Only such draconian measures enabled the Dutch government, at war for most of the seventeenth century, to maintain its credit intact while paying its army and navy regularly; other governments did not even try. Calculations in 1633 by the Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, responsible for funding all Protestant troops fighting in Germany, show the magnitude of the problem. On paper, each of the 78,000 soldiers fielded by the allies earned an average of 125 thalers per year, or almost 10 million thalers for the entire army. Oxenstierna knew that this was far beyond his means. If, however, he provided each soldier with full wages for just one month, a small cash advance for the other 11, and one pound of bread every day, then the total annual cost fell to 5.5 million thalers, or 55 per cent of the original cost.25 But what of the other 45 per cent? Oxenstierna, like other warlords of his day, expected two fiscal expedients to make up the shortfall. He expected his officers to use their own credit to supply their troops with essential items. It was no secret that his principal adversary, Albrecht von Wallenstein, had borrowed five million thalers (five times his personal fortune) between 1621 and 1628 to sustain his army until a victorious peace would bring reimbursement and rewards; and that most of the 1,500 or so colonels who raised regiments to fight in the Thirty Years War did much the same (albeit on a lesser scale). It was also no secret that Wallenstein had introduced a ‘contributions system’ that forced civilians living near his army to provide it with food and other necessities. His quartermasters worked out with the local magistrates of each community the precise quantities and the exact timetable for delivery, threatening that any shortfall or default would trigger the arrival of a detachment of soldiers who would burn everything to the ground. Oxenstierna expected his quartermasters to do the same.
Although it is hard to assess the precise financial impact of war on civilians, the records of the principality of Hohenlohe in southwest Germany show that in each year from 1628, when hostile soldiers first arrived, until the demobilization of 1650, its inhabitants paid at least double what they had done before the war, and that in some years they paid three, four or even five times as much. Yet even this did not suffice to ‘feed Mars’. Just before his regiment was demobilized, one officer complained that he did not ‘earn enough daily bread to support my wife and poor children’.26
Troops elsewhere seldom fared much better. In China, a Manchu Bannerman named Dzengšeo recorded in his campaign diary for 1680 that on some days he did not eat, but instead ‘wept with sorrow under the blanket'; while on one desperate occasion he ‘even sold a woman’ whom he had received as booty at the capture of a town, to buy horses and food. Usually, however, like early modern soldiers elsewhere, when he was hungry Dzengšeo exploited the civilian population: when ‘the food supplies for the whole army had been used up’, he sent his servants to ‘search for food in every single village’ and to take what they found by force.27
Doing God's Work
Rulers in the mid-seventeenth century could not plead ignorance about the economic hardships that their wars inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike. In China, officials deluged their superiors with memoranda that pointed out (to quote one missive), ‘The present dynasty commands the largest area of land in history. But land without people is worthless, and people without wealth are valueless; and in the present dynasty we find that the poverty afflicting the whole population is unprecedented in the history of China.’ Likewise, in 1640, just before the outbreak of revolt in Catalonia and Portugal, a tract published in Madrid perceptively warned Philip IV of the dangers inherent in overtaxing his subjects:
The horror of civil unrest is more to be feared than the weapons of the enemy. The common people will prefer rebellion in order to avoid destitution. Hardship causes desperation; constant rigour incites hatred … Subjects are more obedient when they are less taxed. A prince who in time of war avoids spending on himself will make the word ‘tax’ acceptable, and avoid being called ‘ambitious’.
