Lack of efficient machinery of government. The danger of revolt. Absolutism and reform. Goals of enlightened reform: rationality, uniformity, efficiency. Obstacles to reform. These services consisted in the maintenance of the laws; a strict execution of justice; an employment of his whole powers to prevent any corruption of manners and morals; and defending the state against its enemies.
It is the duty of the magistrate to pay attention to agriculture; it should be his care that provisions for the nation should be in abundance, and that commerce and industry should be encouraged… Princes and monarchs, therefore, are not invested with supreme authority that they may, with impunity, riot in debauchery and voluptuousness. The need for order B. The religious justification of absolutism C. Social and psychological bases of absolutism II.
Between this religious capital of France and the judicial capital at the western end of the island stood a quarter full of old houses, with religious establishments and parish churches.
There were more than twenty churches on the island. Beyond rose the Palais, a sprawling maze of chiefly Gothic buildings and courtyards, which had once served as a residence for French kings. It still was a residence, in theory, but since the fourteenth century the sovereign courts had expanded to use all the space. Housed there were the Parlement, Chambre des Comptes, Cour des Aides, and Cour des Monnaies, together constituting the highest courts in the kingdom. The lower chapel served as a parish church for those living in the Palais and nearby streets.
To the Palais scurried a population as diverse in interests and status as Paris itself. There were probably four or five thousand magistrates, clerks, copyists, and minor officials such as huissiers doorkeepers who together made up the personnel of the sovereign courts.
In addition to these, merchants, booksellers, paper and ink sellers, prostitutes, singers, letter writers, and beggars, among others, daily set up shop or frequented the dozens of stalls displaying such items as cloth, mirrors, dolls, knives, lace, and purses. In this maze of corridors and chambers the principal attraction remained the grande salle itself, with its marble floor, heavy columns lined with statues of French kings, and gold ceiling. It was considered smart to go to the grande salle, for it was a favorite meeting place for distinguished people or for those who wanted to see them and buy luxury goods.
The Right Bank, called the ville in medieval times because it was the commercial part of Paris, had lost this special significance as early as the fourteenth century, when merchants settled on the Left Bank, or University, around the Place Maubert. Before reaching the Right Bank, one passed under a fortress gate. After Philip Augustus established the Halles there as a kind of perpetual fair, the Right Bank became the stronghold of commercial society in Paris.
Street names were usually functional: the rue de la Savonnerie soap , rue de la Chausseterie stockings , rue de la Cossonnerie fowl , and rue de la Lingerie linens. There merchants, as many as two dozen strong, would gather along a street to sell the same products. The chapels, galleries of charnel houses, lamps, crosses, frescoes of the Dance of Death, and the open common graves aroused the morbid curiosity of visitors in The earth of the Innocents was said to be remarkable, because it could manger son cadavre en neuf jours consume its cadaver in nine days.
When graves had to be dug again in the same spot, the bones were pulled out of the earth and stored in piles along the walls. Two or three common graves stood open at the same time. Adjacent to the cemetery on the northwest were the Halles, a series of pavilions where merchants rented stalls to sell chiefly grain, leather, cloth, and meat, and where articles were sold retail and wholesale to merchants foreign and domestic and consumers alike.
The apparent confusion on market days belied the stringent laws and customs regulating sales, the use of land in the nearby streets, and the organization of produce by its place of origin.
The Normans tended to put their stands together in one part of the market, to stay in the same inns, and to travel together, as did merchants from other provinces and foreign countries. Commerce was still familial and provincial. The houses in the market parishes of Sainte-Opportune, Saint-Jacques-dela- Boucherie, Saint-Martin, and Saint-Denis were both commercial and residential, with their ground floors invariably a shop, either for sales or manufacture, and the upper floors living quarters for merchant or artisan families, servants, and apprentices.
In the midst of these stands, pavilions, inns, and houses stood several monasteries, each with its own cloister, refectory, school, and gardens. They varied in size and function, but like the parish churches they were filled with chapels, windows, tapestries, and altars given them by various guilds over the centuries.
These chapels served as meeting houses for guilds and for weddings and funerals of the members. People living on the square rented out their windows on days of public executions.
