INR220: 16th and 17th Century International Relations Theories, Sovereignty, and the State System

Vocabulary flashcards covering the military, maritime, and printing revolutions, 16th-century legal and political thought, the Thirty Years War, the Peace of Westphalia, mercantilism, and 17th-century international relations philosophies.

Gunpowder Revolution

A 16th-century transformation that rendered feudal knights obsolete, shifted military dominance from cavalry to infantry, established artillery, escalated war costs, and forced monarchs to develop taxation and central administration.

Maritime Revolution

The global projection of state power enabled by Iberian ship designs, the compass, and the astrolabe, establishing long-distance trade, colonial revenue streams, and maritime rivalries (exemplified by Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator).

Printing Revolution

The advent of Johannes Gutenberg's movable type around 1450 (yielding about 8 million books within 50 years), which democratized knowledge, challenged Church orthodoxy, accelerated the Reformation, and encouraged religious individualism.

Ninety-five Theses (1517)

Martin Luther's foundational Protestant Reformation text that attacked the Catholic Church's sale of indulgences and argued for justification and salvation by grace through faith alone.

Dulce Bellum Inexpertis

A work by Desiderius Erasmus asserting that war corrupts man's natural pacific nature and characterizing warfare as "madness."

Treaty of Augsburg (1555)

A treaty establishing the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, allowing each prince to determine the religion of his realm; it largely failed initially and took a century to gain full acceptance.

Justus Lipsius

A 16th-century political thinker whose writings exhibited contradiction by defining rule according to Christian virtue while simultaneously concluding that princes must employ fraud and deception.

Tommaso Campanella

A contradictory Renaissance thinker who attacked Niccolò Machiavelli yet utilized balance-of-power concepts in his political analysis.

Giovanni Botero

A political theorist who opposed Machiavelli yet adopted Ragione d'Interesse (self-interest) and introduced economic factors—such as production, trade, and population—as bases of state power.

Francisco de Vitoria

A Spanish Dominican jurist and foundational figure of modern international law who asserted that indigenous peoples held true dominion over their property and that the only just cause for offensive war is "a wrong received."

Alberico Gentili

An Italian jurist and diplomat who established states as the basic units of international politics, conceptualized a society of states via anthropomorphism, and identified denial of "privileges of nature" as a just cause for war.

Jean Bodin

A 16th-century French theorist who defined sovereignty during the French civil wars as an absolute, perpetual, and indivisible power vested in a commonwealth, limited by divine, natural, and fundamental laws.

Sovereignty (Bodin's Definition)

"An absolute and perpetual power vested in a commonwealth" that is indivisible (cannot be shared), perpetual (belongs to the state, not the ruler), and absolute (the sovereign makes law without being subject to another's commands).

Force and Faith (Bodin)

The two principles governing order in Jean Bodin's international system: Force, meaning a sovereign is bounded only by the power of other sovereigns; and Faith, meaning agreements are the foundation of justice.

Pacta sunt servanda

The core legal principle that agreements and covenants must be kept, central to Bodin's concept of justice and Hugo Grotius's framework for interstate relations.

Thirty Years War (1618–1648)

A devastating conflict in Central Europe characterized by mercenary armies, vast predatory "ambulatory slums," and severe fragmentation, resulting in the establishment of the modern sovereign state system.

Ambulatory Slums

The phrase used to describe the large, predatory mercenary armies raised by military entrepreneurs during the Thirty Years War that devastated Central Europe and turned to banditry when demobilized.

Peace of Westphalia (1648)

The treaties ending the Thirty Years War that granted sovereignty to small states, rendered the Holy Roman Emperor politically impotent, established cuius regio, eius religio, and spurred the creation of national standing armies.

Ferdinand III

The Holy Roman Emperor who was made politically impotent by the Peace of Westphalia, losing the unilateral power to recruit, tax, legislate, declare war, or ratify peace.

Cuius regio, eius religio

The legal and political doctrine ("whose realm, his religion") reaffirming that each sovereign prince chooses his territory's religion, consolidating territorial state power and undermining imperial and papal authority.

Leibniz's Criteria of Sovereignty

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's standard for sovereign statehood, requiring a minimum territory size, "majesty" (the legitimate authority to demand obedience), and actual military control of the territory.

Pierre de Belloy (1588)

A theorist of domestic absolutism and divine right who argued that the monarch's power is derived from divine authority and that the king is responsible to God alone.

Robert Filmer (Patriarcha)

An English author who defended absolute patriarchal monarchy by arguing that royal authority originated from Adam and descended through first-born sons, making monarchs paternal rulers over their realms.

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

A French theorist who argued that kings are God's vice-regents on Earth, possessing power that is absolute but explicitly not arbitrary.

Mercantilism

A 17th-century economic doctrine subordinating commerce to state-building, resting on the premise that wealth and military strength mutually reinforce one another.

Balance of Trade (Mercantilist Theory)

A foreign-policy objective articulated by Raleigh, Selden, Bacon, and Mun, wherein maintaining export surpluses of manufactured goods over imports was utilized to build state wealth and finance military power.

Émeric Crucé

An early 17th-century optimistic thinker who viewed humans as rational and equal, advocated for peace through economic interdependence, and proposed an assembly of states in a neutral city.

Hugo Grotius

A moderate theorist whose De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625) posited that humans have a "unique desire for society" and derived international law from human reason and custom rather than divine decree.

De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625)

Hugo Grotius's treatise establishing international law as an independent discipline, incorporating a social contract for states, humanizing warfare, and enforcing pacta sunt servanda out of enlightened self-interest.

Thomas Hobbes

An English political realist and author of Leviathan (1651) who argued that violent anarchy and mortal fear necessitate submitting to an absolute sovereign with coercive enforcement power.

State of Nature (Hobbes)

A pre-political condition characterized by a "war of every man against every man" where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," lacking property or formal justice; interstate relations permanently replicate this condition.

Force and Fraud (Hobbes)

The "two cardinal virtues" of war and the state of nature according to Thomas Hobbes, where concepts of moral right and wrong have no standing.

Right of Nature (Hobbes)

The primary behavioral axiom articulated by Thomas Hobbes recognizing the universal, fundamental impulse and entitlement of every individual toward self-preservation.

Samuel von Pufendorf

A 17th-century thinker who regarded the Peace of Westphalia as a historical watershed and sought to secularize natural law by thoroughly cleansing it of theological dogma.

Duke of Rohan

A 17th-century writer whose maxim "Interest alone can never fail" reflected the broader shift of the era toward secular, calculated state self-interest as the driving engine of politics.