The Business of War in Europe, 1000–1600 111increases were practically impossible. Indeed, existing burdens pro
voked economic retrogression. Diminished royal income meant
smaller and weaker armies. After the mid-seventeenth century, Spain
fell behind France, where Louis XIV’s intendants, presiding over a
much larger population, were able to find means to pay for an army
that soon outstripped anything Spanish resources could support.^42
Eventually, therefore, fiscal limitations asserted their sovereign
power over the regal majesty of even the greatest king of Europe. One
may well ask why? Why should the command and will of Philip II and
his ministers not have prevailed over the will of the bankers who made
him loans? In Asian lands, where monarchs ruled over territories less
extensive than those that obeyed Philip II’s commands, no cobweb of
credit spun by calculating bankers restrained the will of the rulers or
limited their military initiatives. The reason was that in Asia, when
goods and services were needed to put an army in the field, the rulers’
commands sufficed to mobilize whatever was, or could be, mobilized.
If adequate supplies were not forthcoming from taxes and free market
sale to the government, officials felt free to seize the goods and money
of the subject populations—insofar as agents of public authority could
lay hands on such resources and convert them into forms useful for
military enterprise or any other public undertaking that was in view.
Often, as we saw in the case of China, a slightly more subtle ap
proach was preferred. By setting a “fair price” below that at which
possessors of the goods in question were willing to sell, a kind of
justice could be done all round—or so public authorities and the great
majority of the subject population felt. An administered “just price”
effectively trimmed back the “unjust” gains unscrupulous merchants
and engrossers gathered into their hands. Government actions
thereby effectually inhibited development of large-scale private finan
cial and commercial activity. But under such regimes, an artisan levelSpanish French
1630s 300,000 150,000
1650s 100,000 100,000
1670s 70,000 120,000
1700s 50,000 400,000
Other armies lagged far behind in size even when technically abreast of French and
Spanish. The Dutch army, for example, numbered only about 50,000 in the 1630s and
100,000 in the 1700s. In the north, the Swedes counted 45,000 in the 1630s, 100,000
in the 1700s; Russia, 35,000 in the 1630s, 170,000 in the 1700s. Ibid. Parker’s figure
for the French army in the first decade of the eighteenth century is high, however.
Other authorities give Louis XIV only 300,000 men in the War of the Spanish Succes
sion. See below, chap. 4.
- According to Parker, “The ‘Military Revolution’ 1550–1660,” p. 206, the num
bers of men in the Spanish and French armies varied as follows: