid in 1618 because he had proved unable to defend Spanish interests in Europe generally, and especially in the Holy Roman Empire.⁷⁶ His successor, Zúñiga, thrived on being able to deliver there and died in high favour in 1622. The man who took his place, Olivares, on the other hand, was criticized for the mounting costs of Spanish grand strategy, particularly in the Empire. Likewise, in Paris, the French chief minister, Charles d’Albert, Duke of Luynes, lost influence at court on account of his failed German strategy,⁷⁷ as did his successor, Charles, Duke of Vieuville. Cardinal Richelieu, on the other hand, waxed on the strength of his successes in the Empire.

It was in England, however, that foreign affairs led to the most spectacular domestic eruption. As the Austro-Spanish imperial tide engulfed Germany at the start of the Thirty Years War, parliamentary and popular outrage against the monarchy exploded.78 To critics of the Stuart monarchy, the Bohemian conflict was not taking place in a far-off country between people of whom they knew nothing. As Sir John Davies told the House of Commons in 1620, ‘the Palatinate is on fire; religion is on fire; and all other countries on fire . . . this is dangerous to the Low Countries, the United Provinces and the whole Protestant interest’. Looking across to the continent, the king’s parliamentary critics saw ‘a mighty and prevalent party . . . aiming at the subversion of all the Protestant churches of Christendom’, and noted ‘the weak resistance that is made against them’.⁷⁹ By 1642, the two sides were locked in a bitter civil war, which led to the defeat of the king in 1646, his execution in 1649 and the replacement of the monarchy by a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. The need to support the Palatinate and European Protestantism featured prominently in the major parliamentary statements of war aims. In short, the Great Rebellion against Charles was in its essence a revolt against Stuart foreign policy. Failure to grasp a foreign nettle led to the breakdown of consensus at home. In the end, Englishmen went to war with each other in 1642 because they had not gone to war effectively on behalf of the Protestant cause in Europe over the previous twenty years.

In order to remain competitive in the battle for Europe, states sought to consolidate internally, or to find security in larger unions. Charles V recognized the difficulty of coordinating the Austrian, Hungarian and Mediterranean fronts against the Turks in addition to his Italian, German and Burgundian theatres of war against the French and the Protestant princes of the Empire. He therefore subcontracted the defence of central Europe, and much of the management of the Holy Roman Empire, to his younger brother, Ferdinand. In 1522, Charles abdicated as archduke of Austria to make way for him, and nine years later he forced the German princes to elect him King of the Romans and thus his designated successor. This had profound implications for state formation in south-eastern Europe. Ferdinand rescued Bohemia and Silesia from the Hungarian wreckage, making his north-eastern flank more secure.⁸⁰ He told the Landtag, the assembled representatives of the nobility, at Linz in 1530 that ‘the Turks cannot be resisted unless the Kingdom of Hungary was in the hands of an Archduke of Austria or another German prince’.81 After some hesitation, Croatia and the Hungarian rump joined the Habsburgs. In both cases, the link was essentially a contractual one, directly linked to Ferdinand’s ability to provide protection against the Turks.⁸²

The Dutch were even more successful in providing for the common defence. In the late sixteenth century they quickly overcame the ‘particularism’ which William of Orange warned was undermining the struggle to gain independence from Spain. In 1572, the States of Holland voted to make William Stadholder and supreme commander, granted him taxes to fight Philip, and proclaimed religious toleration to forestall civil war. Three years later the province of Zealand joined in: the very first joint measure was a declaration in October 1575 ‘that we should forsake the King [of Spain] and seek foreign assistance’. In 1579, Holland, Zealand, most of Utrecht, and the province of Groningen formed the ‘Union of Utrecht’. A complex system of extraction, credit and war finance was agreed. All this probably made the Netherlanders the most highly taxed people in Europe. It was sustainable only because they had decided to take their destinies and security into their own hands. The Dutch now ‘owned’ their security policy. They started the revolt as a congeries of separate provinces, all fiercely attached to their privileges. It was only the pressures of conflict which created the United Provinces. The Dutch found ways to make war, but the war also made Dutchmen.⁸³

