The Story Of Mankind - Part 23

The Story of Mankind was written and illustrated by Dutch-American journalist, professor, and author Hendrik Willem van Loon and published in 1921. In 1922, it was the first book to be awarded the Newbery Medal for its outstanding contribution to children's literature.

Transcript

This is part 23 of the story of mankind by Hendrik van Loon.

The balance of power.

In France,

On the other hand,

The divine right of kings continued with greater pomp and splendor than ever before,

And the ambition of the ruler was only tempered by the newly invented law of the balance of power.

As a contrast to the previous chapter,

Let me tell you what happened in France during the years when the English people were fighting for their liberty.

The happy combination of the right man in the right country at the right moment is very rare in history.

Louis XIV was a realization of this ideal,

As far as France was concerned,

But the rest of Europe would have been happier without him.

The country over which the young king was called to rule was the most populous and the most brilliant nation of that day.

Louis came to the throne when Mazarin and Richelieu,

The two great cardinals,

Had just hammered the ancient French kingdom into the most strongly centralized state of the 17th century.

He was himself a man of extraordinary ability.

We,

The people of the 20th century,

Are still surrounded by the memories of the glorious age of the Sun King.

Our social life is based upon the perfection of manners and the elegance of expression attained at the court of Louis.

In international and diplomatic relations,

French is still the official language of diplomacy and international gatherings,

Because two centuries ago it reached a Polish elegance and the purity of expression which no other tongue had yet been able to equal.

The theatre of King Louis still teaches us lessons which we are only too slow in learning.

During his reign,

The French Academy,

An invention of Richelieu,

Came to occupy a position in the world of letters,

Which other countries have flattered by their imitation.

We might continue the list for many pages.

It is no matter of mere chance that our modern bill of fare is printed in French.

The very difficult art of decent cooking,

One of the highest expressions of civilization,

Was first practiced for the benefit of the great monarch.

The age of Louis XIV was a time of splendor and grace which can still teach us a lot.

Unfortunately,

This brilliant picture has another side which was far less encouraging.

Glory abroad too often means misery at home,

And France was no exception to this rule.

Louis XIV succeeded his father in the year 1643.

He died in the year 1715.

That means that the government of France was in the hands of a single man for 72 years,

Almost two whole generations.

It will be well to get a firm grasp of this idea.

One single man.

Louis was the first of a long list of monarchs who in many countries established that particular form of highly efficient autocracy which we call enlightened despotism.

He did not like kings who merely played at being rulers and turned official affairs into a pleasant picnic.

The kings of that enlightened age worked harder than any of their subjects.

They got up earlier and went to bed later than everyone else,

And felt their divine responsibility quite as strongly as their divine right which allowed them to rule without consulting their subjects.

Of course,

The king could not attend to everything in person.

He was obliged to surround himself with a few helpers and counselors,

One or two generals,

Some experts upon foreign politics,

A few clever financiers,

And economists would do for this purpose.

But these dignitaries could act only through their sovereign.

They had no individual existence.

To the mass of the people,

The sovereign actually represented his own sacred person,

The government of their country.

The glory of the common fatherland became the glory of a single dynasty.

It meant the exact opposite of our own American ideal.

France was ruled of and by and for the House of Bourbon.

The disadvantages of such a system are clear.

The king grew to be everything.

Everybody else grew to be nothing at all.

The old and useful nobility was gradually forced to give up its former shares in the government of the provinces.

A little royal bureaucrat,

His fingers splashed with ink,

Sitting behind the greenish windows of a government building in faraway Paris,

Now performed a task which a hundred years before had been the duty of the feudal lord.

The feudal lord,

Deprived of all work,

Moved to Paris to amuse himself as best he could at the court.

Soon his estates began to suffer from that very dangerous economic sickness,

Known as absentee landlordism.

Within a single generation,

The industrious and useful feudal administrators had become the well-mannered but quite useless loafers of the court of the Versailles.

