VIII

LUMEN

Part II

Enlightenment and Absolutism, c.1650–1789

MASON

ON St John Baptist’s Day 1717, representatives from London’s four existing freemasons’ lodges met at the Goose and Gridiron alehouse to form a ‘Mother Grand Lodge of the World’ and to elect their first Grand Master. Though the minutes did not survive, historians of freemasonry do not question that the meeting took place, or that London’s Grand Lodge was henceforth the nerve-centre of an international movement.1

The earlier history of freemasonry is murky. The story of a thirteenth-century papal bull creating a society of church-builders is pure fiction. Connections with the medieval commecines or steinmetzen, still more with an underground association of ex-Templars, are quite unproved. A report of 1723 contained the jingle:

If history be no ancient Fable
Freemasons came from the Tower of Babel.

The earliest reliable references point to seventeenth-century Scotland, and to contacts with England made during the Civil War. Elias Ashmole (1617–92), the antiquary, astrologer, and founder of the Oxford Museum, made a note of his own initiation in his diary:

1646 Oct 16, 4h 30’ pm. I was made a Freemason at Warrington in Lancashire with Col. Henry Mainwaring of Cheshire. The names of those who were then of the Lodge: Mr Rich. Penket, Warden, Mr. James Collier, Mr. Rich, Sankey, Henry Littler, John Ellam, Richard Ellam, and Hugh Brew.2

The air of mystery surrounding freemasonry is deliberately cultivated. It is attractive to sympathizers, offensive to opponents. Non-initiates are left guessing about its rituals, its hierarchy, its pseudo-oriental jargon, its signs and symbols, and its purposes. The compass and square, the apron and gloves, and the circle on the floor are obviously designed to encourage belief in the movement’s medieval guild origins. But it is the alleged oath of secrecy which has caused the greatest controversy. According to one account, the blindfolded initiate was asked:

‘In Whom do you put your trust?’ and answered, ‘In God.’ ‘Where are you travelling?’ and answered ‘From West to East, to the Light.’ He was then required to promise on the Bible, not to reveal the society’s secrets ‘under no less penalty than having my throat cut across, my tongue torn out, and my body buried in the rough sands of the sea …’

Freemasonry has always acted essentially as a mutual benefit society, though the benefits are nowhere defined. Its enemies have often maintained that it is anti-feminist, since it does not admit women, and antisocial as well as anti-Christian, since its members supposedly help each other with political, commercial, and social contacts to the detriment of others. Freemasons have always stressed their opposition to atheism, their religious tolerance, neutrality in politics, and commitment to charitable works.

Freemasonry expanded dramatically in the eighteenth century. It recruited from the highest ranks of the British aristocracy, and became a lasting pillar of the monarchy. A lodge was founded in Paris in 1725 by expatriate Scots; thereafter it spread to every country of the Continent. It was established in Prague (1726), Warsaw (1755), even St Petersburg. By the time of the Napoleonic wars the network was sufficiently wide for stories to circulate about officers on opposing sides at Borodino or Waterloo giving each other the secret sign of recognition and holding their fire.

In the Catholic countries, freemasonry took an anti-clerical turn and played an important role in the radical Enlightenment.4 Its members were often deists, philosophers, critics of Church and State. In Austria, for example, where the papal bulls denouncing it were not published, it was extremely active in the promotion of the arts until its suppression in 1795. In France, it contributed to the pre-revolutionary ferment. In the nineteenth century and beyond, it would be strongly associated with the cause of Liberalism.

The response of the Catholic Church was unequivocal. The Vatican regarded freemasonry as evil. From the Bull In Eminenti (1738) to Ab Apostolici (1890), the popes condemned it on six separate occasions as conspiratorial, wicked, and subversive. Loyal Catholics could not be freemasons, who were often classed in ultra-Catholic circles as a public enemy alongside Jacobins, Carbonari, and Jews. Totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century were still more hostile. Freemasons were consigned to concentration camps by both Fascists and Communists. In many parts of Europe they could only rebuild their activities after the fall of Fascism, or, in the East, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

Controversy about the role of freemasonry continues. But the most impressive document about freemasonry is its membership list, which is said to include, Francis I of Austria, Frederick II of Prussia, Gustav IV of Sweden, Stanislaw-August of Poland, and Paul I of Russia; Wren, Swift, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gibbon, Goethe, Burns, Wilkes, Burke; Haydn, Mozart, Guillotin, and Marat; Generals Lafayette, Kutuzov, Suvorov, and Wellington; Marshals MacDonald and Poniatowski; Talleyrand, Canning, Scott, Trollope, O’Connell, Pushkin, Liszt, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Kossuth; Leopold I of Belgium, William I of Germany; Eiffel, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Masaryk, Kerensky, Stresemann, and Churchill; and all British kings except one from George IV to George VI. Which shows that the greatest of international secret societies was not completely secret.

PHILIBEG

IN 1727 the chief of the Clan Macdonnell of Glengarry entered the iron-smelting business. He leased the forest of Invergarry to a Quaker forgemaster from Barrow in Lancashire, Thomas Rawlinson, and raised the workforce to cut the timber and man the furnace. Rawlinson, who visited regularly, noticed that the clansmen’s traditional attire, the long breacon or ‘belted plaid’, was hampering their labour. So, consulting the garrison tailor at Inverness, he designed a shorter, pleated, knee-length garment, which would soon be known as the felie-beg, the ‘philibeg’ or small kilt. In this way, the central item of Scotland’s supposedly ancient Highland costume was invented by an Englishman.1

Soon afterwards the second Jacobite Rising was defeated; and the Westminster Parliament banned all Highland dress. For forty years the kilt could not be worn in public, except by the Highland regiments which the British Army was busy recruiting—the Black Watch (1739), the Highland Light Infantry (1777), the Seaforth Highlanders (1778), the Camerons (1793), the Argyll and Sutherlands and the Gordons (1794). In those same decades, whilst the Highland Society in London campaigned for the return of the kilt, male civilians in the Highlands took permanently to trousers,[NOMEN]

In 1822 George IV paid the first royal visit to Edinburgh since the Union. Sir Walter Scott, the novelist, acted as a master of ceremonies. The Highland regiments, who had covered themselves in glory at Waterloo, were paraded in full kilted splendour. All the clan chiefs of Scotland were urged to attend in ‘traditional costume’. They, too, wore kilts, each in a distinctive tartan. Chequered plaid had been woven for centuries by a thriving industry, which supplied the ‘trews’ or tapered breeches of the well-to-do. But its colourful ‘setts’ or patterns had been loosely associated with regions, not with clans; and it had not been used by ordinary folk. The most famous of the setts, the black-and-green tartan of the Campbells, which would be given to the Black Watch, had been known in the trade as ‘Kidd No. 155’, after a Caribbean planter who ordered it for his slaves. Yet the Highland regiments and the gathering of 1822 combined to establish the custom of linking each sett with one particular clan name. They were greatly assisted by the later publication of a finely illustrated but spurious work, the Vestiarium Scoticum (1842), written by two charlatan brothers, the self-styled Sobieski-Stuarts, who held romantic court on the island of Eileann Aigas near Inverness.

The allocation of tartans completed a remarkable process of cultural invention which had been evolving over two centuries. In the first stage, after the founding of the Presbyterian colony in Ulster, the obviously Irish origins of Highland civilization were neglected, then repudiated. A new, exclusively Scottish history and literature were compiled, not least by the brilliant fake poetry of James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’. Supposedly ‘ancient and original’ Highland customs, like the kilt, proved attractive, since they met the demand for an unambiguous national pedigree. In the final stage, which started with the Act of Amnesty (1786), masses of Highland refugees crowded into the Lowlands, and the new traditions were adopted by Scots of all ilks as a mark of their non-Englishness. This highly romantic game was abetted by Queen Victoria, who acquired the estate of Balmoral in 1848, and invented a Balmoral tartan for her own very un-Scottish consort and family.

The Macdonnells of Glengarry did not see the end of this revolution.2 Originally a sept or sub-clan of the Clan Macdonald of Skye, once ‘Lords of the Isles’, their Gaelic name meant ‘sons of Domhnull’, the ‘world ruler’. During intervals of their feud with the Mackenzies, they had always been prominent in the Catholic and Jacobite cause. A Macdonnell carried the standard of James II at Killiecrankie in 1689, and fought again at Sheriffmuir in 1715. His successor fought in the Forty-Five at the head of 600 clansmen, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. But the sixteenth chief sold the ancestral lands and emigrated to New Zealand. Their red, black, dark green, and white tartan has all the signs of a simple and ancient sett. Whether it adorned the original Scottish kilt of 1727 is not known.

In the late nineteenth century, ‘invented tradition’ was mass-produced all over Europe.3 When the German Socialists invented May Day (1890), when the Greeks restaged the Olympic Games (1896), when the Russians marked the founding of the Romanov Dynasty (1913), or the Scots instituted ‘Burns Night’—the Lowlanders’ answer to the kilt, the pipes, and the haggis— they were all seeking to endow their constituents with a common sense of identity.

Within the British Isles, Ireland was a country apart. Though its fate cannot be compared to the harrying of the Scottish highlands, the legacy of conflict was deep and bitter. Both Protestants and Catholics had suffered foul persecution during the religious wars. After 1691 the Protestant supremacy was bolstered by dracon-ian penal laws which denied Catholics the right to office, property, education, and intermarriage. Ireland was excluded from the Union of 1707. It retained its own Parliament, but was still subject to the ancient ‘Poyning’s Law’, which gave automatic control of legislation to the king’s ministers in London. Unlike Scotland, Ireland was not allowed to benefit from free trade with England. Unlike Wales, it did not yet experience any sort of national or cultural revival. With the sole exception of Protestant Ulster, where Huguenot refugees started the prosperous linen industry, it did not participate directly in Britain’s industrial revolution. A rising population made rural distress a fact of life. The famines of 1726–9 and 1739–41 foreshadowed the disaster of the 1840s. The ferocious ‘Whiteboy’ gangs first made their appearance in the countryside in 1761. A movement for reform led by Henry Flood (1732–91) and Henry Grattan (1746–1820) was eventually overtaken by the abortive rebellion of Wolfe Tone and his United Irishmen (1798), and by Ireland’s forcible incorporation into the United Kingdom through the second Act of Union (1801).

Hanoverian Britain lasted for 123 years. The reigns of the four Georges—I (1714–27), II (1727–60), III (1760–1820), and IV (1820–30)—witnessed a truly constitutional monarchy presiding over the acquisition and the loss of an empire, over the world’s first Industrial Revolution, and over the rise of unprecedented naval power which rendered Britain uniquely immune from the Continent’s affairs. Such indeed were the differences between Britain and its Continental neighbours which arose during this period that many insular historians have been led to conceive of British and European history as separate subjects.

In retrospect, the most momentous event of later Hanoverian times is to be found in the loss of thirteen British colonies during the so-called ‘American Revolution’ of 1776–83. Of course, no one in 1776 could possibly have foreseen the full potential of the USA. The thirteen colonies still looked to be very fragile ventures, surrounded by the uncontrolled forces of nature in a largely unexplored continent. Even so, the prospects for the British Empire on the eve of the War of Independence were enormous by any standards. British naval power had already raised the very real possibility that the vast western and mid-western territories of Spain and France in America could be absorbed without serious opposition. (In 1803, the French were indeed obliged to sell their ‘Louisiana’—effectively, the whole of the mid-West—for a song.) Shorn of their most attractive transatlantic possessions, however, the British were increasingly constrained to seek their further imperial fortunes elsewhere, especially in India and Africa.

At the time, the British government was blind to even the most immediate implications. John Hancock was right to sign the Declaration of Independence (1776) in large letters, so that King George could read it ‘without his spectacles’. For Britain’s Continental rivals, the American revolt provided an opportunity for short-term meddling. France and Spain assisted a cause which they would never have tolerated among their own colonists. Yet for all Europeans of conscience it raised issues of fundamental political principle, challenging the very foundations of the monarchies by which almost all of them were ruled. The seven articles of the Constitution to which it gave rise contain the clearest and most practical formulations of the ideals of the Enlightenment. They are short, secular, democratic, republican, rational; firmly grounded in the contract theory of Locke, in English legalism, in Montesquieu’s thoughts on the division of powers, in Rousseau’s concept of the general will. The Constitution was written in the name of’We, the people of the United States’, and has proved remarkably durable. Its irony lies in the fact that many of its leading authors, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, were slave-owners, and that it was wrested from a country which was one of the most free and best-governed of the day.

