This century is usually called the age of the scientific revolution, but one must not immediately visualize too rosy a picture of the world. Hunger and poverty were still rampant even in “prosperous” Europe and the division between rich and poor had begun to harden, with the bitterness which led ultimately to the revolutions of the next century. The poor were sometimes chained together as criminals and made to do the vilest of tasks. In some areas vagrants had their heads shaved and were whipped. World population in 1650 was approximately 500,000,000, but at the end of the century ½ to 1/3 of the population of Finland died of famine. And things were even worse in Asia, China, and India, as we shall document in later paragraphs. Although the rich lived an average of 10 years longer than the poor, this was not to say much. In Beauvaises 25 to 33% of newborn children die in their first year and only 50% reached their 20th year. The high infant mortality, famine, chronic malnutrition, and terrible epidemics kept the number of deaths roughly equivalent to the number of births. (Ref. 260)
In the 16th and this 17th century, tobacco conquered the entire world, surpassing even tea and coffee in popularity. Government prohibitions encircled the globe but were universally ignored, so that soon some governments themselves cashed in on the market. France established the “Tobacco Monopoly” in 1674. (Ref. 260)
The various conflicts between the Catholic and Protestant divisions of the Christian Church continued well into this century and were augmented at the end of the period by a war which included Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox, all at times changing sides, one with another. Most of the popes of the latter half of the century and the next were worthy men, but the currents of the times were against them. By attempting to remain neutral in the Bourbon-Habsburg conflicts, the popes sacrificed the support of both. Jansenism versus Jesuitism also sapped the papacy. Cornelius Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, emphasized “inner regeneration” rather than “external reorganization” as represented by the Jesuits.
In the Orthodox Church, the Patriarch Nikon of Russia launched a program of reform in 1653, trying to produce conformity in the Orthodox liturgy with ancient Greek models and he used the techniques of textural criticism of the Jesuits. Persecution of the “old believers” began and they went underground, considering the reformers as “anti-Christ”. Thus, the Russian Church withstood the attack of the West only at the cost of a serious schism in its ranks. (Ref. 139)
All of the three Moslem empires described in the last chapter showed signs of degeneration in this century. The Ottomans had a crisis both economically and from loss of manpower; the Sfavid Dynasty in Persia, like the Ottomans, entered a period of decline after the death of Abbas I in 1629; and the Mugals in India, after an initial surge of power soon came up against a new, strong Hindu force which promptly had the entire country in revolt. Even so, in the second half of the century, the Moslems continued to win important victories and to penetrate new territories in southeast Europe, India, Africa, and southeast Asia. (Ref. 139)
In this century England, France, and the Netherlands all readmitted Jews, although they were not always socially acceptable. In the southern Baltic area Jews continued to be persecuted and massacred, as we shall detail under that section. (See also page 856)
Back to Africa: A.D. 1501 to 1600
In the early century, Ethiopian emperors began to reconsolidate their power among the plains and lush hillsides of Begemder and developed a permanent royal residence at Gondar, after 1636. Emperor Fasilida expelled all Jesuits by 1633, put down the Moslems of Adal, and closed the country to foreigners. Later local wars against both the neighboring Muslims and the Galla, farming people of central and south Ethiopia, resumed and was to last almost two centuries. Galla groups continued to move in Somali, some intermarrying with Arabs and developing a passionate devotion to Islam. Cubes of salt served as both money and food for these people. In Egypt, Turkish control continued. (Ref. 83, 260)
This area continued to decline economically and intellectually, Ali Bey made himself hereditary Bey of Tunis, while Algiers and Tripoli became virtually independent states. Politics was violent, with riots, plots, counter-plots, and massacres. 30,000 of Algiers’ 130,000 people were Christian slaves of the dominant Moslems. The Barbary pirates continued to work the Algiers and Oran areas throughout this century, using renegade Europeans from Calabria or Sicily, as captains. (Ref. 83)
In the western bulge of Africa the state of Ashanti was formed and rapidly expanded to absorb some 30 independent neighboring kingdoms in the area that is now part of western Ghana. It was the Ashanti who teamed up with the European slavers for the greatest exports of men. Between the Ashanti and the Niger delta the states of Dahomey and Oyo were also established in this century and the entire region was sometimes called “the slave coast”. Later some of it was called “the gold coast”. The Portuguese had refused to sell firearms to any of these people, but in the middle of the century the Dutch did. On the upper Niger, the black Bambara Kingdom defeated and replaced the old Manding empire about 1670. Brought from America, maize gradually came to be the primary food plant north of the Congo in Benin and among the Yoruba. (Ref. 58, 83, 260)
