CHAPTER SEVEN
Being once perfected how to grant suits,
How to deny them, who t'advance, and who
To trash for overtopping, new created
The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang'd ‘em,
Or else new form' d ‘em, having both the key
Of officer and office, set all hearts i'th'state
To what tune pleased his ear…1
FROM EARLY in the sixteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth two conflicts intertwined: the religious struggle that began with the Reformation and which provoked horrific civil wars throughout Europe; and the efforts of the Habsburg dynasty to establish a true imperial realm in Europe. These two interacting dramas culminated in the Peace of West-phalia in 1648, which ratified the role of the kingly state as the dominant, legitimate form of government in western Europe. During this period of more than a century, the kingly state—a domain of absolute authority that made the king the personification of the State—achieved pre-eminence, although the seeds of its successor, the territorial state, were sown by the same treaties that ratified the kingly states' dominance. Before the kingly state could prevail, however, the international scope of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire, whose weakening had facilitated the emergence of the princely state, had to be shattered. The Habsburg drive for hegemony put these stakes on the table by uniting two goals—to restore Catholic universality and to make the Holy Roman Empire a universal power—and it was the Habsburg defeat that brought the kingly state to triumph.
KINGLY STATES
In the year 1500, Europe comprised some 500 or so princely domains, independent cities, and contested territories. By the middle of that century, the princely states that had superseded this rich variety of constitutional forms were already being transformed themselves by the advent of kingly states. Three such states in particular—Sweden, France, and England—embodied this nascent, potential constitutional successor to the princely state. Like Spain, all three had greatly expanded the permanent bureaucracies of the princely states, introducing and maintaining standing armies, and they had centralized taxation specifically directed toward the ability to finance war.2 As Charles Tilly concluded, European “state structure appeared chiefly as a by-product of rulers' efforts to acquire the means of war.”3 Not coincidentally these states commenced to codify their civil and criminal laws at this time, a constitutional ramification of the objectified State. The precise state structure that emerged during the period from roughly 1550 to 1660—the kingly state—was only one possibility. The imperial realm, a dynastic conglomeration of princely states, also presented an option. This was the constitutional form pursued by Habsburg Spain. France, whose development of the kingly state set the pattern for all others once it had shown itself to be strategically dynamic and overpowering, provided one constitutional model of the kingly state. Sweden also effected an historic transition from princely to kingly state when Gustavus Adolphus and his gifted minister Oxenstierna collaborated to transform a succession crisis into the consolidation of this new constitutional form. All of this unfolded when strategic developments decisively undermined the constitutional role of the princely state at the end of the century.
In 1494, the year that Charles VIII began his campaign in Italy, he did so at the head of a multinational army,* paid regularly by royal finances whose collection and disbursement had been reformed in order to provide a fully stipendiary force in the field for the life of the campaign. “With hindsight we can describe Charles VIII's force as the first ‘modern' army, in that it consisted of the three arms deployed in various mutually supporting tactical combinations, and was very largely made up of men paid from a central treasury.”4
The military lessons that the French invasion had prompted the princes and oligarchs of Italy to learn—the requirement of larger professional mercenary forces, the need for artillery, new fortress design—were applied by unified Italian administrative organizations supported by consistent finance. When France developed the princely state, however, she could draw on a great national culture, nourished by a vast and contiguous estate that could staff and pay for its bureaucratic apparatus, which in turn provided the mechanisms for raising even greater revenue. It is often said that the Valois successes in the Italian invasion can be attributed to the introduction of mobile artillery, and this is doubtless true. France had no monopoly on the manufacture of artillery, however. (Nor were there many “French” in the French army, it being mainly composed—like the forces of the Italian cities—of foreign mercenaries, chiefly Swiss.) Rather it was a combination of French reforms and the diplomatic paralysis of the Italian cities that led to the inevitable military outcome. In 1494 Charles VIII had moved against Naples, which had a secure dynasty and lay near to many of the richest cities in Europe, of which she was one, and had defeated the Neapolitan forces by February 1495. Initially, each of the neighboring cities had sought to defend its own autonomy rather than unite with Naples. Milan, in fact, gave the French army free passage. Florence revolted against its regime, and the citizens set up a republican government that was in effect a French satellite.
The princely state in Italy had been developed by families who wished to re-enforce their legitimacy to govern, and who required a more efficient means of marshaling wealth in order to defend their claims by means of expensive mercenaries. The kingly state took the Italian constitutional innovation—fundamentally, the objectification of the state—and united this with dynastic legitimacy. The result was a formidable creation that dominated Europe for the next century. Confronting the princely state and the imperial realm as competing constitutional forms, the kingly state proved able to vanquish these forms strategically and, as a consequence, historically. As before, the development of constitutional forms came about in tandem with a revolution in military tactics.
Prior to this period, the progress of operations in war had become increasingly drawn out. The combination of missile fire and rapid movement, so lethally effective at Agincourt in the fifteenth century, had been succeeded in the sixteenth century by the Swiss tactics using massive formations of pike and musket. The Swiss order of battle ranged men in twelve or more rows, practically immobilizing them once deployed. Spain used these tactics for the relentless and terrifying assaults of the tercio, a tightly packed rectangle, often fifty files wide and forty ranks deep, whose heart was formed of pikemen wielding fifteen-foot spears, flanked by mus-ketmen (arquebusiers) who protected the formation from cavalry attacks. The armies of which these formations were composed were hardly more mobile: they depended upon magazines located in fortresses and thus could not stray far or for long from their very limited communications with these fixed points. The fortresses themselves, reconstructed along the lines discussed earlier, could no longer be easily reduced by artillery, which meant that siege campaigns became more drawn out and were themselves a complex logistical process of assembling artillery and stores. Campaigns now came to revolve around sieges, and great battles were seldom fought. Europe appeared to be locked into a situation of military stalemate: a heavily defended fortress sheltering perhaps 10,000 troops had to be seized by an advancing army, but barring surprise (as in the capture of the Dutch towns in 1572 by the Sea Beggars) or treachery (as at Aalst in 1576, where the town was sold by its English garrison to the Spanish), this could be a matter of many months, even years.
The introduction of small arms, which dates to the middle of the six-teenth century, eventually changed this situation and brought a revolution in tactics. Reliance on firepower on the battlefield led not only to a changed role for the cavalry—because infantry now became a potentially decisive force—but also added urgency to the move to larger armies. Such a move depended upon consistent finance, centralized government organization, and logistics planning of a high order. When Michael Roberts coined the phrase “military revolution” to describe these innovations, his characterization became perhaps the single most influential concept in the studies of early modern warfare in Europe.5 He argued not only that these tactical changes were responsible for a dramatic shift in the strategy and scale of warfare, but also for a change in the societies that undertook such warfare.
What was this revolution in tactics and what brought it about? It is associated, at least in its initial appearance, with Maurice of Nassau, who led Europe in the development of a year-round professional force. The Dutch, owing to the great wealth amassed from their maritime trade, were able to afford a standing army. That meant that the state could specify the conditions of training, and this fact actually made possible the revolution in warfare that is associated with Maurice, the Dutch leader.
Maurice's cousin, William Louis of Nassau, wrote him a letter from Groningen dated December 8, 1594—which has been preserved—in which he first suggested the technique of an infantry countermarch. William Louis had just read Aelian's description of a drill practiced by the Roman army; inspired by this account, William Louis suggested that six rotating ranks of musketeers could replicate with gunfire the continuous hail of missiles that the Romans had achieved using javelins and slingshots. By this means, it would be possible to create tidal waves of fire through a coordinated fusillade, replacing individual aiming. Maurice modified the ancient Roman practice by alternating ten ranks in order to maintain constant musket fire, and the technique of rolling musket volleys soon became the standard battle tactic of European armies.6
This innovation was perhaps as crucial in the transformation of the state during this period as the development of fortresses had been in the previous era, or the use of artillery against fortified cities before then. Muskets capable of piercing armor plate at 100 yards had been introduced earlier in the century, but the rate of fire was torturously slow, owing to the complicated process of reloading. If this problem could be solved, however, muskets promised to remake armies because muskets required little experience to use compared to the long bow and were as effective against cavalry as the pike. Moreover, large tight squares of pikemen made attractive targets for the not-very-accurate muskets.
If the innovation of fortress design had been to take a target—the fortified city—and transform it into a platform for fire, then the Spanish tercio did much the same thing for shock: it took infantry otherwise vulnerable to charges from cavalry and made them a sort of gunless prototank, invulnerable and inexorable. These slow-moving formations would crush anything in their way, unless it was another such massive square, in which case neither side would gain a decisive advantage. Battles tended therefore, like sieges, toward stalemate. The tactics of the period provided no effective means of penetrating this type of defense in depth.
Maurice, however, saw
that fire power was now the decisive element rather than shock: that the pike was there to protect the musket, not the other way round. It was thus necessary to devise both formations which would maximize fire power, and procedures to ensure its continuous and controlled delivery. Instead of pike squares several thousand strong… Maurice adopted elongated formations of musketeers… countermarching in their files, reloading as they did so, so that their front rank was always giving continuous fire.7
In the armies that adopted this innovation—the forces of the anti-Habsburg coalition—the infantry was deployed in shallower, more linear firing formations that allowed for more tactical flexibility than did the tercio, with its massive squares of infantry composed of central blocks of pikemen forty to sixty soldiers deep, encased on all sides by deep sleeves of musketeers who protected them from assault. To perfect these tactics, intricate drills were practiced in order to speed up the rate of fire until Gus-tavus Adolphus introduced a variation that concentrated fire on massive simultaneous volleys by multiple ranks, opening up the opposing pike formation to a cavalry charge. While Spanish cavalry were still practicing the traditional caracole—in which successive ranks of horsemen charged toward an enemy line, fired their handguns and then wheeled off to the flanks—Swedish cavalry restored the attack with the saber, directly charging into those ranks decimated by a focused musket volley.
These innovations required a great degree of control by the commander, a prerequisite of which is discipline in the ranks. “It was discipline and not gunpowder,” Max Weber concluded, “which initiated the transformation. [G]unpowder and all the war techniques associated with it became significant only with the existence of discipline.”8 That in turn was only possible with forces that were constituted over a long term, were constantly drilled, and sought their identity in the professional esteem of the corps, rather than the glory of feudal knights or the personal enrichment of mercenaries. This required a state apparatus, but not just any sort of state. Rothenberg reminds us that, up to this time,
the greatest obstacle to the conduct of consistent military operations could be found [not just in problems of logistics and siege warfare, but] in the social characteristics of most armies. Altogether, the ascendancy of the tactical defense, the strength of the new fortifications, and the mercenary character of troops explain why warfare in Europe had become so drawn out and indecisive.9
Therefore, when Maurice of Nassau attempted to exploit the use of infantry firepower through a technique that put a premium on fast arming, he introduced further innovations, which required standardization in weaponry and the extensive training of troops. Only thorough practice could train troops to withstand the terror of cavalry charges without losing their nerve and either breaking and running, or at the very least disrupting the complicated rhythm of the volley and permitting themselves to be assaulted at close quarters. When Gustavus Adolphus adopted these tactics, putting his troops in line (rather than in the classic squares that had dominated European battlefields), he changed their tactical mission. By teaching his forces to use a countermarch in which musketeers rotated their positions by slowly moving through the ranks of their own men, moving backward to reload, then moving forward through stationary reloaders, he enabled his line to take the offensive rather than being forced to remain static. These tactics had the effect of restoring the infantry to its status as a battle-winning force and reducing the significance of the artillery-encrusted bastioned fortresses. Such tactics, however, required the continuity of substantial forces in being. Only a standing army would have the professionalism to execute such complicated and harrowing tactics. Roberts argued that these standing armies tended to enhance monarchical power, and militarize the nobility as well as much of the general populace through conscription. Thus there was, he argued, a mutually reinforcing relationship between the professionalization of the military required by these tactical innovations and the rise of the kingly state. Roberts wrote that “the new principle of concentrating military power under the absolute control of the sovereign” was a consequence of “the transformation in the scale of war [that] led inevitably to an increase in the authority of the state… Only the state, now, could supply the administrative, technical, and financial resources required for large-scale hostilities.”10 Speaking of this period, William McNeill concurred that “new weaponry began to favor larger states and more powerful monarchs,” and he referred to the “centralizing effects of the new technology of war.”11 As Jeremy Black has observed of Roberts's thesis,
the chronology of military change is apparently matched by a more general political chronology… Thus the modern art of war, with its large professional armies and concentrated yet mobile firepower, was created at the same time as—and indeed made possible and necessary by—the creation of the modern state.12
The strategic innovations of ever more expensive fortress design and complex infantry fire crushed those constitutional forms that could not adapt in order to exploit those innovations: first princely states, with their modest revenue bases; then the discontinuous Habsburg empire of princely states that risked decisive battles in so many theatres that it was bled dry by the new, more dynamic and lethal warfare.