Prior to the eighteenth century, Savoy had been a frontier province of the Holy Roman Empire. It straddled the ridge of the western Alps between the kingdom of France and the plain of Lombardy. Its ruling house, which claimed to be Europe’s oldest ruling dynasty, was descended from the eleventh-century Count Umberto Biancamano, ‘Humbert of the White Hand’, whose family secured possession of territory on either versant of the Mont Cenis and the Grand St Bernard passes. Its western region—the francophone county of Savoy, including Chambéry, Annecy, and the massif of Mont Blanc—reached to the shore of Lake Geneva. Its eastern region, the Italian-speaking principality of Piedmont, including Aosta, Susa, and Turin, extended as far as the Ligurian riviera. After the rise of the Swiss Confederation the province was cut off from the main body of the Empire, and its rulers in Turin, when raised to the status of imperial dukes, were able to pursue a virtually independent existence. Like his predecessors, Duke Victor Amadeus II (r. 1675–1730) trod a delicate path between his powerful French and Habsburg neighbours. However, by deserting his alliance with Louis XIV at a critical point of the War of the Spanish Succession, he was rewarded by the Emperor with royal status, and the island of Sicily to boot. In 1720 he was obliged by the Austrians to exchange Sicily for the island of Sardinia, thereby ending his reign on the throne of a composite ‘Kingdom of Sardinia’ made up of Savoy, Piedmont, and Sardinia itself. This strange conglomerate, an archetypal product of dynastic politics, a ‘Prussia of the south’, was to turn a century later into the unlikely leader of the movement for Italian unification (see Chapter X).

Spain headed the long procession of countries which were fast losing their former political and economic standing. Under the Bourbon kings—Philip V (r. 1700–46), Ferdinand VI (r. 1746–59), Charles III (r. 1759–88), and Charles IV (r. 1788–1808)—it lost all pretensions to be a great power. Stripped of its Continental possessions except for Parma and Piacenza, and tied to a vast American empire of doubtful value, it stayed under the domination of the grandees, the Church, and the Inquisition. In Philip’s reign alone, 700 autos-da-fé were staged. Some success was achieved in reorganizing the administration on French lines, in embellishing Madrid, and in encouraging cultural life through the Academy (1713). [BASERRIA] [PRADO]

Portugal likewise vegetated under the rule of indifferent monarchs and a militant Church. John V (r. 1706–50), known as ‘The Faithful’, was a priest-king, ‘one of whose sons by an abbess became Inquisitor-General’. The reign of his successor, Joseph I (r. 1750–77), was shattered by the Lisbon earthquake, and restored by the energetic but short-lived reforms of Portugal’s latter-day Colbert, Sebastão, Marquis of Pombal (1699–1782). Pombal probably never uttered the words most frequently attributed to him—’Bury the dead, and feed the living’—but from 1750 he dominated the country for a quarter of a century, reorganizing finance, education, navy, commerce, and colonies. Maria I (r. 1777–1816), like her British contemporary, lapsed into insanity, and Portugal, like Britain, was to pass the whole of the revolutionary period under a regency, [QUAKE]

BASERRIA

THAT the baserria or ‘communal farmstead’ formed the basis of a unique type of social organization in the Basque country is confirmed by the census records of Navarre from 1786. To overcome the succession crises which often beset the single peasant household [GRILLENSTEIN], the Diet of Navarre had confirmed the right of each farmstead to be run by two coresident managerial couples. All the adult members of a farmstead, whether owners or tenants, were empowered to elect an heir or heiress in each generation who would succeed as soon as one of the managerial couples was disabled by death or retirement. The marriages and dowries of the managers and their offspring were also subject to communal approval. As a result, the baserria was r–markably stable in terms of ownership and management, as well as being economically self-sufficient. It was the ‘true repository of Basque culture’ in the face of growing urbanization and industrialization, the bedrock of the Basques’ separate identity until the onset of rural depopulation in recent times. Culture, economy, and social organization were inseparable in a system which preserved one of Europe’s oldest pre-lndo-European peoples through many centuries.1

Eighteenth-century Italy was still divided, even if the lines of division were somewhat altered. The main rivalry now lay between the House of Savoy in Turin, the Austrian Habsburgs, holding Milan, and the Duchy of Tuscany. The re-establishment in 1738 of an independent Bourbon kingdom in Naples added some balance. All these territories benefited from the sound management of enlightened despots. Elsewhere, the old contrasts prevailed between the city republics such as Venice and the divine autocracy of the Papal States. The Vatican lost much of its room for political manœuvre when the Catholic powers were disunited in everything except their demand to suppress the Jesuits (see pp. 593–4). Three long papacies, those of Clement XI (1700–21), Benedict XTV (1740–58), and Pius VI (1775–99), could not check the Vatican’s political effacement. Secular culture saw a marked revival; Italian language and literature were promoted by official academies in Florence and Rome. Science and scholarship flourished. Names such as that of L. A. Muratori the archivist (1672–1750) at Ferrara, Antonio Genovesi the economist (1712–69) at Naples, Cesare Beccaria the criminologist (1738–94) at Milan, or Alessandro Volta the physicist (1745–1821) at Pavia gained continental fame. They undoubtedly strengthened the bonds of a growing national cultural community, [TORMENTA]

QUAKE

ON 1 November 1755 the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, was wrecked by an earthquake. A tidal wave destroyed the quays and ships in the Tagus. Two-thirds of the city’s buildings were razed or burned. Between 30,000 and 40,000 citizens’ lost their lives. The shocks were felt from Scotland to Constantinople.

The Lisbon earthquake was neither the first nor the last of Europe’s disasters. Similar devastation had occurred in 1421, when the collapse of the Maas Polder drowned hundreds of low-lying villages in Holland, in December 1631, when an eruption of Mt Vesuvius killed some 18,000 people in Italy, or in 1669, when lava from Mt Etna buried the port of Catania in Sicily. The earthquake of 1356 wrecked Basle, whilst that of 28 December 1908 levelled both Messina and Reggio di Calabria, with a loss of 77,000. London’s Great Fire (1666) had many counterparts. Visitations of plague and cholera did not cease until the end of the nineteenth century, [SANITAS]

Yet the quake of 1755 caused more than physical damage. It rocked the most cherished hopes of the Enlightenment. It shook the belief of the philosophes in an ordered, predictable world and in a benign, rational God. It brought ruin to just and unjust alike. As Voltaire himself was forced to admit: ‘After all, the world does contain evil.’

The United Provinces, like Portugal once a jewel in the Spanish crown, were still left with an overseas empire but with little influence over events nearer to home. At sea they had lost their maritime pre-eminence to the British; on land they were surrounded on all sides by the Habsburgs. The long-standing tug-of-war between the republican oligarchy and the House of Orange continued until 1815, when a hereditary monarchy was finally created, [BATAVIA]

Eighteenth-century Scandinavia entered centre-stage on only one occasion. Sweden’s last throw for greatness under Charles XII (r. 1697–17) was an anachronism which ended in disaster (see below). With that exception, the Scandinavian countries settled down to an existence of inoffensive obscurity. In Denmark-Norway the four Oldenburg kings—Frederick IV (r. 1699–1730), Christian VI (r. 1730–46), Frederick V (r. 1746–66), and Christian VII (r. 1766–1808)—went some way to modernizing the country on enlightened lines. A zealous experiment in this direction, with 2,000 decrees passed in two years, ended abruptly in 1772 when the King’s chief minister, J. F. Struensee, a Prussian, and presumed father of the Queen’s child, was beheaded for lèse-majesté. In Sweden a long and strong reaction against royal absolutism gave prominence to a Diet whose stormy proceedings were given over to the laborious workings of its four estates, and the rivalry of the factions of ‘Hats’ and ‘Caps’. The monarchy was greatly weakened by the abdication of Charles XII’s sister, Ulrica Leonora, in favour of her hapless German husband, Frederick I (r. 1720–51), and in 1756 by the Prussian-inspired intrigues of his successor, Adolphus Frederick (r. 1751–71) of Holstein-Gottorp-Eutin. Its successful reassertion after the royal coup d’état of 1772 under Gustavus III (r. 1771–92) brought Sweden closer to the mainstream of contemporary politics and culture. This patriotic and accomplished young king, who had once stormed the salons of Paris, was to be assassinated in 1792 whilst trying to organize a league of princes against the French Revolution, [ELDLUFT]

Whilst Western Europe was preoccupied with the supremacy of France, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe had major preoccupations of their own. Within the lifetime of Louis XIV, Central Europe experienced two unexpected developments which seriously affected the history of the German states. One was the last great surge of the Ottomans, who in 1683 returned to the siege of Vienna. The other was provided by a further dramatic stage in the rise of Prussia, whose ambitions now stood to disrupt the entire region. Eastern Europe witnessed the decisive stage in the emergence of the Russian Empire, henceforth a military and political power of the first rank. Trapped in the middle of these rapid shifts, the old Republic of Poland-Lithuania first rallied to the rescue of Vienna, then slowly sank beneath the blows of her rapacious neighbours. Before the eighteenth century was out, the traditional power structure of Central and Eastern Europe had been transformed out of all recognition.

The Ottoman surge of the late seventeenth century was associated with an extended political crisis, which for thirty years put the grand viziership in the hands of the Köprülüs, a family of Albanian origin. It began in the 1650s amidst recriminations over Crete and the Venetian blockade of the Dardanelles, and was fuelled after 1660 by a disputed succession in Transylvania which placed the Porte in direct opposition to the Habsburgs. The Köprülüs saw war as a means for diverting the intrigues and resentments of the army, especially the corps of janissaries, against whom they had taken such drastic disciplinary measures. In 1672 they attacked the Polish province of Podolia, seizing the fortress of Kamieniets on the Dniester, until checked at Chocim by the Crown Hetman, John Sobieski. In 1681–2, in Hungary, they took the side of rebels led by Count Tököli and, after declaring Hungary to be an Ottoman vassal, advanced up the Danube towards Vienna.

The Siege of Vienna lasted for two months, from July to September 1683. It saw the poorly provisioned Austrian capital invested by a powerful army of 200,000 men equipped with a large siege train of heavy artillery. At a juncture when the German princes were fixated by the encroachments of Louis XIV on the Rhine, the Emperor had great difficulty responding to the danger on the Danube. As it was, the most effective assistance came from Poland, where Sobieski, now King and weaned from his early alliance with France, saw a Turkish war and Austrian subsidies as a solution to his own domestic problems. Having taken command of the relief force in early September, he prayed in the chapel on the heights of the Kahlenberg in the Vienna Woods. Then, in the mid-afternoon of the 12th, he ordered the attack: his winged hussars charged down the hill and rode straight for the centre of the Ottoman camp. At half-past five he was galloping through the enemy ranks amid scenes of panic, confusion, and slaughter. The following evening, he found time to write to his wife, Queen Marie-Louise, from the Grand Vizier’s tent:

ELDLUFT

IN 1773 the Swedish pharmacist Karl Scheele (1742–86) discovered that air was a mixture of ‘several airs’, and that one of its components, which he called eldluft or ‘fire air’, held the secret of combustion.1 In October of the following year, he sent his findings to Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–94), the director of France’s gunpowder and saltpetre monopoly. That same month Lavoisier gave lunch to the English dissenter and experimenter Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), and heard from him too how ‘dephlo-gisticated air’ caused lighted tapers to burn with incandescent flame.

Lavoisier, who directed the King’s Ferme Générale or tax-farming system as well as the Régie de Poudre, had the time and money to indulge his passion for experimentation. He had already noticed that many substances gained weight when burned, and he knew that this effect was not compatible with the reigning theory of Phlogiston—an invisible (and imaginary) form of matter which most scientists, including Priestley, still believed in.

So Lavoisier designed an experiment which would measure the amount of ‘fire air’ that might be absorbed when quicksilver was burned in a closed flask.2 He found not only that the heated quicksilver combined with fire air but also that further heating separated out the new compound into its component parts. Modern chemical notation would have described Lavoisier’s experiment thus:

Hg + O = HgO (Mercuric oxide): HgO = Hg+O

Science had finally reached an understanding of the nature of chemical reactions, namely that substances could be coupled and uncoupled with others in a material world made up of simple elements and their compounds.

Lavoisier then addressed the task of giving simple names to the simple elements and compound names to compounds. Scheele’s ‘fire air’, or Priestley’s ‘Dephlogisticated air’, became oxygenè, Scheele’s ‘foul air’, hydrogène. The compound of mercury and oxygen became ‘mercuric oxide’. In 1787 Lavoisier helped publish a list of 33 elements with their new nomenclature. In 1789, he published his Traité préliminaire de la Chimie, the world’s first chemical textbook.

Scheele was already dead, in all probability poisoned by the fumes of his own furnace. In 1791 Priestley was burned out of house and home by the Birmingham mob, for having welcomed the French Revolution. He fled to the USA. On 8 May 1794 Lavoisier met his death on the guillotine in the company of twenty-six other royal tax-farmers. The appeal judge was said to have remarked, ‘The Republic has no need of savants.’ The Chemical Revolution coincided almost exactly with its political counterpart. Both of them ‘consumed their own children’.

Only solace of my heart and soul, my fairest, most beloved Marysienka!

Our Lord and God, Blessed of all ages, has brought unheard victory and glory to our nation. All the guns, the whole camp, untold spoils have fallen into our hands… There is enough powder and ammunition alone for a million men… The Vizir took such hurried flight that he had time to escape with only one horse… [The camp is] as extensive as the cities of Warsaw or of Lwow within their walls … I have all the tents, and cars, et mille autres galanteries fort jolies et fort riches, mais fort riches.… They abandoned their janissaries in the trenches, who were put to the sword during the night… They left behind a mass of innocent Austrian people, particularly women; but they butchered as many as they could… The Vizir had a marvellously beautiful ostrich … but this too he had killed… He had baths; he had gardens and fountains; rabbits and cats, and a parrot which kept flying about so that we could not catch it…27

When Sobieski posted the green standard of the Prophet to the Pope, he appended Charles V’s comment after Mühlberg: ‘Veni, vidi, Deus Vicit’ (I came, I saw, God conquered).

