Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  Yet this comparison between Caesar and Charles is instructive in a different way. It is worth remembering that the real cost of war had gone up considerably since the Roman Republican period. Charles’s abortive attempt to take the French border city of Metz had cost him more than 3 million ducats. Converted into grain equivalent, this much gold would have paid for a year’s deployment of well over 100,000 soldiers at the time of Caesar, or a joint force of close to a quarter million Romans and allies a century earlier—enough to succeed where Caesar did and Charles could not hope to.43

  Throughout his reign, and in fact increasingly, Charles V was hamstrung by fiscal constraints. In economic terms, waging war was a losing proposition, as his European campaigns consumed growing amounts of money without generating new revenue flows or even helping to protect existing sources of income, such as Spain, the Low Countries, and the Americas, which were not under any significant threat. Instead, fiscal demands only served to alienate taxpayers in some of these areas, most notably the Low Countries, with fatal consequences later. Armies steadily grew in size and cost, from 15,000 men for an aborted invasion of Italy in 1529 to 80,000 by 1552. Meanwhile, the rising importance of mercenaries drove up per capita cost as well, as did expanding reliance on credit.44

  Loans became increasingly important: 46 percent of the funds for Charles’s wars from 1529 to 1541 was generated by loans from Castile, but 72 percent (of a total that was more than one and a half times as large) from 1543 to 1552. The growing inflow of silver from the Americas was the only thing that kept credit going without triggering violent unrest along the lines of the massive tax revolt that had rocked Castile in 1520–1521.45

  Charles’s ballooning debt eventually constricted his policy choices: thus, he was unable to capitalize on military successes by establishing garrisons he simply could not afford. In his conflict with the Schmalkaldic League, fiscal exhaustion prompted a five-year hiatus in hostilities, and renewed fighting pushed Charles to the brink of bankruptcy. In the absence of an effective fiscal bureaucracy, warfare on this scale was simply unsustainable—and a harbinger of worse crises to come under his equally warlike son and successor, Philip II.46

  In sum, Habsburg ambitions faced an array of seemingly irresistible forces. One was the sheer diversity of Charles’s dominions, which lacked both a capital and a unified administration: as a result, he was always on the move, much as Charlemagne, the first of many post-Roman “Roman” emperors, had been 750 years earlier. Another was the soaring cost of war, driven by mercenaries, gunpowder, and intricate fortifications. A third was growing ideological disunity that amplified existing political divisions in ways that eventually led to the cataclysmic struggle of the Thirty Years’ War. Whatever it was Charles actually aspired to—universal empire, a hegemonic position in Europe, leadership of Christendom—none of these appeared to be within his reach.47

  Consideration of these conditions makes it all the more striking to encounter a counterfactual that extrapolates very different outcomes from a perfectly plausible minimal rewrite of history. In this scenario, developed by Carlos Eire, Henry VIII either does not break with Rome or he dies early—either of which could easily have happened. England consequently remains in the Catholic camp: allied to Spain, it helps Charles defeat France and the Schmalkaldic League. Northern Germany and Switzerland are purged of Protestants; Luther and Calvin are captured and burned in Rome. Later the offspring of Philip II and Anne rule England. A more unified Europe pushes back the Ottomans and is able to commit more of its resources to learning and science, thereby ushering in European global dominance sooner than it had happened in real life.48

  However, Eire also considers radically different developments based on the same rewrite. Protestantism might well have survived in England, triggering civil war instead of a stable alliance with Spain. This could have fueled religious wars in Europe and the New World: England rather than the Netherlands would have become a money pit for the Spanish military, and the seventeenth century might have turned out even more violent than it actually did. Much hinges on how we assess the role of religion, as more or less pliable in the face of political and military pressure. Our position on this question to a large extent determines overall outcomes—a valuable reminder of the pitfalls of counterfactual reasoning.49

  The main merit of this exercise lies in its highlighting the importance of the (early) sixteenth century as a “key choice point,” when some developmental pathways opened at the lasting expense of others: this was when Europe’s rise to global power commenced (and the question arose whether its reach could be monopolized by any one power or coalition); when its state system was consolidated (further); and when massive religious transitions took place. Because England came to play an outsized role in all of these processes—just as it would in the later breakthrough to modernity—it makes sense to position it at the center of a counterfactual.50

  Even so, Eire’s scenario is vulnerable on too many fronts. England, then a country of just 4 million (a quarter of the French population), was in fact allied with Spain against France but to little avail, and its support alone was unlikely to have been sufficient to allow Charles to crush both France and the German princes. Second-order effects also come into play: greater Habsburg dominance might well have encouraged more balancing even among Catholic powers, making the vision of a semidependent England less likely. France was so populous that it would have been hard to cow into submission under almost any circumstances. As important as England was going to be, it can hardly be instrumentalized as a pivot around which a substantially different history of Europe can be constructed, least of all one that yields durable hegemony under the Habsburgs—which, in any case, might well have been much more detrimental to European science than Eire allows for. Europe’s potential for unleashing countervailing forces to any would-be hegemon was already very high.