The Marais, or parishes of Saint-Gervais and Saint-Paul, was the most fashionable and wealthy part of the city. Since the late Middle Ages, when the royal residences of Saint-Pol and the Tournelles had attracted numerous aristocrats and clergymen to build in the area, the Marais had been the most homogeneous and solidly aristocratic part of the city. But the princes still set the tone. Gardens stretched back to meet each other; the new streets were wide enough to let carriages pass. Artisans could work there free from the restrictions of a guild because the grand prieur defended the independence of the Temple against both the city and the monarchy.
The city was still very sparse west of the Halles. Outside were fields and windmills, just four or five narrow streets away from Saint-Eustache. This church, begun in , rose high and spacious, reflecting the wealth and status of the merchants west of the Halles, and of the courtiers who lived in the houses and inns near the Louvre. Long fashionable because of its proximity to the Louvre, the area became a European center of art and culture in the late sixteenth century.
The Hospice of the Quinze-Vingts, founded for the blind by Louis IX, occupied a big piece of land along the street, reaching back to where the rue de Rivoli now is. In addition to the blind, numerous artisans lived there in order to be under the protection of the Hospice and thus escape the restrictions of the guilds. Judging from the inscriptions on the tombs of the Quinze-Vingts, the neighborhood around it must have housed some of the first families to move from commerce into the service of the Crown.
Referred to simultaneously as noble homme, merchant, and notary to the king, those interred so near the Louvre must have been some of the first robe families of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Several streets ran behind the hospital, between the Louvre and the walls, approximately where Napoleon was to build the Arc du Carrousel. This postern entrance had been built by Charles V as a part of the flamboyant, even fanciful Gothic residence into which he had transformed the old fortress of Philip Augustus. After crossing the drawbridge over the moat and passing under the east wing, one entered a courtyard crowded with people, carriages, and horses. The people had either come out of curiosity or to beg, steal, or otherwise seek their fortune in the Louvre, for the courtyard was open to anyone wishing to enter.
The Gothic walls of the "old" Louvre on the north and east sides of the courtyard must have been in sharp contrast to those facing the Seine and the west.
These latter had been built in the last half of the sixteenth century in the Renaissance style. Instead of conical roofs and gargoyles, there was a balanced play of classical columns, windows, and statues carved after the manner of the ancients.
Tourists from all over Europe marveled at the beauty of these wings, forming an L, designed partly by Lescot and decorated, in the salle des cariatides, by Goujon. Judging from the number of travel accounts that include descriptions of the rooms, it must have been relatively easy to visit the interior and even the royal apartments.
In both the old and new parts, the rooms on the ground floor were very long and wide, with huge painted beams and supporting cross beams painted with arabesques and monograms of the last Valois kings.
On the floor above, the ceilings were even more magnificent, done in the Italian style of plaster and panels, covered with gold leaf and frescoes representingscenes from classical mythology. Only one of these ceilings has survived in its original place, tastefully restored and made beautiful again by the birds of Braque. The monumentalfireplaces and the small windows and doors, cut through here and there at random,were reminiscent of a fortress and gave these rooms a somber dignity outmoded by the bright, sensual, regular style of the Renaissance wings.
The abbots were high-ranking feudal lords, usually of royal blood. The Faubourg Saint-Germain, extending from the lands of the Luxembourg Palace west to the Seine, where the Eiffel Tower now stands, was completely under the jurisdiction of the abbey court.
The monastery contained one of the largest prisons in Paris and was the scene of many public hangings. Standing almost alone beyond the walls in , Saint-Germain still possessed all the characteristics of a medieval stronghold. Surrounded by a wide ditch, high crenellated walls, towers, drawbridges, and gates, the abbey remained as independent of Paris physically as it was legally.
The abbey church housed numerous relics and a vast treasury of altar vessels and manuscripts. The main pavilion was nearly two hundred feet wide. In fact the fair included all kinds of merchandise. Merchants rented stalls and built stands in the nearby streets; the houses all around the fair also contained shops. The fair was a very fashionable and also a very wild place to go. The Parisians showed off their new clothes, while young noblemen would gallop through the fair on horseback, pushing over carts and displays and picking up girls on the way.