Louis was ten years old when the Peace of Westphalia was concluded and the House of Habsburg,

As a result of the Thirty Years' War,

Lost its predominant position in Europe.

It was inevitable that a man with his ambition should use so favorable a moment to gain for his own dynasty the honors which had formerly been held by the Habsburgs.

In the year 1660,

Louis had married Maria Theresa,

Daughter of the King of Spain.

Soon afterward,

His father-in-law Philip IV,

One of the half-witted Spanish Habsburg,

Died.

At once,

Louis claimed the Spanish Netherlands,

Or Belgium,

As part of his wife's dowry.

Such an acquisition would have been disastrous for the peace of Europe,

And would have threatened the safety of the Protestant states.

Under the leadership of Jan de Wit,

Rad pensionaris of foreign minister of the United Seven Netherlands,

The First Great International Alliance,

The Triple Alliance of Sweden,

England and Holland,

Of the year 1661,

Was concluded.

It did not last long.

With money and fair promises,

Louis bought up both King Charles and the Swedish estates.

Holland was betrayed by her allies,

And was left to her own fate.

In the year 1672,

The French invaded the Low Countries.

They marched to the heart of the country.

For a second time,

The dikes were opened and the royal sun of France set amidst the mud of the Dutch marshes.

The Peace of Nijmegen,

Which was concluded in 1678,

Settled nothing but merely anticipated another war.

A second war of aggression from 1689 to 1697,

Ending with the Peace of Ryswick,

Also failed to give Louis that position in the affairs of Europe to which he aspired.

His old enemy,

Jan de Wit,

Had been murdered by the Dutch rabble,

But his successor,

William III,

Whom you met in the last chapter,

Had checkmated all efforts of Louis to make France the ruler of Europe.

The great war for the Spanish succession began in the year 1701,

Immediately after the death of Charles II,

The last of the Spanish Habsburgs,

And ended in 1713 by the Peace of Utrecht.

Remained equally undecided,

But it had ruined the treasury of Louis.

On land the French king had been victorious,

But the navies of England and Holland had spoiled all hope for an ultimate French victory.

Besides,

The long struggle had given birth to a new and fundamental principle of international politics,

Which thereafter made it impossible for one single nation to rule the whole of Europe,

Or the whole of the world for any length of time.

That was the so-called balance of power.

It was not a written law,

But for three centuries it has been obeyed as closely as are the laws of nature.

The people who originated the idea maintained that Europe,

In its nationalistic stage of development,

Could only survive when there should be an absolute balance of the many conflicting interests of the entire continent.

No single power or single dynasty must ever be allowed to dominate the others.

During the Thirty Years' War,

The Habsburgs had been the victims of the application of this law.

They,

However,

Had been unconspicuous victims.

The issues during that struggle were so cladded in a haze of religious strife that we do not get a very clear view of the main tendencies of that great conflict.

But from that time on,

We begin to see how cold economic considerations and calculations prevail in all matters of international importance.

We discover the development of a new type of statesman,

The statesman with the personal feelings of the slide rule and the cash register.

Jan De Witt was the first successful exponent of this new school of politics.

William III was the first great pupil.

And Louis XIV,

With all his fame and glory,

Was the first conscious victim.

There have been many others since.

The Rise of Russia.

The story of the mysterious Muscovite Empire,

Which suddenly burst upon the grand political stage of Europe.

In the year 1492,

As you know,

Columbus discovered America.

Early in the year,

A Tyrolese by the name of Schnaps,

Traveling as the head of a scientific expedition for the Archbishop of Tyrol,

And provided with the best letters of introduction and excellent credit,

Tried to reach the mythical town of Moscow.

He did not succeed.

When he reached the frontiers of his vast Muscovite state,

Which was vaguely supposed to exist in the extreme eastern part of Europe,

He was firmly turned back.

No foreigners were wanted.

