The Emergence of Modern Europe

c. 1500 to 1788

Britannica Educational Publishing, Heather Campbell

• Publisher: Britannica Educational Publishing
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781615303939
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

At the end of the Renaissance, the Western world was beginning to change. Explorers brought back treasures from other lands. Merchants helped develop the rudiments of a modern economy. The new Protestant religion swept across Europe, sparking the brutal Thirty Year's War with Roman Catholics. By the time of the French Revolution, the world had been introduced to the distinct entities that still largely make up present-day Europe, and to the revolutionary social, cultural, and political philosophies of the enlightenment. Within these pages, readers will encounter the developments that altered the course of Europe's early modern era. The volume contains a wealth of thoroughly researched information complemented by beautiful photographs to draw readers into the remarkable history of the development of this powerful continent.

CHAPTER 1
EUROPEAN ECONOMY AND SOCIETY, C. 1500–1648

The 16th century was a period of vigorous economic expansion. This expansion in turn played a major role in the many other transformations—social, political, and cultural—of the early modern age. By 1500 the population in most areas of Europe was increasing after two centuries of decline or stagnation. The bonds of commerce within Europe tightened, and the “wheels of commerce” (in the phrase of the 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel) spun ever faster. The great geographic discoveries then in process were integrating Europe into a world economic system. New commodities, many of them imported from recently discovered lands, enriched material life. Not only trade but also the production of goods increased as a result of new ways of organizing production. Merchants, entrepreneurs, and bankers accumulated and manipulated capital in unprecedented volume. Most historians locate in the 16th century the beginning, or at least the maturing, of Western capitalism. Capital assumed a major role not only in economic organization but also in political life and international relations. Culturally, new values—many of them associated with the Renaissance and Reformation—diffused through Europe and changed the ways in which people acted and the perspectives by which they viewed themselves and the world.

This world of early capitalism, however, can hardly be regarded as stable or uniformly prosperous. Financial crashes were common; the Spanish crown, the heaviest borrower in Europe, suffered repeated bankruptcies (in 1557, 1575–77, 1596, 1607, 1627, and 1647). The poor and destitute in society became, if not more numerous, at least more visible. Even as capitalism advanced in the West, the once-free peasants of central and eastern Europe slipped into serfdom. The apparent prosperity of the 16th century gave way in the middle and late periods of the 17th century to a “general crisis” in many European regions. Politically, the new centralized states insisted on new levels of cultural conformity on the part of their subjects. Several states expelled Jews, and almost all of them refused to tolerate religious dissenters. Culturally, in spite of the revival of ancient learning and the reform of the churches, a hysterical fear of witches grasped large segments of the population, including the learned. Understandably, historians have had difficulty defining the exact place of this complex century in the course of European development.

THE ECONOMIC BACKGROUND

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The century’s economic expansion owed much to powerful changes that were already under way by 1500. At that time, Europe comprised only between one-third and one-half the population it had possessed about 1300. The infamous Black Death of 1347–50 principally accounts for the huge losses, but plagues were recurrent, famines frequent, wars incessant, and social tensions high as the Middle Ages ended. The late medieval disasters radically transformed the structures of European society—the ways by which it produced food and goods, distributed income, organized its society and state, and looked at the world.

The huge human losses altered the old balances among the classical “factors of production”—labour, land, and capital. The fall in population forced up wages in the towns and depressed rents in the countryside, as the fewer workers remaining could command a higher “scarcity value.” In contrast, the costs of land and capital fell; both grew relatively more abundant and cheaper as human numbers shrank. Expensive labour and cheap land and capital encouraged “factor substitution,” the replacement of the costly factor (labour) by the cheaper ones (land and capital). This substitution of land and capital for labour can be seen, for example, in the widespread conversions of arable land to pastures; a few shepherds, supplied with capital (sheep) and extensive pastures, could generate a higher return than plowland, intensively farmed by many well-paid labourers.