Prostitutes gathered there in search of provincials and Parisians. Near where the east wing of the Institute now stands rose the Tower of Nesle, where the decaying wall of Philip Augustus ended at the Seine. Though not so high or so strong, as Dallington observed, this still-unbroken southern wall was bordered by a ditch. Until the twelfth century, little except monasteries nestled among the vineyards and Roman ruins of the Left Bank. Crowds of students, excited by his brilliance and radical way of teaching Aristotle, followed him and collected in the open air to hear lectures.
Colleges were founded which in became the University of Paris when Philip Augustus granted it a charter.
What had started as an exciting intellectual experience became institutionalized into quarrelsome and competing colleges and faculties. The ancestor of the modern university was the University of Paris. The University grew rich and the Left Bank became an international community of students and scholars. Parisians called it the Quartier Latin because of the habit of writing and conversing in that language which prevailed in the colleges, inns, and streets until the eighteenth century.
The character of the quarter changed little, though there were fewer students in than there had been in , and the University was less independent and less influential in secular affairs than it had been before the reign of Louis XI.
The religious quarrels and the civil war caused the Sorbonne to sink to a new low as an old-fashioned, even reactionary institution of higher learning. Intellectual discipline prevailed there in lieu of independence of thought or originality of argument; Clermont posed a threat to the medieval schools, but not to their intellectual stature.
Though slumbering and losing students to Clermont, the Sorbonne had met Aquinas before. The monks possessed the relics of the patron saint of Paris, who in the year had convinced the Parisians that they had nothing to fear from Attila and the Huns, who would bypass the city. The procession would make its way to Notre-Dame while all the bells of Paris tolled.
Flowers would cover the streets, and tapestries would hang from the housefronts. The abbey constituted a typically medieval ensemble of buildings serving every function performed by the monks. Many of these buildings, however, were either renovated or were cut up in the sixteenth century. Lawyers and judges were next to settle on the Left Bank. These were the ancestors of the noblesse de robe, because they were no longer mere merchants and bourgeois, nor were they yet gentilshommes.
Inside, fine libraries, works of art, silver, and furniture provided the owners with a unique environment that was neither simply bourgeois nor an imitation of a noble residence. Jacques-Auguste de Thou, with his robes of red marble and his head of white, evokes the bust of a Roman senator, and certainly not by accident. The Church of the Grands Augustins, a convent with buildings vast enough to house the Estates General and the church assemblies, was also a favorite burial place for robe families, who in addition frequently left it endowments.
There was no social frontier between, say, the rue Hautefeuille, where the judges lived, and the Place Maubert, but only a gradual embourgeoisement. Approaching the Place, one found progressively more shops, artisans, and butchers mixed in with the students and clerics, and fewer lawyers or royal officials, especially beyond the Grands Augustins.
By this he meant that the families living there still behaved, talked, dressed, and married like merchants. Few of their members had adopted the high-blown courtly language so characteristic of social climbers in either merchant or robe families.
The families around the Place Maubert were rich, and proud of it. The frontier between courtly and bourgeois styles was most marked between the wholesalers, who aped the latest fashions and language, and the retailers, who did not. The wholesalers and minor royal officials were a more homogeneous group, taking their cue from the aristocracy and the parlementaires. The retailers were something else, at the summit, as it were, of the artisanal and commercial corporations, which were beneath them in status and wealth.
The Place Maubert remained more retail throughout the seventeenth century than, say, the districts around Saint-Eustache and north of the Halles. The Place Maubert witnessed sporadic burnings of heretics in the sixteenth century. And Denmark regained all its old commercial privileges on shipping between the Baltic and North Sea. But the greatest blow was Sweden's loss to Russia. By the Peace of Nystad , Peter the Great returned the bulk of Finalnd, but annexed former Swedish territory along the Baltic coast; roughly from the modern Russian border with Finland to Latvia.
The site he chose for his grand edifice, where the Neva River forms its delta before flowing into the Baltic Sea, came into Peter's possession in Within two weeks, he officially founded the new city he called his " paradise ". This was not a promising place: a dreary marshy woodland, bitterly cold in winter, uncomfortably hot in summer.
