4.1: Absolutist States
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Introduction
The concept of the authority of rulers granted only by a higher power, as seen in many European territories of the Middle Ages as the “divine right of kings,” as well as in Chinese government as the “Mandate of Heaven,” continues within the absolutist state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This particular concept of absolutism, though, changed slightly from earlier forms but still maintained the belief in the ruler’s divine authority and lack of questioning by “lesser” groups or people. This does not mean the rulers didn’t rely on individual councils or refuse opportunities to meet with others close to their social class. However, in an absolutist state, a ruler answered only to God. The biggest change occurring with the rise of absolutism was economic in nature; it signaled an end to feudalism and the early stages of what would become a capitalist system, where money and trade goods – and the ability to acquire both – could potentially unseat a ruler or cause conflict within their realm. Therefore, a need to be “worshipped” by the citizens of the territory developed as a means of control. This would ultimately create more problems, causing the Atlantic Revolutions, among others, that we will explore later in this chapter.
Figure 4.1.1 is a world map from 1720, by John Senex, who was one the main European cartographers of the eighteenth century. This map is titled "A New Map of the World: From the Latest Observations." This is a double hemisphere world map. The title cartouche in the top center is elaborately surrounded by allegorical figures representing the four continents. Europe in the top left is portrayed as a land of abundance. The figure depicting Asia is seated to the right, carrying a smoking censer in one hand and a balsam branch in the other hand. Africa is depicted as a figure wearing an elephant headdress and holding the scorpion of the desert sands. America is depicted as a robed female with a feather headdress and holding a bow. The map also includes four hemispheric inset maps in each of the corners. The maps of John Senex capture the exploration spirit of the eighteenth century.
Figure 4.1.1 A "New Map" of the World in 1720, Rawpixel Ltd, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
The "Sun King" and Versailles
Louis XIV was only five years old (seen in Figure 4.1.2) when he inherited the throne of France in 1643. His early rule was marked by a regency during which he was led by a series of advisors, including his mother and the senior church leader Cardinal Mazarin, from whom he took over in 1661 when Mazarin died at the age of 23. During the regency, a series of uprisings, led by discontented nobles who even aligned with Spain for a time, shaped the world of Louis XIV, as these nobles and other French citizens rebelled against the growing power of the crown. After taking the throne, Louis declared he would bring the nobles in line, which shows the impression these uprisings had on the young king. And he had a specific way of creating order: He would reign supreme as the “Sun King”, forcing all of his nobles to reside with him and his family in what had originally been a rather run-down hunting lodge known as Versailles.
The project of Versailles took nearly his whole reign to complete, and quickly became the most opulent palace in Europe, a crowning achievement for a man who used its imagery to expand his majesty and power over not only the people of France but also the regions of the world that would later be occupied by French powers. Its intent was to showcase the wealth of the French monarchy, and therefore its power, to other nations of the world.
Although he spent the majority of his time at Versailles, Louis modernized Paris, under the direction of his finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. This was done to a similar end as Versailles; to show the rest of the world the wealth and splendor of France’s capital city. However, the reality of how the people of Paris – and in Versailles as well – lived was far from the opulent picture Louis hoped to portray, and as France moved into the eighteenth century with subsequent reigns, conditions got worse, with many living in poverty under a corrupt government.
Louis didn’t necessarily reign alone; he had a council and government structure similar to the neighboring European countries. In France, it was known as the Three Estates, with each Estate representing different socioeconomic classes and statuses within French society. The First Estate was made up of the royalty and nobility, the same nobility who were forced to remain under the king’s watchful eye in Versailles. In order to gain any preference – mainly for trade and money – one needed to appease Louis, so the court was a vicious pit of favoritism and playing people off of others. Even though a sense of noblesse oblige, or “obligation of the nobles,” to care for the citizens of their regions still remained from the sixteenth century, so many of the nobility were focused on surviving at court that keeping their lands in order and their citizens fed and happy fell by the wayside. French nobles' attempts to maintain any sense of noblesse oblige continued to deteriorate in later reigns, eventually becoming a factor in the French Revolution against the monarchy.
The clergy made up the second Estate, and none of them dared gainsay the man who called himself “The Sun King” and with that name, ruled as God’s anointed. Like the nobility, the higher-level clergy found themselves often kept at Versailles for various reasons and events. And lower-level clergy – those who preached in local churches among the common folk – were frequently put between a rock and a hard place, between king and local patronage. As the nobility failed in their duties to the common people, those religious leaders – whose Estate rarely diverted from the desires of the royalty – were powerless to help.
That final Estate was made up of the common folk in order to appease the masses with representation. Together, all three Estates comprised the Etates General, or the General Estates, which gathered only by the king’s command as a council. However, the king’s father, Louis XIII (r. 1610-43), and his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, concentrated power in the hands of the King by refusing to convene the Estates General. Louis XIV ruled absolutely. And this would have disastrous consequences for France and the monarchy a century later.