If the king read this, he paid no attention – just as, 12 years later, he ignored the protests of his spiritual advisor, Sor María de Ágreda, ‘that, for the love of God, Your Majesty should introduce as few innovations as possible and avoid oppressing the poor, lest their misery leads them to revolt’. Instead Philip loftily assured Sor María that, although ‘everything possible will be done for the relief of my poor vassals’, nevertheless ‘the requirements of the army pull in the opposite direction’. Spain's wars therefore continued.28
Why, exactly, did so many seventeenth-century rulers raise taxes to satisfy ‘the requirements of the army’ instead of taking steps to ‘avoid oppressing the poor'? One reason lay in the lack of any restraint. In China, the emperor claimed to possess the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ for all his actions, and his subjects revered him as Tianzi, ‘Son of Heaven’, possessing supreme power in all things:
He judged whether a given offender should be punished severely or not at all. He judged the qualifications of candidates for high offices and for the civil service examination degrees. He validated or refused requests to do anything non-routine, such as whether to issue amnesties or disaster relief, or modify a ritual or bureaucratic procedure, or mount an attack against [foreign enemies] … The outside world could not function without imperial decisions. No one else in the realm was empowered to make authoritative rulings.29
Every aspect of the emperor's official life proclaimed his unique status and untrammelled authority. At audiences he alone faced south and everyone else faced north; no one else could wear clothes designed like his; he alone used red ink (everyone else used black); the character for ‘emperor’ received a line of text to itself; no one else could use the character for each emperor's given name or the word he used for ‘I’ (chen).
Other Asian rulers also claimed to embody divine power on earth, which conferred the right to make war at will. Korean kings held that they both embodied the state and acted with divine sanction to bring the purposes of heaven and of human beings into harmony. In the words of a scholar and minister in 1660: ‘The ruler regulates things in place of Heaven, and causes them to find their appointed places’.30 Political rhetoric in South Asia also presented rulers as endowed with superhuman powers. Successful Buddhist monarchs claimed to be chakhravarthi (‘world conquerors’), just as India's Mughal emperors projected themselves as Sahibkiran (the ‘Shadow of God on Earth’). India's Hindu rulers claimed to be not only the incarnation of one of the gods but also sexual heroes: court poems and dance-dramas, the preferred media for political propaganda in southern India, portrayed the capital as a city of erotic delights and war as a sexual adventure. None of these political visions left room for restraint.31
Indonesian rulers likewise acknowledged no limits to their power. Thus in the 1640s the sultan of Mataram assembled 2,000 of his senior clerics shortly after his accession, accused them of disloyalty, and executed them all. A generation earlier, according to a foreign visitor, whenever Sultan Iskandar Muda of Acheh heard about an attractive ‘woman, either in city or country, he sends for her to the court. Although she be married, she must come and if her husband seem unwilling or loath to part from her, then [the Sultan] presently commands her husband's prick to be cut off.’ Iskandar Muda did not stop at ‘pricks’: he also (according to another foreign visitor) ‘exterminated almost all the ancient nobility’ in the course of his reign. Therefore by 1629 no one had the authority to restrain the sultan when he decided to lead the entire military and naval strength of his state to attack Portuguese Melaka, or to remind him of the need to fortify his own siege works – with the result that a Portuguese relief army destroyed almost all his army, his fleet and his guns.32
Most Muslim political writers extolled a powerful monarchy as both the only alternative to anarchy and the best way to advance the cause of Islam, often citing a paradigm known as the ‘Circle of Justice’:
There can be no government without the military;
There can be no military without wealth;
The su
bjects produce the wealth;
Justice preserves the subjects’ loyalty to the sovereign;
Justice requires harmony in the world;
The world is a garden, its walls are the state;
The Sharî'a [Islamic law] orders the state;
There is no support for the Sharî'a except through government.33
A treatise of advice presented to Ottoman Sultan Murad IV in 1630 by a learned palace official, Mustafa Koçi Beg, ascribed the problems facing the empire to the failure of the sultan to use his divinely sanctioned arbitrary power to overcome anarchy and advance the cause of Islam. To implement this advice, Murad addressed a stream of requests to the Chief Mufti (Şeyhulislam) of Istanbul to certify (usually in the form of a written opinion, or fatwā) that a proposed action or edict conformed to the Sharî'a.34 In 1638 Murad even took the Şeyhulislam with him on campaign, so that he could ensure that his military as well as his civilian decisions conformed to God's will. Occasionally the Şeyhulislam might defy a sultan – in 1648 one even issued a fatwā to legitimize the sultan's deposition (see chapter 7 below) – but normally the shoe was on the other foot: sultans deposed (and occasionally executed) a Şeyhulislam who challenged their authority.