Capital could also support the technology required to develop new tools, enabling labourers to work more productively. The late Middle Ages was accordingly a period of significant technological advances linked with high capital investment in labour-saving devices. The development of printing by movable metal type substituted an expensive machine, the press, for many human copyists. Gunpowder and firearms gave smaller armies greater fighting power. Changes in shipbuilding and in the development of navigational aids allowed bigger ships to sail with smaller crews over longer distances. By 1500 Europe achieved what it had never possessed before: a technological edge over all other civilizations. Europe was thus equipped for worldwide expansion.

Social changes also were pervasive. With a falling population, the cost of basic foodstuffs (notably wheat) declined. With cheaper food, people in both countryside and city could use their higher earnings to diversify and improve their diets—to consume more meat, dairy products, and beverages. They also could afford more manufactured products from the towns, to the benefit of the urban economies. The 14th century is rightly regarded as the golden age of working people.

Economic historians have traditionally envisioned the falling costs of the basic foodstuffs (cereals) and the continuing firm price of manufactures as two blades of a pair of open scissors. These price scissors diverted income from countryside to town. The late medieval price movements thus favoured urban artisans over peasants and merchants over landlords. Towns achieved a new weight in society; the number of towns counting more than 10,000 inhabitants increased from 125 in about 1300 to 154 in 1500, even as the total population was dropping. These changes undermined the leadership of the landholding nobility and enhanced the power and influence of the great merchants and bankers of the cities. The 16th would be a “bourgeois century.”

Culturally, the disasters of the late Middle Ages had the effect of altering attitudes and in particular of undermining the medieval faith that speculative reason could master the secrets of the universe. In an age of ferocious and unpredictable epidemics, the accidental and the unexpected, chance or fate, rather than immutable laws, seemed to dominate the course of human affairs. In an uncertain world, the surest, safest philosophical stance was empiricism. In formal philosophy, this new priority given to the concrete and the observable over and against the abstract and the speculative was known as nominalism. In social life, there was evident a novel emphasis on close observation, on the need to study each changing situation to arrive at a basis for action.

The 16th century thus owed much to trends originating in the late Middle Ages. It would, however, be wrong to view its history simply as a playing out of earlier movements. New developments proper to the century also shaped its achievements. Those developments affected population; money and prices; agriculture, trade, manufacturing, and banking; social and political institutions; and cultural attitudes. Historians differ widely in the manner in which they structure and relate these various developments; they argue over what should be regarded as causes and what as effects. But they are reasonably agreed concerning the general nature of these trends.

DEMOGRAPHICS

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For the Continent as a whole, the population growth under way by 1500 continued over the “long” 16th century until the second or third decade of the 17th century. A recent estimate by the American historian Jan De Vries set Europe’s population (excluding Russia and the Ottoman Empire) at 61.6 million in 1500, 70.2 million in 1550, and 78.0 million in 1600; it then lapsed back to 74.6 million in 1650. The distribution of population across the Continent was also shifting. Northwestern Europe (especially the Low Countries and the British Isles) witnessed the most vigorous expansion; England’s population more than doubled between 1500, when it stood at an estimated 2.6 million, and 1650, when it probably attained 5.6 million. Northwestern Europe also largely escaped the demographic downturn of the mid-17th century, which was especially pronounced in Germany, Italy, and Spain. In Germany, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) may have cost the country, according to different estimates, between 25 and 40 percent of its population.

Cities also grew, though slowly at first. The proportion of Europeans living in cities with 10,000 or more residents increased from 5.6 percent of the total population in 1500 to only 6.3 percent in 1550. The towns of England continued to suffer a kind of depression, now often called “urban decay,” in the first half of the century. The process of urbanization then accelerated, placing 7.6 percent of the population in cities by 1600, and even continued during the 17th-century crisis. The proportion of population in cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants reached 8.3 percent in 1650.