Prussia
Arguably the most successful absolutist state in Europe besides France was the small northern German kingdom of Brandenburg, the forerunner of the later German state of Prussia. In 1618, the king of Brandenburg inherited the kingdom of East Prussia, and in the following years smaller territories in the west on the Rhine River. This geographically unconnected series of territories would eventually evolve into the country now known as Germany.
In 1653, the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm struck the “Great Compromise” with his nobles. He received a military subsidy in the form of taxes, along with the right to make law independent of noble oversight. In return, the nobility received confirmation that only nobles could own land and, further, that they had total control over the peasants on their land. In essence, the already-existing status of serfdom on Prussian lands was made permanent. Serfs could not inherit property or even leave the land they worked without the permission of their lord. One Prussian recalled being taught, presumably in a church-run primary school, that “the king could cut off the noses and ears of all his subjects if he wished to do so, and that we owed it to his goodness and his gentle disposition that he had left us in possession of these necessary organs.”
In turn, Friedrich Wilhelm oversaw the creation of the first truly efficient state apparatus in Europe, with his tax collection agency (which grew out of the war office) operating at literally twice the efficiency of the French equivalent. The major state office was called General Directory Over Finance, War, and Royal Domains; it was perhaps one of the original sources of the stereotypes of ruthless German efficiency. His son, Frederick I (r. 1688 – 1713) further consolidated the power of the monarchy, built up the royal capital of Berlin, and received the right to claim the title of “King of Prussia” from the Holy Roman Emperor.
Prussian power was concentrated in their military. By the end of the seventeenth century, Prussia became the most militarized state in Europe. Wilhelm’s son, another Friedrich, doubled the size of the country’s standing military and created reserves and conscription systems, which we in the modern world know as a military draft. These reserves and systems would prove to be the defining feature of Prussia, which would in turn give Prussia the status of a European “great power.” Friedrich himself lived a Spartan lifestyle, wearing his officer’s uniform every day and occupying only a handful of rooms in the palace. This contributed to Prussia’s reputation as a powerful imperial force, as much as France. However, where France showed power through displays of wealth through art and architecture, Prussia showed it through brute force and strength. The Prussian ruler was a strong military figure in comparison to the French king, who was graced by God with wealth to effectively run his territory. Different forms of absolutism, but both with the same goals and outcome.
Russia - The Rise of the Tsars (Czars)
There was no unified state called "Russia" before the late fifteenth century. Originally populated by Slavic tribal groups, Swedish Vikings called the Rus colonized and then mixed with the native Slavs over the course of the ninth century. The Rus were led by princes who ruled towns that eventually developed into small cities, the most important of which was Kiev in the present-day country of Ukraine. The Rus eventually converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity thanks to the influence of Byzantium and its missionaries, but their historical development was undermined by the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century. The period of Mongol rule is still referred to as the "Mongol Yoke" in Russian history, meaning a period in which the Russian people were used as beasts of burden and sources of wealth by their Mongol lords, like animals yoked to plows.
Russia emerged from the “Mongol yoke” thanks to the efforts of the Grand Prince of the city of Moscow, Ivan III (r. 1462 – 1505), and his grandson Ivan IV – “the Terrible” (r. 1533 – 1584). Ivan III was the prince of Muscovy, the territory around the city of Moscow, but thanks to his ruthless militarism, he expanded Muscovy’s influence to the Baltic Sea, fighting the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth to the west and conquering the prosperous city of Novgorod and its territories. He also overthrew the authority of the Mongol Golden Horde in his lands and began the process of permanently ending Mongol control in Russia. For the first time, a Russian prince carved out a significant territory through conquest.
Two generations later, Ivan IV came to power in Muscovy. Ivan IV was, like his grandfather, a highly successful leader in war. Muscovy conquered a large part of the Mongol Golden Horde’s territory and also pushed back Turkic Khans in the south. He dispatched explorers and hunters into Siberia, beginning the long process of the conquest of Siberia by Russia. He was also the first Russian ruler to claim the title of Tsar (also anglicized as Czar), meaning "Caesar." Because Russia had adopted the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity centuries earlier, and because Constantinople (and the last remnant of the actual Roman Empire) fell to the Turks in 1453, Russian rulers after Ivan claimed that they were the true inheritors of the political power of the ancient Roman emperors. Just as the Holy Roman Emperors in the West claimed to be the political descendants of Roman authority (the German word “Kaiser,” too, means “Caesar”) so too did the Tsars of Russia.
Ivan IV was called The Terrible because of his incredible sadism: he had the beggars of Novgorod burned to death, he had nobles that displeased him ripped apart by wolves and dogs, and he crushed his own son’s skull with a club while in a rage. He had whole noble families slaughtered when he thought they posed a threat to his authority or were simply slow to respond to his demands that they serve him personally at his court. His overall goal was the transformation of the Russian nobles – called boyars – into servants of the state, one in which their power was based only on their loyalty to the Tsar. During his reign, he succeeded in asserting his authority through sheer brutality and terror.
