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A POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE VOLUME I 1500-1815
BY CARLTON J. H. HAYES
PREFACE
This book represents an attempt on the part of the author to satisfy a very real need of a textbook which will reach far enough back to afford secure foundations for a college course in modern European history.
The book is a long one, and purposely so. Not only does it undertake to deal with a period at once the most complicated and the most inherently interesting of any in the whole recorded history of mankind, but it aims to impart sufficiently detailed information about the various topics discussed to make the college student feel that he is advanced a grade beyond the student in secondary school. There is too often a tendency to underestimate the intellectual capabilities of the collegian and to feed him so simple and scanty a mental pabulum that he becomes as a child and thinks as a child. Of course the author appreciates the fact that most college instructors of history piece out the elementary textbooks by means of assignments of collateral reading in large standard treatises. All too frequently, however, such assignments, excellent in themselves, leave woeful gaps which a slender elementary manual is inadequate to fill. And the student becomes too painfully aware, for his own educational good, of a chasmal separation between his textbook and his collateral reading. The present manual is designed to supply a narrative of such proportions that the need of additional reading will be somewhat lessened, and at the same time it is provided with critical bibliographies and so arranged as to enable the judicious instructor more easily to make substitutions here and there from other works or to pass over this or that section entirely. Perhaps these considerations will commend to others the judgment of the author in writing a long book.
Nowadays prefaces to textbooks of modern history almost invariably proclaim their writers' intention to stress recent happenings or at least those events of the past which have had a direct bearing upon the present. An examination of the following pages will show that in the case of this book there is no discrepancy between such an intention on the part of the present writer and its achievement. Beginning with the sixteenth century, the story of the civilization of modern Europe is carried down the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries with constant crescendo. Of the total space devoted to the four hundred years under review, the last century fills half. And the greatest care has been taken to bring the story down to date and to indicate as clearly and calmly as possible the underlying causes of the vast contemporaneous European war, which has already put a new complexion on our old historical knowledge and made everything that went before seem part and parcel of an old régime.
As to why the author has preferred to begin the story of modern Europe with the sixteenth century, rather than with the thirteenth or with the French Revolution, the reader is specially referred to the Introduction. It has seemed to the author that particularly from the Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth century dates the remarkable and steady evolution of that powerful middle class—the bourgeoisie— which has done more than all other classes put together to condition the progress of the several countries of modern Europe and to create the life and thought of the present generation throughout the world. The rise of the bourgeoisie is the great central theme of modern history; it is the great central theme of this book.
Not so very long ago distinguished historians were insisting that the state, as the highest expression of man's social instincts and as the immediate concern of all human beings, is the only fit subject of historical study, and that history, therefore, must be simply "past politics"; under their influence most textbooks became compendiums of data about kings and constitutions, about rebellions and battles. More recently historians of repute, as well as eminent economists, have given their attention and patronage to painstaking investigations of how, apart from state action, man in the past has toiled or traveled or done the other ordinary things of everyday life; and the influence of such scholars has served to provide us with a considerable number of convenient manuals on special phases of social history. Yet more recently several writers of textbooks have endeavored to combine the two tendencies and to present in a single volume both political and social facts, but it must be confessed that sometimes these writers have been content to tell the old political tale in orthodox manner and then to append a chapter or two of social miscellany, whose connection with the body of their book is seldom apparent to the student.
The present volume represents an effort really to combine political and social history in one synthesis: the author, quite convinced of the importance of the view that political activities constitute the most perfect expression of man's social instincts and touch mankind most universally, has not neglected to treat of monarchs and parliaments, of democracy and nationalism; at the same time he has cordially accepted the opinion that political activities are determined largely by economic and social needs and ambitions; and accordingly he has undertaken not only to incorporate at fairly regular intervals such chapters as those on the Commercial Revolution, Society in the Eighteenth Century, the Industrial Revolution, and Social Factors, 1870-1914, but also to show in every part of the narrative the economic aspects of the chief political facts.
Despite the length of this book, critics will undoubtedly note omissions. Confronting the writer of every textbook of history is the eternal problem of selection—the choice of what is most pointedly significant from the sum total of man's thoughts, words, and deeds. It is a matter of personal judgment, and personal judgments are notoriously variant. Certainly there will be critics who will complain of the present author's failure to follow up his suggestions concerning sixteenth-century art and culture with a fuller account of the development of philosophy and literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth century; and the only rejoinders that the harassed author can make are the rather lame ones that a book, to be a book, must conform to the mechanical laws of space and dimension, and that a serious attempt on the part of the present writer to make a synthesis of social and political facts precludes no effort on the part of other and abler writers to synthesize all these facts with the phenomena which are conventionally assigned to the realm of "cultural" or "intellectual" history. In this, and in all other respects, the author trusts that his particular solution of the vexatious problem of selection will prove as generally acceptable as any.
In the all-important matter of accuracy, the author cannot hope to have escaped all the pitfalls that in a peculiarly broad and crowded field everywhere trip the feet of even the most wary and persistent searchers after truth. He has naturally been forced to rely for the truth of his statements chiefly upon numerous secondary works, of which some acknowledgment is made in the following Note, and upon the kindly criticisms of a number of his colleagues; in some instances, notably in parts of the chapters on the Protestant Revolt, the French Revolution, and developments since 1848 in Great Britain, France, and Germany, he has been able to draw on his own special studies of primary source material, and in certain of these instances he has ventured to dissent from opinions that have been copied unquestioningly from one work to another.
No period of history can be more interesting or illuminating than the period with which this book is concerned, especially now, when a war of tremendous magnitude and meaning is attracting the attention of the whole civilized world and arousing a desire in the minds of all intelligent persons to know something of the past that has produced it. The great basic causes of the present war the author has sought, not in the ambitions of a single power nor in an isolated outrage, but in the history of four hundred years. He has tried to write a book that would be suggestive and informing, not only to the ordinary college student, but to the more mature and thoughtful student of public affairs in the university of the world.
CARLTON J. H. HAYES. AFTON, NEW YORK, May, 1916.
NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author begs to acknowledge his general indebtedness to a veritable host of historical writers, of whose original researches or secondary compilations he has constantly and almost unblushingly made use in the preparation of this book. At the close of the Introduction will be found a list of the major works dealing with the whole period under review, or with the greater part of it, which have been drawn upon most heavily. And there is hardly a book cited in any of the special bibliographies following the several chapters that has not supplied some single fact or suggestion to the accompanying narrative.
For many of the general ideas set forth in this work as well as for painstaking assistance in reading manuscript and correcting errors of detail, the author confesses his debt to various colleagues in Columbia University and elsewhere. In particular, Professor R. L. Schuyler has helpfully read the chapters on English history; Professor James T. Shotwell, the chapter on the Commercial Revolution; Professor D. S. Muzzey, the chapters on the French Revolution, Napoleon, and Metternich; Professor William R. Shepherd, the chapters on "National Imperialism"; and Professor Edward B. Krehbiel of Leland Stanford Junior University, the chapter on recent international relations. Professor E. F. Humphrey of Trinity College (Connecticut) has given profitable criticism on the greater part of the text; and Professor Charles A. Beard of Columbia University, Professor Sidney B. Fay of Smith College, and Mr. Edward L. Durfee of Yale University, have read the whole work and suggested several valuable emendations. Three instructors in history at Columbia have been of marked service—Dr. Austin P. Evans, Mr. D. R. Fox, and Mr. Parker T. Moon. The last named devoted the chief part of two summers to the task of preparing notes for several chapters of the book and he has attended the author on the long dreary road of proof reading.
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
PART I
FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN EUROPE
CHAPTER I. THE COUNTRIES OF EUROPE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY The New National Monarchies The Old Holy Roman Empire The City-States Northern and Eastern Europe in the year 1500
CHAPTER II. THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION Agriculture in the Sixteenth Century Towns on the Eve of the Commercial Revolution Trade Prior to the Commercial Revolution The Age of Exploration Establishment of Colonial Empires Effects of the Commercial Revolution
CHAPTER III. EUROPEAN POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY The Emperor Charles V Philip II and the Predominance of Spain
CHAPTER IV. THE PROTESTANT REVOLT AND THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION The Catholic Church at the Opening of the Sixteenth Century The Protestant Revolt Lutheranism Calvinism Anglicanism The Catholic Reformation Summary of the Religious Revolution in the Sixteenth Century
CHAPTER V. THE CULTURE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY The Invention of Printing Humanism Art in the Sixteenth Century National Literatures in the Sixteenth Century Beginnings of Modern Natural Science
PART II
DYNASTIC AND COLONIAL RIVALRY
CHAPTER VI. THE GROWTH OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE AND THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS, 1589-1661 Growth of Absolutism in France: Henry IV, Richelieu, and Mazarin Struggle between Bourbons and Habsburgs: The Thirty Years' War
CHAPTER VII. THE GROWTH OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE AND THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS, 1661-1743 The Age of Louis XIV Extension of French Frontiers The War of the Spanish Succession
CHAPTER VIII. THE TRIUMPH OF PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND Conflicting Political Tendencies in England: Absolutism versus Parliamentarianism The Puritan Revolution The Restoration: the Reign of Charles II The "Glorious Revolution" and the Final Establishment of Parliamentary Government in Great Britain
CHAPTER IX. THE WORLD CONFLICT OF FRANCE AND GREAT BRITAIN French and English Colonies in the Seventeenth Century Preliminary Encounters, 1689-1748 The Triumph of Great Britain: The Seven Years' War, 1756-1763
CHAPTER X. THE REVOLUTION WITHIN THE BRITISH EMPIRE The British Colonial System in the Eighteenth Century The War of American Independence, 1775-1783 The Reformation of the British Empire
CHAPTER XI. THE GERMANIES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The Holy Roman Empire in Decline The Habsburg Dominions The Rise of Prussia. The Hohenzollerns The Minor German States The Struggle between Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs
CHAPTER XII. THE RISE OF RUSSIA, AND THE DECLINE OF TURKEY, SWEDEN, AND POLAND Russia in the Seventeenth Century Peter the Great Sweden and the Career of Charles XII Catherine the Great: the Defeat of Turkey and the Dismemberment of Poland
PART III
"LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY"
CHAPTER XIII. EUROPEAN SOCIETY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century Commerce and Industry in the Eighteenth Century The Privileged Classes Religious and Ecclesiastical Conditions in the Eighteenth Century Scientific and Intellectual Developments in the Eighteenth Century
CHAPTER XIV. EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The British Monarchy The Enlightened Despots The French Monarchy
CHAPTER XV. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Introductory The End of Absolutism in France, 1789 The End of the Old Regime: the National Constituent Assembly, 1789-1791 The Limited Monarchy in Operation: the Legislative Assembly (1791-1792) and the Outbreak of Foreign War Establishment of the First French Republic: the National Convention, 1792-1795 The Directory (1795-1799) and the Transformation of the Republic into a Military Dictatorship Significance of the French Revolution
CHAPTER XVI. THE ERA OF NAPOLEON The French Republic under the Consulate, 1799-1804 The French Empire and its Territorial Expansion Destruction of the French Empire Significance of the Era of Napoleon
INTRODUCTION
The story of modern times is but a small fraction of the long epic of human history. If, as seems highly probable, the conservative estimates of recent scientists that mankind has inhabited the earth more than fifty thousand years [Footnote: Professor James Geikie, of the University of Edinburgh, suggests, in his Antiquity of Man in Europe (1914), the possible existence of human beings on the earth more than 500,000 years ago!], are accurate, then the bare five hundred years which these volumes pass in review constitute, in time, less than a hundredth part of man's past. Certainly, thousands of years before our day there were empires and kingdoms and city-states, showing considerable advancement in those intellectual pursuits which we call civilization or culture,—that is, in religion, learning, literature, political organization, and business; and such basic institutions as the family, the state, and society go back even further, past our earliest records, until their origins are shrouded in deepest mystery. Despite its brevity, modern history is of supreme importance. Within its comparatively brief limits are set greater changes in human life and action than are to be found in the records of any earlier millennium. While the present is conditioned in part by the deeds and thoughts of our distant forbears who lived thousands of years ago, it has been influenced in a very special way by historical events of the last five hundred years. Let us see how this is true.
Suppose we ask ourselves in what important respects the year 1900 differed from the year 1400. In other words, what are the great distinguishing achievements of modern times? At least six may be noted:
(1) Exploration and knowledge of the whole globe. To our ancestors from time out of mind the civilized world was but the lands adjacent to the Mediterranean and, at most, vague stretches of Persia, India, and China. Not much over four hundred years ago was America discovered and the globe circumnavigated for the first time, and very recently has the use of steamship, telegraph, and railway served to bind together the uttermost parts of the world, thereby making it relatively smaller, less mysterious, and in culture more unified.
(2) Higher standards of individual efficiency and comfort. The physical welfare of the individual has been promoted to a greater degree, or at all events preached more eloquently, within the last few generations than ever before. This has doubtless been due to changes in the commonplace everyday life of all the people. It must be remembered that in the fifteenth century man did the ordinary things of life in much the same manner as did early Romans or Greeks or Egyptians, and that our present remarkable ways of living, of working, and of traveling are the direct outcome of the Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth century and of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth.
(3) Intensification of political organization, with attendant public guarantees of personal liberties. The ideas of nationalism and of democracy are essentially modern in their expression. The notion that people who speak the same language and have a common culture should be organized as an independent state with uniform laws and customs was hardly held prior to the fifteenth century. The national states of England, France, and Spain did not appear unmistakably with their national boundaries, national consciousness, national literature, until the opening of the sixteenth century; and it was long afterwards that in Italy and Germany the national idea supplanted the older notions of world empire or of city-state or of feudalism. The national state has proved everywhere a far more powerful political organization than any other: its functions have steadily increased, now at the expense of feudalism, now at the expense of the church; and such increase has been as constant under industrial democracy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as under the benevolent despotism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But in measure as government has enlarged its scope, the governed have worked out and applied protective principles of personal liberties. The Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the uprisings of oppressed populations throughout the nineteenth century, would be quite inexplicable in other than modern times. In fact the whole political history of the last four centuries is in essence a series of compromises between the conflicting results of the modern exaltation of the state and the modern exaltation of the individual.
(4) Replacement of the idea of the necessity of uniformity in a definite faith and religion by toleration of many faiths or even of no faith. A great state religion, professed publicly, and financially supported by all the citizens, has been a distinguishing mark of every earlier age. Whatever else may be thought of the Protestant movement of the sixteenth century, of the rise of deism and skepticism in the seventeenth and eighteenth, and of the existence of scientific rationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth, there can be little doubt that each of them has contributed its share to the prevalence of the idea that religion is essentially a private, not a public, affair and that friendly rivalry in good works is preferable to uniformity in faith.
(5) Diffusion of learning. The invention of printing towards the close of the fifteenth century gradually revolutionized the pursuit of knowledge and created a real democracy of letters. What learning might have lost in depth through its marvelous broadening has perhaps been compensated for by the application of the keenest minds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to experimental science and in our own day to applied science.
(6) Spirit of progress and decline of conservatism. For better or for worse the modern man is intellectually more self-reliant than his ancestors, more prone to try new inventions and to profit by new discoveries, more conscious and therefore more critical of conditions about him, more convinced that he lives in a better world than did his fathers, and that his children who come after him should have a better chance than he has had. This is the modern spirit. It is the product of all the other elements of the history of five hundred years—the larger geographical horizon, the greater physical comfort, the revolutionized political institutions, the broader sympathies, the newer ideals of education. Springing thus from events of the past few centuries, the modern spirit nevertheless looks ever forward, not backward. A debtor to the past, it will be doubly creditor to the future. It will determine the type of individual and social betterment through coming centuries. Such an idea is implied in the phrase, "the continuity of history"—the ever-flowing stream of happenings that brings down to us the heritage of past ages and that carries on our richer legacies to generations yet unborn.
