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Rise of Sovereignty
Introduction
In the period from 1600 to 1715, the traditional hierarchical structure of European society came under new
pressures. As you recall, this structure was one in which a large class of poor agricultural laborers
(the peasantry) supported a small and wealthy class of elites (the nobility). As the monarchs of Europe
fought wars to expand their kingdoms and created larger state bureaucracies to manage them, the pressure
to raise greater sums of money through taxes stretched the economies and social structures of European
societies to the breaking point. Meanwhile, the continuous increase in trade and diversification of the
economy was creating a new class of people: a middle class made up of merchants and professionals that
did not fit comfortably into the traditional hierarchy. Changes in the social and political structure of the
seventeenth century were mirrored in the evolution of artistic style.
Economic Stress and Change
A series of unusually harsh winters that characterized the "little ice age" of the 1600s led to a series of poor
harvests, which, in turn, led to malnutrition and disease. In an effort to cope with increasing poverty,
members of the besieged agricultural class opted to have smaller families. This combination of famine,
poverty, and disease led to a significant decrease in the population during this period.
These "natural" problems that plagued the peasantry of Europe were exacerbated during this period by
increasing demands from the nobility that ruled them. The endless warfare waged by the rival monarchs of
Europe at this time further depleted the agricultural population by conscripting their sons into the army and
taking them off to war. War also required money that the monarchs and their governments attempted to
raise by increasing taxes. Because the nobility was largely exempt from taxes, the peasantry bore the brunt
of this new economic burden. In many places, the peasantry resisted violently in a series of tax revolts, but
temporary concessions won by them were quickly reversed.
Resistance to the monarchs' desire for increased power and wealth came from provincial nobles, town
officials, and church leaders. The outcome of these power struggles varied from kingdom to kingdom.
Britain: The Triumph of Constitutionalism
In Britain, these tensions came to a head in the form of a struggle between the monarchs of the Stuart
dynasty and the English Parliament. Already an old and important institution by 1600, the English
Parliament was an assembly of elites who advised the king. However, it differed from its counterparts in
the other European kingdoms in several important ways:

Its members were elected by the property-holding people of their county or district.

Eligibility for election was based on property ownership, so its members included wealthy merchants
and professional men as well as nobles.