In England, the demands of international politics produced some radical thinking about how the tension between metropolis and outlying areas could be resolved. The Tudors feared that, in the hands of a hostile power, Scotland and Ireland would be the ‘back door’ to England, or at the very least contribute to her encirclement. Elizabeth’s early intervention and the triumph of Presbyterianism largely solved the problem north of the border, for the time being at least. Ireland, where the bulk of the population remained Catholic, and where the natives bitterly resented English colonists of whatever religion, was a much thornier issue. Spanish infiltration there had to be stopped, and the threat of Gaelic rebellion crushed for good. A durable solution would have to be found, especially in a context where rival states, as Elizabeth’s chief minister, Cecil, warned in 1560, ‘have of late so increased their estates that now they are nothing like what they were, and yet England remains always one, without accession of any new force’. For this reason, he recommended ‘united strength, by joining the two kingdoms [England and Scotland], having also Ireland knit thereto, is worthy consideration’. In the end, dynastic happenstance after the death of Elizabeth brought the Scottish and English crowns together under James I in 1603. A few years later, he launched the ‘Plantation of Ulster’, the expropriation of the native Catholic Irish landowners and their replacement by English and Scotch Protestant settlers. James thus secured the kingdom’s westward flank once and for all, and ensured that England, Ireland and Scotland would act as one on the European stage.84

To the north and east, a similar process of consolidation was taking place. Here the decline of the Teutonic Knights and their territories on the Baltic sparked a partitionist cycle which threatened to engulf the entire area. In 1558, Tsar Ivan IV, ‘the Terrible’, grabbed Narva in northeastern Livonia. The Russians also seized parts of the northern Polish Commonwealth in the early 1560s. At around the same time, the Swedes annexed the northern half of present-day Estonia. Hemmed in on all sides by the Habsburgs, the rising Swedes, Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire, the weaker powers entered into a series of territorial mergers to stay competitive in an increasingly predatory neighbourhood. In 1561, the Teutonic Knights united with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and eight years later they both merged with the Polish Commonwealth in the Union of Lublin. The vast new Polish-Lithuanian conglomerate stretched from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. It grew bigger still for a while when the King of Poland, Sigismund Vasa, succeeded to the Swedish crown in 1592, uniting the two monarchies. The union briefly provided some hope of holding back the Russians and Ottomans.

Central to the project of state formation and consolidation was the question of minorities, most of them religious. Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European governments wrestled with the question of how they could be assimilated, or whether they should be suppressed or simply expelled. Again two illustrations will have to suffice. The Spanish experience represented one extreme. The collaboration of the local Muslim (Morisco) minority with the Ottomans drove Philip II to promulgate draconian new legislation in 1567. This required Moriscos to learn Spanish in three years; after that time, it would be a crime to speak, read or write Arabic in public or private. Morisco dress was forbidden as were their distinctive surnames. Philip even banned public baths, which were a front for covert Muslim ablutions. When protesting Moriscos drew attention to their large tax contributions, they were told by the king’s representative that Philip ‘valued religion more than revenue’.85 The Moriscos promptly revolted in 1568, causing such extensive military problems for Philip that he had to draft forces from Italy before the rising was finally crushed.⁸⁶ He subsequently held all Moriscos, whether or not they had been implicated in the revolt, responsible for treason. Some 80,000 were deported inland to other parts of Spain in chains. About 10,000 remained in Granada, while those dispersed in other parts of the country became a constant security headache. In 1609, his successor, Philip III, moved to resolve the question once and for all, by expelling them en bloc – all 300,000 – to North Africa. Hundreds of years of Muslim civilization in Al Andalus had come to an end.⁸⁷

In other cases, governments opted for religious toleration, because they genuinely believed in confessional co-existence, because they held that toleration strengthened state coherence in the face of the enemy, or simply because the groups involved were too powerful to be suppressed. Thus Emperor Ferdinand I tended to tolerate Protestants in order to mobilize his territories against the Ottomans.⁸⁸ The most systematic attempt at toleration was made by Ferdinand’s son, Emperor Maximilian II. In 1571, he issued the Assekuration, which confirmed the right of Lutheran nobles in Austria to practise their religion on their own lands. Indeed, the emperor hoped to bury the confessional hatchet not only in Austria, but throughout the Empire. This was, Maximilian believed, his only chance of rallying the German princes against the Turks. In short, external threats led to very different approaches to religious toleration between the two lines of the Habsburg dynasty.

Europeans were divided as to whether autocratic or representative systems were best equipped to compete in the battle for Europe. The Florentine statesman and writer Niccolò Machiavelli made this question the focal point of his two seminal works, The prince and especially the Discourses. These books were the first systematic attempt to conceptualize the new geopolitics and its implications for the domestic structure of European states. In the preface to Book One of the Discourses, Machiavelli described states as communities which had banded together ‘to live more conveniently and the more easily to defend themselves’. This, he stressed, they could not do without ‘power’. Indeed, Machiavelli admonished that ‘Present-day princes and modern republics which have not their own troops for offence and defence ought to be ashamed of themselves.’ The purpose of his ideal republic was thus not the articulation of civic virtue per se, but to make the best strategic decisions and mobilize the strength of the state behind them.89 The key to success here was not simply resource extraction. ‘Money,’ he warned, ‘is not the sinews of war as it is commonly supposed to be.’

