Before Book 2: King of the Vagabonds

The Ottoman Empire and the Siege of Vienna

Book 2 opens in 1683, during the Ottoman siege of Vienna. Some background:

The Ottoman Empire stretched from Hungary to North Africa to the Persian Gulf. It was the great power on Europe's eastern and southern borders — feared, respected, and poorly understood by most Europeans.

In July 1683, a massive Ottoman army besieged Vienna, capital of the Holy Roman Empire. The city held out for two months before a coalition army led by Jan III Sobieski, King of Poland, broke the siege in September. The Ottomans never seriously threatened Central Europe again. The Habsburgs were freed to focus westward — against Louis XIV.

The Janissaries were the empire's elite infantry: boys taken from Christian families, converted to Islam, and trained as soldiers. By 1683 they were also a political force that could make and unmake sultans.

The Barbary slave trade — North African corsairs raiding European coasts for captives — was a related feature of the Ottoman world. Between 1530 and 1780, over a million Europeans were enslaved. Coastal villages in Ireland, Iceland, and Italy were raided. Ransoming captives was an organized business.

The Dutch Republic

The Dutch Republic (officially the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands) was the richest, most commercially advanced state in 17th-century Europe. It won independence from Spain after an 80-year revolt and was run by merchants rather than kings — though the House of Orange, led by William of Orange as Stadtholder, held military and political authority.

Amsterdam was the financial capital of Europe. The Amsterdam Exchange traded shares in the VOC (Dutch East India Company) — the world's first publicly traded corporation, founded 1602. Investors could buy, sell, and speculate on ownership stakes in a company that operated on the other side of the world. Options and futures were invented here.

The Hague was the seat of government, home to the States-General and the Binnenhof. It was also where foreign ambassadors were posted — including France's Comte d'Avaux, who ran intelligence networks and bribed Dutch officials to keep the Republic from uniting against France.

Religious tolerance was partly ideological and partly commercial: persecuting people was bad for business. Jews expelled from Spain, Huguenots fleeing France, dissenting Protestants from England — all found refuge and brought skills, capital, and networks.

Money and Finance

In the 1680s, most people thought of money as physical: coins made of gold or silver, worth the metal they contained. But the Dutch were inventing something new.

Bills of exchange let merchants move money across Europe without shipping gold — a written order to pay, endorsed and passed along like currency. They had existed since the medieval Italian banking houses, but by the late 1600s they were the circulatory system of European commerce.

The VOC's publicly traded shares, the Amsterdam Exchange's options and futures, the Bank of Amsterdam's stable currency — these were the tools of a financial system that was moving from the physical to the abstract. This transition is a major theme of Book 2.

Louis XIV and France

Louis XIV, the Sun King, is the dominant figure in European politics throughout all three books. France was the richest, most populous, and most militarily powerful state in Europe, and Louis used all of it.

• He revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, stripping French Protestants (Huguenots) of their rights. Hundreds of thousands fled to England, the Dutch Republic, and Brandenburg-Prussia, taking their skills with them.
• His Versailles court was a system for controlling the French aristocracy — nobles competed for the privilege of watching the king eat breakfast.
• His ambassador to the Dutch Republic, the Comte d'Avaux, ran intelligence networks and tried to keep the Dutch divided and compliant.
• William of Orange, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, was Louis's chief opponent. Their rivalry drives the politics of Book 2 and Book 3.

Central Europe

Book 2 passes through parts of Central Europe that may be unfamiliar:

• The Holy Roman Empire — the patchwork of hundreds of German-speaking states, free cities, and principalities loosely governed by an elected emperor (always a Habsburg). The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) had left it fragmented and weakened. Leibniz worked for the House of Hanover, one of its more important states.
• The Harz Mountains — a silver-mining region in central Germany. Silver mining was economically important and technically challenging; draining flooded mines was an engineering problem that attracted serious thinkers.
• Leipzig — a major trade fair city, where merchants from across Europe gathered to buy and sell.