The chief advantage of the kingly state over the princely states it dominated was sheer scale. Yet this advantage was not enjoyed by the Habsburg empire, which assembled a vast collection of princely states into a single constitutional unit. It is important to see how, despite enormous wealth and experienced forces, who were, as at Nördlingen, capable of devastating victories, the Habsburg imperial constitutional form was nevertheless vulnerable to the escalating possibilities of violence posed by the revolution in tactics.
The sheer quantitative advantage that imperial and kingly forms shared should not blind us to the constitutional, qualitative difference between the kingly state and the princely state. Henry VIII may have broken with Rome in order to marry again, a princely prerogative, but the fact that he could make himself head of a new national church is indicative of a change in the nature of monarchy.
When at the end of this period, the last of the great figures of the kingly state proclaimed, “L'état, c'est moi,” he was saying no more than other monarchs of the kingly state could have claimed; but he was saying a great deal more than the proudest Medici or Sforza. The kingly state had a voice distinct from that of the princely state. We can hear it clearly in the work of Jean Bodin, one of the most influential European political philosophers. In his preface to the Six Books Concerning a Republic, written in 1576, Bodin attacks Machiavelli—the poet of the princely state—for suggesting that the leader of a state is bound to different moral rules than an ordinary man. Machiavelli's idea is fundamental to the notion of the State as something other than a human being, and thus something in whose service the prince must obey imperatives other than those that govern ordinary human behavior. Bodin challenges this advice as tending to weaken the monarch's authority. Whereas for the princely state the great leap is from the prince as person to the prince plus an administrative structure—the prince and the State—the transformation to the kingly state (the state already having been objectified) reverses this move and makes the monarch the apotheosis of the State. To put it differently: the princely state severed the person of the prince from his bureaucratic and military structure, thereby creating a state with attributes hitherto reserved to a human being; the kingly state reunites these two elements, monarch and state, and makes of the king the State itself: “L‘état, c'est moi.”
If such a king were seen as immoral, Bodin argued, this would undermine the state's legitimacy. Moreover, he wrote:
In addition to the counselors of tyranny [e.g., Machiavelli], there are others… who are no less dangerous and are maybe even more so. These are the ones who under the pretext of the people's liberties cause subjects to rebel against their natural princes, and thereby open the way to factious anarchy which is worse than tyranny ever was.13
These “others,” perhaps even more “dangerous” than Machiavelli, were writers who claimed the right of resistance for the people. Bodin insisted that all authority had to be vested in a sovereign, a single will. The king could impose any law on his subjects with or without their consent; to hold otherwise meant that the State was something less than sovereign, that it could be thwarted as when a man with a severe physical disorder finds himself unable to command his limbs to move. A king's will is the sovereign of the State just as a man's will is the sovereign of his body. This is the credo of absolutism, and it is the constitutional doctrine of the kingly state.
Perhaps we today are inclined to exaggerate the actual absolutism of the kingly state.14 Things may look more monolithic from a distant perspective. Doubtless a more consensual and complex arrangement prevailed at the time than may now appear. For our purposes, however, it is enough to observe that contemporaries of this period perceived both an enormous change under way in the centrality of the State as well as a crisis of legitimacy besetting that State. For it was a significant change to place the State in man, especially when it had been scarcely a century since the State was torn from the local princes who were so soon to be made redundant by it. Hobbes saw this clearly, and made it his life's work to give reasons why the monarch was not simply another man—owing to the move to an objectified State—and why the obedience owed the State could be owed to a man. In the Behemoth, he complains:
Lastly, the people in general were so ignorant of their duty [they had been seduced and corrupted], that no one perhaps of ten thousand knew what right any man had to command him, of what necessity there was of King or Commonwealth, for which he was to part with his money against his will; but thought himself to be so much master of whatsoever he possessed, that it could not be taken from him upon any pretense of common safety without his own consent. [Moreover] king, they thought, was but a title of the highest honor, to which gentlemen, knight, baron, earl, duke were but steps to ascend to, with the help of riches…15
To overcome this attitude had been one of the chief goals of the consti-tutional form of the kingly state. Some form of constitutional response was certainly necessary owing to those strategic innovations that were marginalizing the princely states as well as imposing new demands upon them. The kingly state established itself as an absolute yet legitimate state form in the era that witnessed the permanent schism of the ecclesiastical regime (which had been the main barrier to the emergence of the kingly state) and the destruction of the imperial regime (which was the kingly state's main rival to succeed the princely state as the dominant constitutional order in Europe).
This outcome was far from obvious in the first half of the sixteenth century when Charles V attempted to consolidate a Habsburg empire against the opposition of the French king Francis I. In a way, the princely state can be said to have originated in the rivalry between the Habsburg dynasty and that of the Angevin/Valois of France, because the invasion of Italy in 1494 had been undertaken to support a French claim to the throne of Naples against the claims of Aragon; to this claim was later added the assertion of a French dynastic right to the Duchy of Milan against the Sforzas and their Imperial patrons. The opposition to French claims became unified, however, and vastly increased with the consolidation in one Habsburg heir, Charles V, of a staggering dynastic inheritance. Thereafter the modest princely states of the Italian peninsula were no longer principal players. Instead, Charles's vast continental realm of dynastic properties was eventually opposed by an alliance of princely states led by the champions of the emerging constitutional order of kingly states. Thus the competing variants of the State all contended, and, thanks to the sheer scope of Charles's inheritance, these forms played for stakes that would be historically decisive.
Charles was born at Ghent in 1500. His father was the Habsburg archduke of Austria, son of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, and of Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Charles's mother was the daughter of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile. Thus Charles promised to unite within one person an Austrian-Spanish realm that included the Low Countries, to which he might add the German emperorship and even lay fair claim to Burgundy. It was an astounding example of the dynastic conglomerations that were acquired through inheritance and the alliances of marriage. Such a “realm,” as I have used the term, was in essence a personal union of territories. To the modern eye some of these dynastic states seem very odd indeed, and would appear to have little hope of survival; their various geographic components seem too disparate in terms of culture, language, and institutions. This observation, however, anticipates the outcome of a struggle that Charles V and his successors had first to play out: it is only because the universalism of the Empire and the Church was shattered during that struggle that it seems to us that national culture, language, and local institutions are the stuff out of which viable states must be made. Indeed it was Charles's goal to reverse this development and restore the unity of a Catholic Europe.*
One might say that the inheritance of Charles V created the conditions for a perfect experiment to determine whether in fact the State could encompass many different nations once the Reformation had so greatly sharpened the cultural differences among the peoples under his rule.
When Charles was crowned emperor in 1519, he had inherited not only vast dynastic properties from his grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon and his other grandfather, Maximilian, but also quarrels over the thrones of Naples and Milan, respectively; plus a third dispute over the crown of Navarre from one grandmother, Isabella, as well as a fourth dynastic claim, from his other grandmother, over lands lost to France by her father, the Duke of Burgundy. In all of these disputes his antagonist was the losing candidate for the emperorship, Francis I, who had become king of France.
What is important for our study is that both Charles and Francis failed to achieve their strategic objectives, so that by the end of this period in the mid-sixteenth century, it was clear that a dynastic realm agglomerating princely states across Europe could not succeed in creating an imperial state. Such an entity simply could not manage sufficient control of its domestic resources in order to maintain standing armies capable of the prolonged campaigns required to vindicate dynastic claims that were often geographically remote and politically fraught.
It took an entire century, however, for the new constitutional form of the kingly state to triumph, ascending a helical staircase whose steps connected religious conflicts on one side and dynastic ones on the other. For at the same time that Charles V was concluding the compact of Noyon with Francis I, which provided him with safe passage to his new Spanish inheritance, Martin Luther was proclaiming his doctrines for the reform of the Church. In the ensuing two decades—that is, until the beginning of the more radical career of John Calvin, which made matters considerably more difficult—religious strife rendered the domestic bases of both Francis and Charles ever more insecure, so that when their conflict ended with Francis's death in 1547, the main objective of Charles's policy was the suppression of the Protestant cause, which he himself had done much indirectly to support when his pursuit of hegemony in Europe had united anti-imperial German princes with religious reformers. Charles's motives at this moment were expressed in a letter to his sister:
[I have decided to attack the Protestant League because] if we fail to intervene now, all the Estates of Germany would be in danger of breaking with the faith… After considering this and considering it again, I decided to embark on war against Hesse and Saxony as transgressors of the peace… [a]nd although this pretext will not long disguise the fact that it is matter of religion, yet it will serve for the present to divide the renegades.16
The hostility of France toward Habsburg designs did not die with Francis, however personal the quarrel with Charles. Indeed the possibility of alliance between German princes and Henry II, Francis's successor, drove Charles to agree to the Treaty of Passau, whose provisions led to the Augsburg settlement in 1555.
Augsburg is an historic agreement because it provided that rulers were to determine the religious denomination of their respective states (the constitutional principle of cuius regio eius religio), matching Lutheran princes with Lutheran subjects and Catholic rulers with Catholic peoples. According to this principle, the decisions of the ruler as to which sectarian preference to adopt were binding also upon his subjects with the concession that dissatisfied persons were welcome to emigrate to more congenial states. This, with the migrations that followed, sealed the dominance of the princely state over the feudal princes who had ruled within a universal Christendom, and intensified the sectarian basis of the princely state. Augsburg enshrined the constitutional form of the princely state because it attached to the State an attribute—religious affiliation—hitherto associated with a human being, the prince.
Charles, in frustration and despair at these developments, which forever fragmented Europe and ended his dream of a restored, single Christendom, abdicated in October 1555. He left his Spanish dominions (including the Netherlands) to his son, Philip II, and arranged for the imperial crown to be assumed by his brother Ferdinand, who possessed the Austrian lands of the Habsburgs. A putative constitutional successor to the princely state—a dynastic empire accumulating many princely states—had thus far failed.
Although foreigners frequently regarded the empire of Charles V or that of Philip II as monolithic and disciplined, it was in fact a congeries of territories… There was no central administration… The absence of such institutions which might have encouraged a sense of unity and the fact that the ruler might never visit the country, made it difficult for the king to raise funds in one part of his dominions in order to fight in another.17
But the princely states of Italy had not succeeded either, for these states had been extinguished by the wars between Charles and Francis, with whom the comparatively small states of the Italian cities could not compete, even though they had pioneered the techniques by which the energies and resources of their conquerors were concentrated. The sack of Rome by Habsburg mercenaries in 1527 is perhaps the best date for the death certificate of the innovative Italian states whose “precocious development of an urban economy”18 had produced the wealth that could employ, and the vulnerability that would require, mercenary forces and had thus begun the process of modern state formation. The next historic constitutional event, the development of the kingly state, could not be completed so long as civil war threatened those great states that were candidates for absolute monarchical rule. A domestic, constitutional imperative—consolidation—drove the strategic aims of the State; when this was accomplished the strategic innovations by which this prerequisite was achieved still required further constitutional change before the kingly state, a unified, autocratic, monarchical state—the “absolute” State of early modern Europe—could fully emerge. Such states, though legitimated by dynastic rules, had to be reconfigured by the demands of war for mass taxation and state efficiency.
The Peace of Augsburg had the unfortunate effect of giving free rein to savage repression by those sovereigns who stayed within its rules, and thus the Inquisition and the civil wars in France, Germany, and the Netherlands began in earnest at this time. The ensuing Thirty Years' War made evident the weakness of both the princely and the imperial options for the state. But the kingly state did not truly triumph as a stable and powerful entity until constitutional centralization became a reality. The Peace of West-phalia, ending the Thirty Years' War, ratified this new political creation, uniting the legitimacy of the dynastic realm and the Italian administrative innovations of the Renaissance, with the permanence of a fixed and contiguous national population. Westphalia provided France—the first and most successful kingly state—with a period of domestic consolidation, and effectively ended the Habsburg drive for empire. Ironically, it also set the stage for the next constitutional form of the state, the territorial state,* as if the triumph of one constitutional order somehow germinates the form that will ultimately vanquish it.
In France, as in the rest of Europe, the experience of the Italian Renaissance had paved the way for the Reformation. The Italian Wars begun by Charles VIII in 1494 had brought the French into contact with a spirit that is reflected in the colorful chateaux that replaced the dark feudal castles of medieval France, and in the works of Rabelais, and, somewhat later, Montaigne. In time this spirit must catch fire in theology: five years before Luther's 95 theses, a lecturer in Paris had published a commentary on St. Paul in which the doctrine of justification by faith was asserted.
