Chapter Seven
In the summer of 1583, Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer, John Dee, received a visit that testified to his towering reputation for learning. As he recorded in his journal, Prince Albertus Laski, one of the mightiest nobles in Poland-Lithuania, itself the greatest kingdom in Europe, arrived with loud fanfare at Dee’s house besides the river Thames: “he was rowed by the Quene’s men,” the magus noted with pride, “he had the barge covered with the Quene’s cloth, the Quene’s trumpeters, &c. He cam of purpose to do me honor, for which God be praysed!”
It was one of the last truly happy entries in Dee’s journal. He was still waiting for Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s return from America, unaware that in the very week of Laski’s arrival his partner had drowned in the Bay of Biscay. Meanwhile his book buying had landed him in such dire poverty he needed a patron, and he eagerly accepted the Polish prince’s offer of a position in his household. The relationship would involve Dee in a folly that would tarnish his reputation down the centuries.
The Polish commonwealth stretched from Lithuania in the north to Prussia in the west and Ukraine in the south, making it the largest country in Europe. Its military strength was in proportion. No fewer than seventy-five Muslim attacks had been repelled by Poland’s armies between 1474 and 1569, earning the country the title of “the Christian bulwark” of Europe. And Prince Laski, in the words of Lord Burleigh, Queen Elizabeth’s chancellor, was “a personage of great estimation, few exceed him in sovereignty and power.” As one of the foremost members of the szlachta or nobility, he had not only been influential in the election of Poland’s new king, Stefan Bátory, in 1576, but thanks to the country’s system of electoral monarchy, was seen as a potential future king himself.
In England, anyone who possessed land and political influence on such a scale would be dripping with cash. And when Laski recruited Dee and his Irish associate, Edward Kelley, into his service, the magus felt his future had been secured. But the once-feudal economy of the eastern European plain had developed along a different path from England’s. Prince Laski’s extensive estates near Lodz were worked with serf labor.
On the face of it, there seemed little reason why private property should not have emerged in Poland. Like their English counterparts, Polish landowners enclosed common land, squeezed out smaller freeholders, and regarded their estates as private possessions to be passed on to the next generation free of feudal dues. A solid trade in wheat and rye, more than eighty thousand tons a year at its peak in the sixteenth century, sent down the Vistula River for export through Danzig, might have provided the same impetus to treat the earth as a private source of wealth as the wool trade did in England.
The financial sophistication to back such a transformation could have come from Danzig, now Gdansk, a city port with a mercantile structure as advanced as London’s, and sufficient wealth to put an army of five thousand mercenaries in the field. The Jews who had been expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century had dispersed beyond Amsterdam to Poland, promoting international trade and financial links to the outside world. Under the liberal constitution of 1505, the szlachta elected the monarch and members of the Sejm, or parliament, thus giving landowners enough political influence in government to enact the measures that would give them property in their estates. The legal system guaranteed individual freedoms, including a degree of religious tolerance that made Poland the first country in the world to deem anti-Semitism a crime. Poland’s Renaissance culture fostered the heliocentric discoveries of Nicholas Copernicus, the art of Hans Dürer, and the Protestant theology of Jan Laski, the prince’s cousin and a friend of Erasmus.
Hanging in the National Gallery in Washington, Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Polish Nobleman, painted in 1637, gives a glimpse of what it meant to be a member of the szlachta. The model may be Rembrandt himself, but the flamboyant Asiatic garb, the sable fur flung round the shoulders, the pearl earring dangling from the fleshy ear, and the winged mustache spreading luxuriantly beneath the bulbous nose, all suggest the extravagant freedom that was encapsulated in the gentlemanly code known as “Sarmatism” that governed the nobility’s conduct. Within their own caste, every member of the szlachta, however needy, was assumed to be equal, and united in gallantry, independence of mind, and generosity of behavior. But the extravagance of Sarmatian values was not reflected in the economy. While the harvest produced money, there was, as Dee’s journal makes clear, none in the land itself. Although he and Kelley were living on Laski’s enormous estate, or folwark, near Lodz, worked by over a hundred serfs, there was barely enough silver and gold to pay the prince’s two new advisors.
During the very period that England’s landowners were transforming land from a feudal possession into capital and relying on paid labor to exploit its value, their Polish counterparts were going in the opposite direction, converting feudal dues to forced labor, pushing peasants into serfdom, and enshrining land as the symbol of nobility. The basic division of a feudal estate, between demesne land belonging directly to the lord and the tenements that were worked by peasants in return for dues to the lord, was carried over into serfdom. But in contrast to the relative freedom of a peasant, a serf in eastern Europe was unable to move from the estate where he or she was born.
