In the seventeenth century, Ottoman sultans sought to avoid such chaos by confining their male relatives within the Istanbul palace in sealed apartments known as the kafes (‘cage’). Even the crown prince rarely left the ‘cage’ to visit the world outside, but immediately after his accession he killed all his male relatives – both siblings and younger sons – in an attempt to avoid succession disputes. The system changed in 1617, when Sultan Ahmad died leaving only two young sons. The Ottoman elite allowed them and Ahmad's brother to live, but in 1622 palace factions murdered a sultan they deemed incompetent. When Ahmad's son Murad IV reached manhood, he executed three of his brothers so that, at his death in 1640, only one male member of the House of Osman survived: his youngest brother Ibrahim, who had never left ‘the cage’. After eight years of erratic rule, he too was murdered, but the Ottoman elite once again allowed all his young sons to live because they were the only surviving male members of the dynasty (four of them would reign; the last of them would be deposed in 1687). These succession protocols may have been slightly less disruptive than the civil wars among male members of the Qing, but they destabilized the Ottoman state all the same.59
The Mughal emperors also faced repeated succession disputes. When Jahangir's heir rebelled the emperor impaled 300 of his supporters alive to form an avenue through which his son had to pass to beg forgiveness, yet a year later the heir conspired against his father again. This time Jahangir had the young man blinded and entrusted to his younger son, Shah Jahan, who himself rebelled in 1622–3. Once again the revolt failed, and once again Jahangir pardoned the miscreant so that Shah Jahan survived to succeed his father when he died a few years later – and promptly had all other male members of his family killed or blinded. This left Shah Jahan and his four sons as the only surviving male members of the dynasty. Each prince built up a powerful following until 1658 when, believing that their father was on the point of death, three of them rebelled and fought a civil war that lasted two years. Aurangzeb, the eventual victor, murdered all his rivals just as his father had done. Later he tried to partition his inheritance, hoping to avoid another succession war, but his ambitious sons refused to accept anything less than the whole empire – and fought each other after he died in 1707 until only one remained.
The Curse of the ‘Composite State’
Although tanistry never took root in early modern Europe, over half the major seventeenth-century revolts occurred in ‘Composite States’ comprising a well-integrated core territory linked by loose and often contested bonds to other more autonomous regions, some of them far away. These composite states included Denmark (whose monarch also ruled Norway, Greenland, Iceland, Holstein and many Baltic islands) and Sweden (which included Finland, Estonia, Ingria and several Polish enclaves). Similarly, the Russian state included several areas annexed by treaties, many with distinct religious and ethnic groups, even before the annexation of Ukraine and Siberia in the seventeenth century; while the Ottoman empire likewise incorporated territories that contained disparate religious and ethnic groups (above all, Shi'ites, Christians of various creeds and Jews) as well as several provinces with separate legal codes and local traditions (notably the Crimea, the Balkan principalities and the North African states).60 But the most volatile composite states were those created by earlier dynastic unions: the Stuart and Spanish Monarchies, and the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs.
