"The seventeenth century is the period when Europe, shattered in its political and religious ideas by the Reformation, reconstructed its political system upon the principle of territorialism under the rule of absolute monarchs. It opens with Henry IV, it closes with Peter the Great. It reaches its climax in Louis XIV and the Great Elector. It is therefore the century in which the principal European States took the form, and acquired the position in Europe, which they have held more or less up to the present time. A century in which France takes the lead in European affairs, and enters on a course of embittered rivalry with Germany, in which England assumes a position of first importance in the affairs of Europe, in which the Emperor, ousted from all effective control over German politics, finds the true centre of his power on the Danube, in which Prussia becomes the dominant state in north Germany, in which Russia begins to drive in the Turkish outposts on the Pruth and the Euxine – a century, in short, which saw the birth of the Franco-German Question and of the Eastern Question..." - Henry Offley Wakeman
Contents: Europe at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century. France under Henry IV. The Counter-Reformation and Religious Troubles in Germany. The Beginning of the Thirty Years' War. The Thirty Years' War from the Peace of Lübeck to the Peace of Prague. The Aggrandisement of France. France under Richelieu and Mazarin. Northern Europe to the Treaty of Oliva. Louis XIV and Colbert. Louis XIV and the United Provinces. Louis XIV and William III, 1672-1698. South-Eastern Europe. The Northern Nations from the Treaty of Oliva to the Peace of Utrecht, 1660-1715. The Partition Treaties and the Grand Alliance. The War of the Spanish Succession and the Death of Louis XIV.