But Peter was not deterred in the least. Nor did the nobles Peter compelled to move from Moscow to St. Petersburg share his enthusiasm for the project. In the end, as in so many other contests of will, Peter triumphed. During his reign the Tzar brought outstanding craftsmen from Europe to create elegant and graceful stone buildings. No detail escaped his attention. He beautified his city with 5, trees imported from Holland. After Catherine the Great had made her contributions, St.
Petersburg was one of Europe's great capitals. Almost by sheer force of will, Peter linked Russia permanently with to Europe, and the Russian Empire would henceforth loom large in European affairs. For all his vision for Russia's future, Peter did a poor job of preparing for his succession.
Peter's mother selected his first wife, who bore him a son, Alexie, but the marriage was an unhappy one; he divorced her in by forcing her into a convent. His second wife, who he married in , was his former mistress, a beautiful Polish-Lithuanian peasant who was received into the Russian Orthodox church under a new name, Catherine. Unfortunately for Peter, Catherine only bore him daughters. His son, Alexie, was a conservative and scholarly young man, who had been brought up by his mother to disdain his father.
Tension between them finally provoked Alexis to write a pitiful letter to his father in , offering to renounce the throne in favour of his own infant son. Peter agreed but only if Alexei entered a monastery to remove himself as a dynastic threat. Instead, he fled from Russia, taking refuge with the Austrian emperor. Peter, viewing this as treason, tricked the young man into returning home on a promise of clemency.
He then imprisoned him, and tried to torture his friends into confessing to a conspiracy. Little evidence emerged, so Alexie died discreetly in the St. Petersburg's fortress, after twice being flogged within inches of his life with the fearsome Russian whip known as the knout. Peter died in early , and was succeeded by his second wife as Empress Catherine I , as regent for his nine-year-old grandson.
In doing so, she blazed a trail for an unusual series of female rulers of Russia. After the Thirty Years' War , the states of the Holy Roman Empire, granted their independence by the Peace of Westphalia , were a numerous and very mixed bunch. About were ruled by princes dukes or counts , and another fifty by high clergymen archbishops, bishops or abbots. Then there were the free cities, many not much more than market towns.
Among the princes, there were five great dynastic families whose rule covered huge areas. By far the most powerful were the Austrian Habsburgs , with their hereditary lands occupying the south-east of the empire.
To the north of them were the Wittelsbachs, the prince-elector of most of southern Germany, including Bavaria and the Rhineland Palatinate. In north-western Germany, the ancient House of Welf had many provinces, of which Brunswick and Hanover were the most important.
The north of Germany was in the hands of the Wettin, a family headed by the prince-elector of Saxony. And beyond Saxony, in the north-east, was the territory of the newcomer, the Hohenzollerns, who had only been since prince-elector of Brandenburg. A lessor branch of the family also held Prussia since , a duchy on the Baltic that had establish by the Teutonic Knights in the 13th-century; this Hohenzollern line dies out in and passed to Brandenburg.
These two states were separated from one another by part of Poland, including the valuable port of Gdansk. Brandenburg itself was poor, having lost half its population in the Thirty Years War; the capital, Berlin, had only 6, inhabitants.
Sweden was the dominant power in the Baltic, who regarded Prussia as a minor, if useful, potential ally in their own wars against Sweden and Russia; Prussia was notionally still a vassal the Polish crown.
The profusion of principalities in the 18th century was of considerable benefit to German culture, with princes competing with one another in the quality of the entertainment they could offer. Georg Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach were born in the same year of , and together were the towering figures of baroque music.
Frederick William I, popularly known as " the Great Elector ", who set Brandenburg-Prussia on a distinctive path toward an absolutist and militaristic nation-state. During the 17th-century, Brandenburg-Prussia began to establish a position second only to the Habsburgs.
Following the Peace of Westphalia , the " Great Elector ", as he became known, successfully rebuilt his war-ravaged territories through astute political, military, economic, and diplomatic leadership that propelled him into the ranks of prominent absolutism rulers.
By cleverly playing the Poles, Swedes, and Russians off one another during the Second Northern War —60 , he managed to get himself declared the fully sovereign duke of Prussia in He forced the high nobility of his various territories to grant him permanent taxation rights, thus stripping the parliaments of their main source of power; in return, the nobles were promised free-rein with their peasants and exemption from most taxes. He then used the money to build and sustain a standing army of 40, troops soon 80, from a population of no more than 3.