The Ottoman retreat which began that day at Vienna continued by stages for the next 200 years. In the short term it inspired the leaders of the Holy League, organized by the Pope, to press on down the Danube into lands undisputed since crusading times. By the Peace of Carlowitz (1699) Hungary was returned to Austria, Podolia to Poland, Azov to Muscovy, and the Morea to Venice. In the long term it trapped the Ottomans’ European provinces between a concerted pincer movement, with the Habsburgs holding the line of their Military Frontier on the western flank and the Russians advancing relentlessly round the Black Sea on the eastern flank. In this regard the Austro-Russian treaty signed in 1726 played a long-standing strategic role (see Appendix III, p. 1284).

The fortunes of the Ottoman wars swung back and forth. In 1739 Austria was made to disgorge all the gains, including Belgrade, achieved at the earlier Treaty of Passarowitz (1718). But three extended Russo-Turkish Wars—in 1735–9, 1768–74, and 1787–92—left the entire northern coast of the Black Sea in Russian hands. The decisive Treaty of Kücük-Kainardji (1774) gave the Tsar a protectorate over all the Sultan’s Christian subjects, and commercial rights in the Ottoman Empire previously enjoyed only by the French. It marked the onset of the ‘Eastern Question’. Much of the Balkans, however, remained under Ottoman rule. The eighteenth century was a period of slowly rising national expectations, often among people whose first instinct was to support the Ottoman authorities.

Greece was brought into the political arena partly through a growing degree of autonomy, partly through Russian intervention. A class of Greek officials grew up, together with Greek schools to educate them. The tribute of children (the devşirme) fell into abeyance after 1676. Greek society became more consciously Greek. The Venetian presence in Corfu and, from 1699, in the Morea strengthened links with the West. In 1769 a Russian fleet sent to the Mediterranean against the Ottomans promised deliverance to Greece. The extension of Russian commercial privileges to Greek merchants was an important step.

Serbia was affected by similar developments. The battles over Belgrade, and the Austrian occupation of 1711–18, when many Serb volunteers flocked to the Habsburg colours, showed that the Ottomans were not invincible. Serbia’s Orthodox links with Russia were even closer than Greece’s. The activities of ‘Karađorđe’ or ‘Black George’ Petrović (1767–1817), who served both with Turkish brigands and with a Habsburg regiment, culminated in the rising of 1804–13 that was to bring the first taste of independence. A second rising in 1815–17 under Karađorđe’s assassin, Miloš Obrenović (1780–1860), was to pave the way for international recognition.

The two Romanian principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, were ruled by the Porte through the medium of Phanariot Greeks—so-called from the Greek quarter of Phanar in Constantinople. The Phanariot regime, though corrupt and exploitative, encouraged immigration and Western cultural contacts. The Austrian seizure of Bukovina (1774) and still more the Russian occupations of 1769–74 and 1806–12 were catalysts of change. The notion of liberation from the Ottomans first gained ground among the dominant Greek minority.

Bulgaria suffered greatly from the passage of Ottoman armies, and from bands of deserters, known as Krajlis, who ravaged the countryside for decades. In 1794, one of the Krajli leaders, Pasvanoílu, established himself at Vidin on the Danube in a virtually independent robber republic. Like the Serbs, the Christian Bulgars looked increasingly towards Russia.

Albania fell into the hands of local tribal chieftains. One such chief, Mehemet of Bushat, founded a dynasty c.1760, which ruled upper Albania from Scutari for several generations. Another, Ali Pasha of Tepelen, carved out a fiefdom centred on Joanina, which stretched from the Adriatic to the Aegean, [SHQIPERIA]

Crna Gora, which was known to the outside world by its Venetian name of ‘Montenegro’, was the only part of the Balkans to escape Ottoman rule. According to legend, when God created the earth a lot of rocks were left over; so He made Montenegro. Though the Turks occupied the capital, Cetinje, for short periods, they never held onto it. ‘A small army is beaten’, they said, ‘and a large army dies of starvation.’ From 1516 to 1696 Montenegro had been a theocratic state, ruled by monkish bishops. From 1696 until 1918 it was ruled by hereditary princes of the Petrović dynasty.

By the late eighteenth century, when the Balkan élites first began to dream about independence, they had been living under Ottoman rule for four to five centuries. The experience had left its mark. The Orthodox Church had made its accommodation long since, instilling in its subjects profoundly conservative and anti-Western attitudes. From the time of the Crusades, the Orthodox looked on the West as the source of a subjugation worse than that of the infidel. As a result, none of the great civilizing movements that shook the Western world— Renaissance, Reformation, Science, Enlightenment, Romanticism—could effectively penetrate the Balkan countries. Political traditions owed little to rationalism, absolutism, or constitutionalism; kinship politics dominated at all levels; nepotism lubricated by bribery was a way of life. ‘Power is a trough,’ ran the Turkish proverb, ‘and he who does not feed is a pig.’ The border of the shrinking enclave of what came to be called ‘Turkey-in-Europe’ formed one of Europe’s most deep-seated cultural fault-lines.

SHQIPERIA

ALBANIA (Shqiperia, ‘Land of the Eagles’) can fairly claim to be the least , familiar of all European states. Sailing down the coast in the 1780s, Edward Gibbon wrote of ‘a country within sight of Italy which is less known than the interior of America’. Yet no country has suffered more from the whims of international politics.

The insurrection of 1911, which was to free Albania from Ottoman rule, accelerated the creation of the Balkan League made up of Albania’s Christian neighbours. All the League’s members, except Bulgaria, possessed territories containing important Albanian populations; and none was prepared to see a ‘Greater Albania’ in which all Albanians would have been united. The Treaty of London (May 1913), which ended the War of the Balkan League, recognized Albanian sovereignty. But it insisted on the delimitation of frontiers by an international commission, and the introduction of a Western-style monarchy. (See Appendix III, p. 1310.)

Albanian society was deeply divided both by social structure and by religion. The highland clans of the north, the Gheg, who lived by the law of the blood feud, had little in common with the lowlanders, or Tosk, of the south. Two-thirds of the inhabitants were Muslim. The remaining third was equally divided between Catholics and Orthodox. Important minorities included the Vlach-speaking pastoralists of the east, Italians in the coastal cities, and Greeks, who were accustomed to regard southern Albania as ‘northern Epirus’. [GAGAUZ]

During the First World War Albania was invaded both by Serbia and by Greece. By the second Treaty of London (1915), with Italy, the Allied powers secretly promised to turn Albania into an Italian protectorate. The Albanian monarchy suffered a chequered fate. The first Mpret or King, Wilhelm von Wied (r. 1914) landed in March and fled in September. After the War, General Ahmet Zogu was established as State President of an Albanian Republic, only to have himself proclaimed King in 1926.

During the Second World War, Mussolini established the Italian protectorate promised a quarter of a century earlier. Albanian territory was extended to include the district of Kossovo; and Victor Emmanuel X was declared King. There was a brief German occupation in 1944–5.

The Albanian People’s Republic was set up in 1946 by a group of communist Tosk partisans, who had gained wartime ascendancy thanks to Western support. Their leader, Enver Hodzha, resigned all interest in the Albanians living in Montenegro, Kossovo, and Macedonia, retreating into almost total isolation behind the pre-war frontiers. Two hundred years after Gibbon, tourists in the Adriatic were still sailing or flying past Albania with the same feelings of wonder and incomprehension.1

Once the Ottoman threat was repulsed, the fortunes of the Habsburgs revived. Leopold I (r. 1658–1705) did not live to see the humbling of Louis XTV; but his sons, Joseph I (r. 1705–11) and Charles VI (r. 1711–40), succeeded to an inheritance greatly enlarged in Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands. The principal political crisis arose once again from a problem of succession, which caused the outbreak of a major Continental war. Charles VI, like the Spanish namesake whom he had once nominally succeeded, had no male heir. A narrow-minded bigot, he devoted much of his life to enforcing religious conformity and, by the Pragmatic Sanction, to ensuring the succession of his daughter, Maria Theresa. In the event, the imperial throne was seized on his death by Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria, who as Charles VII (r. 1742–5) briefly reigned with French collusion as the only non-Habsburg emperor in 400 years. It then reverted to Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis I (r. 1745–65), Grand Duke of Tuscany, and their elder son, Joseph II (r. 1765–90). In effect, in her various capacities as Empress-consort, Emperor’s mother, or Queen of Bohemia and Hungary, Maria Theresa (1717–80) held sway in Vienna for 40 years. She was a woman of conscience and restraint, devoted among other matters to agrarian reform and the relief of the serf-peasantry. Joseph II, in contrast, was an impatient radical, ‘a crowned revolutionary’, a convinced anticlerical and opponent of noble privilege. Jozefism—the name given to his policy of asserting state power against the traditional pillars of Church and nobility—was one of the more thorough variants of enlightened despotism.

In this period, Austria developed a bureaucratic system that is sometimes called cameralism, that is, a system based on an élite caste of professional office-holders. Together with an expanded and reorganized military system, it provided the cement which was to keep the Habsburg monarchy going long after the demise of the Empire in Germany. The University of Vienna possessed a special faculty for the training of such civil servants, who passed straight into the higher echelons of finance, justice, and education. (The University of Halle did the same for Prussia.) These highly educated, well-paid, German-speaking and loyalist bureaucrats were entirely dependent on the monarch’s favour. They formed a solid buffer against the divergent interests of the nobility, the Church, and the nationalities, and led the drive for disinterested rationalization and reform.

In this (as it proved) its terminal phase, the cohesion of the Holy Roman Empire was greatly undermined by the separate dynastic policies of its leading princes. Just as the Habsburg emperors could rely on their lands and possessions beyond the Empire, so increasingly could the Electors. From 1697 to 1763 the Wettins, Electors of Saxony, ruled as kings of Poland-Lithuania (see below). From 1701 the Hohenzollerns, Electors of Brandenburg, ruled as kings in Prussia (see below). From 1714 the Electors of Hanover ruled as kings of Great Britain (see above). Throughout the century the Wittelsbach Electors of Bavaria sought to enlarge their fortunes through their traditional alliance with France. Because of their varied connections, all the ‘capital cities’ of ‘Germany’—Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Hanover, and Münich—assumed very different flavours. The last two emperors—Leopold II (r. 1790–2), Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Francis II (r. 1792–1806)—had little chance of saving their Empire from the revolutionary deluge which destroyed it. [FREUDE]

Hungary, liberated from the Turks, fell victim to the despotic designs of its Habsburg liberators. In 1687 the 700-year-old elective monarchy was abolished. Hereditary Habsburg rulers turned the noble Diets into mere registers of royal decrees. The ancient ‘right of resistance’ of the Magyar nobles was eliminated. From 1704 to 1711 a widespread rebellion under Francis Rákóczi II succeeded in exploiting the Habsburgs’ preoccupations with Spain and with the Turks. Many of the ancient liberties were restored first by the Peace of Szátmár (1711) and later as the Magyars’ price for acceding to the Pragmatic Sanction. Here were the basic laws which prevailed until 1848. Hungary escaped the fate of neighbouring Bohemia. Still, the compromise was not an easy one. Maria Theresa ruled after 1764 without recourse to the Hungarian Diet; whilst Joseph II rode roughshod over all the constitutional formalities, omitting even to be crowned. In 1784, treating Austria and Hungary as one united state, he introduced German as the official language. The storms of protest were defused by Leopold II, who in 1791 reconfirmed Hungary’s separate status, together with the use of Latin and Magyar. The deep conservatism of Hungarian life, centred on the patronage of the magnates and the dietines of the counties, was strengthened by the repeated Turkish wars and by the ethnic and religious divisions. It may well have been prolonged by Maria Theresa’s agrarian reforms which, in the so-called Urbarium of 1767, ended the peasants’ adscription to the land and reduced their revolutionary temper. Her educational reforms, together with the founding of the University of Buda and the Magyar literary revival at the turn of the century, laid the seeds of modern national consciousness. In due course, the groundswell of Magyar nationalism was to awaken corresponding reactions among the Slovak, Croat, and Jewish minorities.

