Part 353

When Brandenburg and Prussia united began to rise to importance, the neighboring kingdom of Poland had already passed the climax of its career. Under the Jagellon dynasty, sprung from the Duke Jagellon of Lithuania, who married Hedwig, Queen of Poland, in 1386, and united the two states, Poland was a great power for two centuries, and seemed more likely than Russia to dominate the Slavonic peoples of Europe. The Russians at that time were under the feet of the Mongols or Tartars, whose terrific sweep westwards, from the steppes of Asia, had overwhelmed them completely and seemed to bring their independent history to an end. Slowly a Russian duchy had emerged, having its seat of doubtful sovereignty at Moscow, and being subject quite humbly to the Mongol Khan. About 1477 the Muscovite duke of that time, Ivan Vasilovitch, broke the Tartar yoke and acquired independence. But his dominion was limited. The Poles and Lithuanians, now united, had taken possession of large and important territories formerly Russian, and the Muscovite state was entirely cut off from the Baltic. It began, however, in the next century, under Ivan the Terrible, first of the Czars, to make conquests southward and south-eastward, from the Tartars, until it had reached the Caspian Sea. The dominion of the Czar stretched northward, at the same time, to the White Sea, at the single port of which trade was opened with the Russian country by English merchant adventurers in the reign of Elizabeth. Late in the sixteenth century the old line of rulers, descended from the Scandinavian Ruric, came to an end, and after a few years Michael Romanoff established the dynasty which has reigned since his time.

As between the two principal Slavonic nations, Russia was now gaining stability and weight, while Poland had begun to lose both. It was a fatal day for the Poles when, in 1573, on the death of the last of the Jagellons, they made their monarchy purely elective, abolishing the restriction to one family which had previously prevailed. The election was by the suffrage of the nobles, not the people at large (who were generally serfs), and the government became an oligarchy of the most unregulated kind known in history. The crown was stripped of power, and the unwillingness of the nobility to submit to any national authority, even that of its own assembly, reached a point, about the middle of the seventeenth century, at which anarchy was virtually agreed upon as the desirable political state. The extraordinary "liberum veto," then made part of the Polish constitution, gave to each single member of the assemblies of the nobles, or of the deputies representing them, a right to forbid any enactment, or to arrest the whole proceedings of the body, by his unsupported negative. This amazing prerogative appears to have been exercised very rarely in its fullness; but its theoretical existence effectually extinguished public spirit and paralyzed all rational legislation. Linked with the singular feebleness of the monarchy, it leaves small room for surprise at the ultimate shipwreck of the Polish state.

The royal elections at Warsaw came to be prize contests at which all Europe assisted. Every Court set up its candidate for the paltry titular place; every candidate emptied his purse into the Polish capital, and bribed, intrigued, corrupted, to the best of his ability. Once, at least (1674), when the game was on, a sudden breeze of patriotic feeling swept the traffickers out of the diet, and inspired the election of a national hero, John Sobieski, to whom Europe owes much; for it was he who drove back the Turks, in 1683, when their last bold push into central Europe was made, and when they were storming at the gates of Vienna. But when Sobieski died, in 1696, the old scandalous vendue of a crown was re-opened, and the Elector of Saxony was the buyer. During most of the last two centuries of its history, Poland sold its throne to one alien after another, and allowed foreign states to mix and meddle with its affairs. Of real nationality there was not much left to extinguish when the time of extinction came. There were patriots, and very noble patriots, among the Poles, at all periods of their history; but it seems to have been the very hopelessness of the state into which their country had drifted which intensified their patriotic feeling.

Russia had acquired magnitude and strength as a barbaric power, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but it was not until the reign of Peter the Great, which opened in 1682, that the great Slavonic empire began to take on a European character, with European interests and influences, and to assimilate the civilization of the West. Peter may be said to have knotted Russia to Europe at both extremities, by pushing his dominions to the Baltic on the north and to the Black Sea on the south, and by putting his own ships afloat in both. From his day, Russia has been steadily gathering weight in each of the two continents over which her vast bulk of empire is stretched, and moving to a mysterious great destiny in time to come.

The Turks.