And Schnaps went to visit a heathen Turk in Constantinople,

In order that he might have something to report to his clerical master when he came back from his explorations.

Sixty-one years later,

Richard Chancellor,

Trying to discover the northeastern passage to the Indies,

And blown by an ill wind into the White Sea,

Reached the mouth of the Dvina and found the Muscovite village of Kolmogory,

A few years from the spot where in the 1584s the town of Archangel was founded.

This time the foreign visitors were requested to come to Moscow and show themselves to the Grand Duke.

They went and returned to England with the first commercial treaty ever concluded between Russia and the Western world.

Other nations soon followed,

And something became known of this mysterious land.

Geographically,

Russia is a vast plain.

The Ural mountains are low and form no barrier against invaders.

The rivers are broad but often shallow.

It was an ideal territory for nomads.

While the Roman Empire was founded,

Grew in power and disappeared again.

Slavic tribes,

Who had long since left their homes in Central Asia,

Wandered aimlessly through the forests and plains of the region between the Dniester and the Dnieper rivers.

The Greeks had sometimes met these Slavs,

And a few travelers of the 3rd and 4th centuries mentioned them.

Otherwise they were as little known as were the Nevada Indians in the year 1800.

Unfortunately for the peace of these primitive people,

A very convenient trade route ran through their country.

This was the main road from Northern Europe to Constantinople.

It followed the coast of the Baltic until the Neva was reached.

Then it crossed Lake Lodoga and went southward along the Volkhov river,

Then through Lake Ilmen and up the small Lovat river.

There was a short portage until the Dnieper was reached,

Then down the Dnieper into the Black Sea.

The Norsemen knew of this road at a very early date.

In the 9th century they began to settle in Northern Russia,

Just as other Norsemen were laying the foundation for independent states in Germany and France.

But in the year 862,

Three Norsemen brothers crossed the Baltic and founded three small dynasties.

Of the three brothers,

Only one,

Rurik,

Lived for a number of years.

He took possession of the territory of his brothers,

And 20 years after the arrival of the first Norsemen,

A Slavic state had been established with Kiev as its capital.

From Kiev to the Black Sea is a short distance.

Soon the existence of an organized Slavic state became known in Constantinople.

This meant a new field for the zealous missionaries of the Christian faith.

Byzantine monks followed the Dnieper on their way northward and soon reached the heart of Russia.

They found the people worshipping strange gods,

Who were supposed to dwell in woods and rivers and in mountain caves.

They taught them the story of Jesus.

There was no competition from the side of the Roman missionaries.

These good men were too busy educating the heathen Teutons to bother about the distant Slavs.

Hence Russia received its religion and its alphabet and its first ideas of art and architecture from the Byzantine monks,

And,

As the Byzantine Empire had become very oriental and had lost many of its European traits,

The Russians suffered in consequence.

Politically speaking,

These new states of the Great Russian Plains did not fare well.

It was the Norse habit to divide every inheritance equally among all the sons.

No sooner had a small state been founded,

But it was broken up among eight or nine heirs,

Who in turn left their territory to an ever-increasing number of descendants.

It was inevitable that these small,

Competing states should quarrel among themselves.

Anarchy was the order of the day.

And when the red glow of the eastern horizon told the people of the threatened invasion of a savage Asiatic tribe,

The little states were too weak and too divided to render any sort of defense against this terrible enemy.

It was in the year 1224 that the first great Tartar invasion took place,

And the hordes of Genghis Khan,

The conqueror of China,

Bokhara,

Tashkent,

And Turkestan made their first appearance in the West.

The Slavic armies were beaten near the Kalka River,

And Russia was at the mercy of the Mongolians.

Just as suddenly as they had come,

They disappeared.

Thirteen years later,

In 1237,

However,

They returned.

In less than five years,

They conquered every part of the vast Russian plains.

Until the year 1380,

When Dmitry Donskoy,

Grand Duke of Moscow,

Beat them on the plains of Kulikovo.