Soldiers also asserted juridical, tax-collection and policing powers, so that any opposition to his measures was easily crushed. The term originally meant younger sons of a German lord, the sort of men who were ready to stake their lives on armed expansion with the Teutonic Knights. The Junkers were by now far poorer than most western aristocrats, because, in a practice unique to east of the Elbe, their estates could not be sold by law to non-Junkers; originally designed to prevent Slavs buying land.
But this meant estates could not be mortgaged to make improvements. The net result was an enormous number of proud young men, bred to arms, with absolutely no money. In a bargain unique to Prussia, Frederick ensured that only noblemen of proper lineage became officers in his army. And they made wonderful officers, walking into cannon-fire, and driving their men into it too. The opportunity to test his new army came in the Scanian War , an offshoot of the Franco-Dutch War.
The war began when Frederick William joined an anti-French alliance, and Sweden promptly upheld their part of the bargain. When the hitherto invincible Swedes invaded, the Prussian army astonished all Europe by defeating them at the small but spectacular Battle of Fehrbellin June near Berlin. Meanwhile, to pay for his army, Frederick taxed heavily, while supporting measures that would increase the tax base, such as building up industries, paying attention to infrastructure especially canals, and welcoming skilled French Huguenots following Louis' revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Together with a tightly controlled and lean bureaucracy, Frederick William bequeath to his son a thriving economy, Europe's best-trained army, and powerful realm; as dukes of Prussia, a sovereign nation outside the Holy Roman Empire, and as dukes of Brandenburg, a prestigious prince-elector within it. The royal title means that from this point onwards the emphasis in Brandenburg-Prussia was on "Prussia". Frederick's price was the status elevation of Prussia from a duchy to a kingdom.
Within the Holy Roman Empire, no one could call himself king except the emperor as king of Bohemia. There thus couldn't be a king of Brandenburg, but, using the legal nicety that Prussia was outside the empire, Frederick was allowed to call himself the " king in Prussia ". The title " king of Prussia " could not be used because it might offend the Polish king whose kingdom included a province called Royal Prussia, though such niceties were dispensed with after the Partition of Poland in The royal title was not merely decorative, but regarded as a political necessity in the competition between German prince-electors; George I Hanover had recently secured the English throne, while Augustus "the Strong" of Saxony had secured the elective Polish throne.
Frederick's son, Frederick William I Hohenzollern —40 , took devotion to the army to new heights. The " Soldier King ", as he became known, led an austere Calvinist lifestyle, always wore military uniform, undertook reform of training, tactics, and conscription, and personally drilled the army relentlessly; soldiers were expected to fire six times a minute, three times faster that most armies of that period.
His army became the envy and terror of Europe, so much so that he actually needed to use it relatively rarely; his troops only briefly saw action in the Great Northern War.
Frederick also did much to improve Prussia's economy and bureaucracy. He exempted the merchant class from military service, supported compulsory primary education, and rewarded royal officials on merit even if they were commoners; on the other hand, minor infringement were severely punished, and two infringement meant instant dismissal.
He expected martial values to shape all of Prussian society, not just the army, with discipline, obedience and order the most prized virtues. Frederick the Great, a brilliant military campaigner who greatly enlarged Prussian territory, largely at the expense of the Habsburgs and Poland, and made Prussia perhaps the foremost military power in Europe. When Frederick II Hohenzollern , better known as Frederick the Great , inherited the throne of Prussia, at the age of twenty-eight, he was an exceptionally cultured young man.
In his youth, he had been mostly interested in music, books, and French culture. He conducted a regular correspondence with French philosopher, Voltaire. His severe father, whose only interests were administration and the army, was alarmed by his son's artistic tendencies, and did his best to force the boy into a life of military discipline; frequently beating or humiliating him.
At the age of eighteen, Frederick plotted with a friend to escape from his father for a visit to England. The scheme was discovered, and the pair were treated as a deserter. Frederick was court martialed and then imprisoned, where he was compelled to watch his friend's execution. It is not surprising that Frederick emerged in adulthood as a formidable personality; he must have had reserves of strength to survive such a childhood.