Instead, the Florentine argued that the basis for a strong foreign policy was a sound domestic structure. In Book Six of the Discourses, Machiavelli spoke of the need to ‘give the state a constitution which would put it in a position to enlarge itself if the occasion required it, and to preserve what it had conquered’. Here the crux was participation and debate, more important even than a large and efficiently exploited tax base. ‘The masses are more knowing and more constant than is a prince,’ Machiavelli wrote. Indeed, he argued that ‘it seems as if the populace by some hidden power discerned the evil and the good that was to befall it’. The people would hold the executive to account in the great matters of state. Republics were thus stronger competitors in the international sphere. ‘No cities have augmented their revenues or enlarged their territories but whilst they were free and at liberty,’ he wrote. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, therefore, Machiavelli set out with unmistakable clarity the domestic and geopolitical issues which were to exercise European powers, be they autocracies or republics, to the present day.

The case of England suggested that Machiavelli was right. After the catastrophic loss of their French empire, Englishmen had concluded that the provision of ‘good counsel’ through parliament was essential.⁹⁰ Taxes would have to be paid on time – in other words the nation as a whole should take responsibility for the reconquest of France – but in return the king would have to listen to the advice of parliament and seasoned advisers. In time, Henry VIII was able to fund extensive campaigns in Scotland, Ireland and especially Europe thanks to close cooperation with parliament, which had to approve all past, current or imminent military expenditure. For more than thirty years the Lords and Commons stumped up largely uncomplainingly; there was no necessary link, therefore, between the pressure of war and the triumph of royal power.⁹¹ This was because parliament was in broad agreement with the king’s grand strategy: the vindication of the monarchy’s rights in France, or at least the control of the coastline on the other side of the Channel, and the protection of the back door to England via Ireland and Scotland.92 Likewise, Elizabeth I’s position in Europe was greatly strengthened by her ability to work with parliament. Conversely, it was the divisions within Westminster and between parliament and crown which so fatally damaged early Stuart foreign policy.

In general, though, experience seemed to show that greater royal power was a prerequisite for strategic success. In France, for example, victory was attributed to the resurgence of the monarchy.⁹³ Reformist discourse tended to stress the need for strong central government with tax-raising powers. To be sure, the ejection of the English was a collaborative project in which the estates worked together with the king, but the emphasis was on execution, not consultation; on royal power, rather than baronial counsel. The French parliament, or Estates General, lost the right to assent to the important taille, a direct land tax, in 1439 and local estates in central France forfeited that privilege in 1451. They agreed not only to pay for the royal army, but to collect the tax for the king at a rate set by him. The various ‘councils’ which French kings consulted were a point of contact between monarch and nobility, but not a serious check on his power.⁹⁴ Above all, taxes were paid and troops raised without the consent of the Estates General. If parliamentary structures and national strength became increasingly synonymous in England, French political culture established a contrary but equally powerful connection between royal authority and France’s place in Europe.

Moreover, the many polities in which representative assemblies remained strong appeared to suffer a resulting lack of internal cohesion and external leverage. Even the mighty Charles V had to cope with a profusion of parliaments: the Cortes of Castile, the Estates General of the Netherlands, and various smaller assemblies across the monarchy. The Cortes were happy to pay for operations in support of Spanish interests, such as the defence of Navarre, suppressing the Barbary corsairs, and fighting the Turks in the Mediterranean; they were not keen on wars in central Europe, however. A request to pay for an expedition to Hungary was refused in 1527, whereas one to attack Tunis in 1535 was granted. In 1538, rather than vote another payment, they even told Charles to make peace with France.⁹⁵ One of the reasons the burden fell so heavily on Castile was that very little money was raised from Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, whose representative assemblies were distinctly uncooperative. The only other area where the shortfall could be made good was in the rich Low Countries, with their efficient taxation system. Here too, however, the estates were unhappy with royal foreign policy. ‘What the Hollanders most complain about,’ his Regent, Margaret of Parma, reported to Charles in February 1524, ‘is that they always pay under colour of war, but one does not make war on their behalf.’ In the 1540s and 1550s, the estates of the Netherlands paid only very grudgingly for the final stages of the wars against France.96 Similar problems dogged later Habsburg rulers, in both Spain and Austria.