From such a conception of the continuity of history, the real significance of our study can be derived. It becomes perfectly clear that if we understand the present we shall be better prepared to face the problems and difficulties of the future. But to understand the present thoroughly, it becomes necessary not only to learn what are its great features and tendencies, but likewise how they have been evolved. Now, as we have already remarked, six most important characteristics of the present day have been developed within the last four or five centuries. To follow the history of this period, therefore, will tend to familiarize us both with present-day conditions and with future needs. This is the genuine justification for the study of the history of modern times.
Modern history may conveniently be defined as that part of history which deals with the origin and evolution of the great distinguishing characteristics of the present. No precise dates can be assigned to modern history as contrasted with what has commonly been called ancient or medieval. In a sense, any division of the historical stream into parts or periods is fundamentally fallacious: for example, inasmuch as the present generation owes to the Greeks of the fourth century before Christ many of its artistic models and philosophical ideas and very few of its political theories, the former might plausibly be embraced in the field of modern history, the latter excluded therefrom. But the problem before us is not so difficult as may seem on first thought. To all intents and purposes the development of the six characteristics that have been noted has taken place within five hundred years. The sixteenth century witnessed the true beginnings of the change in the extensive world discoveries, in the establishment of a recognized European state system, in the rise of Protestantism, and in the quickening of intellectual activity. It is the foundation of modern Europe.
The sixteenth century will therefore be the general subject of Part I of this volume. After reviewing the geography of Europe about the year 1500, we shall take up in turn the four factors of the century which have had a lasting influence upon us: (1) socially and economically—The Commercial Revolution; (2) politically—European Politics in the Sixteenth Century; (3) religiously and ecclesiastically—The Protestant Revolt; (4) intellectually—The Culture of the Sixteenth Century.
ADDITIONAL READING
THE STUDY OF HISTORY. On historical method: C. V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, trans. by G. G. Berry (1912); J. M. Vincent, Historical Research: an Outline of Theory and Practice (1911); H. B. George, Historical Evidence (1909); F. M. Fling, Outline of Historical Method (1899). Different views of history: J. H. Robinson, The New History (1912), a collection of stimulating essays; J. T. Shotwell, suggestive article History in 11th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica; T. B. Macaulay, essay on History; Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship; Karl Lamprecht, What is History? trans. by E. A. Andrews (1905). Also see Henry Johnson, The Teaching of History (1915); Eduard Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (1911); Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie, 5th ed. (1914); G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913).
TEXTBOOKS AND MANUALS OF MODERN HISTORY. J. H. Robinson and C. A. Beard, The Development of Modern Europe, 2 vols. (1907), a political and social narrative from the time of Louis XIV, and by the same authors, Readings in Modern European History, 2 vols. (1908-1909), an indispensable sourcebook, with critical bibliographies; Ferdinand Schevill, A Political History of Modern Europe from the Reformation to the Present Day (1907); T. H. Dyer, A History of Modern Europe from the Fall of Constantinople, 3d ed. revised and continued to the end of the nineteenth century by Arthur Hassall, 6 vols. (1901), somewhat antiquated but still valuable for its vast store of political facts; Victor Duruy, History of Modern Times from the Fall of Constantinople to the French Revolution, trans. by E. A. Grosvenor (1894), verbose and somewhat uncritical, but usable for French history. More up-to-date series of historical manuals are now appearing or are projected by Henry Holt and Company under the editorship of Professor C. H. Haskins, by The Century Company under Professor G. L. Burr, by Ginn and Company under Professor J. H. Robinson, and by Houghton Mifflin Company under Professor J. T. Shotwell: such of these volumes as have appeared are noted in the appropriate chapter bibliographies following. The Macmillan Company has published Periods of European History, 8 vols. (1893-1901), under the editorship of Arthur Hassall, of which the last five volumes treat of political Europe from 1494 to 1899; and a more elementary political series, Six Ages of European History, 6 vols. (1910), under the editorship of A. H. Johnson, of which the last three volumes cover the years from 1453 to 1878. Much additional information is obtainable from such popular series as Story of the Nations (1886 sqq.), Heroes of the Nations (1890 sqq.), and Home University Library, though the volumes in such series are of very unequal merit. Convenient chronological summaries are: G. P. and G. H. Putnam, Tabular Views of Universal History (1914); Carl Ploetz, Manual of Universal History, trans. and enlarged by W. H. Tillinghast, new edition (1915); Haydn's Dictionary of Dates, 25th ed. (1911); C. E. Little, Cyclopædia of Classified Dates (1900); Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XIII (1911). The best atlas—a vitally necessary adjunct of historical study—is either that of W. R. Shepherd, Historical Atlas (1911), or that of Ramsay Muir, Hammond's New Historical Atlas for Students, 2d ed. (1915); a smaller historical atlas is that of E. W. Dow (1907), and longer ones are Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XIV (1912) and, in German, Putzger, Historischer Schulatlas. Elaborate treatises on historical geography: Elisée Reclus, The Universal Geography, trans. and ed. by E. G. Ravenstein, 19 vols.; Nouveau Dictionnaire de Géographie Universelle, by Vivien de Saint-Martin and Louis Rousselet, 10 vols. See also H. B. George, The Relations of Geography and History (1910) and Ellen C. Semple, The Influence of Geographic Environment (1911).
STANDARD SECONDARY WORKS AND SETS ON MODERN HISTORY. The Cambridge Modern History, 12 vols. and 2 supplementary vols. (1902-1912), planned by Lord Acton, edited by A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero, and Stanley Leathes, written by English scholars, covering the period from 1450 to 1910, generally sound but rather narrowly political. Better balanced is the monumental work of a group of French scholars, Histoire générale du IVe siècle à nos jours, edited by Ernest Lavisse and Alfred Rambaud, 12 vols. (1894-1901), of which the last nine treat of the years from 1492 to 1900. For social history a series, Histoire universelle du travail, 12 vols., is projected under the editorship of Georges Renard. The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (1910-1911), is the work mainly of distinguished scholars and a storehouse of historical information, political, social, and intellectual. Also available in English is History of All Nations, 24 vols. (1902), the first nineteen based on translation of Theodor Flathe, Allgemeine Weltgeschichte,—Vols. X-XXIV dealing with modern history,—Vol. XX, on Europe, Asia, and Africa since 1871, by C. M. Andrews, and Vols. XXI-XXIII, on American history, by John Fiske; likewise H. F. Helmolt (editor), Weltgeschichte, trans. into English, 8 vols. (1902-1907). Sets and series in German: Wilhelm Oncken (editor), Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen, 50 vols. (1879-1893); Geschichte der europäischen Staaten, an enormous collection, appearing more or less constantly from 1829 to the present and edited successively by such famous scholars as A. H. L. Heeren, F. A. Ukert, Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, and Karl Lamprecht; G. von Below and F. Meinecke (editors), Handbuch der mittel-alterlichen und neueren Geschichte, a series begun in 1903 and planned, when completed, to comprise 40 vols.; Paul Hinneberg (editor), Die Kultur der Gegenwart, ihre Entwicklung und ihre Ziele, a remarkable series begun in 1906 and intended to explain in many volumes the civilization of the twentieth century in all its aspects; Erich Brandenburg (editor), Bibliothek der Geschichtswissenschaft, a series recently projected, the first volume appearing in 1912; J. von Pflugk-Harttung, Weltgeschichte: die Entwicklung der Menschheit in Staat und Gesellschaft, in Kultur und Geistesleben, 6 vols. illust. (1908-1911); Theodor Lindner, Weltgeschichte seit der Völkerwanderung, 8 vols. (1908-1914). Valuable contributions to general modern history occur in such monumental national histories as Karl Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte, 12 vols. in 16 (1891-1909), and, more particularly, Ernest Lavisse (editor), Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu'à la Révolution, 9 double vols. (1900-1911).
BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARIES. General: Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., 29 vols. (1910-1911); New International Encyclopedia, 2d ed., 24 vols. (1914-1916); Catholic Encyclopedia, 15 vols. (1907-1912). Great Britain: Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (editors), Dictionary of National Biography, 72 vols. (1885-1913). France: Hoefer (editor), Nouvelle biographie générale, 46 vols. (1855-1866); Dictionnaire de biographie française, projected (1913) under editorship of Louis Didier, Albert Isnard, and Gabriel Ledos. Germany: Liliencron and Wegele (editors), Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, 54 vols. (1875 sqq.). Austria-Hungary: Wurzbach (editor), Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich, 60 vols. (1856-1891). There is also a well-known French work—L. G. Michaud, Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, 45 vols. (1880).
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Many of the works cited above and most of the works mentioned in the following chapter bibliographies contain convenient bibliographies on special topics. The best general guide to collections of source material and to the organization of historical study and research, though already somewhat out-of-date, is C. V. Langlois, Manuel de bibliographie historique, 2 vols. (1901-1904). See also C. M. Andrews, J. M. Gambrill, and Lida Tall, A Bibliography of History for Schools and Libraries (1910); and C. K. Adams, A Manual of Historical Literature, 3d ed. (1889). Specifically, for Great Britain: W. P. Courtney, A Register of National Bibliography, 3 vols. (1905- 1912); S. R. Gardiner and J. B. Mullinger, Introduction to the Study of English History, 4th ed. (1903); H. L. Cannon, Reading References for English History (1910); Bibliography of Modern English History, now (1916) in preparation under the auspices of English scholars and of the American Historical Association. For German bibliography: Dahlmann- Waitz, Quellenkunde der deutschen Geschichte, 8th ed. (1912); Jahresberichte der Geschichtswissenschaft, a valuable annual publication issued under the auspices of the Historical Association of Berlin. For French bibliography: Gabriel Monod, Bibliographie de l'histoire de France (1888), new ed. projected (1910) in 4 vols.; Manuels de bibliographie historique (1907-1916): Part II, 1494-1610, by Henri Hauser, Part III, 1610-1715, by Émile Bourgeois and Louis André; Répertoire méthodique de l'histoire moderne et contemporaine de la France, an annual publication edited by Brière and Caron. For American bibliography: Edward Channing, A. B. Hart, and F. J. Turner, Guide to the Study of American History (1912). Among important historical periodicals, containing bibliographical notes and book reviews, are, History Teacher's Magazine, The American Historical Review, The English Historical Review, Die historische Zeitschrift, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, La revue historique, and La revue des questions historiques. For periodical literature see Poole's Index (1802-1906) and Readers' Guide (1900 sqq.). The most famous lists of published books are: The American Catalogue (1876 sqq.); the English Catalogue (1835 sqq.); C. G. Kayser, Bücher-Lexikon (1750 sqq.); Wilhelm Heinsius, Bücher-Lexikon (1700-1892); Otto Lorenz, _Catalogue général de la librarie française (1840 sqq.); and, for general comment, American Library Association, Index to General Literature (1893 sqq.).
PART I
FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN EUROPE
CHAPTER I
THE COUNTRIES OF EUROPE AT THE OPENING OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
1. THE NEW NATIONAL MONARCHIES
[Sidenote: "National Monarchies" in 1500]
Before we can safely proceed with the story of European development during the past four hundred years, it is necessary to know what were the chief countries that existed at the beginning of our period and what were the distinctive political institutions of each.
A glance at the map of Europe in 1500 will show numerous unfamiliar divisions and names, especially in the central and eastern portions. Only in the extreme west, along the Atlantic seaboard, will the eye detect geographical boundaries which resemble those of the present day. There, England, France, Spain, and Portugal have already taken form. In each one of these countries is a real nation, with a single monarch, and with a distinctive literary language. These four states are the national states of the sixteenth century. They attract our immediate attention.
ENGLAND
[Sidenote: The English Monarchy]
In the year 1500 the English monarchy embraced little more than what on the map is now called "England." It is true that to the west the principality of Wales had been incorporated two hundred years earlier, but the clannish mountaineers and hardy lowlanders of the northern part of the island of Great Britain still preserved the independence of the kingdom of Scotland, while Irish princes and chieftains rendered English occupation of their island extremely precarious beyond the so- called Pale of Dublin which an English king had conquered in the twelfth century. Across the English Channel, on the Continent, the English monarchy retained after 1453, the date of the conclusion of the Hundred Years' War, only the town of Calais out of the many rich French provinces which ever since the time of William the Conqueror (1066- 1087) had been a bone of contention between French and English rulers.
While the English monarchy was assuming its geographical form, peculiar national institutions were taking root in the country, and the English language, as a combination of earlier Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, was being evolved. The Hundred Years' War with France, or rather its outcome, served to exalt the sense of English nationality and English patriotism, and to enable the king to devote his whole attention to the consolidation of his power in the British islands. For several years after the conclusion of peace on the Continent, England was harassed by bloody and confused struggles, known as the Wars of the Roses, between rival claimants to the throne, but at length, in 1485, Henry VII, the first of the Tudor dynasty, secured the crown and ushered in a new era of English history.
[Sidenote: Increase of Royal Power in England under Henry VII]
Henry VII (1485-1509) sought to create what has been termed a "strong monarchy." Traditionally the power of the king had been restricted by a Parliament, composed of a House of Lords and a House of Commons, and as the former was then far more influential than the latter, supreme political control had rested practically with the king and the members of the upper house—great land-holding nobles and the princes of the church. The Wars of the Roses had two effects which redounded to the advantage of the king: (1) the struggle, being really a contest of two factions of nobles, destroyed many noble families and enabled the crown to seize their estates, thereby lessening the influence of an ancient class; (2) the struggle, being long and disorderly, created in the middle class or "common people" a longing for peace and the conviction that order and security could be maintained only by repression of the nobility and the strengthening of monarchy. Henry took advantage of these circumstances to fix upon his country an absolutism, or one-man power in government, which was to endure throughout the sixteenth century, during the reigns of the four other members of the Tudor family, and, in fact, until a popular revolution in the seventeenth century.
Henry VII repressed disorder with a heavy hand and secured the establishment of an extraordinary court, afterwards called the "Court of Star Chamber," to hear cases, especially those affecting the nobles, which the ordinary courts had not been able to settle. Then, too, he was very economical: the public revenue was increased by means of more careful attention to the cultivation of the crown lands and the collection of feudal dues, fines, benevolences [Footnote: "Benevolences" were sums of money extorted from the people in the guise of gifts. A celebrated minister of Henry VII collected a very large number of "benevolences" for his master. If a man lived economically, it was reasoned he was saving money and could afford a "present" for the king. If, on the contrary, he lived sumptuously, he was evidently wealthy and could likewise afford a "gift.">[, import and export duties, and past parliamentary grants, while, by means of frugality and a foreign policy of peace, the expenditure was appreciably decreased. Henry VII was thereby freed in large measure from dependence on Parliament for grants of money, and the power of Parliament naturally declined. In fact, Parliament met only five times during his whole reign and only once during the last twelve years, and in all its actions was quite subservient to the royal desires.
[Sidenote: Foreign relations of England under Henry VII]
Henry VII refrained in general from foreign war, but sought by other means to promote the international welfare of his country. He negotiated several treaties by which English traders might buy and sell goods in other countries. One of the most famous of these commercial treaties was the Intercursus Magnus concluded in 1496 with the duke of Burgundy, admitting English goods into the Netherlands. He likewise encouraged English companies of merchants to engage in foreign trade and commissioned the explorations of John Cabot in the New World. Henry increased the prestige of his house by politic marital alliances. He arranged a marriage between the heir to his throne, Arthur, and Catherine, eldest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish sovereigns. Arthur died a few months after his wedding, but it was arranged that Catherine should remain in England as the bride of the king's second son, who subsequently became Henry VIII. The king's daughter Margaret was married to King James IV of Scotland, thereby paving the way much later for the union of the crowns of England and Scotland.
England in the year 1500 was a real national monarchy, and the power of the king appeared to be distinctly in the ascendant. Parliament was fast becoming a purely formal and perfunctory body.
FRANCE
[Sidenote: The French Monarchy]
By the year 1500 the French monarchy was largely consolidated territorially and politically. It had been a slow and painful process, for long ago in 987, when Hugh Capet came to the throne, the France of his day was hardly more than the neighborhood of Paris, and it had taken five full centuries to unite the petty feudal divisions of the country into the great centralized state which we call France. The Hundred Years' War had finally freed the western duchies and counties from English control. Just before the opening of the sixteenth century the wily and tactful Louis XI (1461-1483) had rounded out French territories: on the east he had occupied the powerful duchy of Burgundy; on the west and on the southeast he had possessed himself of most of the great inheritance of the Angevin branch of his own family, including Anjou, and Provence east of the Rhone; and on the south the French frontier had been carried to the Pyrenees. Finally, Louis's son, Charles VIII (1483-1498), by marrying the heiress of Brittany, had absorbed that western duchy into France.