The birth of this model of land ownership took place during the fifteenth century conflict between king and noble landowners. Like every other European country, Poland’s feudal system was shaken by the inrush of silver, first a stream from southern German mines then a flood from Spanish America, giving rise to decades of inflation. Across the continent, the era of the self-financed army sustained by feudal dues came to an end, its demise accelerated by the new and dramatic cost of supplying heavy artillery and portable firearms such as the arquebus and musket. By the end of the sixteenth century, the price of waging war had made national taxation a central strategic concern, and the Europe-wide struggle between monarchs and their most powerful subjects for control of the land’s revenues reflected its importance as the primary source of wealth and income. Only the commercially successful Netherlands and the silver-enriched Spanish Habsburgs were exempt. Elsewhere on the continent, the struggle tilted in favor of kings, emperors, and single rulers, but in Poland the outright winners were the szlachta.
From the early fifteenth century, the commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania—the two countries were united in 1446—not only waged a prolonged war in the south with Islam, in the shape of the Ottoman Empire and later the Crimean Tatars, but mounted repeated campaigns in the north against Prussia, Russia, and Sweden. Although Polish armies employed mercenaries, its powerful cavalry, whose reputation reached from Istanbul to Paris, was supplied and led by the nobility. Initially, the cost of each armored knight was, in theory, covered by the revenues and services from each feudal estate, while the army’s other needs were met by taxation and the resources of royal lands. But under the strain of the incessant demand for men and military resources, the structure buckled. To persuade the szlachta to neglect their fields and forests for lengthening periods of warfare, Poland’s kings were forced to cede an ever-growing list of concessions.
Some of the nobility’s gains resembled those later won by England’s landed gentry—the elected Sejm, to represent their interests; a guarantee that the king would secure the approval of the Sejm before raising taxes or going to war; an unequivocal declaration that should the king break any of these agreements, the szlachta would have the freedom to rebel. But there were some still unknown to a private property society. The most astonishing was the agreement made under the liberal constitution of 1505 that kings should be elected by the nobility.
Given these ingredients, there might seem little reason why private property should not have emerged in Poland. Like their English counterparts, Polish landowners regarded their estates as private possessions to be passed on to the next generation free of feudal dues. The crucial difference were two measures that affected ownership of the broad, flat grasslands that provided nearly all Poland’s exports and the bulk of her wealth. In 1496 the Piotrków Privilege, extracted from the king shortly before the outbreak of a fresh campaign against the Ottoman Empire, conferred on the szlachtathe power of preventing any of their peasants from leaving their estates, and at the same time it prohibited city merchants, a class that was not liable for military service, from buying land “because they have no part in the general levy.” The short-term purpose of these privileges was to reward Poland’s noble commanders by restricting the privilege of owning land to them, and to reassure them that during their absence on service the workforce could not be enticed away from their estate. The long-term consequence was the creation of the serf economy.
Once a peasant’s movements were restricted to the estate on which he was born, he and his family could no longer escape their feudal lord’s demands. As peasants, they continued to own the use of farms, large enough sometimes to employ laborers themselves, and to have teams of horses and oxen to work the soil, and in exchange they still gave their labor to the noble landowner. But, like slavery, the new institution soon altered every aspect of social life.
Within an estate’s boundaries, peasant life was organized tightly around the provision of forced labor—Robot in German—primarily for the cultivation of the noble’s private land, but also for road building or military service, and only when these obligations had been fulfilled could serfs work on their own strips of land. In order to keep the entire family on the estate, landowners put in place a continually growing list of regulations, that “Peasants . . . must not give their daughters in marriage within other jurisdictions”; that without permission children were forbidden to “rent their working strength out to others”; that unless the widow of a deceased plowman “remarries within a year,” she would be evicted; and that “since the land is the lord’s property, none of his subjects has the right . . . to share it among his relatives.”
Even after serfdom had been abolished, it left a nightmare memory that a nineteenth-century teacher, Jan Slomka of Dzikow in southeast Poland, found to be still vivid when he talked to former serfs in the area. “As the folk who knew this system and remembered it used to tell of it,” he recounted, “no worse punishment could be found for men and women than serfdom.” As late as the 1800s, a serf’s home might be no better than a single-roomed cottage with an earth floor, sheepskins for bedding, and a central fire that had no chimney. Until his family had fulfilled their quota of Robot, the overseer was liable to burst into their cottage, throw a bucket of water on the fire, or tear the door off its hinges and drive them out to work. “The lord of the manor was owner of everything,” Slomka concluded. “His was both land and water, yes even the wind; since only he was allowed to build a wind-mill to grind corn. Only when all his compulsory dues were completed could the peasant sing the old song: ‘I’m not afraid the landlord will molest me, My dues are done, I’ll set me home and rest me!’ ”
As Polish landowners tightened their grip in the sixteenth century, they absorbed smaller estates and unoccupied territory until the possessions of the greatest nobility resembled latifundia, the term employed during the Roman Empire to describe the gigantic spreads amounting to petty kingdoms accumulated by its most powerful citizens. The Polish word was folwark, and the power of folwark courts to enforce regulations reduced the already limited freedom of peasants to the constricted condition of serfs. Their one weapon was to perform their Robot more slowly, but the szlachta retaliated by marking out the area of aristocratic fields and the length of public roads with their own measuring rods, which grew longer until what had been a day’s work in the 1500s took a day and half to complete in the 1600s. Meanwhile the serfs’ own fields were measured, as one petition to the Sejm put it, “with a very small rod which reduced [our land] so badly that we no longer know what to do, and how to support ourselves.”