Members voted individually rather than as an order or class.
As a result, the English Parliament of the seventeenth century was an alliance of nobles and well-to-do
members of a thriving merchant and professional class that saw itself as a voice of the "English people,"
and it soon clashed with the monarch it had invited to succeed the heirless Elizabeth I.
When James Stuart, the reigning king of Scotland (known there as James VI), agreed to take the throne of
England as James I (1603–1625), he was determined to rule England in the manner described by the theory
of absolutism. Under this theory, monarchs were viewed as appointed by God (an appointment known as
the Divine Right of Kings). As such, they were entitled to rule with absolute authority over their subjects.
Despite this tension, James I's reign was characterized by a contentious but peaceful coexistence with
Parliament.
A religious element was added when James's son and successor, Charles I (1625–1649), married a sister of
the Catholic king of France. That, together with his insistence on waging costly wars with Spain and
France, led to a confrontation with Parliament. Having provoked the Scots into invading England by
threatening their religious independence, Charles I was forced to call on the English Parliament for yet
more funds. Parliament responded by making funds contingent on the curbing of monarchical power. This
stalemate degenerated into the English Civil War (1642–1646). Forces loyal to the king fought to defend
the power of the monarchy, the official Church of England, and the privileges and prerogatives of the
nobility; forces supporting Parliament fought to uphold the rights of Parliament, to bring an end to the
notion of an official state church, and for notions of individual liberty and the rule of law.
The victory of the Parliamentary forces led to the trial and execution of Charles I for treason and to the
establishment of the Commonwealth (1649–1660). The Commonwealth deteriorated into a fundamentalist
Protestant dictatorship under the rule of the Parliamentary army's leading general, Oliver Cromwell. Upon
Cromwell's death in 1658, English Parliamentarians worked to establish aRestoration (1660–1688) of the
English monarchy, inviting the son of the king they executed to take the throne as Charles II (1660–1685).
The relative peace of the Restoration period broke down when Charles's brother, a Catholic, ascended to
the throne as James II (1685–1688). James was determined to establish religious freedom for Catholics, to
avenge his father, and to restore absolute monarchy to Britain. To thwart James's plans, Parliament enlisted
the aid of the king's eldest daughter, Mary, the Protestant wife of William of Orange of the Netherlands.
The quick, nearly bloodless uprising that coordinated Parliament-led uprisings with the invasion of a
Protestant fleet and army from the Netherlands, and which led to the quick expulsion of James II in 1688, is
known as the Glorious Revolution. The reign of William and Mary marks the clear establishment of
a constitutional monarchy, a system by which the monarch in Britain rules within the limits of the laws
passed by a legislative body. The text written by the leading legal spokesman of the Parliamentary faction,
John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), is still read today as the primary argument for
the establishment of natural limits to governmental authority.
France: Absolutism
Several key differences allowed for a far different outcome in France. A series of religious and dynastic
wars in the sixteenth century produced a kingdom in which the religious issue had been settled firmly in
favor of the Catholic majority. The lack of religious turmoil in the seventeenth century allowed the French
monarchy to cement an alliance with both the clergy and the middle class, and to use the great
administrative expertise of both to build a powerful centralized government. Both Louis XIII (1610–1643)
and Louis XIV (1643–1715) relied on well-connected Catholic Cardinals to oversee the consolidation of
royal power by transferring local authority from provincial nobility to a bureaucracy that was both efficient
and trustworthy.
As chief minister to Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu used the royal army to disband the private armies of the
great French aristocrats and to strip the autonomy granted to the few remaining Protestant towns. More
significantly, he stripped provincial aristocrats and elites of their administrative power by dividing France
into some 30 administrative districts and putting each under the control of an intendent, an administrative
bureaucrat, usually chosen from the middle class, who owed his position and, therefore, his loyalty directly
to Richelieu.
These policies were continued by Richelieu's successor as chief minister, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, and
perfected by Louis XIV when he took full control of the government upon Mazarin's death in 1661. To the
intimidation tactics practiced by Richelieu and Mazarin, Louis added bribery. Building the great palace
at Versailles, 11 miles outside of Paris, Louis presented the nobility of France with a choice: Oppose him
and face destruction or join him and be part of the most lavish court in Europe. In choosing to spend most
of their time at Versailles, French nobles forfeited the advantages that made their English Parliamentary
counterparts so powerful: control of both the wealth and loyalty of their local provinces and districts. As a
result, Louis XIV became known as "the Sun King" because all French life seemed to revolve around him
as the planets revolved around the sun.
Central and Eastern Europe: Compromise
Whereas the contests for power and sovereignty in Britain and France had clear winners and losers, similar
contests in the European kingdoms further to the east resulted in a series of compromises between
monarchs and rival elites.
In general, kingdoms in central and eastern Europe, such as Brandenburg–Prussia, the independent German
states, Austria, and Poland, were less economically developed than their western counterparts. The