The rise of Prussia reached its critical momentum in the eighteenth century. It is generally interpreted in the light of Prussia’s later mission of unification in Germany. In reality, it occurred through the relendess pursuit of dynastic policies, which repeatedly divided the German world and which raised a kingdom possessing none of the characteristics of a latent national state. It was achieved through the creation of an administrative machine of marvellous efficiency, which enabled its rulers to maintain a standing army of disproportionate size. (In terms of the ratio between professional soldiers and population, Prussia was thirty times more efficient than its neighbour, Poland-Lithuania.) The Prussian Excise (1680) made possible the upkeep of the Prussian army. The army was based on an aristocratic officer corps, and after 1733 on the cantonal system of peasant conscription,[GOOSE-STEP]

Under Frederick III (r. 1688–1713) and Frederick-William I (r. 1713–40), the ‘drill-master of Europe’, the Hohenzollerns followed the same unscrupulous path laid down by the ‘Great Elector’ (see Chapter VII). In 1700 their electoral vote was sold to the Habsburgs in return for recognition of their own claim to kingship. In 1728 their accession to the Pragmatic Sanction was bought by the cession of Berg and Ravenstein. Fleet footwork in the alliances of the Spanish Succession and the Great Northern War resulted in the important acquisitions of Stettin and Western Pomerania. Sweden was only the latest to learn that it was no less dangerous having Prussia as an ally than as an enemy. The inimitable ‘Prussian spirit’ grew from a mixture of loyalty to the dynasty, of arrogance born of military prowess, and of justified pride in cultural and educational advances. Halle received the first Prussian university in 1694; Berlin, invigorated by a major influx of French Huguenots and Austrian Protestants, received its Royal Academy of Arts (1696) and its Royal Academy of Sciences (1700). An edict of 1717 looked to the improvement of public education.

Under Frederick the Great (r. 1740–86) Prussia unleashed the forces so carefully garnered by his predecessors. From Frederick’s opening sensation, the seizure of Austrian Silesia in 1740, war was the prime instrument of policy for a quarter of a century. Then, having brought his country to the brink of annihilation, Frederick turned to diplomatic brigandage, which in the first Partition of Poland finally brought the prize of a consolidated territorial base (see below), [GROSSENMEER]

Frederick’s personality was one of the wonders of the age. It was formed under the lash of a brutal father, who had forced him in boyhood to watch the execution of his friend, Katte, and had imprisoned him for years in the fortress of Küstrin (Kostrzyn) on the Oder. Throughout the reign, the crash of cannon and the groans of the battlefield were mixed with the flights of the King’s flute and the chatter of the philosophes. ‘I was born too soon,’ Frederick once said, ‘but I have seen Voltaire.’ German historians have not been alone in praising his merits. Lord Acton called him ‘the most consummate practical genius’ that ever inherited a modern throne.

The wars and battles of Frederick the Great fill many volumes. They are among classics of historic warfare. After the two Silesian wars, 1740–2 and 1744–5, which formed part of the wider War of Austrian Succession and earned him the undying hatred of Maria Theresa, he retained the fruits of his aggression. At Mollwitz, Chotusitz, Hohenfriedberg, Frederick carried the day. In 1745 he occupied Prague. In the Seven Years War he reached the heights of glory and the depths of despair. It began with his attack on Saxony. Through Lobositz, Rossbách, Zorndorf, Leuthen, Kolin, Kunersdorf, Liegnitz, and Torgau, he brilliantly exploited his interior lines of communication, and repeatedly evaded his enemies’ attempts to bring their overwhelming numbers to bear. At Rossbach, he triumphed with trifling losses. At Kunersdorf, he survived amidst scenes of carnage. In 1762, with the treasury empty, British subsidies stopped, and the Russians poised to take Berlin, he was saved by the death of the Russian Empress and an unexpected truce. Once again, at the Treaty of Hubertusburg (1763), he kept his winnings intact. ‘Hunde,’ he had once railed, when his guards had hesitated, ‘wollt ihr ewig leben?’ (dogs, do you wish to live forever?).

Under Frederick-William II (r. 1786–97) Prussia began to take a different course. The new King even risked an alliance with Poland-Lithuania. But the logic of the revolutionary era and of Russian power brought him back into line. At the second and the third Partitions of Poland, Prussia acquired both Danzig and Warsaw. By 1795 Berlin found itself ruling over a country that was 40 per cent Slav and Catholic, with a large Jewish community. It was one of the most dynamic melting-pots of Europe. Had this situation developed without interruption, it is hard to imagine what course German and Central European history might eventually have taken. As it was, old Prussia was to be overwhelmed by Napoleon; and the new Prussia which appeared in 1815 was to be a very different beast indeed.

If Prussia exemplified the successful pursuit of power in a small country, Russia exemplified a similar phenomenon on a heroic scale in Europe’s largest country. Frederick the Great himself was impressed. Of the Russians, he once remarked: ‘It will need the whole of Europe to keep those gentlemen within bounds.’

In the 149 years which separated the deaths of Alexei Mikhailovitch in 1676 and of Alexander I in 1825, the Romanovs raised the fortunes of their country from that of a nascent regional power to that of the invincible ‘gendarme of Europe’. Alexei, who had succeeded in the same decade as Louis XIV, was an obscure Muscovite prince of whom, at Versailles, little was even known; Alexander rode through Paris in triumph. During the intervening century and a half, scores of military campaigns were fought, largely with success; the Grand Duchy of Moscow was revamped as the ‘Empire of all the Russias’; the territory of the state engulfed a string of neighbouring countries; society and administration were subjected to root-and-branch reforms; the whole identity of the state and ruling nation was remodelled. For all who revelled in this exhibition of power, all the people and policies who made the transformation possible were by definition good and, as Klyuchevsky wrote of Peter the Great, ‘necessary’.

In autocracies the personality of the autocrat is no secondary factor, and in Russia two personalities stood out—those of Peter I (r. 1682–1725) and of Catherine II (r. 1762–96). Both were awarded the epithet of ‘Great’; both were larger than life, in physical stature, animal energy, and determination; and both have been eulogized for their undoubted contribution to Russia’s own greatness. In any overall judgement, however, whether about the ruler or the realm, one must wonder if size and brute strength alone can be taken as the test of greatness. Critics find no difficulty in finding traits that provoke shame rather than respect. Peter, in particular, was a moral monster. His lifelong participation in the debaucheries of the Sobor of Fools and Jesters—an obscene and blasphemous Russian variant of the English Hell-fire Club—may conceivably be dismissed as eccentric bad taste. But his personal involvement in gross and sadistic tortures, first revealed during the mass maltreatment of the rebel streltsyin 1697, cannot be counted a foible, even by the standards of his own day. His quaint delight in model ships and tin soldiers must be contrasted with his colossal disregard for the immense human suffering which attended many of his projects—such as the building of St Petersburg. A Tsar who could watch his innocent son and heir racked to death in the afternoon before attending a ribald court party in the evening was not far from Nero, even if he did change Russia ‘from non-being into being’.

GROSSENMEER

IN 1785 Grossenmeer was a village in the Duchy of Oldenburg in northwest Germany, close to the border of the Netherlands and the newly acquired Prussian province of East Friesland. At that time it had a total population of 885, made up from 142 households, plus some 77 ‘paupers’ or other casual residents. An analysis of the village’s households reveals the following categories:

Household type	No. %
1 Solitaries (e.g. widows)	2	1.4
2. Non-conjugal household (co-resident siblings)	1	0.7
3 Single-family households (parents and children)	97	68.3
4. Extended family units (several generations and relatives)	28	19.7
5. Multiple-family households (2 or more conjugal units co-resident)	14	9.9
Total	142	100

From this, it is evident that single-family households formed a clear majority (68 per cent), although extended and multiple-family households constituted a strong minority (30 per cent).

A senior scholar in the field chose this example to typify ‘that ill-defined European area where households tended to have the characteristics we have called ‘middle’. A ‘Four-Region Hypothesis’ was built on isolated examples of that sort. If Grossenmeer (1785) typified Europe’s ‘West-Central’ or ‘Middle’ region, the Essex village of Elmdon (1861) was taken to typify ‘the West’, Fagagna (1870), near Bologna, ‘the Mediterranean’, and Krasnoe Sobakino (1849), in Russia, ‘the East’. The geography is as suspect as the generalizing is grandiose.

The hypothesis was presented as the refinement of an older scheme, taken to be ‘universally accepted’, which had presumed to divide the traditional European family into two still simpler types—‘West’ and ‘East’. Grossenmeer was taken to be a variation on Elmdon, where no less than 73 per cent of households conformed to the simple type, whilst Fagagna was taken as a variation on Krasnoe Sobakino, where 86 per cent of households were of extended or multiple type.1

Comparative social history is an extremely fruitful subject. But it is an absolute principle that like must be compared with like. To compare a village in pre-industrial Germany with one at the industrializing height of Victorian England is dubious. Yet to typify the whole of another ‘ill-defined area’ called ‘Eastern Europe’ on the basis of one serf-bound village in the depths of Russia is, for ‘Western’ scholars, alarmingly typical. Diversity schematized is diversity denied, [ZADRUGA]

Family history only came into its own in the 1970s. The English-language Journal of Family History dates from 1976. Hitherto, social scientists who studied family problems had apparently been ‘indifferent to the historical dimensions’, whilst social historians had been preoccupied with questions of class. Many scholars had assumed that a large, traditional, patriarchal form of household had existed in Europe since time immemorial, and hence that there was not much to study until the onset of modernization. The work of pioneers such as Frédéric Le Play (1806–82), whoseOrganisation de la Familie (1871) introduced a typology of families, was not widely known. Le Play posited three family types: the patriarchal extended family; the familie souche or ‘stem-family’, with three generational nuclei; and the unstable household unit or cellule, which only existed as long as the parents were raising children. Apart from genealogy, which had a very long genealogy, the systematic study of family problems in history had to wait for a hundred years.2

None the less, the variety of studies within the field has become very impressive. One can find studies of everything from wet-nursing techniques in medieval Iceland to bastardy in seventeenth-century England, or paternal authority in nineteenth-century Sardinia. There are several main lines of enquiry. One concerns the formation, structures, and disintegration of household units, [BASERRIA] Another centres on the statistical, biological, and sexual trends within the realm of family and kin. A third focuses on the problems of the individuals, of the sexes, and of the generations within the family unit—and hence on ‘life-course analysis’, on women, on labour patterns, on childhood, marriage, and old age. [GRILLENSTEIN] A fourth, anthropological focus highlights family customs, ceremonies, and rituals. A fifth is legal, examining the evolutions of family law and government policy. A sixth is economic, examining family budgets in varying agrarian, urban, or industrial contexts. All modern family problems, from single-parenting to unemployment, child discipline, and juvenile crime, have historical roots. Nor has genealogy been forgotten. What was once the passion of a noble élite has recently become the most popular of pastimes.3

To some extent, historians’ interests reflect the nature of available sources. The households of the medieval nobility, for example, or of Renaissance merchants had long been accessible because both left copious records, [MERCANTE] The households of the peasantry or plebs were much less accessible. Yet the application of sociological and quantitative techniques [RENTES] and the exploitation of visual, literary, statistical, and oral sources has opened up a wealth of information. No period or location has escaped. Family history has universal appeal. For everyone has either been, or has missed being, the member of a family.

Catherine, too, presents the historian with ‘images of splendor contending with the specter of scandal’.28 A German princess, born in Stettin as Sophia Augusta Frederica von Alhalt-Zerbst, she has few equals in the annals of grasping ambition. Her gross sexual licence was not in itself out of place, but must be judged repulsive when mixed with foul intrigue. The rumour that she died through the failure of a machine called ‘Catherine’s Winch’ whilst trying to make love with a horse is notable only because people have been willing to believe it. More to the point, she seized the throne through a palace putsch, having incited the imperial guards to murder her husband, Peter III (r. 1761–2). She governed with the cooperation of a long line often official lovers—from Gregory Orlov, and Gregory Potemkin to Platón Zubov, 38 years her junior. In her favour, it can be said that she headed a civilian entourage practising persuasion more than terror. An indulgent biographer might conclude: ‘she did for Russia what Louis XIV did for France before he became the prisoner of Versailles… autocracy [was] cleansed from the stains of tyranny… despotism turned into a monarchy.’

Praetorian revolutions became a habit with the Romanovs, as with the Romans. Legal succession by the dynastic heir was a rarity. Catherine I (r. 1725–7), alias Skovorotska, a Latvian peasant girl and Peter’s second consort, overthrew him on his deathbed. Peter II (r. 1727–30) succeeded through a forged will; the Empress Anne (r. 1730–40), Duchess of Courland, through a ploy of the Privy Council; Ivan VI (r. 1740–1), the infant Duke of Brunswick, through a scheme of Baron Biron; the Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741–61), sometime fiancée of a Bishop of Lübeck and fréquentéeof the guards’ barracks, through a straightforward coup de force; Alexander I (r. 1801–25), through the assassination of his father. Paul I (1796–1801), a would-be reformer-Tsar, was long held to be mentally unbalanced by official historiographers, obviously for being sane. When Paul insisted on exhuming the body of his murdered father, Peter III, and on reburying his parents in the cathedral of Peter and Paul, the aged Count Orlov was obliged to carry the imperial crown behind the coffin of the victim, whom he had killed 35 years before. This grisly act of reconciliation well symbolizes the fraud, fear, and violence which surrounded the court of St Petersburg and all its works.

Muscovy took its giant leap out of the shadows during the second or Great Northern War, 1700–21. This 20-year contest centred on the rivalry of Peter the Great, who had set envious eyes on Swedish possessions at the head of the Baltic, and the youthful Charles XII of Sweden, who was eager to attack all his neighbours at once. It began in August 1700 with Charles’s adventurous landing near Copenhagen and with Peter’s disastrous attack on Narva, a Swedish fortress on the Gulf of Finland. But it was largely fought out on the intervening territory of Poland-Lithuania, whose King (Augustus, Elector of Saxony) had formed a private alliance with Peter. In the end, Poland-Lithuania was to be an even greater casualty than Sweden (see below).