In response to these developments, Charles's successor, Francis I, and his successor, Henry II, favored a policy of Protestant suppression; this became in time a policy of persecution. The accession of Francis II produced no change. When, in 1560, a Protestant conspiracy to seize the government was exposed, a new round of persecution began. The death of Francis II in 1560 brought an eleven-year-old, Charles IX, to the throne. Neither he, nor his mother, Catherine de Medici, nor her other son, Charles's successor, Henry III, seem to have had any especially intense sectarian convictions. Their chief goal was simply to maintain themselves in power between two powerful contending parties. In the event, they presided over forty years of civil war, including the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants on August 24, 1572, which is as good a date as any to mark the end of the princely state in France. The massacre was a consequence of strategems attributed to the Florentine Queen Mother whereby the leader of the Protestant party was to be killed, and the blame laid on the leader of the Catholic party. The last Valois monarch, Henry III, finally murdered the head of the Catholic League, and was himself assessinated by a Burgundian monk. After four further years of fighting, Henry of Navarre, a Calvinist Bourbon prince who was the next in the dynastic line, agreed to a nominal conversion to Catholicism—his was the famous phrase, “Paris is worth a mass”—and was crowned at Chartres in 1594. Having subdued the last remnants of civil war, Henry propounded the Edict of Nantes on April 13, 1598, granting religious toleration to all sects. His assassination in 1610 by a deranged monk cut short this experiment in multiculturalism, and made way for the full development of the kingly state in France, which depended upon a united, rather than internally tolerant but divided, populace.
The architect of the French kingly state was the remarkable minister Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu. One significant contrast between the kingly and princely states can be detected in the contrasting concepts of raison d‘état and ragione di stato, principles of the kingly and princely constitutional orders, respectively. Among the Italian princely states, ragione di stato simply stood for a rational, unprincipled justification for the self-aggrandizement of the State, whereas raison d‘état achieved a parallel justification through the personification of the state, and leveraged the imperatives of this justification to impose obligations on the dynastic ruler. This enabled Richelieu to pursue a policy abroad that was in pragmatic harmony with his domestic policy, though distasteful to his ruler. Such an approach contrasted also with the constitutional imperatives of the Habsburgs: Olivares, Richelieu's Spanish counterpart, was not allowed the same latitude, dealing as he was with a dynastic ruler who was not committed to the personification of the state but rather to the reverse, one who instead saw his realm as an objectification of himself. “If constitutions do not allow this, then the devil take constitutions,” Philip IV once exclaimed in frustration. Thus Olivares's strategic designs were largely governed by Philip's personal religious convictions, a limitation that ultimately proved fatal to the plans of both men. Richelieu, on the other hand, contended that state decisions were not to be confused with questions of personal religious preference: the State (and therefore the king who embodied the State) had special responsibilities for preserving peace and the general welfare, and the king was divinely appointed to this role. History does not record Richelieu's reply to a prominent Jansenist who asked, “Would [the king] dare to say to God: let your power and glory and the religion which teaches me to adore You be lost and destroyed, provided the state is protected and free from risks?” but we can imagine his reply: “Take this up with God—it is He who has imposed this responsibility on me.”
THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR
Richelieu used the epochal war we know as the Thirty Years' War (1618 – 1648) as the means by which the new French state was forged and French hegemony in Europe achieved. Indeed, the Thirty Years' War can be understood as the interlocking of two great struggles, to which France supplied the decisive key. This is partly explicable for geopolitical reasons: France happened to lie along both the borders of the territories where two separate wars were fought. For our purposes, however, it is equally important to observe that France underwent the transformation of the princely Valois state into the Bourbon kingly state, a centralization, secularization, and nationalization of state authority along absolutist lines famously identified with the principle of raison d‘état. By contrast, the two conflicts for which France provided the crucial nexus were themselves efforts of two different Habsburg states to perpetuate, on the one hand, and to greatly expand, on the other, the princely states that were the legacy of the division of the realms of Charles V.
The first of these historic struggles was the Dutch war against Spain by which the Habsburg provinces of the northern Low Country rebelled in a religious, nationalist uprising against Madrid. The second struggle occurred in Germany, where the Emperor Ferdinand II, who was also a Habsburg prince, sought to subdue and re-Catholicize the German principalities that formed the empire (including his own hereditary kingdom of Bohemia), in order to forge a single princely state.
The seam along which these two struggles met was a long corridor between the Habsburg provinces in Northern Italy and those in the Netherlands. This corridor provided the indispensable line of re-enforcement for Spain once the Dutch successfully denied Spanish access to Northern Europe by sea. Along this line ran the border between France and the Holy Roman Empire, that congeries of cities, principalities, and estates that was the remnant of the Roman Empire after Otto the Great combined the kingship of the Germans with the emperorship of Rome. Since 1438 the emperor, “Erwahlter Romischer Kaiser,”* had been a member of the Habsburg dynasty.19 To keep this strategic passageway secure necessarily meant the continental encirclement of France, and the strict control of the German principalities of the western Empire, including the rich Palatinate and its capital of Heidelberg.
In the Peace of Augsburg (1555) that ended the first modern epochal war, the Habsburgs had appeared to relinquish their pursuit of a dynastic empire that would control Europe but in the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), they had wrung consent from Valois France to its encirclement, though one divided between Spanish and Austrian Habsburg branches to be sure. The cordon that bound France and connected Habsburg lands was a precarious line subject always to the vagaries of dynastic inheritance and political disintegration.
The new French dynasty that came to power with the accession of the Bourbon prince Henry IV in 1589 aimed at breaking this encirclement. From the first decade of the seventeenth century until mid-century, with only the short interlude of the de Medici regency, France sought ways to sever this geopolitical cordon, to penetrate Germany and to cut the link between the Low Countries and Spain. First through the means of financial subsidies and covert aid, then later through open warfare, France entered both these great struggles and linked them together as politically as they were linked logistically.
France's own constitutional evolution had made her the first kingly state in Europe. Efforts at constitutional centralization were undertaken by Ferdinand in Germany and by the Habsburg king of Spain, but both these princes clung to a dynastic fragmentation, which dissipated national unity, and a sectarian ideology, which constricted diplomatic and military freedom of action. Both were prisoners of the archetype of the princely state at a time when a new, more aggressive constitutional form of regime was being born. Spain's failure to restrict Dutch independence and the emperor's failure to destroy the independence of the German princes sealed the decline of their respective monarchies and delivered Europe to the ambitions of France. By contrast, France's adroit maneuvering during this period allowed her to exploit to her advantage these essentially consti-tutional struggles facing Spain and the Empire, and to succeed to the leadership of Europe when the heirs of Gustavus Adolphus were unable to build on his successful effort to make Sweden a dynamic kingly state.
The Thirty Years' War (1618 – 1648) was an epochal war composed* of the Bohemian and Palatine War (1618 – 1623); the War of the Graubünden (1620 – 1623); the Swedish-Polish War (1621 – 1629); the Danish War (1625 – 1629); the War of Mantuan Succession (1628 – 1631); the Swedish War (1635 – 1648); the War of Smolensk (1632 – 1634); and the French and Swedish War (1635 – 1648). The reason why it is convenient to treat these sometimes overlapping, sometimes episodic conflicts as a single war, despite intervening peace treaties, changes in the parties, and even some switching sides, is that a single constitutional issue was at stake through-oout: would the princely states of the Habsburg dynasty impose their consti-tutional form of the state—the militantly sectarian and multinational dynastic state—on the contested areas of Germany and the Netherlands, whose constitutions were in play? That is, would the United Provinces of the Netherlands emerge as a Spanish possession, re-Catholicized, an example of the archetypal princely Habsburg state? Would the German and central European Protestant states of the empire be remade into a Catholic, German princely state under the Austrian Habsburg heir? Or would the secular relationships among the national, absolutist monarchs of the new kingly states of France, Sweden, and Britain prevail instead?
The behavior of France and Spain is exemplary in its contrast between these two forms of the State. In the struggle to reunify the states of Germany under Catholicism, Richelieu (a cardinal and devout Catholic) resolutely continued the foreign policy of Henry IV and opposed Spanish re-Catholicization in Germany as a long-term threat to France. Yet when Olivares wished to aid the Protestant Huguenots in France, as a way of weakening the French state that was assisting the Netherlands in its efforts to throw out the Spanish, Philip would not consent. Nor would he permit an end to the hemorrhage in the Low Countries that, more than anything else, destroyed Spanish power in Europe, because the Habsburgs could not in good conscience abandon this territory to heresy. Nor could they strike a bargain with heretics, such as was brokered by the imperial warlord Wallenstein, that would have pacified the Empire. Thus were the interests of Spain sacrificed to the interests of the Habsburg dynasty, including its hereditary claims in Italy and the Netherlands, and to the sectarian convictions of Habsburg rulers. At the same time, Richelieu was pursuing a domestic policy of persecuting the Protestant Huguenots while hiring the Protestant Swedes as allies, and giving subsidies to the Protestant Dutch on the condition that they abandon their support for the Huguenots. One cannot imagine the Spanish forging an alliance with the infidel Ottoman Turks, as Richelieu did, enabling France to harass the Austrians by proxy and thereby divert Habsburg resources from the struggle in Germany.
The 1618 revolt of the Protestant aristocracy in Bohemia against their new Habsburg ruler, Ferdinand II, had escalated rapidly, quickly encompassing many issues. Eventually it embraced the struggle for independence of the Low Countries from Spanish rule, a revolt that had begun in the 1540s; a revolt by the electors and princes of the Holy Roman Empire against the Habsburg emperor; and a religious war between the Evangelical Union, made up mostly of German principalities, and the Catholic League. Confirming its status as an epochal war, Gustavus Adolphus said of this conflict, “All the wars of Europe are now blended into one.”20
In the early stages of the war, the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand's forces were successful, and by the late 1620s, Wallenstein, the imperial war commander, seemed to be poised to seize all of Germany. This provoked Gus-tavus Adolphus, the Swedish king, to enter the conflict on the side of the Protestants. His manifesto was that of the head of a kingly state, however, not that of a religious fanatic. Upon joining the war he explained his rationale simply: “It will be sufficient to say that the Spaniard and the house of Austria have been always intent upon a Universal monarchy….”21
Gustavus Adolphus, with his minister Axel Oxenstierna, had in Sweden created one of the first and most formidable kingly states. Through a series of reforms, the treasury and tax system, education and the courts—indeed the entire state administration of Sweden was centralized. The nobility, which had so bedeviled Gustavus's father, was induced to take up state service as an ideal.
Yet this would hardly have seemed likely in 1611 when Gustavus, still a minor, inherited the throne usurped by his father, Charles IX. The Swedish Diet took this opportunity to extort the Charter of January 1, 1612, from him, which bound the monarchy to rule in terms of the constitution, a restraint that had not troubled Charles. The charter provided that the consent of a Council was required for all new laws, major acts of foreign policy, and the summoning of the Diet. No new taxes could be imposed, and no new troops levied, without the consent of the relevant constitutional parties. Gustavus Adolphus had no choice but to accept this document in an apparent blow to royal authority and in favor of aristocratic constitutionalism. But what appeared to be a casting away of royal power was apparent only: accepting the charter brought not only reconciliation but also the services of Oxenstierna, its main drafter, to the chancellorship. Together these two very different men—“Gustavus dynamic, impetuous, ‘ever allegro and courage‘; Oxenstierna imperturbable, tireless, unhurry-ing; the one supplying inspiration, the other ripe wisdom and many-sided administrative ability”22—creatively exploited this reconciliation to fashion a powerful, absolutist state. There was a resolute effort by the king to abandon the arbitrary rule of his father with its judicial murders and political tribunals. In time the ability and popularity of the king induced a consensus in the society that enabled him to rewrite the charter in practice. He did not feel bound to obtain the consent of the State Council in high matters of state, nor did he so much submit to the Diet requests for new taxes and conscription as insist on their confirming these orders.
It is not a question of whether I have the right to make impositions without advice, nor of what your privileges may permit; what we have to look to is the temper of the commonalty and the necessity of the times; and it is not a question of what they are bound to pay, but of what they can pay.23
Roberts sums up the constitutional development well:
Thus against all probability, Gustavus emerged from the crisis of his accession with regal authority essentially unimpaired; and monarchy remained personal, after 1611 as before. But with a difference. In the first place, the attempt which Charles had made to exercise direct supervision over all branches of government was abandoned; the business of state was now too heavy for such methods… There had to be delegation, and Gustavus recognized this. In the second place, there was a difference of personality, tone and manner. Charles IX had ruled against the grain of the nation: Gustavus ruled with it. His popularity, his personal prestige, enabled him to enlist the institutions of government—the Council, the Diet, the provincial administration, the Church—behind the policies he considered necessary; and consultation produced an appearance of collaboration which was not wholly illusory, since it in fact reflected something like a national consensus. Without such a consensus, the sacrifices which his policies demanded would scarcely have been tolerable to his people.24
Thus Sweden moved from the condition of a princely state—wherein the state apparatus functions to implement the will of the prince in virtually all matters—to a kingly state, in which the state apparatus is delegated direct supervision over state matters, and in which the king plays a role of inducing patriotic collaboration by essentially becoming the state in a person. The two qualifications on regal authority described by Roberts are in fact like two halves of a scissors: the absolutist regime requires both more delegation and greater consensus. Gustavus and Oxenstierna provided this constitutional innovation at a time when it was necessary to do so in order to effect the strategic innovations that would determine the course of the Thirty Years' War.