The Turks, natural enemies of all the Christian races of eastern and southeastern Europe, came practically to the end of their threatening career of conquest about the middle of the sixteenth century, when Suleiman the Magnificent died (1566). He had occupied a great part of Hungary; seated a pasha in Buda; laid siege to Vienna; taken Rhodes from the Knights of St. John; attacked them in Malta; made an alliance with the King of France; brought a Turkish fleet into the western Mediterranean, and held Europe in positive terror of an Ottoman domination for half a century. His son Selim added Cyprus to the Turkish conquests; but was humbled in the Mediterranean by the great Christian victory of Lepanto, won by the combined fleets of Spain, Venice and the Pope, under Don John of Austria. After that time Europe had no great fear of the Turk; though he still fought hard with the Venetians, the Poles, the Russians, the Hungarians, and, once more, carried his arms even to Vienna. But, on the whole, it was a losing fight; the crescent was on the wane.

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Last glories of Venice.

In the whole struggle with the Ottomans, through the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the republic of Venice bore a noble part. She contested with them foot by foot the Greek islands, Peloponnesus, and the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Even after her commerce began to slip from her control, and the strength which came from it sank rapidly, she gave up her eastern possessions but slowly, one by one, and after stout resistance. Crete cost the Turks a war of twenty-four years (1645-1669). Fifteen years afterwards the Venetians gathered their energies afresh, assumed the aggressive, and conquered the whole Peloponnesus, which they held for a quarter of a century. Then it was lost again, and the Ionian Islands alone remained Venetian territory in the East.

Rise of the House of Savoy.

Of Italy at large, in the seventeenth century, lying prostrate under the heavy hand of Spain, there is no history to claim attention in so brief a sketch as this. One sovereign family in the northwest, long balanced on the Alps, in uncertainty between a cis-Alpine and a trans-Alpine destiny, but now clearly committed to Italian fortunes, had begun to win its footing among the noticeable smaller powers of the day by sheer dexterity of trimming and shifting sides in the conflicts of the time. This was the House of Savoy, whose first possessions were gathered in the crumbling of the old kingdom of Burgundy, and lay on both slopes of the Alps, commanding several important passes. On the western and northern side, the counts, afterwards dukes, of Savoy had to contend, as time went on, with the expanding kingdom of France and with the stout-hearted communities which ultimately formed the Swiss Confederacy. They fell back before both. At one period, in the fifteenth century, their dominion had stretched to the Saone, and to the lake of Neufchatel, on both sides of it, surrounding the free city of Geneva, which they were never able to overcome, and the lake of Geneva entire. After that time, the Savoyards gradually lost territory on the Gallic side and won compensations on the Italian side, in Piedmont, and at the expense of Genoa and the duchy of Milan. The Duke Victor Amadeus II. was the most successful winner for his house, and he made his gains by remarkable manœuvering on both sides of the wars of Louis XIV. One of his acquisitions (1713) was the island kingdom of Sicily, which gave him a royal title. A few years later he exchanged it with Austria for the island kingdom of Sardinia—a realm more desirable to him for geographical reasons only. The dukes of Savoy and princes of Piedmont thus became kings of Sardinia, and the name of the kingdom was often applied to their whole dominion, down to the recent time when the House of Savoy attained the grander kingship of united Italy.

First wars of Louis XIV.

The wars of Louis XIV. gave little opportunity for western and central Europe to make any other history than that of struggle and battle, invasion and devastation, intrigue and faithless diplomacy, shifting of political landmarks and traffic in border populations, as though they were pastured cattle, for fifty years, in the last part of the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth (1665-1715). It will be remembered that when this King of France married the Infanta of Spain, he joined in a solemn renunciation of all rights on her part and on that of her children to such dominions as she might otherwise inherit. But such a renunciation, with no sentiment of honor behind it, was worthless, of course, and Louis XIV., in his own esteem, stood on a height quite above the moral considerations that have force with common men. When Philip IV. of Spain died, in 1665, Louis promptly began to put forward the claims which he had pledged himself not to make. He demanded part of the Netherlands, and Franche Comté—the old county (not the duchy) of Burgundy—as belonging to his queen. It was his good fortune to be served by some of the greatest generals, military engineers and administrators of the day—by Turenne, Condé, Vauban, Louvois, and others—and when he sent his armies of invasion into Flanders and Franche Comté they carried all before them. Holland took alarm at these aggressions which came so near to her, and formed an alliance with England and Sweden to assist Spain. But the unprincipled English king, Charles II., was easily bribed to betray his ally; Sweden was bought over; Spain submitted to a treaty which gave the Burgundian county back to her, and surrendered an important part of the Spanish Netherlands to France. Louis' first exploit of national brigandage had thus been a glorious success, as glory is defined in the vocabulary of sovereigns of his class. He had stolen several valuable towns, killed some thousands of people, carried misery into the lives of some thousands more, and provoked the Dutch to a challenge of war that seemed promising of more glory of like kind.