When he inherited the crown, in , it is clear that he still retained his intellectual and artistic interests. In the first year of his reign, Frederick established a court orchestra under C.
Bach; the son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Two years later, he provided Berlin with an opera house. But he also did something which his father would have admired. Charles issued an imperial decree, the Pragmatic Sanction , allowing his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa , to inherit. Frederick was one of the first to exploit Austrian weakness, thereby beginning the War of Austrian Succession In early December, he delivered an ultimatum to Maria Teresa, to cede the Habsburg possession of Silesia to Prussia, in return for confirming the Pragmatic Sanction; a territory that had been vaguely disputed since the extinction of its ruling dynasty in the 16th-century.
Frederick's demand was refused almost immediately, and, two weeks later, he stunned Europe by marching a Prussian army into the rich province. Maria Theresa was also a woman of strong resolve, but Austrian armies prove no match for the Prussians. The Battle of Mollwitz April was Frederick's first battle, in which neither army acquitted itself well.
When the Austrian cavalry scattered the Prussian right-flanks, Frederick himself abandoned the field to avoid capture, leaving his lieutenant to lead the disciplined Prussian infantry to victory. Victory at Mollwitz emboldened the French and Bavarians to attack the beleaguered archduchy. Their intervention was of great help to the Prussian adventurer, but Frederick shows no interest in becoming involved in a wider conflict.
He continued to occupy Silesia, and fought battles only its defence, culminating in a decisive Prussian victory at the Battles of Hohenfriedberg June This was one of Frederick's most admired victories, studied by later officers as a model for aggressiveness: deploying in the dark to conceal his movement; advancing in orderly lines as if on a parade ground; granting officers a large amount of autonomy to exploit opportunities; the spirit of aggression instilled in the entire army; and the unexpected cavalry charge in the centre that finally broke the exhausted enemy line.
For the next few years, Maria Theresa half-heartedly remained in a war whose nature had changed; becoming primarily a conflict between France and Britain. Frederick had enough time of his hands to build the Sanssouci in Berlin, a Rococo-style summer palace where he could relax away from the pomp and ceremony of the Berlin court.
Both monarchs awaited the eventual settlement, which came in the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle Apart from adjustments between Austrian and Spanish holdings in Italy, the peace restored to their previous owners the territories occupied during the eight years of the War of the Austrian Succession; with one exception.
Frederick, whose sudden aggression launched the conflict, was formally recognised as sovereign over Silesia. This added one of the most densely industrialized German regions to Prussia, nearly doubling its population and increasing its territory by a third. This was only the first round of the long struggle for leadership in Germany between Austria and Prussia.
Like many European rulers of the time, Frederick adopted French tastes and manners. Even his private residence just outside Berlin got a French name, Sanssouci "carefree".
He left instructions that he should be buried on the vineyard terrace, but his successor instead had him entombed next to his father. In , Frederick's body was finally laid to rest at Sanssouci, in accordance with his will. Frederick the Great's wars had only just begun. Maria Theresa of Austria remained his most unforgiving opponent; calling him " that evil man in Sanssouci ". Austria almost recovered Silesia, when it managed to put together a grand coalition with France and Russia in the Seven Years War Prussia only survived because Britain, engaged in global war with France, pumped enormous subsidies into Berlin, and because Elizabeth of Russia died - who loathed Frederick - and was succeeded by Peter III - who adored him.
In , Frederick physically connected most of his realm by seizong large portions of Polish territory in the First Partition of Poland. And late in life, he involved Prussia in the low-scale War of the Bavarian Succession , to thwart Maria Theresa's attempt to exchange Austrian Belgium for Bavaria. Frederick used the years between the wars to modernize Prussia.
He viewed kingship as a duty; it was his obligations to protect his subjects, to make them prosperous, and to give them honest administration. He reformed the judicial system, prohibiting the death penalty without a warrant signed by the king himself, abolishing most uses of judicial torture, moving the law towards greater equality, and making it possible for non-noble to become judges and senior bureaucrats.