After the initial clashes Charles XII took the initiative on the mainland. He first aimed to punish Peter’s Saxon ally, and in 1704 succeeded in replacing Augustus on the Polish throne with a leader of the pro-Swedish faction, Stanistaw Leszczyñski. In so doing, he gave Peter the chance to grab the Swedish provinces of Livonia and Ingria, where in 1703 the foundation of the new city of St Petersburg was immediately proclaimed. In 1707 he turned east, counting on support from Livonia and from Mazeppa, Hetman of Ukraine. He was deceived on both scores. In the winter of 1708–9, harassed by peasant guerrillas, he was forced to abandon the original plan of a march on Moscow and to turn south. On 27 June 1709, at Poltava in Ukraine, he was comprehensively beaten and driven to take refuge in the Ottoman domains. The triumphant Muscovite armies swept westwards. Warsaw was occupied and Augustus II restored. The Baltic provinces remained in Muscovite hands. No shortage of vultures was found among the German princes to join Denmark and Prussia in preying on Sweden’s more westerly possessions. Charles XII was killed in action in November 1718, besieging the fortress of Frederikshald on the Norwegian-Swedish frontier. A diplomatic congress held on the Aland Islands preceded the Russo-Swedish Treaty signed at nearby Nystadt (1721). Sweden was humbled. Peter was left the arbiter of the North, the proud possessor of his ‘Window on the West’. In 1721 he promoted himself from the style of Muscovite ‘Tsar’ to that of Emperor—a title not generally recognized in his lifetime, [PETROGRAD]

As Muscovy assumed its imperial mantle, far-reaching reforms were imposed to turn the new Empire into a modern, Western state. In the eyes of Peter I, in particular, reform was equivalent to ‘Westernisation’. The Tsar made two lengthy visits to Western Europe, in 1696–8 and in 1717, taking notes on the techniques of everything from naval construction to face-shaving. But it was the Great Northern War that served as Russia’s taskmaster. First and foremost came the Tsar’s demand for a standing army, and for the financial and social institutions required to support it. The old Muscovite state had been monstrously inefficient. A ragbag army, which melted away in winter, was consuming the produce of two-thirds of the population and, in bad years like 1705, up to 96 per cent of the state’s revenues. By the end of Peter’s reign a permanent force of over 300,000 trained men was supported by a poll-tax or ‘soul tax’, which had tripled revenue, by peasant conscription, and by the reorganization of the nobility.

Few stones were left unturned. A key statute, the Preobrazhensky Prikaz (1701), regulated the system of political police. Important changes were made by the division of the country into guberniyas or ‘provinces’ (1705); by the creation of a senate and of administrative colleges within the central administration (1711); by the introduction of municipal government (1718–24); by the state promotion of trade, industry, education, literature, science, and the arts. In 1721 the Patriarchate was abolished, subordinating the Russian Orthodox Church to the state-run Holy Synod. Priests were ordered to betray the secrets of the confessional. From 1722 the table of ranks tied an enlarged nobility into a hierarchical caste system wedded to state service and landed privileges. The creation of so many new institutions involved what one authority has called ‘the partial dismantling of the Patrimonial State’ and the first realization in Russia of the distinction between ‘state’ and ‘society’.30 This occurred even though no significant changes were made in the political sphere and the nobles themselves were held in abject servitude. They were subject to public flogging andshelmovanie(outlawry) for evading education or service. Most historians would now agree, in fact, that the Petrine reforms were not quite what contemporaries imagined. They did not act as a great unifying force; on the contrary, they divided the loyalties of the Tsar’s subjects, especially in matters of religion and nationality. Equally, they were apt to introduce the form of Western institutions whilst ignoring the substance. Peter could not turn Muscovites into Europeans by ordering them to shave their beards and to dress in powdered wigs.

Catherine II cared more about the substance. Once again, despite the enlightened rhetoric, there was no tampering with the foundations of autocracy or serfdom. But her famous instruction to the legislative commission of 1766–8 aiming at a modern legal code, her centralizing and ‘russifying’ tendencies in provincial administration, and, above all, her acceptance of the ‘freedom of the nobility’ made lasting modifications to the system. The Charter of Nobility (1785), which confirmed an earlier decree granting limited rights of noble assembly and self-government in the provinces, complemented the table of ranks; and ancient restrictions on the sale of serfs as chattels were eased. The final product was a compromise, half-old, half-new: a hybrid whereby the autocratic monarchy was gradually rendered dependent on the service nobility which it had created, whilst the nobility could not transmit to central government the power which they wielded over the mass of the population in the localities. ‘Paradoxically, by their insistence on the monopoly of political power, the Russian autocrats secured less effective authority than their constitutional counterparts in the West.’The old Muscovite tyranny was at least consistent. The new Russian Empire contained the seeds of its own destruction, [EULER]

None the less, Russia’s remorseless expansion continued (see Appendix III, p. 1277). A country that already possessed more land than it could usefully exploit kept on indulging its gargantuan appetite. In the west, Russia ate up the larger part of Sweden-Finland and of Poland-Lithuania. In the south, starting with Azov (1696), it swallowed up the whole of the Ottomans’ Black Sea provinces and Crimea (1783), before moving against Persia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In the east, having crossed Siberia to the Pacific, from the 1740s it explored the shores of Alaska, where a permanent settlement was built on Kodiak Island in 1784.

Russian historians have rationalized their country’s expansion in terms of ‘national tasks’ and ‘the gathering of the lands’. In reality, Russia and its rulers were addicted to territorial conquest. Their land-hunger was the symptom of a pathological condition born of gross inefficiency and traditional militarism. It is highly ironic that the world’s largest country needed an ever-growing supply of land and people to offset its sense of insecurity, to execute operations which others achieved with far smaller resources, and to reward the overblown machine which guarded the Romanovs’ throne. Here, if ever, was an extreme case of bulimia politica, of the so-called ‘canine hunger’, of gross territorial obesity in an organism which could only survive by consuming more and more of its neighbours’ flesh and blood. Every successful Russian officer needed an estate run by hundreds or thousands of serfs, to support his family in the accustomed style. Of 800,000 such conquered ‘souls’ redistributed by Catherine II, no fewer than 500,000 came from Poland-Lithuania alone. Significantly, whilst the German nobility of the ex-Swedish ‘Baltikum’ were permitted to retain their privileges, the ex-Polish nobility of Lithuania and Ruthenia (Byelorussia and Ukraine) were not.

Within the expanding Russian empire, Ukraine upheld its separate identity for more than a hundred years. From 1654 to 1783 the ‘Hetman State’ of Ukraine was ruled, under Tsarist supervision, by the heirs of the Dnieper Cossacks who had first sought the Tsar’s alliance against Poland. Their bid to break free under Hetmán Mazeppa during the Swedish invasion of 1708–9 (see above) came to nothing. Their suppression coincided with the annexation of Crimea and the end of their usefulness as a buffer against Tartars and Ottomans, [RUS’]

Thereafter, the historic distinction between Ruthenia and Russia was officially suppressed. Ukraine was renamed Malorossiya (Little Russia), and all traces of its separate traditions were erased. Its Cossacks were denied the same degree of autonomy granted to their Russian counterparts on the Don or the Kuban. Its rich lands were subjected to intense russification and colonization. The ‘wild plains’ of the south, Europe’s last frontier, were settled with peasant immigrants, mainly Russians and Germans. The monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church among the Slavs was enforced, as was the public use of the Russian language. Any remaining Uniates were removed. Russian immigrants began to change the complexion of the cities, especially Kiev, now presented as an ancient Russian city. Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish culture steadily lost ground. The Ruthenian (Ukrainian) language, which survived in the countryside, was officially described as a Russian dialect The magnificent new port of Odessa, founded in 1794 as capital of the province of’New Russia’, opened an outlet for the growing corn trade, a window to the south, [POTEMKIN]

The Republic of Poland-Lithuania was the principal European casualty of Russia’s expansion. Indeed, the Republic’s demise was the sine qua non of the Russian Empire’s success. Like its former province of Ukraine, the Republic was the object first of Muscovite penetration and then of alternating periods of indirect and direct rule. Muscovite influence rose steadily after the death of Sobieski in 1696.

RUS’

ON 6 September 1749, in St Petersburg, the imperial historian, Dr Gerhard Müller, rose to read a paper in Latin on ‘The Name and Origin of Russia’. He was to expound his theory that the ancient Kievan state had been founded by Norsemen. But he was shouted down; his patriotic Russian audience was not willing to hear how Russia had not been founded by Slavs. After an official inquiry, Dr Müller was ordered to abandon the subject and his existing publications were destroyed. (He at least escaped the fate of the French scholar, Nicholas Fréret, who had died that same year, and who had once been cast into the Bastille for writing that the Franks were not descended from Trojans.)

Historians of Russia have been arguing about the ‘Normanist’ theory ever since. Owing to state censorship, Russian history has been subjected to a peculiar degree of political interference and teleological argument. The story of the Kievan State has been made to serve the interests of modern Russian nationalism, or else, in reaction to the Russian version, the interests of modern Ukrainian nationalism. It has proved impossible to deny, however, that Norsemen were in some way involved. The name of Rus’ has been variously ascribed to ‘red-haired’ Vikings (cf. russet in English); to ruotsi, a Finnish name for Swedes; to a Scandinavian tribe called Rhos, unknown in Scandinavia; and even to a multinational mercantile consortium based at Rodez in Languedoc.

According to this last ingenious (and unlikely) hypothesis, Rodez Inc. used Norse seamen to penetrate the Khazarian slave-market via the Baltic-Dnieper route and, c. AD 830, to oust the rival Jewish Radaniya consortium, which had controlled the slave-trade from the Black Sea to North Africa from Arles. Having established a ‘kaganate’ of Rus’ over Khazaria, the Rodezians supposedly changed from a ruling foreign élite centred on T”mutorakan/Tamartarka on the Volga into the native princes of a predominantly Slav community centred on Kiev.2 [KHAZARIA]

Where firm conclusions prove impossible, the re-examination of sources is essential. Yet the most forbidding aspect of Kievan scholarship lies in the vast range of its source materials. Apart from the Slavic and Byzantine chronicles, scholars must examine Old Norse literature, comparative Germanic and Turkic (Khazarian) mythology, runic inscriptions, Scandinavian and Friesian law codes, Danish and Icelandic annals, Arab geographies, Hebrew documents, even Turkic inscriptions from Mongolia. Archaeology, too, is vital. One rare element of hard evidence in the puzzle lies with Arab coins that are found in hoards all over Eastern Europe, [DIRHAM] The earliest mention of Kiev—in the form of OYYWB— occurs in a Hebrew letter now in Cambridge University Library, which was written by Jews in Khazaria to the synagogue of Fustat-Misr near Cairo.3

Yet from Dr Müller’s time to 1991 the main obstacle to scholarship lay in the fact that no one in Russia or Ukraine was free to pursue independent research. The emergence of a free Ukraine, and of a free Russia, may or may not improve the academic climate, [METRYKA] [SMOLENSK]

In the course of the Great Northern War, it reached the stage where a Russian protectorate could be established in all but name. Then, after decades of turmoil between would-be Polish reformers and Russian-backed agents of the status quo, it moved towards the logical conclusion of the Partitions. Between 1772 and 1795, Russia led the feast in which the Republic was totally consumed.

John Sobieski (r. 1674–96) earned glory abroad whilst neglecting problems at home. The Siege of Vienna showed that the Republic was still a first-rate military power; but it was the final fling. Lithuania was left to stew in civil war; the Sejm was repeatedly broken by the liberum veto; the magnates went unpunished; central legislation and taxation ground to a halt. By the unratified ‘Eternal Treaty’ with Moscow in 1686, Ukraine was abandoned. The King spent his strength fighting for the Holy League, hoping to carve out a base for his son in Moldavia. Many years later, gazing at Sobieski’s statue in Warsaw, a Russian Tsar was to remark: ‘Here is another [like me] who wasted his life fighting the Turk’.32

The royal election of 1697 dashed all the Sobieskis’ schemes. Jakub Sobieski did not gain the electors’ confidence; the Austrian candidate was outbribed; the French candidate, the Due de Conti, was shipwrecked off the coast of Danzig. Thanks to Russian gold and a timely conversion to Catholicism, the prize was won by Friedrich-August, Elector of Saxony, who took to the throne as Augustus II. The exiled Sobieskis had nothing left but to marry their daughter to the exiled Stuarts, who came to grief at the same time. Bonnie Prince Charlie had a Polish mother.

The Saxon period—under Augustus II (r. 1697–1704, 1710–33) and Augustus III (r. 1733–63)—is generally judged to be the nadir of Polish history. The Great Northern War, in which the Polish King, in his capacity as Elector of Saxony, was a leading combatant, brought endless disasters and divisions. Poland-Lithuania was fought over as the main theatre of operations between Swedes and Russians, each of whom was supported by a rival confederation of Polish nobles (see above). It was treated by the Saxon court as a counterweight to neighbouring Prussia and as a source of plunder. The Saxon army, when deployed in Poland, was immune to the protests of the Sejm. Its depredations led to the conflict between King and nobility which had much in common with the parallel conflict in nearby Hungary. This in turn gave an opening for direct Russian intervention.