[Sidenote: Steady Growth of Royal Power in France]
Meanwhile, centralized political institutions had been taking slow but tenacious root in the country. Of course, many local institutions and customs survived in the various states which had been gradually added to France, but the king was now recognized from Flanders to Spain and from the Rhone to the Ocean as the source of law, justice, and order. There was a uniform royal coinage and a standing army under the king's command. The monarchs had struggled valiantly against the disruptive tendencies of feudalism; they had been aided by the commoners or middle class; and the proof of their success was their comparative freedom from political checks. The Estates-General, to which French commoners had been admitted in 1302, resembled in certain externals the English Parliament,—for example, in comprising representatives of the clergy, nobles, and commons,—but it had never had final say in levying taxes or in authorizing expenditures or in trying royal officers. And unlike England, there was in France no live tradition of popular participation in government and no written guarantee of personal liberty.
[Sidenote: Foreign Relations of the French Kings about 1500]
Consolidated at home in territory and in government, Frenchmen began about the year 1500 to be attracted to questions of external policy. By attempting to enforce an inherited claim to the crown of Naples, Charles VIII in 1494 started that career of foreign war and aggrandizement which was to mark the history of France throughout following centuries. His efforts in Italy were far from successful, but his heir, Louis XII (1498-1515), continued to lay claim to Naples and to the duchy of Milan as well. In 1504 Louis was obliged to resign Naples to King Ferdinand of Aragon, in whose family it remained for two centuries, but about Milan continued a conflict, with varying fortunes, ultimately merging into the general struggle between Francis I (1515- 1547) and the Emperor Charles V.
France in the year 1500 was a real national monarchy, with the beginnings of a national literature and with a national patriotism centering in the king. It was becoming self-conscious. Like England, France was on the road to one-man power, but unlike England, the way had been marked by no liberal or constitutional mile-posts.
SPAIN AND PORTUGAL
[Sidenote: Development of the Spanish and Portuguese Monarchies]
South of the Pyrenees were the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies, which, in a long process of unification, not only had to contend against the same disuniting tendencies as appeared in France and England, but also had to solve the problem of the existence side by side of two great rival religions—Christianity and Mohammedanism. Mohammedan invaders from Africa had secured political control of nearly the whole peninsula as early as the eighth century, but in course of time there appeared in the northern and western mountains several diminutive Christian states, of which the following may be mentioned: Barcelona, in the northeast, along the Mediterranean; Aragon, occupying the south-central portion of the Pyrenees and extending southward toward the Ebro River; Navarre, at the west of the Pyrenees, reaching northward into what is now France and southward into what is now Spain; Castile, west of Navarre, circling about the town of Burgos; Leon, in the northwestern corner of the peninsula; and Portugal, south of Leon, lying along the Atlantic coast. Little by little these Christian states extended their southern frontiers at the expense of the Mohammedan power and showed some disposition to combine. In the twelfth century Barcelona was united with the kingdom of Aragon, and a hundred years later Castile and Leon were finally joined. Thus, by the close of the thirteenth century, there were three important states in the peninsula —Aragon on the east, Castile in the center, and Portugal on the west— and two less important states—Christian Navarre in the extreme north, and Mohammedan Granada in the extreme south.
While Portugal acquired its full territorial extension in the peninsula by the year 1263, the unity of modern Spain was delayed until after the marriage of Ferdinand (1479-1516) and Isabella (1474-1504), sovereigns respectively of Aragon and Castile. Granada, the last foothold of the Mohammedans, fell in 1492, and in 1512 Ferdinand acquired that part of the ancient kingdom of Navarre which lay upon the southern slope of the Pyrenees. The peninsula was henceforth divided between the two modern states of Spain and Portugal.
[Sidenote: Portugal a Real National Monarchy in 1500]
Portugal, the older and smaller of the two states, had become a conspicuous member of the family of nations by the year 1500, thanks to a line of able kings and to the remarkable series of foreign discoveries that cluster about the name of Prince Henry the Navigator. Portugal possessed a distinctive language of Latin origin and already cherished a literature of no mean proportions. In harmony with the spirit of the age the monarchy was tending toward absolutism, and the parliament, called the Cortes, which had played an important part in earlier times, ceased to meet regularly after 1521. The Portuguese royal family were closely related to the Castilian line, and there were people in both kingdoms who hoped that one day the whole peninsula would be united under one sovereign.
[Sidenote: The Spanish Kingdom in 1500]
From several standpoints the Spanish monarchy was less unified in 1500 than England, France, or Portugal. The union of Castile and Aragon was, for over two centuries, hardly more than personal. Each retained its own customs, parliaments (Cortes), and separate administration. Each possessed a distinctive language, although Castilian gradually became the literary "Spanish," while Catalan, the speech of Aragon, was reduced to the position of an inferior. Despite the continuance of excessive pride in local traditions and institutions, the cause of Spanish nationality received great impetus during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was under them that territorial unity had been obtained. It was they who turned the attention of Spaniards to foreign and colonial enterprises. The year that marked the fall of Granada and the final extinction of Mohammedan power in Spain was likewise signalized by the first voyage of Christopher Columbus, which prefigured the establishment of a greater Spain beyond the seas. On the continent of Europe, Spain speedily acquired a commanding position in international affairs, as the result largely of Ferdinand's ability. The royal house of Aragon had long held claims to the Neapolitan and Sicilian kingdoms and for two hundred years had freely mixed in the politics of Italy. Now, in 1504, Ferdinand definitely secured recognition from France of his rights in Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. Spain was becoming the rival of Venice for the leadership of the Mediterranean.
[Sidenote: Increase of Royal Power in Spain under Ferdinand and
Isabella]
While interfering very little with the forms of representative government in their respective kingdoms, Ferdinand and Isabella worked ever, in fact, toward uniformity and absolutism. They sought to ingratiate themselves with the middle class, to strip the nobility of its political influence, and to enlist the church in their service. The Cortes were more or less regularly convened, but their functions were almost imperceptibly transferred to royal commissions and officers of state. Privileges granted to towns in earlier times were now gradually revoked. The king, by becoming the head of the ancient military orders which had borne prominent part in the struggle against the Mohammedans, easily gained control of considerable treasure and of an effective fighting force. The sovereigns prevailed upon the pope to transfer control of the Inquisition, the medieval ecclesiastical tribunal for the trial of heretics, to the crown, so that the harsh penalties which were to be inflicted for many years upon dissenters from orthodox Christianity were due not only to religious bigotry but likewise to the desire for political uniformity.
In population and in domestic resources Spain was not so important as France, but the exploits of Ferdinand and Isabella, the great wealth which temporarily flowed to her from the colonies, the prestige which long attended her diplomacy and her armies, were to exalt the Spanish monarchy throughout the sixteenth century to a position quite out of keeping with her true importance.
2. THE OLD HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
[Sidenote: The Idea of an "Empire" Different in 1500 from that of a
"National Monarchy">[
The national monarchies of western Europe—England, France, Spain, and Portugal—were political novelties in the year 1500: the idea of uniting the people of similar language and customs under a strongly centralized state had been slowly developing but had not reached fruition much before that date. On the other hand, in central Europe survived in weakness an entirely different kind of state, called an empire. The theory of an empire was a very ancient one—it meant a state which should embrace all peoples of whatsoever race or language, bound together in obedience to a common prince. Such, for example, had been the ideal of the old Roman Empire, under whose Caesars practically the whole civilized world had once been joined, so that the inhabitant of Egypt or Armenia united with the citizen of Britain or Spain in allegiance to the emperor. That empire retained its hold on portions of eastern Europe until its final conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, but a thousand years earlier it had lost control of the West because of external violence and internal weakness. So great, however, was the strength of the idea of an "empire," even in the West, that Charlemagne about the year 800 temporarily united what are now France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium into what he persisted in styling the "Roman Empire." Nearly two centuries later, Otto the Great, a famous prince in Germany, gave other form to the idea, in the "Holy Roman Empire" of which he became emperor. This form endured from 962 to 1806.
[Sidenote: The Holy Roman Empire; Its Mighty Claims in Theory and its
Slight Power in Practice]
In theory, the Holy Roman Empire claimed supremacy over all Christian rulers and peoples of central and western Europe, and after the extinction of the eastern empire in 1453 it could insist that it was the sole secular heir to the ancient Roman tradition. But the greatness of the theoretical claim of the Holy Roman Empire was matched only by the insignificance of its practical acceptance. The feudal nobles of western Europe had never recognized it, and the national monarchs, though they might occasionally sport with its honors and titles, never admitted any real dependence upon it of England, France, Portugal, or Spain. In central Europe, it had to struggle against the anarchical tendencies of feudalism, against the rise of powerful and jealous city- states, and against a rival organization, the Catholic Church, which in its temporal affairs was at least as clearly an heir to the Roman tradition as was the Holy Roman Empire. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the conflict raged, with results important for all concerned,—results which were thoroughly obvious in the year 1500.
[Sidenote: The Holy Roman Empire practically Restricted by 1500 to the
Germanies]
In the first place, the Holy Roman Empire was practically restricted to German-speaking peoples. The papacy and the Italian cities had been freed from imperial control, and both the Netherlands—that is, Holland and Belgium—and the Swiss cantons were only nominally connected. Over the Slavic people to the east—Russians, Poles, etc.—or the Scandinavians to the north, the empire had secured comparatively small influence. By the year 1500 the words Empire and Germany had become virtually interchangeable terms.
Secondly, there was throughout central Europe no conspicuous desire for strong centralized national states, such as prevailed in western Europe.
[Sidenote: Internal Weakness of the Holy Roman Empire]
Separatism was the rule. In Italy and in the Netherlands the city- states were the political units. Within the Holy Roman Empire was a vast hodge-podge of city-states, and feudal survivals—arch-duchies, such as Austria; margravates, such as Brandenburg; duchies, like Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg; counties like the Palatinate, and a host of free cities, baronies, and domains, some of them smaller than an American township. In all there were over three hundred states which collectively were called "the Germanies" and which were united only by the slender imperial thread. The idea of empire had not only been narrowed to one nation; it also, in its failure to overcome feudalism, had prevented the growth of a real national monarchy.
[Sidenote: Government of the Holy Roman Empire]
What was the nature of this slight tie that nominally held the Germanies together? There was the form of a central government with an emperor to execute laws and a Diet to make them. The emperor was not necessarily hereditary but was chosen by seven "electors," who were the chief princes of the realm. These seven were the archbishops of Mainz (Mayence), of Cologne, and of Trier (Trèves), the king of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Brandenburg, and the count palatine of the Rhine. Not infrequently the electors used their position to extort concessions from the emperor elect which helped to destroy German unity and to promote the selfish interests of the princes. The imperial Diet was composed of the seven electors, the lesser princes (including the higher ecclesiastical dignitaries, such as bishops and abbots), and representatives of the free cities, grouped in three separate houses. The emperor was not supposed to perform any imperial act without the authorization of the Diet, and petty jealousies between its members or houses often prevented action in the Diet. The individual states, moreover, reserved to themselves the management of most affairs which in western Europe had been surrendered to the central national government. The Diet, and therefore the emperor, was without a treasury or an army, unless the individual states saw fit to act favorably upon its advice and furnish the requested quotas. The Diet resembled far more a congress of diplomats than a legislative body.
[Sidenote: The Habsburgs: Weak as Emperors but Strong as Rulers of
Particular States within the Holy Roman Empire]
It will be readily perceived that under these circumstances the emperor as such could have little influence. Yet the fear of impending Slavic or Turkish attacks upon the eastern frontier, or other fears, frequently operated to secure the election of some prince who had sufficiently strong power of his own to stay the attack or remove the fear. In this way, Rudolph, count of Habsburg, had been chosen emperor in 1273, and in his family, with few interruptions, continued the imperial title, not only to 1500 but to the final extinction of the empire in 1806. Several of these Habsburg emperors were influential, but it must always be remembered that they owed their power not to the empire but to their own hereditary states.
Originally lords of a small district in Switzerland, the Habsburgs had gradually increased their holdings until at length in 1273 Rudolph, the maker of his family's real fortunes, had been chosen Holy Roman Emperor, and three years later had conquered the valuable archduchy of Austria with its capital of Vienna. The family subsequently became related by marriage to reigning families in Hungary and in Italy as well as in Bohemia and other states of the empire. In 1477 the Emperor Maximilian I (1493-1519) married Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold and heiress of the wealthy provinces of the Netherlands; and in 1496 his son Philip was united to Joanna, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and heiress of the crowns of Castile and Aragon. The fortunes of the Habsburgs were decidedly auspicious.
[Sidenote: Vain Attempts to "Reform" the Holy Roman Empire]
Of course, signs were not wanting of some national life in the Germanies. Most of the people spoke a common language; a form of national unity existed in the Diet; and many patriots raised their voice in behalf of a stronger and more centralized government. In 1495 a Diet met at the city of Worms to discuss with Emperor Maximilian projects of reform. After protracted debates, it was agreed that private warfare, a survival of feudal days, should be abolished; a perpetual peace should be declared; and an imperial court should be established to settle all disputes between states within the empire. These efforts at reform, like many before and after, were largely unfruitful, and, despite occasional protests, practical disunion prevailed in the Germanies of the sixteenth century, albeit under the high-sounding title of "Holy Roman Empire."
3. THE CITY-STATES
[Sidenote: "City-States" in 1500]
Before the dawn of the Christian era the Greeks and Romans had entertained a general idea of political organization which would seem strange to most of us at the present time. They believed that every city with its outlying country should constitute an independent state, with its own particular law-making and governing bodies, army, coinage, and foreign relations. To them, the idea of an empire was intolerable and the concept of a national state, such as we commonly have to-day, unthinkable.
Now it so happened, as we shall see in the following chapter, that the commerce of the middle ages stimulated the growth of important trading towns in Italy, in Germany, and in the Netherlands. These towns, in one way or another, managed to secure a large measure of self-government, so that by the year 1500 they had become somewhat similar to the city- states of antiquity. In Germany, though they still maintained their local self-government, they were loosely attached to the Holy Roman Empire and were overshadowed in political influence by other states. In the case of Italy and of the Netherlands, however, it is impossible to understand the politics of those countries in the sixteenth century without paying some attention to city-states, which played leading rôles in both.
[Sidenote: Italy in 1500 neither a National Monarchy not Attached to the Holy Roman Empire]
In the Italy of the year 1500 there was not even the semblance of national political unity. Despite the ardent longings of many Italian patriots [Footnote: Of such patriots was Machiavelli (see below, p. 194). Machiavelli wrote in The Prince: "Our country, left almost without life, still waits to know who it is that is to heal her bruises, to put an end to the devastation and plunder of Lombardy and to the exactions and imposts of Naples and Tuscany, and to stanch those wounds of hers which long neglect has changed into running sores. We see how she prays God to send some one to rescue her from these barbarous cruelties and oppressions. We see too how ready and eager she is to follow any standard, were there only some one to raise it.">[, and the rise of a common language, which, under such masters as Dante and Petrarch, had become a great medium for literary expression, the people of the peninsula had not built up a national monarchy like those of western Europe nor had they even preserved the form of allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire. This was due to several significant events of earlier times. In the first place, the attempt of the medieval German emperors to gain control of Italy not only had signally failed but had left behind two contending factions throughout the whole country,—one, the Ghibellines, supporting the doctrine of maintaining the traditional connection with the Germanies; the other, the Guelphs, rejecting that doctrine. In the second place, the pope, who exercised extensive political as well as religious power, felt that his ecclesiastical influence would be seriously impaired by the creation of political unity in the country; a strong lay monarch with a solid Italy behind him would in time reduce the sovereign pontiff to a subservient position and diminish the prestige which the head of the church enjoyed in foreign lands; therefore the popes participated actively in the game of Italian politics, always endeavoring to prevent any one state from becoming too powerful. Thirdly, the comparatively early commercial prominence of the Italian towns had stimulated trade rivalries which tended to make each proud of its independence and wealth; and as the cities grew and prospered to an unwonted degree, it became increasingly difficult to join them together. Finally, the riches of the Italians, and the local jealousies and strife, to say nothing of the papal policy, marked the country as natural prey for foreign interference and conquest; and in this way the peninsula became a battleground for Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Germans.