The internal factor [that accounts for Sweden's swift rise to dominance from unpromising foundations] was the well-known series of reforms instituted by Gustavus Adolphus and his aides…. In developing the national standing army… in training his troops in new battlefield tactics, in his improvements of the cavalry and introduction of mobile, light artillery and finally in the discipline and high morale which his leadership gave to the army, Gustavus [produced] perhaps the best fighting force in the world when he moved into northern Germany… during the summer of 1630.25
When Sweden entered the war, Gustavus introduced new tactics on a scale that only such a state can field and in so doing he utterly transformed the fortunes of the Protestant side. Gustavus Adolphus, perhaps more than any other leader, used the potentiality of the kingly state to exploit the military revolution begun by gunpowder. His father had been enamored of Maurice's tactical theories, but his attempts actually to employ them in a campaign against Poland had met with disaster. The son realized that constitutional as well as strategic reform was necessary. Rejecting the idea that conscripts could never fight on equal terms with professional mercenaries, Gustavus personally drew up the Ordinance for Military Personnel in 1620, which instituted a reformed conscription. A draft was cheaper than hiring mercenaries; it could invoke patriotism in order to win sacrifice on the battlefield; it relied on a relationship between subject and monarch so that the duties it imposed were matters of obedience to orders and not interpretations of a contract. The king could prescribe what weapons and formations his men would use, regardless of their personal preferences. As Roberts has observed, “The Ordinance of Military Personnel was much more than a successful regulation… It was a social landmark…. Not the least important of [its] characteristics was the state's unremitting control of its subjects.” The scope of the Thirty Years' War was too broad for Sweden's manpower, and mercenaries were mainly employed; but the kernel of the armies was always Swedish. The mercenary forces Gustavus enlisted were put through training under Swedish officers to relearn their trade along Swedish lines. Gustavus and Oxenstierna had drafted the Articles of War of 1621 as a code of military law. These differed from earlier instruments in that they were devised as direct orders from a sovereign and not a matter of negotiation between the prince and military entrepreneurs. To take two examples: there were explicit provisions commanding troops to entrench when ordered to do so, and there was a code of military justice providing for courts martial.
Gustavus Adolphus modified Maurice's linear formations, though with much the same objectives of flexibility and increased fire in mind. Like those of the Dutch school, Gustavus's battle orders provided for two or three lines, small units, and a high proportion of officers and NCOs, but where Maurice's lines were ten deep, Gustavus limited them to six to make the troops easier to command. Cavalry was drawn up at no more than three deep at the battle of Lützen, and it was intended to operate in a revolutionary way. By 1627 Gustavus had begun to attach musketeers to his cavalry to discharge volleys into the enemy ranks, enabling the cavalry to charge through the gap in the pikemen that was thus opened up; the musketeers would reload while the cavalry charged and returned. Similarly, he used pikemen in a charge once an opening in the opposing formation had been blasted through by musket volleys. Not Maurice's rolling fire, but instead a series of shattering blasts was Gustavus's goal, and so he trained his men in the salvo whereby platoons of musketeers fired simultaneously instead of successively. This rhythmical alteration of shot and charge, of fire and shock, depended upon disciplined coordination no less than Maurice's choreographed sequences, and therefore it too required careful and extensive training.26
Gustavus's tactics served a strategy of annihilation, and thus represented a profound change in thinking from Wallenstein's strategy of attrition or the siege tactics of Maurice.27 Gustavus sought a decisive resolution through massed force in order to strengthen the State rather than allowing its power to be diffused through lengthy and indecisive campaigns.
When, despite Gustavus's death at Lützen in 1632, the fortunes of war did not shift, Olivares dispatched a new Spanish army to aid the Austrians in 1634. That year the Spanish defeated the main Swedish army at Nördlingen. This, however, had the effect of bringing French forces into the war in 1635. Now Spain turned directly to confront France, and Olivares looked across the Pyrenees at Richelieu. “Either all is lost, or else Castile will be head of the world,” wrote Olivares in that year as he planned an invasion of France on three fronts for 1636.
At this point, however, the fundamental strategic weakness of the constitutional order of the Habsburg realm made itself felt. Unlike France, Spain was not a kingly state. Nor was the Empire, though Wallenstein appears to have hoped to make it so. Wallenstein's goal was to secure a stable, absolute monarchy for the whole of Germany. His great wealth—from confiscated Protestant estates—enabled him to propose that he would raise a large army at his own expense and lend the emperor the money to maintain it. This would render the emperor free of Maximilian I, elector of Bavaria, and of Tilly, Maximilian's general, as well as of the other German princes who cherished their independent roles. In our terms, Wallenstein—meritocratic in his promotions, indifferent to religious affiliations—sought to transform the empire into a German kingly state. Neither his emperor nor the princes and electors would permit that, however, and despite Wallenstein's remarkable military gifts, eventually these men conspired in his assassination.
Nor were Olivares's efforts to consolidate the Iberian state as successful as those of his French counterpart. Indeed, the most disastrous failure to mobilize resources lay in Spain itself, where the crown's fiscal rights were in fact very limited. Each of the three realms of the crown of Aragon had its own laws and tax systems, and as a result each had considerable autonomy.
This lack of centralization was further accentuated by the geographic dispersion of the Habsburg constitutional order. Such de facto decentralization tended to surrender initiative to Spain's adversaries owing to the Habsburg refusal to abandon any part of the realm no matter how lengthy and precarious the lines of communication. During the next decade, Dutch and French forces attacked the Spanish Netherlands at two points; the Portuguese revolted in 1640; Swedish and German troops pressed Habsburg forces in northern Germany; a Catalan rebellion began; and there appeared to be some possibility of a complete breakup of Spain itself.
Mainly, though, the conflict settled in Germany, where more than five hundred separate garrisons carried out a savage war designed to deny their enemies any material support, and to seize for themselves whatever forage they could discover. The war that had hitherto been fought principally by German states with foreign assistance now entered its characteristically “epochal” phase as a struggle between the great kingly states of Sweden and France versus Habsburg Austria and Spain. France's defeat of Spain at Rocroi in 1643 and Sweden's victory over the imperial armies at Jankau forced the Habsburgs to the peace tables. Although a Franco-Spanish conflict lingered on for ten more years, the central war in Europe was ended in 1648.
The final destruction of the princely state—of which states the vast Habsburg assemblage was a conglomerate—was the result of the settlement of the Thirty Years' War itself. The Westphalian Peace, as we shall see in Book II, replaced the vision of a dynastic continental empire with the reality of the kingly state. With some exceptions, the Peace gave Ferdinand III, the Habsburg emperor, a free hand in his hereditary territories, including of course the right to suppress Protestantism. At the same time, the treaties removed the pre-eminence of the Habsburg dynasty in Germany. It would now be possible to speak of the interests of the Empire as deriving from the electors, princes, and free cities represented in the Diet. All princes were confirmed in their “territorial superiority in matters ecclesiastical as well as political.”28 All princes gained the right to conclude treaties with foreign powers. Thus did the Reformation destroy the universal lay structure, just as the Renaissance had destroyed the universal Church. In Paradise Lost, Milton would re-create Machiavelli's prince in the guise of Satan.29 At Westphalia the sectarian princely state had similarly been cast out.
The Peace of Westphalia “is null, void, invalid, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time,” declared Pope Innocent X, 30 reflecting a shrewd and percipient assessment of the implications of the treaty for a universalist Catholic Europe. Rather than an imperial, hierarchical states system that might operate in tandem with a pan-European reconquista, the Peace* created a system based on absolutist sovereignty, which meant a system predicated on the legal equality of states.
The peace legitimated the ideas of sovereignty and dynastic autonomy from hierarchical control… The reverse of the coin was that it de-legitimated all forms of hegemony and the vestiges of hierarchical controls… By sanctifying Europe's centrifugal forces by providing a legal basis… the documents licensed an anarchical dynastic states system and the internal consolidation of its members.31
Princely states persisted in Italy and in Germany because of powerful competing cities in both places and owing to the presence of the papal states in the former and irreconcilable religious division in the latter. These thwarted the consolidation necessary for the creation of a kingly state in both places. The princely state by contrast was “in essence a personal union of territories. In institutional terms, the state was unified only in the person of the prince. Most rulers had enclaves of territory within their states which owed allegiance to another prince.”32 Generally, in Europe, however, this constitutional form gradually gave way, in the period of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to another idea, wherein the dynastic heir ruled an impersonal state in which the function of kingship was inseparable from that of an enduring, immortal state. After the ratification of the constitutional form of the kingly state at Westphalia, no war arising primarily from religious issues occurred in Europe among the signatories. The victory of the kingly state was accompanied by the broad introduction of rationalism into European thought. Thus Bossuet, 33one of the proponents of the autocratic power of Louis XIV, is also notable for maintaining that government was a work of reason and intelligence.
Bossuet claimed that there were four characteristics of monarchical power: it was sacred; it was paternal; it was absolute; and it was subject to reason. We might re-characterize these qualities of the monarch as legitimate by means of divinely guided dynastic succession (sacred); owing a duty to the State that superseded the personality of the monarch (paternal); owing no hierarchical duty to any other institution, domestic or external (absolute); secular and rational rather than dogmatic (subject to reason).
Over the period of the rise, triumph, and fall of the kingly state—roughly from 1567 and the outbreak of the Dutch revolt against Spain, until 1688 and the expulsion of the Stuarts from England—the armies of France, England, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic tripled or quadrupled, sending government expenditures soaring. These immense strategic demands provided a constitutional impetus toward absolutism. Vastly more money and planning also were required for the sieges of the Thirty Years' War than anything preceding it. To capture Hertogenbosch in 1629, for example, the Dutch had to construct over twenty-five miles of trench works.
During the Thirty Years War, capital levies were imposed by both sides on cities and towns… The discovery that taxes collected regularly by any permanently existing governmental unit… could be multiplied many times by assigning them to the service and repayment of a specific war debt laid the basis for far-reaching innovations in public finance throughout Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century.34
Six institutional structures typified the kingly state: a standing army35 (or navy, in the case of England); a centralized bureaucracy; a regularized statewide system of taxation; permanent diplomatic representation abroad; systematic state policies to promote economic wealth and commerce; the placement of the king as the head of the church. But note these differences between the kingly state and the territorial state that eventually replaced it: the former had standing armies, but these were armies in which foreign mercenaries still predominated, at least numerically. The kingly state had a centralized bureaucracy but positions in it were sold to raise revenue. Diplomacy was made more formal and representation more stable, but a principal duty of the legation remained to negotiate marriage contracts for the royal family. Finally, although the kingly state regulated and protected its local industries, it did so not in order to enlarge private wealth, and thereby increase tax revenues, but to boost its own power, and it often reneged on its debts.36
TERRITORIAL STATES
The outcome of the Thirty Years' War finally established the pre-eminence of the kingly state, although in such a way as to seed the next development in statecraft, the territorial state. Partly this had to do with the way the war was fought.
In the Thirty Years War, warfare reached the nadir of brutality and pointlessness portrayed in the etchings of Callot and the black humour of Grimmelshausen's prose. In order to survive at all, mercenary forces had to batten on the civil population. In order to survive at all, civilians, in their turn, their homes burned and their families butchered, [swelled armies] governed not by strategic calculation but by the search for unplundered territory.37
Such horrors fed the need for a state constitutionally grounded in territorial identity. When brutalized inhabitants fled the countryside and populated the besieged cities, they looked to the state for protection. There has been an active debate over the magnitude of the actual population loss owing to the Thirty Years' War.38 Some historians say about one-third of Germany's population was lost and the war has been variously estimated as having depleted the population of the Empire by 20 – 40 percent. Ward notes that of 35,000 villages in Bohemia at the beginning of the war, scarcely more than 6,000 remained at the end. Some war zones lost over half their population; in a corridor running from Pomerania in the north to the Black Forest, the loss of civilian population reached 50 percent. Even these estimates are clouded by the enormous number of refugees. Some cities that were places of refuge then became targets, as happened to Magdeburg, which lost almost its entire population in the sack of 1631. All these events, including the collapse of an independent and prosperous peasantry that had local ties and did not identify with the larger states, as well as the consequent rise of large-scale estate farming, tended to enhance the viability of and desire for territorial states. Finally, the Peace of Westphalia encouraged mass migrations, as populations sought the protection of sympathetic kings of the same religious sect as themselves.
Craig and George begin their study of diplomatic history by observing that the “Thirty Years War [brought] to the fore the most modern, best organized, and, if you will, most rationally motivated states: the Netherlands, Sweden, and France.”39 The political practices of this wartime coalition were ratified “by the Westphalian settlement as the rules of the new commonwealth in Europe [which] rules then developed by ad hoc practice into the constituent legitimacy of the European society of states.”40 Each of the members of the coalition had had to be persuaded to cooperate, rather than being obliged to do so, which secured for each a de facto equality as a state.
Of these three allied states, one would take the kingly state to new heights (France), while another (the Netherlands) would develop the internal institutions and external attitudes of a territorial state. France remained a kingly state, struggling to assert its primacy in a society of states that would be increasingly inhospitable to such states, while its competitor kingly state, Sweden, fell successively to the flaws inherent in such states: the caprice of inheritance, the megalomania of rulers, the lack of domestic levers of mobilization, the unity such states evoke from their adversaries, and the suspicion they evoke in their allies. For a century and a half after Westphalia, the military and political struggles in Europe were divided between two theatres, east and west, in which these kingly states asserted themselves, and within which the supremely successful territorial states— the Dutch and their successors, the British in the west and Prussia in the east—rose to pre-eminence. The first half of this era culminates in the Treaty of Utrecht, which enshrines the political system of the territorial states, and the second half ends with the French Revolution, which utterly effaces the greatest kingly state, France.
