The Origins of the Modern European State System, 1494-1618

M.S. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317892755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This study examines the early years of the post-medieval European states and the growth of a recognisably 'modern' system for handling their international relations. M S Anderson gives much of his space to France, Spain and England and to the state of the relations between them, as their various power plays rolled over Italy and the Low countries, but, he also incorporates the Northern and Eastern states including Russia, Poland and the Baltic world into the main European political arena. He provides a broad narrative of European politics and its impact on diplomacy including the Italian Wars 1494-1559, the French Wars of Religion, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the relations of Christendom and Islam with the advance of the Ottoman empire. He also gives considerable attention to the influence of military and economic factors on international relations.

CHAPTER ONE

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The Instruments of International Relations: Armies and Navies

War: part of the natural order

It is appropriate that any account of international relations in Europe between those two traditional historical signposts, the French invasion of Italy in 1494 and the beginning of the Thirty Years War in 1618, should begin with a consideration of war and its implications. Throughout this period armed struggle, potential or actual, was the most important and enduring influence on the relationships between the European states. Personal rivalries between monarchs, conflicting dynastic claims, the workings of a still embryonic balance of power, generated conflicts to which religious antagonisms, between Christians and Muslims, later between Catholics and Protestants, added a more emotional dimension. War to men of that age was a natural condition, as natural as peace and perhaps more so. Martin Luther’s often-quoted remark that it was ‘as necessary as eating, drinking, or any other business’ expressed a viewpoint from which few would have seriously dissented; and the voice of these few was a weak and ineffective one which rulers and their ministers could safely ignore. Erasmus might attack the aggressiveness and territorial ambitions of rulers.¹ Anabaptists might put forward their own brand of Christian pacifism. None of this made any practical difference. War, it seemed, had always existed and always would.

It could also be seen not merely as natural and inevitable but as in many ways and for much of society beneficial. The long-standing belief that it was the salutary punishment decreed by God for the transgressions of sinful mankind, and therefore part of the divine scheme of things, had deep roots. So had the assumption, even more ancient and destined to be even more lasting, that enduring peace inevitably led to weakness and degeneration in any society, that it stifled energies and promoted an ignoble desire for material comfort at the expense of nobler ambitions. A people in this position, wrote an Elizabethan commentator, would ‘wax rotten in idleness’, while another had no doubt that ‘Warre is the remedy for a State surfeited with peace, it is a medicine for Commonwealths sicke of too much ease and tranquillitie’.² Such attitudes were to persist, unchanged in essentials, until the cataclysm of 1914.

Moreover, in an age with nothing approaching modern police forces crime, disorder, riot, discontent of any kind which might erupt in violence, were a continual threat. A war which swept, often forcibly, the unemployed, the vagrant, the starving and the criminal into the army, and sent them off to fight and die comfortably far from home, very often seemed to the respectable a valuable social safety-valve. Foreign war might well be the best of all guarantees of domestic peace.³ At the very end of this period an English preacher could still see it as a welcome opportunity ‘to cleanse the city and rid the country of as much as may be of those straggling vagrants, loytering fellowes and lewd livers … which doe so swarme among us’;⁴ and feelings of this kind were also to survive for centuries to come. Queen Elizabeth herself told a French ambassador in the 1590s that the English soldiers then in France ‘were but thieves and ought to hang’.⁵ Of more strictly political weight was the argument that foreign war provided an essential safety-valve for aggressive energies which otherwise would find a potentially disastrous outlet in factional struggles at home. The existence almost everywhere of a noble and gentry class trained and fit for little but fighting lent force to this claim. It was put most persuasively during the wars of religion in France from the 1560s onwards, in which soldiers returned from fighting in Italy or on France’s north-eastern frontier played an important part; and it is not surprising to find a veteran French professional soldier then asserting, in terms which many contemporaries would have agreed with, that ‘A great estate replenished with warlike people, ought still to have some foreine warre wherewith to keep it occupied, lest being at quiet they (sic) convert their weapons against each other’. In the same vein a Venetian writer in 1589 could argue that Spain then enjoyed domestic tranquillity because she was so deeply involved in foreign wars ‘that thought or the actual deeds of war occupy the Spaniards and their own country enjoys perfect peace: the evil humours have been driven elsewhere’. Even in Elizabethan England the government sometimes used the conscription of men to fight abroad as a means of averting possible unrest at home.⁶