The tsars of Russia likewise claimed divine status and encouraged writers and artists to portray them as the secular version of the transfigured Christ, as paragons of Old Testament kingship (especially David), and as the ‘Image and likeness of God’, while their subjects became the Chosen People, their country the Earthly Paradise, and their capital the New Jerusalem. The state apartments in the Kremlin sported paintings that interspersed the victories of Moses, Joshua and Gideon with the leading events of Russian history and portraits of the biblical ‘tsars’ with the princes of Russia. The main Moscow churches displayed icons in which an archangel and the heavenly host led the tsar and his troops on campaigns of conquest. When the tsar ‘wishes to wage war or make peace with any state,’ an experienced minister explained in the 1660s, ‘or when he wishes to decide any other great or small affairs, it is in his power to do what he wishes’. As with the rhetoric of absolutism in Asia, the ‘Paradise myth’ fostered by the tsars left no room for discussion or dissent, let alone for loyal opposition.35
The equivalent of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, the ‘World Conqueror’, the ‘Shadow of God on Earth’ and the ‘Paradise Myth’ for rulers in Latin Christendom was the ‘Divine Right of Kings’. Many early modern European rulers claimed both that their power was absolute (a term derived from Roman law to describe the authority of one ‘absolved’ from obeying the laws he had made) and that their actions enjoyed divine approval. In 1609 James I of Great Britain boasted that ‘The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth, for kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called god.’ Therefore, James continued, ‘They exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth’ because ‘they make and unmake their subjects, they have power of raising and casting down, of life and of death, judges over all their subjects and in all causes and yet accountable to none but God only.’ A generation later, the funeral oration for a German prince echoed the same sentiments. ‘Just as the sun in the heavens above is made and fashioned by God, and is truly a wondrous work of the Almighty, so are kings, princes and lords placed and ordered by God in the secular estate. For that reason, they may themselves be called gods.’ In France, a treatise written by a royal minister likewise argued that the king's commands must always prevail:
One can ask the question, if a man's conscience tells him that what the king has ordered him to do is unjust, is he bound to obey? To this I respond that, if there are considerations for and against, he must follow the king's will, not his own … One must pay attention to circumstance, because if [a measure] relates to a pressing necessity for the public good … Necessity knows no law.
Later still, ex-queen Christina of Sweden wrote that ‘Only monarchs must rule: everyone else must obey and execute their orders.’ Specifically, she continued, a royal decision to wage war – even a war of aggression – obliged everyone to obey because sovereigns could discern the true interests of the state better than their subjects.36
Most European monarchs received an education crafted explicitly to reinforce these attitudes. They studied history (national, Classical and occasionally foreign) primarily ‘to examine how each prince had acted well or badly’ and to learn how to ‘ascertain what our subjects are hiding from us’. Thus on hearing that France had signed the peace of Westphalia in 1648, Louis XIV's preceptor seized the chance to give his 10-year-old charge a crash course in German history, and especially on the history of the Rhineland (which Louis would later spend vast resources trying to annex); while during the Fronde revolt of 1648–53, Louis read chronicles that described how his predecessors had overcome rebellious nobles.37 Princely instruction in language and geography was also utilitarian. Louis XIV, his son and his grandsons all studied Spanish history and literature, and learned to speak Spanish, in case they might one day succeed their ailing cousin, Carlos II. They likewise learned the principles of architecture and mathematics explicitly so that they would better understand how to attack and defend fortified towns; and Louis XIV commissioned a set of huge relief models of frontier fortresses so that his son could follow the progress of his wars until he was old enough to participate in person.38
Above all, seventeenth-century rulers believed that ‘religion is the most important element in what must be taught to a young prince destined to wear the crown’ – and this meant not only private but also public devotions. Throughout the Fronde, the official Gazette de France recorded not only the zeal and humility of the young Louis XIV during sermons but also his participation in pilgrimages; while between 1654 and 1663 it chronicled the 42 occasions on which he ‘touched’ (and, according to popular tradition, cured) subjects afflicted with scrofula – some 20,000 individuals in all – perhaps the most striking public demonstration of divinely delegated power in the early modern world.39 French monarchs proudly styled themselves ‘The Most Christian King’, while their Spanish counterparts used the style ‘The Catholic King’ and English monarchs were Supreme Governors of the Established Church. Catholic and Protestant rulers alike appointed the prelates of their state (the former with papal concurrence) and expected their subjects to follow their theological opinions – or, in the formula that prevailed in the Holy Roman Empire, Cuius regio, eius religio: ‘Rulers determine religion’.