  In real life, Charles’s son Philip II inherited most of the Habsburg domains: the spun-off Austrian territories were comparatively small and poor and beset by the Ottomans; and all overseas colonies belonged to Spain. This division within the Habsburg realm reflected the consolidation of a Spain-centered global empire, and a concurrent shift away from fantasies of universal rule under the aegis of the German empire. The prospect of imperial unification of Europe thus retreated even further (figure 6.3).

  Failure in key military endeavors contributed to this trend. Philip’s overall record was decidedly mixed. Spain gained respite from French pressure as France descended into religious wars between Catholic and Protestant factions (1562–1598): Philip supported the former and became actively involved in this conflict during its final decade. Relations with the Ottomans were marked by naval defeat in 1560 and victory in 1571, effectively a stalemate. In 1580 Philip acquired Portugal and its overseas possessions, a move that—if only very briefly—cemented his global hegemony over European trade and colonization. The American territories and their silver production expanded, and Spain established a presence in the Philippines.

  FIGURE 6.3   The possessions of Philip II, 1590s CE.

  However, all these gains were more than counteracted by setbacks in the North Sea region that came to be the cradle of modernity. In the northern Low Countries, the tax burden, encroachment on administrative autonomy, and repression against Protestants triggered a revolt against Philip’s rule in 1568. Despite early successes, his armies ultimately proved incapable of suppressing this defection. Relations with nearby England deteriorated after Philip’s brief tenure as its king (by way of marriage) in 1554–1558. England’s later support for the Dutch rebels and the execution of the Catholic Mary Stuart provoked a Spanish invasion attempt that failed in 1588. At that point, almost two-thirds of the Spanish military were set against England or garrisoned in the Low Countries.

  Both of these theaters produced costly setbacks: renewed naval buildup in the 1590s did not deliver victories and the army of Flanders’s direct engagement in France drained its resources, precipitati
ng mutinies. In the end, enormous expenditures had been incurred without producing tangible benefits. England and the Netherlands retained their independence and stepped up their pressure on Spanish and Portuguese possessions overseas, and France remained hostile. Meanwhile, Philip defaulted on his debts no fewer than five times.51

  It is hard to see how one might salvage from all this any even remotely plausible counterfactual of Spanish hegemony over Europe. The main options would have been to avert the Dutch revolt, to kill Elizabeth I and tie England under Mary Stuart closer to Spain, or to successfully invade England in 1588. The first of these objectives had been achieved under Charles V but became increasingly elusive as taxation, centralization, and the Reformation intensified. The second option was certainly feasible—the Dutch leader William of Orange was assassinated—but merely takes us back to Eire’s counterfactual of a (mainly) Catholic England being allied to Charles V: the question remains whether Protestantism could have been fully contained, or whether a Catholic England would have placed religious affinity over national interests. After all, France was also primarily Catholic but reliably hostile to the Habsburgs.

  The third scenario looks superficially more appealing at least in the short term: England’s military and walls were no match for the Spanish troops and their equipment, and the country was very low on cash and credit. Spanish occupation or some sort of settlement with England would have cut off support for the Netherlands and stifled Atlantic raiding, helping Spain maintain its hold on its global assets and freeing up resources to crack down on the Dutch and on Protestants elsewhere. But once again, we must not ignore the possibility of second-order counterfactuals: Spanish heavy-handedness in England might well have galvanized resistance elsewhere, discouraging Dutch proponents of peace and emboldening Germany’s Protestant princes.52

  In the longer term, it seems unlikely that Spain would have been able to detach England from the Protestant zone in northern Europe and control its foreign policy tightly enough to avoid future conflict. Just as Spanish intervention in France in the 1590s weakened its flagging efforts against the Dutch, operations in England could have had similar consequences. The sheer number of theaters competing for attention—France, England, and the Low Countries—made it difficult to succeed in all of them, and offered Spain’s opponents ample opportunities for balancing.

  Thus, Spanish hegemony was improbable even in the short term, and even less plausible over a longer time frame. Not for the first time, too much history would need to be rewritten to allow parsimonious modifications to contingent events—such as the fate of Elizabeth I or the Armada—to generate substantially divergent geopolitical outcomes. Moreover, what is at stake here is some measure of Spanish hegemony in Latin Europe: a unified empire that covered much of Europe was far beyond Philip’s reach, just as it had been beyond Charles’s. In this sense, polycentrism as the defining characteristic of Europe’s political order was never under any serious threat.

  THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: THE OTTOMAN ADVANCE

  If European powers were unable to create a monopolistic super-state, was there any hope for outside contenders to succeed? The Ottoman empire was the only conceivable candidate. Rooted in a coalition of Turkic warriors and their allies formed in the early fourteenth century in northwestern Anatolia, this polity swiftly expanded across Asia Minor and into the Balkans and on to Romania. In 1453, the Ottomans took Constantinople, and in 1516–1517 replaced the Mamluks as rulers of Syria and Egypt. Hungary was overrun in 1526, and most of the Black Sea littoral fell under Ottoman control. Vassal regimes were established in the eastern and central Maghreb, which served as a base for naval operations against Christian states. The sultanate built a large navy that dislodged Europeans from their eastern Mediterranean strongholds and pushed farther west. In 1527, the sultan’s standing army of some 20,000 was augmented by 90,000 land-grant soldiers, two-thirds of whom lived within reach of the European frontier, even if only part of them could actually be mobilized.