The Peace of Westphalia recognized the legal status of a great many states; representatives of over a hundred attended the congress. The most important aspect of this recognition is that, extrapolating from the Peace of Augsburg, the Peace of Westphalia augmented the sources of constitutional legitimacy of the State, which hitherto had been conferred by the customary system of dynastic inheritance and conquest. By simply removing from over three hundred autonomous territories in Germany the umbrella of authority hitherto supplied by the Holy Roman Emperor, the two Westphalian treaties legitimated a vast number of states on two novel bases: one, that the “state” was organized on a recognizable constitutive basis that did not conflict with the status quo; and two, that the congress (and thus the new European society) found it acceptable. This recognition embraced such small principalities as Parma, Baden, and Hesse, but also ecclesiastical lordships such as Cologne, Mainz, and Salzburg, as well as city-republics such as Venice, Genoa, Lucca, Geneva, and Berne. It included states whose affairs were governed by dynastic princes, elected officials, collective bodies, and mixtures of these models. At the same time, this society of states refused to recognize national groups that inhabited provinces such as Catalonia, Scotland, Brittany, Sicily, and Bohemia, where larger states had absorbed them. From the perspective of the present work, the great English historian C. V. Wedgwood could hardly be more wrong in her conclusion that the Thirty Years' War was “the outstanding example in European history of a meaningless conflict.”41 From the point of view of constitutional law and strategic conflict, the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia ended the interstate dimension of the religious struggles of the previous era and set the strategic agenda for a century. Indeed one might even say that by generalizing the Augsburg principle of cuius regio eius religio to all the states of Europe,*the result of this conflict was the inevitable identification of a particular population with a particular state, a development that in time led to the nation-state and the struggle for self-determination. Thus the Westphalian settlement's calculated omission of a unified Germany led directly to the Long War of our century.
The territorial state had special concerns that contrasted with those of the kingly state. Whereas a kingly state was organized around a person, the territorial state was defined by its contiguity and therefore fretted constantly about its borders. For the territorial state, its borders were everything—its legitimacy, its defense perimeter, its tax base. The territorial state depended on vigorous trading systems because its domestic market might often be insignificant, and also because it derived a significant amount of its revenue from taxing imports. Such states, of which the United Provinces of the Dutch was the initial example, pursued similar diplomatic and strategic objectives, including rational borders; free seas and open markets; an international consensus that no state should be allowed to dominate the affairs of the others; secular state preferences in the international arena; and a continuous diplomatic dialogue. Above all, the territorial states depended upon an active and engaged society of states. Only an international society could confer legitimacy on the constant territorial adjustments required by the balance of power, once legitimacy was founded on formally ratified treaties and agreements and not simply inheritance or conquest. As with the other historic changes in the constitutional orders of the European powers, however, it required the strategic collapse of the dominant form for the new order to be widely adopted.
With Louis XIV the kingly state reached its final apotheosis. He inherited four mutually supporting elements of such a state: a widely supported theory of divine right; a rich, well-organized, and highly centralized state apparatus; an unquestioned dynastic legitimacy; and a regal temperament. Bossuet, his court chaplain and resident political philosopher, expressed the view of many of his contemporaries that a king is a minister of God, to Whom alone he is responsible. On a somewhat different basis, the English political philosopher Filmer wrote: “That which is natural to man exists by divine right. Kingship is natural to man, therefore kingship exists by divine right.”42 This theory fitted perfectly the attitude and temperament of the new king.
His greatest asset was the structure of the French kingdom that Richelieu and Mazarin had shaped that enabled Louis, with his incomparable finance minister Colbert, to exploit its resources for war. The establishment of the French war ministry, whose intendants supervised and inspected the financing, supply, and organization of troops;* the creation of an entire military physical plant and infrastructure including barracks, hospitals, officer academies, ship repair yards, parade grounds, magazines, and arms depots: these formed the sinews not only of the military authority of the State, but of its political and constitutional status as well. Other states ardently copied the French model. As Kennedy puts it:
[A]ll this forced the other powers to follow suit, if they did not wish to be eclipsed. The monopolization and bureaucratization of military power by the state is clearly a central part of the story of “nation-building”; and the process was a reciprocal one since the enhanced authority and resources of the state in turn gave to their armed forces a degree of permanence which had not often existed a century earlier.43
Richelieu had died in 1642, having orchestrated the coalition that defeated the Habsburg drive for empire in Europe. The following year Louis XIII died, leaving as his heir a five-year-old boy. For eight years Mazarin struggled to maintain the state in the face of a civil war known to history as the Fronde. When the young king attained his majority in 1651, Marshal Turenne was able to restore order in Paris and to declare the Fronde to be rebels against the king's person. By 1653 the movement was dead, and Mazarin, the object of its hatred, had been restored to power as prime minister. But although suppressed, just as the English Restoration suppressed the Protectorate, these movements against the absolutism of the kingly state, their patriotic appeals to “the country,” and their hatred of foreigners at court, can be seen in retrospect as harbingers of the ultimately triumphant form of the territorial state.
In 1654 Louis XIV was crowned at Reims. The next year when Parlement attempted to criticize the edicts of the king, he appeared suddenly before them and is said to have made his celebrated declaration, the motto of the kingly state: “L'état, c'est moi.”Whatever his actual remarks, he scolded the members and left without waiting for their reply, a maneuver that had been previously attempted with such disastrous effects by another champion of the kingly state, Charles I of England. In this case, Mazarin and Turenne were able to suppress any insurrectionary reaction. Louis returned to the field, where he led his troops in their campaigns.
Louis did not share power. He never summoned the States-General or the Parlement. The nobility, the Church, and the towns were all made subservient to the absolute authority of the king. An administrative apparatus operating through ministers who were no more than agents of the Crown, initiated by Richelieu, was put securely into place. Once Louis was secure from internal challenges, with the administrative despotism of a sophisticated kingly state thus in place, he began to make war on the settlements of Westphalia in order that he might become the arbiter of Europe.
“Everything was calm everywhere [when I ascended the throne],” Louis XIV later recalled ruefully; “peace was established with my neighbors, probably for as long as I myself might wish… my age and the pleasure of being at the head of my armies perhaps made me desire rather more external activity.”44
At some point Mazarin and his kingly protégé conceived the plan of uniting the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties through marriage and eventually bringing Spain within French control. Toward this end Mazarin began negotiations with Philip IV for the marriage of his daughter, Maria Theresa, to Louis. These negotiations were accelerated by French strength in the field and a show of French interest in the young princess of Savoy. When Louis was reconciled to the prince of Conde, his principal rival, who had attempted to seize power in 1650, the king made a tour through the south of the country to Bayonne, where his marriage with the Spanish infanta took place. He then made a triumphal entry to Paris with his bride. When Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, died in 1661, Louis did not replace him, choosing instead to be his own prime minister. Louis was twenty-three. All the elements of the kingly state—political unity, absolutism, centralized administration, dynastic legitimacy, secularism—were in place.
Louis abolished or ignored all rival authorities and councils. The local authorities, the nobility, the Church, and town government were all placed directly in relationship to the Crown, and all were made responsible to his will. The bureaucratic structure of the kingly state created by Richelieu had been perfected by Mazarin, who sought and promoted the talented managers necessary to run it—Fouquet, Colbert, le Tellier. There were more men of remarkable ability, promoted on merit, who were wholly dependent on the king for their status and authority. Speaking of the most celebrated of this cadre, Mazarin is said to have declared upon his deathbed, to Louis, “Sire, I owe everything to you, but I pay my debt in giving you Colbert.”
Colbert, who succeeded the masterful Fouquet, was from 1661 to 1672 supreme in virtually every domestic department. He increased methods of indirect taxation, thus capturing some of the hitherto exempt classes; gave incentives to trade and manufactures; invited foreign talent to settle in France; produced road and canal projects by the score; created a fleet that was, in size at least, the equal of any in Europe; financed the fortifications with which Vauban, the great siege architect, overcame the very tactics he had taught the rest of Europe and secured Calais, Dunkirk, Brest, and a whole line of interior fortresses; and most significantly, produced a revenue surplus each year with which Louis could pursue his foreign policy. This permitted France to enlarge the standing army first established in 1640. Louis's domination of Europe was largely based on the fact that by 1666 he was able to maintain a force of almost 100,000 men, which he would soon triple. This, however, would have been fruitless without the centralized civilian structure put into place during this period by Louis's ministers.
Bankruptcy, indiscipline, corruption: these were the characteristics of French armies, as of most others, before… 1661. Yet by 1680 the French forces were nearly 300,000 strong and the wonder of Europe… Basically [this] was the work of two outstanding and tireless bureaucrats, le Tellier… and his son… Louvois. [Their] most important innovation… was the creation of a civil bureaucracy to administer the army.45
All French soldiers, of whatever rank, were subject to civilian control in every aspect of defense preparation: procurement, weapons manufacture, the hiring and fitting out of privateers, no less than logistics.
When Philip IV of Spain died in 1665, Louis laid claim to various lands in the southern Netherlands, relying on his wife's dynastic rights.* The War of Devolution (1667 – 1668) ensued when he invaded these territories. The Spanish could not mount a serious resistance, but the French invasion prompted the Dutch and the English, then in the midst of a trade war, to conclude a peace at once and to enter into an alliance in order to prevent Louis from seizing the entire southern Netherlands. At Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668 Louis agreed to a settlement, gaining a number of fortified cities in Flanders. This was merely a prelude.
For the next four years, Louis planned his campaign against the Dutch. In 1667 Colbert had imposed discriminatory tariffs against Dutch products; in 1671 these were sharply increased. French diplomacy deftly detached the British (in the secret Treaty of Dover) and the Swedes from Dutch alliances. Then, in 1672 Louis struck on land while the English fleet attacked the Dutch at sea. This invasion brought William III to power in Holland, a man who embodied the ideals of the territorial state to the same degree that Louis XIV represented the kingly state. It is an irony that is not uncommon in strategic affairs that the very success of Louis's forces so terrified the Dutch that they turned to their most intransigent and dynamic leader. He, by playing on the fears of other states that Louis would upset the balance of power in Europe—fears that were excited by Louis's successes in the field—was able to organize a general coalition against the French. In 1673 the Spanish joined the Dutch; the next year a number of German states joined the alliance. In 1674 the English parliament forced Charles II to withdraw from the war, and in 1677 William married Charles's niece, Mary, the daughter of his brother and heir.
Louis redoubled his efforts. At the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678, he took back Franche-Comté and made further gains in the southern Netherlands and Alsace. Along these lines, Louis—with the guidance of Vauban—built the “iron barrier” of fortifications that presaged the Maginot Line of a later century. Louis was determined to press on to the Rhine. Of the cities that he then seized in 1681 the most important was Strasbourg, which was followed by the siege of Luxembourg. When the English threatened a general European war, Louis raised the siege in return for an agreement that for thirty years he would remain in possession of the territory he had claimed. This was the Truce of Ratisbon, which ratified all of Louis's gains since 1678.
Louis chose this time to revoke the Edict of Nantes and renew the persecution of Protestants. Although this might seem reckless, perhaps explained only by the deepest religious convictions, in fact neither conclusion is warranted. It was Louis, after all, who, when the emperor and pope appealed to him for help in driving the Turks from Vienna in 1683, replied laconically that “crusades [are] no longer in fashion.”46 Moreover, Pope Innocent XI condemned the revocation of the Edict and correctly saw that Louis intended to use this step as a means of ultimately asserting his supremacy over the French Church. This was precisely Louis's objective, and it is doubtless also true that he correctly read the mood of his people, who had collaborated in many ways since the death of Mazarin in petty and malicious attacks on Protestants.* Thus Louis managed to succeed in further centralizing in his person the aspirations, and the prejudices, of his subjects.
This step had the unintended effect, however, of destroying his closest ally, James II, who had been trying to maintain a kingly state in Britain. James had attempted to intercede with the pope, soliciting his support for the Revocation, a move that scarcely endeared James to his own subjects, some 300,000 of whom were non-Anglican Protestants.47
In 1686 the League of Augsburg was formed to maintain the agreements of Westphalia, which, it was felt, were jeopardized by Louis's ambitions. The emperor, the kings of Spain and Sweden, the Dutch, Bavaria, and the Rhine provinces all joined, as did the pope the following year. Louis replied by demanding that the League adopt the Truce of Ratisbon as the permanent peace settlement, and James was unwise enough to support this claim. Along with other factors (including James's scarcely concealed Catholicism), this provoked leading English figures to invite William III to replace James, and thus Louis's chief opponent, and the chief protagonist of the territorial state, came to power in London.
