Atlantic West Europe (1696–1707): Dynastic Warfare, Economic Strain, and Cultural Continuity

From 1696 to 1707, Atlantic West Europe—including northern France, the Low Countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), and coastal regions along the Atlantic and English Channel—faced escalating dynastic conflict, economic pressures, and persistent religious and intellectual tensions. This era was dominated by the climax and aftermath of the Nine Years' War and the onset of the critical War of the Spanish Succession, significantly influencing the political landscape, reshaping economic networks, and reinforcing regional identities amid broader European power struggles.

Political and Military Developments

The End of the Nine Years' War (1688–1697)

• The protracted conflict ended with the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), temporarily halting Louis XIV’s territorial ambitions. Under its terms, Louis returned territorial gains in the Low Countries and ceased claims in the Rhineland, reaffirming balance-of-power principles in Europe.

• This treaty, while restoring temporary stability, left underlying dynastic tensions unresolved, laying the foundation for future conflicts.

The War of the Spanish Succession Begins (1701–1714)

• The death of the childless Spanish king, Charles II, in 1700 triggered a continent-wide crisis. Louis XIV sought to place his grandson, Philip of Anjou, on the Spanish throne, creating fears of Franco-Spanish domination.

• In response, England, the Dutch Republic, Austria, and several German states formed the Grand Alliance (1701), initiating a new, extensive conflict aimed at preventing Bourbon dominance over Europe.

Early Battles and Military Struggles

• The Low Countries became a primary theater for fierce military engagements. Battles such as Ramillies (1706) witnessed decisive victories by allied forces under the command of English general John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, significantly reducing French control in the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium).

• Warfare placed immense pressure on northern French and Flemish towns, which experienced repeated sieges, requisitions, and economic disruptions, notably around cities like Lille and Brussels.

Economic Developments and Maritime Challenges

Economic Strain from Continuous Warfare

• Constant military conflicts strained regional economies, causing increased taxation, inflation, and interruptions in trade and agricultural production. Northern France’s economy was particularly burdened by wartime expenses and demographic losses due to conscription.

• The Dutch Republic, while maintaining substantial maritime trade networks, faced severe fiscal pressures supporting the alliance against France, gradually losing ground in economic competitiveness to England.

Shifts in Maritime Trade

• The English and Dutch maritime empires continued to dominate Atlantic commerce, securing critical trade routes. Ports like Amsterdam, Antwerp, and increasingly Rotterdam benefited from stable, albeit strained, maritime trade networks.

• French Atlantic ports—particularly Nantes, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux—endured significant hardship from naval blockades and restricted Atlantic commerce, profoundly affecting regional prosperity, especially the wine and textile industries.

Religious and Intellectual Developments

Persistent Religious Tensions and Huguenot Legacy

• Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) continued to affect regional religious dynamics, reinforcing strict Catholic orthodoxy but perpetuating economic and intellectual consequences from the Huguenot exodus.

• Protestant refugees significantly contributed to cultural and intellectual life in host nations, notably the Dutch Republic, England, and Prussia, fostering thriving expatriate communities renowned for craftsmanship, publishing, and commerce.

Early Enlightenment Thought and Critical Scholarship

• Intellectual centers like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Leiden continued to serve as crucial nodes for early Enlightenment thought. Scholars such as Pierre Bayle (d. 1706) promoted ideas of religious tolerance, rational skepticism, and critical inquiry, deeply influencing European intellectual developments.

• In France, despite stringent censorship, intellectual salons and clandestine publications proliferated, subtly challenging traditional authority and paving the way for future Enlightenment thinkers.

Cultural and Artistic Continuities

Baroque and Rococo Transitions

• Cultural patronage in France and the Spanish Netherlands persisted, showcasing ornate Baroque styles symbolizing royal and ecclesiastical power. At Versailles and in Paris, Baroque aesthetics reached new sophistication, anticipating early signs of Rococo refinement in interiors and decorative arts.

• Flemish cities, notably Brussels and Antwerp, continued producing significant works of art, though cultural patronage increasingly reflected commercial rather than purely aristocratic tastes.

Flourishing of Music and Theater

• Music flourished, notably through composers such as Marc-Antoine Charpentier (France), François Couperin, and Flemish-born composers active throughout the region. Their works enriched religious, courtly, and civic musical life.

• Theater remained a vibrant cultural force, with playwrights like Jean-Baptiste Racine and Jean-François Regnard continuing to shape French drama, influencing European theatrical traditions.

Social and Urban Developments

Urban Strain and Demographic Challenges

• Continuous warfare, heavy taxation, and economic disruption intensified urban poverty, particularly pronounced in northern French and Flemish cities. Towns endured demographic challenges, including population decline due to military recruitment and wartime hardships.

