The seventeenth century was a tempestuous and turbulent age, filled with ruinous wars and bloody revolutions. In the early 1640s some English preachers and political pamphleteers spoke of a “universal shaking” that affected states from Catalonia to England and from Germany to Portugal. They observed that the struggles then waged “pierced many kingdoms,” and they included among them Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland.
Profound changes were occurring almost everywhere and in many spheres of life. Historians examining new departures in warfare refer to a military revolution. Those who study sciences, as symbolized in the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton, speak of a scientific revolution. Indeed, the term has a wide application. Progress and regress, magnificence and misery seemed equally characteristic of this era. The resplendent baroque style in literature, arts, and architecture, affecting the general outlook and the way of life, appeared as an outward manifestation of the triumphant Counter-Reformation, rising absolutism, and aristocratic mentality. And yet all this grandeur seemed also designed to dispel doubts. Historians viewing the baroque in the Habsburg lands have characterized it as a “blend of insecurity and confidence” and felt that it reflected a “crisis of sensibility.”
Turning to East Central Europe, the leitmotif of impediment and even of threatening doom ran through the writings of contemporaries. Hungarian politicians, preachers, writers gave way to despair when speaking of wars, social ills, economic dislocations. In Poland the optimism of the sixteenth century seemed on the wane. Moralists would see a sign of God’s wrath in the Cossack uprising of 1648 and translate the royal initials ICR (loannes Casimirus Rex) into “initium calamitatis regni” (the beginnings of calamities in the kingdom). The great Czech thinker and pedagogue Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius) spoke in similar terms about the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War. His famous allegorical book, The Labyrinth of the World, portrayed a pilgrim’s search for order and harmony in a world full of frightening contradictions. The work may
Be symbolic of the wider preoccupations with conflict and disintegration in culture of the time.
Recent historiography has advanced the concept of a general crisis of the seventeenth century, which is formulated in spiritual, ideological-political, and socio-economic terms. When exactly did this crisis occur, and what were its origins, nature, and outcome? Did it affect all of Europe? The British historian E. J.Hobsbawm, noting the economic and demographic boom being succeeded by stagnation and even recession, used the term to cover the entire 1560-1660 period. Wealth, he argued, had grown too fast and was used unproductively by the upper classes. The crisis was symptomatic of the break between feudal society and the capitalist forms of production, and it marked a transition from feudalism to capitalism. Several historians probing into economic stagnation, demographic decline, and recessions added findings about climatic conditions and other factors. Hobsbawm’s concept was tested with regard to political developments in England, Spain, and France (by H. R.Trevor-Roper, J. E.Elliott, and R. Mousnier) and produced varying definitions of the crisis: a conflict between the “court” and “country,” between the center and the regions, between absolutism and republicanism. The tentative conclusion was that one could indeed speak of an economic and political crisis in western and central Europe that manifested itself in different ways, the differences resulting from divergent social and political structures, religious institutions, and beliefs.
The Czechoslovak historian J. Polisensky sought to bring greater precision to the notion of crisis. He defined it as
The culmination of ever-deepening internal conflicts within the infrastructure of a given society, which leads to a sudden collapse of existing economic, social, cultural and political relationships, and whose consequences will be either regression—regional or general—or on the other hand a powerful step forward in the development of that society.10
This definition allowed Polisensky to include the Netherlands (then in its Golden Age) and England, for which the crisis meant advancement and not decline.
The question of exact origins and of the length of the crisis troubled the American historian T. Rabb. By invoking the original use of the term in medicine, he stressed the importance of the “rising temperature” stage and of the climax which marked the discontinuity of the process. He placed the relaxation of tensions in the 1660s. Incidentally, this decade was meaningful for Poland, to some extent for Bohemia, least for Hungary. Recognizing the multifaceted nature of the seventeenth-century crisis, its economic, social, ideological, and other dimensions, Rabb concluded that if a single label was appropriate to cover such disparate manifestations it would be “a crisis of authority.” Here, the basic questions would be, what constituted authentic authority? Where was it located? Where did it come from? The issues involved were: the growth of a centralized government, bureaucracy, and taxes, all threatening the freedom or autonomy of an estate or a province. The contest between Castille and the provinces in Spain, between the Crown and the nobles (and peasants crushed by taxes) in France, and the Crown and Parliament in England provided illustrations of these processes. The outcome according to Rabb was a domination of politics, society, and culture by an aristocracy associated with the central government and its institutions, and the establishment of structures recognizable as the modern state.
An attempt to test in depth the applicability of these concepts to East Central Europe would transcend the nature and the size of this book. We may note, however, a tentative model constructed by O. Subtelny on the basis of five crises in the region in the early eighteenth century. Without going any further into methodological issues, one can state that Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary were all affected in the course of the seventeenth century by a major upheaval for which the term crisis is most appropriate. In the Czech and Polish cases the results were far graver than anywhere else in the West. They marked a turning point in their history and threatened the very survival of the Czech nation and of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Chronologically, the crisis affected Bohemia in the first half of the seventeenth century, and while permanent scars remained, economic recovery was visible in the last decades. In Poland’s case the relatively peaceful and prosperous 1620s and 1630s were followed by the mid-century upheaval. As the country began slowly to recuperate the process was interrupted by wars in the early eighteenth century. The crisis in Hungary, in view of its threefold division, did not affect most of the country until fairly late. Transylvania, for instance, experienced a short-lived Golden Age in the early part of the century and collapsed after the mid-1650s. Wars and uprisings were an almost permanent occurrence in the Commonwealth and in the lands of St Stephen.