Before reviewing the chief city-states of northern Italy, it will be well to say a word about two other political divisions of the country. The southern third of the peninsula comprised the ancient kingdom of Naples, which had grown up about the city of that name, and which together with the large island of Sicily, was called the kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
[Sidenote: Southern Italy in 1500: the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies]
This state, having been first formed by Scandinavian adventurers in the eleventh century, had successively passed under papal suzerainty, under the domination of the German emperors, and at length in 1266 under French control. A revolt in Sicily in the year 1282, commonly called the Sicilian Vespers, had severed the relation between the island and the mainland, the former passing to the royal family of Aragon, and the latter troublously remaining in French hands until 1442. The reunion of the Two Sicilies at that date under the crown of Aragon served to keep alive the quarrel between the French and the Spanish; and it was not until 1504 that the king of France definitely renounced his Neapolitan claims in favor of Ferdinand of Aragon. Socially and politically Naples was the most backward state in Italy.
[Sidenote: Italy in 1500: the Papal States]
About the city of Rome had grown up in the course of centuries the Papal States, or as they were officially styled, the Patrimony of St. Peter. It had early fallen to the lot of the bishop, as the most important person in the city, to exercise political power over Rome, when barbarian invasions no longer permitted the exercise of authority by Roman emperors; and control over neighboring districts, as well as over the city, had been expressly recognized and conferred upon the bishop by Charlemagne in the eighth century. This bishop of Rome was, of course, the pope; and the pope slowly extended his territories through central Italy from the Tiber to the Adriatic, long using them merely as a bulwark to his religious and ecclesiastical prerogatives. By the year 1500, however, the popes were becoming prone to regard themselves as Italian princes who might normally employ their states as so many pawns in the game of peninsular politics. The policy of the notorious Alexander VI (1492-1503) centered in his desire to establish his son, Cesare Borgia, as an Italian ruler; and Julius II (1503-1513) was famed more for statecraft and military prowess than for religious fervor.
[Sidenote: The City-States of Northern Italy in 1500]
North and west of the Papal States were the various city-states which were so thoroughly distinctive of Italian politics at the opening of the sixteenth century. Although these towns had probably reached a higher plane both of material prosperity and of intellectual culture than was to be found at that time in any other part of Europe, nevertheless they were deeply jealous of each other and carried on an interminable series of petty wars, the brunt of which was borne by professional hired soldiers and freebooters styled condottieri. Among the Italian city-states, the most famous in the year 1500 were Milan, Venice, Genoa, and Florence.
[Sidenote: Italian City-States: Milan Governed by Despots]
Of these cities, Milan was still in theory a ducal fief of the Holy Roman Empire, but had long been in fact the prize of despotic rulers who were descended from two famous families—the Visconti and the Sforza—and who combined the patronage of art with the fine political subtleties of Italian tyrants. The Visconti ruled Milan from the thirteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth, when a Sforza, a leader of condottieri established the supremacy of his own family. In 1499, however, King Louis XII of France, claiming the duchy as heir to the Visconti, seized Milan and held it until he was expelled in 1512 by the Holy League, composed of the pope, Venice, Spain, and England, and a Sforza was temporarily reinstated.
[Sidenote: Venice, a Type of the Commercial and Aristocratic Italian
City-States]
As Milan was the type of Italian city ruled by a despot or tyrant, so Venice was a type of the commercial, oligarchical city-states. Venice was by far the most powerful state in the peninsula. Located on the islands and lagoons at the head of the Adriatic, she had profited greatly by the crusades to build up a maritime empire and an enviable trade on the eastern Mediterranean and had extended her sway over rich lands in the northeastern part of Italy. In the year 1500, Venice boasted 3000 ships, 300,000 sailors, a numerous and veteran army, famous factories of plate glass, silk stuffs, and gold and silver objects, and a singularly strong government. Nominally Venice was a republic, but actually an oligarchy. Political power was intrusted jointly to several agencies: (1) a grand council controlled by the commercial magnates; (2) a centralized committee of ten; (3) an elected doge, or duke; and (4), after 1454, three state inquisitors, henceforth the city's real masters. The inquisitors could pronounce sentence of death, dispose of the public funds, and enact statutes; they maintained a regular spy system; and trial, judgment, and execution were secret. The mouth of the lion of St. Mark received anonymous denunciations, and the waves which passed under the Bridge of Sighs carried away the corpses. To this regime Venice owed an internal peace which contrasted with the endless civil wars of the other Italian cities. Till the final destruction of the state in 1798 Venice knew no political revolution. In foreign affairs, also, Venice possessed considerable influence; she was the first European state to send regular envoys, or ambassadors, to other courts. It seemed in 1500 as if she were particularly wealthy and great, but already had been sowed the seed of her subsequent decline and humiliation. The advance of the Ottoman Turks threatened her position in eastern Europe, although she still held the Morea in Greece, Crete, Cyprus, and many Ionian and Ægean islands. The discovery of America and of a new route to India was destined to shake the very basis of her commercial supremacy. And her unscrupulous policy toward her Italian rivals lost her friends to the west. So great was the enmity against Venice that the formidable League of Cambrai, entered into by the emperor, the pope, France, and Spain in 1508, wrung many concessions from her.
[Sidenote: Genoa]
Second only to Venice in commercial importance, Genoa, in marked contrast with her rival, passed through all manner of political vicissitudes until in 1499 she fell prey to the invasion of King Louis XII of France. Thereafter Genoa remained some years subject to the French, but in 1528 the resolution of an able citizen, Andrea Doria, freed the state from foreign invaders and restored to Genoa her republican institutions.
The famed city-state of Florence may be taken as the best type of the democratic community, controlled by a political leader. The city, as famous for its free institutions as for its art, in the first half of the fifteenth century had come under the tutelage of a family of traders and bankers, the wealthy Medici, who preserved the republican forms, and for a while, under Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492), surnamed the Magnificent, made Florence the center of Italian culture and civilization.
[Sidenote: Florence, a Type of the Cultured and Democratic Italian
City-State]
Soon after the death of Lorenzo, a democratic reaction took place under an enthusiastic and puritanical monk, Savonarola, who welcomed the advent of the French king, Charles VIII, in 1494, and aided materially in the expulsion of the Medici. Savonarola soon fell a victim to the plots of his Florentine enemies and to the vengeance of the pope, whom Charles VIII had offended, and was put to death in 1498, The democracy managed to survive until 1512 when the Medici returned. The city-state of Florence subsequently became the grand-duchy of Tuscany.
[Sidenote: The Obscure Duchy of Savoy in 1500]
Before we take leave of the Italian states of the year 1500, mention should be made of the insignificant duchy of Savoy, tucked away in the fastnesses of the northwestern Alps, whose duke, after varying fortunes, was to become, in the nineteenth century, king of a united Italy.
[Sidenote: The City-States in the Netherlands]
The city-state was the dominant form of political organization not only in Italy but also in the Netherlands. The Netherlands, or the Low Countries, were seventeen provinces occupying the flat lowlands along the North Sea,—the Holland, Belgium, and northern France of our own day. Most of the inhabitants, Flemings and Dutch, spoke a language akin to German, but in the south the Walloons used a French dialect. At first the provinces had been mere feudal states at the mercy of various warring noblemen, but gradually in the course of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, important towns had arisen so wealthy and populous that they were able to wrest charters from the lords. Thus arose a number of municipalities—practically self- governing republics—semi-independent vassals of feudal nobles; and in many cases the early oligarchic systems of municipal government speedily gave way to more democratic institutions. Remarkable in industry and prosperity were Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels, Liege, Utrecht, Delft, Rotterdam, and many another.
[Sidenote: Relation of the City-Stats of the Netherlands to the Dukes of Burgundy]
Beginning in 1384 and continuing throughout the fifteenth century, the dukes of Burgundy, who as vassals of the French king had long held the duchy of that name in eastern France, succeeded by marriage, purchase, treachery, or force in bringing one by one the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands under their rule. This extension of dominion on the part of the dukes of Burgundy implied the establishment of a strong monarchical authority, which was supported by the nobility and clergy and opposed by the cities. In 1465 a common parliament, called the States General, was constituted at Brussels, containing deputies from each of the seventeen provinces; and eight years later a grand council was organized with supreme judicial and financial functions. Charles the Bold, who died in 1477, was prevented from constructing a great central kingdom between France and the Germanies only by the shrewdness of his implacable foe, King Louis XI of France. As we have seen, in another connection, Louis seized the duchy of Burgundy on the death of Charles the Bold, thereby extending the eastern frontier of France, but the duke's inheritance in the Netherlands passed to his daughter Mary. In 1477 Mary's marriage with Maximilian of Austria began the long domination of the Netherlands by the house of Habsburg.
Throughout these political changes, the towns of the Netherlands maintained many of their former privileges, and their prosperity steadily increased. The country became the richest in Europe, and the splendor of the ducal court surpassed that of any contemporary sovereign. A permanent memorial of it remains in the celebrated Order of the Golden Fleece, which was instituted by the duke of Burgundy in the fifteenth century and was so named from the English wool, the raw material used in the Flemish looms and the very foundation of the country's fortunes.
4. NORTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE YEAR 1500
[Sidenote: Northern and Eastern Europe of Small Importance in the
Sixteenth Century, but of Great Importance Subsequently]
We have now reviewed the states that were to be the main factors in the historical events of the sixteenth century—the national monarchies of England, France, Portugal, and Spain; the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanies; and the city-states of Italy and the Netherlands. It may be well, however, to point out that in northern and eastern Europe other states had already come into existence, which subsequently were to affect in no small degree the history of modern times, such as the Scandinavian kingdoms, the tsardom of Muscovy, the feudal kingdoms of Poland and Hungary, and the empire of the Ottoman Turks.
[Sidenote: Northwestern Europe: the Scandinavian Countries]
In the early homes of those Northmen who had long before ravaged the coasts of England and France and southern Italy and had colonized Iceland and Greenland, were situated in 1500 three kingdoms, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, corresponding generally to the present-day states of those names. The three countries had many racial and social characteristics in common, and they had been politically joined under the king of Denmark by the Union of Calmar in 1397. This union never evoked any popularity among the Swedes, and after a series of revolts and disorders extending over fifty years, Gustavus Vasa (1523-1560) established the independence of Sweden. Norway remained under Danish kings until 1814.
[Sidenote: The Slavs in Central and Eastern Europe]
East of the Scandinavian peninsula and of the German-speaking population of central Europe, spread out like a great fan, are a variety of peoples who possess many common characteristics, including a group of closely related languages, which are called Slavic. These Slavs in the year 1500 included (1) the Russians, (2) the Poles and Lithuanians, (3) the Czechs, or natives of Bohemia, within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire, and (4) various nations in southeastern Europe, such as the Serbs and Bulgars.
[Sidenote: Russia in 1500]
The Russians in 1500 did not possess such a huge autocratic state as they do to-day. They were distributed among several principalities, the chief and center of which was the grand-duchy of Muscovy, with Moscow as its capital. Muscovy's reigning family was of Scandinavian extraction but what civilization and Christianity the principalities possessed had been brought by Greek missionaries from Constantinople. For two centuries, from the middle of the thirteenth to the middle of the fifteenth, the Russians paid tribute to Mongol [Footnote: The Mongols were a people of central Asia, whose famous leader, Jenghiz Khan (1162-1227), established an empire which stretched from the China Sea to the banks of the Dnieper. It was these Mongols who drove the Ottoman Turks from their original Asiatic home and thus precipitated the Turkish invasion of Europe. After the death of Jenghiz Khan the Mongol Empire was broken into a variety of "khanates," all of which in course of time dwindled away. In the sixteenth century the Mongols north of the Black Sea succumbed to the Turks as well as to the Russians.] khans who had set up an Asiatic despotism north of the Black Sea. The beginnings of Russian greatness are traceable to Ivan III, the Great (1462-1505), [Footnote: Ivan IV (1533-1584), called "The Terrible," a successor of Ivan III, assumed the title of "Tsar" in 1547.] who freed his people from Mongol domination, united the numerous principalities, conquered the important cities of Novgorod and Pskov, and extended his sway as far as the Arctic Ocean and the Ural Mountains. Russia, however, could hardly then be called a modern state, for the political and social life still smacked of Asia rather than of Europe, and the Russian Christianity, having been derived from Constantinople, differed from the Christianity of western Europe. Russia was not to appear as a conspicuous European state until the eighteenth century.
[Sidenote: Poland in 1500]
Southwest of the tsardom of Muscovy and east of the Holy Roman Empire was the kingdom of Poland, to which Lithuanians as well as Poles owed allegiance. Despite wide territories and a succession of able rulers, Poland was a weak monarchy. Lack of natural boundaries made national defense difficult. Civil war between the two peoples who composed the state and foreign war with the neighboring Germans worked havoc and distress. An obstructive parliament of great lords rendered effective administration impossible. The nobles possessed the property and controlled politics; in their hands the king gradually became a puppet. Poland seemed committed to feudal society and feudal government at the very time when the countries of western Europe were ridding themselves of such checks upon the free growth of centralized national states.
[Sidenote: Hungary in 1500]
Somewhat similar to Poland in its feudal propensities was the kingdom of Hungary, which an invasion of Asiatic tribesmen [Footnote: Hungarians, or Magyars—different names for the same people.] in the tenth century had driven like a wedge between the Slavs of the Balkan peninsula and those of the north Poles and Russians. At first, the efforts of such kings as St. Stephen (997-1038) promised the development of a great state, but the weakness of the sovereigns in the thirteenth century, the infiltration of western feudalism, and the endless civil discords brought to the front a powerful and predatory class of barons who ultimately overshadowed the throne. The brilliant reign of Matthias Hunyadi (1458-1490) was but an exception to the general rule. Not only were the kings obliged to struggle against the nobles for their very existence—the crown was elective in Hungary—but no rulers had to contend with more or greater enemies on their frontiers. To the north there was perpetual conflict with the Habsburgs of German Austria and with the forces of the Holy Roman Empire; to the east there were spasmodic quarrels with the Vlachs, the natives of modern Rumania; to the south there was continual fighting, at first with the Greeks and the Slavs—Serbs and Bulgars, and later, most terrible of all, with the Ottoman Turks.
[Sidenote: The Ottoman Turks in 1500]
To the Eastern Roman Empire, with Constantinople as its capital, and with the Greeks as its dominant population, and to the medieval kingdoms of the Bulgars and Serbs, had succeeded by the year 1500 the empire of the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Turks were a tribe of Asiatic Mohammedans who took their name from a certain Othman (died 1326), under whom they had established themselves in Asia Minor, across the Bosphorus from Constantinople. Thence they rapidly extended their dominion over Syria, and over Greece and the Balkan peninsula, except the little mountain state of Montenegro, and in 1453 they captured Constantinople. The lands conquered by the arms of the Turks were divided into large estates for the military leaders, or else assigned to the maintenance of mosques and schools, or converted into common and pasturage lands; the conquered Christians were reduced to the payment of tribute and a life of serfdom. For two centuries the Turks were to remain a source of grave apprehension to Europe.