He also re-codifyied the law code, one of the most important 18th-century efforts of its kind. With the help of French experts, he improved the tax system by introducing indirect taxation, which provided the state with more revenue than direct taxation. He presided over the construction of canals to promote internal trade, protected his industries with high tariffs, and created new farmland through draining swamps and founding new villages.
A government reserves of grain were built up, to control bread prices in years of famine or poor harvests. The thing the marked-out Frederick in the eyes of contemporaries as a Enlightened ruler, was his pursuit of religious tolerance. This was largely pragmatic: to integrate Catholic Silesia and western Poland into Prussia; to promote trade with Poland where most merchants were Jews; and to attract a diversity of skills to his realm, whether from Jesuit teachers, Huguenot merchants, or Jewish bankers.
Frederick also supported arts and science. He allowed freedom of speech in press and literature, and was one of the first rulers to attempt to introduce universal primary education; Prussia's education system was already regarded as one the best in Europe.
As well as an opera house, Berlin was provided with a royal library, a rejuvenated Academy of Sciences, and St. Hedwig's Cathedral. Frederick's long reign, his military successes, his ceaseless devotion to furthering Prussian interests, and his renown as the ruler that Voltaire called the " philosopher king " all combine to make him the pre-eminent example of an "enlightened despot" so admired in 18th-century political theory.
He died childless - he was almost certainly homosexual - and was succeeded by his nephew and great nephew, Frederick William II and Frederick William II, who proved less capable. Frederick William II failed to deal adequately with the challenges to the existing order posed by the French Revolution.
Frederick William III ruled Prussia during the severe challenge of the Napoleonic Wars , suffering a humiliating military defeat in From the s, all of Europe was obsessed with the death, thought imminent, of king Charles II Habsburg of Spain The Spanish monarchy had created a problem for their royal line by intermarrying within the House of Habsburg. Charles II, the only surviving son of Philip IV , suffered severe mental and physical infirmity, and was in all likelihood sterile.
With no heir, the question of the day was who would inherit the vast Spanish domains, including Spanish Belgium, possessions in Italy, the Americas, and the Philippines. Both men had a Spanish Habsburg princess as a mother and a Spanish Habsburg princess as a wife. Despite being at loggerheads in the recent Franco-Dutch War and War of the Grand Alliance , Louis XIV and William III of Britain joined forces to try and resolve the issue by diplomacy; both were anxious to avoid another costly war, but determined to prevent the reassembling of the great Habsburg domain held by Charles V Habsburg in the 16th century.
They signed a partition treaty whereby a compromise candidate, 6-year-old Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, would inherit the Spanish crown, with Spain's possessions in Italy shared between the Austrian Habsburgs and French Bourbons as a compensation.
Alas the boy died in Undaunted, Louis and William came up with a second partition treaty, the Treaty of London , whereby Leopold's younger son was to have almost all the Spanish domains except those in Italy, seemingly a rather generous offer but without the linchpin of Milan the two Habsburg dominions would find it difficult to function together.
Shortly before his death in , Charles II finally made his choice, and changed his will to leave the throne to the Bourbon claimant; Philip, the younger grandson of Louis XIV. Perhaps he was convinced only France had the power to keep the Spanish possessions intact, or perhaps it was simply a fit of pique at the high handed wrangling over his heir.
Historians have long debated about whether the War of Spanish Succession was now inevitable. The alternative meant handing the Spanish throne to Habsburg Austria, whose domains would surround France on all sides. Leopold of Austria had rejected the Treaty of London, and there was little change the British and Dutch would fight to enforce the partition. Perhaps if Louis had acted more diplomatically, the conflict might have be contained to France and Austria. But a series of provocations - moving French troops into the Spanish Belgium alarming the Dutch, and granting French merchants trading advantages in the Spanish Americas antagonized both Dutch and British interests - turned a delicate situation into one in which France was again faced by a hostile alliance of major powers.
France and Spain could meanwhile only count on Bavaria as a reliable ally. Although the detailed development of the war is very complicated, the basic aim of each side was clear; to trying to control of certain territories that made up Spain's European empire.
Each made early inroads. But a bold French initiative in threatened to make these peripheral successes of trifling importance. A joint French and Bavarian army pressed eastwards to threaten Vienna itself, hoping to take Austria out of the war, which was struggling to suppress a Hungarian war of independence.
