So in our last episode, we saw the Hapsburgs with the help of Romanians and some others drive the Ottomans out of large swaths of Eastern Europe, which started the Hapsburg expansion eastward.

But there were some other important states making big moves during the 17th century.

Today we're gonna focus on two of them Russia, which sought stability after a time of troubles.

And the House of Brandenburg, Prussia, Ah, small state that within two centuries would grow to become extraordinarily powerful in the huge Russian empires are Peter The first became an outsized monarch.

Literally.

He was six feet nine inches tall, which is like three meters.

Yeah, just say, with authority green, he was three meters tall.

Don't write that on your tests Now.

Early in Peter's life, his future didn't look particularly promising.

He was born in 16 72 and he was not first in line to the Russian throne.

His half sister Sophia was ruling Russia at the time as regent for the young Romanov brothers, of whom Peter was the youngest.

Sophia wanted to become the permanent ruler, but Peter and his supporters had other ideas at the time.

Many interest groups in Russia helped shape who ended up with political power, including the Orthodox Church, the army, the aristocracy and wealthy traders.

And as Peter and his brothers came of age, these groups negotiated to arrive at a consensus candidate for czar, and then the Russian people had to seal the deal, so to speak, via public demonstrations of acclaim and approval, which developed the sacred trust between the ruler and the ruled and short political power in this monarchy was not as simple as the czar has all of it, and Peter only became czar with the help of his advisors and the support of powerful interest groups in Russia.

He became an autocratic ruler.

But the autocracy was intertwined with widespread, if certainly not universal public support from the Russian people.

What I'm getting at is that the relationship between the government and the governed is always complex, and the example of the Russian monarchy is important, partly because it helps us to see that even absolutist governments could only retain their power by having support from outside institutions and individuals.

Now, Peter tackled every facet of state building he reorganized both the military and the nobility and in doing so, also reorganized, who had political power and how they could wield it.

For the nobility, he created a precise table of ranks with each promotion to a higher rank, depending on the aristocrat performing service to the state.

This reform aimed to end older political practices based on networking and nepotism and favoritism, and instead make the aristocracy more of a meritocracy.

Peter also eliminated the power of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church by leaving the post vacant and setting up a council or synod of laypeople, as overseers headed.

Of course, by the czar, Peter was also curious and adventurous.

He like to tinker and build, focusing on clocks and military machinery and the deployment of his toy soldiers.

And he was fascinated by Western Europe.

In fact, he set off in 16 97 to see what Western rulers were up to.

The Dutch, in particular, attracted him.

You may remember that they were advanced in canal building and fire control and architecture and urban lighting, and also had lots of money from trading and having seen all these enterprises in action, Peter returned from Western Europe, full of determination to modernize and western eyes.

Russia, while Peter was still in Western Europe in the spring of 60 98 The strength see a band of infantrymen first initiated by Ivan the Terrible Slash Awesome rose up against the bad conditions that they faced.

They had hopes of reviving the administration of the region.

Sofia, who at the time was imprisoned Peter, ordered them crushed, and when he returned to Russia in August of 16 98 he had hundreds of the stroll see, tortured, exiled or executed.

The purge of the strokes he actually helped clear the way for the modern fighting force that Peter envisioned.

A major innovation was giving Russia a standing army that ultimately included some 200,000 recruits, which was a massive number for Europe at the time.

And serious training of that army, as well as modernization of weaponry, ultimately paid off when it came to battling Sweden.

At first, during an early battle of the Great Northern War, the ambitious and land hungry ruler of Sweden, Charles the 12th defeated Russian forces at Narva in 1700 hold on a second, Sweden had 12 kings named Charles.

History never ceases to surprise my friends, right?

So Swedish Charles, the 12th also defeated Poland in the war.

But then Peter fortified his army, even Maur and formed an important alliance.

He built a coalition of Denmark and Poland that ultimately conquered Sweden in 17 21 and ended its continental influence.

As a result of this victory, Russia obtained Sweden's continental territory, including Estonia and Latvia.

Sweden had gone from being a rescuer in the 30 years war to being almost entirely stuck in Scandinavia, where they would go on to engage in fewer wars and instead build a state with among the world's lowest poverty rates and highest life expectancy.

The fools all right back to Russia, Let's go to the thought bubble.

During these years, Peter was also building a European style city with an outlet to the Baltic called.

You'll Never Guess it.

ST.

Petersburg Tens of thousands of serfs were commandeered from aristocrats workforces to build the new city at a great cost in lives, the marshy site needed to be entirely reclaimed through the building of canals.

You'll remember Peter's admiration for Amsterdam, any ordered museums and libraries and universities and stately government buildings to adorn the city.

His aristocratic subjects were ordered to build lavish houses and to hold social events like dances.

Peter also saw the city as the backdrop for the reform of women's role in society.

They were to leave seclusion and appear at public events.

Heater decreed the end to veiling for women and an end to dresses or caftans for boyars that is, men in the old aristocracy.

Further reforms aimed to develop his middle and upper class subjects as modern thinkers, especially in math and the sciences to remain in the aristocratic ranks.

For instance, sons had to study math, science or engineering also requirements for serving as officers in the military.

Peter founded schools, including military schools, to teach these subjects and additional schools to teach women reading and writing and other skills.

And unlike earlier Russian rulers, Peter embraced foreigners not just their canal building and lamp lighting, but also their manners and fashion.

Thanks thought bubble.

So Peter also ended the practice of men wearing beards.

Did the center of the world just how often they weren't easy to see back there.

But it stands favorite joke.

The old stick on moustache movie magic.

How'd I look?

Stan?

You would say that I once tried to ah, do this in.