  This was the first time since the Umayyad period that an empire of this size had emerged in such close proximity to Latin Europe. The Ottomans ruled territories that very roughly coincided with those held by the East Roman empire at its peak 1,000 years earlier—minus Italy but plus Mesopotamia, Romania, and the northern Black Sea basin—and even shared the same capital city. And unlike the first caliphate, the Ottoman empire turned out to be much more durable: it maintained its territorial possessions at close to their maximum extent until the end of the eighteenth century and at least nominally even beyond that (figure 6.4).53

  Yet just like the Umayyad caliphate, the Ottomans did not make major headway into Latin Europe. Assaults on Vienna failed in 1529, 1532, and again in 1664 and 1683, as did a landing in southern Italy in 1480–1481 and the siege of Malta in 1565. Naval operations in alliance with France in the mid-sixteenth century accomplished little of substance. Venice’s loss of Crete in 1668 was the Ottoman’s final gain, a trivial one.

  FIGURE 6.4   The Ottoman empire, c. 1683 CE.

  By the early seventeenth century, Spanish fleets were already able to score victories in the eastern Mediterranean. From the 1590s into the 1650s, the Anatolian heartland of the empire was shaken by a series of revolts of military elements and provincial officials. The central authorities struggled to retain full control of its military resources. State capacity did not keep up with ongoing improvements in Europe. By 1600, Ottoman tax revenue in per capita terms lagged behind that of Spain, Venice, the Netherlands, France, and England. In absolute terms, Spain’s annual revenues were three times as large as those of the Ottomans. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, Ottoman tax income measured in silver remained flat in both per capita and absolute terms, while it increased steadily and in some cases dramatically almost everywhere in Europe.

  In 1600, the population of Europe west of the Ottoman realm—excluding anything east of Poland—was about two and a half times that of the Ottoman empire. This demographic imbalance was reflected by military manpower: in the mid-sixteenth century, the combined military forces of England, France, Spain, and Austria were two and a half times as large as those of the Ottomans, and by 1700 this ratio had risen to 4 to 1. Latin Europe was more than any sultan could hope to swallow.54

  One might object that Europe’s forces were fractured, and employed in the first instance to fight other Europeans, whereas those of the Ottomans reported to a single government. However, two factors offset this advantage. We need to control for second-order counterfactuals arising from a more determined Ottoman push into Europe: it was one thing for France to cooperate with them when their nearest outposts were almost 800 kilometers away, but it would have been another thing entirely had they penetrated Austria and Bavaria and reached the Rhine. More importantly, the Ottoman empire was locked into long-term conflict, alternately active and latent, with another formidable power in its Asian rear: Safavid Iran.

  From 1514 to 1639, the two regimes—Sunni Ottomans and Shia Safavids—competed for control of Iraq, which the Ottomans had seized from the Safavids in 1514, and of the southern Caucasus. On eight separate occasions, they were at war with each other during 55 of these 126 years. While the Ottomans initially had the upper hand, in the sixteenth century Iranian reforms and Ottoman internal instability raised the pressure: Baghdad was lost for 14 years, and it took the Ottomans until 1639 to restore their positions. The European and Iraqi theaters continuously competed for attention: in the 1550s, Ottoman operations in the east curbed engagement in the west, whereas in the early 1600s it was the other way around.

  All this leaves little room for credible counterfactuals of a larger Ottoman European empire. It is telling that the Ottomans were unable to make major inroads at a time when conflict among European states intensified. This does not bode well for a scenario in which more successful advances might have checked some of these conflicts enough to coordinate resistance. In terms of fiscal and military capabilities, the Ottoman
state already lagged behind the major European powers when it appeared on the scene and then continued to fall behind as competitive European state formation accelerated.

  Religious affiliation might also have served as an obstacle to further Ottoman expansion: while it is true that the Arabs had conquered and ruled many millions of Christians in the Levant, the Maghreb, and the Iberian peninsula (as well as Zoroastrians in Iran), these populations had not yet been organized in the type of more cohesive and capable state that had begun to emerge in early modern Europe. This makes the Ottoman conquests in the Christian Balkans a poor analogy for what might have happened farther west, where the time for the successful absorption of tens of millions of Christians and their lasting acquiescence to a Muslim regime might well have passed.

  Plausible rewrites such as a fall of Vienna or an invasion of Italy cannot alter these structural features. Very major modifications of history would be required to allow the Ottomans to unite much of Latin Europe under their rule: we would have to boost their internal stability and fiscal capabilities, and write the Safavid empire (and any alternative Middle Eastern competitor) out of the story.55

  The resultant environment would be dramatically different from that which actually existed at the time, a construct that cannot serve as a basis for credible counterfactual considerations. Despite its striking early successes and long-term resilience, the Ottoman state lacked the mobilization skills, the military edge, and the ability to concentrate all its assets in one theater that would have been necessary to carry its arms into Latin Europe.