After the Russian victory at Poltava in 1709, Augustus II only recovered his Polish throne with the aid of Russian troops. Thereafter he was seen as a double danger, both as a pawn of the Tsar and as an ‘absolutist’ in his own right. In 1715–16 open warfare broke out between the King and his opponents. For the Tsar, it was a heaven-sent opportunity. By acting as mediator, Peter the Great could save the Polish nobles from their Saxon king whilst imposing conditions that would reduce the Republic to dependence. At the ‘Silent Sejm’ or ‘Dumb Diet’ summoned to Warsaw in January 1717, the Russian army stood by as the following pre-arranged resolutions were passed without debate:

POTEMKIN

IN 1787 Field Marshal Prince Gregory Potemkin (1739–91), Governor of I New Russia, organized a river journey down the Dnieper for the Empress Catherine and her court. His aim was to prove his success in colonizing the province, recently wrested from the Ottomans. To this end he assembled a number of mobile ‘villages’, each located at a strategic spot on the river bank. As soon as the imperial barge hove into sight Potemkin’s men, all dressed up as jolly peasants, raised a hearty cheer for the Empress and the foreign ambassadors. Then, as soon as it turned the bend, they stripped off their caps and smocks, dismantled the sets, and rebuilt them overnight further downstream. Since Catherine was Potemkin’s lover at the time, it is not possible to believe that she was ignorant of the ploy; the principal dupes were the foreign ambassadors. ‘Potemkin Villages’ has become a byword for the long Russian tradition of deception and disinformation.1 Force and fraud are the stock-in-trade of all dictatorships. But in Russia Potemkinism has been a recurring theme.

On this subject, the views of a professional deceptionist may not be entirely irrelevant. According to a senior KGB defector, Western opinion has been skilfully and systematically duped ever since Lenin’s NEP. The control of all information, combined with selective leaks and plants, enabled the Soviet security service to feed the West with an endless stream of false impressions. The ‘de-Stalinization’ of the 1950s was only a modified form of Stalinism. The ‘Sino-Soviet split’ of 1960 was jointly engineered by the CPSU and the CPC. ‘Romanian Independence’ was a myth invented for the convenience both of Moscow and Bucharest. Czechoslovak ‘democratization’ in 1968 was orchestrated by progressive elements in the KGB. ‘Eurocommunism’ was another sham. Even ‘Solidarity’ in Poland was run by Moscow’s agents. Published in 1984, before Gorbachev’s rise to power, this exposé of the KGB by an insider is obligatory reading for anyone pondering the ambiguities of glasnost’ and perestroika’, or the mysteries of the 1991 ‘Putsch’. The problem is: when do professional deceivers stop deceiving?2

Apart from his ‘villages’, Prince Potemkin is most often associated with the battleship named after him, whose mutinous crew sailed out of Odessa during the Revolution of 1905. People inevitably wonder whether that mutiny, too, was a fake.3 [SOVKINO]

The proponents of conspiracy theory hold that all historical events mask the designs of tricksters, plotters, and evil ‘unidentified forces’. Their opponents suggest the opposite, that conspiracy and deception do not exist. Both are badly mistaken, [PROPAGANDA]

1.The King’s Saxon army was to be banished from the Republic. (In other words, the King lost all semblance of an independent power base.)

2.The ‘golden liberties’ of the nobility were to be upheld. (In other words, through the preservation of the liberum veto, the central government of the Republic could be paralysed whenever convenient)

3.The armed forces of the Republic were to be limited to 24,000 men. (In other words, Poland-Lithuania was to be rendered defenceless.)

4.The armed forces were to be financed through allocations from a list of royal, ecclesiastical, and magnatial estates. (In other words, they were put beyond the control of king or Sejm.)

5.The settlement was to be guaranteed by the Tsar. (In other words, the Tsar could intervene in Poland-Lithuania at any time, and could legally suppress any movement for Reform.)

Henceforth, to all intents and purposes the Republic of Poland-Lithuania became a Russian protectorate, a mere appendage to the Russian Empire, a vast buffer-state which sheltered Russia from the West but cost nothing to maintain, [EROS]

Under Augustus III the central government collapsed completely. The King had to be installed by a Russian army which had overturned the re-election of Stanislaw Leszczyński, thereby sparking off the War of the Polish Succession; but he usually stayed in Dresden. The Sejm was regularly summoned, but regularly blocked by the liberum veto before it could meet. Only one session in 30 years was able to pass legislation. By an extreme example of the principle of subsidiarity, government was left to the magnates and to the provincial dietines. The Republic had no diplomacy, no treasury, no defence. It could enact no reforms. It was the butt of the philosophes. When the first volume of the French Encyclopédie was published in 1751, the prominent article on ‘Anarchie’ was all about Poland, [CANTATA] [SZLACHTA]

The reforming party fled abroad, thereby starting the unbroken Polish tradition of political emigration. Stanisław Leszczyński, twice elected king and twice driven out by the Russians, took refuge in France. Having married his daughter to Louis XV he was given the Duchy of Lorraine where, at Nancy, as Ie bon roi Stanislas he could practise the enlightened government forbidden at home.

Stanisław August Poniatowski (r. 1764–95), the last King of Poland, was a tragic and in some ways a noble figure. One of Catherine the Great’s earlier lovers, he was put in place with the impossible task of reforming the Republic whilst preserving the Russian supremacy. As it was, shackled by the constitution of 1717, he provoked the very convulsions which reform was supposed to avoid. How could one curtail the nobles’ sacred right of resistance without some nobles’ resisting? How could one limit the Russians’ right of intervention without the Russians intervening? How could one abolish the liberum veto without someone exercising the liberum veto7. The King tried to break the vicious circle on three occasions; and on three occasions he failed. On each occasion a Russian army arrived to restore order, and on each occasion the Republic was punished with partition. In the 1760s the King’s proposals for reform led to the war of the Confederation of Bar (1768–72) and to the First Partition. In 1787–92 the King’s support for the reforms of the Great Sejm and the Constitution of 3 May (1791) led to the Confederation of Targowica and the Second Partition (see Chapter IX). In 1794–5 the King’s adherence to the national rising of Tadeusz Kościuszko led to the final denouement. After the Third Partition, there was no Republic left over which to reign. Poniatowski abdicated on St Catherine’s Day 1795, and died in Russian exile.

CANTATA

IN October 1734, when the newly crowned King of Poland returned home at short notice, his music master had to compose an entire nine-part Cantata Gratulatoria in three days flat. The words were as baroque as the soaring music:

1. Chorsatz	Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen
	(Praise Thy Good Fortune, blessed Saxony)
4. Rezitativ	Was hat dich sonst, Sarmatien, bewogen …? (What has stirred thee, Sarmatia …?)
5. Arie	Rase nur verwegner Schwarm… (Bluster now, presumptuous swarm, in thine own bowels!)
7. Arie	Durch die von Eifer entflammeten Waffen … (To punish one’s enemies with weapons inflamed by zeal…)
8. Rezitativ	Lass doch, o teurer Landesvater, zu
	(Grant then, O Father of our country, that the Muses may honour the Day when Sarmatia elected thee King.)
9. Chorsatz	Stifter der Reiche, Beherrscher der Kronen … (Founder of Empires, Lord of Crowns …)

The events which prompted the cantata have been long forgotten. But the music could be reworked into later compositions, and became immortal. No. 7 became No. 47 in the Christmas Oratorio. No. 1 now forms the ‘Hosannah’ of the B Minor Mass. For the King of Poland was also the Elector of Saxony, and his music master was Johann Sebastian Bach.1

Throughout the terminal agony of the Republic, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania preserved its individuality. Its political weakness did not preclude a vigorous life which made it the source of four lasting traditions. Its capital city—Wilno-Vil’na-Vilnius—was a true cultural crossroads. The dominant Polish élite was doubly reinforced, first by the National Education Commission after 1773 and later by a regional board of education, based on the University of Wilno, which was to flourish under tsarist rule until 1825. Lithuania’s Yiddish culture was to be strengthened when the Grand Duchy was made the basis for Russia’s Jewish Pale of Settlement. The Lithuanian and Ruthenian (Byelorussian) peasantry, having preserved themselves from polonization, retained enough of their substance to withstand all the russifications of the future. Once absorbed by the Russian Empire, the Grand Duchy would never revive as an administrative entity. But its inhabitants would not completely forget their origins. They would participate in all the Polish risings of the nineteenth century. The Polish and Jewish traditions would hold out until the murderous era of Stalin and Hitler. The Lithuanian and to a lesser extent the Byelorussian traditions would survive hell and high water to reach independence in the 1990s. [B.N.R.][LIETUVA]

The international relations of the eighteenth century were concerned, above all, with the balance of power. All the general wars of the period were designed to maintain it (see Appendix III, pp. 1282–3). No one state felt strong enough to attempt the military conquest of the entire Continent; but relatively minor regional disturbances could provoke a chain reaction of coalitions and alliances to contain the perceived threat. Few matters of ideology or national pride were involved. Alliances could be rapidly permutated, and small professional armies could march swiftly into action to settle the disputes in tidy, set-piece battles. With the Concert of Europe in full operation, a series of diplomatic congresses could weigh out the consequences of the fighting and draw up the balance sheet of colonies, fortresses, and districts won or lost. Generally speaking, these wars served their purpose. No major redistribution of power and territory took place in Europe as the direct result of military conquest. Such adjustments that war did provoke—notably through the cession of Spanish territories at Utrecht or through Prussia’s seizure of Silesia—cannot compare to the greatest of all the territorial redistributions of the era, the Partitions of Poland, which were arranged without recourse to war. [DESSEIN]

The three Partitions of Poland-Lithuania furnish the finest examples which European history can boast of peaceful aggression. Completed in three stages, in 1773, 1793, and 1795, they divided up the assets of a state the size of France. They were carried out by gangsterish methods, where the unwritten threat of violence underlay all the formal agreements and where the victims were forced to condone their own mutilation. Many contemporary observers, thankful for the avoidance of war, were conditioned to accept the partitioners’ explanations. Many historians have accepted the view that the Poles brought disaster on themselves. It took a Burke, a Michelet, or a Macaulay to call a crime a crime.

The mechanism of the Partitions rested on two simple considerations: first, that a Russian army of intervention was required to suppress the Polish reform movement; and secondly, that a Russian advance into the Republic posed a threat to the Republic’s other neighbours, Prussia and Austria. After the draining experience of the Seven Years War, Prussia in particular was in no condition to fight another war against Russia. Instead, it was suggested that Prussian and Austrian interests could best be protected if, as the price of their acquiescence in Russian actions in Poland, they could be given territorial compensation. So, by general agreement of its neighbours, the defenceless Republic was to submit to the suppression of its reformers by Russian force, and to pay for the operation by the cession of huge tracts of territory. What was worse, the Republic had to listen in silence whilst its tormentors told the world of their generous and peaceful intentions.

DESSEIN

WHEN the second edition of the Due de Sully’s memoirs were prepared for publication in 1742, a great deal of re-editing was done. In particular, a large number of the Duke’s scattered and often contradictory comments on foreign relations were simplified and consolidated into one single chapter entitled ‘The Political Scheme commonly called the Grand Design of Henri the Great’. In this way, Sully’s Grand Dessein was reconstructed, not to say invented, more than a century after his death. Critics have argued that it was a product more of the eighteenth than of the seventeenth century.1

It must be said that Maximilien de Béthune (1560–1641), Baron de Rosny and Due de Sully, had little to do with foreign policy during his decade as Henri IV’s chief minister. He had been Superintendent of the Royal Finances, Grand Voyer (from viarius, ‘master of the roads’) of France, Grand Master of Artillery and then of Fortifications, and Governor of the Bastille.2 His thoughts on international relations date from his first years in retirement after 1610 and then, with major amendments, from the Thirty Years War. He had published them all, unsorted, in the two volumes of his Mémoires des sages et royales oeconomies d’estat (1638).

Sully’s immediate purpose was to reduce the preponderance of the Habsburgs. From this essentially opportunist purpose, however, he drew up a plan which envisaged both a new map of Europe and the machinery for maintaining a perpetual peace. The map was to consist of fifteen equal states that would be created by confining Spain to Iberia, by separating the House of Austria from the Empire, and by redistributing their possessions. The Spanish Netherlands, for example, were either to be divided between England and France or to be given to the United Provinces. Hungary was to be restored as an independent elective monarchy. The imperial throne in Germany was to be filled by open elections, and free from the monopoly power of any one dynasty. In the interests of perpetual peace, Sully planned a European League of Princes. The League was to be governed by a Federal Council, where the greater powers would hold four seats each and the others two, and where the chairmanship, starting with the Elector of Bavaria, would rotate. It would use its combined forces to settle disputes and to enforce policy.

The key concept behind both the new map and the new league was to be ‘equilibrium of strength’. No power was to be strong enough to impose its will on the others. Europe was to be ‘une république très chrétienne’ and ‘one great family’. Within its borders, it was to enjoy freedom of trade. Beyond its borders, it was to destroy the Turk and to undertake ‘convenient’ conquests in Asia and North Africa.