In eastern Europe, the connection between strong representative bodies and external weakness seemed particularly clear. When the Swedish nobility revolted against Sigismund Vasa of Poland-Lithuania-Sweden, the Polish Diet refused to vote him sufficient men to suppress the uprising. By 1599, Sigismund had been deposed by the Swedish parliament and the union with Poland was dissolved. In Russia, the experience of civil war followed by Polish occupation between 1598 and 1610 also made the case for greater autocracy. In 1613, the Romanov dynasty was installed on the throne, ending Russia’s fifteen-year ‘Time of Troubles’ (1598–1613). To the Russian elite, the lessons of the past two decades seemed clear: too much ‘liberty’ led to chaos and national weakness; the terms ‘free’ and ‘at will’ suggested disorder and disturbance. For this reason, Russian society was organized around the principle of service to the state, especially the defence of its external sovereignty. To be sure, many Russians believed that they had a right of participation extending well beyond the ‘bread and butter’ issues of rudimentary economic security and social justice. Russians lacked, however, formal representative bodies – a States General, Estates General, Reichstag or parliament – on western lines. The assembly of Russian nobles (Boyars) – its name, Duma, taken from the Russian word for ‘to think’ or ‘to consider’ – did not have any control over taxation. Romanov power was thus more or less absolute, constrained only by the vast extent of the land. And so long as the new dynasty was able to deliver national greatness, or at least security, it would be safe.⁹⁷

The greatest indictment of corporate political participation, however, was the Holy Roman Empire itself. It failed to mobilize effectively against either the Turks or the encroaching French. For example, when Emperor Frederick III of Habsburg convened an imperial Diet at Frankfurt in 1454, to launch crusade against the Turk, no action resulted. The frantic Hungarian emissaries were accused by the German princes of ‘wanting to involve Germany in their calamities, since they were unable to defend their own kingdom’.⁹⁹ When the Turks resumed their advance in the summer of 1480, heading for the Austrian city of Graz, the Reichstag remarked sarcastically on the ‘long speeches about the Turk’ emanating from the emperor.¹⁰⁰ Likewise, Frederick’s son and heir, Maximilian, was forced to give up Burgundy to France. One way or the other, the Empire was failing to respond coherently to the threats on its borders.

Unhappy with their treatment at the hands of outside powers, German reformers made repeated attempts to regenerate the Holy Roman Empire by increasing political participation in imperial bodies, especially the Diet, but these failed. In 1489, they assembled at the Diet of Frankfurt under the leadership of Berthold von Henneberg, Archbishop of Mainz.¹⁰¹ Within a few years, he had established the ‘common penny’ (der gemeine Pfennig), a blended property, income and poll tax, payable to the emperor. In return, he was enjoined to uphold the general peace of the German lands (der allgemeine Landfriede) and reform the imperial law courts; Germany must be at peace at home in order to be formidable abroad. The emperor was constrained to accept the advice of an imperial ‘council’ – responsible to the Diet – on military matters. In other words, just as in mid-fifteenth-century England, the German imperial parliament was staking a claim to participation in matters of grand strategy. The next step was to put Germany’s military house in order. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1500, the Empire was divided into ten regional ‘circles’ to which the task of internal order and mobilization against external enemies was to be devolved. This was not only an embryonic German collective-security system, but also a potential vehicle for national unity against outsiders.102

In the early sixteenth century, it looked for a moment as if the imperial council, which opposed Maximilian’s military emphasis on Italy, would assert itself. They formed a ‘Union of Electors’, resolving to meet as a Diet in the absence of the emperor if necessary, and to push through a programme of reform. Germany looked set to find some form of greater national unity under either the emperor or the Diet. In practice, each side sought to block the other, producing stasis and stagnation. The estates proved adroit at clipping the emperor’s wings. They were unable or unwilling, however, to create a truly national alternative: the experiment with the council soon petered out. None of the threats facing the Empire from the French, Turks or Hungarians, even taken together, were ever powerful enough to persuade the German estates to surrender their liberties to a powerful executive. On the other hand, by the early sixteenth century Germany had acquired enough of the characteristics of a state to ride out the storms ahead more effectively than it could previously have done.¹⁰³