In the fifteenth century, the historian Jan Dlugosz penned a notable sketch of the characteristics of his countrymen: “the Polish gentry are eager for glory, keen on the spoils of war, contemptuous of danger and death, inconstant in their promises, hard on their subjects and people of the lower orders . . . courteous to foreigners and guests, [and] lavish in hospitality.”
Since disputes were ultimately resolved by the landowner’s overseer, with refractions punished by the manor court, serfs had little hope of redress. Nevertheless, as at least one folwark regulation suggested, they still refused to labor for their masters with any enthusiasm. “In order to encourage people to work in a perfect fashion,” ran one decree issued by a nobleman with an estate near the Baltic coast, “I have decided that the son or the son-in-law (preferably the son) will inherit [the right to work the farm] from the deceased parent if . . . either is capable of replacing the father.” Presumably this privilege must have served as an incentive, but one so easily given could be taken away with as little difficulty.
By preventing ownership from passing outside the nobility, however, the Piotrków Privilege inadvertently made it impossible to use the land as security to raise loans from the wealthy city burghers of Krakow or Danzig. There could be no equity in szlachta property, no competition to improve its fertility, no cash in the employment of its workers. While in town, Laski and his like had access to silver and gold, but on their estates they were persistently short of cash.
It was the desperate need for money that led John Dee astray. He allowed himself to believe the claim of his colleague Edward Kelley that the angel Uriel had shown him how to concoct a chemical that would turn base metals to gold. This may have been what really interested Prince Laski, rather than the magus’s extensive learning. But when Kelley refused to repeat the experiment, the two alchemists were allowed to leave for the more promising surroundings of the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II, in Prague. Under pressure to produce results, Kelley claimed in 1586 to have performed the experiment again, and in his diary Dee solemnly recorded the result in the Latin he used for esoteric events: “et producta est optimi auri oz. fere” (“and [it] produced almost an ounce of finest gold”). For a period, their stock soared, and Kelley seized the chance to acquire another powerful patron. But among less credulous courtiers, Dee’s reputation was sullied, and his inability to find a patron himself forced him to struggle back to the safety of London in 1589, where he found his library ransacked and a life of poverty awaiting him.
In effect, serfdom was a command structure, shaped by the demands of war and the relative emptiness of the war-torn grasslands of eastern Europe. In the late fifteenth century, the system spread to the Austrian Empire then engaged in its own long life-or-death struggle with the Ottoman Empire, and it was introduced by the Poles to the duchy of Prussia in 1525 when the duchy was still ruled by the military order of Teutonic Knights. Serfdom’s most significant convert, however, was Poland’s old enemy, Russia, and it took root during the 1550s while Russia was fighting for survival against repeated invasions by the Tatar khans of the Crimea and the Volga basin.
The obvious inefficiencies of serfdom’s micromanagement, quite apart from the injustice of reducing more than two thirds of the population to such a servile state, ought to have made the serf economy uncompetitive from the start. Yet for more than two centuries, it turned out to be a far more dynamic way of owning the earth than private property. The great serf empires of Austria and Russia would spread faster and further until in 1789 they enveloped all of central and eastern Europe, from Vienna to the Urals, while private landed property was still confined to the islands of Britain and Ireland and a thinly populated coastal region in North America.
Warfare provided the ultimate test of an economy’s efficiency, and judged by that ruthless yardstick, the source of serfdom’s energy becomes obvious.