Again, belief in the supreme importance of honour, the pervasive emphasis on personal glory and prestige, the persistence of a legacy of chivalric attitudes, meant that to rulers and nobilities alike war was often welcome as an opportunity to achieve these intangible but deeply important objectives. Frequently it was embarked on with what now seems almost criminal light-heartedness, without any clear idea of how it was to be paid for or what it might reasonably hope to achieve. At the very summit of society, to command successfully on the field of battle gave a monarch prestige as nothing else could. The young Henry VIII of England was perhaps the most obvious of a number of rulers who showed themselves very conscious of this fact; and the two who dominated the first half of the sixteenth century in western Europe, Francis I of France and the Emperor Charles V, were both at times prominent on the battlefield. There were certainly kings with different attitudes. Ferdinand VII of Aragon, Henry VII of England and Louis XII of France played little active military role (though this seemed unusual, perhaps even a little suspect, to their contemporaries). Philip II of Spain was only twice in his life, as a young man, even distantly involved in military operations, and never commanded on the battlefield. Nevertheless the ideal of the ruler who vindicated his territorial or dynastic claims by war, and if possible by personal leadership in the field, remained a powerful one. After all, the Church had for centuries taught that a just war was fully permissible; and arguments could always be found to maintain the justice of almost any conflict, even between Christians. War against the infidel, it went without saying, was not merely permissible but highly praiseworthy.

Further down the social scale the nobility and gentry in every European state often found war a field of opportunity, a source of personal gratification and material gain. To a class essentially military in origin it was a natural and welcome outlet for their energies; and here too the lure of fame and personal reputation was often important. To the minor nobility and gentry in particular, seldom wealthy, usually poorly educated and in any case contemptuous of sedentary civilian occupations, war could mean profit, even riches. Booty, best of all a really important prisoner able to pay a large ransom, could be a very welcome windfall to some poor squire or provincial noble. To the great bulk of society, to the tradesman, the artisan, the peasant, glory or profit hardly entered into the picture. But here also the assumption of the inevitability of war was complete. Like a hard winter or a poor harvest it was something very unwelcome but at the same time unavoidable. There might well be grumbling, even serious discontent, over some particular demand made or loss suffered as a result of some particular conflict. A new tax or an interruption of some established trading link might provoke serious opposition. But rejection of war as such, any idea that it could be banished from human life, struck no significant responsive chord at any level of society.

The lack of clear definitions

War was still, by the standards of the present day, very badly delimited. It was strikingly lacking in the clear definitions we now take for granted. It was possible, even normal, for there to be quite serious fighting between the subjects of two states without any formal declaration of war; and constant low-level hostilities of this kind were greatly encouraged by the fact that almost all frontiers were still very badly and vaguely defined. Indeed the modern idea of a frontier, a line precisely drawn and clearly demarcated, did not as yet exist. For generations to come frontiers were to remain badly defined zones, usually criss-crossed by traditional jurisdictions and privileges of many kinds, so that individuals or institutions subject to one ruler might assert rights to collect dues or taxes from the subjects of another.

Such a situation was almost inevitable in an age when maps were rare and the few that existed were extremely rudimentary. Without adequate maps men were still, in a sense, blind, unable to envisage frontiers in any large-scale or strategic way. Until the treaties of Madrid in 1526 and Cambrai in 1529, for example, it was hardly possible to speak at all of a frontier in any meaningful sense between France and the Low Countries. Such vagueness helped to make possible local conflicts, often on a considerable scale, even while the rulers on each side of these very vaguely defined boundaries remained at least technically at peace. In eastern and east-central Europe, where geographical divisions between states were even less well defined and the control of rulers over their subjects, especially on the periphery of their territories, was even less effective than in the west, this situation was still more marked. An outstanding example is the boundary area in Hungary and Croatia between the Ottoman Empire and the territories of the Austrian Habsburgs. Even after the Turkish conquest of most of Hungary in the 1520s and 1530s many Hungarian nobles kept up claims to rights of various kinds over their former lands – to levy feudal dues there or even to live on them tax-free for limited periods – and these were to play for generations to come a role in Habsburg–Ottoman negotiations.⁷ The second half of the sixteenth century saw the frontier between the two powers become relatively stable; but it was hardly better defined. Yet conflict of this kind, however frequent and destructive, did not by itself mean formal war. The Treaty of Sitva-Torok in 1606 began an unprecedentedly long period of official peace between Habsburgs and Ottomans; but even after this much frontier raiding went on, with a tacit understanding that this did not amount to war if the forces involved on each side were of less than a certain size.⁸