Let us now look briefly at the demographic, economic, and social components in East Central Europe that bore some resemblance to those in the West, but retained their own specific characteristics. While a certain demographic stagnation or even decline was visible in many European countries the situation was nowhere as catastrophic as in East Central Europe. Historians speak of a general slowing down of European economy, but the regression in Poland was on a totally different scale. Owing to wars fought on their territory and plagues which accompanied or followed them, the population of Bohemia and Poland declined by as much as a third or even a half, depending on the various estimates. Similar figures were given for Hungary, reunited at the end of the century, although they are now being questioned as too high. At any rate this demographic disaster has been seen as decisively impeding the productive forces at a time when they were most needed. However, there are also historians who stress the growth of manorial economy and serfdom as making an economic recovery impossible. The latter view may now be less popular.
The general picture was complex and there were many factors that adversely affected the economy, in particular, the decline of the urban sector. The towns that suffered greatly during wars were also affected by a contraction of the domestic market, a result of the growth of self-sufficient magnate estates as well as of noble encroachments on municipal structures. Private towns without guilds and linked with the rich hinterland offered serious competition to free or royal towns. In Bohemia and Hungary the burghers endured increased fiscal burdens. The nature of East-West trade (agrarian products for finished goods) was in the long run harming towns, even though Silesian and Lusatian cloth and linen products, cheaper than those from England, were gaining. The wars of the 1650s destroyed the dynamic network of international fairs; other factors, such as the competition from Russian grain and Swedish copper, damaged the existing trade patterns. With falling grain prices in the West and Polish productivity registering no increase, the Baltic exports peaked in 1618 and then declined. Hungarian cattle exports suffered a similar fate, the 1620s seeing the end of the previous boom.
By mid-century East Central Europe lost its earlier significance in the international division of labor. The Polish-Dutch trade began to be replaced by British-Muscovite (and Swedish), in which hemp and tar occupied an important place. Intensive Polish-Lithuanian-Muscovite commerce, however (manufactured goods for furs and forest products) continued, with Riga playing a role comparable to Gdansk. The Hungarian cattle trade in turn was suffering in competition with the Danish, and Hungarian copper likewise with Swedish metals. When cattle prices went up again in the 1660s the beneficiaries were mainly foreign (that is, South German) merchants. Hungarians, except for such magnates as the Zrinyis and Batthyanys, could no longer compete.
As economic conditions deteriorated, the divergence between the rich and the poor grew. Many peasants fell into the latter category, although the highly diversified character of this social class makes sweeping generalization about its economic position and legal status hazardous. While serfdom, accompanied by a growing manorial economy, was spreading during the century over Bohemia and Royal Hungary, there were borderline strata, such as the earlier-mentioned haiduks in Hungary or the Cossaks (see p. 100) in the Commonwealth. Still, two facts need stressing. One, that serfdom was becoming harsher; two, that it was not confined to East Central Europe. King John Casimir of Poland vowed in 1656 to free the people of his kingdom “from unjust burdens and oppression.”11 A contemporary Hungarian chronicle contained the statement that it was against God that “one nation should thus cripple other people of the same nation.”12
Were peasants still viewed as belonging to the same nation as the nobles and burghers? Komensky defined the nation as a mass of people descended from a common tribe, inhabiting the same place (which they call the country), using their own tongue, linked together by special ties, and striving for common good; he saw himself as being of the Moravian nation and Czech language. But this did not necessarily mean that he spoke of the nation in terms of a conscious political-social unit. Increasingly the term political nation excluded the peasantry, even though exceptions existed. A contemporary Polish political writer, A. A. Olizarowski, opined that his country had no real democracy because the sejm deputies represented only szlachta and not the people. But his was not the typical view.
The lot of the peasantry was getting worse in many parts of Europe, which makes some historians speak of “refeudalization.” In France, Cardinal Richelieu compared peasants to mules “which being accustomed to carry burdens, are harmed more by a long rest than by working.” A contemporary Neapolitan economist saw the peasant as “a beast of burden.”13 What may have been different in East Central Europe was that, as mentioned earlier, the royal government had ceased to interfere in landlord-peasant relations. Also, the passing of the boom worsened the economic status of the peasants; it killed their initiative while making their compulsory work highly inefficient.
On the other end of the social scale the richest part of the nobility was increasingly distancing itself from the rest of the gentry. Wealth was the principal criterion, wealth lavishly displayed and used to fortify one’s political and social position. This top group, rejuvenated by some new blood (but strikingly new and on a large scale only from the 1620s on in Bohemia), took the form of magnate oligarchy in Poland-Lithuania, and of a titled aristocracy in Bohemia and Hungary. As for the poor nobles, the decline of the Hungarian institution of retainers (familiares) deprived the gentry of additional incomes. In Poland the szlachta became increasingly dependent on the magnates, especially in Lithuania and the Ukraine, although the lords were careful to pay lip-service to the principle of noble egalitarianism. As for Bohemia, the great upheaval of 1618-48 resulted in a virtual collapse of the gentry (that is, the knights) as an independent political factor.
World History
