SOCIETIES

The handiest method for understanding East European societies in the eighteenth century is to explain the different classes into which they were divided, to grasp the profound gulf between urban and agrarian life, and to appreciate the importance of religious identities.

The last of these, religion, deserves mention first, as a factor which had shaped societies in the region since antiquity. The Roman Empire officially adopted Christianity in the fourth century, but even before that the Emperor Constantine moved the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium, henceforth Constantinople, at the junction of Europe and Asia. The move to what was in the main a Greek-speaking, Hellenised environment meant, with time, an increasing divergence between an eastern, Greek-based Church and the Latin-based Church of Rome, a gap widened by the barbarian invasions of Europe and the breakdown of imperial control in the west. By 1071 the differences in liturgy, ritual and certain aspects of religious belief itself were such that a formal schism occurred between adherents of the older Greek rite and the Roman papacy.

This split between Roman Catholicism, as we know it today, in the west, and Greek Orthodoxy, in the east, has shaped Eastern Europe ever since. For the pagan peoples who arrived in Eastern Europe over the centuries and were converted to Christianity found themselves the objects of a competition between east and west to retain their religious loyalty. Broadly speaking, those converted from the direction of Rome stayed with the Latin rite, while those who owed their conversion to Byzantium followed Orthodoxy. This religious, and hence cultural, fault line runs in an arc from the Adriatic to the Russo-Finnish border to this day. Croats, some Albanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Baltic peoples all belonged, at least initially, to the Catholic world and, when they developed a literary language, used a Latin-based alphabet. The peoples of the Balkans, together with the Slav inhabitants of Russia, were Greek Orthodox in religion and eventually developed literary languages using a Cyrillic or Greek-based alphabet.

The Ottoman invasions introduced a new religion, I slam. This was the faith of the new Ottoman overlords, but its establishment did not herald the forcible conversion of the Christian population. On the contrary, the Ottomans by medieval standards were remarkably tolerant of other religions. As long as non-Muslims acknowledged the sultan's suzerainty, they were free to practise their faith and even allowed autonomy in running their own churches. This was convenient for the Ottoman government, which preferred to tax the non-Muslim rather than the Muslim population. Despite the material advantages of conversion, the majority of Ottoman Christians remained true to their faith. In parts of Bosnia, and in the Albanian-inhabited parts of the Empire, substantial numbers converted to Islam, a process which has left Muslim populations in these areas to the present. In addition, the Jewish population of the Ottoman Empire gradually rose as Jews were lured there by the promise of a religious toleration not extended to them in Christian Europe.

I n the sixteenth century Protestantism further divided the Christians of Eastern Europe. The teachings of Martin Luther proved popular among the German population of Prussia, the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Baltic coast, as well as in Bohemia and Moravia; as an essentially German import, however, Lutheranism made rather fewer converts among Poles, Czechs and Hungarians. Calvinism, by contrast, was initially quite successful among the Polish and Hungarian gentry, largely for political and social

Reasons: it was not only associated with freedom of conscience and hence political liberty but also with a sense of being the elect or chosen by God. By the early eighteenth century, however, the Catholic 'counter-reformation' had won back many in both countries, although a substantial minority of the Hungarian gentry, at least, stayed Calvinist. The religious situation was more complicated in the Bohemian lands, where the proto-Protestant heresy of Hussitism had already taken root before the Reformation; Czech Protestants then suffered persecution and exile at the hands of the Catholic Habsburgs in the seventeenth century, and by 1740 very few of them were left.

Apart from Eastern Europe's scattered Jewish communities, the last major religious grouping was the Uniate or Greek Catholic Church. This consisted of Orthodox communities who acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope in Rome, in return for the right to practise the traditional rites and customs of Orthodoxy, such as priestly marriage. There were three main 'Unions': the Union of Brest in 1596 with the Ukrainians of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth; the Union of Ungvar in 1646, among the Ruthene or Ukrainian-speaking population of north-eastern Hungary; and the Union of Gyulafehervar, concluded with the Orthodox Romanians of Transylvania, also part of Habsburg Hungary by that point, in 1698. Uniates, it was reasoned in these countries, would thus be less likely succumb to the blandishments of Orthodox Russia, an increasingly threatening neighbour. At the outset of the eighteenth century Uniates made up 33 per cent of the population of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth alone, and were the dominant confession among Hungarian Ruthenes and Romanians.