More remarkable than the slow growth in the number of urban residents was the formation of cities of a size never achieved in the medieval period. These large cities were of two principal types. Capitals and administrative centres—such as Naples, Rome, Madrid, Paris, Vienna, and Moscow—give testimony to the new powers of the state and its ability to mobilize society’s resources in support of courts and bureaucracies. Naples, one of Europe’s largest cities in 1550, was also one of its poorest. The demographic historian J.C. Russell theorized that Naples’ swollen size was indicative of the community’s “loss of control” over its numbers. Already in the 16th century, Naples was a prototype of the big, slum-ridden, semiparasitic cities to be found in many poorer regions of the world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Commercial ports, which might also have been capitals, formed a second set of large cities: examples include Venice, Livorno, Sevilla (Seville), Lisbon, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Bremen, and Hamburg. About 1550, Antwerp was the chief port of the north. In 1510, the Portuguese moved their trading station from Brugge to Antwerp, making it the chief northern market for the spices they were importing from India. The Antwerp bourse, or exchange, simultaneously became the leading money market of the north. At its heyday in mid-century, the city counted 90,000 inhabitants. The revolt of the Low Countries against Spanish rule (from 1568) ruined Antwerp’s prosperity. Amsterdam, which replaced it as the greatest northern port, grew from 30,000 in 1550 to 65,000 in 1600 and 175,000 in 1650. The mid-17th century—a period of recession in many European regions—was Holland’s golden age. Late in the century, Amsterdam faced the growing challenge of another northern port, which was also the capital of a powerful national state—London. With 400,000 residents by 1650 and growing rapidly, London then ranked below only Paris (440,000) as Europe’s largest city. Urban concentrations of such magnitude were unprecedented; in the Middle Ages, the largest size attained was roughly 220,000, reached by a single city, Paris, about 1328.

Life wasn’t all hardship in early modern Europe. This 1650 painting by artist Jan Steen shows a lively scene in a Dutch tavern. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Another novelty of the 16th century was the appearance of urban systems, or hierarchies of cities linked together by their political or commercial functions. Most European cities had been founded in medieval or even in ancient times, but they long remained intensely competitive, duplicated each other’s functions, and never coalesced during the Middle Ages into tight urban systems. The more intensive, more far-flung commerce of the early modern age required a clearer distribution of functions and cooperation as much as competition. The centralization of governments in the 16th century also demanded clearly defined lines of authority and firm divisions of functions between national and regional capitals.

TRADE AND THE “ATLANTIC REVOLUTION”

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The new importance of northwestern Europe in terms of overall population and concentration of large cities reflects in part the “Atlantic revolution,” the redirection of trade routes brought about by the great geographic discoveries. The Atlantic revolution, however, did not so much replace the old lines of medieval commerce as build upon them. In the Middle Ages, Italian ports—Venice and Genoa in particular—dominated trade with the Middle East and supplied Europe with Eastern wares and spices. In the north, German cities, organized into a loose federation known as the Hanseatic League, similarly dominated Baltic trade. When the Portuguese in 1498 opened direct maritime links with India, Venice faced the competition of the Atlantic ports, first Lisbon and Antwerp. Nonetheless, Venice effectively responded to the new competition and attained in the 16th century its apogee of commercial importance; in most of its surviving monuments, this beautiful city still reflects its 16th-century prosperity. Genoa was not well placed to take advantage of the Atlantic discoveries, but Genoese bankers played a central role in the finances of Spain’s overseas empire and in its military ventures in Europe. Italians did not quickly relinquish the prominence as merchants and bankers that had distinguished them in the Middle Ages.

In the north, the Hanseatic towns faced intensified competition from the Dutch, who from about 1580 introduced a new ship design (the fluitschip, a sturdy, cheaply built cargo vessel) and new techniques of shipbuilding, including wind-powered saws. Freight charges dropped and the size of the Dutch merchant marine soared; by the mid-17th century, it probably exceeded in number of vessels all the other mercantile fleets of Europe combined. The English competed for a share in the Baltic trade, though they long remained well behind the Dutch.

In absolute terms, Baltic trade was booming. In 1497 the ships passing through the sound separating Denmark from Sweden numbered 795; 100 years later the number registered by the toll collectors reached 6,673. The percentage represented by Hanseatic ships rose over the same century from roughly 20 to 23–25 percent; the Germans were not yet routed from these eastern waters.

In terms of maritime trade, the Atlantic revolution may well have stimulated rather than injured the older exchanges. At the same time, new competition from the western ports left both Hanseatics and Italians vulnerable to the economic downturn of the 17th century. For both the Hanseatic and Italian cities, the 17th—and not the 16th—century was the age of decline. At Lübeck in 1628, at the last meeting of the Hanseatic towns, only 11 cities were represented, and later attempts to call a general meeting ended in failure.