The resulting War of the League of Augsburg, begun when Louis responded to the developments against him by invading the Rhineland and burning Heidelberg, was the greatest international conflict since the Thirty Years' War. For the first time Louis faced armies that were a match for his own. By 1697 both sides were exhausted and agreed to the Peace of Ryswick. Louis was obliged to surrender some of the towns he had seized before the war, including Luxembourg, and to recognize William III as king of England, but he retained Strasbourg and Franche-Comté. Ryswick was a victory for the territorial states, and for the constitutional geography of a multipolar Europe in which small states held the balance of power. For that reason, every diplomat of the period must have realized that when the issue arose of the succession to the Spanish throne—for which Louis had so long prepared himself—Ryswick would be challenged.
The War of the Spanish Succession arose owing to an essential shortcoming in the system of kingly states, its dependence on dynastic legitimacy and on the will of a single person. As it happened, “[o]n no other occasion in the history of modern Europe have so many questions of vital concern to its peoples depended on the death or survival of one man.”48
That man was the Spanish king, Carlos II, the last descendant of the male line of the great emperor Charles V. He had long been an invalid, and had not produced an heir. The prospect of his death, which appeared imminent over an unexpectedly long reign, excited and alarmed the dynasties of Europe because of the possibility that either Bourbon France or the Habsburg empire would attempt to amalgamate with what was still the richest and by far the most populous collection of human beings owing allegiance to a single European sovereign, the kingly state of Spain—encompassing the Iberian peninsula (minus Portugal), Belgium, a huge overseas colonial empire, and various parts of Italy, including Milan. The pieces that Louis had carefully assembled—his Spanish wife, a dowry controversy, a secret partition agreement with the Austrian Habsburg king Leopold I that provided for a division of the Spanish empire between them if Charles should die without an heir—now all seemed to fall into place.
There remained two formidable obstacles. Spain's partners in the Peace of Ryswick would not tolerate the blow to the balance of power that would occur from uniting Spanish overseas possessions with either France or the Empire. It is a matter of some dispute whether the occupation of the Americas had continued to be nearly as enriching to Spain as it proved at first; compared to the ever-escalating expense of garrisoning a continent and the costly maintenance of long lines of threatened communications across the Atlantic, this may not actually have been so. But in light of the greatly increased costs of maintaining competitive military forces on the continent of Europe, no territorial state could risk diverting this treasure, however costly it had become to extract, to a hegemonical kingly state so plainly on the march.
Shortly after Ryswick, England, Holland, and France had attempted to settle the question of Spanish succession. It is interesting to observe the two sets of negotiating states in these treaties: the territorial states, personified by William III, carefully trying to maintain a balance of power; the kingly states, represented by Louis, keeping intact those dynastic inheritances that might, in the fullness of time, augment the kingly state. William's vision of the European community would eventually triumph at Utrecht when the epochal war waged by Louis finally ended.
Lossky portrays the two men with great insight, and accomplishes also a vivid portrayal of a Europe constituted by Westphalia, compared with that which would emerge at Utrecht.
Louis' aim was quite simple: to increase the grandeur of his State and of his House, so that his own preeminence as “the greatest king in Christendom” would be beyond dispute. He believed that each country had its own “true maxims of state,” rooted in the natural order, whose ultimate author was God. Good statesmanship consisted in following these maxims… Only an absolute monarch stood a chance of following the true maxims consistently. Wherever kingly power was limited, it was virtually certain that private interest would becloud the real interest of the State…. There was more room for change in [William's] world than in Louis'… [William came to see] the struggle on [a] plane that helped him attain to that comprehensive view of the war, and eventually of all Europe, which made him natural leader of the coalition. He ceased to belong to any one country. He sacrificed Dutch interests to English, English to Dutch; when necessary, he was ready to sacrifice the interests of both to those of the coalition; and towards the end he preferred the welfare of all Europe to the smooth running of the coalition.
The correspondence of William and his narrow circle of friends frequently contains expressions like “the general interest of Europe” and “the public good.” These are no mere phrases: often the writer is aware of a conflict between “public good” and State interests, and he invariably sides with the former. Louis, probably, would have resolved such a conflict the other way around, had he been aware of its existence anywhere except in the imagination of misguided men.49
The Spanish and King Carlos II objected to the arrangement negotiated by William and Louis in the Partition Treaty, however, as did the Emperor Leopold. When Carlos died in November 1700, it was discovered that he had left the entire of his dominions to Louis's grandson. Carlos evidently believed that France, as Europe's strongest military force, was most able to prevent a future dismemberment of the Spanish monarchy. And there was this codicil: if Louis chose to honor the Partition Treaty instead and to reject the bequest, all the Spanish holdings were to go to Leopold's younger son, whose family, conveniently, was not a party to the Partition Treaty.
When the Spanish king died and Louis was informed of the will, he called his councillors together and solicited their views. The memoirs of the foreign minister, Torcy, who was present, recount the debate:
It was easier to foresee than to prevent the consequences of the decision in question. [In signing the Partition Treaty with the British and Dutch, the king] had engaged himself to reject every disposition whatever made by the King of Spain in favor of a prince of the line of France…. [T]he consequence of such a violation was inevitable war. [But if Louis rejected the will, the whole of Spain's dominion would go to the Habsburgs, a union that, when last held by Charles V, was deemed] heretofore so fatal to France [that war here too was inevitable].50
It was absurd that France should make war on Spain because its late king had tried to give his dominions to a French prince. Furthermore, Louis was well aware that he would fight such a war to enforce the Partition Treaty without allies. Only weeks before Carlos's death, William III had written to the Dutch Grand Pensionary that it “would be quite against my intention to be at present involved in a war for a treaty which I concluded only with a view to prevent [a war].”51 Finally the prospect of the union of the two kingdoms was too tempting for a man of Louis's nature to reject. On Tuesday, November 16, 1700, Louis exuberantly introduced his grandson to the court as Philip V of Spain. The Spanish ambassador exclaimed, “There are no more Pyrenees. They have vanished and we are but one nation.”
The wrath of the disappointed emperor was not in itself a reason to rouse the territorial states to defy Carlos's will. They declined to insist, with Leopold, that the Partition Treaty be enforced. Then Louis went too far: he declared that his grandson could not renounce his rights to the French throne. Anticipating the reaction, Louis quickly invested the Spanish fortresses of Luxembourg, Namur, and Mons on the Dutch border; and he transferred to France commercial advantages formerly granted by Spain to England. The French ambassador to Madrid became a kind of proconsul through whom Louis effectively administered Spain. A council of four was set up to reform Spanish finances and administration along French lines.
Thus began the War of the Spanish Succession. Initially, Louis decided to carry the front to Vienna, an audacious plan that miscarried with the vic-tory at Blenheim of the virtuoso partnership of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy. In 1706, an Anglo-Portuguese army seized Madrid. This was followed by further defeats for the French at the hands of Marlborough and Eugene: Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and finally Malplaquet (1709), all enormous battles with tens of thousands of casualties. France was invaded, and the hard winter of 1709 starved countless peasants to death. Louis sued for terms. The allies, however, now insisted that Louis send French troops to drive Philip, Louis's own grandson, from the peninsula. This the French king refused to do. Philip was able, in part owing to the success of French reforms, to garner widespread popular support in Spain and in 1710 twice won victories. When the unexpected death of Leopold's successor brought his son to the imperial throne, the entire picture changed. Now the territorial states faced the prospect of a new Habsburg ruler reassembling the dynastic properties of Charles V. When Louis agreed to promise that the Spanish and French crowns would never be united, the territorial powers were willing to accept the obvious preference of the Spanish for Philip V. Only the Austrians wished to continue the struggle, and, after long negotiations, the war was ended by the treaties of Utrecht in 1713 and Rastadt in the following year.
For our present study, the importance of the Treaty of Utrecht cannot be overstated. By its terms it is the first European treaty that explicitly establishes a balance of power as the objective of the treaty regime. The letters patent that accompanied Article VI of the treaty between England, France, and the king of Spain whose dynastic rights were being set aside acknowledged the “Maxim of securing for ever the universal Good and Quiet of Europe, by an equal weight of Power, so that many being united in one, the Ballance of the Equality desired, might not turn to the Advantage of one, and the Danger and Hazard of the Rest.”
This treaty permitted adjustments at the margin, but not the wholesale annexation of a national state; inhabitants now cared whether they were French, German, or Austrian.52 More importantly, securing the territorial state system had now become an important diplomatic objective; after Utrecht, the recognition of any state required its assurance to an international society that the system generally was not thereby jeopardized. That meant that “hereditary right and the endorsement of the constituent local authorities were no longer sufficient by themselves to secure sovereignty over a territory.”53
It had required an international society to accomplish these achievements, including the effective ratification of the constitutional triumph of the territorial state. So much else that we now take for granted in the international system flows from this watershed event. For example, the authority of multinational congresses (of which Utrecht itself was the most far-reaching in the eighteenth century) and our view of law as the legitimation of acknowledged customary practice (because this revolution in legitimation came about not through a hierarchical appeal but through consensus) both date from this time. In one respect, however, the Peace of Utrecht stood for a system that is very different from the system of international rule making and rule following we have today: Utrecht gave a significant role to war. At Utrecht and thereafter, the balance of power not only permitted but required occasional territorial adjustments, though resort to war was tempered by the further requirement that these adjustments be ratified by the society of states.
This society was motivated by a commitment to preserve its own peace and stability. As ever, strategic means were deployed to secure constitutional ends, but these ends were subtly shaped by the necessities imposed by the development of innovative strategic forms. After Utrecht, the eighteenth century saw many wars, but all of them were
minor wars of adjustment: the final means, after other pressures and inducements had not succeeded, of compelling… modifications of the balance between the states of the system… [T]he commitment to preserving a balance of power led to the transfer of territories from one sovereign to another regardless of tradition, the wishes of the inhabitants [or dynastic rules].54
This crucial and unusual role for war as an integral part of the diplomatic system would, of itself, have led to an increasing professionalization of war making, but that development was accelerated by other factors having to do with innovation in war-making itself. These factors led to the success of the two territorial states best able to professionalize their capacity to make a new kind of war and maintain their independence from the wars of others: England and Prussia.
Historians debate whether territorial states made the development of professional armies possible—armies that were trained by the State, paid year round from a state treasury, employed within a career structure that was designed and maintained by the State—or whether the changes in warfare brought about by the deployment of such armies made the development of territorial states a necessity. The kingly state was well suited to deploy forces that comprehended the revolution in tactics of the seventeenth century—Gustavus Adolphus showed that beyond doubt—but such states could not maintain these forces in the field for decade after decade, which the collapse of the French economy in 1708 – 1709 also showed. Only forces that were socially cohesive, drawn from a single territory, recruited to fight for “their country”—a phrase uniquely associated with the territorial state—rather than for highly paid mercenary captains, and above all used for the limited objectives of limited wars, as opposed to the ambitious dynastic enterprises of the megalomaniacal kingly states, could make up a standing army capable of being supported over the long term. The triumph of the territorial state coincided with developments in weapons technology—the replacement of the matchlock musket by the flintlock, whose simple and reliable design made possible a discharge of three rounds per minute and thus the establishment of three ranks capable of simultaneous fire, and the invention of the ring bayonet, which eliminated pikemen from the battlefield—and together led to the successes of Marlborough and Eugene and thus directly to Utrecht.
The Peace of Utrecht,* composed of the whole complex of treaties embracing Utrecht, Rastadt, and, a few years later, Passarowitz and Ny-stad, subordinated the traditional legal criteria of inheritance and hierarchical allegiance (religious or political). In their place was a unity of strategic approach—a judgment by the society of states as to what was an appropriate strategic goal and what constitutional forms were legitimate. This is how it looked to Voltaire, writing in about 1750:
For some time now it has been possible to consider Christian Europe, give or take Russia, as “une espèce de grande republique” —a sort of great commonwealth—partitioned into several states, some monarchic, the others mixed, some aristocratic, others popular, but all dealing with one another; all having the same basic religion, though divided into various sects; all having the same principles of public and political law unknown in the other parts of the world. Because of these principles the European [states] never enslave their prisoners, they respect the ambassadors of their enemies, they jointly acknowledge the preeminence and various rights of [legitimate rulers], and above all they agree on the wise policy of maintaining an equal balance of power between themselves so far as they can, conducting continuous negotiations even in times of war, and exchanging resident ambassadors or less honourable spies, who can warn all the courts of Europe of the designs of any one, give the alarm at the same time and protect the weaker…55
Such practices are usually taken to be the necessary preconditions of modern public international law; indeed the most influential commentator on international law of the period, Vattel, virtually repeats this characterization of European political society in the summary of his Law of Nations.† What is equally interesting, however, is the passage with which Vattel ends this summary:
England… has the honour to hold in her hands the political scales. She is careful to maintain them in equilibrium. It is a policy of great wisdom and justice, and one which will be always commendable, so long as she makes use only of alliance, confederations, and other equally lawful means.56
The Treaty of Utrecht was often called by contemporaries the “Paix d‘Anglais” and for good reason: it represented the success of a constitutional order that had passed from the Dutch to the English with William of Orange at about the same time that the trade wars against the Dutch ceased and British merchants secured the majority of maritime trade. William's policies required an unprecedented level of state expenditure: the rate of taxation was doubled to pay for a large and growing navy and an army the size of those of continental states. Once Britain effectively defeated the Jacobite movement in Scotland in 1746, she became a territorial state free of the vulnerabilities, as well as the temptations, of continental acquisitions. Even though the electorate of Hanover had been brought to London along with a new dynasty in 1714, Britain did not seek territorial expansion on the continent. And while it was a less than constant leader in preserving the balance of power—acting forcefully in 1717 by organizing the triple alliance of the Hague to check Spanish ambitions but refusing in 1731 to act on behalf of the balance—Britain was a principal beneficiary of the new international order. Within that order Britain meant to improve her position outside the continent. Rather than seek European conquests, Queen Anne declared, “It is this nation's interest to aggrandize itself by trade.”57 For the rest of the century, when Britain and France clashed, the principal impact was felt overseas.