The Empire still made very heavy weather of the renewed Ottoman surge under Suleiman the Magnificent. The imperial Diet ignored repeated calls for help: from King Louis of Hungary to the Diet of Worms in 1521, and from the Croatian nobles at Nuremberg in 1522. In vain, Ferdinand of Austria called upon Germans to support ‘the gallant Christian Croatian nation, which as a bulwark and a strong shield stands before our Inner Austrian lands’.¹⁰⁴ To the assembled princes, cities and clerics the danger seemed remote, and continued ‘free-riding’ on the Croats and Hungarians was a comfortable default option. A voluminous pamphlet literature agreed that the Turks were not an immediate threat to their liberties, suggesting instead that the Habsburgs were using the Ottoman spectre to pursue a tyrannical domestic agenda. Hungary’s collapse at Mohacs did concentrate minds, but only briefly and very ineffectively. Throughout the 1530s and 1540s, the Empire sent several armies to Hungary, with mixed success. In the end, the Diet was never quite worried enough about the Turks, or sufficiently organized to do the job itself. Once again, an opportunity to unite Germany in the face of an existential external threat had been missed.

In the late sixteenth century, the chief imperial military commander, Lazarus von Schwendi, sought to get to grips with German military weakness. He feared that confessional and political differences would ignite a ‘blaze of mistrust and division’ in the ‘poor fatherland’, with Protestants and Catholics calling in outside powers to support them. In 1569, Schwendi warned that Spanish interference would lead to ‘internal wars’ and ultimately to the ‘complete partition and destruction of the Reich and the total decline of German well-being’. For this reason, he demanded that Germany should mobilize all its potential to protect the integrity of the Empire. Indeed, if outside powers could be prevented from prostituting Germans through the untrammelled recruitment of mercenaries, Schwendi looked forward to a time when the Reich would be able to lay down the law to ‘all foreign potentates’ and erect a Pax Germanica in Europe. Failure to act, he warned, would condemn the Empire to ‘pitiful downfall’ on Byzantine lines. The proposals he produced at the Diet of Speyer in 1570 included a standing German imperial army, tasked with collective security, to be commanded by the emperor; Schwendi also hoped that the toleration of Protestants would rally German opinion behind a common effort against the Turks. The princes, who now distrusted the emperor more than they feared the Ottomans, shot down this attempt to unify Catholic and Protestant against the common foe. Germany would remain a military dwarf.105

The struggle for mastery also drove the expansion of Europe. In the late fifteenth century and the early sixteenth, Ferdinand and Isabella, and the Portuguese monarchs, continued their crusade against the Moors southwards into North Africa, capturing a number of enclaves there,¹⁰⁶ in order to deny the Ottomans a base to attack the southern flank of the peninsula. The same notion now lay behind the early exploratory voyages. From the mid-1480s, Christopher Columbus tried to interest the monarchs of Portugal and Spain in the idea of an Atlantic route to India. To be sure, a thirst for adventure, personal enrichment and glory were never far from his mind or that of other explorers and their sponsors. The ultimate purpose of the venture, however, was to launch an attack on the undefended Ottoman flank, leading to the recapture of Jerusalem, a task which Columbus described in more and more millenarian terms. Seizing new lands beyond the seas would not only open up a new front against the Ottomans; it would also secure the resources necessary for the recovery of the Holy Lands.107

Columbus set off in 1492, with charters signed by Ferdinand and Isabella. He took with him an Arabic interpreter (a Jewish convert to Christianity), and promised that ‘all the gain of this my enterprise should be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem’.¹⁰⁸ Instead of reaching Asia and finding allies against the Muslims, however, or claiming a share of the riches of the orient, Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean, where a Spanish colony was soon established. The natives were described, logically enough, as ‘Indians’, an appellation which stuck until the late twentieth century. The initial European discovery of America, in short, was a consequence of the struggle for mastery against Islam, just as its subsequent colonization was driven by rivalries between the western powers. Meanwhile, the Portuguese probed down the west coast of Africa. To prevent the two Iberian powers from falling out in their crusading enterprise, in June 1494 the pope mediated the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the New World between them. West of a line beyond the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic was to be Spanish; east of the line Portuguese. In 1497–8, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and explored the eastern African coast, finding a more practical route to India.¹⁰⁹ When Colombus set off on his fourth voyage in search of India in 1502, he did so in the expectation of meeting da Gama in a kind of pincer movement. Within a few years, Portuguese raiders were harassing Muslim shipping in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, causing considerable economic dislocation. The planned encirclement of the Ottomans had now become tenuous reality.