In 1672 he prepared himself to chastise the Dutch, and his English pensioner, Charles II., with several German princes, joined him in the war. It was this war, as related already, which brought about the fall and the death of John de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland; which raised William of Orange to the restored stadtholdership, and which gave him a certain leadership of influence in Europe, as against the French king. It was this war, likewise, which gave the Hohenzollerns their first great battle-triumph, in the defeat of the Swedes, allies of the French, at Fehrbellin. For Frederick William, the Great Elector, had joined the Emperor Leopold and the King of Spain in another league with Holland to resist the aggressions of France; while Sweden now took sides with Louis. England was soon withdrawn from the contest, by the determined action of Parliament, which forced its king to make peace. Otherwise the war became general in western Europe and was frightful in the death and misery it cost. Generally the French had the most success. Turenne was killed in 1675 and Condé retired the same year; but able commanders were found in Luxemburg and Crequi to succeed them. In opposition to William of Orange, the Dutch made peace at Nimegueu, in 1678, and Spain was forced to give up Franche Comté, with another fraction of her Netherland territories; but Holland lost nothing. Again Louis XIV. had beaten and robbed his neighbors with success, and was at the pinnacle of his glory. France, it is true, was oppressed and exhausted, but her king was a "grand monarch," and she must needs be content.

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For a few years the grand monarch contented himself with small filchings of territory, which kept his conscience supple and gave practice to his sleight-of-hand. On one pretext and another he seized town after town in Alsace, and, at last, 1681, surprised and captured the imperial free city of Strasburg, in a time of entire peace. He bombarded Genoa, took Avignon from the Pope, bullied and abused feeble Spain, made large claims on the Palatinate in the name of his sister-in-law, but against her will, and did nearly what he was pleased to do, without any effective resistance, until after William of Orange had been called to the English throne. That completed a great change in the European situation.

Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The change had already been more than half brought about by a foul and foolish measure which Louis had adopted in his domestic administration. Cursed by a tyrant's impatience at the idea of free thought and free opinion among his subjects, he had been persuaded by Catholic zealots near his person to revoke the Edict of Nantes and revive persecution of the Huguenots. This was done in 1685. The fatal effects within France resembled those which followed the persecution of the Moriscoes of Spain. The Huguenots formed a large proportion of the best middle class of the kingdom,—its manufacturers, its merchants, its skilled and thrifty artisans. Infamous efforts were made to detain them in the country and there force them to apostacy or hold them under punishment if they withstood. But there was not power enough in the monarchy, with all its absolutism, to enclose France in such a wall. Vast numbers escaped—half a million it is thought—carrying their skill, their knowledge, their industry and their energy into Holland, England, Switzerland, all parts of Protestant Germany, and across the ocean to America. France was half ruined by the loss.

The League of Augsburg.

At the same time, the Protestant allies in Germany and the North, whom Louis had held in subserviency to himself so long, were angered and alarmed by his act. They joined a new defensive league against him, formed at Augsburg, in 1686, which embraced the Emperor, Spain, Holland, and Sweden, at first, and afterwards took in Savoy and other Italian states, along with Germany almost entire. But the League was miserably unprepared for war, and hardly hindered the march of Louis' armies when he suddenly moved them into the Rhenish electorates in 1688. For the second time in his reign, and under his orders, the Palatinate was fearfully devastated with fire and sword. But this attack on Germany, occupying the arms of France, gave William of Orange his opportunity to enter England unopposed and take the English crown. That accomplished, he speedily brought England into the League, enlarging it to a "grand alliance" of all western Europe against the dangerous monarch of France, and inspiring it with some measure of his own energy and courage. France had now to deal with enemies on every side. They swarmed on all her frontiers, and the strength and valor with which she met them were amazing. For three years the French more than held their own, not only in land-fighting, but on the sea, where they seemed likely, for a time, to dispute the supremacy of the English and the Dutch with success. But the frightful draft made on the resources of the nation, and the strain on its spirit, were more than could be kept up. The obstinacy of the king, and his indifference to the sufferings of his people, prolonged the war until 1697, but with steady loss to the French of the advantages with which they began. Two years before the end, Louis had bought over the Duke of Savoy, by giving back to him all that France had taken from his Italian territories since Richelieu's time. When the final peace was settled, at Ryswick, like surrenders had to be made in the Netherlands, Lorraine, and beyond the Rhine; but Alsace, with Strasburg, was kept, to be a German graft on France, until the sharp Prussian pruning knife, in our own time, cut it away.