Bornu continued as the most powerful state of the central Sudan, but interstate wars continued in this and the next century. Kuba was a group of chiefdoms at the south edge of the rain forest which developed a relatively high standard of living and rapid population increase as they received new American crops and techniques, both brought by the Portuguese. The Buchwezi Kingdom in Uganda was succeeded by the Buganda and this had become the most powerful of the Bantu-speaking kingdoms by 1700. Those people carved wooden sculptures and had very artistic palaces, shrines, and houses. Large drums, some 12 feet across, were used as ritual objects, supposedly to communicate with ancestors. (Ref. 175)
Portuguese domination of Swahili cities of the east coast was eliminated by the Arabs of Oman, who had considerable maritime power at that time. A 1690 revolt in Mozambique, led by Changamire, to protest against harsh Portuguese treatment, resulted in the elimination of Europeans there, but they still bought slaves through other ports. (Ref. 83)
In parts of southern Africa, Bushmen still made rock-paintings and engravings of polychrome animals which could compare favorably with any stone-age art of the Sahara or even of western Europe. The best paintings of this and the next two centuries are in the Drakenburg Mountains. (Ref. 88) In 1652 the Dutch East India Company established a rest station near the cape at the tip of Africa, en route to the Spice Islands (Indonesia). Soon slaves were imported for local labor and the local Hottentots supplied beef. Several hundred French Huguenots arrived as settlers also by 1700 so that by the time there was a mixture of about 1000 Dutchmen with some French and the native Hottentots and Bushmen. Neither of the latter are correctly considered to be truly of the Negro race and the Bantu-speaking, true Negroes were still in the process of migrating slowly down the eastern coast of the continent, although the Nguni were beginning to settle over most of Natal. (Ref. 83)
Although the Europeans were establishing trading posts along the coast of Africa, the mainland of the continent remained self-contained and there were no true European colonies until the end of the next century. Probably the chief reason for the slow penetration up the rivers by Caucasians is that most of tropical Africa’s rivers are blocked by huge waterfalls only a short distance from the rivers’ mouths. There was some traveling up the Senegal and the Gambiae. As the sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations developed in the New World, the slave trade from Africa reached substantial proportions. Initially handled by the Portuguese, the trade was progressively taken over by British, Dutch, and French. In 4 ½ centuries some 10 million slaves were brought to the Americas and this slave trade inhibited political, economic, and social development and culled out the sound and healthy population already debilitated by endemic disease. (ref. 68) Early on the Portuguese had a trading station in Angola, but for a while the Dutch took this away, depriving the Portuguese for slaves for the Brazilian plantations. By 1640, then independent of Spain, Portugal recovered Angola and some 14 years later even drove the Dutch out of Brazil as well. The French started some settlements on Madagascar in 1626 and intermarried with various primitive tribes and the Hovas, who had arrived from across the Indian Ocean about 1000 A.D. They were the most advanced of several peoples of Malay and Melanesian stocks, all speaking one language, but with many dialects.
Back to The Near East: A.D. 1501 to 1600
The Turkish Ottomans continued their rule over almost all of this area. Some Europeans came back from the East Indies to settle in Mocha and Jiddah on the Arabian Red Sea coast, but otherwise there was little change on the peninsula. Intermittent warfare was waged with the Safavid Dynasty of Persia, but trade across the region continued. There was tremendous profit in spices and war was not to interfere with that. 3,000 tons of spices bought in the East Indies for the equivalent of $227,603 could be sold for $1,972,920 at Aleppa, Syria. (Ref. 211)
Rejuvenated under Shah Abbas I, the Safavid dynasty wrested Baghdad and the Armenian border provinces away from the Turks, and there were some periods of tranquility, with progress in the arts and crafts. Beautiful, strong horses were plentiful and some were moved in caravans of 1,000 at a time. They were reserved for warfare or treated as luxuries with harnesses of silver, gold, and precious stones. Rather than use them for communication, human runners called “chatirs” were utilized. These runners were specially trained for the job from childhood and they were often of the road for 30 to 40 hours at a time. (Ref. 260)
The Shia fanaticism faded somewhat, at least in the court, and a lasting peace was finally concluded with the Ottomans in 1639. When Abbas’ grandson Shah Safi came to the throne, however he began to distinguish himself with wholesale executions. It was the beginning of “harem rule” in Persia, initiating a period of rapid decline. The Turks re-won Baghdad and the Cossacks raided on the Caucasus front.