The overlap of politics and religion influenced foreign as well as domestic policy. In the words of the governor of Louis XIV's heir, Christian princes must not only ‘love and serve God’ but also ‘make others honour Him, avenge His injuries, and take up His causes'; and in 1672 the Dauphin, aged 11, composed a campaign history that justified his father's invasion of Holland because it advanced the Catholic faith.40 Religion often served as a pretext for war in Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. Thus when in 1619 the Bohemians offered their crown to the German Protestant leader, Frederick of the Palatinate, he accepted because, he claimed, it ‘is a divine calling that I must not disobey. My only end is to serve God and his Church’. A similar confidence motivated Frederick's brother-in-law Charles I, who steadfastly refused to negotiate with his rebellious subjects because, as his wife Henrietta Maria put it in a confidential letter of 1642, on the eve of the English Civil War, ‘This is no longer mere play. You must declare yourself; you have testified your gentleness enough, you must show your justice. Go on boldly: God will assist you.’ The king complied. A few months later he informed a close colleague that ‘no extremity or misfortune shall make me yield, for I will either be a glorious king or a patient martyr’. Even after his catastrophic military defeat at Naseby in 1645 Charles refused a suggestion that he should seek the best terms possible from his adversaries because
If I had any other quarrel but the defence of my religion, crown, and friends, you had full reaso
n for your advice; for I confess that, speaking either as a mere soldier or statesman, I must say that there is no probability but of my ruin. Yet as a Christian, I must tell you that God will not suffer rebels and traitors to prosper, or this cause to be overthrown … A composition with them at this time is nothing else but a submission, which, by the grace of God, I am resolved against, whatever it cost me; for I know my obligation to be, both in conscience and honour, neither to abandon God's cause, injure my successors, or forsake my friends.41
Charles continued to reject all compromise until, on 30 January 1649, he became a ‘martyr'; yet even from the grave he continued to claim divine sanction for his actions. A posthumous volume of his prayers and meditations on recent events, Eikon Basilike (‘The king's image’), circulated almost immediately, with a frontispiece that showed the king looking like Christ, putting aside his earthly crown and grasping a crown of thorns as he prayed (Plate 3).
Charles's uncle, Christian IV of Denmark, also stressed his special relationship with God. While championing the Protestant cause in Germany, he claimed to have seen a vision of Christ wearing a crown of thorns and, to make the most of this signal mark of divine favour, the painting commissioned to commemorate it made Jesus look strikingly like Christian himself. In similar vein, the Catholic emperor Ferdinand II claimed that, during the siege of Vienna by his rebellious subjects in 1619, as he knelt in prayer before a crucifix, Christ spoke from the Cross: ‘Ferdinande, non te deseram’ – ‘Ferdinand, I will not desert you’. Shortly afterwards, a contemporary print depicted him as Christ on the Mount of Olives, surrounded by his sleeping noblemen. Many of Ferdinand's contemporaries also had themselves portrayed as characters from the Gospels (Anne of Austria and her son Louis XIV as Madonna and child; and, more remarkably, together with Louis XIII as the Magi); as Old Testament figures (Gustavus Adolphus as Judas Maccabeus; Philip IV as Solomon; Frederick Henry of Orange as David); or as saints (Louis XIII as his ancestor, St Louis; Anne of Austria and her sister-in-law Henrietta Maria of England as Saints Helena and Elizabeth).42
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