ADDITIONAL READINGS
THE NATIONAL MONARCHIES ABOUT 1600. A. F. Pollard, Factors in European History (1907), ch. i on "Nationality" and ch. iii on "The New Monarchy"; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I, ch. xiv, xii, xi; Histoire générale, Vol. IV, ch. xiii, iv, v; History of All Nations, Vol. X, ch. xii-xvi; A. H. Johnson, Europe in the Sixteenth Century (1897), ch. i, ii; Mary A. Hollings, Renaissance and Reformation (1910), ch. i-v. On England: A. L. Cross, History of England and Greater Britain (1914), ch. xviii; J. F. Bright, History of England, Vol. II, a standard work; James Gairdner, Henry VII (1889), a reliable short biography; Gladys Temperley, Henry VII (1914), fairly reliable and quite readable; H. A. L. Fisher, Political History of England 1485-1547 (1906), ch. i-iv, brilliant and scholarly; A. D. Innes, History of England and the British Empire (1914), Vol. II, ch. i, ii; William Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times, 5th ed., 3 vols. (1910-1912), Vol. I, Book V valuable for social conditions under Henry VII; William (Bishop) Stubbs, Lectures on Mediæval and Modern History, ch. xv, xvi; F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (1908), Period II. On Scotland: P. H. Brown, History of Scotland, 3 vols. (1899-1909), Vol. I from earliest times to the middle of the sixteenth century; Andrew Lang, A History of Scotland, 2d ed., 4 vols. (1901- 1907), Vol. I. On France: A. J. Grant, The French Monarchy, 1483- 1789, 2 vols. (1900), Vol. I, ch. i, ii, brief and general; G. B. Adams, The Growth of the French Nation (1896), ch. viii-x, a suggestive sketch; G. W. Kitchin, A History of France, 4th ed., 3 vols. (1894-1899), Vol. I and Vol. II (in part), dry and narrowly political; Lavisse (editor), Histoire de France, Vol. V, Part I (1903), an exhaustive and scholarly study. On Spain and Portugal: E. P. Cheyney, European Background of American History (1904), pp. 60-103; U. R. Burke, A History of Spain from the Earliest Times to the Death of Ferdinand the Catholic, 2d ed., 2 vols. (1900), edited by M. A. S. Hume, Vol. II best account of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella; W. H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, 3 vols. (1836), antiquated but extremely readable; Mrs. Julia Cartwright, Isabella the Catholic (1914), in "Heroes of the Nations" Series; H. M. Stephens, Portugal (1891) in "Story of the Nations" Series; F. W. Schirrmacher, Geschichte von Spanien, 7 vols. (1902), an elaborate German work, of which Vol. VII covers the years 1492-1516.
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I (1902), ch. ix, a political sketch; James (Viscount) Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, new ed. revised (1911); William Coxe, History of the House of Austria, Bohn edition, 4 vols. (1893-1894), a century-old work but still useful for Habsburg history; Sidney Whitman, Austria (1899), and, by the same author, The Realm of the Habsburgs (1893) 5 Kurt Kaser, Deutsche Geschichte zur Zeit Maximilians I, 1486-1519 (1912), an excellent study appearing in "Bibliothek deutscher Geschichte," edited by Von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst; Franz Krones, Handbuch der Geschichte Oesterreichs von der altesten Zeit, 5 vols. (1876-1879), of which Vol. II, Book XI treats of political events in Austria from 1493 to 1526 and Vol. III, Book XII of constitutional development 1100-1526; Leopold von Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494- 1514, a rev. trans. in the Bohn Library (1915) of the earliest important work of this distinguished historian, published originally in 1824.
ITALY AND THE CITY STATES. Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I (1902), ch. iv-viii; _Histoire générale, Vol. IV, ch. i, ii; Mrs. H. M. Vernon, Italy from 1494 to 1790 (1909), a clear account in the "Cambridge Historical Series"; J. A. Symonds, Age of the Despots (1883), pleasant but inclined to the picturesque; Pompeo Molmenti, Venice, its Individual Growth from the Earliest Beginnings to the Fall of the Republic, trans. by H. F. Brown, 6 vols. (1906-1908), an exhaustive narrative of the details of Venetian history; Edward Armstrong, Lorenzo de' Medici (1897), in the "Heroes of the Nations" Series, valuable for Florentine history about 1500; Col. G. F. Young, The Medici, 2 vols. (1909), an extended history of this famous Florentine family from 1400 to 1743; Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, trans. from 4th German ed. by Annie Hamilton, 8 vols. in 13, a non-Catholic account of the papal monarchy in Italy, of which Vol. VII, Part II and Vol. VIII, Part I treat of Rome about 1500. For the city-states of the Netherlands see Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I (1902), ch. xiii; the monumental History of the People of the Netherlands, by the distinguished Dutch historian P. J. Blok, trans. by O. A. Bierstadt, 5 vols. (1898-1912), especially Vols. I and II; and Belgian Democracy: its Early History, trans. by J. V. Saunders (1915) from the authoritative work of the famous Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1910). For the German city-states see references under HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE above.
NORTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPE ABOUT 1500. General: Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I (1902), ch. x, iii; _Histoire générale, Vol. IV, ch. xviii-xxi; R. N. Bain, Slavonic Europe: a Political History of Poland and Russia from 1447 to 1796 (1908), ch. i-iv; T. Schiemann, Russland, Polen, und Livland bis ins 17ten Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (1886-1887). Norway: H. H. Boyesen, The History of Norway (1886), a brief popular account in "Story of the Nations" Series. Muscovy: V. O. Kliuchevsky, A History of Russia, trans. with some abridgments by C. J. Hogarth, 3 vols. to close of seventeenth century (1911-1913), latest and, despite faulty translation, most authoritative work on early Russian history now available in English; Alfred Rambaud, Histoire de la Russie depuis les origines jusqu'à nos jours, 6th ed. completed to 1913 by Émile Haumant (1914), a brilliant work, of which the portion down to 1877 has been trans. by Leonora B. Lang, 2 vols. (1879); W. R. A. Morfill, Russia, in "Story of the Nations" Series, and Poland, a companion volume in the same series. See also Jeremiah Curtin, The Mongols: a History (1908). For the Magyars: C. M. Knatchbull-Hugessen, The Political Evolution of the Hungarian Nation, 2 vols. (1908), especially Vol. I, ch. i-iii; A. Vámbéry, The Story of Hungary (1886) in "Story of the Nations" Series; Count Julius Andrássy, The Development of Hungarian Constitutional Liberty, trans. by C. Arthur and Ilona Ginever (1908), the views of a contemporary Magyar statesman on the constitutional development of his country throughout the middle ages and down to 1619, difficult to read. For the Ottoman Turks and the Balkan peoples: Stanley Lane-Poole, Turkey (1889), in "Story of the Nations" Series, best brief introduction; A. H. Lybyer, The Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of Suleiman the Magnificent (1913); Prince and Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, The Servian People, their Past Glory and their Destiny, 2 vols. (1910), particularly Vol. II, ch. xi, xii; far more pretentious works are, Joseph von Hammer, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, 2d ed., 4 vols. (1834-1835), and Nicolae Jorga, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches nach den Quellen dargestellt, 5 vols. (1908-1913), especially Vol. II, 1451-1538, and H. A. Gibbons, The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire (1916), covering the earlier years, from 1300 to 1403.
CHAPTER II
THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION
[Sidenote: Introductory]
Five hundred years ago a European could search in vain the map of "the world" for America, or Australia, or the Pacific Ocean. Experienced mariners, and even learned geographers, were quite unaware that beyond the Western Sea lay two great continents peopled by red men; of Africa they knew only the northern coast; and in respect of Asia a thousand absurd tales passed current. The unexplored waste of waters that constituted the Atlantic Ocean was, to many ignorant Europeans of the fifteenth century, a terrible region frequented by fierce and fantastic monsters. To the average European the countries surveyed in the preceding chapter, together with their Mohammedan neighbors across the Mediterranean, still comprised the entire known world.
Shortly before the close of the fifteenth century, daring captains began to direct long voyages on the high seas and to discover the existence of new lands; and from that time to the present, Europeans have been busily exploring and conquering—veritably "Europeanizing"— the whole globe. Although religion as well as commerce played an important role in promoting the process, the movement was attended from the very outset by so startling a transformation in the routes, methods, and commodities of trade that usually it has been styled the Commercial Revolution. By the close of the sixteenth century it had proceeded far enough to indicate that its results would rank among the most fateful events of all history.
It was in the commonplace affairs of everyday life that the Commercial Revolution was destined to produce its most far-reaching results. To appreciate, therefore, its true nature and significance, we must first turn aside to ascertain how our European ancestors actually lived about the year 1500, and what work they did to earn their living. Then, after recounting the story of foreign exploration and colonization, we shall be in a position to reappraise the domestic situation in town and on the farm.
AGRICULTURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: Differences between Sixteenth-century Farming and That of
To-day]
Agriculture has always been the ultimate basis of society, but in the sixteenth century it was of greater relative importance than it is now. People then reckoned their wealth, not by the quantity of stocks and bonds they held, but by the extent of land they owned. Farming was still the occupation of the vast majority of the population of every European state, for the towns were as yet small in size and few in number. The "masses" lived in the country, not, as to-day, in the city.
A twentieth-century observer would be struck by other peculiarities of sixteenth-century agriculture. He would find a curious organization of rural society, strange theories of land-ownership, and most unfamiliar methods of tillage. He would discover, moreover, that practically each farm was self-sufficing, producing only what its own occupants could consume, and that consequently there was comparatively little external trade in farm produce. From these facts he would readily understand that the rural communities in the year 1500, numerous yet isolated, were invulnerable strongholds of conservatism and ignorance.
[Sidenote: Two Rural Classes: Nobility and Peasantry]
In certain respects a remarkable uniformity prevailed in rural districts throughout all Europe. Whether one visited Germany, Hungary, France, or England, one was sure to find the agricultural population sharply divided into two social classes—nobility and peasantry. There might be varying gradations of these classes in different regions, but certain general distinctions everywhere prevailed.
[Sidenote: The Nobility]
The nobility [Footnote: As a part of the nobility must be included at the opening of the sixteenth century many of the higher clergy of the Catholic Church—archbishops, bishops, and abbots—who owned large landed estates quite like their lay brethren.] comprised men who gained a living from the soil without manual labor. They held the land on feudal tenure, that is to say, they had a right to be supported by the peasants living on their estates, and, in return, they owed to some higher or wealthier nobleman or to the king certain duties, such as fighting for him, [Footnote: This obligation rested only upon lay noblemen, not upon ecclesiastics.] attending his court at specified times, and paying him various irregular taxes (the feudal dues). The estate of each nobleman might embrace a single farm, or "manor" as it was called, inclosing a petty hamlet, or village; or it might include dozens of such manors; or, if the landlord were a particularly mighty magnate or powerful prelate, it might stretch over whole counties.
Each nobleman had his manor-house or, if he were rich enough, his castle, lording it over the humble thatch-roofed cottages of the villagers. In his stables were spirited horses and a carriage adorned with his family crest; he had servants and lackeys, a footman to open his carriage door, a game-warden to keep poachers from shooting his deer, and men-at-arms to quell disturbances, to aid him against quarrelsome neighbors, or to follow him to the wars. While he lived, he might occupy the best pew in the village church; when he died, he would be laid to rest within the church where only noblemen were buried.
[Sidenote: Reason for the Preëminence of the Nobility]
In earlier times, when feudal society was young, the nobility had performed a very real service as the defenders of the peasants against foreign enemies and likewise against marauders and bandits of whom the land had been full. Then fighting had been the profession of the nobility, And to enable them to possess the expensive accoutrements of fighting—horses, armor, swords, and lances—the kings and the peasants had assured them liberal incomes.
Now, however, at the opening of the sixteenth century, the palmy days of feudalism were past and gone. Later generations of noblemen, although they continued by right of inheritance to enjoy the financial income and the social prestige which their forbears had earned, no longer served king, country, or common people in the traditional manner. At least in the national monarchies it was the king who now had undertaken the defense of the land and the preservation of peace; and the nobleman, deprived of his old occupation, had little else to do than to hunt, or quarrel with other noblemen, or engage in political intrigues. More and more the nobility, especially in France, were attracted to a life of amusement and luxury in the royal court. The nobility already had outlived its usefulness, yet it retained its old- time privileges.
[Sidenote: The Peasantry]
In striking contrast to the nobility—the small minority of land-owning aristocrats—were the peasantry—the mass of the people. They were the human beings who had to toil for their bread in the sweat of their brows and who were deemed of ignoble birth, as social inferiors, and as stupid and rude. Actual farm work was "servile labor," and between the man whose hands were stained by servile labor and the person of "gentle birth" a wide gulf was fixed.
[Sidenote: Serfdom and the Manorial System]
During the early middle ages most of the peasants throughout Europe were "serfs." For various reasons, which we shall explain presently, serfdom had tended gradually to and the die out in western Europe, but at the opening of the sixteenth century most of the agricultural laborers in eastern and central Europe, and even a considerable number in France, were still serfs, living and working on nobles' manors in accordance with ancient customs which can be described collectively as the "manorial system."
The serf occupied a position in rural society which it is difficult for us to understand. He was not a slave, such as was usual in the Southern States of the American Union before the Civil War; he was neither a hired man nor a rent-paying tenant-farmer, such as is common enough in all agricultural communities nowadays. The serf was not a slave, because he was free to work for himself at least part of the time; he could not be sold to another master; and he could not be deprived of the right to cultivate land for his own benefit. He was not a hired man, for he received no wages. And he was not a tenant-farmer, inasmuch as he was "attached to the soil," that is, he was bound to stay and work on his land, unless he succeeded in running away or in purchasing complete freedom, in which case he would cease to be a serf and would become a freeman.
[Sidenote: Obligations of the Serf to the Lord]
To the lord of the manor the serf was under many and varied obligations, the most essential of which may be grouped conveniently as follows: (1) The serf had to work without pay two or three days in each week on the strips of land and the fields whose produce belonged exclusively to the nobleman. In the harvest season extra days, known as "boon-days," were stipulated on which the serf must leave his own work in order to harvest for the lord. He also might be called upon in emergencies to draw a cord of wood from the forest to the great manor- house, or to work upon the highway (corvée). (2) The serf had to pay occasional dues, customarily "in kind." Thus at certain feast-days he was expected to bring a dozen fat fowls or a bushel of grain to the pantry of the manor-house. (3) Ovens, wine-presses, gristmills, and bridges were usually owned solely by the nobleman, and each time the peasant used them he was obliged to give one of his loaves of bread, a share of his wine, a bushel of his grain, or a toll-fee, as a kind of rent, or "banality" as it was euphoniously styled. (4) If the serf died without heirs, his holdings were transferred outright to the lord, and if he left heirs, the nobleman had the rights of "heriot," that is, to appropriate the best animal owned by the deceased peasant, and of "relief," that is, to oblige the designated heir to make a definite additional payment that was equivalent to a kind of inheritance tax.
[Sidenote: Free-Tenants]
As has been intimated, the manorial system was already on a steady decline, especially in western Europe, at the opening of the sixteenth century. A goodly number of peasants who had once been serfs were now free-tenants, lessees, or hired laborers. Of course rent of farm-land in our present sense—each owner of the land letting out his property to a tenant and, in return, exacting as large a monetary payment as possible—was then unknown. But there was a growing class of peasants who were spoken of as free-tenants to distinguish them from serf- tenants. These free-tenants, while paying regular dues, as did the others, were not compelled to work two or three days every week in the lord's fields, except occasionally in busy seasons such as harvest; they were free to leave the estate and to marry off their daughters or to sell their oxen without the consent of the lord; and they came to regard their customary payments to the lord not so much as his due for their protection as actual rent for their land.
[Sidenote: Hired Laborers]
While more prosperous peasants were becoming free-tenants, many of their poorer neighbors found it so difficult to gain a living as serfs that they were willing to surrender all claim to their own little strips of land on the manor and to devote their whole time to working for fixed wages on the fields which were cultivated for the nobleman himself, the so-called lord's demesne. Thus a body of hired laborers grew up claiming no land beyond that on which their miserable huts stood and possibly their small garden-plots.
[Sidenote: Métayers]
Besides hired laborers and free-tenants, a third group of peasants appeared in places where the noble proprietor did not care to superintend the cultivation of his own land. In this case he parceled it out among particular peasants, furnishing each with livestock and a plow and expecting in return a fixed proportion of the crops, which in France usually amounted to one-half. Peasants who made such a bargain were called in France métayers, and in England "stock-and-land lessees." The arrangement was not different essentially from the familiar present-day practice of working a farm "on shares."