• Despite difficulties, urban centers such as Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Lille, and Rouen persisted as critical commercial and administrative hubs, supporting vibrant merchant classes amid economic adversity.

Reinforcement of Local and Regional Identities

• Despite broader centralizing trends, distinctive regional identities persisted strongly, particularly in the Low Countries and northern France. Flemish, Dutch, and Breton cultural traditions remained resilient, asserting local pride and cultural distinctiveness amid centralized French and Spanish governance.

Legacy and Long-Term Significance

The period from 1696 to 1707 deeply influenced Atlantic West Europe:

• Politically, this era marked intensified warfare and dynastic struggles, setting the stage for future geopolitical alignments, notably through the unresolved Spanish Succession conflict.

• Economically, ongoing warfare and maritime competition strained regional economies, reshaping trade patterns and reinforcing Dutch and English dominance in global commerce.

• Intellectually, early Enlightenment thought gained strength, disseminating critical scholarship and ideas of tolerance, rational inquiry, and skepticism that profoundly shaped European intellectual landscapes.

• Culturally, the continued prominence of Baroque aesthetics, music, and drama reinforced artistic traditions while signaling subtle shifts toward more refined Rococo styles.

Overall, the period significantly shaped subsequent political stability, economic vitality, and cultural dynamism, laying critical foundations for Atlantic West Europe’s future development through the eighteenth century and beyond.

A famine in 1696-97 wipes out almost a third of the population of Finland and ...

...a fifth of the population of Estonia.

The famine occurs in a period known as the Little Ice Age.

Cold springs and summers characterize the climate in Europe during the 1690s, when temperatures are generally estimated to be 1.5°C lower than the average during the Little Ice Age.

This impacts other countries: France suffers the worst famine since the Middle Ages and ice floes form in the Thames, while Lake Constance and Lake Zurich freeze over completely.

The availability of salt, a vital ingredient for preserving meat and fish, had been impacted by the colder climate.

Portugal, the main source of salt to the Baltic region, had been affected by excessive rain, making salt production difficult.

The shortage of salt means that meat and fish produces cannot be preserved, reducing stockpiles available for consumption.

Harvests in Estonia had been poor in the years 1692 to 1694, due to the shorter than normal summer growing seasons and longer winters.

Seed stocks had been reduced as a result.

Excessive rain had fallen in the summer of 1695, almost constantly from June 24 to September 29.

This excess rain had destroyed crops and hay as the low lying land was flooded, resulting in a shortage of seed for the following autumn and spring sowing seasons.

The winter of 1695-96 had been extremely cold, and the early spring thaw was short-lived when winter conditions returned in March 1696, delaying sowing of the little available seed until the end of May.

The return of heavy rains in the summer had wrecked the harvest, with only between a fifth and a quarter of the seed planted being harvested.

In some areas the crop yield was a little as three percent.

Many peasants were destitute and hungry by the end of the summer in 1696; farmhands, servants and even some members of the nobility were reduced to begging.

Famine had taken hold by the autumn and the death rate had begun to rise in October.

The winter of 1696-97 is so severe that corpses will not be buried until the following spring.

An estimated seventy thousand people—one fifth or fourth of Estonian population—have died during the Great Famine.

Estonia and Livonia are seen at this time as the granaries of the Swedish Empire, shipping in large quantities to Sweden and Finland.

As these provinces hold low status in the empire, priority is given to the fulfillment of export quotas.

The Government in Stockholm is slow to react to the developing famine and does not relax their policies until 1697 when it is too late.

Peter the Great, as one of his main pretexts for declaring war against Sweden in 1700, will cite the Great Northern War, the inadequate provisioning of his retinue of two hundred and fifty people and horses by the Swedish Governor Generals in 1697 as they passed through the province during the famine.

Peter conducts negotiations with the Duke of Courland, where the Jelgava palace and its court leave a great impression.

The duchy and Russia hold diplomatic talks on mutual cooperation against the Swedes.

The reign of Sava Kaludjerovic as Montenegro’s Prince-Bishop (Vladika) is short; he dies in 1697 and Danilo Petrovic of Njegos, the former deacon of Cetinje monastery and a member of the Ridjani clan, wins popular acclaim as vladika, thereby founding the Petrovic-Njegos dynasty.

Charles Perrault, having lost his post as secretary to the influential minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1695, when he was sixty-seven, has decided to dedicate himself to his children.

At a time when the French court values embellishments and elaboration, Perrault modifies simple plots, embellishes the language, and writes for an audience of the nobility and aristocracy.

