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The Rise of Eastern Europe
I.
Whilst Western Europe was slowly transforming into dominant nation-states with definitive cultural identities, in
Eastern Europe, three extremely large states filled the map—the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and Russia.
a.
These states, particularly the Ottoman Empire and Muscovite Russia, seemed profoundly alien to the rest of
Europe.
b.
Travelers found the Turks and Russians almost as barbaric and exotic as the Indians of America, yet infinitely more
dangerous because of their large armies, equipped with modern weapons.
II.
c.
Fortunately for the west, the Turks, Poles, and Russians were all politically weak in the late 16 th and 17th centuries.
d.
Size was detrimental to the effectiveness of centralized authority of the rulers of these states.
The Ottoman Empire
a.
The Ottoman Empire had been anything but soft before the middle of the 16 th century.
b.
Suleiman the Magnificent, the last of the great Turkish warrior sultans, held the whole Balkan peninsula and most
of Hungary.
i. He had 30 million subjects, a greater revenue than any European monarch, and a much more efficient
military system, including a permanent standing army of over ten thousands janissaries, ten thousand
cavalry, and at least 100,000 auxiliary infantry.
ii. The Janissaries were Moslem converts, mainly drawn from the conquered Orthodox people of the
Balkans.
1.
Taken captive as boys, they were brainwashed to fight for Islam and to be the Sultan’s enslaved
elite fighting force.
iii. After the death of Suleiman in 1566, however, the Turkish fighting machine lost much of its fearsome
power.
iv. A long line of useless sultans were more worried about expanding their harems rather than their empire.
v. Back in the days of tough, ruthless leadership, each new Ottoman sultan had stabilized his title by killing
his younger brothers.
vi. Now, with the sultans’ large harems resulting in numerous offspring, this custom was turning the seraglio
into a slaughterhouse.
1.
c.
For example, in 1595, Mehmed III had 19 brothers and 15 pregnant harem women strangled.
Late in the 17th Century, this systematic fratricide was stopped, but by then, the sultan himself had become a
puppet of the ever-powerful janissary class.
i. In the 1650s, a drastic change to the position of the sultan allowed a brief resurrection of the Ottoman
power under Mehmed IV, who bestowed most of his power on the Grand Vizier, who curtailed the power
of the janissaries.
ii. In the 1660s, the Turks recaptured the island of Crete from Venice. They tightened their grip over
Hungary and resumed their drive up the Danube into Austria by 1680…
d.
The Ottoman Empire was something of a cultural no-man’s-land—the only thing specifically Turkish was the area
surrounding Constantinople itself and its leadership.
i. The rest was dozens of different ethnicities spread throughout the Balkans and the Middle East.
ii. With the Ottomans, the people of the Balkan peninsula had much greater freedom and religious
toleration than their peasant counterparts in much of western Europe.
iii. In fact, the Ottomans encourage the Greek Orthodox Church, first to keep the populations happy, but
mostly to keep them hostile to Western European Christianity.
III.
Poland
a.
North of the Ottoman Empire and east of the HRE lay the massive kingdom of Poland, stretching from the Oder
River to the Dneiper, and from the Baltic to the Carpathian Mts.
b.
The majority of Poles were farmers and herdsmen.
c.
Poland possessed considerable human and natural resources, yet in the 1500s and 1600s, played only a weak
international role, and in the 1700s, the Polish state completely disappeared.
i. The major reason for this was political disorganization.
d.
The dominant social class in Poland was the szlachta, the feudal aristocracy.
i. Its members were absolute masters of their rural domains and they forced the peasantry into serfdom.
ii. Due to the fact that they wanted to preserve this power, the szlachta would elect foreigners to serve as
ceremonial kings.
e.
During the second half of the 1500s, the Polish king was Lithuanian, French, Hungarian, and Swedish.
i. Not until John Sobieski in the late 17th century would Poland truly have a strong Polish ruler.
ii. This lack of a strong ruler caused the Polish people to never quite unify. Plus, unification was close to
impossible due to the several different ethnicities within its large borders.
f.
Following 1600, three of Poland’s neighbors constantly were nipping at Polish territory.
i. The Ottomans to the south, the Swedes to the north, and their most menacing neighbor, Russia to the
east.