[Sidenote: Steady Decline of Serfdom]
In France and in England the serfs had mostly become hired laborers, tenants, or métayers by the sixteenth century. The obligations of serfdom had proved too galling for the serf and too unprofitable for the lord. It was much easier and cheaper for the latter to hire men to work just when he needed them, than to bother with serfs, who could not be discharged readily for slackness, and who naturally worked for themselves far more zealously than for him. For this reason many landlords were glad to allow their serfs to make payments in money or in grain in lieu of the performance of customary labor. In England, moreover, many lords, finding it profitable to inclose [Footnote: There were no fences on the old manors. Inclosing a plot of ground meant fencing or hedging it in.] their land in order to utilize it as pasturage for sheep, voluntarily freed their serfs. The result was that serfdom virtually had disappeared in England before the sixteenth century. In France as early as the fourteenth century the bulk of the serfs had purchased their liberty, although in a few districts serfdom remained in its pristine vigor until the French Revolution.
In other countries agricultural conditions were more backward and serfdom longer survived. Prussian and Austrian landowners retained their serfs until the nineteenth century; the emancipation of Russian serfs on a large scale was not inaugurated until 1861. There are still survivals of serfdom in parts of eastern Europe.
[Sidenote: Survival of Servile Obligations after Decline of Serfdom]
Emancipation from serfdom by no means released the peasants from all the disabilities under which they labored as serfs. True, the freeman no longer had week-work to do, provided he could pay for his time, and in theory at least he could marry as he chose and move freely from place to place. But he might still be called upon for an occasional day's labor, he still was expected to work on the roads, and he still had to pay annoying fees for oven, mill, and wine-press. Then, too, his own crops might be eaten with impunity by doves from the noble dovecote or trampled underfoot by a merry hunting-party from the manor-house. The peasant himself ventured not to hunt: he was precluded even from shooting the deer that devoured his garden. Certain other customs prevailed in various localities, conceived originally no doubt in a spirit of good-natured familiarity between noble and peasants, but now grown irritating if none the less humorous. It is said, for instance, that in some places newly married couples were compelled to vault the wall of the churchyard, and that on certain nights the peasants were obliged to beat the castle ditch in order to rest the lord's family from the dismal croaking of the frogs.
[Sidenote: Persistence of "Three-field System" of Agriculture]
In another important respect the manorial system survived long after serfdom had begun to decline. This was the method of doing farm work. A universal and insistent tradition had fixed agricultural method on the medieval manor and tended to preserve it unaltered well into modern times. The tradition was that of the "three-field system" of agriculture. The land of the manor, which might vary in amount from a few hundred to five thousand acres, was not divided up into farms of irregular shape and size, as it would be now. The waste-land, which could be used only for pasture, and the woodland on the outskirts of the clearing, were treated as "commons," that is to say, each villager, as well as the lord of the manor, might freely gather fire-wood, or he might turn his swine loose to feed on the acorns in the forest and his cattle to graze over the entire pasture. The cultivable or arable land was divided into several—usually three—great grain fields. Ridges or "balks" of unplowed turf divided each field into long parallel strips, which were usually forty rods or a furlong (furrow-long) in length, and from one to four rods wide. Each peasant had exclusive right to one or more of these strips in each of the three great fields, making, say, thirty acres in all; [Footnote: In some localities it was usual to redistribute these strips every year. In that way the greater part of the manor was theoretically "common" land, and no peasant had a right of private ownership to any one strip.] the lord too had individual right to a number of strips in the great fields.
[Sidenote: Disadvantages of Three-field System of Agriculture]
This so-called three-field system of agriculture was distinctly disadvantageous in many ways. Much time was wasted in going back and forth between the scattered plots of land. The individual peasant, moreover, was bound by custom to cultivate his land precisely as his ancestors had done, without attempting to introduce improvements. He grew the same crops as his neighbors—usually wheat or rye in one field; beans or barley in the second; and nothing in the third. Little was known about preserving the fertility of the soil by artificial manuring or by rotation of crops; and, although every year one-third of the land was left "fallow" (uncultivated) in order to restore its fertility, the yield per acre was hardly a fourth as large as now. Farm implements were of the crudest kind; scythes and sickles did the work of mowing machines; plows were made of wood, occasionally shod with iron; and threshing was done with flails. After the grain had been harvested, cattle were turned out indiscriminately on the stubble, on the supposition that the fields were common property. It was useless to attempt to breed fine cattle when all were herded together. The breed deteriorated, and both cattle and sheep were undersized and poor. A full-grown ox was hardly larger than a good-sized calf of the present time. Moreover, there were no potatoes or turnips, and few farmers grew clover or other grasses for winter fodder. It was impossible, therefore, to keep many cattle through the winter; most of the animals were killed off in the autumn and salted down for the long winter months when it was impossible to secure fresh meat.
[Sidenote: Peasant Life on the Manor]
Crude farm-methods and the heavy dues exacted by the lord [Footnote: In addition to the dues paid to the lay lord, the peasants were under obligation to make a regular contribution to the church, which was called the "tithe" and amounted to a share, less than a tenth, of the annual crops.] of the manor must have left the poor man little for himself. Compared with the comfort of the farmer today, the poverty of sixteenth-century peasants must have been inexpressibly distressful. How keenly the cold pierced the dark huts of the poorest, is hard for us to imagine. The winter diet of salt meat, the lack of vegetables, the chronic filth and squalor, and the sorry ignorance of all laws of health opened the way to disease and contagion. And if the crops failed, famine was added to plague.
On the other hand we must not forget that the tenement-houses of our great cities have been crowded in the nineteenth century with people more miserable than ever was serf of the middle ages. The serf, at any rate, had the open air instead of a factory in which to work. When times were good, he had grain and meat in plenty, and possibly wine or cider, and he hardly envied the tapestried chambers, the bejeweled clothes, and the spiced foods of the nobility, for he looked upon them as belonging to a different world.
In one place nobleman and peasant met on a common footing—in the village church. There, on Sundays and feast-days, they came together as Christians to hear Mass; and afterwards, perhaps, holiday games and dancing on the green, benignantly patronized by the lord's family, helped the common folk to forget their labors. The village priest, [Footnote: Usually very different from the higher clergy, who had large landed estates of their own, the parish priests had but modest incomes from the tithes of their parishioners and frequently eked out a living by toiling on allotted patches of ground. The monks too were ordinarily poor, although the monastery might be wealthy, and they likewise often tilled the fields.] himself often of humble birth, though the most learned man on the manor, was at once the friend and benefactor of the poor and the spiritual director of the lord. Occasionally a visit of the bishop to administer confirmation to the children, afforded an opportunity for gayety and universal festivity.
[Sidenote: Rural Isolation and Conservatism]
At other times there was little to disturb the monotony of village life and little to remind it of the outside world, except when a gossiping peddler chanced along, or when the squire rode away to court or to war. Intercourse with other villages was unnecessary, unless there were no blacksmith or miller on the spot. The roads were poor and in wet weather impassable. Travel was largely on horseback, and what few commodities were carried from place to place were transported by pack- horses. Only a few old soldiers, and possibly a priest, had traveled very much; they were the only geographies and the only books of travel which the village possessed, for few peasants could read or write.
Self-sufficient and secluded from the outer world, the rural village went on treasuring its traditions, keeping its old customs, century after century. The country instinctively distrusted all novelties; it always preferred old ways to new; it was heartily conservative. Country-folk did not discover America. It was the enterprise of the cities, with their growing industries and commerce, which brought about the Commercial Revolution; and to the development of commerce, industry, and the towns, we now must turn our attention.
TOWNS ON THE EVE OF THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION
[Sidenote: Trade and the Towns ]
Except for the wealthy Italian city-states and a few other cities which traced their history back to Roman times, most European towns, it must be remembered, dated only from the later middle ages. At first there was little excuse for their existence except to sell to farmers salt, fish, iron, and a few plows. But with the increase of commerce, which, as we shall see, especially marked the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, more merchants traveled through the country, ways of spending money multiplied, and the little agricultural villages learned to look on the town as the place to buy not only luxuries but such tools, clothing, and shoes as could be manufactured more conveniently by skillful town artisans than by clumsy rustics. The towns, moreover, became exchanges where surplus farm products could be marketed, where wine could be bartered for wool, or wheat for flax. And as the towns grew in size, the prosperous citizens proved to be the best customers for foreign luxuries, and foreign trade grew apace. Town, trade, and industry thus worked together: trade stimulated industry, industry assisted trade, and the town profited by both. By the sixteenth century the towns had grown out of their infancy and were maintaining a great measure of political and economic freedom.
[Sidenote: Freedom of the Towns.]
[Sidenote: Town Charters]
Originally many a town had belonged to some nobleman's extensive manor and its inhabitants had been under much the same servile obligations to the lord as were the strictly rural serfs. But with the lapse of time and the growth of the towns, the townsmen or burghers had begun a struggle for freedom from their feudal lords. They did not want to pay servile dues to a baron, but preferred to substitute a fixed annual payment for individual obligations; they besought the right to manage their market; they wished to have cases at law tried in a court of their own rather than in the feudal court over which the nobleman presided; and they demanded the right to pay all taxes in a lump sum for the town, themselves assessing and collecting the share of each citizen. These concessions they eventually had won, and each city had its charter, in which its privileges were enumerated and recognized by the authority of the nobleman, or of the king, to whom the city owed allegiance. In England these charters had been acquired generally by merchant gilds, upon payment of a substantial sum to the nobleman; in France frequently the townsmen had formed associations, called communes, and had rebelled successfully against their feudal lords; in Germany the cities had leagued together for mutual protection and for the acquisition of common privileges. Other towns, formerly founded by bishops, abbots, or counts, had received charters at the very outset.
[Sidenote: Merchant Gilds]
A peculiar outgrowth of the need for protection against oppressive feudal lords, as well as against thieves, swindlers, and dishonest workmen, had been the typically urban organization known as the merchant gild or the merchants' company. In the year 1500 the merchant gilds were everywhere on the decline, but they still preserved many of their earlier and more glorious traditions. At the time of their greatest importance they had embraced merchants, butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers: in fact, all who bought or sold in the town were included in the gild. And the merchant gild had then possessed the widest functions.
[Sidenote: Earlier Functions of the Merchant Gild.]
[Sidenote: Social]
Its social and religious functions, inherited from much earlier bodies, consisted in paying some special honor to a patron saint, in giving aid to members in sickness or misfortune, attending funerals, and also in the more enjoyable meetings when the freely flowing bowl enlivened the transaction of gild business.
[Sidenote: Protective]
As a protective organization, the gild had been particularly effective. Backed by the combined forces of all the gildsmen, it was able to assert itself against the lord who claimed manorial rights over the town, and to insist that a runaway serf who had lived in the town for a year and a day should not be dragged back to perform his servile labor on the manor, but should be recognized as a freeman. The protection of the gild was accorded also to townsmen on their travels. In those days all strangers were regarded as suspicious persons, and not infrequently when a merchant of the gild traveled to another town he would be set upon and robbed or cast into prison. In such cases it was necessary for the gild to ransom the imprisoned "brother" and, if possible, to punish the persons who had done the injury, so that thereafter the liberties of the gild members would be respected. That the business of the gild might be increased, it was often desirable to enter into special arrangements with neighboring cities whereby the rights, lives, and properties of gildsmen were guaranteed; and the gild as a whole was responsible for the debts of any of its members.
[Sidenote: Regulative]
The most important duty of the gild had been the regulation of the home market. Burdensome restrictions were laid upon the stranger who attempted to utilize the advantages of the market without sharing the expense of maintenance. No goods were allowed to be carried away from the city if the townsmen wished to buy; and a tax, called in France the octroi, was levied on goods brought into the town. [Footnote: The octroi is still collected in Paris.] Moreover, a conviction prevailed that the gild was morally bound to enforce honest straightforward methods of business; and the "wardens" appointed by the gild to supervise the market endeavored to prevent, as dishonest practices, "forestalling" (buying outside of the regular market), "engrossing" (cornering the market), [Footnote: The idea that "combinations in restraint of trade" are wrong quite possibly goes back to this abhorrence of engrossing.] and "regrating" (retailing at higher than market price). The dishonest green grocer was not allowed to use a peck-measure with false bottom, for weighing and measuring were done by officials. Cheats were fined heavily and, if they persisted in their evil ways, they might be expelled from the gild.
These merchant gilds, with their social, protective, and regulative functions, had first begun to be important in the eleventh century. In England, where their growth was most rapid, 82 out of the total of 102 towns had merchant gilds by the end of the thirteenth century. [Footnote: Several important places, such as London, Colchester, and Norwich, belonged to the small minority without merchant gilds.] On the Continent many towns, especially in Germany, had quite different arrangements, and where merchant gilds existed, they were often exclusive and selfish groups of merchants in a single branch of business.
[Sidenote: Decline of Merchant Guilds]
With the expansion of trade and industry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the rule of the old merchant gilds, instead of keeping pace with the times, became oppressive, limited, or merely nominal. Where the merchant gilds became oppressive oligarchical associations, as they did in Germany and elsewhere on the Continent, they lost their power by the revolt of the more democratic "craft gilds." In England specialized control of industry and trade by craft gilds, journeymen's gilds, and dealers' associations gradually took the place of the general supervision of the older merchant gild. After suffering the loss of its vital functions, the merchant gild by the sixteenth century either quietly succumbed or lived on with power in a limited branch of trade, or continued as an honorary organization with occasional feasts, or, and this was especially true in England, it became practically identical with the town corporation, from which originally it had been distinct.
[Sidenote: Industry: the Craft Guilds]
Alongside of the merchant gilds, which had been associated with the growth of commerce and the rise of towns, were other guilds connected with the growth of industry, which retained their importance long after 1500. These were the craft gilds. [Footnote: The craft gild was also called a company, or a mistery, or métier (French), or Zunft (German).] Springing into prominence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the craft gild sometimes, as in Germany, voiced a popular revolt against corrupt and oligarchical merchant gilds, and sometimes most frequently so in England—worked quite harmoniously with the merchant gild, to which its own members belonged. In common with the merchant gild, the craft gild had religious and social aspects, and like the merchant gild it insisted on righteous dealings; but unlike the merchant gild it was composed of men in a single industry, and it controlled in detail the manufacture as well as the marketing of commodities. There were bakers' gilds, brewers' gilds, smiths' gilds, saddlers' gilds, shoemakers' gilds, weavers' gilds, tailors' gilds, tanners' gilds, even gilds of masters of arts who constituted the teaching staff of colleges and universities.
When to-day we speak of a boy "serving his apprenticeship" in a trade, we seldom reflect that the expression is derived from a practice of the medieval craft gilds, a practice which survived after the gilds were extinct. Apprenticeship was designed to make sure that recruits to the trade were properly trained. The apprentice was usually selected as a boy by a master-workman and indentured—that is, bound to work several years without wages, while living at the master's house. After the expiration of this period of apprenticeship, during which he had learned his trade thoroughly, the youth became a "journeyman," and worked for wages, until he should finally receive admission to the gild as a master, with the right to set up his own little shop, with apprentices and journeymen of his own, and to sell his wares directly to those who used them.
This restriction of membership was not the only way in which the trade was supervised. The gild had rules specifying the quality of materials to be used and often, likewise, the methods of manufacture; it might prohibit night-work, and it usually fixed a "fair price" at which goods were to be sold. By means of such provisions, enforced by wardens or inspectors, the gild not only perpetuated the "good old way" of doing things, but guaranteed to the purchaser a thoroughly good article at a fair price.
[Sidenote: Partial Decay of Craft Gilds]
By the opening of the sixteenth century the craft gilds, though not so weakened as the merchant gilds, were suffering from various internal diseases which sapped their vitality. They tended to become exclusive and to direct their power and affluence in hereditary grooves. They steadily raised their entrance fees and qualifications. Struggles between gilds in allied trades, such as spinning, weaving, fulling, and dyeing, often resulted in the reduction of several gilds to a dependent position. The regulation of the processes of manufacture, once designed to keep up the standard of skill, came in time to be a powerful hindrance to technical improvements; and in the method as well as in the amount of his work, the enterprising master found himself handicapped. Even the old conscientiousness often gave way to greed, until in many places inferior workmanship received the approval of the gild.
