Jeroen Duindam

Vienna and Versailles : the courts of Europe's dynastic rivals, 1550-1780

List of illustrations List of tables Acknowledgements Abbreviations Part I. Prelude: 1. Introduction 2. The household on the eve of the early modern age Part II. Contours: 3. Numbers and costs 4. Status and income Part III. Court Life: 5. A calendar of court life 6. Ceremony and order at court: an unending pursuit Part IV. Power: 7. Levels and forms of power at court 8. The court as focus of the realm Part V. Epilogue: 9. Conclusions and conjectures Manuscript sources Printed sources Bibliography Index.

Pre-modern Power Elites: Princes, Courts, Intermediaries

This chapter provides a global view of pre-modern elites. Dynastic rule predominates in history; it molded the shape of elites worldwide. Rulers’ offspring held elite status, and their alliances created a second elite. In addition to these two core groups, various types of servants can be found in most domains: domestics, administrators, soldiers, and spiritual leaders. Which forms of recruitment and legitimization can be found for these functional elites? Is it possible to establish regional typologies? How did these elites relate to the ruler, and how did their interaction take shape? How powerful were rulers, often styled as omnipotent? What tied the intermediary elites to the court, and what alienated them? The chapter closes with a brief comparison of pre-modern and modern political practices.

Prince, Pen, and Sword: Eurasian Perspectives

This book on the relationship between rulers and elites in Eurasian polities started out as an attempt to bridge the gap between two contradictory but equally valid impulses. All history is regional history: scholars need languages and contexts to make sense of the past. At the same time, regional compartmentalization turns history into a dead-end street: only more comprehensive views can show the specificity of regions as well as their multiple connections. The authors were trained as regional specialists, and haveworkedwith primary sources in the languages and scripts connected to their areas of expertise. Yet at the same time, they noticed the limitations of the area perspective, and subscribe, in one way or another, to the current challenge to move towards a more global understanding of history. We share these conflicting loyalties with many other scholars, and over the last four decades several paradigms took shape to deal with the challenge of combining specialized research with the global horizon. The introduction considered some of these paradigms and outlined our preliminary choices. Comparison, whether regional or global, defines themes and questions that are equally relevant in different settings and examines the variety in outcomes with the intention to make sense of divergences. It takes diversity for granted but looks for patterns in human behaviour. One of the main challenges facing comparative historians is to define questions that do not accept as standard the specific experiences of one region or period; this problem is relevant for all historians, but it becomes painfully explicit in the case of comparatists. Secondly, it is particularly difficult for comparative historians to acquire an equal basis of knowledge and materials for all areas they include: extension of scope will necessarily reduce depth of the comparison. There is a third complication: the availability and the nature of source materials vary greatly from region to region. The problem, therefore, is more fundamental than the researchers’ ability to master languages or find enough time to read materials. With a specific theme and carefully crafted set of questions, however, global comparison can be a powerful intellectual tool and a necessary safeguard against cultural parochialism.

The Dynastic Centre and the Provinces

The dynastic centre and the provinces were linked by agents and ritual occasions. This book includes contributions by specialists examining these connections in late imperial China, early modern Europe, and the Ottoman empire, suggesting important revisions and an agenda for comparison. This title is available online in its entirety in Open Access

Law and Empire

Law and Empire relates the principles of legal thinking in Chinese, Islamic, and European contexts to practices of lawmaking and adjudication. It shows how legal procedure and legal thinking could be used in strikingly different ways.

The Habsburg Court in Vienna: Kaiserhof or Reichshof?

other travellers noticed the busy traffic of nobles around the emperor’s court, ranking it high among europe’s courts, and indeed we find series of booklets describing all emperors from roman to habsburg times. Yet only rarely was Vienna presented as the ‘capital’ of germany, and Patin’s description of the city as europe’s leading metropolis stands as a singular exception.2 There was little ground for his assessment. neither in population, nor in economic importance did early modern Vienna approach Paris or London. The political centrality of these cities in their realms,

Early Modern Europe: Beyond the Strictures of Modernization and National Historiography

This paper examines the particulars of ‘early modern’ as well as ‘European’ political history in terms of chronological and spatial divides. Most political historians of early modern Europe and its component states are far removed from classic teleological approaches based on national state formation and modernization. On the whole, however, a pragmatic national orientation of research based on the proximity of sources and the language capabilities of researchers remains strong, even if it is combined with transnational conceptual gestures. Moreover, the demands of specialized historical research lead to concentration on relatively brief periods: only rarely do we find research reaching from the sixteenth into the eighteenth century. In consequence, while well-worn conventional divides in time as well as in space have few staunch advocates, they tenaciously remain in place. The political history of European states, full of untested reputations, needs a comparative perspective. This will work only if it is based on symmetrical comparison and analysis of primary sources: comparison founded on secondary literature threatens to reinforce national clichés. European history, finally, finds its place only in contrast with other variants of global history. A global comparative perspective presents daunting challenges for researchers, but it is an inevitable and necessary component of the reassessment of European history, modernization, and period labels.