IV.
Russia
a.
East of Poland lay the vast stardom of Muscovy, or Russia.
b.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was an open question whether Russia was part of European civilization, for in scale
and temper, life was much different.
c.
To begin with, the country was gigantic.
d.
In 1533, when Ivan the Terrible inherited the throne, Russia covered five times the area of France.
e.
100 years later, during the reign of Louis XIV, Russia covered 30 times the area of France.
f.
The climate of Russia was also savage by European standards, with arctic winters, blazing summers, and a short
growing season.
g.
It’s contact with western Europe was minimal before 1682.
h.
Blocked by Sweden from an outlet on the Baltic and by the Ottomans on the Black Sea, Russia only had one port—
Archangel, on the White Sea, opened by the English—from which to trade directly with western Europe.
i.
Its commerce with the Middle East was more important.
j.
Its only true link with the rest of Europe was Christianity.
k.
Yet the Russian Orthodox Church viewed Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, with the darkest
suspicion.
l.
For centuries, they had accepted as spiritual head of church the Patriarch at Constantinople and when Byzantium
fell to the Ottomans, the Russian Orthodox naturally supposed that Moscow had inherited that title.
m. The Russians called Moscow the Third Rome.
n.
The man responsible for the initial transformation of Russia was Ivan IV, better known as Ivan the Terrible.
i. Ivan was the principal author of the Tsarist formula—absolute power, state service for the nobility
(boyars), and brutal serfdom for the peasantry.
ii. As a young prince, Ivan amused himself by tossing animals from the palace tower and watched them die
in agony.
iii. In 1547, he had himself crowned Tsar (Caesar) of all the Russians, the first Muscovite ruler to do so.
iv. His behavior toward his subjects could be described as raging, frantic, foolish, visionary, and lunatic.
v. He decimated the boyar class by killing thousands of its members, utilizing his secret police, the
Oprichniki.
vi. He pitilessly sacked Novgorod, the second city in his realm, because of a rumor that their boyars were
going to defect to the kingdom of Poland.
vii. He was deeply religious, but it did not prevent him from whipping and torturing priests or killing his
victims in church during mass.
viii. He struck his oldest son and heir so hard with a pointed stick that he killed him—this murder hastened his
own madness and demise.
ix. Still, most of the time, there was method to his insanity.
x. His wholesale confiscation and redistribution of land was economically catastrophic for Russia, but it
broke the boyar power and bolstered that of a new service nobility.
xi. The more Ivan bullied the Russian Orthodox Church, the more the clergy preached hopeless reverence to
the tsar.
xii. Uncivilized as Ivan was, he singlehandedly magnetized both landlord and peasant alike.
o.
After Ivan’s death in 1584, Russia plunged into the Time of Troubles from 1584 to 1613.
i. A series of weak, lunatic tsars allowed the boyars to take power back—still, there was constant fighting
among these would-be tsars and the peasants bore the brunt of this conflict.
p.
In 1613, the zemsky sobor (boyar council) chose Michael Romanov as the new tsar due to the fact that he would be
a weak ruler.
q.
The Romanovs would lead Russia for the next three hundred years. Eventually, the first Romanov tsars, those
ruling between 1613 and 1682, albeit much less forceful tsars than Ivan the Terrible, maintained their partnership
with the church and won cooperation from the boyars.
r.
This was between 1667 and 1671, when a peasant rebellion led by a river pirate named Stenka Razin spread from
the Volga basin in southern Russia throughout the countryside.
s.
Razin became a folk hero to the Russian masses, a Robin Hood-type figure.
t.
As disciple began to flock to him, Razin moved along the Don and Volga, proclaiming that he was going to rescue
the tsar from the wicked boyars so that all could live in freedom and equality.
u.
But Razin had no organization and his followers had no military experience.
v.
The tsar’s soldiers beat Razin in pitched battle and his magical authority quickly evaporated. He was captured and
executed in Moscow in 1671.
w. Meanwhile, the tsar and boyars smashed one rebel band after another, and terrorized the peasantry into
submission by dismembering all rebels caught alive, impaling them on stakes, or nailing them onto gibbets.
x.