The great rival of Poland, as of the other serf economies of Russia and Austria, was the Ottoman Empire. So potent were its armed forces that in the middle of the sixteenth century, its sultan, Süleyman the Magnificent, could claim to be the most powerful ruler in Europe, outranking the Polish king, Sigismund II, and the Spanish Habsburg emperor, Philip II. Habsburg possessions stretched from Spain through the Netherlands and Burgundy into Italy, but Süleyman held the Balkans, Greece, Romania, and most of Hungary and Austria, as far north as Vienna in the heart of Europe, and his navies enveloped Italy and threatened the southern coast of Spain. The Atlantic Ocean divided the Spanish Habsburg possessions in Europe from their American empire, but the sliver of the Hellespont, less than a mile across, was all that separated Suleiman’s European domain from the rest of the Ottoman Empire stretching through Turkey and the Middle East into North Africa and as far east as the Persian Gulf.
The empire had its roots in the nomadic Turkic people of central Asia who had swirled westward with the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century and established themselves in what is now known as the Middle East. The cutting edge of Ottoman armies was delivered by its fearsome horse-mounted archers, known usually as sipahis, or sometimes as timariots, from the landholding or timar that fed and supplied them with their mounts and arms. Adopting the tactic of the Mongol horsemen who were their forebears, the sipahis shot arrows at the gallop, outflanking enemy formations by their speed of movement. They were recruited only from Muslim landholders. At the height of his power in the 1560s, Süleyman the Magnificent could rely on the timar system to finance the deployment of eighty-seven thousand sipahi cavalry.
Although an Ottoman cavalryman held his timar directly from the sultan in return for service in war—much as a Christian feudal knight held his land from the king—it could never be a purely military relationship. A fundamental concept of sharia law, the basis of the empire’s legal system, was that the earth belonged to God—“Unto Allah belongeth whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is in the earth,” the Koran states explicitly. Thus, Süleyman the Magnificent, in common with all Ottoman rulers, possessed the soil simply as God’s agent, the leader of the Muslims, Amir-al-Muslimin.
Land, in other words, was the currency paid to those who served the empire, and thereby advanced Islam. Holders of timar land not only fought, but were responsible for gathering taxes and providing local justice and administration, while alongside them the holders of religious land, the waqf, a category comprizing almost one fifth of the empire’s territory, were expected to build schools and hospitals. In theory at least, the holders of Ottoman soil could neither inherit it nor lease it to someone else. As in Poland, however, the strains of war had begun to distort this formal structure, and as a European power, the Ottoman Empire could not escape the destructive effects of silver inflation. In the course of the sixteenth century, the cost of equipping a sipahi soared, while the value of revenues from timar land remained fixed.
Next to his military achievements, Süleyman’s magnificence lay in his legal reforms, and especially the framework of land law that he laid over the patchwork quilt of imperial land ownership. It remained in force for three hundred years. And in European terms it represented a preemptive strike to establish imperial control of the land’s resources. The main purpose of the changes was to increase revenues for the state, and so it made the use of land dependent on payment of taxes and dues. Cadastral surveys—to map the ownership of land—were ordered throughout the empire in order to register its main categories—miri or state land, including the timariot; waqf or religious land; and mülk or private land, including small allotments and large tracts of reclaimed land.
A strongly centralized bureaucracy in Istanbul, headed by the Grand Vizier, used the information to impose imperial taxes that were levied through provincial governors. Throughout Süleyman’s reign these produced a treasury surplus that amounted to 71 million akçer (very approximately twelve million dollars) in 1528. Measured by the crude but unforgiving test of war, his revenue permitted him to raise an army of up to one hundred thousand warriors in the west, strong enough to force the Hapbsburg Austrians to cede control of Hungary, while a smaller force in the east captured Baghdad from the Persians and took possession of the Persian Gulf.
A century later, the French traveler Jean de Thévenot testified to the lasting effects of Süleyman’s reforms, writing of the empire’s “strong agricultural base . . . the well being of the peasantry, the abundance of staple foods, and the pre-eminence of organization in Süleyman’s government.” But the appearance was deceptive. By then his successors were losing control of the land, and in 1670 the treasury would be in deficit by forty-four million akçer or about seven million dollars.
In part the loss of control was due to the localized structure of Sunni Islam—the version favored by Ottoman sultans—that fragmented the general tenets of Süleyman’s reforms into hundreds of regional variations. The eternal conflicts arising over land’s inheritance, use, and taxation were adjudicated, in the last resort, by an imam who made reference to the two highest authorities on the subject, the Koran and the sunna, the nonsacred sayings and actions of Muhammad, but was free to interpret these in the light of one of four established bodies of legal opinion, and adapt his interpretations to take account of local custom and geography. Ottoman land law was anything but common, and Süleyman’s own creation of the millet, a separate administrative system for each religion, Muslim, Jew, and Christian, added to the complexity.
