BA Semester IV- Rise of the Moderns West-II (BAHS CC 401) Dr. Mukesh Kumar UNIT-I 17 Century European Crisis

BA Semester IV- Rise of the Moderns West-II (BAHS CC 401) Dr. Mukesh Kumar UNIT-I 17th Century European Crisis: The two decades of war and occupation in the mid-17th century, which in the case of Lithuania gave a foretaste of the 18th-century partitions, ruined and exhausted the Commonwealth. Famines and epidemics followed hostilities, and the population dropped from roughly 11 to 7 million. The number of inhabitants of Kraków and Warsaw fell by two-thirds and one-half, respectively. Wilno was burned down. The Khmelnytsky uprising decimated the Jews in Ukraine, even if they recovered fairly rapidly demographically. The productivity of agriculture diminished dramatically owing to labour shortages, the destruction of many farm buildings and farming implements, and the loss of numerous cattle. The dynamic network of international trade fairs also collapsed. Grain exports, which had reached their peak in the early 17th century, could not redress the un favourable balance of trade with western Europe. Losses of art treasures the Swedes engaged in systematic looting were irreplaceable. The Commonwealth never fully recovered, unlike Muscovy, which had suffered almost as much during the Time of Troubles. Twentieth-century Marxist historians blamed the manorial economy based on serf labour for pauperizing the masses and undermining the towns, yet the Polish economy was not unique in that respect. Moreover, some attempts to replace serfs with rent-paying tenants did not prove to be a panacea. The economic factor must therefore be treated jointly with other structural weaknesses of the Commonwealth that militated against recovery. The 17th-century crisis a European phenomenon was basically a crisis of political authority. In the Commonwealth the perennial financial weakness was the central issue. The state budget in the second half of the century amounted to 10-11 million złotys, as compared with the equivalent of about 360 million in France or 240 million in England. About nine-tenths of it went for military purposes, compared with half in Brandenburg and more than three-fifths in France and Russia. This was true even after the chastising experience of the Swedish “deluge.” Most nobles contented themselves with invoking the special protection of St. Mary, symbolically crowned queen of Poland, as a sufficient safeguard. Political stagnation Those wishing to reform the state without strengthening the monarchy wanted to make the Sejm an effective centre of power. In 1652 the notorious and often misunderstood practice of liberum veto (free veto) appeared: a single negative vote by a member of the Sejm was considered sufficient to block the proceedings. It was argued that unanimity was essential for passing laws, for deputies, as representatives of the local sejmiki, were bound by instructions. Moreover, a majority could disregard local interests and be corrupted by the administration. Hence, liberum veto came to be regarded as the kernel of liberty and a safeguard against tyranny. In reality, the dissenting deputy was usually an instrument of a magnate or even of the king. The liberum veto could paralyze the functioning of the state, and in the 17th century it was used sparingly. The weakening of the Sejm meant that some of its functions, notably in matters of taxation, had to pass to local sejmiki. Without a central bureaucracy and with a dual structure of offices in the Crown and Lithuania, the fragmentation of sovereignty became increasingly ominous. The attempts at reform by John Casimir and his energetic wife, Marie Louise, may have been ill-conceived, but, given the factional strife within the oligarchy, it was difficult for the monarch to find a stable base of support. The szlachta, ever suspicious of anything that could smack of absolutism, was naturally opposed. The royal plans were defeated by a rokosz in 1665- 66 led by Marshal Jerzy Lubomirski. Two years later the frustrated John Casimir abdicated and settled in France, having prophetically warned the Sejm that Poland would fall victim to its rapacious neighbours unless it reformed its ways. Cultural changes- The prevalent mentality in the Commonwealth in the 17th century manifested itself in Sarmatism. The name came from alleged ancestors of the Sarmatians, and the concept served to integrate the multiethnic nobility. Representing a symbiosis of a political ideology and a lifestyle typical of a landowning, rather provincial, tightly knit, and increasingly xenophobic culture, Sarmatism extolled the virtues of the szlachta and contrasted them with Western values. An Orientalization of Polish-Lithuanian culture (including modes and manners) was occurring. Roman Catholicism was Sarmatized in its turn, assuming a more intolerant posture toward other denominations. The struggles against Lutheran Swedes and Prussians, Orthodox Russians, and Muslim Turks and Tatars strengthened the belief in Poland’s mission as a Catholic bastion. The