Many craft gilds exhibited in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a tendency to split somewhat along the present lines of capital and labor. On the one hand the old gild organization would be usurped and controlled by the wealthier master-workmen, called "livery men," because they wore rich uniforms, or a class of dealers would arise and organize a "merchants' company" to conduct a wholesale business in the products of a particular industry. Thus the rich drapers sold all the cloth, but did not help to make it. On the other hand it became increasingly difficult for journeymen and apprentices to rise to the station of masters; oftentimes they remained wage-earners for life. In order to better their condition they formed new associations, which in England were called journeymen's or yeomen's companies. These new organizations were symptomatic of injustice but otherwise unimportant. The craft gilds, with all their imperfections, were to continue in power awhile longer, slowly giving away as new trades arose outside of their control, gradually succumbing in competition with capitalists who refused to be bound by gild rules and who were to evolve a new "domestic system," [Footnote: See Vol. II, ch xviii.] and slowly suffering diminution of prestige through royal interference.
[Sidenote: Life in the Towns]
In the year 1500 the European towns displayed little uniformity in government or in the amount of liberty they possessed. Some were petty republics subject only in a very vague way to an extraneous potentate; some merely paid annual tribute to a lord; some were administered by officers of a king or feudal magnate; others were controlled by oligarchical commercial associations. But of the general appearance and life of sixteenth-century towns, it is possible to secure a more uniform notion.
It must be borne in mind that the towns were comparatively small, for the great bulk of people still lived in the country. A town of 5000 inhabitants was then accounted large; and even the largest places, like Nuremberg, Strassburg, London, Paris, and Bruges, would have been only small cities in our eyes. The approach to an ordinary city of the time lay through suburbs, farms, and garden-plots, for the townsman still supplemented industry with small-scale agriculture. Usually the town itself was inclosed by strong walls, and admission was to be gained only by passing through the gates, where one might be accosted by soldiers and forced to pay toll. Inside the walls were clustered houses of every description. Rising from the midst of tumble-down dwellings might stand a magnificent cathedral, town-hall, or gild building. Here and there a prosperous merchant would have his luxurious home, built in what we now call the Gothic style, with pointed windows and gables, and, to save space in a walled town, with the second story projecting out over the street.
The streets were usually in deplorable condition. There might be one or two broad highways, but the rest were mere alleys, devious, dark, and dirty. Often their narrowness made them impassable for wagons. In places the pedestrian waded gallantly through mud and garbage; pigs grunted ponderously as he pushed them aside; chickens ran under his feet; and occasionally a dead dog obstructed the way. There were no sidewalks, and only the main thoroughfares were paved. Dirt and filth and refuse were ordinarily disposed of only when a heaven-sent rain washed them down the open gutters constructed along the middle, or on each side, of a street. Not only was there no general sewerage for the town, but there was likewise no public water supply. In many of the garden plots at the rear of the low-roofed dwellings were dug wells which provided water for the family; and the visitor, before he left the town, would be likely to meet with water-sellers calling out their ware. To guard against the danger of fires, each municipality encouraged its citizens to build their houses of stone and to keep a tub full of water before every building; and in each district a special official was equipped with a proper hook and cord for pulling down houses on fire. At night respectable town-life was practically at a standstill: the gates were shut; the curfew sounded; no street-lamps dispelled the darkness, except possibly an occasional lantern which an altruistic or festive townsman might hang in his front-window; and no efficient police-force existed—merely a handful of townsmen were drafted from time to time as "watchmen" to preserve order, and the "night watch" was famed rather for its ability to sleep or to roister than to protect life or purse. Under these circumstances the citizen who would escape an assault by ruffians or thieves remained prudently indoors at night and retired early to bed. Picturesque and quaint the sixteenth-century town may have been; but it was also an uncomfortable and an unhealthful place in which to live.
TRADE PRIOR TO THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION
Just as agriculture is the ultimate basis of human society, so town- life has always been an index of culture and civilization. And the fortunes of town-life have ever depended upon the vicissitudes of trade and commerce. So the reviving commerce of the later middle ages between Europe and the East meant the growth of cities and betokened an advance in civilization.
[Sidenote: Revival of Trade with the East]
Trade between Europe and Asia, which had been a feature of the antique world of Greeks and Romans, had been very nearly destroyed by the barbarian invasions of the fifth century and by subsequent conflicts between Mohammedans and Christians, so that during several centuries the old trade-routes were traveled only by a few Jews and with the Syrians. In the tenth century, however, a group of towns in southern Italy—Brindisi, Bari, Taranto, and Amalfi—began to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean and were soon imitated by Venice and later by Genoa and Pisa.
This revival of intercourse between the East and the West was well under way before the first Crusade, but the Crusades (1095-1270) hastened the process. Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, on account of their convenient location, were called upon to furnish the crusaders with transportation and provisions, and their shrewd Italian citizens made certain that such services were well rewarded. Italian ships, plying to and from the Holy Land, gradually enriched their owners. Many Italian cities profited, but Venice secured the major share. It was during the Crusades that Venice gained numerous coastal districts and islands in the Ægean besides immunities and privileges in Constantinople, and thereby laid the foundation of her maritime empire.
The Crusades not only enabled Italian merchants to bring Eastern commodities to the West; they increased the demand for such commodities. Crusaders—pilgrims and adventurers—returned from the Holy Land with astonishing tales of the luxury and opulence of the East. Not infrequently they had acquired a taste for Eastern silks or spices during their stay in Asia Minor or Palestine; or they brought curious jewels stripped from fallen infidels to awaken the envy of the stay-at-homes. Wealth was rapidly increasing in Europe at this time, and the many well-to-do people who were eager to affect magnificence provided a ready market for the wares imported by Italian merchants.
[Sidenote: Commodities of Eastern Trade]
It is desirable to note just what were these wares and why they were demanded so insistently. First were spices, far more important then than now. The diet of those times was simple and monotonous without our variety of vegetables and sauces and sweets, and the meat, if fresh, was likely to be tough in fiber and strong in flavor. Spices were the very thing to add zest to such a diet, and without them the epicure of the sixteenth century would have been truly miserable. Ale and wine, as well as meats, were spiced, and pepper was eaten separately as a delicacy. No wonder that, although the rich alone could buy it, the Venetians were able annually to dispose of 420,000 pounds of pepper, which they purchased from the sultan of Egypt, to whom it was brought, after a hazardous journey, from the pepper vines of Ceylon, Sumatra, or western India. From the same regions came cinnamon-bark; ginger was a product of Arabia, India, and China; and nutmegs, cloves, and allspice grew only in the far-off Spice Islands of the Malay Archipelago.
Precious stones were then, as always, in demand for personal adornment as well as for the decoration of shrines and ecclesiastical vestments; and in the middle ages they were thought by many to possess magical qualities which rendered them doubly valuable. [Footnote: Medieval literature is full of this idea. Thus we read in the book of travel which has borne the name of Sir John Maundeville: "And if you wish to know the virtues of the diamond, I shall tell you, as they that are beyond the seas say and affirm, from whom all science and philosophy comes. He who carries the diamond upon him, it gives him hardiness and manhood, and it keeps the limbs of his body whole. It gives him victory over his enemies, in court and in war, if his cause be just; and it keeps him that bears it in good wit; and it keeps him from strife and riot, from sorrows and enchantments, and from fantasies and illusions of wicked spirits. … [It] heals him that is lunatic, and those whom the fiend torments or pursues.">[ The supply of diamonds, rubies, pearls, and other precious stones was then almost exclusively from Persia, India, and Ceylon.
Other miscellaneous products of the East were in great demand for various purposes: camphor and cubebs from Sumatra and Borneo; musk from China; cane-sugar from Arabia and Persia; indigo, sandal-wood, and aloes-wood from India; and alum from Asia Minor.
The East was not only a treasure-house of spices, jewels, valuable goods, and medicaments, but a factory of marvelously delicate goods and wares which the West could not rival—glass, porcelain, silks, satins, rugs, tapestries, and metal-work. The tradition of Asiatic supremacy in these manufactures has been preserved to our own day in such familiar names as damask linen, china-ware, japanned ware, Persian rugs, and cashmere shawls.
In exchange for the manifold products of the East, Europe had only rough woolen cloth, arsenic, antimony, quicksilver, tin, copper, lead, and coral to give; and a balance, therefore, always existed for the European merchant to pay in gold and silver, with the result that gold and silver coins grew scarce in the West. It is hard to say what would have happened had not a new supply of the precious metals been discovered in America. But we are anticipating our story.
[Sidenote: Oriental Trade-Routes]
Nature has rendered intercourse between Europe and Asia exceedingly difficult by reason of a vast stretch of almost impassable waste, extending from the bleak plains on either side of the Ural hills down across the steppes of Turkestan and the desert of Arabia to the great sandy Sahara. Through the few gaps in this desert barrier have led from early times the avenues of trade. In the fifteenth century three main trade-routes—a central, a southern, and a northern—precariously linked the two continents.
(1) The central trade-route utilized the valley of the Tigris River. Goods from China, from the Spice Islands, and from India were brought by odd native craft from point to point along the coast to Ormuz, an important city at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, thence to the mouth of the Tigris, and up the valley to Bagdad. From Bagdad caravans journeyed either to Aleppo and Antioch on the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean, or across the desert to Damascus and the ports on the Syrian coast. Occasionally caravans detoured southward to Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt. Whether at Antioch, Jaffa, or Alexandria, the caravans met the masters of Venetian ships ready to carry the cargo to Europe.
(2) The southern route was by the Red Sea. Arabs sailed their ships from India and the Far East across the Indian Ocean and into the Red Sea, whence they transferred their cargoes to caravans which completed the trip to Cairo and Alexandria. By taking advantage of monsoons,—the favorable winds which blew steadily in certain seasons,—the skipper of a merchant vessel could make the voyage from India to Egypt in somewhat less than three months. It was often possible to shorten the time by landing the cargoes at Ormuz and thence dispatching them by caravan across the desert of Arabia to Mecca, and so to the Red Sea, but caravan travel was sometimes slower and always more hazardous than sailing.
(3) The so-called "northern route" was rather a system of routes leading in general from the "back doors" of India and China to the Black Sea. Caravans from India and China met at Samarkand and Bokhara, two famous cities on the western slope of the Tian-Shan Mountains. West of Bokhara the route branched out. Some caravans went north of the Caspian, through Russia to Novgorod and the Baltic. Other caravans passed through Astrakhan, at the mouth of the Volga River, and terminated in ports on the Sea of Azov. Still others skirted the shore of the Caspian Sea, passing through Tabriz and Armenia to Trebizond on the Black Sea.
The transportation of goods from the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean was largely in the hands of the Italian cities,[Footnote: In general, the journey from the Far East to the ports on the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean was performed by Arabs, although some of the more enterprising Italians pushed on from the European settlements, or fondachi, in ports like Cairo and Trebizond, and established fondachi in the inland cities of Asia Minor, Persia, and Russia.] especially Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Florence, although Marseilles and Barcelona had a small share. From Italy trade-routes led through the passes of the Alps to all parts of Europe. German merchants from Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Regensburg, and Constance purchased Eastern commodities in the markets of Venice, and sent them back to the Germanies, to England, and to the Scandinavian countries. After the lapse of many months, and even years, since the time when spices had been packed first in the distant Moluccas, they would be exposed finally for sale at the European fairs or markets to which thousands of countryfolk resorted. There a nobleman's steward could lay in a year's supply of condiments, or a peddler could fill his pack with silks and ornaments to delight the eyes of the ladies in many a lonesome castle.
[Sidenote: Difficulties of European Commerce]
Within Europe commerce gradually extended its scope in spite of the almost insuperable difficulties. The roads were still so miserable that wares had to be carried on pack-horses instead of in wagons. Frequently the merchant had to risk spoiling his bales of silk in fording a stream, for bridges were few and usually in urgent need of repair. Travel not only was fraught with hardship; it was expensive. Feudal lords exacted heavy tolls from travelers on road, bridge, or river. Between Mainz and Cologne, on the Rhine, toll was levied in thirteen different places. The construction of shorter and better highways was blocked often by nobles who feared to lose their toll-rights on the old roads. So heavy was the burden of tolls on commerce that transportation from Nantes to Orleans, a short distance up the River Loire, doubled the price of goods. Besides the tolls, one had to pay for local market privileges; towns exacted taxes on imports; and the merchant in a strange city or village often found himself seriously handicapped by regulations against "foreigners," and by unfamiliar weights, measures, and coinage.
Most dreaded of all, however, and most injurious to trade were the robbers who infested the roads. Needy knights did not scruple to turn highwaymen. Cautious travelers carried arms and journeyed in bands, but even they were not wholly safe from the dashing "gentlemen of the road." On the seas there was still greater danger from pirates. Fleets of merchantmen, despite the fact that they were accompanied usually by a vessel of war, often were assailed by corsairs, defeated, robbed, and sold as prizes to the Mohammedans. The black flag of piracy flew over whole fleets in the Baltic and in the Mediterranean. The amateur pirate, if less formidable, was no less common, for many a vessel carrying brass cannon, ostensibly for protection, found it convenient to use them to attack foreign craft and more frequently "took" a cargo than purchased one.
[Sidenote: Venice]
These dangers and difficulties of commercial intercourse were due chiefly to the lack of any strong power to punish pirates or highwaymen, to maintain roads, or to check the exactions of toll- collectors. Each city attempted to protect its own commerce. A great city-state like Venice was well able to send out her galleys against Mediterranean pirates, to wage war against the rival city of Genoa, to make treaties with Oriental potentates, and to build up a maritime empire. Smaller towns were helpless. But what, as in the case of the German towns, they could not do alone, was partially achieved by combination.
[Sidenote: The Hanseatic League. Towns in the Netherlands: Bruges]
The Hanse or the Hanseatic League, as the confederation of Cologne, Brunswick, Hamburg, Lübeck, Dantzig, Königsberg, and other German cities was called, waged war against the Baltic pirates, maintained its trade-routes, and negotiated with monarchs and municipalities in order to obtain exceptional privileges. From their Baltic stations,— Novgorod, Stockholm, Königsberg, etc.,—the Hanseatic merchants brought amber, wax, fish, furs, timber, and tar to sell in the markets of Bruges, London, and Venice; they returned with wheat, wine, salt, metals, cloth, and beer for their Scandinavian and Russian customers. The German trading post at Venice received metals, furs, leather goods, and woolen cloth from the North, and sent back spices, silks, and other commodities of the East, together with glassware, fine textiles, weapons, and paper of Venetian manufacture. Baltic and Venetian trade- routes crossed in the Netherlands, and during the fourteenth century Bruges became the trade-metropolis of western Europe, where met the raw wool from England and Spain, the manufactured woolen cloth of Flanders, clarets from France, sherry and port wines from the Iberian peninsula, pitch from Sweden, tallow from Norway, grain from France and Germany, and English tin, not to mention Eastern luxuries, Venetian manufactures, and the cunning carved-work of south-German artificers.
THE AGE OF EXPLORATION
[Sidenote: Desire of Spaniards and Portuguese for New Trade-Routes]
In the unprecedented commercial prosperity which marked the fifteenth century, two European peoples—the Portuguese and the Spanish—had little part. For purposes of general Continental trade they were not so conveniently situated as the peoples of Germany and the Netherlands; and the Venetians and other Italians had shut them off from direct trade with Asia. Yet Spanish and Portuguese had developed much the same taste for Oriental spices and wares as had the inhabitants of central Europe, and they begrudged the exorbitant prices which they were compelled to pay to Italian merchants. Moreover, their centuries-long crusades against Mohammedans in the Iberian peninsula and in northern Africa had bred in them a stern and zealous Christianity which urged them on to undertake missionary enterprises in distant pagan lands. This missionary spirit reënforced the desire they already entertained of finding new trade-routes to Asia untrammeled by rival and selfish Italians. In view of these circumstances it is not surprising that Spaniards and Portuguese sought eagerly in the fifteenth century to find new trade-routes to "the Indies."
