3.1 Contextualizing State Building

The 1600s were hard. The Little Ice Age, a long period of cooler temperatures that was especially severe in the 1600s, shortened growing seasons and caused crop failures. Plague still returned. The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) wrecked central Europe, and states raised taxes to pay for bigger armies.

Many places saw revolts around the same time: the Catalan revolt against the Spanish crown (1640), Portugal's break from Spain (1640), a revolt in Naples (1647), riots in Moscow (1648), the Fronde in France (1648–1653) and the English Civil War (1642–1651). Historians call this the general crisis of the 17th century and debate its main cause. Some stress economic strain, others conflict between royal courts and the provinces, and others the climate.

War was the main driver. Armies were growing, gunpowder weapons and new fortresses were expensive, and rulers needed reliable taxes. To get them, monarchs tried to override local privileges, the special rights that nobles, provinces, towns and churches had long held.

Rulers justified this with divine right of kings, the idea that monarchs get their authority directly from God and answer only to God. James I of England wrote in its defense, and in France the bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet later argued it from the Bible. In 1651 Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan offered a non-religious case: people are so violent in a state of nature that they must hand power to a strong sovereign to keep peace.

Kings also ran into regions with their own languages and traditions. Catalans and Portuguese rose against Castile's demands in 1640, Bohemia's Protestant nobles, defending their kingdom's traditional rights, rejected their Habsburg king in 1618, and Scots and Irish resisted rule from London in the 1630s and 1640s. The Dutch Revolt (see 2.4) was the most successful case of a region breaking away.

Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII from 1624 to 1642, put the interests of the state first. He sent royal officials called intendants to oversee the provinces, tore down nobles' castles and besieged the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle (1627–1628). The Peace of Alais (1629) left Huguenots their worship but took away their fortified towns and military rights.

When Louis XIV inherited the throne as a child, his minister Cardinal Mazarin kept raising taxes for war. The Fronde (1648–1653) was a series of revolts by the Paris law courts and then great nobles. It failed because the rebels were divided, but it left the young king with a lasting fear of disorder and of powerful nobles.

States came out of the crisis on two broad paths. In absolutism, a monarch claimed full power without sharing it with a representative body, as in France under Louis XIV and Russia under Peter the Great (see 3.7). In constitutionalism, power was limited by law and shared with a parliament or elected body, as in England after 1688 and the Dutch Republic (see 3.2 and 3.5).