Modern European History: Prussia & Austria Monarchies Research Paper

Introduction

In 1700 de Witt already expected the influences of regna youth and socio-political, even economic potential to prompt Austria and Prussia to wage wars of conquest as a result of Spanish incapacity to assure equilibrium between the two great powers. His observation is commonplace; the same understandings could be found in the observations of astute observers all across Europe, not only about Austria but about Prussia as well.

The nominal as a philosophical mode of argument began to undermine the belief in the intrinsic qualities and powers of kings in the late fifteenth century; humanists such as Buda, Rubella’s, and Le Roy sought to shore them up. Kings were believed to possess a nature that obliged them to conduct military actions. This gift was believed to be in their blood. Therefore a monarchy was taken as strong when it had a king who could organize and lead his militant for conquest. This constituted one of the major features of the monarchy. (E. Lavisse1911)

Prussian and Austrian monarchies: factors of growing

In political terms, Early-Modern kings were more respected, than the current leaders. Their subjects more willingly turned over their resources to them if they confirmed this idea of monarchial nature by riding at the head of their armies in battle. While the war was thought to be a scourge, and its devastating effects were lamented, protest by constituted bodies, the royal council, the assemblies of the clergy, the assemblies of notables, and the estates-generals, rarely ventured to criticize wars for either conquest or defense in the long history of the Ancients Régime.

Our century has accustomed us to puppet kings ruling in puppet kingdoms to monarchs who spend their time in ceremonial. Such was not the case in Prussian and Austrian monarchies. The inflation of the kings’ titles was watered down in the 19th century, which then lowed the king’s dignity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before then kingship was acquired through inheritance and no diplomat or group of diplomats was elected as a king or a Queen. (E. Lavisse1911)

The dignity of king or queen was held by only a select few who were endowed with the dynastic heritage, territory, and marriages with other royal houses to sustaining the dignity. Some Prussian and Austrian families had more illustrious and ancient pedigrees than some of those born to the dignity of a king, but these lacked the territorial possessions to sustain the title. For example, in Europe Wittelsbachs were certainly of more ancient nobility than the Bourbons, but Bavaria and the Palatinate combined still did not make a Monarchies Françoise in territorial dimensions, nor confer the power to conduct war, because of the size of the European realm.

In this type of leadership, the dignity held by a young prince made him devise a method of how to conquest other kingdoms and expand his territory, to earn more respect from his subject. In the end, a precedent would be set when an electoral family finally gained the title king as it was in Prussia, but for a time they were still denied the quality. Only military and diplomatic success (and momentarily Imperial need for allies against Louis XIV) permitted this monstrous creation, a conquering elector who became king.

As Reinhold Hatton so learnedly observed, kings had their eyes on each other, not only across time but also by the recognition that they were an exclusive club of players. The phenomena of increased state power certainly affected how kings observed each other, but it was not until the later eighteenth century that the regal rhythms that called for conquest in youth would be tempered. The scale became such that dignities became quite empty. (E. Lavisse1911)

The rise of the modern monarchies resulted in a change in how the institutions were running. In the former regimes, kings who inherited their regimes to their blood relatives mostly their sons were administering institutions. The rising of regimes such as Persia and Austria weakened these monarchies. The factors that influenced the rise of Prussia and Austria were.

These factors included war for conquest, which was a major characteristic of monarchy in the Early-Modern period. Where young princes strategize on how to expand their kingdoms by conquering other neighboring kingdoms. This is why the Early-Modern monarchies were almost always at war. This to them was very necessary so that to conquer other kingdoms and expand their territories. This process made the kings encourage most young men to join the military where they received training on various fighting tactics to equip them with wars for conquests. This process was very common in Prussia and Austria kingdoms Therefore this was one of the characteristics that comprised the Prussia and Austria monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries.