However, a rapid mile march by Marlborough from the Low Countries brought him to the Danube in time to join Prince Eugene. The resulting Battle of Blenheim August was the outstanding victory of the war for the Grand Alliance; instead of Austria, Bavaria was knocked out of the war.
In that year, the Grand Alliance had considerable success at sea too. These two events gave the allies command of the Mediterranean for the rest of the war. Allied efforts to exploit their victories in foundered on poor co-ordination. The stalemate was broken in with the Grand Alliance achieving spectacular successes. Prince Eugene's brilliant campaign that summer in north Italy was so convincing that Louis XIV withdrew all his troops from that theatre of the war.
The setbacks of prompted Louis XIV, old now and perhaps weary, to discuss a possible peace. His very reasonable offer of returning to the Treaty of London was rejected; the allies were now determined that the Bourbons should benefit from no part of the Spanish inheritance.
The Battle of Malplaquet, an Allied victory with no strategic gain. The losses shocked Europe and increased the desire for peace. The war continued, and because of the close links between war and trade, extended beyond Europe, particularly to North America, where it is known as Queen Anne's War , and perhaps more noteworthy for justifying massacres of native American Indians.
It also spread to the West Indies, India and Asia, where it particularly strained Dutch naval resources. The situation in Europe stabilised for the French, when Marlborough and Eugene launched an invasion, advancing on Paris, and defeating the French at the Battle of Malplaquet September , the bloodiest battle of the war. Despite winning, the allies lost over 20, men, twice as many as their opponents. Unable to proceed with the invasion, the defeat ended Austrian and Dutch hopes of a breakthrough in Northern France.
A subsequent allied invasion of Spain in also failed to make any progress, because the population remained fiercely loyal to Philip V. The Grand Alliance, in the meantime, was cracking. In in Britain, the Whigs suffered an election defeat to the Tories who were inclined towards peace. Moreover, the friendship between Queen Anne and Marlborough's wife came to an end, and with it much of his political clout.
Then in , the eldest son of Leopold of Austria unexpectedly died, bringing his brother Charles VI Habsburg to the imperial throne. This undermined the cause of the Grand Alliance; their aim had been to place Charles on the throne of Spain, but nobody wanted him to inherit it as well as being Austrian emperor. The War of Spanish Succession was brought to a close with two separate peace treaties; the Treaty of Utrecht and Rastatt The House of Bourbon could be said to have gained the greatest advantage in the war.
Philip V Bourbon was recognised as king of Spain and its overseas empire, but renounced his place in the French line of succession, for himself and his descendants. This precluded the union of the French and Spanish crowns, though they remained close allies. But other nations made significant gains too, particularly the British.
They won strategic bases in the Mediterranean at Gibraltar and Minorca, and territories in North America disputed with the French in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and the Hudson Bay, as well as commercial privileges in the Spanish Americas. Louis XIV also recognised the Protestant succession, and promised to give no further support to the exiled Jacobites; the same pledge had been made before the war, but broken during the conflict.
The Austrian Habsburgs were granted Spanish Belgium as compensation, and to provided a buffer for the Dutch against further French aggression. The Habsburgs also profited in Italy, though the dust took longer to settle there. A still disunited Italy underwent another thirty-odd years of uncertainty, as minor representatives of European royal houses shuffling around it attempting to tie up the loose; Spain for instance reclaimed Sicily and Naples in Longer term, the settlement represented a major adjustment to the European balance of power, that held good until the French Revolution years later.
For the first time the treaty of declared the aim of the signatories to be the security of peace through a balance of power. So practical an aim was an important innovation in political thinking. There were good grounds for such realism; the war left the participants with unprecedented levels of debt. Wars were more expensive than ever, with the average size of armies having almost trebled in the 60 years since ; a level unsustainable for pre-industrial economies.
All the great powers saw peace and trade as in their national interest, and Europe enjoyed years of relative peace until the War of Austrian Succession. It also marked the rise of Britain as the leading European maritime and commercial power, at the expense of both France and Spain; she recovered financially from the war in years, while France took decades.
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