Disputes about land, its taxation, and its revenues, lay at the heart of nearly every one of the increasingly ferocious revolts that shook the empire after Süleyman the Magnificent’s death in 1566. Significantly, the most serious uprisings, at the end of the sixteenth century, and again in 1622 and 1657, occurred in the very heartland of the empire, the Anatolian Peninsula, and involved the disaffected sipahi cavalry. Caught between the growing expense of military service and the fixed revenue from timariot estates, the class that had been the backbone of the empire turned in on itself and abandoned its military duties. Increasingly sipahis took to treating the timariot as property that was theirs to occupy even when they no longer went to war, and might in time be passed on to their offspring. By 1630, Süleyman’s successors could expect barely eight thousand sipahisto take to the field. “Most of the feudal lords today release themselves from their military obligations,” the treasurer of sultan Ahmad I complained at that time, “so that on campaign where military service is required, from ten timars not a man will turn up.”
It was possible to see what was happening from an otherwise minor skirmish that took place between several squadrons of Polish hussars and Ottoman sipahis on September 7, 1621. In the course of a long, bitterly fought siege of the Polish-occupied fortress of Khotyn situated in the frontier region of Moldavia, a force of Ottoman infantry, the elite janissaries, guarded on the flanks by a screen of sipahi horsemen, broke through the outer defenses of the Polish line. At the critical moment, the defenders’ commander, Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, let loose an onslaught of about six hundred heavily armed hussars. In a devastating charge, the Polish riders cut through the Turkish cavalry, sabered the infantry, then, sweeping away the last of the horsemen, drove into the advanced camp of the enemy, killing almost five hundred men. For the besieged Poles, the sight of the irresistible power of their cavalry restored flagging morale, and they continued to hold out until the first winter snow forced the Ottoman army to lift their siege and retreat to Istanbul.
Although the subsequent treaty left both sides claiming victory, a watershed had been reached. On his return, Osman II, the young Ottoman ruler, was assassinated by his janissaries, and his successor faced both rebellion and the need to find a substitute for the once-famed sipahis. For the Polish nobility, the triumphant cavalry charge and the Turkish retreat vindicated their monopoly on the possession of the land and its revenues. While the Ottoman sultans attempted to impose central bureaucratic control over distant landholders, the szlachta policed themselves and could direct the country’s resources where they were most needed. They kept government both small and immediately under their control but, as it must have seemed to them in 1621, strong enough to see off their enemies.
In the course of the seventeenth century, the szlachta used their hold on power to extend their privileges, permanently ensuring that taxation fell on their serfs and the urban population and persistently voting in weak kings who would not challenge aristocratic rule. Notoriously, they created the “liberum veto,” a nuclear option that allowed a single negative vote by one representative in the Sejm to defeat any legislative proposal however great the majority that supported it. Quite suddenly this concentration of power, once a source of strength, became toxic.
In 1648, the szlachta in southern Poland attempted to extend serfdom into estates they held in Ukraine, provoking a Cossack revolt that soon brought in Russia. Poland was now encircled by enemies, from Sweden in the north to Ukraine and Islam in the south, from Russia in the east to Prussia in the west. Prevented by the szlachta from raising adequate taxation to cover the military budget, the government of what had been the most powerful country in Europe a generation earlier was effectively bankrupt by the second half of the seventeenth century.
Nevertheless, as late as 1683, the Polish cavalry were able to offer one final and decisive display of military muscle. In that year, an Ottoman army, made up largely of professional janissaries and Muslim Tatar cavalry from the Crimea, invaded Austria and were not stopped until they reached the gates of Vienna. For most of one day, September 12, a mighty infantry battle raged in front of the city until in the evening, Jan Sobieski, king of Poland, led some twenty thousand horsemen of many nationalities, including the famous Polish hussars, in what is often described as the largest cavalry charge in history against the weary Ottoman troops. A few thousand sipahis were brushed aside, the Tatar cavalry melted away, and Sobieski’s charging horsemen destroyed the army of an empire that had threatened to overwhelm eastern Europe for 250 years.
In 1786 James Madison examined Poland’s elected kingship as a possible model for the United States constitution. By then the country was close to final dismemberment by its serf-owning neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and Madison concluded that the fatal flaw lay in its form of government. This left “the Chief Magistrate,” or executive arm, too weak to resist a landowning legislature that had pushed its monopoly of power to the point of allowing a single member to veto the executive’s policy. As a result, Poland’s very existence was about to be sacrificed to the interests of one small power bloc. In his recommendation that the president have an electoral mandate separate from Congress, and independent powers in foreign and military policy, Madison was determined that the United States would not make the same mistake.
There was no possibility that the United States would look to the declining Ottoman Empire for any examples in democracy. Denuded of self-supporting soldiers and tax-gatherers, eighteenth-century sultans were forced to rely on a central bureaucracy backed by the professional janissaries, who acted as both police force and infantry. Tax gathering was farmed out for a percentage of the revenue to private contractors, while provincial governors were expected to administer their regions from their own resources. In the west, it had become a byword for tyranny.