No attempt to explain the class structure of Eastern Europe in this period would make sense without an appreciation of the overwhelmingly agrarian nature of the societies in question. Towns in this environment were small islands in a sea of countryside. This was not unique to Eastern Europe: across the continent it was rare for any urban centre to exceed a population of 100,000, and London and Paris, with 675,000 and 500,000 in 1750, were giants.1 It was rather the pattern and speed of urbanisation, and the relatively greater number of towns in Western and especially north-western Europe, which made Eastern Europe seem backward by comparison. In England by 1750 17 per cent of the population was urban.2 In the Habsburg Monarchy of 1700, by contrast, only 2 per cent of the population was urban.3 Vienna, capital of the Habsburgs, had a mere 120,000 inhabitants in 1750; Prague, 50,000; Warsaw, 30,000.4 The exceptional size of Constantinople, with over 400,000 people in the mid-century, was due to its long history as an imperial capital, at the crossroads of two continents.5

Populations in Eastern Europe continued to increase throughout the eighteenth century, and this was reflected in the growth of some towns: Vienna by the 1790s had 200,000 inhabitants, Warsaw had 150,000 and St Petersburg, founded in 1703, had 191,000.6 But the majority of towns remained stagnant economically, for reasons which were largely negative. Historians are still debating why modern, industrialised society should have emerged first in north-western Europe, but among the long-term causes were the breakdown of feudalism, the intensification of commerce, the accumulation of capital and 'the uniquely flexible parliamentary system that allowed capitalism to flourish'.7 Towns were at the heart of this politico-economic culture and 'the combination of strong towns and the absence of strong imperial and Church rule' released powerful forces in society.8 Eastern Europe lacked these advantages. Not only were its political institutions authoritarian but its social structures were both a consequence and a reinforcement of the existing political order.

At the top of the social tree, in the Christian societies of Eastern Europe, was the magnate class, or titled aristocracy, the feudal origins of whose status lay in the lands granted to them by the monarch in exchange for military or bureaucratic service. Few in numbers, magnates were distinguished from the rest of the landowning or noble class by the sheer size of their estates, their fabulous wealth and their near monopoly, at least in the Habsburg Monarchy, of the high offices of state, at court, in government and in the military, as well as in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. This was a class most visible in the Austrian and Bohemian crownlands, the Kingdom of Hungary (including Croatia) and the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this context, it is worth noting that monarchs themselves were also great landowners, as were the Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church.

An entirely different class was the lesser nobility or gentry class. This distinction is important for two reasons. Firstly, in Poland—Lithuania, and in Hungary, the gentry were numerous: the Polish szlachta, as the nobility was called, amounted to some 10 per cent of the population, while in Hungary the nobility generally (including magnates) made up about 5 per cent.9 Many Polish and Hungarian nobles were wealthy, but many were not; indeed, at the lower end of the scale the 'sandalled nobility', so called because they could not afford leather boots, lived a life little different from that of peasants. Rich or poor, however, the nobility in Poland—Lithuania was the only class entitled to vote and to sit in the Sejm (the Polish parliament), while in the Hungarian Diet, nobles had an overwhelming predominance over townspeople; when Poles or Hungarians referred to the 'nation' in the eighteenth century, they meant this gentry class, not all Poles or Hungarians. And the Polish szlachta exercised real power, as we shall see, while containing the turbulent Hungarian gentry was a recurrent headache for the Habsburgs.

The second reason for singling out the lesser nobility is that, in Russia most of all, but also in Prussia, nobles functioned as an arm of the state. This service nobility held their estates and their privileges explicitly on condition that they rendered service to the monarch, whether in the bureaucracy or in the military. In autocratic Russia, this was a method by which successive tsars tightened their control over the potentially rebellious landowning class. A partial exception to this pattern, in the recently acquired Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire, was represented by the German landowners there, who retained ancient privileges of local assembly and self-regulation. In Prussia, the Junkers, as the landowning class was called, had been more recently subordinated to the monarch's supervision in this fashion, but they were fast acquiring a reputation for blind loyalty and pride in military service.