Close to 100,000 peasants were slaughtered in the aftermath. Such was the atmosphere of Russia when Peter the
Great assumed the throne in 1682.
V.
The Rise of Austria and Brandenburg-Prussia
a.
After the debacle of the Thirty Years’ War, the HRE was a phantom state, a still revered throwback to the glories of
old, but a mechanism which no longer worked.
b.
The German princes’ final victory over the Hapsburg emperor at the Peace of Westphalia confirmed the emperor’s
inability to have absolute control over the German people.
c.
With the empire a hollow façade, interest focuses on the several German states which were large enough to
function on the international level.
d.
Two German states, Austria and Brandenburg, developed vigorously during the second half of the century.
e.
The Hapsburgs transformed their dynastic possessions into a great Danubian monarchy, while in northern German,
the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg laid the foundations for another great state, the 18th century kingdom of
Prussia.
f.
Three other German states, Bavaria, Saxony, and the Palatinate seemed to have as much chance as Brandenburg
to build their strength during the late 17th century, but all failed to do so.
g.
Palatinate was peculiarly unlucky because as soon as it recovered from the Thirty Years’ War, Louis XIV devastated
it with invasion. Saxony became too involved in the affairs of Poland.
h.
The Wittlesbachs of Bavaria became a satellite of Louis XIV.
i.
Both the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns built their new states at the expense of the Ottomans, Poland, and
Sweden.
VI.
Austria
a.
The rise of Austria was the most striking phenomenon in Eastern Europe during the late 17th century.
b.
The Hapsburgs, who had concentrated most of its affairs in western and central Europe, began to look east down
the Danube for territory.
c.
Hapsburg Austria was a unique creation, a crossbreed between a centralized western nation-state like France and
an old-dynastic empire like the HRE.
d.
Besides still being the ceremonial HRE, the Hapsburgs directly ruled Austria, Styria, Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, and
later Transylvania, though much of these lands were constantly changing hands between the Austrians and the
Turks.
e.
The Hapsburgs had to manage each of these provinces separately because each province had its individual native
customs and institutional patterns.
f.
The Hapsburg subjects spoke some ten languages and practiced at least 8 religious creeds.
g.
No part of Europe was more heterogeneous ethnically or culturally.
h.
Still, the Hapsburgs did not want to weld these peoples into a national identity like France or England.
i.
On the contrary, they played each province against each other.
j.
The Austrian Hapsburgs learned its mistakes from the Thirty Years’ War.
k.
A big standing army was necessary and provided muscle.
l.
A small educated class provided the priests and civil servants. The German language was considered superior to
the Slavic languages, hence German culture was mandatory for all ruling elites.
m. The Austrian Empire was partially feudal and ranged from province to province. Most notable was the robota, in
which all peasants were required three days unpaid labor for lords.
n.
During the second half of the 17th Century, the Austrians were fighting on two fronts against France and the
Ottoman Empire, which…
VII.
Brandenburg-Prussia
a.
Compared with the growth of Hapsburg Austria, the development of Hohenzollern Brandenburg during the late
seventeenth century was modest.
b.
The key figure here was Frederick William, known as the Great Elector.
i. Frederick William was the most clever ruler of his day in eastern Europe, even though Brandenburg was
still relatively small.
ii. FW was an institutional innovator whose policies bore fruit long after his death.
iii. The Hohenzollerns that follow his formula eventually turn Prussia into a European power culminating in
the 19th Century unification of Germany.
iv. In 1640, FW inherited the Hohenzollern family’s scattered collection of underdeveloped German
territories.
v. Brandenburg was his chief possession, a flat country with crappy soil, cut off from the Baltic coast, whose
500,000 residents raised grain and brewed beer.
vi. The chief town in Brandenburg, Berlin, was pretty small.
vii. More than 500 miles from Berlin lay the small duchy of Prussia, completely enveloped by Poland.
viii.