After Ivan’s death in 1584, Russia was plunged into a thirty-year period of anarchy called the Time of Troubles in which no one reigned as the recognized sovereign. Nobles reasserted their independence, and Russia existed in a state of civil war (or armed anarchy, depending on one’s perspective) for decades. The period between rulers ended when an assembly of nobles elected the first member of the Romanov family to hold the title of Tsar in 1613 – Michael I – but the Tsars remained weak and plagued by both resistance by nobles and huge peasant uprisings for many decades. One enormous peasant uprising, led by a man who claimed to be the “true” Tsar, threatened to overwhelm the forces of the real Tsar before being defeated in 1670.
The institution of serfdom was cemented in the midst of the chaos of the seventeenth century. When times were hard for Russian peasants, they frequently fled to the frontier, either Siberia or what would later be called Ukraine (meaning “border region”). In these regions, Russian commoners worked the land in a manner that gave them the impression that they owned it, or at least the goods produced there, by helping each other out and not relying on a stable government structure. Since Russia was so enormous, this exacerbated what the government saw as an ongoing labor shortage problem. Unlike in the West, there was more than enough land in Russia, just not enough peasants to work it. Thus, the Tsarist (Czarist) state officially instituted serfdom in 1649 across the board, formalizing what was already a widespread institution. This made peasants legally little better than slaves, forced to work the land and serve the state in a war when conscripted. This mindset would also allow the concept of Communism to take root during the nineteenth century.
Serfdom had been a system used in other regions of the world, including most of Europe during the Middle Ages as well as Japan prior to the Tokugawa time period. But Russia during the reign of the Tsars made this institution an integral part of their absolutism. Russian peasants became “tied” to the land that they worked, eventually forming what Westerners might call “co-ops” to work more effectively. In fact, these co-ops would make enforcing serfdom easier for the Tsars. This institution would last well into the twentieth century, supposedly ending during the rise of the Bolsheviks, but in reality going through an evolution to continue under Communism.
Russia’s transformation and engagement with the rest of Europe began in earnest under Tsar Peter I (the Great), r. 1682 – 1725 (seen in Figure 4.1.3). Up to that point, so little was known about Russia in the West that Louis XIV once sent a letter to a Tsar who had been dead for twelve years. Russian nobles themselves tended to be uneducated and uncouth compared to their Western counterparts, and the Russian Orthodox Church had little emphasis on the learning that now played such a major role in both the Catholic and Protestant churches of the West. Peter learned about Western Europe from visiting foreigners in his early twenties and decided to go and see what the West had to offer himself – he disguised himself as a normal workman and undertook a personal journey of discovery.
In the process, Peter personally learned about shipbuilding and military organization, returning intent on transforming the Russian state and military. He forced the Russian nobility to dress and act more like Western Europeans, sent Russian noble children abroad for their education, built an enormous navy and army to fight the Swedes and the Turks, and (on the backs of semi-slave labor) created the new port city of St. Petersburg as the new imperial capital. His military reforms were huge in scope – he instituted conscription in 1705 that required one out of every twenty serfs to serve for life in his armies, and he oversaw the construction of Russia’s navy from nothing. Over two-thirds of the state's revenues went to the military even after he instituted new taxes and royal monopolies. He also forced the boyars to undergo military education and serve as army officers, with all male nobles after 1722 required to serve the state either as civil officials or military officers.
In 1762, the Prussian-born empress Catherine (who later acquired the honorific “the Great”) seized power from her husband in a coup. Figure 4.1.3 is a painting from the early eighteenth century of Peter I and Catherine, who was his second wife, along with their two daughters and small son. The painting also includes Peter I's older son from his first wife. Catherine would go on to introduce reforms meant to improve the Russian economy, creating the first state-financed banks and welcoming German settlers to the region of the Volga River to modernize farming practices. She also modernized the army and the state bureaucracy to improve efficiency. Despite being an enthusiastic supporter of “Enlightened” philosophy (as noted as the Age of Enlightenment in other parts of this chapter), Catherine was as focused on Russian expansion as Peter had been half a century earlier, seizing the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, expanding Russian power in Central Asia, and extinguishing Polish independence completely, with Poland divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795. By her death in 1796, Russia was more powerful than ever before.
By the time Peter died in 1725, the Russian Empire was now six times larger than it had been under Ivan the Terrible. Thanks to its territorial gains on the Baltic after the Great Northern War against Demark and Sweden and the construction of St. Petersburg in 1703, it was now a resolutely European power, albeit an unusual one. While Russia suffered from a period of weak rule after Peter’s death, it was simply so large and the Tsar’s authority so absolute that it remained a great power. Tsar rulership would come to an end under the Romanovs in the early part of the twentieth century.
- What role did the American and French Revolutions play in the uprising that led to the Haitian Revolution? What concepts and ideas coming from these other revolutions would inspire the rebellion of slaves in Haiti?
- What are some similarities among the various Atlantic Revolutions? What ideals and structures were born as a result of these revolutions, and how did they affect European colonization?
- How did the Enlightenment impact European expansion, particularly in the face of the uprisings and rebellions occurring against this expansion?
- See Figure 4.1.3. How does this image represent Peter’s desire to be “more European”? What did Peter hope to accomplish with this “Europeanization” of himself and his family?