The Tartars were the masters of the Russian people.

All in all,

It took the Russians two centuries to deliver themselves from this yoke.

For a yoke it was,

And a most offensive and objectionable one.

It turned the Slavic peasants into miserable slaves.

No Russian could hope to survive unless he was willing to creep before an Asian man who sat in a tent somewhere,

In the heart of the steppes of southern Russia,

And spat at him.

It deprived the mass of the people of all feelings of honor and independence.

It made hunger and misery and maltreatment and personally abused the normal state of human existence.

Until at last the average Russian,

Were he peasant or nobleman,

Went about his business like a neglected dog,

Who has been beaten so often that his spirit had been broken,

And he dared not wag his tail without permission.

There was no escape.

The horsemen of the Tartar Khan were fast and merciless.

The endless prairie did not give a man a chance to cross into the safe territory of his neighbor.

He must keep quiet,

And bear what his Asian master decided to inflict upon him,

Or run the risk of death.

Of course,

Europe might have interfered.

But Europe was engaged upon business of its own,

Fighting the quarrels between the Pope and the Emperor,

Or surpassing this or that or the other heresy.

And so Europe left the Slav to his fate,

And forced him to work out of his own salvation.

The final savior of Russia was one of the many small states,

Founded by the early Norse rulers.

It was situated in the heart of the Russian plain.

Its capital,

Moscow,

Was upon a steep hill on the banks of the Moskva River.

This little principality,

By dint of pleasing the Tartar,

When it was necessary to please,

And opposing him,

When it was safe to do so,

Had,

During the middle of the 14th century,

Made itself the leader of a new national life.

It must be remembered that the Tartars were wholly deficient in constructive political ability.

They could only destroy.

Their chief aim in conquering new territories was to obtain revenue.

To get this revenue in the form of taxes,

It was necessary to allow certain remnants of the old political organization to continue.

Hence there were many little towns,

Surviving by the grace of the Great Khan,

That they might act as tax-gatherers,

And rob their neighbors for the benefit of the Tartar treasury.

The state of Moscow,

Growing fat at the expense of the surrounding territory,

Finally became strong enough to risk open rebellion against its masters,

The Tartars.

It was successful,

And its fame as the leader in the cause of Russian independence made Moscow the natural center for all those who still believed in a better future for the Slavic race.

In the year 1458,

Constantinople was taken by the Turks.

Ten years later,

Under the rule of Ivan III,

Moscow informed the western world that the Slavic state laid claim to the worldly and spiritual inheritance of the lost Byzantine Empire,

And such traditions of the Roman Empire as had survived in Constantinople.

A generation afterwards,

Under Ivan the Terrible,

The Grand Dukes of Moscow were strong enough to adapt the title of Caesar,

Or Tsar,

And to demand recognition by the western powers of Europe.

In the year 1598,

With Theodor I,

The old Muscovite dynasty,

Descendants of the original Norseman Rurik,

Came to an end.

For the next seven years,

A Tartar half-breed by the name of Boris Godunov reigned as Tsar.

It was during this period that the future destiny of the large masses of the Russian people was decided.

This empire was rich in land,

But very poor in money.

There was no trade,

And there were no factories.

Its few cities were dirty villages.

It was composed of a strong central government and a vast number of illiterate peasants.

The government,

A mixture of Slavic,

Norse,

Byzantine,

And Tartar influences,

Recognized nothing beyond the interests of the state.

To defend this state,

It needed an army.

To gather the taxes,

Which were necessary to pay the soldiers,

It needed civil servants.

To pay these many officials,

It needed land.

In the vast wilderness on the east and the west,

There was a sufficient supply of this commodity.

But land without a few laborers to till the fields and tend the cattle has no value.

Therefore,

The old nomadic peasants were robbed of one privilege after the other,

Until finally,

During the first year of the 16th century,

They were formally made a part of the soil upon which they lived.