Nevertheless, by changing Ottoman land ownership, Süleyman the Magnificent’s laws transformed Ottoman society. Legislation linking tax payment to land possession accelerated the process by which the tax-gathering sipahis came to regard themselves as owners who could inherit the land rather than office holders. Marking the change, the land in their possession was increasingly described as a çiftlik, a name that referred to the size of the estate.
In the Balkans and southern Europe generally, a çiftlik looked like a serf estate, with peasants forbidden to move and subjected to an ever-growing weight of labor dues by a superior who was both government official and feudal lord. In the Middle East and North Africa, however, sharia law’s emphasis on the priority of supporting members of the family tended to give the peasants on a çiftlik a closer resemblance to members of a clan who acknowledged the owner as their chief. Except in the immediate vicinity of cities such as Cairo and Damascus and trading ports such as Izmir and Alexandria, where commercial farms supplied food for urban consumers, agriculture aimed at peasant self-sufficiency rather than capitalist profit making.
Yet, compared to the peasant monarchies of Europe, the Ottoman Empire had a lesson to teach. The wide range of land holdings allowed an equally wide variety of societies to flourish, from the desert tribes of Iraq to the typical peasant villages of Anatolia, and this multiplicity encouraged the growth of a degree of religious toleration within the millet system that was otherwise absent from the continent of Europe.
The ownership of land never exacted a greater toll than during the Thirty Years War that pitted Catholic against Protestant in Europe between 1618 and 1638. Up to one third of the German-speaking population died from internecine slaughter and miserable deprivation. Superficially, the conflict was triggered by the reluctance of newly Protestant states to hand back to the Catholic authorities church lands they had confiscated at the time of their conversion. But this concealed the deeper struggle of peasants who actually worked the soil to retain a degree of freedom from feudal lords intent on squeezing them into serfdom on the Polish model. In both cases, however, these rulers were driven by the same imperative to gain greater control of the land and its revenues during a period of inflation and mounting military expenditure.
Like their eastern counterparts, feudal landlords further west had attempted to coerce smaller freehold peasants into providing forced labor, to broaden the services demanded of existing tenants, and to claim common grazing and woodland as their own. Unlike the serfs to the east, however, peasants in every country from Hungary to England resisted. In western and southern Germany especially, they rose up in a bloody rebellion in 1525.
For most peasants, the church was the forum where their labor was given a moral context. Since few of their rights were written down, they needed the church’s authority to reinforce what tradition and their own fierce sense of justice suggested was right. Consequently, they grasped at the anti-authoritarian language of Martin Luther’s Protestantism to give voice to their revolutionary impulses. First among the demands made by a meeting of Black Forest peasants in 1525 was an insistence on having their own preachers rather than those imposed on them by feudal superiors, and close behind came the declaration that “it is devised by the scripture, that we are and that we want to be free.”
The freedom they had in mind entailed an end to the feudal burdens and taxes that so constricted their lives. Unfortunately for their hopes, Luther was determined to support the princes, electors, dukes, and landgraves who had converted to Protestantism, and he defended their cause in a vicious pamphlet entitled “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants.” It was left to Thomas Müntzer, a former student of Luther turned Anabaptist preacher, to give a lead. Quoting Christ’s words “I came not to bring peace but a sword,” he preached a social and spiritual crusade against all authority beyond individual conscience, and against any form of property except what people needed for their shelter and nourishment.
The decisive clash between peasant and lord took place on May 15, 1525, outside the central German town of Frankenhausen where the Landgrave Philip of Hesse lined up his well-trained army of mercenaries against the eight thousand peasants assembled by Thomas Müntzer. When the landgrave sent them an order to lay down their arms and surrender, Müntzer gave voice to the egalitarian Christian impulse that drove his footsoldiers: “Say, you wretched, shabby bag of worms! who made you a prince over the people whom God has purchased with his precious blood?”
Before nightfall, the rebels were destroyed, Müntzer was about to be tortured to death, and as a class peasants would sink below the historical radar, becoming a byword among urban commentators for their secrecy, superstition, and conservatism. Yet through the growing religious turbulence and land grabbing of the next century, a consistent pattern emerges of peasant resistance to encroachment by lords and rulers on their land and their liberty. From the river Elbe to the Atlantic, the same grinding battle pitted landlord against peasant. In the poor valleys of Burgundy, farmers struggled relentlessly against their lords’ attempts to prevent them marrying outside the estate, a restriction that would have taken them toward serfdom, while the nobles whose sheep grazed the mountainsides of Saxony did their best to stop peasants erecting fences to protect their crops from the animals.