It is sometimes difficult to see this through the fog of engagements on the continent. Despite important battles abroad—the French besieged Madras, while the British had notable successes in America and French overseas trade was virtually halted by blockade—it was French success in the southern Netherlands that brought the British to the negotiating table and forced them to return Louisbourg, the key to Canada. It was clear to all parties, however, that the great stakes lay outside Europe, even if the key to winning them might lie within. Some French strategists argued that America could be conquered by attacking Hanover; others, that this was only a diversion from maritime engagements that depended upon a pre-eminent navy. Meanwhile, in London, opposition members denounced continental involvement to defend “the despicable electorate” of Hanover, while others argued that America could be won on the banks of the Elbe by tying down French resources. Everyone was agreed, however, that America was the stake.
The Seven Years' War sustained this argument. All-out war began in North America in 1755 (as a young lieutenant colonel, George Washington, and his men fired the first shots of the war) and quickly spread to the European continent. Pitt's strategy of using Prussia to bleed French land forces on the continent while the British Navy destroyed the French at sea proved to be a spectacular success. One by one the French overseas posts were taken once their communications had been cut by British seapower. The Peace of Paris in 1763 brought Canada and Florida to Great Britain. Then the American colonies revolted, and France concluded a formal alliance with the United States, “not,” as Louis XVI put it, “with any idea of territorial aggrandizement for us, but solely as an attempt to ruin [British] commerce.”58 By 1780, the Spanish, Dutch, and French were all arrayed against Britain. The American victory at Yorktown in 1781 was the accomplishment of an army that was half-French and of a French fleet that blocked relief for the surrounded British forces (though this is not the standard account in American schoolbooks). For the first time since 1692 the British lost control of the seas.
To American eyes, British policy appeared as a lapse by the British into the ways of the kingly state: George III and his ministers were just so described in the Declaration of Independence. If this was the case, the British had steadied by 1786 and concluded a new commercial treaty with France, restoring by this and many other efforts the British position as arbiter of the balance of power. Despite the younger Pitt's famous remark in 1792 anticipating a long period of peace, this step came just in time.*
One other state especially benefited from the new society in Europe organized around the balance of power by the territorial states. Prussia was best able to exploit the revolution in technology and tactics in warfare, as Britain was best able to benefit from the commercial advantages of relative tranquility on the continent and of maritime expansion beyond. Prussia, by happenstance as much as planning, had been shaped by its ruling family into an instrumental, highly effective territorial state seeking its aggrandizement in carefully selected limited wars, always adding territories that would increase rather than divert the power of the center, avoiding dynastic overextension, and above all, separating the person of the ruler from the state that he and the state's system of bureaucracy served. This last, of course, is the constitutional watermark of the territorial state, and contrasts sharply with its constitutional predecessor.
The kingdom of Prussia began its modern course in 1618, when the electorate of Brandenburg and the duchy of Prussia were united under a Hohenzollern prince.59 Prussia was hitherto a small state on the Baltic in Poland, to the east of the Vistula, once inhabited by Lithuanian tribes who were conquered and converted by the Knights of the Teutonic Order. During the Thirty Years' War, the Brandenburg electorate had played an insignificant role until the succession of Frederick William, known as the Great Elector. It was he who transformed the electorate into a kingly state, observing the example of Louis XIV. At the Peace of Westphalia, the Great Elector was able to gain valuable accessions of contiguous territory, and in 1653 he secured a small grant to raise an army of a few thousand men from the estates in which the landed aristocracy was the main voice;*in return, the nobility were confirmed in their privileges and were given full jurisdiction within their lands and a guarantee of preferment as to official posts; in addition, the towns were confirmed in their judicial immunities and guild rules.60 To finance the army the estates agreed to the assessment by royal officials of land values on which a modest tax was levied—the Gener-alkriegskommissariat. In so doing the estates compromised their traditional right to tax themselves. Frederick William promptly used this reform to leverage higher taxes; when some estates objected, he levied taxes by force. By these measures he was able to create a highly centralized absolutist monarchy and its necessary accompaniment, a standing army, which by 1672 was 45,000 strong.61 Virtually all state resources were subordinated to the building up of the army. The royal bureaucracy responsible for levying taxes to support the army extended its control over many aspects of Prussian commercial life: in the towns where the tax was raised by an excise on goods, and in the country where levies against harvests and rents supplied revenue, these Prussian officials constituted a supervisory arm of the king and intensified the increasing centralism of Prussian economic life. The Prussian victory against the Swedes at Fehrbellin in 1675 had shaken Europe, 62 and the Great Elector's successor, Frederick III, was recognized as King Frederick I of Prussia by the emperor. Superficial as this recognition may appear to us, it fulfilled a prerequisite for the formation of a territorial state by giving to the subjects of the Prussian crown a common name. Frederick's son resumed the policy of strengthening the army.
This figure is well known to historians from Macaulay's description: Frederick William I did indeed, it seems, walk into private houses and inspect the family dinner, and cane idlers when he happened to meet them on the street, and did fly into inexplicable rages as well as fits of depression. But he also first introduced universal conscription into military service, while exempting the bourgeois taxpayers, taking care to send peasant soldiers back to their farms at harvest time, and nurturing a textile industry with state purchases. By the time of his death in 1740, Prussia had a highly efficient bureaucracy, large financial reserves, and the fourth largest army in Europe (although the state ranked only tenth in territory and thirteenth in population).
In the same year, 1740, the Austrian emperor Charles VI died. With Charles, the male line died out and the throne passed to his daughter Maria Theresa. The last years of Charles's reign had been clouded by his fears for her succession, and so he had persuaded the other European powers to subscribe to the Pragmatic Sanction, an agreement according to which they promised to observe and defend the integrity of Austrian possessions under Maria Theresa. Among the signers was Frederick II, the new king of Prussia.
Nevertheless, without warning, Frederick invaded Silesia, an Austrian possession that lay between the Brandenburg and Prussian lands of his state. In the ensuing three wars, he managed to retain Silesia, despite overwhelmingly adverse odds, and thereby almost doubled the size of his small kingdom. The following excerpt is from Frederick's memorandum on the matter to his ministers:
Silesia is the portion of the [Austrian] heritage to which we have the strongest claim and which is most suitable to the House of Brandenburg. The superiority of our troops, the promptitude with which we can set them in motion, in a word, the clear advantage we have over our neighbors, gives us in this unexpected emergency an infinite superiority over all other powers of Europe…. England could not be jealous of my getting Silesia, which would do her no harm, and she needs allies. Holland will not care, all the more since the loans of the Amsterdam business world secured on Silesia will be guaranteed. If we cannot arrange with England and Holland, we can certainly make a deal with France, who cannot frustrate our designs and will welcome the abasement of the [Austrian] house. Russia alone might give us trouble. If the empress lives,… we can bribe the leading counsellors. If she dies, the Russians will be so occupied that they will have no time for foreign affairs… All this leads to the conclusion that we must occupy Silesia before the winter and then negotiate. When we are in possession we can negotiate with success.63
To this remarkable document, Craig and George say only, “This memorandum really requires no comment. Here is a mind completely dominated by Staats raison, a mind that admits no legal or ethical bonds to state ambition.” Although this term translates to “reasons of state,” it has a connotation unique to the territorial state, in contrast to raison d‘état and to ragione di stato, which, as we have seen, reflect their respective constitutional origins. Staats raison is a rationale given on behalf of the State, an imperative that compels its strategic designs (such as the seizure of a proximate province for geostrategic reasons). It identifies the state with the country, the land. The raison d‘état is a reason invoked on behalf of a king, justifying his acts as being those imposed on him by the State (such as aid to Protestant princes by a Catholic king); it identifies the king with the State when he takes on the role of the state. Ragione di stato are reasons that distinguish the state code of behavior from the moral code of the prince (such as deceit or treachery) when the state takes on the role of the prince and the prince is relieved of his moral obligations as an individual. Each phrase, though it translates into the same English words, belongs to that constitutional order within which it acquired use—the territorial state, the kingly state, and the princely state, respectively.
Frederick's seizure of Silesia had profound effects on the future of Germany, for when Austria lost Silesia, with its large population and impor-tant commercial resources, the western half of the Austrian empire ceased to be predominantly German, and Prussia became the primary force in Germany. Two further wars confirmed Frederick's gains: the War of the Austrian Succession (1740 – 1748), in which various states abandoned the Pragmatic Sanction and joined Prussia in a bid for Austrian territories in the Netherlands, Italy, and Bohemia, and the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), in which Prussia was supported only by Hanover and Great Britain (which took the war to North America and India, where British success was finally achieved). The Prussia of the Great Elector who inherited parcels of territory along the vulnerable north German plain, repeatedly crossed and recrossed by brutal mercenaries of every contending power in the Thirty Years' War, had become one of the great powers of Europe in little more than twenty years. Moreover, the Great Elector's Prussia, which had been so carefully modeled on the French kingly state, was transformed by his great-grandson, now called Frederick the Great, into a territorial state of singular intensity. It was Frederick, who entertained no self-doubts about his role at the apex of Prussian political society, who nevertheless described himself not as the incarnation of the State but as its “first servant.”64
What sort of power was the Prussian state? It was highly stratified; it carefully husbanded its resources; it emphasized loyalty to the State rather than to the dynasty; it encouraged economic growth in manufactures, trade, and agriculture rather than stripping these enterprises of their wealth for the Crown; and it derived all of these imperatives from a desire to create and maintain an army well beyond what most observers would have regarded as its means. In Frederick's view, the State must assure a careful balance between classes within the State, and between economic power and the diversion of economic resources to the military. To accomplish this he insisted that only members of the nobility could serve as officers, and that noble lands could not be sold to peasants or townsmen; that peasant lands must not be absorbed by bourgeois or noble acquisition, and that only those peasants who could be spared from agricultural duties should be recruited to the army; and that townspeople were most useful to the state as producers of wealth and thus “should be guarded as the apple of one's eye.” Frederick's soldiers felt no great loyalty to him as a person. Indeed, in his political memoir, he confides that, during the first Silesian wars, “he had made a special effort to impress upon his officers the idea of fighting for the country of Prussia.”
In all of these respects, Frederick the Great typified the ruler of a territorial state.65 His objectives were territorial and statist, rather than dynastic and personal or religious. It is intriguing that even the training of troops reflected the attributes of the state Frederick created, but not so surprising because the state itself had been crafted to provide resources and a structure for warfare. This is evident in the iron discipline that Frederick instilled in the Prussian forces. The goal of this discipline was to make the army into an instrument that could respond to a single strategic will. Frederick once remarked that his soldiers must be more afraid of their officers than of their enemies.66 Officers and men must understand that every act “is the work of a single man.” “No one reasons, everyone executes.” Men who are trained to march smartly can also turn quickly and in unison in battle. At Lentzen, Frederick's men suddenly began a flank attack with an about-face.67 An army thus trained can achieve tactical mobility, becoming skilled in quickly shifting from marching order to battle order, remain steady under withering fire, and, most important, respond to a unified strategic vision. An army trained in this way, Frederick repeatedly said, could provide full scope to the art of generalship.68
What kind of generalship was that to be? The answer is consistent with the answer to the question “what kind of statesmanship does the territorial state exact from its leaders?” Strategy, which is the art of the general, is the answer to the question posed by constitutional imperatives, the objects of the statesman. But constitutional imperatives, like the constitutional order itself, change in response to the demands of innovations acquired by strategy. A state that presents a new model, constitutionally, like the territorial state—which identifies the State with the land of its people—will succeed or fail depending on how it is able to adapt new forms of strategy to serve that model. And these new strategic forms will inevitably impose themselves on the constitutional order. The strategic innovations of Frederick and the Prussian state were so dramatically successful that they changed the shape of warfare—and of the State itself—for all Europe. Palmer observes of this new form:
Battle, with troops so spiritually mechanized, was a methodical affair. Opposing armies were arrayed according to pattern, almost as regularly as chessmen… on each wing cavalry, artillery fairly evenly distributed along the rear, infantry battalions drawn up in two parallel solid lines… each… composed of three ranks each rank firing as at a single command while the other two reloaded…69
According to Frederick, marching order was determined by battle order: troops should march in columns so arrayed that by a quick turn the column presented itself as a rank, firing in lines with cavalry on its flanks. Because a battle order of long unbroken lines was as vulnerable as it was murderous, Frederick designed the “oblique order,” which involved the advance of one wing by successive echelons while the other wing remained steady, minimizing exposure to the weaker end. This either gained a quick victory by a flanking attack, rolling up the enemy's line or, if failing, tended to minimize losses as the hitherto static wing maneuvered to cover the withdrawal of the extended wing. Such a general tends to avoid cataclysmic engagements; he looks for set battles, preferably sieges, and tries to acquire fortresses. Forts, Frederick wrote, were “mighty nails which hold a ruler's provinces together.” Generalship of this kind is after all territorial, both tactically and strategically: “To win a battle means to compel your opponent to yield you his [territorial] position.”