There were other ways in which the dividing line between war and peace, so clear to modern eyes, could be blurred. A government might allow or encourage its subjects to attack the forces and territory of another, quite openly and on a large scale, or even use its own army and navy in this way, without any formal declaration of hostilities. War of this unofficial but sometimes serious kind became particularly important in the later decades of the sixteenth century as the power of Spain reached its zenith. The desire of other states to resist its growth, combined with their hesitations about challenging the greatest power in Europe, meant that this sort of underhand or semi-official war played for some years a very significant role. Thus in 1572 a French army commanded by a Huguenot leader, the Sieur de Genlis, attempted without any declaration of war (and with notable lack of success) to raise the Spanish siege of Mons in the southern Netherlands. In the same way a French fleet took a leading part in the unsuccessful Portuguese attack on the Azores, now Spanish-held, in 1582, while three years later Drake raided destructively Spanish settlements in the Caribbean, without either France or England having declared war on Philip II. At sea particularly the situation was confused and chaotic. The very widespread issue to privateers (who were often hard to distinguish from pirates) of letters of marque which gave them at least some claim to legitimacy did much to blur the dividing line between peace and war. The use, often on a large scale, of privately owned ships to supplement the small navies which were usually all that governments could afford, meant that even when war had been declared a naval expedition might be a private enterprise rather than an official act of hostility. Nor were the rights of neutrals any more clearly defined than the distinction between peace and war. In particular it was widely argued that a belligerent state had the right, in attacking its enemy, to move its forces across the territory of a neutral provided that it paid compensation for any damage these might do on their march (the so-called right of transitus innoxius). This alleged right was often resisted by the neutral states concerned, and belligerent ones tended to avoid unnecessary use of it; but it remained none the less a significant element in the structure of international relations. In a whole series of ways, therefore, war during this period lacked the clear definitions and precise dividing lines that it has since acquired.

War: seldom decisive

War, then, was endemic in sixteenth-century Europe. Yet of all the many struggles that mark the age, remarkably few ended in decisive victory for one of the combatants if these were at all evenly matched. Sweeping territorial gains, spectacular conquests, were very hard to achieve, at least in the western half of the continent. (The one great example of such conquests, those of the Ottomans in the Balkans and Hungary, was achieved at the expense of opponents militarily much weaker and often socially deeply divided.) For this situation there were several explanations; but one is of overriding importance. War was expensive and becoming more so. Though rulers spent money on other things – on their courts and palaces, on their civilian administrative machines, on gifts to favoured ministers and generals, even on the diplomatic services that were slowly taking shape – the costs of present wars and the debts incurred to pay for past ones were incomparably the greatest drain on their finances. Yet no government, not even that of Spain as she began to draw great resources from her American possessions in the later decades of the century, could sustain a long struggle on a large scale without crippling financial difficulties. Louis XII of France, as he planned a new assault on Italy in the first years of the century, was told by one of his chief commanders, a very experienced Italian, that for success in such an undertaking three things were needed: ‘money, more money, and yet more money’. This was the voice of realism. But no ruler, however grandiose his ambitions, was ever rich enough to achieve great and lasting conquests in the face of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Instruments of International Relations: Armies and Navies
• 2 The Instruments of International Relations: Trade and Finance
• 3 The Instruments of International Relations: Diplomats and Diplomacy
• 4 The Birth of Valois–Habsburg Rivalry, 1494–1529
• 5 The Empire of Charles V and Its Enemies, 1529–59
• 6 Spanish Power and Resistance To It, 1559–85
• 7 Spanish Power Checked but Unbroken, 1585–1609
• 8 Approach to Conflict, 1609–18
• 9 The Ottomans and Europe
• 10 Eastern and Northern Europe: The Russian Advance
• Chronology
• For Further Reading
• Maps
• Index