reasserted orthodoxies—in Europe the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, in
Eurasia energized forms of Islam and Buddhism. Apocalyptic thought infused
Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism in these centuries. European monarchs capital-
ized on religious dissent by establishing national churches; Ottoman sultans
patronized both Sunni and SufiIslam to appeal across their diverse population
and made Safavid Shiism a rallying cry for militant conquest. In the Polish-
Lithuanian lands, Protestantism made great inroads, as did the Counter-
Reformation, pushing some Ukrainian and Belarus’an Orthodox into Union
with the Vatican (Brest 1596). Russia was affected by all these heady trends.
Apocalyptic thought prevailed in sixteenth-century religious writings and art, and
was nurtured by religious dissenters from the seventeenth century; the Orthodox
Church embarked on religious reform inspired in part by confessionalization
happening in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church; those Russian reforms in turn
sparked a schism by traditionalists in the seventeenth century.
Advances in military hardware—artillery and guns—stimulated and made pos-
sible more ambitious military campaigns; the arms trade, broadly conceived,
brought experts and munitions to the Ottoman and Russian empires and stimu-
lated indigenous military industry and fortifications from thefifteenth century.
Catching up with China, which had had a form of printing for centuries, printing
and trade in books expanded across Europe from the sixteenth century, but Russia
and the Ottomans both reacted selectively to this new technology. Initially rejecting
printing in the sixteenth century (the Belarus’an Ivan Fedorov and his printing
press were thrown out of Moscow after printing only a handful of religious titles in
the 1560s), church and state gingerly admitted printing in the seventeenth century
for state documents and religious texts. Even when Peter I embraced printing, it
remained state-controlled through the eighteenth century. Expanding literacy and
communications in much of Europe (France, England, the Germanies, northern
Italy) fueled the emergence of a public sphere of political import. Institutions of
sociability (coffee houses, pubs, salons, theater, newspapers) across Europe, in
Ottoman cities and by the late eighteenth century in the Russian capitals and
major provincial towns provided spaces for public discussion, even as European and
Eurasian rulers also mobilized communication—literacy, newspapers, proclamations—
to further their own goals.
Novel ideologies of rulership emerged in these centuries to underwrite state
building. Some ideas were grounded in tradition: in China, Russia, and the
Ottoman sphere among others, multiple forms of communication (writings, por-
traiture, architecture, ritual, dress) broadcast a state’s claims to legitimacy in an age-
old idiom of godly appointment. Other dynasties (Mughal India, Crimean and
other splinter khanates of the Mongol Horde, the Qing dynasty in China) claimed
legitimacy through charismatic Chinggisid and Timurid lineage. Claims to central-
ized monarchical authority in Europe from the sixteenth century onward (“the
well-ordered police state,”absolutism) justified their reach not only by reference to
God-given authority but also to the ruler’s obligation to serve and improve“the
common good”; these ideas were potent in eighteenth-century Russia as well. New
philosophies of rule, principally in Europe, contrasted theories of strong states with
Land, People, and Global Context 37