These composite Monarchies were politically unstable for two reasons. First, they owed their origin to repeated endogamy among monarchs, which reduced the gene pool of the dynasty and therefore the viability of their offspring. This seems to have produced both more minorities and more disputed successions. For example, the intermarriage of several generations of his progenitors meant Philip IV of Spain boasted only 8 great-grandparents instead of the normal 16; and after he married his niece in 1649, he became the great-uncle as well as the father of his children, while their mother was also their cousin. This created the same genetic inheritance as the child of siblings, or of a parent and child. Only two of the couple's six children survived infancy, and although their son Carlos II lived to be 39, he was physically deformed, mentally challenged and sterile. His death unleashed a prolonged succession war between the various claimants that resulted in the dismemberment of the Spanish Monarchy.61
The second weakness of the composite Monarchies lay in the fact that many territories preserved their own institutions and collective identity, sometimes re-inforced by a separate language or a distinct religion. An English pamphlet of 1641 noted the vulnerability of both the Stuart and Spanish Monarchies on this score: the former stood, it argued, on the brink of disintegration ‘because there was not heretofore a perfect union twixt England and Scotland, incorporating both into one body and mind'; while in the latter the same ‘reason has caused Portugal and Catalonia to revolt from the king of Spain’.62 Diversity created instability because every political organism has a distinct ‘boiling point’ – or, as Francis Bacon put it in an essay entitled ‘Of seditions and troubles’: ‘discontentments’ are ‘in the politique body like to humours in the natural, which are apt to gather a preternaturall heat, and to enflame’. When either natural disaster (such as famine) or human agency (such as war), ‘enflame’ the parts of a composite state, it becomes unstable and its ‘discontentments’ soon emerge. Not only was the political ‘boiling point’ unusually low in composite states, it was lowest on their peripheries, making them the least stable component.63
At first sight this may seem surprising: after all, global cooling, failed harvests and lethal epidemics affected the core as well as the periphery of each composite state. Indeed, cores often endured more intense government pressure – taxpayers in England and Castile paid far more than their neighbours in peripheral territories – and yet England was the last of Charles I's kingdoms to rebel against him, while (except for Andalusia) Castile did not rebel at all. The paradox has three explanations. First, the core of each state often escaped the worst consequences of war, and thus the full synergy between human and natural disasters. Thus the villages of Castile contributed soldiers and taxes to the wars, and also suffered from extreme weather, poor harvests and high food prices, but most of them remained safe from the devastation of war. Their inhabitants were rarely robbed or raped; troops seldom burnt their property or spread disease; and normally they even escaped billeting. By contrast, at a time of failed harvests and epidemics, the need to feed garrisons as well as the local population created a crisis in frontier regions like Catalonia long before enemy troops wrought further devastation. Second, several parts of Europe's composite states retained not only their own institutions and identity, but also their own economic, defensive and strategic agendas. The priorities of the local elite in Barcelona (as well as in Lima, Mexico, Manila, Naples, Palermo, Milan and Brussels) often differed from those of the imperial government in Madrid (just as the priorities of Edinburgh, Dublin, Jamestown and Boston often differed from those of the central government in London). Third and finally, diversity frequently led to ‘sub-imperialism’. Peripheral parts of each composite state often possessed extensive privileges, permanently guaranteed by the sovereign, and whenever conditions became difficult, whether through war or weather, regional elites invoked their constitutional guarantees (often termed ‘fundamental laws’, ‘charters’ and ‘constitutions’), while the central government sought to override them. Such confrontations could and did lead to rebellion. Thus in 1638, when his Scottish subjects refused to accept a new liturgy mandated by Charles I, the king told one of his ministers that ‘I would rather die than yield to those impertinent and damnable demands’ because ‘it is all one, as to yield, to be no king in a very short time’. The following year, in Spain, the count-duke of Olivares, Philip IV's chief minister, reached the end of his patience with the insistence of the Catalan elite that he must respect their ‘Constitutions’. He exclaimed: ‘By now I am nearly at my wits’ end; but I say, and I shall still be saying on my deathbed, that
if the Constitutions do not allow this, then the Devil take the Constitutions.’ In both cases, within a few months intransigence led to armed insurrection.64
Favourites