The customs and dress of the ordinary Persians changed little over the centuries. Braudel (Ref. 260) quotes Chardin, after living 10 years in Persia, in 1686:
“I have seen Tamerlane’s costume, which is kept in the treasury of Ispahan and it is cut exactly like the clothes worn here today, without any different—dress in the East is not subject to fashion…”[264]
The same might be said of their cities. In spite of some degree of culture manifested in advanced arts and crafts, the streets of Ispahan remained without any type of paving, dirty in the summer and muddy in winter. Dead animals, blood from butchered ones, and human excrement increased the filth. An Italian visitor at the end of the century wrote that the humblest house in Palermo was better than the best in Ispahan. (Ref. 260)
Constantinople, with 700,000 people, was larger than any city in Europe and needed all the Balkan sheep, Egyptian rice, beans, and corn, Black Sea grain and wood, and Anatolian oxen, camels, and horses to support it. It required all empire manpower as well as Russian slaves brought in to the salve market of Besistan. (Ref. 260) The sultan himself had 5,000 servants. After Suleiman I (in the last century) the sultans did not marry, basically to keep official wives from meddling in the state and the sultan’s mother became the ruler of the harem. The harem women were technically slaves and as Moslem women could not be enslaved, all these women were foreigners – Russians, Circassians, Venetians, Greeks, and especially women from the Caucasus, where there were many blue-eyed beauties. Originally the eunuchs were white and they came also chiefly from the Caucasus, but at the beginning of this century blacks were used. Since castration was also against Moslem law, these black boys were castrated by Coptic Christians near Aswan as they were brought up from deeper Africa. In theory, these eunuchs, too, were slaves, but they often gained great power because of their proximity to the sultan. As weak, sexually depleted sultans appeared, the Grand Vizier and the Chief of the Black Eunuchs, the “Aga of the women” became the real power in the empire. (Ref. 131) At the beginning of the century the new Sultan Ahmed I refused to strangle his brothers, as had been the custom, and simply locked them up in “the cage”, cut off from the rest of the world. Thereafter, occasionally when a sultan died without male issue, one of the brothers would be brought out of the cage to the throne, knowing nothing. Then the grand vizier would rule.
After signing a peace treaty with Austria in 1606, the Turks fought with Persia and lost Azerbaijan and Georgia. There was a long war with Venice (1645-1660) occasioned by Turkish designs on Crete and again the Ottomans lost, perhaps because of outdated weaponry. A Portuguese ship which was attacked by a Turkish galley in 1603 reported that it was “covered with arrows, up to the topmast.”[265] All through this century, the Ottomans competed with Venetians for the mercenary services of Christian infantrymen of the western Balkans. (Ref. 279) Only in cavalry did Turkey seem to have an advantage. The empire had 40,000 horses in Asia and 100,000 in Europe, while hostile Persia had about 80,000. (Ref. 260) It is probable that the loss of Ottoman manpower and money in their 16th century military excursions, plus the effect of inflation after 1584 and the continuing rising population with a shrinking economy, produced an internal crisis in the early decades of this 17th century. (Ref. 8)
With the empire near collapse, a temporary restoration of power was promoted by the Albanian grand vizier, Muhammad Korprulu, his son Ahmed, and his brother-in-law Kara Mustapha, covering the period from 1656 to 1683. During that interval, in response to a Hungarian appeal for aid against the Emperor Leopold, Kara Mustapha again took an army of over 200,000 to the walls of Vienna. When the attack finally failed due to a coalition of Bavarians, Saxons, and Poles, led by John III Sobieski, Kara was strangled on order of the sultan and after this the empire began again to disintegrate, as both Buda and Belgrade fell. Kara’s fate was typical of the tenuous power of the grand viziers in the last of the century. Between 1683 and 1701 some 12 of these came and went. (Ref. 131)
The Treaty of Carlowitz of 1699 by which most of Hungary was surrendered to Austria marked a turning point in the European-Islamic military balance. Other factors also aggravated the crisis in the Ottoman state. New sea routes to the East left the great Ottoman markets stranded in a backwater. (Ref. 68( New World silver swamped the Turkish economy, cutting the value of the standard Ottoman coin to 50% of its former value, precipitating uncontrollable inflation. The Janissaries, who had reached 51,647 in number in this century, were already deteriorating due to the admission of free Moslems to their ranks in the previous century and the carefully trained slave-militia was no more. (Ref. 131)