[Sidenote: Geographical Knowledge]
In their search for new trade-routes to the lands of silk and spice, these peoples of southwestern Europe were not as much in the dark as sometimes we are inclined to believe. Geographical knowledge, almost non-existent in the earlier middle ages, had been enriched by the Franciscan friars who had traversed central Asia to the court of the Mongol emperor as early as 1245, and by such merchants and travelers as Marco Polo, who had been attached to the court of Kublai Khan and who subsequently had described that potentate's realms and the wealth of "Cipangu" (Japan). These travels afforded at once information about Asia and enormous incentive to later explorers.
Popular notions that the waters of the tropics boiled, that demons and monsters awaited explorers to the westward, and that the earth was a great flat disk, did not pass current among well-informed geographers. Especially since the revival of Ptolemy's works in the fifteenth century, learned men asserted that the earth was spherical in shape, and they even calculated its circumference, erring only by two or three thousand miles. It was maintained repeatedly that the Indies formed the western boundary of the Atlantic Ocean, and that consequently they might be reached by sailing due west, as well as by traveling eastward; but at the same time it was believed that shorter routes might be found northeast of Europe, or southward around Africa.
[Sidenote: Navigation]
Along with this general knowledge of the situation of continents, the sailors of the fifteenth century had learned a good deal about navigation. The compass had been used first by Italian navigators in the thirteenth century, mounted on the compass card in the fourteenth. Latitude was determined with the aid of the astrolabe, a device for measuring the elevation of the pole star above the horizon. With maps and accurate sailing directions (portolani), seamen could lose sight of land and still feel confident of their whereabouts. Yet it undoubtedly took courage for the explorers of the fifteenth century to steer their frail sailing vessels either down the unexplored African coast or across the uncharted Atlantic Ocean.
[Sidenote: The Portuguese Explorers]
In the series of world-discoveries which brought about the Commercial Revolution and which are often taken as the beginning of "modern history," there is no name more illustrious than that of a Portuguese prince of the blood,—Prince Henry, the Navigator (1394-1460), who, with the support of two successive Portuguese kings, made the first systematic attempts to convert the theories of geographers into proved fact. A variety of motives were his: the stern zeal of the crusader against the infidel; the ardent proselyting spirit which already had sent Franciscan monks into the heart of Asia; the hope of reëstablishing intercourse with "Prester John's" fabled Christian empire of the East; the love of exploration; and a desire to gain for Portugal a share of the Eastern trade.
To his naval training-station at Sagres and the neighboring port of Lagos, Prince Henry attracted the most skillful Italian navigators and the most learned geographers of the day. The expeditions which he sent out year after year rediscovered and colonized the Madeira and Azores Islands, and crept further and further down the unknown coast of the Dark Continent. When in the year 1445, a quarter of a century after the initial efforts of Prince Henry, Denis Diaz reached Cape Verde, he thought that the turning point was at hand; but four more weary decades were to elapse before Bartholomew Diaz, in 1488, attained the southernmost point of the African coast. What he then called the Cape of Storms, King John II of Portugal in a more optimistic vein rechristened the Cape of Good Hope. Following in the wake of Diaz, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape in 1497, and then, continuing on his own way, he sailed up the east coast to Malindi, where he found a pilot able to guide his course eastward through the Indian Ocean to India. At Calicut Vasco da Gama landed in May, 1498, and there he erected a marble pillar as a monument of his discovery of a new route to the Indies.
[Sidenote: Occupation of Old Trade-Routes by the Turks]
While the Portuguese were discovering this new and all-water route to the Indies, the more ancient Mediterranean and overland routes, which had been of inestimable value to the Italians, were in process of occupation by the Routes by Ottoman Turks. [Footnote: Professor A. H. Lybyer has recently and ably contended that, contrary to a view which has often prevailed, the occupation of the medieval trade-routes by the Ottoman Turks was not the cause of the Portuguese and Spanish explorations which ushered in the Commercial Revolution. He has pointed out that prior to 1500 the prices of spices were not generally raised throughout western Europe, and that apparently before that date the Turks had not seriously increased the difficulties of Oriental trade. In confirmation of this opinion, it should be remembered that the Portuguese had begun their epochal explorations long before 1500 and that Christopher Columbus had already returned from "the Indies.">[ These Turks, as we have seen, were a nomadic and warlike nation of the Mohammedan faith who "added to the Moslem contempt for the Christian, the warrior's contempt for the mere merchant." Realizing that advantageous trade relations with such a people were next to impossible, the Italian merchants viewed with consternation the advance of the Turkish armies, as Asia Minor, Thrace, Macedonia, Greece, and the islands of the Ægean were rapidly overrun. Constantinople, the heart of the Eastern Empire, repeatedly repelled the Moslems, but in 1453 Emperor Constantine XI was defeated by Sultan Mohammed II, and the crescent replaced the Greek cross above the Church of Saint Sophia. Eight years later Trebizond, the terminal of the trade-route from Tabriz, was taken. In vain Venice attempted to defend her possessions in the Black Sea and in the Ægean; by the year 1500 most of her empire in the Levant was lost. The Turks, now in complete control of the northern route, proceeded to impose crushing burdens on the trade of the defeated Venetians. Florentines and other Italians who fared less hardly continued to frequent the Black Sea, but the entire trade suffered from Turkish exactions and from disturbing wars between the Turks and another Asiatic people—the Mongols.
[Sidenote: Loss to the Italians]
For some time the central and southern routes, terminating respectively in Syria and Egypt, exhibited increased activity, and by rich profits in Alexandria the Venetians were able to retrieve their losses in the Black Sea. But it was only a matter of time before the Turks, conquering Damascus in 1516 and Cairo in 1517, extended their burdensome restrictions and taxes over those regions likewise. Eastern luxuries, transported by caravan and caravel over thousands of miles, had been expensive and rare enough before; now the added peril of travel and the exactions of the Turks bade fair to deprive the Italians of the greater part of their Oriental trade. It was at this very moment that the Portuguese opened up independent routes to the East, lowered the prices of Asiatic commodities, and grasped the scepter of maritime and commercial power which was gradually slipping from the hands of the Venetians. The misfortune of Venice was the real opportunity of Portugal.
[Sidenote: Columbus]
Meanwhile Spain had entered the field, and was meeting with cruel disappointment. A decade before Vasco da Gama's famous voyage, an Italian navigator, Christopher Columbus, had presented himself at the Spanish court with a scheme for sailing westward to the Indies. The Portuguese king, by whom Columbus formerly had been employed, already had refused to support the project, but after several vexatious rebuffs Columbus finally secured the aid of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish monarchs who were at the time jubilant over their capture of Granada from the Mohammedans (January, 1492). In August, 1492, he sailed from Palos with 100 men in three small ships, the largest of which weighed only a hundred tons. After a tiresome voyage he landed (12 October, 1492) on "San Salvador," one of the Bahama Islands. In that bold voyage across the trackless Atlantic lay the greatness of Columbus. He was not attempting to prove a theory that the earth was spherical—that was accepted generally by the well informed. Nor was he in search of a new continent. The realization that he had discovered not Asia, but a new world, would have been his bitterest disappointment. He was seeking merely another route to the spices and treasures of the East; and he bore with him a royal letter of introduction to the great Khan of Cathay (China). In his quest he failed, even though he returned in 1493, in 1498, and finally in 1502 and explored successively the Caribbean Sea, the coast of Venezuela, and Central America in a vain search for the island "Cipangu" and the realms of the "Great Khan." He found only "lands of vanity and delusion as the miserable graves of Castilian gentlemen," and he died ignorant of the magnitude of his real achievement.
[Sidenote: America]
Had Columbus perished in mid ocean, it is doubtful whether America would have remained long undiscovered. In 1497 John Cabot, an Italian in the service of Henry VII of England, reached the Canadian coast probably near Cape Breton Island. In 1500 Cabral with a Portuguese expedition bound for India was so far driven out of his course by equatorial currents that he came upon Brazil, which he claimed for the king of Portugal. Yet America was named for neither Columbus, Cabot, nor Cabral, but for another Italian, the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who, returning from voyages to Brazil (1499-1500), published a letter concerning what he called "the new world." It was thought that he had discovered this new world, and so it was called after him,—America.
[Sidenote: First Circumnavigation of the Earth]
Very slowly the truth about America was borne in upon the people of Europe. They persisted in calling the newly discovered lands the "Indies," and even after Balboa had discovered (1513) that another ocean lay beyond the Isthmus of Panama, it was thought that a few days' sail would bring one to the outlying possessions of the Great Khan. Not until Magellan, leaving Spain in 1519, passed through the straits that still bear his name and crossed the Pacific was this vain hope relinquished. Magellan was killed by the natives of the Philippine Islands, but one of his ships reached Seville in 1522 with the tale of the marvelous voyage.
Even after the circumnavigation of the world explorers looked for channels leading through or around the Americas. Such were the attempts of Verrazano (1524), Cartier (1534), Frobisher (1576-1578), Davis (1585-1587), and Henry Hudson in 1609.
ESTABLISHMENT OF COLONIAL EMPIRES
[Sidenote: Portugal]
When Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon in 1499 with a cargo worth sixty times the cost of his expedition, the Portuguese knew that the wealth of the Indies was theirs. Cabral in 1500, and Albuquerque in 1503, followed the route of Da Gama, and thereafter Portuguese fleets rounded the Cape year by year to gain control of Goa (India), Ormuz, Diu (India), Ceylon, Malacca, and the Spice Islands, and to bring back from these places and from Sumatra, Java, Celebes, and Nanking (China) rich cargoes of "spicery." After the Turkish conquest of Egypt in 1517 the bulk of commerce was carried on by way of the Cape of Good Hope, for it was cheaper to transport goods by sea than to pay taxes to the Turks in addition to caravan cartage. Lisbon rapidly gained prominence as a market for Eastern wares.
The Portuguese triumph was short-lived. Dominion over half the world— for Portugal claimed all Africa, southern Asia, and Brazil as hers by right of discovery—had been acquired by the wise policy of the Portuguese royal house, but Portugal had neither products of her own to ship to Asia, nor the might to defend her exclusive right to the carrying trade with the Indies. The annexation of Portugal to Spain (1580) by Philip II precipitated disaster. The port of Lisbon was closed to the French, English, and Dutch, with whom Philip was at war, and much of the colonial empire of Portugal was conquered speedily by the Dutch.
[Sidenote: Spain]
On the first voyage of Columbus Spain based her claim to share the world with Portugal. In order that there might be perfect harmony between the rival explorers of the unknown seas, Pope Alexander VI issued on 4 May, 1493, the famous bull [Footnote: A bull was a solemn letter or edict issued by the pope.] attempting to divide the uncivilized parts of the world between Spain and Portugal by the "papal line of demarcation," drawn from pole to pole, 100 leagues west of the Azores. A year later the line was shifted to about 360 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Portugal had the eastern half of modern Brazil, Africa, and all other heathen lands in that hemisphere; the rest comprised the share of Spain.
For a time the Spanish adventurers were disappointed tremendously to find neither spices nor silks and but little gold in the "Indies," and Columbus was derisively dubbed the "Admiral of the Mosquitos." In spite of failures the search for wealth was prosecuted with vigor. During the next half century Haiti, called Hispaniola ("Spanish Isle"), served as a starting point for the occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba (1508), and other islands. An aged adventurer, Ponce de Leon, in search of a fountain of youth, explored the coast of Florida in 1513, and subsequent expeditions pushed on to the Mississippi, across the plain of Texas, and even to California.
Montezuma, ruler of the ancient Aztec [Footnote: The Aztec Indians of Mexico, like various other tribes in Central America and in Peru, had reached in many respects a high degree of civilization before the arrival of Europeans.] confederacy of Mexico, was overthrown in 1519 by the reckless Hernando Cortez with a small band of soldiers. Here at last the Spaniards found treasures of gold and silver, and more abundant yet were the stores of precious metal found by Pizarro in Peru (1531). Those were the days when a few score of brave men could capture kingdoms and carry away untold wealth.
In the next chapter we shall see how the Spanish monarchy, backed by the power of American riches, dazzled the eyes of Europe in the sixteenth century. Not content to see his standard waving over almost half of Europe, and all America (except Brazil), Philip II of Spain by conquering Portugal in 1580 added to his possessions the Portuguese empire in the Orient and in Brazil. The gold mines of America, the spices of Asia, and the busiest market of Europe—Antwerp—all paid tribute to his Catholic Majesty, Philip II of Spain.
By an unwise administration of this vast empire, Spain, in the course of time, killed the goose that laid the golden egg. The native Indians, enslaved and lashed to their work in Peruvian and Mexican silver mines, rapidly lost even their primitive civilization and died in alarming numbers. This in itself would not have weakened the monarchy greatly, but it appeared more serious when we remember that the high-handed and harassing regulations imposed by short-sighted or selfish officials had checked the growth of a healthy agricultural and industrial population in the colonies, and that the bulk of the silver was going to support the pride of grandees and to swell the fortunes of German speculators, rather than to fill the royal coffers. The taxes levied on trade with the colonies were so exorbitant that the commerce with America fell largely into the hands of English and Dutch smugglers. Under wise government the monopoly of the African trade-route might have proved extremely valuable, but Philip II, absorbed in other matters, allowed this, too, to slip from his fingers.
While the Spanish monarchy was thus reaping little benefit from its world-wide colonial possessions, it was neglecting to encourage prosperity at home. Trade and manufacture had expanded enormously in the sixteenth century in the hands of the Jews and Moors. Woolen manufactures supported nearly a third of the population. The silk manufacture had become important. It is recorded that salt-works of the region about Santa Maria often sent out fifty shiploads at a time.
These signs of growth soon gave way to signs of decay and depopulation. Chief among the causes of ruin were the taxes, increased enormously during the sixteenth century. Property taxes, said to have increased 30 per cent, ruined farmers, and the "alcabala," or tax on commodities bought and sold, was increased until merchants went out of business, and many an industrial establishment closed its doors rather than pay the taxes. Industry and commerce, already diseased, were almost completely killed by the expulsion of the Jews (1492) and of the Moors (1609), who had been respectively the bankers and the manufacturers of Spain. Spanish gold now went to the English and Dutch smugglers who supplied the peninsula with manufactures, and German bankers became the financiers of the realm.
The crowning misfortune was the revolt of the Netherlands, the richest provinces of the whole empire. Some of the wealthiest cities of Europe were situated in the Netherlands. Bruges had once been a great city, and in 1566 was still able to buy nearly $2,000,000 worth of wool to feed its looms; but as a commercial and financial center, the Flemish city of Antwerp had taken first place. In 1566 it was said that 300 ships and as many wagons arrived daily with rich cargoes to be bought and sold by the thousand commercial houses of Antwerp. Antwerp was the heart through which the money of Europe flowed. Through the bankers of Antwerp a French king might borrow money of a Turkish pasha. Yet Antwerp was only the greatest among the many cities of the Netherlands.
Charles V, king of Spain during the first half of the sixteenth century, had found in the Netherlands his richest source of income, and had wisely done all in his power to preserve their prosperity. As we shall see in Chapter III, the governors appointed by King Philip II in the second half of the sixteenth century lost the love of the people by the harsh measures against the Protestants, and ruined commerce and industry by imposing taxes of 5 and 10 per cent on every sale of land or goods. In 1566 the Netherlands rose in revolt, and after many bloody battles, the northern or Dutch provinces succeeded in breaking away from Spanish rule.
Spain had not only lost the little Dutch provinces; Flanders was ruined: its fields lay waste, its weavers had emigrated to England, its commerce to Amsterdam. Commercial supremacy never returned to Antwerp after the "Spanish Fury" of 1576. Moreover, during the war Dutch sailors had captured most of the former possessions of Portugal, and English sea-power, beginning in mere piratical attacks on Spanish treasure-fleets, had become firmly established. The finest part of North America was claimed by the English and French. Of her world empire, Spain retained only Central and South America (except Brazil), Mexico, California, Florida, most of the West Indies, and in the East the Philippine Islands and part of Borneo.
[Sidenote: Dutch Sea Power]