Olivares's insensitivity reflected his distinctive status: he was not only Philip IV's chief minister but also his ‘Favourite’ – a courtier who gained total control of his master's affairs. Favourites abounded across the early modern world and, like minorities and sub-imperialism, their existence made war and rebellion more common. Only the Ottoman empire made the position permanent, in the person of the Grand Vizier. Elsewhere, many Favourites gained a privileged position through the extreme youth of a new ruler: Philip IV and Tsar Alexei came to the throne aged 16; Louis XIV of France succeeded aged four (and only started to exercise his powers at 23). In each case, the monarch relied initially upon a much older man, often a member of his household as heir to the throne, to run the government for them (respectively Olivares, Boris Morozov and Jules Mazarin). Likewise, in China, the Tianqi emperor ascended the throne aged 14 and immediately surrendered his powers to one of the palace eunuchs who had helped to raise him: Wei Zhongxian. But youthful inexperience cannot explain why each ruler continued to rely on their Favourite after (often long after) they became adults, or why the institution (although not new) became so much more common during the first half of the seventeenth century than at any other time.65
The continued prominence of Favourites is all the more surprising in view of the hatred they provoked. The duke of Buckingham, who dominated policy and patronage under both King James I of Great Britain and his son Charles, was compared with Sejanus, the tyrannical adviser of the Roman Emperor Tiberius – a parallel deeply resented by Charles – and when the duke was murdered in 1628 songs, poems and pamphlets compared the murderer with the biblical David.66 The fall and suicide of the eunuch Wei the previous year likewise caused rejoicing throughout China, as did the fall of most Grand Viziers in the Ottoman empire (an event that occurred every four months, on average, in the 1620s). Similar rejoicing would no doubt have greeted the success of any of the numerous assassination plots against Richelieu; or had Tsar Alexei bowed to popular demands and surrendered Morozov to the mob that screamed for his blood in the Kremlin in 1648. According to one of Charles I's more thoughtful English critics, ‘The king's favour is tyrannie, when by that favour a man rules over them in fact, that can plead neither election nor succession to that power'; and, he concluded ruefully, if such men were truly deemed necessary, ‘a king should have more than one Favourite, [because] emulation will make them walke the fairer wayes’. Charles paid no heed.67
The rise of the Favourites in part reflected the relentless increase in the administrative burdens that weighed upon monarchs. In the aphorism of Queen Christina of Sweden: ‘If you knew how much princes have to do, you would be less keen to be one’. Copies and minutes of some 18,000 letters survive from the office of France's secretary for war between 1636 and 1642, an average of 2,500 a year; but by 1664 the total had risen above 7,000, and by 1689 above 10,000. In the Mughal empire, ‘The state records and documents pertaining to the reign of Shah Jahan (1627–57) must have numbered in the millions'; while, in China, the Shunzhi emperor complained in the 1650s that ‘The nation is vast and affairs of state are extremely complex. I have to endorse all memorials and make decisions by myself without a minute of rest.’ His son, the Kangxi emperor, read and returned 50 memorials on normal days, but when on campaign the total rose above 400. He later recalled that the amount of paperwork generated by a rebellion in 1674 forced him to stay up until midnight.68
Favourites not only reduced the bureaucratic burden on their masters, they also simplified the process of decision-making by operating outside the traditional institutional channels. Each of them sought to monopolize both the people and the information reaching their master; and to this end they promoted their own relatives and clients, excluding all potential rivals. Cardinal Richelieu built up a network of créatures, literally people he had ‘created’: men ‘who would be faithful to him and only to him without exception and without reservation’. The ‘creatures’ worked as a team: whether at court or in the provinces they exchanged information and did each other favours. They also took every opportunity to praise Richelieu to the king and made sure that their advice and proposals coincided with his, since they knew that their own political survival depended on the cardinal monopolizing Louis's confidence. Likewise, in Spain, as Philip III lay dying in 1621, his Favourite the duke of Uceda came face to face with Olivares, who enjoyed the complete confidence of the heir apparent. ‘Now everything is mine,’ Olivares gloated. ‘Everything?’ asked the doomed duke. ‘Yes, without exception,’ Olivares replied. He immediately set about replacing all Uceda's appointees with his own men.69
The reliance on Favourites promoted revolts and civil dissension for several reasons. First, rival courtiers excluded from power might lose patience and rebel, especially when the fall or death of a Favourite failed to change the status quo. Thus the duke of Híjar in 1648 began to plot against Philip IV not merely through resentment that Olivares had excluded his entire family from power because they had been allies of the duke of Uceda, but also because he had hoped to regain royal favour as soon as Olivares fell – whereas Philip now relied on the late Favourite's nephew, don Luis de Haro, who likewise excluded Híjar from court. Second, discontented subjects who hesitated to challenge the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ found it far easier to justify their disobedience by claiming that the ruler had been deceived by his wicked ministers; and the cry ‘Long live the king; down with the evil ministers!’, common in earlier rebellions, became a constant refrain in the mid-seventeenth century because the monopoly of power by a Favourite made it all the more plausible. Ming scholar-officials claimed that the orders issued by Wei Zhongxian lacked imperial sanction; opponents of Philip IV in Portugal and Catalonia claimed that they strove to free the king from the snare or satanic spell cast by Olivares; opponents of both Tsar Alexei and King Charles I demanded the sacrifice of unpopular ministers who, they claimed, had bewitched their master.