These wars used a lot of the monarchy’s resources. Therefore a lot of resources of Prussia and Austria were consumed to finance these wars. These wars could end after a short period and in other cases, they lasted for years. During that period idea of J.R.Hale of establishing peace could not succeed as it was understood that state-building was not so much a matter of peace but of war, and the size of the war and war-making potential was very vital to the monarchies. (Dupaquier1980)

The other factor that greatly boosted the growth of Prussia and Austria monarchies into great kingdoms was their rich resources. The availability of resources was very vital for the success of monarchies of those times and especially Prussia and Austria. Most of the monarchy’s resources during the 17th and 18th centuries went primarily for the payment of troops and secondarily for arms, fortresses, and aggressive fleets, in monarchies throughout the Early-Modern period.

The allocation of resources during these periods was very high not like today when governments are criticized when defense spending reaches about 30% but in the 1700s Louis XIV appears to have devoted 75 percent to war, while Peter the Great 85 percent. To be sure, the late seventeenth-century wars, both in Eastern and Western Europe, were exceptionally costly. In Prussia and Austria, the percentage that was allocated to war was very minimal but fluctuated to a very high value in times of war. But at these years of peace, when the percentages allocated to war would fall, the total annual revenue fell even faster in peace years, because no revenue was collected as rooting by the troops in times of war to increase the domestic revenue thus the percentages allocated for the military remained very high.

Therefore warfare was the only effective and powerful means of mobilizing resources in Prussia and Austria. Most rich families and people gave a lot of their resources to the monarchy’s rulers to help them receive the high resources that were needed to finance these wars. In the eighteenth century, public works projects began to count for some royal spending, and the resources allocated for wars started to diminish gradually.

Therefore the availability of resources greatly boosted the growth of Persian and Austrian monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries. This is because these resources helped to finance the high costs of the Wars of Austria and Prussia. In Prussia, the allocation in the 17th century was as high as 90 percent during the Seven Years’ War. The huge expenses were important to sustain the needs of the large scale of troops that the kings employed in the field, sometimes over a long period.

Hence monarchies such as Prussia and Austria who had enough resources to mobile for their troops were then successful in establishing strong monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries. These huge expenditures for wars in Monarchies lead to leaving these monarchies in debt and leaning toward crisis management and jerry built-in administration, those beautiful charts of the jurisdictions, offices, and duties of the fiscal institutions drawn up in the eighteenth century, and beloved by historians, mask the reality of contradiction, confusion, and competition in the fiscal and judicial administration.

This resulted in the adoption of a more effective method of raising the revenue needed through the collection of taxes. This was enabled by the establishment of elections that is the jurisdiction for assessing the levied taxes on parishes or the alternative of having local representative institutions, the estates, meet and vote assessments, was a matter of center and periphery in the realm. The jurisdictions and duties of the elections in the old central provinces were established quite definitively in the fourteenth century and remained quite stable over the next centuries. In the peripheral and recently acquired provinces, and there were many of these datings from the fifteenth century, local estates customarily voted taxes in a negotiated, even contested with the king. Some of these provinces had venerable autonomist traditions.

Some elected councilors certainly preferred the procedure of assigning a certain sum to be levied in an election, to the routine squabbles on negotiating and bribing a local estate to vote monies. In the latter case the powers of high-ranking members of the aristocracy also almost always had to be brought into play, since they presided over the local estates as governors. When the royal letter and gubernatorial speech did not include requests for special funds for war, which was rare, 1500-1715, then the sums voted declined precipitously. Thus like armies mustered in the spring; the estates were called in the fall or winter to vote monies. At these eras, the nearer the enemy, the greater the sum voted.

Paul Solon’s recent study of the rhetoric of the royal letters regarding information about defeat, victory, and revenue-raising is very significant because it demonstrates the subtle relationship between them. A defeat dared not be admitted too bluntly for fear of spreading panic; a victory dared not be too definitive, or no tax increase would be accepted. Thus, beneath the humanist rhetoric that the crown used to define its power and majesty to all, there lay important structural mechanisms that had to be recognized if the monarchy was to maintain its sphere of action or increase it.

These changes brought new mechanisms for appealing an assessment just, and emanating from a state that took the flowery language about the king’s love for his subjects and concern for their welfare. The answer to this question turns on the issue of who, ultimately, in the royal council was in charge of assessments and revenue collection. From the 17th century, at least, there developed a small but very powerful sub-culture of financiers who gained control of revenue-raising and functioned in the royal council quite autonomously from the advice and powers of the other councilors.