Ah, when I was shaving my beard and I came downstairs to show my wife and she said, I'm gonna quarter directly.

No.

So in Peter's Russia, you had to shave your beard so that you could be like a modern, proper European person.

Put just as in Elizabeth the first and Henry the Eights, England.

You could pay a tax to keep your beard and listen.

I don't like to get political on this show, but if we re instituted that tax, the cities of New York and Portland would pay for health care for everyone.

So despite his move toward the rational and refined and clean shaven, Peter himself could be Brougher crude, heartless and violent.

That is the complete opposite of the kind of citizen he wanted to populate his kingdom.

And that is a lesson we keep learning over and over.

In history, paradox is not unusual.

As for service, their lives became more difficult as new regulations meant to attract aristocratic loyalty gave them fewer rights.

Serfs were stripped of the right to move from the noble estate where they worked.

Most lived precarious lives and were subjected to landowners brutality.

They had little recourse to protect themselves from abuse and were forced to work in extremely difficult conditions.

Most serfs did manual or agricultural labor, but some became highly skilled artisans to embellish life for the upper classes, creating intricate cabinetry or music or paintings.

Some noble families even rented out their artists serfs or centam touring to bring in funds with their accomplishments.

These traveling serfs helped connect far flung Russians to one another through paintings of distant cities or landscapes or notable people, for example, and peasant Song also eventually found its way into Russian classical music as it developed in the 19th century.

But to be clear, Peter's modernization did not mean increased protection or power for the most vulnerable.

Which raises a question.

Does modernization generally result in protection or power for the most vulnerable?

Should it then, can we even generalize about what it means to be modern when there is so much variety just on this one continent or arguably subcontinent?

So the time lives are Peter had massively different effects.

Depending on where you stood, some people were learning Maura about science or art than they'd ever been able to before others were bound to land or lost their lives in the construction of ST Petersburg.

History is not just about what happened, but also about where you sit.

Are you a boy, your son learning new mathematical discoveries or a peasant born to a fate of hard labor?

You can never escape.

The other rising Eastern Kingdom during this time was the house of Brandenburg, Prussia.

Ah, bird with an arm stand informs me that Brandenburg pressure was actually headed by the Hohenzollern family.

It grew over the centuries from a tiny holding to an extensive kingdom, albeit one that was initially landlocked.

Okay, so I'm gonna need you to brace yourselves because many Fredericks air coming.

It's gonna be a little confusing, but we will get through this together.

The 1st 1 to know about is the great elector Frederick William, who was one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire.

He worked to keep his territories together in the closing days of the 30 years war and to protect them from attack by Sweden in the 16 fifties.

But a Sweden started to weaken Poland gave its dependent Prussia, the status of kingdom and the title of King of That New Kingdom went to the after mentioned great elector Frederick William and then later to his son, Frederick.

The third.

At that point, Frederick the third, became known as King Frederic, the first of Prussia because, you know, it was already confusing enough anyway.

As a ruler, Frederic the first was something of a connoisseur of all the fine things that were coming to characterize increasingly affluent and world the European monarchs, while his son King Frederick William, the first I wish I was kidding was quite the opposite.

The Hohenzollern kings, who, like the Romanovs of Russia ruled into the 20th century, created very strong institutions, beginning with the great elector Frederick William in the 17th century.

The military was especially important to Prussia, survival and growth.

He understood that Brandenburg crushes lack of natural boundaries, made it really vulnerable to those wanting to expand their territory, which in the 17th century was everyone so state building in Prussia involved fortifying its borders.

A strong military isn't the only way to stabilize power, but it certainly is a way.

Additionally, the great elector Frederick William weakened the representative bodies or estates general, through which the nobility had its say in the kingdom's running.

But to make up for it, the monarchs allowed the nobility to intensify their grip on peasant lives very similar to what happened in Russia.

That, by the way, is called rien feud ation, which means additional regulations that Titan surf obligations to their wards.

It happened often, and in many places monarchs would give noble families greater power over ordinary people's labor in exchange for the nobles giving greater service to the kingdom's military and administration.

The strategy of power consolidation, by the way, still happens.

The most powerful placate, the less powerful by giving them control over the least powerful, the great electors grandson King Frederick William.

The first made the Prussian Army the most modern in Europe.

He created a branch of government called the General Directory that oversaw the operation of the kingdom to the benefit of the Army, raising taxes and recruiting administrators and soldiers.

And Frederick William, the first sought a certain kind of recruit, specifically giant soldiers at least six feet in height from all across Europe.

He sold off his father's more luxurious possessions such a cz silver and works of art to boost military strength.

Even Maur Prussia was called a large army with a small state attached.

Kind of like Russia today.

He's back, isn't he?

It's just he's very subtle, but I could I could feel his presence.

One of the weirdness is of building a state or an empire.

Is that in order for it to work, you must convince both those outside of your borders and those within them that your state is really, really and also really powerful.

States do this partly through treaties, partly through state building exercises like national anthems and national histories, and partly by building structures within the state armies.

Government apparatus is statewide walls that strengthened the state and make it less vulnerable to attack.

And the rising monarchies of Russia and Prussia were very effective at state building, which would allow them to shape the future of Europe as a whole and also aid in the final demise of Poland, Lithuania, over the 18th century Poland.

Lithuania failed in part because it's constitutional system failed, the nobility wheeled and dealed instead of fortifying government institutions like Russia and Prussia had and because of the ways Prussia and Russia organized political power, that wasn't as much of a problem in their kingdoms.

There were problems, of course, which would eventually prove catastrophic, and we'll get there eventually.

But first, things are about to get a bit brighter around here because next time we get to turn our attention to the Enlightenment.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you then crash courses filmed here in the Jaden Smith studio in Indianapolis.

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