Europe 1700

The turn of the 17th century was sandwiched between the Great Turkish War (1683–97), which effectively ended Ottoman expansion into Europe, and the Great Northern War (1700–21), through which Russia wrested control of the Baltic from Sweden, and effectively replaced the Ottomans as Europe’s threat to the east. The nightmare scenario (for Protestant Europe and the Habsburgs) of a Bourbon union of the French and Spanish Crowns would be averted by the War of the Spanish Succession (1700–13). The Dutch emerged from their long wars of independence as the latest masters of global trade, even supplying the English with a two-for-one deal on Protestant monarchs with William and Mary’s accession in 1689. The German states of the Holy Roman Empire recovered slowly from the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), but a shrewd princeling, the Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia gained recognition as a kingdom for Prussia (1701), a future great power, in return for military backing to the French.

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