The creation of the Spanish overseas empire was also driven by European imperatives, primarily the need to deploy the resources and prestige of the New World to tip the balance on the old continent. In 1519, Hernán Cortés conquered Mexico and its silver for the Spanish crown.¹¹⁰ This made the Habsburg monarchy a kingdom – as the poet Ludovico Ariosto remarked – on which ‘the sun never set’.¹¹¹ The New World was an increasingly important part of the balance of power, but it was completely subordinate to European considerations. The Spanish colonial empire took up relatively little of Charles V’s time. Its principal function was to provide the resources to support his ambitions on the near side of the Atlantic: again and again, it was bullion from the Indies – usually about a quarter of total revenue – which either funded campaigns against the French, Turks and German princes directly, or provided the security against which the emperor could borrow from the great banking house of Fugger in Augsburg. For example, of nearly 2 million escudos’ worth of treasure brought from Peru one year, the largest single recipient was Germany, followed by the Low Countries. Charles’s travels throughout his reign also show his priorities quite clearly: he visited Italy on seven occasions, France on four, and England and Africa on two, and spent six long stays in Spain itself, but he travelled to Flanders and Germany on no fewer than nineteen occasions; he never visited the Americas. His imperial status stemmed from the Imperium Romana, not the global sweep of his lands.112 In short, the Holy Roman Empire, not the emerging Spanish American Empire, provided the imperial context in which the ambitions of Charles V were played out.¹¹³

It was European considerations, too, which lay behind Elizabeth’s naval offensive against Spain. The colonial balance, or lack of it, was conceived as part of the overall balance of power. ‘Whoever commands the sea,’ the English sailor and adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh argued, ‘commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.’ The prestige and fiscal muscle Philip enjoyed as King of New Spain were an important part of his European leverage. Thus Richard Hakluyt, in his celebrated Discourse of Western Planting (1584), noted that ‘with this great treasure’ Charles V had ‘got from the French King the Kingdom of Naples, the dukedom of Milan and all his other dominions in Italy, Lombardy, Piedmont and Savoy’. Elizabeth sponsored Drake’s voyages between 1577 and 1580, not as the first step towards an overseas empire of her own, but to reduce the flow of bullion paying Philip’s armies in Flanders. Likewise, as the Thirty Years War erupted in the Empire, the notion that American gold and silver subsidized not only Spanish endeavours in Europe, but also those of the emperor against German Protestants, was part of English strategic orthodoxy. Sir Benjamin Rudyerd told the House of Commons in 1624 ‘that Spain itself is but weak in men, and barren of natural commodities’; it was ‘his mines in the West Indies’ which fuelled ‘his vast ambitious desire of universal monarchy’. No better way of helping the embattled Palatines, another argued, than to ‘wast the Kinge of Spain’s shipping upon his coast, [and] interrupt the retornes of his plate’. The connection made here between overseas empire, the security of England’s continental bulwarks and ultimately the safety of the realm was to resonate in English strategic discourse for the next 150 years or so.114

The colonization of the New World was also very much an extension of the European conflict.¹¹⁵ The Puritans who left England in the 1620s, and eventually arrived in Massachusetts, were not turning their back on the Old World, far from it. Despairing of England, and then of the increasingly exposed Dutch Republic, they saw America as a springboard from which they would prepare the defeat of the ‘antichrist’, that is the Habsburgs in Europe. They prayed for reform in England, for ‘the miserable state of the churches in Germany’ and the victory of the Protestant cause there; ‘the news from Bohemia is very bad,’ John Winthrop observed in 1621, some years before setting out for Massachusetts. The colonists followed the news from the continent closely, particularly that from Geneva, Frankfurt, Leiden, Heidelberg and Strassburg, as well as from England itself; they trembled for the Palatinate and rejoiced at the successes of Gustavus Adolphus. Some of them, such as Governor Winthrop’s son Stephen, returned across the water to fight on the parliamentarian side in the Civil War, but the practical help they could render was limited.¹¹⁶ Instead, the Puritans should be, as John Winthrop told them, ‘as a shining city on a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.’ What was being celebrated here was not the apartness of the colonists but the opposite: their membership of Christendom, and the obligations deriving therefrom. They would help to redeem Europe as much through their example as by their efforts. American colonists, the parliamentarian cause in England and European Protestants were thus all bound up together in one greater community of fate.¹¹⁷

The centrality of Germany was reflected in the fact that the two most important European settlements revolved around the future of the Holy Roman Empire. Charles came to terms with the German Protestants at the Treaty of Augsburg in September 1555. He was forced to unravel the gigantic Habsburg dynastic trust into two separate Spanish and Austrian branches. Charles renounced his territories in reverse order of acquisition, abdicating as King of Spain in favour of Philip in 1555, and in the end laying down his most important title, the imperial crown, shortly afterwards. Two years later, Charles’s long-suffering brother Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor. The Spanish Habsburgs had been uncoupled from the Empire. Not until the time of Napoleon would one man rule over such a wide stretch of Europe again. The Treaty of Augsburg also laid down the principle of cuius regio, eius religio – that territories should take the religion of the reigning prince. It sanctioned the ‘secularization’ of lands taken by Protestant princes from the Church before 1552, and established equality between Lutheranism and Catholicism, though not Calvinism. This was enough to restore peace to Germany, and thus to most of central Europe, at least for the time being.