These officials played wizard-like roles in tax-raising and financial management. Not a few of them were executed, disgraced, or imprisoned for their pains. It is important to note that it was the nucleus for the growth of state power because, one way or another, it mobilized the resources of the realm for war. If there was a real rhythm in the monarchy, there was also an ebb and flow of power in the financier sub- culture’s influence over assessments, royal borrowing, patronage, and bribing.

The relatively few years of peace were ones of relatively equitable attempts to live within the ordinary revenues by quite fair-minded and upright royal officials. The years of war were ones in which the financial sub-culture flourished through non-public (or secretive) arbitrary, disparate, and desperate actions to raise funds by any means. (Parker1980)

A post-revolution atmosphere

After the Wars of Religion, as after the Fronde, the monarchy benefited from a popular, or at least somewhat popular, tide in favor of centralization and increase in the power of royal officials appointed by Paris. Local estates, city officials, and perhaps local nobles were perceived as obstructionists and sources of disorder. Sully benefited from a post-revolution atmosphere to restore fiscal solvency to the monarchy by making established procedures work. (W.Beik1985)

Monarchy in Action was the power to render justice, not only between the king and most of his subjects but among his subjects. Certainly for many litigants was the distinction between fiscal and judicial administration would have made no sense. By fees and fines, thousands of royal officials lived off the power of the king to judge, and by defending royal rights in royal courts. Jurists began their treatises and opinions with descriptions of royal, paternal love, the power to pardon, and the power to redress. In the public squares, it was the public execution that struck contemporaries as a manifest royal justice.

On no subject is it more difficult to trace the phenomenon of scale than the power of the royal judicial administration over three centuries. Weight of numbers may account for something at this point, and we have already noted the massive extension of venal offices in the courts of law. Regarding jurisdictions, surely those between royal and ecclesiastical were already largely in place by 1500. (R. Lander1989)

The church also played a major role in contributing to the growth of the Prussia and Austria Monarchies. This is because it helped in the religious-social program for moral uplift to become integrated into the public law. This allowed these monarchies to develop bases that enabled the regularization of work, holidays, begging, prostitution, and idleness as they came into the domain of civil authority as a result of these reformist movements; what had previously been either sin or nothing at all before the magistrate, became a criminal offense. J.S. Holmes. (R. Lander1989)

Conclusion

The factors that helped the Prussia and Austria monarchies to grow into strong and very powerful monarchies their rich resources, and their powerful troops that enabled them to conquer their wars. Religion and the establishment of jurisdictions institutions other than the King’s palace also contributed to their success. The emergence of these modern monarchies brought various changes in the old regimes. The monarchies enabled to shift of large-scale charity and moral clean-up programs from private funding to royal funding and with a Realm-wide impact. The Monarchy assumed a more activist dimension in accord with the attitudes of elites and artisans alike. Colbert’s administration also took steps to launch new industries, and actually pursuing a strategy of increasing wealth in the realm (J.S. Holmes1959).

References

1. E. Lavisse, Histoire de France (Paris, l9ll) VII, part 2, 28l.
2. Trans. by J.S. Holmes and H. van Marle, Men and Ideas (New York, l959) 77-96.
3. War and Society in Renaissance Europe, l450-l620 (Baltimore, l985) 97.
4. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, l500-l800 (Cambridge, UK, l988) 62.
5. J. R. Lander, The Limitations of English Monarchy in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto, 1989) Chapter I; and the brief summary of the older literature in C. Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, l603- l763 (London, l965) l3l, 3l3-3l5.
6. Parker, The Military Revolution, 58, drawing on recent research by J.A. Lynn, “The Growth of the French Army in the Seventeenth Century,” Armed Forces and Society 6 (l980) 568-585.
7. See the magisterial review of all the issues in J. Dupâquier, Histoire de la Population Française (Paris, l988) II, 5l5. For the seventeenth century there was zero population growth, 52l.
8. W. Beik, Absolutism and Society in l7th century France (Cambridge, England, l985) passim.