economies of Britain and France in the seventeenth century were based on an agricultural system run by a
free and mobile peasantry and supplemented by an increasingly prosperous middle class consisting of
artisans and merchants in thriving towns. In contrast, the land-holding nobility of the kingdoms in central
and eastern Europe during this period managed to retain control of vast estates worked by serfs who were
bound by the land. By doing so, they were able to avoid the erosion of wealth that weakened their
counterparts in Britain and France.
In both Britain and France, the power struggle between the monarch and the elites was won by the side that
managed to form an alliance with the wealthy merchant and professional class. In the European kingdoms
further east, however, these classes failed to gain in wealth and numbers as their counterparts in Britain and
France had done. As a result, the stalemate between royal and aristocratic wealth and power remained more
balanced, necessitating compromise.
Russia: Tsarist Absolutism
The seventeenth-century kingdom furthest to the east proved to be an exception to the rule, as its monarchs,
the Tsars, managed to achieve a high degree of absolutism despite an agricultural economy based on
serfdom and the lack of an alliance with a thriving middle class.
During the period beginning in 1613 and reaching its zenith with the reign of Peter the Great (1689–1725),
the Romanov Tsars consolidated their power by buying the loyalty of the nobles. In return for their loyalty,
the Romanov Tsars gave the nobility complete control over the classes of people below them. A prime
example is the Law Code of 1649, which converted the legal status of groups as varied as peasants and
slaves into that of a single class of serfs. Under the Romanov Tsars, the Russian nobility also enjoyed the
fruit of new lands and wealth acquired by aggressive expansion of the Russian Empire eastward into Asia.
With the nobility firmly tied to the Tsar, opposition to the Tsar's power manifested itself only periodically
in the form of revolts from coalitions of smaller landholders and peasants angered by the progressive loss
of their wealth and rights. Such revolts, like the revolts of the Cossacks in the 1660s and early 1670s, were
ruthlessly put down by the Tsar's increasingly modern military forces, and controlled thereafter by the
creation of a state bureaucracy modeled on those in western Europe, and by encouraging the primacy and
importance of the Russian Orthodox Church that taught that the traditional social hierarchy was mandated
by God.
The Baroque Style
The dominant artistic style of the seventeenth century is known as baroque. In the most general sense, the
baroque style was characterized by its emphasis on grandeur and drama. In response to the Reformation,
the Catholic Church in Europe decreed that art should focus on religious themes and cultivate an
environment of contemplation and holiness. The resulting artistic style, developed initially by artists of
Rome, is sometimes known as Counter-Reformation Baroque. An excellent example in architecture is the
Church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale in Rome, designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Bernini's St. Theresa in
Ecstasy (1645–1652), which decorates the Cornaro Chapel in Rome, is an example of the CounterReformation Baroque style in sculpture, while Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew (c.1598)
and Conversion of St. Paul (c.1602) exemplify the Counter-Reformation Baroque style in painting.
The grandeur of the baroque also appealed to the absolutist monarchs of the seventeenth century, and under
their patronage the baroque evolved beyond religious subject matter. Louis XIV of France had his great
Versailles Palace (1661–1668) built in the baroque style. The sculptor Bernini produced his famous portrait
bust of Louis XIV in 1665. The painter Peter Paul Rubens created baroque masterpieces for many of the
monarchs of Europe. Among the most renowned examples are his cycle of 21 large canvases for the walls
of the Festival Gallery of Louis XIII's Luxembourg Palace, including Henry IV Receiving the Portrait of
Maria de Medici (1622–1625).
The baroque style reached its pinnacle when it migrated away from the royal courts and flourished in the
city of Amsterdam. There, Dutch masters adopted baroque style to depict the grandeur of that bustling
center of trade and learning. Foremost among them was Rembrandt van Rijn (usually just known as
Rembrandt), who captured the civic pride of the Dutch in such paintings as The Night Watch (1642) and
who displayed his personal pride in his series of self-portraits.
Rapid Review
During the period from 1600 to 1715, the dynamics of the traditional, hierarchical social structure of
European kingdoms came under new pressures. As their economies underwent a transformation from a
purely agricultural base to a more complex system that included expanding trade and the uneven growth of
a middle class of merchants and professionals, European monarchs attempted to solidify their claims to
sovereignty.

In Britain, their attempts failed as a section of the traditional nobility (which was motivated by both
self-interest and religious conviction) formed an alliance with like-minded members of the rising
merchant and professional class within Parliament, creating a system of shared sovereignty known as
constitutional monarchy.

In France, the Bourbon monarchs managed to form alliances with both the French Catholic Church
and the middle classes to establish a system of Royal absolutism.

In central and eastern European kingdoms like Brandenburg–Prussia, the German States, Austria, and
Poland, a less dynamic economy meant that the stalemate between monarchs and traditional nobility
was harder to break, and a series of power-sharing arrangements was made.

Furthest east, in Russia, the Romanov Tsars constructed an alliance with the grandest of the landowning nobility at the expense of the classes below them and consolidated their power by expanding
their empire and ruthlessly crushing opposition from below.

Changes in the social and political structure were mirrored by the development of the baroque style in
the arts.