Usually the conflict was resolved peacefully—in France the advocate Sébastien Rouilliard won a notable legal case in 1582 against a landlord attempting to impose on his tenants longer hours of forced labor, hailing it as a victory for “la liberté publique”—but very often the antagonism spilled over into violence. In France, resistance to the imposition of fresh dues triggered so many peasant revolts that Marc Bloch, the foremost twentieth-century authority on feudal France, deemed them “as natural to the seigneurial regime as strikes are to large-scale capitalism.” Further east, in the myriad of tiny German-speaking states in the Holy Roman Empire, where landlord and ruler tended to be the same person, peasant anger over matters of land and liberty quickly became caught up in the religious conflict that pitted one ruler against another.
During the Thirty Years War, differences between secular and religious causes were soon drowned in blood, but from 1648, when disputes could again be settled peacefully, the law courts of a major state such as Saxony became clogged with cases of peasants attempting to protect traditional freedoms against landlord encroachment. Owning the earth in any form was inextricably linked to liberty.
The outcome of this prolonged struggle for power over the land left Europe divided roughly between the serf east and the peasant west along a line customarily taken to be the river Elbe that flows from the Czechoslovak mountains northwest to the German port of Hamburg on the North Sea. No ruler survived the crisis of the seventeenth century without control of the land’s resources, either directly or through the nobility, but unlike the east, where monarchs allied themselves to aristocratic landlords against those who worked the soil, royal government in France and the Rhineland gave a more sympathetic hearing to peasant demands. Free from the threat of Islamic invasion—France even formed alliances with the Ottoman Empire against its enemies in Spain and Austria—these rulers had little reason to placate noble landlords. From the last half of the seventeenth century, their law courts increasingly upheld peasant freedoms against the claims of a potentially divisive aristocracy, and society was sufficiently open for wealthy urban merchants to be allowed to become seigneurs and buy the estates of impoverished landlords.
Even in the west, the earth continued to be held by a feudal lord, but his ownership extended no further—in German terms it was simply Grundsherrschaft (ground ownership), as opposed to the Gutsherrscaft or manorial ownership practiced by serf societies. Peasants would be charged rent or labor for the use of the landlord’s earth, for the right to inherit or transfer its use, and, as their feudal superior, he would require them to pay to have their corn ground in his mill, their cows inseminated by his bull, and their produce weighed and measured with his scales and containers. But in return a feudal lord provided justice, law, and order, and his decisions either conformed to traditional practice or could be appealed to the royal courts.
Out of it came a wary equilibrium that allowed peasants across much of France and the Rhineland to enjoy something close to a guaranteed tenure of the land they worked. They responded by increasing crop production or, in the south, by diversifying into cash crops like vines grown on soil unfit for other purposes, or by cultivating chestnuts and mulberries for feeding pigs and silkworms, respectively. Compared to the serf economies of eastern Europe and the sharecropping regions of Italy and Spain, where productivity per head was no higher in 1700 than in 1600, the output of French peasant farmers grew by almost 8 percent between 1650 and 1750, roughly in line with what was happening across the Channel. La liberté publique evidently paid dividends. Even more astonishing was the expertise of peasant farming in the Rhineland. During the eighteenth century, emigrants from the Palatinate and Hesse regions would travel to farm in the capitalist surroundings of Pennsylvania and the serf economy of the Volga basin, and in both places their methods would become a byword for efficiency and high production.
The difference between peasant Europe and capitalist Britain was not one of production but of ownership. While the common law concentrated ownership of land and produce in one person, peasant ownership was always held by the family, and however clearly its use belonged to the peasant, the land itself ultimately belonged to a lord. This divided ownership gave peasant society a particular quality that prized endurance over enterprise.
A peasant could not conceive, as Shakespeare did, that all his land would pass intact to one male heir at the expense of others. As Alexander Chayanov, the leading twentieth-century authority on the nature of the peasant economy, pointed out, in the struggle to survive, members of a peasant family were prepared to accept such tiny rewards for their unremitting labor that it amounted to “self-exploitation.” The sheer hard work fostered an outlook that was crippling compared to the capitalist model. Chayanov’s extensive research in both tsarist and Soviet Russia showed that peasants had no incentive to produce a surplus beyond what they needed to meet the needs of their family. Thus a peasant economy would always tend toward subsistence farming rather than profit and growth. The increase in productivity achieved by French peasants was driven by the growth of population and the burden of higher taxes that Louis XIV’s glittering, expensive reign imposed. There was no gain to the peasants themselves. Indeed the demand for land from a growing population in the eighteenth century undermined the little liberty they had won for themselves.