Town dwellers, in this top-heavy social order, played a much less significant role than their counterparts in Western Europe. The economic stagnation alluded to above was part consequence and part cause of the fact that towns in Eastern Europe did not enjoy an independent existence. In the lands that came to make up the Habsburg Monarchy, as in Prussia and the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, some towns emerged in the Middle Ages as royal boroughs, obliged to submit to the authority of the crown in return for protection in an uncertain world. This subordinate status, as a source of taxable revenue for the monarch rather than an urban power, was still a characteristic of the royal towns of these kingdoms. In addition, in all these states there were private as opposed to royal towns, built on the estates of noble landowners or the Church, and even less encouraged to develop a separate corporate identity. In the Russian Empire, again with the partial exception of the Baltic provinces, towns were if anything even less regarded, having virtually no municipal autonomy. In the rest of Eastern Europe, towns might be represented as a separate estate in provincial or national diets, but as one historian has said in relation to the Habsburg Monarchy, they 'never developed a legal or constitutional base to match their commercial advance from the later Middle Ages'.10 Only the city states of Venice and Ragusa, by definition merchant oligarchies, stood out against this rule.

At the bottom of the heap suffered the most numerous but the most powerless class of all, the peasantry. Here one must distinguish between those peasants who at the start of the eighteenth century were still free and the vast majority who were decidedly unfree. On the whole, peasants whose economy revolved around transhumance, or the seasonal herding of livestock, such as the Alpine farmers of the Austrian crownlands, retained their personal freedom, however hard their lives. But for tillers of the soil the picture was far grimmer. In contrast to the trend in Western Europe, peasants in this category from the fifteenth century had been increasingly subjected to what has been called the 'second serfdom'. Originally tenant farmers or even freeholders, dependent on noble or royal protection but otherwise free, peasants were the victims of a complex series of economic changes which impelled nobles, or monarchs, to impose even more tax or labour obligations on peasants, while at the same time restricting their personal freedom of movement. In Russia this process of enserfment, whereby the service nobility were granted absolute ownership of their peasants by the autocracy in return for service, was complete by 1649. In Poland—Lithuania, Prussia and the Habsburg Monarchy, economic downturn, often due to war, depopulation and the drying up of monetary rents, drove landowners to create trade monopolies, take over common land, insist on payment of rents in kind and above all demand unpaid labour services and bind the peasant legally to the land. Often landowners were the sole judicial authority over peasants.11

Here, in the condition of the peasantry, was one of the central reasons for the continuing backwardness of Eastern Europe throughout the eighteenth century. Serfdom was an inherently inefficient system, with the added disadvantage that the peasants periodically erupted in savage revolt. Rulers and nobles alike recognised its inefficiency, and in some cases its injustice, but were locked into it by economic interest and fear of the consequences of relaxation.

In contrast to Christian Eastern Europe, the social order in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire was much simpler. In a society where the ultimate authority was God, ruling through the absolute intermediary of the sultan and his vassals, the fundamental distinction was between the Ottoman Muslim ruling class and all non-Muslims, whether Christian or Jewish, Catholic or Orthodox. The gradation of the Ottoman class will be dealt with below, as will the complexities of Christian societies. Here it is enough to say that the sultan's provincial administrators, his army and the landowning class throughout the Balkans, with the exception of the Romanian principalities, were Muslim. By the eighteenth century some officials of the imperial bureaucracy, notably that part of it which handled diplomacy, were by tradition Greeks, among whom education and knowledge of foreign languages was not uncommon. Greeks also functioned throughout European Turkey not only as Orthodox clergy but also as a ubiquitous merchant class. For the Christian population as a whole, however, second-class status was the norm. The majority of non-Muslim inhabitants of the Ottoman Balkans lived the life of peasants, free to practise their religion but heavily taxed and subject to a whole range of galling restrictions.