Throughout all of the Ottoman activity the Anatolian peninsula was honeycombed with trade routes established by Armenian merchants working out of the original Julfa in what was formerly Armenia and from their transplanted New Julfa out of Ispahan, peopling the monsoon ships, commission agents with dealings in Turkey, Russia, Europe, and the Indian Ocean. From their exile center in New Julfa, some traveled to Patna, Nepal and even Lhasa, Tibet. In each city they could be received and assisted by fellow Armenian merchants. Europe, too, felt the impact of these men. In Moscow they handled raw silk from Persia, From permanent settlements there they traveled overland to Sweden, where they met countrymen coming up with other merchandise from Amsterdam. Poland, Germany, England, France, and Venice were all “invaded” by these businessmen. There was a little Armenian colony at Lwow in Poland, with its own printing plants. The master of regular, trading caravans from Poland to the Ottoman Empire was always an Armenian. (Ref. 292)
In the early century, inflation was such that prices were four times what they had been between 1525 and 1550. (Ref. 213) Three great powers contested for dominance – the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, and France, under Louis XIV and Richelieu. Each had a mass of about 17 million people. (Ref. 260) In spite of the presence of these great monarchies, there were still areas all over Europe from southern Italy to Scandinavia and from Scotland to Auvergne where primitive social enclaves persisted, with hundreds of dialects and local, semibarbaric, religious cults. Attempted control of these numerous pockets sapped the resources of the great powers, similar to the drain on the Roman Empire when it was ringed with barbarians. In addition, after about 1620 the entire continent suffered from food shortages as the population increased to about 118 million by 1648 and the result of this was often political instability. Even by 1640, rebellion was everywhere. Although this is often called the century of scientific revolution, this was completely irrelevant to the mass of Europeans as they squandered most of their energies in massive wars. During the whole of the period there were only seven years of peace in Europe. All of the people tended to revolt against the powers of princes and kings over their bodies and properties and to protest against taxation, interference with trade and arbitrary imprisonment. Over most of Europe the peasantry represented vast numbers of people and in one way or another they were almost always in revolt, with occasional open rebellion, as in Naples in 1647. In Orleans, out of an active population of almost 120,000 there were over 67,000 wage earners, but this did not signal great productivity. Many districts were over-populated with great numbers of unemployed. Vagrants were universally put under lock and key, usually in work-houses. (Ref. 292)
The last quarter of the century saw the establishment of responsible parliamentary government in most areas. By 1700 the old north-south trade axis had swung almost 90~ and ran east-west from England-Holland to Saxony, Bohemia and Silesia. Population growth at the end of the century had been slowed not only by war and famine but also by plague, so that shortly after the turn of the century (1713) the population had dropped to about 102 million. (Ref. 68, 147, 8, 131) Still, Europe remained in a favored position when compared to other civilization, particularly in regard to food. Europeans consumed great quantities of meat. Water-mills supplied the chief energy and were owned and supplied by the lord of the manor, while the peasants contributed their labor. The mill, which ground grain, was thus the essential tool of the manorial economy. Otherwise the 17th century civilization was one of wood and charcoal. Buildings, machines, wine-presses, plows and pumps were all made of wood, with a very minimum of metallic parts. Fortunately Europe was well-endowed with forests. Iron, although available, was still in short supply. (Ref. 260) Wigs and then powdered wigs came into fashion in this century despite initial objection by the church.
Practically all the armies of Europe had adopted the military reforms initiated at the end of the previous century by Maurice of Holland. (See page 792). This resulted in obedient, responsive units of soldiers able to function efficiently in any part of the globe. The new drill and techniques spread from officers trained at Maurice's Military Academy, which was founded in 1619, first to Sweden, then