Fashioned by a statesman in irresponsible retirement, and refashioned by an eighteenth-century editor, the Grand Design has more than a smack of abstract theorizing. It may have been influenced by émeric Crucé’s Nouveau Cynée (1623), with its plan for a world-wide peace assembly to be chaired by the pope at Venice, which in turn may have owed something to the ‘League of Perpetual Union’ proposed by a Bohemian king as long ago as 1458 (see p. 428). It certainly belonged to the long tradition of theoretical writing from Dante’s De Monarchia to Erasmus and Campanella. But popularized in the age of the ‘balance of power’, it attracted great attention. In the two centuries which separated its relaunch from the League of Nations and the European Community, its basic thoughts on international stability, on free trade, on pooled sovereignty, and on joint enforcement have not ceased to appeal. Above all, it recognized what many ignored, that peace is a function of power.3

In the first round, the point was reached in the late 1760s when the turmoil in Poland-Lithuania could no longer be contained. The King’s proposals for limited reform had stirred up opposition on all sides. The Prussians had bombarded Polish customs posts on the Vistula, thereby ending all preparations for a modern fiscal system. The Russians had been stirring up a campaign against the alleged maltreatment of religious minorities in Poland, and had carried off the Polish bishops who protested. The Confederates of Bar, led by Casimir Pułaski (1747–79), bad taken the field to oppose both the King and the Russians. In 1769 the Austrians had used the uproar to seize the thirteen towns of the district of Spisz. St Petersburg would be obliged to take drastic action as soon as its Turkish war permitted. Berlin saw the chance: Prussia would not oppose Russian intervention if granted the Polish province of Royal Prussia. Austria would agree if given a slice of southern Poland: ‘The more she wept,’ joked Frederick II of Maria Theresa, ‘the more she took.’ Russia would take most of’White Ruthenia’.

The first Treaty of Partition was signed in St Petersburg on 5 August 1772. Legal niceties were observed throughout. The air was filled with homage to Poland’s ‘golden freedom’. Then the victim was persuaded to wield the knife. The King placed a motion in favour of the Partition before the Sejm. The one member to protest, Tadeusz Rejtan, who lay across the threshold of the Chamber to bar the King’s entry, was later declared insane. The three treaties of secession between the Republic and each of the partitioning powers were completed on 7/18 September 1773. The one sovereign to protest was the King of Spain. ‘I have partaken eucharistically of Poland’s body,’ was Frederick’s comment, ‘but I don’t know how the Queen-Empress has squared her confessor.’

The First Partition bought several years of relative calm. Poland-Lithuania was absorbed with the labours of the National Education Commission (see above); and in 1775 the King was given permission to form the outlines of ministerial government. All the Confederates of Bar had been deported to Siberia or had fled abroad. Pułaski had gone off to America, where he founded the US Cavalry. Russia, Prussia, and Austria were busy absorbing their ill-gotten gains.

The century of the Enlightenment drew to its close with the spectacle of three enlightened despots taking concerted action to crush an enlightened reform movement. The assault on the Polish state was accompanied by much enlightened rhetoric; and the consequent ‘rationalization of the map of Europe’ was widely excused. ‘Un polonais—’, quipped Voltaire, ‘c’est un charmeur; deux polonais— une bagarre; trois polonais, eh bien, c’est la question polonaise’ (one Pole—a charmer, two Poles—a brawl, three Poles—the Polish Question).33 [METRYKA]

Yet the basic problem remained. Poland-Lithuania was still a Russian captive, and the reformers were straining at the leash. If the King were to lose control, others would act for him. And as soon as they moved, the whole cycle of reform and repression would begin again. It began in 1787.

Monday evening, 29 October 1787, Prague. In the National Theatre of Count Nostitz in the old city (now the Tyl Theatre), Bondini’s Italian opera company was presenting the première of Il dissoluto punito, ‘The Rake’s Reward’. The performance had originally been advertised for the evening of the 14th, under the title of ‘The Guest of Stone’, when it had been intended to entertain the Princess of Tuscany on the way to her wedding in Dresden. In the event, the score of the new opera had not been completed. According to one Václav Svoboda (Wenzel Swoboda), who played the double bass in the orchestra, the composer had sat up all the Sunday night of the 28th with a small army of copyists; and the score of the overture was delivered to the theatre with the ink still wet on the page.34 But the players were not deterred. Cheering broke out when the composer took his bow at the front of the candlelit auditorium at 7 p.m. Two extended forte chords in D minor brought the uproar to a halt. Then the music sped away, molto allegro, info the fast chatter of the overture’s opening bars.

Ouverture

Str. 2 Fl. 2 Ob. 2 Cl. 2 Bsn. 2 Hn. 2 Tr. Timp.

At the end of the overture the maestro turned to the orchestra and complemented them on their sight-reading: ‘Bravo, Bravo, meine Herren, das war ausgezeichnet’ (Bravo, Gentlemen, that was admirable).

The libretto, as printed in advance for the court, could be bought at the box-office in Italian only (40 kr. bound in gold paper, 20 kr. ordinary). The title-page read:

IL DISSOLUTO PUNITO. O sia II D. Giovanni. Dramma giocoso in due atti. Da representarsi nel Teatro di Praga l’anno 1787. In Praga di Schoenfeld … La Poesía è dell’Ab Da Ponte, Poeta de’ Teatri Imperiali di Vienna. La Música è del Sig Wolfgango Mozzart, Maestro di Cap, dadesco.

The cast was: Giovanni—Luigi Bassi; Anna—Teresa Saporiti; Ottavio—Antonio Baglioni; Elvira—Caterina Micelli; Leporello—Felice Ponziani; Zerlina— Caterina Bondini (wife of the impresario); Commendatore—Giuseppe Lolli.36

Mozart’s Don Giovanni, as it came to be known, was but the latest variant of a popular tale of seduction that had reached the status of a European myth. Don Juan, the burlador of Seville, had been played over two centuries both in Neapolitan carnival and in French fairground pantomime. It had been given literary form by Molina (1630), Cicognini (c.1650), Molière (1665), Corneille (1677), Goldoni (1736), and Shadwell (1776). It had been set to music, for ballet or stage drama, at Rome in 1669, at Paris in 1746, at Turin in 1767, at Cassel in 1770. In the decade before it reached Mozart it had inspired at least four full-blown operas—by Righini at Vienna (1777), by Albertini at Warsaw (1783), by Foppa/Guardi and Berlati/Gazzaniga at Venice (1787). Mozart’s librettist, the Abbé da Ponte, had drawn heavily on Berlati’s words; and the tenor who sang Ottavio in Prague had come post-haste from singing the same role to Gazzaniga’s music in Venice.37

The basic plot was disarmingly simple. In the opening scene Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore, the angry father of Anna, his latest amorous conquest. After numerous intrigues, he is twice confronted in the closing scenes by the dead Commendatore’s statue, which cries for vengeance as the sinner is swallowed by the fires of Hell. Da Ponte condensed the story into two matching acts, each built round the same dramatic structure:

ACT I	ACT II
Nos. 1–7	Nos. 14–18
SEPARATE EXPOSITION	SEPARATION OF ANTAGONISTS
[Giovanni and 3 women]	[Giovanni disguised or absent]
(Aria) Giovanni-Anna	Giovanni-Leporello
(Trio) Death of Commendatore	(Trio) Deceit of Elvira
(Duet) Anna-Ottavio
Elvira misdirected to Leporello	Elvira misdirected to Leporello
(No. 4)
Zerlina-Giovanni-Masetto	Giovanni-Masetto
Giovanni-Zerlina	Zerlina-Masetto

Nos. 8–10	Nos. 19–21
MIXTURE OF PERSONS & PASSIONS	MIXTURE OF PERSONS & PASSIONS
Collective antagonism	Antagonism directed at Leporello
Quartet	Sextet
[Giovanni in background]	[Leporello escapes]
Anna sees Giovanni’s guilt	Ottavio sees Giovanni’s guilt
Aria (No. 10	Aria (No. 21)
	[Graveyard Scene]
Leporello’s narrative	Giovanni’s narrative
Aria (No. 11)	Duet (No. 22)
[Giovanni’s Garden]	[Anna’s House]
Aria (No. 12)	Aria (No. 23)
FINALE Entry of Masker Attempt on Zerlina  Collective Antagonism	FINALE Entry of Elvira Retribution: the statue Collective Conclusion38

No synopsis, however, could do justice to the exquisite partnership of the score and the libretto, whose memorable moments have withstood any amount of repetition and parody. In Aria No. 4 (‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo’) Giovanni’s servant boasts to Elvira of his master’s prowess in gallantry:

In Italy six hundred and forty,
In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one
A hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one,
While in Spain already a thousand and three! Milk e tre!)

In the delicious No. 7 (‘Là ci darem la mano’)—’the most perfect duet of seduction imaginable’—Giovanni wins the unsuspecting Zerlina without a trace of violence or deceit. His strong confident melody is picked up, played with by the soprano until both walk off arm in arm in a rapture of sheer delight:

Duettino Zerlina, D. Giovanni

Ser. 1 FL 2 Ob. 2 Bin. 2 Hn. Andante

In the melodramatic graveyard scene (Act II, Scene n) the players tremble as the Stone Guest declaims his eerie prophecy to the shattering accompaniment of trombones: ‘By dawn you will have laughed for the last time’:

Sestetto D. Anna, D. Elvira, Zeriina, D. Ottavio, Leporello, Masetto
Str. 2 FL2 Ob. 2 CL 2 Bsn. 2 Hn. 2 Tr. Timp.

After the finale, when Giovanni’s doom is complete, the cast is left singing the none-too-convincing moral in chorus to a scintillating double fugue:

Questo è il fin di chi fa mal
E de’ perfidi la morte alia vita è sempre ugual

(This is the end of the sinner’s game I His life and death are just the same.)

For the opera’s second performance, in Vienna seven months later, Mozart and Da Ponte made a number of changes to suit a new cast and a new theatre. To accommodate some additions, they dropped Ottavio’s Aria, No. 21(22) (‘II mio tesoro intanto’):

Aña D. Ottavio
Str. 2 CL 2 Bsn. 2 Hn.

But the number was soon reinstated, and has remained an essential part of the standard repertoire ever since.

Mozart made two visits to Prague in 1787, both with his wife, Constanze. He was at the very peak of his career. During the first visit, in January and February, he presented his Symphony no. 38, ‘The Prague’ (K. 504), and later conducted a triumphant performance of Le nozze di Figaro. The reception was so favourable that he immediately signed a contract with Bondini for a new opera to be staged at the start of the next season. On his return to Vienna he gave some lessons to a seventeen-year-old pianist from Bonn called Beethoven. In May he was grievously stricken by the death of his beloved father and troubled by the settlement of the estate. Yet not a trace of his distress can be heard either in the Divertimento in F (K. 522) or in the delectable Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in G (K. 525) both of which were composed that summer.

Mozart’s six-week trip to Prague with Don Giovanni can be traced both from his correspondence and from the local press. He left Vienna on 1 October, having just received the meagre proceeds of the auction of his father’s chattels at Salzburg. He travelled again with Constanze, who was six months pregnant. The journey of c.150 miles took three days, since the Praeger Oberpostamtszeitung was already announcing his arrival on the 4th. ‘The news has spread here that the opera newly written by [our celebrated Herr Mozart], Das steinerne Gastmahl be given for the first time at the National Theatre.’ He took rooms in the Three Lions Inn at Kohlmarkt 20, and was joined four days later by his librettist Da Ponte, who stayed across the street at the Glatteis Hotel. The 13th, 14th, and 15th were taken up by the visit of the Princess of Tuscany, and by the last-minute decision to stage a German version of Le nozze de Figaro for her benefit. Mozart at this point was despondent. ‘Everything dawdles along here,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘because the singers, who are lazy, refuse to rehearse on opera days, and the manager, who is anxious and timid, will not force them.’ The last week of the month was taken up by the sickness of various singers, and by the lack of an overture. But finally the première took place amidst universal applause. The Oberpostamtszeitung was ecstatic:

On Monday … the Italian Opera company gave the ardently awaited opera by Maestro Mozard [sic], Don Giovanni… Connoisseurs and musicians say that Prague has never yet heard the like… Everybody on the stage and in the orchestra strained every nerve to thank Mozard by rewarding him with a good performance. There were also heavy additional costs, caused by several choruses and changes of scenery, all of which Herr Guardosoni had brilliantly attended to. The unusually large attendance testifies to unanimous approbation.46

The opera was repeated on 3 November for Mozart’s personal benefit. The Mozarts left Prague on the 13th, but not before several prominent Praguers had written lavish compliments in the composer’s scrapbook:

When Orpheus’ magic lute out-rings
Amphion to his lyre sings,
The lions tame, the rivers quiet grow,
The tigers listen, rocks a-walking go.
When Mozart masterly music plays
And gathers undivided praise,
The quire of Muses stays to hear,
Apollo is himself all ear.

