AP European History Chapter 15 Terms and Names

Gustavus Adolphus

Swedish King who won two important battles during the Thirty Years' War but was fatally wounded in combat.

Peace of Westphalia

The Name of a series of treaties that concluded the Thirty Years' War in 1648 and marked the end of large-scale religious violence in Europe.

Henry IV

French king who issued the Edict of Nantes. He sharply lowered taxes and instead charged royal officials an annual fee to guarantee the right to pass their positions down to their heirs.

Cardinal Richelieu

Became the first minister of the French crown. He extended the use of intendents. His foreign policy goal was to destroy the Catholic Habsburgs' grip on territories surrounding France.

Jules Mazarin

was the chief minister for the young Louis XIV. His struggles to increase royal revenues to meet the costs of war led to uprisings.

Fronde

A series of violent uprisings during the early reign of Louis XIV triggered by growing royal control and increased taxation.

Louis XIV

the "Sun King" established etiquette rules and during his reign the French monarchy reached the peak of absolutist development.

Divine right of kings

God had established kings as rulers on earth, and they were answerable ultimately to him alone.

Palace at Versailles

formally a hunting lodge, it quickly became the center of political, social, and cultural life

French Classicism

artists and writers imitated the subject matter and style of classical antiquity, that their work resembled that of Renaissance Italy, and that French art possessed the classical qualities of discipline, balance, and restraint.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert

he was Louis XIV's financial genius. The wealth and the economy of France should serve the state. He insisted that French industry should produce everything needed by the French people.

Mercantilism

A system of economic regulations aimed at increasing the power of the state based on the belief that a nation's international power was based on its wealth, specifically its supply of gold and silver.

Francois le Tellier

He created a professional army in which the French state, rather than private nobles, employed the soldiers. Louis XIV's secretary of war.

Peace of Utrecht

A series of treaties, from 1713 to 1715, that ended the War of Spanish Succession, ended French expansion in Europe, and marked the rise of the British Empire.

Junkers

The Nobility of Brandenburg and Prussia, they were reluctant allies of Frederick William in his consolidation of the Prussian state.

Ivan the Great

He declared autonomy of Moscow. The princes of Moscow modeled themselves on the Mongol Khans.

Boyars

The highest-ranking members of the Russian nobility.

Ivan the Terrible

He pushed aside his advisors and crowned himself tsar. He persecuted those he suspected of opposing him.

Cossacks

Free groups and outlaw armies originally comprising runaway peasants living on the borders of Russian territory from the fourteenth century onward.

Cossack Stenka Razin

He and his followers killed landlords and government officials and proclaimed freedom from oppression, but their rebellion was defeated in 1671.

Peter the Great

was determined to build the army and to continue Russian territorial expansion. He toured Western capitals. He was impressed with the growing economic power of the Dutch.

Charles XII of Sweden

His well-trained professional army attacked and routed unsuspecting Russians besieging the Swedish fortress of Narva on the Baltic coast.

Battle at Poltava 1709

Russian forces defeat the small army of Sweden, it was one of the most significant battles in Russian history.

Imposition of unigeniture

inheritance of land by one son alone.

Janissary corps

The core of the sultan's army, composed of slave conscripts from non-Muslim parts of the empire.

Millet system

A system used by the Ottomans whereby subjects were divided into religious communities, with each millet enjoying autonomous self-government under its religious leaders.

Constitutionalism

A form of government in which power is limited by law and balanced between the authority and power of the government.

Republicanism

A form of government in which there is no monarch and power rests in the hands of the people as exercised through elected representatives.

Puritans

Members of a sixteenth-and seventeenth-century reform movement with the Church of England that advocated purifying it of Roman Catholic elements.

Test Act

Legislation, passed by the English Parliament in 1673, to secure the position of the Anglican Church by stripping Puritans, Catholics, and other dissenters of the right to vote, preach, assemble, hold public office, and teach at or attend the universities.