His stories were either original literary fairy tales, modified from commonly known stories or based on stories written by earlier writers such as Boccaccio.

Thematically, the stories support Perrault's belief that nobility is superior to the peasant class; moreover many of his stories show an adherence to Catholic beliefs, such as those in which a woman must undergo purification from sin and repentance before reintegration into society.

In 1694, Perrault had written in verse form three stories, "Griselidis", "The Ridiculous Wishes", and "Donkeyskin", published in a single volume and republished a year later in a volume to which he added a preface.

A further edition containing eight more stories, titled Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories of Times Past) with the subtitle Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose Stories), is published in 1697.

The eight new stories written for the 1697 edition are written in prose and combined with the three tales previously written in verse: "Sleeping Beauty", "Little Red Riding Hood", "Bluebeard", "The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots", "Diamonds and Toads", "Cinderella", "Riquet with the Tuft", and "Hop o' My Thumb", "Griselidis" (La Patience de Grisélidis), "The Ridiculous Wishes" (Les Souhaits ridicules), "Donkeyskin" (Peau d'Ane) and "Diamonds and Toads" (Les Fées).

Three of the stories were first published in the elegant literary magazine Mercure galant: "Griselidis" and "Suhait" in 1693, and "Sleeping Beauty" in 1696.

Its publication makes Perrault suddenly widely known beyond his own circles and marks the beginnings of a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with many of the most well-known tales, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood.

He has actually published it under the name of his last son (born in 1678), Pierre (Perrault) Darmancourt ("Armancourt" being the name of a property he bought for him), probably fearful of criticism from the "Ancients".

In the tales, he uses images from around him, such as the Chateau Ussé for The Sleeping Beauty and in Puss in Boots, the Marquis of the Château d'Oiron, and contrasts his folk tale subject matter with details and asides and subtext drawn from the world of fashion.

Very little is known of Adriaen Coorte’s life, but he is assumed to have been born and died in Middelburg.

He became a pupil of Melchior d'Hondecoeter around 1680 in Amsterdam.

He seems from 1683 to have returned to Middelburg, where he has set up a workshop and signs his small, carefully balanced minimalist still lifes.

He often paints on paper that is glued to a wooden panel.

About eighty signed works by him have been catalogued, and nearly all of them follow the same pattern; small arrangements of fruits, vegetables, or shells on a stone slab, lit from above, with the dark background typical of still lifes earlier in the century.

Instead of the Chinese or silver vessels favored by his contemporaries, his tableware is very basic pottery.

Neither his birth nor death date is certain, and archival evidence only exists in Middelburg for his membership in the Guild of St. Luke here from 1695 onward, when he was fined for selling a painting without being a member of the guild.

His works appear frequently in contemporary Middelburg taxation inventories.

Peter’s Grand Embassy, after unsuccessful negotiations in the Netherlands, has to limit itself to acquiring different equipment and hiring foreign specialists.

Rudolph Jakob Camerarius contributes particularly toward establishing sexuality in plants by identifying and defining the male and female reproductive parts of the plant and also by describing their function in fertilization

One of the first botanists to perform experiments in heredity, he shows that pollen is required for this process.

Professor of natural philosophy at the University of Tübingen, he describes his findings in the form of a letter to a colleague, De sexu plantarum (1694; “On the sex of plants”), and in Opuscula botanica (1697; “Botanical Works”).

The Company of Scotland for Trading to Africa, returning to Edinburgh, is able to raise what is, for Scotland, a massive amount of capital: four hundred thousand pounds sterling in a few weeks (equivalent to roughly forty million pounds in 2007), with investments from every level of society, and comprising roughly a fifth of the wealth of Scotland.

The Scots-born trader and financier William Paterson had, while in London, met a sailor called Lionel Wafer, a surgeon and buccaneer marooned for four years on the isthmus.

Wafer had told him about a wonderful paradise on the Isthmus of Panama, with a sheltered bay, friendly Indians and rich, fertile land—a place called Darien.

Paterson has long been promoting a plan for a colony on the Isthmus of Panama to be used as a gateway between the Atlantic and Pacific—the same principle that, much later, will lead to the construction of the Panama Canal.

Paterson, who has a great capacity for hard work, is instrumental in getting the Company off the ground in London.

He had failed to interest several European countries in his project but in the aftermath of the English reaction to the Company he is able to get a respectful hearing for his ideas.

The Scots' original aim of emulating the East India Company by breaking into the lucrative trading areas of the Indies and Africa is forgotten and the highly ambitious Darien scheme is adopted by the company.

Paterson falls from grace when a subordinate embezzles from the Company.

The Company takes back Paterson's stock and expels him from the Court of Directors; he is to have little real influence on events after this point.