Why, then, did the United Provinces not turn toward industrial development? There are several reasons. First, shipping, shipbuilding, and the activities connected with them continued to be important and remunerative. Second, the returns on mercantile activity remained high, indeed higher than on investment in textile production. Third, agriculture in the United Provinces was already capital-intensive and specialized, and it paid high wages; there was therefore no poor rural populace to furnish industrial labor at low rates, as was the case in England. Fourth, the entire Dutch development was ultimately predicated on their ability to capitalize on skills and services, rather than on a strong resource base of their own. The population of the United Provinces was small. It had risen from 275,000 in 1514 to 883,000 in 1680; it fell back to 783,000 in 1750. In fact, manpower was scarce even in shipping, and increasing numbers of Scandinavians and North Germans were hired to man Dutch ships in the eighteenth century. Moreover, the United Provinces possessed neither coal nor iron, with which England was plentifully endowed. Finally, the Republic had always been a polity made up of nearly autonomous city-states, each with its own mercantile oligarchy.
Administration
Knighthood Doğuşu
Kings and knights are now both so emblematic of the Middle Ages that it is hard to imagine that at this time the knight–king combination was a relatively novel one. In 1098, when seventeen-year-old Louis received his arms, knighthood had only been a respectable status synonymous with nobility in northern France for a few decades. Before that, a knight was just a soldier of no particular background, valued, but also vilified, for the violent work he did. But as raising armies in the eleventh century came to require great princes to reward their soldiers (these knights) with land, and the knights and their commanders began to view this land as family property, the knights’ bloodlines took on a new importance. No longer disreputable, low-born men whose company stained the reputation of their associates, by the late eleventh century knights were welcomed at court and admired for their exploits. Knighthood began to seem integral to noble identity, not inimical to it.
Fransa’da Feodalitenin Doğuşu
Charlemagne, who reigned from 768 to 814, combined his astonishing record of military conquest with a knack for innovative governmental experimentation that has shaped European political life down to the present day. Since he could not personally govern the diverse sprawl of territories that he had annexed to Francia, he adopted the long-standing division of the realm into regions each ruled by a nobleman called a count (from the Latin word comes, meaning a trustworthy companion). Charlemagne’s counts were supervised by men sent out to keep them accountable, and they could be reassigned or recalled in case of rebellion or ineptitude. But, as time went on and the empire lost coherence under Charlemagne’s successors, ‘counties’ tended to become inherited possessions belonging to great aristocratic families who ruled them quasi-independently.
Decline of Spain
Venedikli elçi diyor ki “Spain cannot exist unless relieved by others, nor can the rest of the world exist without the money of Spain.” İspanya krallığı amerika kolonilerinden gelen altın ve gümüşle parasal olarak zenginleşiyor. Ama üretim yok, bu yüzden zenginleşen soylu ispanyollar lüks ihtiyaçlarını ingiliz, hollanda ve fransız üreticilerinden karşılıyor. İspanya parası dışarıya kaçıyor. Para ispanya iç ekonomisinde dönmüyor, düşmanlarını zengin ediyor. Toprakları da aşırı verimli değil, artisanları çok yok. “Riches of the Americas provided Spain with purchasing power but ultimately they stimulated the development of Holland, England, France and other European countries.”
Crusade ve hristiyanlık inancıyla akdenizde Osmanlıya karşı, kuzeyde Low Countries’de protestanlara karşı olan mücadelede askeri harcamalar aşırı arttı. Bu harcamaların ekonomik olarak geri kazanımı olmadı.
“Moreover, this artificial prosperity had induced many to abandon the land; schools had multiplied, but they had served mostly to produce a half-educated intellectual proletariat who scorned productive industry and manual labor and found positions in the clergy and in the bloated state bureaucracy, both of which served above all to disguise unemployment. Spain in the seventeenth century was heavily in debt and lacked entrepreneurs and artisans but had an overabundance of bureaucrats, lawyers, priests, beggars and bandits. And the country sank into a dispirited decline.”
