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Eastern Absolutism: Russia, Prussia & Austria

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The eastern bargain

Western absolutism grew where towns, trade and a commercial middle class were strong. Eastern Europe had few large towns and a weak bourgeoisie, and after the fourteenth century the peasantry there was pushed into serfdom rather than out of it, as grain exports to the west made bound labor profitable. The result was a different bargain: eastern monarchs won political authority — taxation, an army, foreign policy — by conceding to nobles near-total control over their peasants. The state grew strong at the top and the countryside grew more unfree, which is the structural fact behind everything else in this lesson.

Russia: Peter the Great

Peter I (r. 1682–1725) westernized in order to compete militarily. He toured western Europe incognito, built a navy, imposed western dress and shaved beards, created the Table of Ranks making noble status depend on state service rather than birth, subordinated the Orthodox Church to a Holy Synod, and founded St. Petersburg on conquered Baltic marshland at enormous human cost as a "window on the west." Victory over Sweden at Poltava (1709) made Russia a great power. Every reform served the army and the state; serfdom was tightened, not loosened, to pay for it.

Prussia and Austria

Prussia was scattered, poor and indefensible, and the Hohenzollerns turned that weakness into a specialization. Frederick William, the Great Elector, traded noble tax exemption and authority over serfs for the right to maintain a standing army; Frederick William I built the army to the fourth largest in Europe from a population ranked thirteenth and bound the Junker nobility to it as an officer corps; Frederick II used it to seize Silesia in 1740. Austria faced the opposite problem — not too little territory but too much variety. The Habsburgs ruled Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Poles and Italians under separate laws, so the Pragmatic Sanction securing Maria Theresa’s succession, and her subsequent centralizing reforms, were attempts to make a state out of a dynasty’s collection of crowns.

Tip

Mirabeau’s line — that Prussia is not a state with an army but an army with a state — is the compression to remember. Around 80% of revenue went to the military, the cantonal system tied recruitment to noble estates, and Junkers officered the regiments whose peasants they also owned. Army, aristocracy and agriculture were one interlocking system.

Worked example

Briefly explain ONE reason absolutism in eastern Europe differed from absolutism in France, and give ONE example of the bargain between ruler and nobility.

  1. 1.Identify the structural difference: eastern Europe lacked the large towns and commercial middle class that gave western monarchs an alternative power base and revenue source.
  2. 2.State the consequence: eastern rulers had to obtain noble cooperation rather than balance nobles against townsmen.
  3. 3.Name the terms of the trade in concrete institutional form.
  4. 4.Give the clearest instance — the Hohenzollerns securing a standing army by conceding tax exemption and authority over serfs to the Junkers.
Answer: Eastern absolutism differed because eastern Europe had few large towns and a weak commercial middle class, so rulers could not play townsmen against nobles as western monarchs did and had instead to buy noble cooperation. The bargain was explicit in Prussia: the Great Elector obtained the right to maintain a standing army and collect the taxes to fund it by confirming Junker exemption from taxation and their near-absolute authority over their serfs, tying the nobility to the state as its officer corps while tightening serfdom in the countryside.
Checkpoint

Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks was significant because it —

Checkpoint

The central problem facing the Habsburg monarchy in the eighteenth century was —

Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.

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