ABSTRACT
Many early modern Europeans themselves perceived the century as characterised by violence. An Italian writer in the 1640s, Fulvio Testi, noted that ‘this is the century of the soldiers’. The Thirty Years War, a political and religious conflict, devastated many parts of central Europe and involved most European political states. The Spanish monarchy, which had dominated Europe from the middle of the sixteenth century partly due to the mineral resources of the Americas and the huge loans these allowed it to secure, was gradually replaced by the French monarchy as the dominant European power from the 1640s onwards. Europe remained a deeply divided society on a religious level in the wake of the sixteenth-century Reformation: Catholic and Protestant rulers presided over Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim minorities. It is important to note that no sourcebook can ever hope to cover every topic, and there is considerable space for more work on marginal cultures and ideas.