Brandenburg and Prussia were both completely dominated by the Junkers, the noble landlords.
ix. Like the Polish szlachta, the Junkers had climbed to power by squeezing the peasantry; they had a
reputation for being smart, tough, and coarse.
x. FW set out to build an effective state with these terrible materials.
xi. His basic decision was to create a permanent standing army.
xii. All his other political, social, and economic innovations stemmed from the army’s role in centralizing the
Hohenzollern state.
xiii. In 1648, FW made out very well following the Thirty Years’ War, gaining eastern Pomerania along the
Baltic coast.
xiv. But whereas the rest of the HRE crawled into a hole following the war, FW kept on fighting.
xv. In the 1650s, he joined Sweden against Poland and later joined Poland against Sweden.
xvi. He fought for purely opportunistic reasons and changed sides whenever beneficial.
xvii. In the 1670s and 1680s, he outdid even himself by switching sides between the French and the Dutch 3
times.
xviii. By 1688, he had 30,000 of Europe’s best soldiers.
xix. How did he pay for this army with such meager resources?
1.
In 1653, FW worked out a compromise with the Junkers in which he recognized their special
economic and social privileges in return for what turned out to be a permanent tax to maintain
his army.
2.
The Elector acknowledged that only Junkers could own land, that Junkers could freely evict
peasants from lands they occupied, and that Junkers were immune from taxation.
3.
But in doing so, he severely curtailed their political ambitions.
4.
Even though the taxes were crushing on the peasants, FW built an enduring strength into his
society.
5.
His army gave him and his heirs absolute political control in that it encouraged the people into
habits of military discipline and a chain of command.
6.
VIII.
Thus, an efficient bureaucracy, based on the military was created.
East European Wars of 1683-1721
a.
While Louis XIV was battling the Grand Alliance, a parallel series of long and bloody wars unfolded east of the Elbe
River.
b.
With no eastern ruler paralleling the power of a Louis XIV, the east became a free for all between Austria, the
Ottoman Empire, Russia, Sweden, Poland, and Prussia.
c.
By the end of these wars in 1721, the map of Europe had been altered dramatically.
d.
It confirmed the strength of some states—Austria and Russia—and the decline of others—Ottomans, Sweden, and
Poland.
e.
IX.
In conjunction with the wars of Louis XIV, a new balance of power was produced in Europe.
Austria vs. Turkey
a.
In the 1660s, the Turks renewed their efforts to conquer Austria.
b.
Though the Hapsburgs beat back an invading Ottoman army in 1664, Leopold I was so alarmed at the Turks’
restored military strength that he paid the sultan a massive tribute in order to secure a truce.
c.
As soon as the truce expired in 1683, another huge Turkish army advanced through Hungary, crossed into Austria
itself.
d.
This invasion was led by Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa, who decided to try and take Vienna itself.
e.
This plan was incredibly daring due to the shock it sent throughout Christian Europe.
f.
On July 1, 1683, he reached the Austrian border with close to 125,000 soldiers. Disregarding to besiege the border
forts or to engage a small Austrian army near the border, Mustafa went straight up the Danube.
g.
Within two weeks, he was just outside the Vienna city walls.
h.
Placing their tents and baggage in a giant crescent around the city walls, the Turks began to dig a spiderwork of
deep trenches and tunnels leading up to and under the Austrian fortifications.
i.
Tartar cavalry roamed freely throughout nearby town and villages, looting and burning as they went.
j.
The Vienna garrison of eleven thousand was greatly outnumbered and the Austrian field army was even smaller to
lift the siege.
k.
Somehow, it held on for near a month—however, on September 4, a Turkish mine (bomb) tore a 30 foot hole in
the inner wall.
l.
But he could still not force his way into the city. His artillery was ineffective and his screaming, saber-wielding
warriors were stopped by Austrian pikesmen and artillery at close quarters.
m. Still, why Kara Mustafa did not throw his entire force into Vienna is a mystery. Then, dramatically, a relief army of
60,000 Poles, Saxons, Bavarians, and other German states (FW of Prussia pointedly declined) led by King John
Sobieski of Poland appeared on the heights overlooking Vienna.
n.
Kara Mustafa only sent around 28,000 cavalry into the initial battle keeping the majority of his infantry in trying to
finish the siege.
o.