Likewise, the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which began to bring the pan-European contest involving France, Spain, Sweden, the Empire and many other powers, to an end, was a German settlement. It was much delayed because none of the antagonists felt able to conclude an ‘honest’ or honourable peace.118 Spain tried very hard to maintain the unity of the Casa de Austria, and thus strategic cooperation with Vienna; this made them sceptical of a separate German settlement, especially one which left the French gains in the western part of the Empire intact.¹¹⁹ The emperor hoped to make peace with Sweden and France, to keep them out of German affairs, and to hold on to as much imperial authority in Germany as he could.¹²⁰ France sought to eliminate Spanish influence in Germany and thus escape the longstanding ‘encirclement’, to reduce the power of the emperor by formalizing the right of the princes to conclude foreign alliances and, if possible, to unbolt the Habsburgs from the imperial crown by blocking their succession. In Germany itself, negotiations were long held up by the emperor’s refusal to allow the estates of the Empire – whom he regarded as his vassals – to participate in discussions with the French. But if the German princes showed themselves as bitterly divided in the mid-1640s as they had since the turn of the century, they were also united by a consensus to restore the integrity of the Empire in the face of outside interference. For example, the Catholic Elector of Bavaria lamented that the ‘spectacle’ to which Germany had been reduced ‘could have only one outcome, with various kings and potentates agreeing among themselves on the division of the Empire’.¹²¹

In the end, the deteriorating Habsburg military situation forced the imperialists to give way on key points, especially the right of the German princes to negotiate with foreign powers.122 The French also compromised, failing to enforce a constitutional ban on the Habsburg succession to the imperial crown. In 1648, the German war finally came to an end with the signing of the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück; the Franco-Spanish conflict, however, continued. This settlement became known jointly as the ‘Treaty of Westphalia’, and has been seen by generations of international lawyers and international relations theorists as the breakthrough for the modern concepts of sovereignty and nonintervention in the domestic affairs of other states.¹²³ In fact, the whole purpose of the treaty was to guard against German princes exercising an untrammelled sovereignty which might jeopardize the confessional peace of the Empire and thus the whole European balance. It was also designed to ensure that Germany could not be united under an imperial authority, native or foreign, capable of aspiring to Universal Monarchy over the whole of Christendom. In short, the Empire was supposed to be strong enough to prevent Germans from falling out among themselves, and to keep out foreign powers, but not so powerful as to become a threat to the European order itself.

This tall order was to be achieved through a series of interlocking geopolitical, constitutional, ideological and confessional provisions. In territorial terms, the changes wrought – or ratified – by Westphalia transformed the European state system. Spain finally acknowledged the independence of the United Provinces, only holding on to Flanders and Wallonia (Spanish Netherlands). Sweden gained Western Pomerania – which protected her southern coastline from attack – as well as the bishoprics of Bremen and Verden, together with their three votes in the German Diet. The Palatinate was divided: the Upper Palatinate remained with Catholic Bavaria (which was permitted to retain its new electoral vote), but the critical Lower Palatinate, which lay astride the ‘Spanish Road’, was restored to the Protestant Charles Ludwig together with its old electoral vote. There were now eight electors in total. In a major concession on the part of the emperor, the treaty expressly permitted German princes, for the first time, to conclude alliances with foreign powers, but only ‘provided . . . such alliances be not against the Emperor and the Empire, nor against the public peace of this transaction’.¹²⁴ French hopes of uncoupling the Habsburgs from the imperial crown were disappointed. On the other hand, the Austro-Spanish bid for Universal Monarchy, real or imagined, had been contained. The ghost of Charles V was laid to rest.