The Russian peasants ceased to be free men.

They became serfs or slaves,

And they remained serfs until the year 1861,

When their fate had become so terrible that they were beginning to die out.

In the 17th century,

This new state with its growing territory,

Which was spreading quickly into Siberia,

Had become a force with which the rest of Europe was obliged to reckon.

In 1618,

After the death of Boris Godunov,

The Russian nobles had elected one of their own to be Tsar.

He was Michael,

The son of Fyodor,

Of the Moscow family of Romanov,

Who lived in a little house just outside the Kremlin.

In the year 1672,

His great-grandson,

Peter,

The son of another Fyodor,

Was born.

When the child was ten years old,

His step-sister,

Sophia,

Took possession of the Russian throne.

The little boy was allowed to spend his days in the suburbs of the national capital,

Where the foreigners lived,

Surrounded by Scotch barkeeps,

Dutch traders,

Swiss apothecaries,

Italian barbers,

French dancing teachers and German schoolmasters.

The young prince obtained a first but rather extraordinary impression of that faraway and mysterious Europe,

Where things were done differently.

When he was seventeen years old,

He suddenly pushed sister Sophia from the throne.

Peter himself became the ruler of Russia.

He was not contended with being the Tsar of a semi-barbarous and half-Asiatic people.

He must be the sovereign head of a civilized nation.

To change Russia overnight from a Byzantine Tartar state into a European empire was no small undertaking.

It needed strong hands and a capable head.

Peter possessed both.

In the year 1698,

The great operation of grafting modern Europe upon ancient Russia was performed.

The patient did not die,

But he never got over the shock,

As the events of the last five years have shown very plainly.

Russia vs Sweden Russia and Sweden fight many wars to decide who shall be the leading power of north-eastern Europe.

In the year 1698,

Tsar Peter set forth upon his first voyage to western Europe.

He traveled by way of Berlin and went to Holland and to England.

As a child he had almost been drowned sailing a homemade boat in the duck pond of his father's country home.

This passion for water remained with him to the end of his life.

In a practical way,

It showed itself in his wish to give his landlocked domains access to the open sea.

While the unpopular and harsh young ruler was away from home,

The friends of the old Russian ways in Moscow set to work to undo all his reforms.

A sudden rebellion among his lifeguards,

The Streltsy regiment,

Forced Peter to hasten home by the fast mail.

He appointed himself executioner-in-chief,

And the Streltsy were hanged and quartered and killed to the last man.

Sister Sophia,

Who had been the head of the rebellion,

Was locked up in a cloister,

And the rule of Peter began in earnest.

The scene was repeated in the year 1716,

When Peter had gone on his second western trip.

That time the reactionaries followed the leadership of Peter's half-witted son,

Alexis.

Again the Tsar returned in great haste.

Alexis was beaten to death in his prison cell,

And the friends of the old-fashioned Byzantine ways marched thousands of jewelry miles to their final destination in the Siberian lead mines.

After that,

No further outbreaks of popular discontent took place.

Until the time of his death,

Peter could reform in peace.

It is not easy to give you a list of his reforms in chronological order.

The Tsar worked with furious haste.

He followed no system.

He issued his decrees with such rapidity that it is difficult to keep count.

Peter seemed to feel that everything that had ever happened before was entirely wrong.

The whole of Russia,

Therefore,

Must be changed within the shortest possible time.

When he died,

He left behind a well-trained army of 200,

000 men and a navy of 50 ships.

The old system of government had been abolished overnight.

The Duma,

Or convention of nobles,

Had been dismissed,

And in its stead,

The Tsar had surrounded himself with an advisory board of state officials,

Called the Senate.

Russia was divided into eight large governments or provinces.

Roads were constructed.

Towns were built.

Industries were created,

Whatever it pleased the Tsar,

Without any regard for the presence of raw materials.

Canals were dug and mines were opened in the mountains of the East.