Modern Diplomasi ve Elçiliğin Ortaya Çıkışı
The shifting system of alliances in Italy depended on obtaining accurate information about those who were alternately enemies and friends. The Italian city-states initially relied on merchants and bankers traveling or living in other cities to pass along information, but in the fifteenth century they began to send out permanent representatives whose functions were to send back a constant stream of foreign news and win the loyalty of important people. These representatives created modern diplomacy: they established permanent embassies, which gradually came to be understood as islands of foreign sovereignty; they kept extensive records; they made both open and secret alliances.
Viking Krallar Niye Hristiyanlığı Kabul Etti?
In each of the Scandinavian kingdoms, unification goes hand in hand with conversion. By officially accepting and imposing Christianity, kings achieved two goals. First, they removed the ability of their competitors to use religion to build networks of friendship and spiritual relationships. The competitors were unable to use paganism for that purpose, since public pagan rites were outlawed, as well as Christianity, since the kings controlled the bishops and thus access to the rituals of that religion. Second, they acquired all the advantages of Christianity, including its legitimizing power, the administrative know-how of its clergy, and its prestigious international connections.
In the competition for power among chieftains, some came out on top, with the result that the first millennium saw fewer and fewer serious contenders as the centuries passed, until only three remained in the early second millennium. They were the kings of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and, not coincidentally, all of them were Christians. They needed Christianity and the church, for they had become so powerful that they were unable to create personal relationships with their followers and subjects because there were too many of them. At that point, Scandinavian kings institutionalized their power. They used the church to help create and legitimize structured kingdoms that were held together by more than gift exchange relationships. The church provided an ideology of kingship that emphasized, among other things, that there could be only one king, just as there was only one God and only one church.
Kilise Gladyatör Arenaların Kapatılma Sebebi
Likewise, it was the Church and the teachings of Christ that helped to abolish the gladiatorial contests, in which men fought each other to the death as a form of entertainment. Such trivialization of human life could not have been more at odds with the Catholic emphasis on the dignity and worth of each individual.
Fransız İhtilali ile Manastırlar Gidince Eğitim Sağlık Düşüyor
Just as the sixteenth-century attack on the monasteries by the Crown debilitated the network of charity that those institutions had supported, the French Revolution’s eighteenth-century attack on the Church likewise struck at the source of so much good work. In November 1789, the revolutionary French government nationalized (that is, confiscated) Church property. The archbishop of Aix en Provence warned that such an act of theft threatened educational and welfare provisions for the French people. He was right, of course. In 1847, France had 47 percent fewer hospitals than in the year of the confiscation, and in 1799 the 50,000 students enrolled in universities ten years earlier had dwindled to a mere 12,000
İngiltere Desteğiyle İskoçya Protestanlaşıyor
In Mary’s absence, however, Scotland had changed a great deal. Her mother was now dead. Over the course of 1559–60, a powerful coalition of Scots nobles had moved to reject both Catholicism and the French alliance, driving out the French garrisons stationed in the kingdom and establishing a new Protestant regime – all with help from England, masterminded by Cecil despite Elizabeth’s initial reluctance to commit to the risks and the costs of military intervention.
Charles’ın Divine Right of King Görüşü
Charles’s religious beliefs have traditionally been more associated with the political theory of the ‘divine right of kings’, the concept elucidated by his father but embraced with less compromise by the son. But to assume that Charles’s ‘divine right’ was a kind of backward-looking, superstitiously unrealistic view of kingly power is to prejudge the issue. In other European monarchies at this time, it was precisely this kind of thinking that was reducing the part played by the ‘Estates’ in government and exalting the monarch’s. Charles’s problem was that he attempted to expound this theory in a political atmosphere that was widely unreceptive to it, and that he seemed to possess the diplomatic skills of a spoilt child.