Absolutism and the ‘willingness to wink’
Circumventing the checks and balances of traditional governments encouraged ‘mission creep’ on the part of the state. As Sheilagh Ogilvie has astutely observed, the new style of absolutism introduced by monarchs and their Favourites in the mid-seventeenth century ‘affected more than taxation and warfare’:
The administrative instruments developed for these purposes could also regulate activities previously inaccessible to government, and they could offer redistributive services to a wide range of favoured groups and institutions. Resistance to these new forms of redistribution, and competition to control them, were central elements in the ‘crisis’ of the mid-seventeenth century.
Whereas the traditional bureaucracy of most early modern states contained mechanisms (however rudimentary) by which subjects could legally protest (however deferentially), the ‘alternative administrations’ invented by Favourites – whether Buckingham, Richelieu, Olivares, Morozov or Wei – brooked no challenge. The imposition of government initiatives by proclamations, often resurrecting or extending a ‘regalian right’, enforced by royal judges with instructions to stifle any opposition in the courts, left those affected without legal redress. Everywhere, ‘absolute’ rulers displayed both inflexibility and ruthlessness in enforcing all government policies – not just those related to war.70
David Cressy has explained this phenomenon brilliantly in the context of Stuart England. Whereas the officials of James I ‘were inclined to avert their gaze from local difficulties,’ he has written, those of his son Charles ‘went looking for trouble’. England, like most (if not all) early modern states, was rife with conflicts; but until the 1630s ‘these conflicts were continually being resolved or mitigated by an overriding insistence on peace’. ‘The famed “consensus” of Jacobean England consisted not in mutual agreement on issues but rather a determination to prevent
divisive issues from disrupting the body politic. It was a social rather than an ideological consensus, and it worked by winking at the gap between theory and practice.’ In the 1630s this ‘willingness to wink’ disappeared. Instead, Charles and his ministers (especially his bishops) developed a ‘remarkable gift for seeing mild irregularity as intransigence, moderate nonconformity as sectarianism, and all disagreement as refractoriness or rebellion’. Eventually, ‘in forgetting how to wink they tore the country apart’.71 By way of example, Cressy cited the insistence that women wear veils when they came to church for the first time after giving birth; the demand that ministers make the sign of the cross at every baptism; and the requirement that communion tables in the centre of the church give way to altars at the east end. Earlier generations had regarded each of these as ‘trifling matters’ or ‘things indifferent’ and so, over time, each parish had developed its own ritual to which the congregation became strongly attached. Then, in the 1630s, the central government proscribed all three former practices (along with many others) and excommunicated those who would not conform, measures that affected literally thousands of churchgoers each year. Therefore, when the need to pay for war forced Charles in 1640 to return to the traditional institutional channels and summon Parliament, he faced an avalanche of grievances that paralysed the transaction of public business.
Some Asian rulers also seem to have gone ‘looking for trouble’ on matters previously regarded as peripheral. Sultan Murad IV forbade both smoking tobacco and drinking coffee throughout the Ottoman empire and had many offenders executed. A seventeenth-century ruler of Borneo forbade his subjects to
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