In this land of illiterates,

Schools were founded and establishments of higher learning,

Together with universities and hospitals,

And professional schools.

Dutch naval engineers and tradesmen and artisans from all over the world were encouraged to move to Russia.

Printing shops were established,

But all books must be first read by the imperial censors.

The duties of each class of society were carefully written down in a new law,

And the entire system of civil and criminal laws was gathered into a series of printed volumes.

The old Russian costumes were abolished by imperial decree,

And policemen,

Armed with scissors,

Watching all the country roads,

Changed the long-haired Russian mugings suddenly into a pleasing imitation of the smooth-shaven West,

Europeans.

In religious matters,

The Tsar tolerated no division of power.

There must be no chance of a rivalry between an emperor and a pope,

As had happened in Europe.

In the year 1721,

Peter made himself head of the Russian Church.

The Patriarchate of Moscow was abolished,

And the Holy Synod made its appearance as the highest source of authority in all manners of the established Church.

Since,

However,

These min reforms could not be successful while the old Russian elements had a rallying point in the town of Moscow,

Peter decided to move his government to a new capital.

Amidst the unhealthy marshes of the Baltic Sea,

The Tsar built this new city.

He began to reclaim the land in the year 1703.

Forty thousand peasants worked for years to lay the foundations for this imperial city.

The Swedes attacked Peter and tried to destroy his town,

And illness and misery killed tens of thousands of the peasants.

But the work was continued,

Winter and summer,

And the ready-made town soon began to grow.

In the year 1712,

It was officially declared to be the imperial residence.

A dozen years later,

It had 17,

000 inhabitants.

Twice a year the whole city was flooded by the Neva,

But the terrific willpower of the Tsar created dikes and canals,

And the floods ceased to do harm.

When Peter died in 1725,

He was the owner of the largest city in Northern Europe.

Of course,

This sudden growth of so dangerous a rival had been a source of great worry for all neighbors.

From his side,

Peter had watched with interest the many adventures of the Baltic rival,

The Kingdom of Sweden.

In the year 1654,

Christina,

The only daughter of Gustavus Adolphus,

The hero of the Thirty Years' War,

Had renounced the throne and had gone to Rome to end her days as a devout Catholic.

A Protestant nephew of Gustavus Adolphus had succeeded the last queen of the House of Vasa.

Under Charles X and Charles XI,

The new dynasty had brought Sweden to its highest point of development.

But in 1697,

Charles XI died suddenly and was succeeded by a boy of 15,

Charles XII.

This was the moment for which many of the northern states had waited.

During the great religious wars of the 17th century,

Sweden had grown at the expense of her neighbors.

The time had come,

So the owners thought,

To balance the account.

At once,

War broke out between Russia,

Poland,

Denmark,

And Saxony on the one side,

And Sweden on the other.

The raw and untrained armies of Peter were disastrously beaten by Charles in the famous Battle of Narva in November of the year 1700.

Then Charles,

One of the most interesting military geniuses of that century,

Turned against his other enemy,

And for nine years he hacked and burned his way through the villages and cities of Poland,

Saxony,

Denmark,

And the Baltic provinces,

While Peter drilled and trained his soldiers in distant Russia.

As a result,

In the year 1709,

In the Battle of Poltava,

The Muscovites destroyed an exhausted army of Sweden.

Charles continued to be a highly picturesque figure,

A wonderful hero of romance,

But in his vain attempt to have his revenge,

He ruined his own country.

In the year 1718,

He was accidentally killed or assassinated,

We do not know which.

And when peace was made in 1721,

In the town of Nidstadt,

Sweden had lost all of her former Baltic possessions,

Except Finland.

The new Russian state created by Peter had become the leading power of Northern Europe,

But already a new rival was on the way.

The Prussian state was taking shape.

Reviews

Even though I'm interested in the history, I always fall asleep. Thank you

Loved it, I am Dutch myself and live in The Netherlands 🇳🇱👌❤️😍