PRICES AND INFLATION

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In historical accounts, the glamour of the overseas discoveries tends to overshadow the intensification of exchanges within the Continent. Intensified exchanges led to the formation of large integrated markets for at least some commodities. Differences in the price of wheat in the various European regions leveled out as the century progressed, and prices everywhere tended to fluctuate in the same direction. The similar price movements over large areas mark the emergence of a single integrated market in cereals. Certain regions came to specialize in wheat production and to sell their harvests to distant consumers. In particular, the lands of the Vistula basin, southern Poland, and Ruthenia (western Ukraine) became regular suppliers of grain to Flanders, Holland, western Germany, and, in years of poor harvests, even England and Spain. In times of famine, Italian states also imported cereals from the far-off Baltic breadbasket. From about 1520, Hungary emerged as a principal supplier of livestock to Austria, southern Germany, and northern Italy.

Changes in price levels in the 16th century profoundly affected every economic sector, but in ways that are disputed. The period witnessed a general inflation, known traditionally as the “price revolution.” It was rooted in part in frequent monetary debasements; the French kings, for example, debased or altered their chief coinage, the livre tournois, in 1519, 1532, 1549, 1561, 1571–75 (four mutations), and 1577. Probably more significant (though even this is questioned) was the infusion of new stocks of precious metal, especially silver, into the money supply. The medieval economy had suffered from a chronic shortage of precious metals. From the late 15th century, however, silver output, especially from German mines, increased and remained high through the 1530s. New techniques of sinking and draining shafts, extracting ore, and refining silver made mining a booming industry. From 1550 “American treasure,” chiefly from the great silver mine at Potosí in Peru (now in Bolivia), arrived in huge volumes in Spain, and from Spain it flowed to the many European regions where Spain had significant military or political engagements. Experts estimate (albeit on shaky grounds) that the stock of monetized silver increased by three or three and a half times during the 16th century.

At the same time, the growing numbers of people who had to be fed, clothed, and housed assured that coins would circulate rapidly. In monetary theory, the level of prices varies directly with the volume of money and the velocity of its circulation. New sources of silver and new numbers of people thus launched (or at least reinforced) pervasive inflation. According to one calculation, prices rose during the century in nominal terms by a factor of six and in real terms by a factor of three. The rate is low by modern standards, but it struck a society accustomed to stability. As early as 1568 the French political theorist Jean Bodin perceptively attributed the inflation to the growing volume of circulating coin, but many others, especially those victimized by inflation, chose to blame it on the greed of monopolists. Inflation contributed no small part to the period’s social tensions.

Inflation always redistributes wealth; it penalizes creditors and those who live on fixed rents or revenues; it rewards debtors and entrepreneurs who can take immediate advantage of rising prices. Moreover, prices tend to rise faster than wages. For the employer, costs (chiefly wages) lag behind receipts (set by prices), and this forms what is classically known as “profit inflation.” This profit inflation has attracted the interest of economists as well as historians; especially notable among the former is the great British economic theorist John Maynard Keynes. In a treatise on money published in 1930, he attributed to the 16th-century price revolution and profit inflation a crucial role in the primitive accumulation of capital and in the birth of capitalism itself. His analysis has attracted much criticism. Wages lagged not so much behind the prices of manufactured goods as of agricultural commodities, and inflation may not have increased profits at all. Then, too, inflation in Spain (particularly pronounced in the 1520s), or later in France, did not lead to a burst of enterprise. There is no mechanical connection between price structures and behaviour.

On the other hand, the price revolution certainly stimulated the economy. It clearly penalized the inactive. Those who wished to do no more than maintain their traditional standard of living had, nonetheless, to assume an active economic stance. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: European Economy and Society, c. 1500–1648
• Chapter 2: European Politics and Diplomacy, c. 1500–1648
• Chapter 3: The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–48
• Chapter 4: European Society and Economy, c. 1648–1788
• Chapter 5: The Rise of Absolutism
• Chapter 6: The Enlightenment
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index