Peasant families were large because many children lightened the burden of peasant work, but it was axiomatic that when grown they had to be provided for, and their children too. During the century up to 1750, when the average size of an arable British farm was growing from fifty to eighty acres, the land around Paris known as the Île-de-France was being subdivided into ever-smaller holdings until 90 percent of them measured less than seven acres. Each intensively worked acre was more productive than its British equivalent, but after all the mouths had been fed, it earned an infinitely smaller surplus.
Across western Europe, landowners reasserted their powers as the population grew, using the courts to enforce old, income-generating privileges like mandatory use of the landlord’s mill and payment of inheritance fees. By 1789, France’s population numbered twenty-seven million, twenty million of whom were peasants caught in a relentless cycle of labor to wring a living from the earth. The margin between success and failure grew too small for experimentation, too uncertain for optimism, too dependent on communal efforts for individualism. “Don’t run away from anything” was the old peasant maxim, “but don’t do anything.” Survival rather than progress was the goal.
For most of history, most people have viewed their pasts and their futures as peasants. No other system of land ownership is so stable and widespread. Various forms of it have appeared in China, India, Latin America, and much of the Middle East. It allows governments to collect taxes and enforce order through landlords without paying them. Landlords receive money for no work, and peasants have the benefit of the land without needing to find the capital to buy it. And so empires have survived for centuries on peasant economies. Entire societies have been fed by peasant labor. Armies and religions have filled their ranks with peasants. Whole cultures of farming, of weaving and knitting, of cooking, preserving and fermenting, of storytelling and music-making, have grown out of the peasant family’s struggle to keep body and mind alive in hard times. What the skeleton is to anatomy, the peasant is to history, its essential, hidden support.
The eighteenth century would demonstrate that each of these three ways of owning the land—serfdom, peasantry, and private property—had a distinct social and political outcome, and the differences were exaggerated by a unique concept enshrined in the Peace of Westphalia that ended the religious bloodletting. It was summed up in the phrase Cujus regio, eius religio, literally “whose kingdom, his religion,” meaning that within a state’s boundaries a ruler’s authority ranked above any external power. To later generations, this pragmatic phrase crystallized the concept of the nation-state, although it would be more accurate to call it “the territorial state.”
It became obvious, for example, that the ability of rulers to gain control of revenues from within the physical boundaries of their realms gave the most successful a head start over their rivals. They could finance the manufacture of expensive armaments—everything from artillery to battleships—and encourage the growth of science and the manufacture of scientific instruments through awards, such as Britain’s £20,000 prize for a method of working out longitude, and by government contracts for mapping and exploration, as Louis XV did with the Cassini family of cartographers.
By this test, the states of northwestern Europe performed well. In the mid-eighteenth century, the French government, with twenty-seven million inhabitants and a gross national product of £160 million raised more than sixteen million pounds in taxes. To put that achievement in perspective, the imperial government of Manchu China, the wealthiest peasant-based economy of the period, raised only twenty-six million pounds from a population ten times as large. The point at which the economies of China, the world’s largest economy in the eighteenth century, and northwestern Europe began to diverge was heralded by the superior efficiency of territorial states in taxing their rural economies.
Within Europe itself, the nationalist wars that characterized the eighteenth century offered a test of the effectiveness of each form of land ownership. Flexing its peasant muscles, Bourbon France first drained then defeated the serf power of Habsburg Austria that had dominated Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But increasingly it also locked horns with Britain’s private property economy in a series of expensive wars that tested both models to the limit. Given the disparity in population—with barely seven million inhabitants, Britain was less than a third of France’s size—the outcome should not have been in doubt. But the British government managed to squeeze more than twice as much revenue from each one of its citizens, giving it resources almost on a level with those of its great rival.
Paradoxical though it might seem, a legislature representing the nation’s wealth producers was ready to tax them at a much higher rate than France’s government. “Having seen the extraordinary [taxes] which the subjects have to pay in England,” a French diplomat commented in 1708, “it has to be said that one is very lucky to be in France.” Not only did Parliament in London tax land and personal property, it assessed and raised the money directly rather than farming the process out to private contractors as the French government did with the Ferme Générale. To the “country gentlemen” in the House of Commons who represented landed wealth there was no paradox. They were ready to pay for Britain’s wars—more than a hundred during the century—because they believed them to be not only in the national interest but necessary to protect the particular kind of freedom that went with private property.
By the time the Bourbon economy began to implode in 1789, the country gentlemen’s belief had helped win an empire in India and the West Indies, and both win and lose another in North America. Yet these acquisitions were dwarfed by those made by Europe’s least efficient form of land ownership. If war was indeed the ultimate test, Russia had apparently found the key to making serfdom work.