When Sobieski’s troops began to rout the Turks, Mustafa tried in vain to send in his infantry, but most broke in
chaos in Sobieski’s advancing army.
p.
Thus, Kara Mustafa’s attack, the boldest maneuver in all of 17th Century warfare, had resulted in the most crushing
defeat of the century.
q.
Kara Mustafa was strangled on the sultan’s orders shortly after.
r.
Meanwhile, the Poles, Venetians, and the Austrians joined in a “Holy League” to rid the continent of Islam
altogether.
s.
The Venetians surprisingly beat the Turks and drove them out of portions of southern Greece.
t.
The Poles, under John Sobieski, the savior of Vienna, aimed to conquer Moldavia and establish a Polish outlet to
the Black Sea.
u.
However, the szlachta blocked these aims by pulling all funding of the war. Sobieski could do little with an unpaid
army.
v.
In contrast, Leopold accomplished all his aims.
w. The imperial attack concentrated on the Turkish fortresses along the Danube. By 1688, the Ottomans had been
cleared out of Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, and Slavonia in only six years of fighting.
x.
By 1697, with the Nine Years’ War with France coming to a halt, Leopold sent 50,000 men under the command of
Prince Eugene of Savoy just north of Belgrade.
y.
The Turks were slowly crossing the Tisza River on a bridge of boats and Eugene had caught them in a perfect trap.
z.
The sultan Mustafa II and his cavalry officers had reached the far bank and the janissaries were following them
across.
aa. Eugene flies in with his army to the riverbank and immediately attacks the janissaries crowded on the floating
bridge.
bb. Mustafa ordered the calvary officers back across the bridge to save the janissaries—however, lacking any escape,
most of the janissaries panicked. Thousands drowned in the river, while others began butchering their own
officers.
cc. The destruction at the Battle of Zenta resulted in the humiliating Peace of Karlowitz, signed in 1699, which doubled
Leopold’s holdings from 1683.
X.
Sweden versus Russia
a. In 1700, just as the Austro-Turkish wars came to a halt, and just before the War of Spanish Succession began,
fighting broke out in quite another quarter—the Baltic.
b. Here, Sweden was the dominant state due to the conquests of the Vasa kings, namely Gustavus Adolphus.
c.
The Swedes had built an empire that incorporated Finland, areas on the northern Baltic (blocking Russia’s access),
Pomeria (bordering Brandenburg-Prussia), and other small northern German territories bordering Denmark.
d. Thus, the Swedes controlled the northern, eastern, and most of the southern portions of the Baltic coast.
e. With the Danes, they shared control of the Oresund Sound, connecting the Baltic and the North Sea, through
which all Baltic shipping passed.
f.
During the 17th Century, Sweden repeatedly fought and defeated its neighbors and they were aching for
revenge. When Charles XI died in 1697, he was succeeded by a 15 year old boy, and the time looked right for
revenge.
g. In 1698-99, the kings of Denmark, Poland, and Russia secretly planned a joint attack, carried out in 1700, assaulting
Swedish strong points along the Baltic, hundreds of miles apart.
h. Thus began the Great Northern War, which no one in 1700 could imagine would last for 21 years.
i.
The Danes wanted to regain Scania, a region across the Oresund Sound from Copenhagen, so that they could
control the Sound absolutely.
j.
The Poles had little interest in war with Sweden—however, their king, Augustus II, badly needed military
conquests.
k.
Augustus, elector of Saxony, had just secured the Polish throne in a disputed election after the death of John
Sobieski.
l.
He was nicknamed “the Strong” because he could bend horseshoes with his bare hands—also because he was the
father of 300 illegitimate children.
m. Conquests would not only legitimize his crown, but rival the growing power of Brandenburg-Prussia.
n. The third party in the attack, the Russian tsar, was the most enigmatic.
o. Peter I had not yet earned his nickname of Peter the Great; in 1700, he was an untested, half-barbaric figure.
p. Peter was clearly intent on opening Russia to western commerce and establishing a Russian navy based upon the
English and Dutch models—this Navy was to sail into the Baltic.
q. Facing this trio of assailants was Charles XII, a monarch of incredible and disturbing gifts.
r.
Before we go into the war, we must first examine Peter and Charles.