expulsion in 1658 of Polish Brethren accused of collaboration with the Swedes when taken together with the virtual elimination of non-Catholics from public offices, was the first harbinger of the Pole-Catholic syndrome (the notion that a true Pole must be a Catholic). Decline and attempts at reform The Lubomirski rokosz was barely over and the truce with Muscovy newly signed when the Cossacks in the Polish part of divided Ukraine submitted to Turkey and called for Tatar aid against Poland. Victories won by Hetman Jan (John III) Sobieski only temporarily forestalled the threat, and in 1672 the Commonwealth faced a major invasion by Turkey. The fall of the key border fortress Kamieniec Podolski was followed by the humiliating Peace of Buczacz. The Commonwealth lost the provinces of Podolia and Bratslav and part of Kiev, which remained under Turkish rule for more than 20 years, and it had to pay a tribute to the Sublime Porte. Sobieski’s victory over the Turks at Chocim in 1673 was not exploited, because of the lack of financial means, but it paved the way for Sobieski’s election to the Polish throne. His predecessor, Michael Korybut Wiśniowiecki who had followed John Casimir reigned for only four years (1669-73) and proved utterly incapable. Sobieski, ruling as John III (1674-96), sought to improve Poland’s position and at first considered conquering Prussia in alliance with France. But that plan did not succeed. With the papacy and the Habsburgs preparing for all-out war against Turkey, John reverted to an anti- Turkish policy and concluded an alliance with Austria. In 1683 he led a relief army to a Vienna besieged by the Turks and, as supreme commander of the allied forces, won a resounding victory that marked the beginning of Turkish withdrawal from Europe. The Commonwealth, however, did not share in the subsequent victorious Austrian campaigns. Poland became a secondary partner, and, when the final peace with Turkey was concluded with the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, the Poles recovered only the lost Ukrainian lands. By that time John was no longer alive, and Augustus II, the elector of Saxony, had succeeded him on the throne (reigned 1697–1733). The English revolution and preludes to the industrial revolution- Defoe, traversing England in 1722, drew a patriotic picture of “the most flourishing and opulent country in the world,” of green fields and overflowing crops, of pastures rambled by golden fleece, of lush grass turning into plump kine, of peasants roistering in rural sports, squires organizing peasants, nobles organizing squires, lordly manors giving law and discipline to villages, and now and then, refuge to poets and philosophers. Word peddlers tend to idealize the countryside, if they are exempt from its harassments, boredom, insects, and toil. Rural life in the England of 1715 was very much as it had been for a thousand years. Each village almost each household was a self-contained economic unit, growing its own food, making its own clothing, cutting its timber for building and fuel from the adjacent woods. Each family baked its bread, hunted its venison, salted its meat, made its butter, jellies, and cheese. It spun and wove and sewed; it tanned leather and cobbled shoes; it made most of its utensils, implements, and tools. So father, mother, and children found work and expression not only in the summer fields but in the long winter evenings; the home was a hub of industry as well as of agriculture. The wife was an honored mistress of many arts, from nursing her husband and rearing a dozen children to making frocks and brewing ale. She kept and dispensed the household medicines; she took care of the garden, the pigs, and the fowl. Marriage was a union of helpmates; the family was an economic as well as a social organism, and had thereby a solid reason and basis for its unity, multiplication, and permanence. The peasants might have been content with the varied vitality of their homes if they had been allowed to preserve their ancient ways in the fields. They remembered when the landlord had permitted them, or their forebears, to graze their livestock on the manor’s common fields, to fish freely in its streams, to cut wood in its forest; now, by a process begun in the sixteenth century, most of the “commons” had been enclosed by the owners, and the peasants found it hard to make ends meet. There was no serfdom left, and no formal feudal dues; but enterprising landlords, and city merchants investing in land, were farming on a larger scale, with more capital, better implements, greater skill, and wider markets than were available to yeomen tilling their narrow areas. Gregory King had reckoned some 180,000 such freeholders in the England of 1688. Voltaire, about 1730, reported “in England many peasants with 200,000 francs’ worth of property, and who do not disdain to continue cultivating the earth that has enriched them, and in which they live free”; but this may have been propaganda for French stimulation.

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