The treaty regulated the coexistence of the three major confessions, Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist). In the new Holy Roman Empire religious matters – and thus effectively everything of substance – had to be settled by compromise between the Catholic and Protestant representatives at the Diet, rather than by majority vote. Within territories, rulers were bound to respect certain rights, including the right to convert; and if they themselves changed religion, they could not compel their subjects to follow suit. Those religious minorities who had enjoyed toleration in 1624, which was declared to be the benchmark year, were not only guaranteed it for the future, but could not be excluded from certain civic offices.125 The geopolitical and the ideological clauses of the treaty were closely linked. Both Sweden and France had entered the war in defence of the ‘German liberty’ they deemed essential to prevent the Habsburgs from over-running the Empire and threatening their own freedom and security. This nexus was summed up by the Swedish negotiator, Johan Adler Salvius, who remarked, ‘the Baltic sea will be the ditch, Pomerania and Mecklenburg will serve as counter-scarp, and the other Imperial estates will be, so to speak, the outer works’ of Swedish security. The Swedish chancellor explained further that his aim was ‘to restore German liberties . . . and in this manner to conserve the equilibrium of all Europe’.¹²⁶ Contemporaries thus saw a direct link between domestic liberty, the balance of power and the right to intervene. It was for this reason that both France and Sweden insisted on being recognized as ‘guarantors’ of the Empire and the liberties of its individual ‘estates’. In short, the Westphalian treaties were nothing less than a charter for intervention: by fixing the internal confessional balance within German principalities, and by placing the whole German settlement under international guarantee, they provided a lever for interference in the internal affairs of the Empire throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹²⁷

Germany had been traumatized by the experience of civil war and humiliated by the march and counter-marching of foreign armies – Spanish, Danish, Swedish and French, to name only the most prominent – across her territory.¹²⁸ Other countries had suffered, to be sure, but none as badly as central Europe, where the German fate was considered to have been particularly gruesome.129 The damage had been far from universal, of course, with some regions being devastated and others escaping almost unscathed.¹³⁰ All the same, the population of the Holy Roman Empire dropped from 21 to just over 13 million people, a far higher percentage loss than in any conflict before or since. Its central European location had nearly become a collective death sentence, which gained in the telling and retelling. By the end of the 1640s, princes, burghers and peasants alike were confronted by a nightmarish vista of devastated landscapes, razed crops, depopulated villages and poisoned wells. They were profoundly ambivalent, however, about the lessons to be drawn from all this. Everybody was agreed that the Empire should be maintained in order to protect Germany from foreign domination (and from themselves), but there the consensus ended. Should German principalities seek to appease their more powerful neighbours, and avoid conflict, or should they seek the domestic coherence and military muscle necessary to deter them? Were ‘German freedoms’ more at risk from the Germans themselves, or from the foreign powers which intervened to protect them?

By 1648, the great 200-year struggle for mastery in Europe had resulted in a stalemate. No one power proved capable of dominating the Holy Roman Empire and thus the continent as a whole. Charles V; Francis I; Henry VIII; Suleiman; Philip II and Philip III; and the France of Richelieu and Mazarin all failed; the Dutch and English saw their hopes of a Protestant emperor, or at least of knocking the Habsburgs off their imperial perch, dashed. There were, however, clear winners and losers. After its humiliating ejection from France in the mid fifteenth century, England had returned to European politics with a vengeance under Henry VIII and Elizabeth; after a long retreat under James I and Charles I, she was about to do so again under Cromwell. The French had emerged from a debilitating religious civil war as the principal state on the continent. Spanish power, by contrast, had passed the high water mark in central Europe and the Low Countries. The Austrian Habsburgs had embraced the ‘German mission’ against the Turks, but they had struggled to parlay this into a decisive position in the Empire. On the European periphery, the Swedes had suddenly burst on the German scene as a major force in the overall balance of power. Meanwhile, the Ottoman advance into central Europe had stalled, to be sure, but its resumption could be expected at any time. The rivalry of the great powers had also extended well beyond Europe itself, starting with Columbus’s attempts to outflank Islam, and ending with the raising of new worlds in America and Asia to dominate, or to balance, the old.

All this had driven profound domestic transformations across Europe as states looked to increase their military capacity. In England and the United Provinces, this process stimulated the growth of political participation; it reduced it in France, Spain and many other states. By contrast, the polity at the heart of the European system, the Holy Roman Empire, made sporadic efforts to increase its military standing, but ended by being effectively neutralized, partly because Germans did not trust each other, and partly because neighbouring powers wanted to ensure that the resources of Germany would not be deployed against them. Internal and external factors were impossible to separate here. At Westphalia, therefore, the Empire was given a constitutional structure which sought to reconcile the political aspirations of Germans with the requirements of the international state system. The ‘German freedoms’ articulated in the Reichstag and in the various territorial estates had been preserved. It remained to be seen, however, whether further pressures generated by the European struggle for mastery would now turn Germany into a parliamentary system on Anglo-Dutch lines, or a more monarchical state on the French or Spanish model, or see a resumption of the tendency towards fragmentation, and outside interference, which it had experienced so extensively over the past 200 years.