These military ideas were a dimension of Frederick's overall views as a statesman, and it was Frederick who succeeded William III as the model of the territorial state leader.70 He carefully maneuvered to augment his state with territory that would actually contribute to the wealth71 or territorial integrity of the state—rather than vindicate dynastic claims—and that could be gained at reasonable costs in concert with the other powers of Europe. The most striking example of this was the result of the First Partition of Poland, whereby, only nine years after the end of the Seven Years' War, Prussia, Austria, and Russia made substantial territorial acquisitions while avoiding conflict. Frederick gives us his view of this incident in his History of My Own Times:
This was one of the most important acquisitions which we could make, because it joined Pomerania and Eastern Prussia; as it rendered us masters of the Vistula we gained the double advantage of a defensible frontier to the kingdom and the power to levy considerable tolls on the Vistula, by which river the whole trade of Poland was carried on.72
Once this vital property was gained—it closed Prussia's territorial gap along the Baltic coast—Frederick immediately moved to improve it. Craftsmen, artisans, manufacturers, educators were all sent to colonize the area; marshes were drained; the Vistula was connected to the Oder and to the Elbe by a great canal.
Frederick was both a beneficiary and a strong supporter of the Utrecht system, even if he had made his debut on the European stage by a successful coup de main within that system.
The ambitious should consider above all that armaments and military discipline being much the same through Europe, and alliances as a rule producing an equality of force between belligerent parties, all that princes can expect from the greatest advantages at present is to acquire, by accumulation of successes, either some small city on the frontier or some territory which will not pay interest on the expense of the war [required to take it].73
He saw clearly enough that war should be undertaken in proximity to one's own frontiers, because of the “difficulty of providing food supplies at points distant from the frontier, and in furnishing the new recruits, new horses, clothing and munitions of war.”74Above all, he relied on forces that, however well-drilled, had no moral enthusiasm or political conviction. For this reason he could not rely on his armies to live off occupied countries because they would desert if dispersed to forage, and their morale would collapse if their supplies were not regularly refreshed. For the same reason, his alliances were solely matters of strategic calculation, and thus he could never depend on support from ideologically sympathetic local parties in the countries he invaded. In order to preserve the authoritarian constitutional structure of the Prussian state, Frederick dared not excite the energy that lay dormant in nationalism. Indeed, this was the challenge of the territorial state: to make the State, rather than the person of the king, the object of constitutional and strategic concern without permitting the people to claim the State as their own. “My land,” “my country,” but not “my nation.” All of this stands in stark contrast to the style of warfare epitomized by Frederick the Great's successor as the leading commander in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte.75
In contrast to the absolutism of the kingly state, the territorial state was a state of definite limits. We have seen this to be the case in the composition and maintenance of its armies. The governments of territorial states were limited in the revenue base they could derive from their subjects because the territorial state depended for its legitimacy on a compact with the estates of the realm, and not on the axiomatic dynastic rights of an absolute ruler. Nor could these governments draw on the entire human resources of the state: typically the aristocracy was privileged to officer the army and the state. (The kingly state was more meritocratic in this respect.) The people, insofar as they were a material factor in the strategic calculations of the territorial state, were simply taxable assets to be encouraged, and not too much disturbed, by the occasional warfare of the state. Frederick the Great wrote that he “wanted to fight [his] wars without the peasant behind his plow and the townsman in his shop even being aware of them.”76 The role of the citizen did not require that he take part in war. Sound political economy counseled that armies should be composed of men who were the least necessary, economically, to the well-being of the state. The aristocratic officer corps scarcely demanded from the marginal persons they commanded any of the characteristics of esprit that the officers expected of themselves. Rather they relied on good physical care, medical attention, adequate housing, and regular pay to motivate their troops. The rise of large standing armies under the kingly state had resulted in the systematic use of billeting. Troops were assigned to private houses, taverns, and stables. After the Seven Years' War, however, the new territorial states of Europe increasingly housed their forces in barracks, isolated from the surrounding populations. It was expected that enlisted men would freely desert if allowed to reconnoiter in small parties and that both officers and men would change sides if presented with the promise of more attractive employment.
Professional armies were expensive and the extensive drill required by eighteenth century tactics meant that the territorial state had a great investment in each soldier. Large-scale pitched battles were seldom risked. Marshal Saxe in his Reveries de Guerre (1732) made the much-quoted statement: “I do not favor pitched battles, especially at the beginning of a war, and I am convinced that a skillful general could make war all his life without being forced into one.” Armies in Europe at this time became, in Clausewitz's words, like “a State within a State, in which the element of violence gradually faded away.”
The delimited territorial state thus produced a delimited warfare, fought with limited means for limited objectives. Wars of position prevailed over wars of attrition, and precisely because battles were so deadly they were largely avoided and were not decisive when they occurred. Thus even though there were technological breakthroughs, particularly in the ability to deliver firepower, and therefore casualty rates rose appreciably during this period, the abundant possibilities for decisive military action ironically prevented the hegemony of any one state. Small sovereignties that had been active participants in earlier eras however—Cologne, Wurtemberg, Münster, Bremen, Genoa, Hesse—virtually disappeared. War became an activity of the Great Powers because only they could control territory significant enough to finance its defense in an era in which terri-ory itself was the medium of exchange of power.
Prior to the arrival of the territorial state, rights of succession had been the principal source of interstate dispute. These were legal rights, based on ancient titles, marriages, cessions, that didn't merely provide the monarch with a patrimony, but established his right to rule. As Holsti has put it, “The territories that reverted to a prince, king or queen were less significant than the rights that inhered in them.”77 But in the eighteenth century, concerns for succession began to relate less to the right to rule—who had the better claim to succeed—than to the power to control territory. To paraphrase Luard slightly, control over territory no longer resulted from a credible claim; the claim resulted from a credible control over territory.78 We have only to compare the careful preparations of Louis XIV to place a Bourbon prince on the throne of Spain—the thwarted dowry, the Spanish wife, the secret agreement with the other principal contending family—with Frederick's casual pretexts regarding his Silesian claims. Once he decided to move against Austria, Frederick directed a subordinate to work up a case that Silesia really belonged to Prussia; on being presented with the results, Frederick replied with amusement that the official had proved to be a good charlatan.
Indeed even in the selection of monarchs, sorting out the dynastic priority among competing legal claims became subordinated to aligning the decision with overriding strategic purposes. Dynasts themselves in this era ceased to think of territory in terms of family patrimony but rather as a commodity—the currency of great power relations that it had become. Dynastic rights were now fig leaves for territorial claims.
This was the era of the great territorial partitions: in 1772 of Poland by Russia, Austria, and Prussia; in 1773, of Swedish possessions by Russia, Denmark, and Prussia. Territory could be traded to avoid or terminate a war, disregarding entirely its legal associations with family compacts, marriages, and titles.79 In place of the princely pursuit of titles and their appurtenant rights, once the coin of European patrimonial conflict, states struggled to gain or hold territory per se. Territorial conflicts became the chief source of war in this period, not simply because land was essential to national power—providing a population from which to conscript, a base of revenue and trade—for this had always been the case, but rather because legitimacy too now came from the sheer control of territory. A state that could consolidate its holdings, shedding noncontiguous family properties that were vulnerable to predation, could build itself a strategic position of relative invulnerability, and this alone was enough to assure its position among the other powers of Europe. Otherwise, it faced steady losses of its territory, even the threat of partition by a coalition. The balance of military technology and tactics was such that no state could hope for the wholesale patrilineal annexation of another—the vindication of a dynastic claim—yet every state was vulnerable to having a province picked off at its borders. The stereotypical view of eighteenth century conflict as indecisive reflects, as Jeremy Black effectively showed, an oversimplification of the political context.
18th century conflicts do appear inconclusive because they were frequently coalition conflicts and… coalition warfare could inhibit a determination to achieve decisive results. [Moreover] governments did not necessarily wish to make their allies too powerful by weakening their rivals excessively.80
This reticence lay in the nature of the constitutional basis for the territorial state and not in a lack of decisive military technology or ambition.
Pikemen had been hitherto used to protect musketeers from attack by cavalry and by other pikemen; now bayonets fulfilled this role and more because they added a firepower the pike could not provide. It had always been difficult to maintain the necessary ratio between pikemen and musketeers once a battle began; the bayonet effectively solved this problem. The deployment of the flintlock musket, in which powder was ignited by a spark caused by the striking of flint on steel, produced a lighter, more reliable weapon that, with the aid of cartridges, doubled the rate of fire. Both of these changes swept through the armies of Europe: Prussia adopted the bayonet in 1689, one year after Louvois had instructed Vauban to produce a prototype; Denmark followed suit in 1690. At the battle of Fleurus that year some Imperial units attracted universal attention when they repulsed repeated French cavalry charges though unsupported by pikemen and armed only with muskets. The French abandoned the pike in 1703, the British the next year. The Austrians adopted the flintlock in 1689, the Swedes in 1696, the Danes and the British by 1700.
From the late seventeenth century onward, especially in Prussia, Holland, and Britain, a new kind of regime was supplanting the king-centered states of which Louis XIV's was exemplar. The primacy of infantry fire made a well-trained and well-disciplined force more valuable than ever but, constitutionally, the state that fielded that force had to justify doing so on some basis more substantial than the vanity of the monarch. During this period, successful military powers were changing the compact that legitimated the state, and this, in the field relationship I have been describing, led to strategic innovation. The crises of legitimacy that brought William of Orange to the British throne and crushed the reign of James II epitomized this change, but it was going on in many states.
The new order was distinguished by a view of the State as a solar system rather than the reflection of the personality of a sun king. Hume expresses this point of view in his 1753 essay “Commerce,” in which he takes up Machiavelli's subject, the State, and transforms it into a marveling disquisition on the state as an invisible mechanism, enabling growth and the creation of wealth. No less a champion of this idea, though it may be shocking to say so, was Frederick the Great, who ceaselessly portrayed himself as the servant of the State, frugally husbanding its material assets and prudently attending to the increase of its efficiencies. This era, the Age of the ancien regime—before the dawning of an acute national self-consciousness but after the mannered rejection of the hubristic pyrotechnics of the kingly state—was characterized by the adroit use of strategic and tactical positioning.
Its military aspect was in perfect harmony with the constitutional modesty of its regimes. If, at other turns of the wheel, a strategic innovation or constitutional cataclysm signaled the new era, the introduction of the territorial state came with the exhaustion that followed the end of the vast European civil conflict, the Thirty Years' War. We can almost date its inception to the beheading of the monarch of the English kingly state, Charles I, in 1649.
The territorial state was characterized by a shift from the monarch-as-embodiment of sovereignty to the monarch as minister of sovereignty. A striking example of this occurred in the well-known “Diplomatic Revolu-tion” of 1748, in which reasons that related entirely to perceptions of the national interests concerned were allowed to predominate over the dynastic traditions of the Bourbon and Habsburg houses, and as a consequence, France and Austria found themselves allies for the first time.
In the period after Utrecht a number of decisive changes occurred, in terms of army size, weapons, and most especially the administration of the armed forces, their training and control by the State. Thus it can be argued that the constitutional imperatives of the territorial state were partly the cause, and not merely the consequences of these changes.81 The period from 1660 to 1760 saw a significant increase in the number of men permanently under arms in Europe, an increase that is more dramatic once we recall that for most of this period European population figures were static. Greater administrative capability was felt in the field: for example, the Austrian conquest of Hungary from 1683 relied on the creation of a series of magazines. Large-scale mapping took place as surveys grew in importance, an obvious consequence of the territorial state's preoccupations.
But not every state was able to reconstruct itself along such constitutional lines; in Poland, for example, the nobility was unable to reconcile itself to fidelity to the State as an entity of which the monarch was the first steward, and it simply destroyed the state structure that might otherwise have successfully resisted partition. Everywhere that control of the troops—everywhere the state monopoly on legitimate violence—fell from the hands of the State, the advantages of this military revolution eluded the country, as happened in Sweden and Hungary. Yet even the rigid stability of the successful territorial states would soon be shaken by a new, more dynamic constitutional form and its accompanying strategic whirlwind.