Your admirer and friend,
Joseph Hurdalek

Prague, 12 November 1787, Rector of the General Seminary

Map 19. Mozart’s Journey to Prague, 1787

During their second trip to Prague the Mozarts stayed much of the time with their friends the Dušeks, in their Villa Bertramka at Smichov, where the final numbers of Don Giovanni were completed. Franz Dušek was a concert pianist; his wife, Jozefa, a soprano and long-standing friend with whom Mozart felt greatly at ease. Before leaving, Mozart was recommended for the sinecure of imperial Kammermusikus.

He arrived back in Vienna to find that the annual salary offered was only 800 gulden, the previous incumbent, Gluck, having died with a salary of 2,000. As always, his prestige outstripped his finances. On 27 December Constanze gave birth to their fourth child, a daughter who lived for six months. Mozart was coming to the end of a golden decade.

Mozart’s collaboration with the Abbé Da Ponte marks a milestone in Europe’s musical development. Their three productions—Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Cost fan tutte (1790)—belong to opera buffa, one of the lightest and, supposedly, most ephemeral of genres; yet they have survived triumphantly. Together with Mozart’s German operas Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782) and Die Zauberflöte (1791), they form the earliest group of compositions to establish themselves within the standard repertoire of Grand Opera. Indeed, within that repertoire of some thirty items they are matched in quantity and unending popularity only by the operas of Wagner and Verdi. Da Ponte proved an ideal partner. A fugitive from his native Venice, where he had been born in the ghetto, he did not take his conversion and his holy orders too seriously. He wrote the text of Don Giovanni from the heart.48 (See Appendix III, p. 1278.)

In the absence of sound-recording [SOUND], there have been several literary attempts to recapture the extraordinary ambience of Mozart’s music-making. Sixty years after Mozart’s death, for example, the poet Eduard Mörike (1804–75) did so by means of a short novella, Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (1851). He recounts an imaginary encounter which the composer might well have had with the sort of cultivated people who made up his most enthusiastic audiences. Wolfgang and Constanze are travelling towards Prague through the pine-clad hills of the Bohemian forest when they spy the castle of the Counts von Schinzberg. Wolfgang is caught red-handed when he carelessly plucks a fruit from an orange tree in the castle’s park. But he is rewarded with an invitation to dinner. After dinner he sits down to play at the piano and recounts, with musical illustrations, how he composed the finale of Don Giovanni.

Without more ado, he put out the candles in the two candelabra standing beside him, and that terrifying air—Di rider finirai pria dell’aurora—rang through the deathly stillness of the room… From distant starry spheres, the silver trumpet notes seem to fall through the blue night, to pierce the soul with the icy tremor of doom.

Chi va là. Who goes there?

Give an answer—One hears Don Giovanni demand.

Then the voice rings out afresh, monotonous as before, bidding the impious youth to leave the dead in peace…49

Nor have the Czechs forgotten the brief days when Mozart graced their country. A contemporary Czech poet uses an evening at the Villa Bertramka as a springboard for reflections on unattainable paradise:

A když počal hrát
a copánek mu poskakoval po zádech
přestaly šumët i lastury
a nasta vily svá rozkošná ouška…

(And when he began to play I and his pigtail to dance on his back I even the sea-shells ceased humming I and pricked up their delicate ears. I Why did they not lock the door then? I Why not unharness the horses from the coach? I He departed so soon.)

The Prague which Mozart loved was reaching a peak of splendour that few European cities could rival. It was the second city of the Habsburg domains, and had recently undergone five or six decades of unparalleled architectural reconstruction. The elegant neo-classical Tyl Theatre, only four years old, where Don Giovanni was performed, was just one of many magnificent new public buildings. The Thun Palace (1727), now the British Embassy, where the Mozarts stayed during their first visit in 1787, was just one of a score of sumptuous aristocratic residences of recent date, including those of Colleredo-Mansfeld, Goltz-Kinsky, Clam-Gallas, Caretto-Millesimo, and Lobkowitz-Schwarzenberg. The basilica of St Nicholas (1755), where Mozart’s Mass in C was performed in the week after his departure, was one of a dozen Baroque churches designed by the Diezenhofers, father and son. The Carolinum (completed 1718) housed the university complex, the Clementinum (completed 1715) the Jesuit church and library.

Most importantly, each of the city’s four main historic centres had recently been enclosed, embellished, and united into a harmonious whole. Hradčany, Prague’s ancient Castle Hill on the left bank of the Vltava, containing St Vitus’ Cathedral (1344) and the Vladislavský Sàl (1502) of the Jagiellons, had been surrounded in 1753–75 by the high walls of Pacassi’s imposing offices. The Malá strana or Lesser City, at the foot of Hradčany, was adorned by a new episcopal palace (1765). The ancient Karlův Most or Charles Bridge (1357) which links the city’s two sides, had been adorned along its 660–m length by a stunning series of religious and historical statues, the streets of the old city on the right bank, still dominated by the Týnsky chrám and the City Hall, had been revitalized by much renovation. They were enlivened, as always, by the hourly spectacle of the city clock where Christ and the apostles led a procession brought up in the rear by Death, the Turk, the miser, the fool, and the cock, and by the chimes of the Loretto carillon (1694). The Charter of United Prague had been granted by the Emperor Joseph II as recently as 1784.

The aristocrats whose residences graced the city and whose patronage ruled its music were the principal beneficiaries of Habsburg rule. They were largely drawn from German families who had benefited from the sequestrations of the native Czech nobility in the course of the Thirty Years War. The wealth of their estates in the prosperous Bohemian countryside supported the glitter of their life in town. By Mozart’s time the majority of Czechs had been reduced to a headless, peasant nation, though a number of middle-class people, like the Dušeks, lived on the margins of Czech and German society.

The contrasts between rich and poor were extreme. During his first visit to Prague in 1771, when a sixth of Prague’s population had died from famine, the Emperor Joseph II had been shocked:

How shameful are the cases which have occurred in this year’s famine. People have actually died, and have taken the last sacrament in the street … In this city, where there is a rich Archbishop, a large cathedral chapter, so many abbeys and three Jesuit palaces … there is not a single proven case where any of these took in even one of the miserable wretches who were lying in front of their doors.51

Joseph II had no patience for the fossilized complacency of the Catholic Church. The Jesuit Order had been disbanded in the previous decade; and when he attained sole rule in 1780 he unleashed a flood of reforming decrees that threatened to undermine the most sacred pillars of the social order. Serfs were emancipated. Religious toleration was extended to Uniates, Orthodox, Protestants and Jews. Children under nine were forbidden to work. Civil marriage and divorce were permitted. Capital punishment was abolished. Freemasonry flourished. Wealth which derived from the secularization of ecclesiastical property was reflected in a spate of imperial and aristocratic architectural extravagance.

Prague’s large Jewish community were sharing in the surge of prosperity. They had put the last of numerous expulsions behind them in 1744–5, and in the 1780s were reaping the fruits of the imperial Toleranzpatent. The Jewish quarter, renamed Jozefov in the Emperor’s honour, shared in the city’s extensive renovation. The medieval Old-New Synagogue and the Klaus Synagogue were both rebuilt. On the Jewish town hall, one modern clock showed the time in Latin numerals whilst another below it did so in Hebrew numerals. Prague’s Jews were destined at a later date to supply the most dynamic element of Viennese Jewry.

Prague’s freemasons, too, basked in the glow of imperial tolerance. They welcomed Mozart, who was a member of the Grand Lodge of Austria in Vienna, as one of their own. They represented the strong reaction that was running against the suffocating hold of the Catholic Church over all intellectual and cultural affairs.

Mozart thrived in the relaxed social climate of the 1780s, which the growth of the opera buffa reflected. He struck a neutral stance towards the morals of his day. But the Rake’s ‘Reward’ is too melodramatic to be taken seriously, and the message of his next collaboration with Da Ponte,Cosí fan tutte (All the Women Are At It) was judged by some to be scandalously permissive. Lines about ‘the gaping bottom of every sweet-watered vale’ were not open to too many interpretations. Lorenzo Da Ponte himself, a converted Jew, had earned a reputation not far removed from that of his friend and fellow Venetian, Giovanni Casanova di Seingalt (1725–98). After a lifetime of spying, lechery, and fleeing from justice, Casanova was passing his final years as librarian to the Count Waldstein at Dux (Duchcov) in northern Bohemia. He is known to have visited his publisher in Prague on 24 October 1787, and it is quite likely that he stayed on for Don Giovanni’s première. Some critics were to suggest that he was the model for the Don.

Gross libertinism had always been a strong undercurrent in the eighteenth century.52 But given the official puritanism of Catholic Austria, it was no mean step to make sexual seduction the theme of public entertainment. It offended the moral guardians of Josephine Prague no less than it offends the guardians of feminist correctness today. Don Giovanni, after all, like Casanova, was a cynical philanderer for whom women were mere objects of desire. Casanova’s own words are not irrelevant:

The man who loves … rates the pleasure which he is sure to give the loved object more highly than the pleasure which the object can give him in fruition. Hence, he is eager to satisfy her. Woman, whose great preoccupation is her own interest, cannot but rate the pleasure she will herself feel more highly than the pleasure she will give. Hence, she procrastinates…53

One of Mozart’s greatest qualities, however, was to place himself above the passions of the world around him. His scores were blithe or sublime by turns, even when he was oppressed by the most agonizing pains of ill health, poverty, and bad fortune. His music, though composed in the world, was not of it. Though he was highly travelled, having spent twenty years touring the courts of Europe, there is not the slightest trace of the politics of his day.

In 1787 Europe was approaching the climacteric of its development over the previous two centuries. This was the year when the republican Constitution of the USA was signed, to the horror of Europe’s monarchies, and when the American dollar began to circulate. In Britain, under the ministry of the Younger Pitt, world-wide imperial concerns were under discussion with the launching both of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of British India, and of the Association for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. In Russia, the Empress Catherine had just embarked on the latest of her campaigns against the Turks—to which end, in her new province of Crimea, she entertained her ally, the Emperor Joseph, Mozart’s patron. In the Netherlands, the Stadholder William V had been expelled, and his wife taken hostage by the republican ‘Patriot’ party. As Mozart prepared to set out for Prague, the Prussian army was setting out for Holland to restore the Stadholder. The Vatican was fighting the secular tide: Pius VI (r. 1775–99) had been barred from sending a nuncio to Munich, and had been refused the customary feudal homage by the King of Naples. In Florence he was faced by a Grand Duke who had introduced Gallican rules into the Tuscan Church. In France, by the time that Don Giovanni was performed, both the Assembly of Notables and the Parlement of Paris had been convened and dis missed. The King of France had been convinced of the country’s impending bank ruptcy, and had resolved to summon the Estates-General, initially for July 1792. Other events, of great importance for the future, took place virtually unnoticed. The first practical steamboat was demonstrated. In August, Horace Saussure made the first ascent of Mont Blanc. Man was mastering Nature.

With hindsight, the historian can see that Mozart’s music was playing out many of the most doomed and decrepit elements of the Ancien Régime. No one knew at the time, but Joseph II was the penultimate occupant of the Holy Roman Empire. Doge Paolo Renier (r. 1779–89) was the 125th in the line of 126 doges of Venice. Bohemia’s neighbour, Poland, had already entered the last decade of the last reign of its 51 sovereign kings and princes. Pope Pius VI was destined to die in a French revolutionary dungeon.

In the creative arts, as always, the traditional vied with the innovative. 1787 saw Jeremy Bentham’s Defence of Usury, Goethe’s Iphigenie in verse, and Schiller’s Don Carlos. Fragonard, David, and Goya were at their easels, alongside Reynolds, Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Romney. Mozart’s musical contemporaries included Haydn, Cherubini, and C. P. E. Bach.

Of course, it could be said that Don Giovanni was conceived as a brilliant, intuitive allegory of the judgement which awaited a corrupt and dissolute continent. If so, there is no such hint either in Mozart’s correspondence or in the work itself. People had no awareness of impending catastrophe, least of all in France. The Marquis de Condorcet, for example, one of the most radical philosophes of the day, was certain of only one thing, that monarchy was impregnable.54 An intelligent young Frenchwoman with musical inclinations recorded her impressions of Paris in that same era:

The musical gatherings [at the Hotel de Rochechouart] were very distinguished. They were held once a week… but there were rehearsals as well. Mme Montgeroux, a famous pianist of the day, played the piano; an Italian singer from the Opera sang the tenor parts; Mandini, another Italian, sang the bass; Mme de Richelieu was the prima donna; I sang the contralto, M de Duras the baritone; the choruses were sung by other good amateurs. Viotti accompanied us on the violin. We executed the most difficult finales in this way. Everyone took the greatest pains, and Viotti was excessively severe… I doubt if there exists anywhere the ease, harmony, good manners, and absence of all pretension which was to be found then in all the great houses of Paris…

Amid all these pleasures, we were drawing near to the month of May 1789, laughing and dancing our way to the precipice. Thinking people were content to talk of abolishing all the abuses. France, they said, was about to be reborn. The word ‘revolution’ was never uttered.

*1 July 1690 (Old Style) = 11 July 1690 (New Style). Owing to confusion over the changed calendar, or perhaps over the Protestants’ second victory of July 1690 at Aughrim, ‘The Boyne’ has come to be celebrated traditionally in Northern Ireland as a national holiday held on 12 July.