War of the Spanish Succession.

There were three years of peace after the treaty of Ryswick, an then a new war—longer, more bitter, and more destructive than those before it—arose out of questions connected with the succession to the crown of Spain. Charles II., last of the Austro-Spanish or Spanish-Hapsburg kings, died in 1700, leaving no heir. The nearest of his relatives to the throne were the descendants of his two sisters, one of whom had married Louis XIV. and the other the Emperor Leopold, of the Austrian House. Louis XIV., as we know, had renounced all the Spanish rights of his queen and her issue; but that renunciation had been shown already to be wasted paper. Leopold had renounced nothing; but he had required a renunciation of her Spanish claims from the one daughter, Maria, of his Spanish wife, and he put forward claims to the Spanish succession, on his own behalf, because his mother had been a princess of that nation, as well as his wife. He was willing, however, to transfer his own rights to a younger son, fruit of a second marriage, the Archduke Charles.

The question of the Spanish succession was one of European interest and importance, and attempts had been made to settle it two years before the death of the Spanish king, in 1698, by a treaty, or agreement, between France, England, and Holland. By that treaty these outside powers (consulting Spain not at all) undertook a partition of the Spanish monarchy, in what they assumed to be the interest of the European balance of power. They awarded Naples, Sicily, and some lesser Italian possessions to a grandson of Louis XIV., the Milanese territory to the Archduke Charles, and the rest of the Spanish dominions to an infant son of Maria, the Emperor's daughter, who was married to the elector of Bavaria. But the infant so selected to wear the crown of Spain died soon afterwards, and a second treaty of partition was framed. This gave the Milanese to the Duke of Lorraine, in exchange for his own duchy, which he promised to cede to France, and the whole remainder of the Spanish inheritance was conceded to the Austrian archduke, Charles. In Spain, these arrangements were naturally resented, by both people and king, and the latter was persuaded to set against them a will, bequeathing all that he ruled to the younger grandson of Louis XIV., Philip of Anjou, on condition that the latter renounce for himself and for his heirs all claims to the crown of France. The inducement to this bequest was the power which the King of France possessed to enforce it, and so to preserve the unity of the Spanish realm. That the argument and the persuasion came from Louis' own agents, while other agents amused England, Holland and Austria with treaties of partition, is tolerably clear.

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Near the end of the year 1700, the King of Spain died; his will was disclosed; the treaties were as coolly ignored as the prior renunciation had been, and the young French prince was sent pompously into Spain to accept the proffered crown. For a time, there was indignation in Europe, but no more. William of Orange could persuade neither England nor Holland to war, and Austria could not venture hostilities without their help. But that submissiveness only drew from the grand monarch fresh displays of his dishonesty and his insolence. Philip of Anjou's renunciation of a possible succession to the French throne, while occupying that of Spain, was practically annulled: The government of Spain was guided from Paris like that of a dependency of France. Dutch and English commerce was injured by hostile measures. Movements alarming to Holland were made on the frontiers of the Spanish Netherlands. Finally, when the fugitive ex-king of England, James II., died at St. Germains, in September, 1701, Louis acknowledged James' son, the Pretender, as King of England. This insult roused the war spirit in England which King William had striven so hard to evoke. He had already arranged the terms of a new defensive Grand Alliance with Holland, Austria, and most of the German states. There was no difficulty now in making it an offensive combination.

But William, always weak in health, and worn by many cares and harassing troubles, died in March, 1702, before the war which he desired broke out. His death made no pause in the movement of events. Able statesmen, under Queen Anne, his successor, carried forward his policy and a great soldier was found, in the person of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, to command the armies of England and the Dutch. Another commander, of remarkable genius, Prince Eugene of Savoy, took service with the Emperor, and these two, acting cordially together, humbled the overweening pride of Louis XIV. in the later years of his reign. He had worn out France by his long exactions. His strong ministers, Colbert, Louvois and others, were dead, and he did not find successors for them. He had able generals, but none equal to Turenne, Condé or Luxemburg,—none to cope with Marlborough and Prince Eugene. The war was widespread, on a stupendous scale, and it lasted for twelve years. Its campaigns were fought in the Low Countries, in Germany, in Italy and in Spain. It glorified the reign of Anne, in English history, by the shining victories of Blenheim, Ramilies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet, and by the capture of Gibraltar, the padlock of the Mediterranean. The misery to which France was reduced in the later years of the war was probably the greatest that the much suffering nation ever knew.

The Peace of Utrecht.