Three Absolutisms Built on Serfdom: Prussia, Austria, Russia

The idea

The exam's first band asks how absolutism formed in Austria and Prussia and how Russia was westernized, and the anchor's answer to all three is one bargain. Louis XIV had beaten and then bought his nobles; the eastern monarchs could not afford either, so they paid their nobles in peasants. Prussia did it first and most cleanly. The Great Elector's Compromise of sixteen fifty-three gave the crown taxes for a standing army and law without noble oversight, and gave the nobles a monopoly of land and total control of their peasants, serfdom made permanent. From that bargain came the tax-and-war office that collected at twice French efficiency, the royal title of seventeen-oh-one, and the Soldier-King's army of eighty-three thousand with conscription and reserves, an army with a country. Austria made the same bargain unevenly, because it ruled three kingdoms. In Bohemia the crown took control and the nobles took the robot, three days a week of unpaid peasant labor; in Hungary the nobles resisted; and the whole structure stood on a frontier where the Ottomans reached Vienna in sixteen eighty-three, an empire on three continents, before the Holy League drove them south. After Westphalia the Empire meant nothing and Habsburg meant Austrian. Russia made the bargain last and most completely. Serfdom by law in sixteen forty-nine bound peasants to the soil in a land-rich, labor-poor country; Peter then bound the nobles too, forcing Western dress and schooling on them and, after seventeen twenty-two, requiring every male noble to serve as officer or official under the Table of Ranks, a ladder that the witness says a commoner could climb by merit. The army took two-thirds of revenue and one serf in twenty for life; St. Petersburg rose on forced labor; and the Great Northern War, sealed at Nystad in seventeen twenty-one, made Russia the Baltic's master and a European power six times Ivan IV's size. Spain is the anchor's counter-case: a monarchy that could not bargain with its nobles, lost Portugal in sixteen forty and its dynasty in seventeen hundred. The lesson the anchor draws is that absolutism was not one thing. It was a set of compromises, and in the east the compromise was serfdom.