| Term | Definition |
| Louis XIV | Convinced his people he ruled by divine right and even possessed magical qualities. As a result he gained huge sums of money to entertain him and his court. |
| Absolutism | One model of state building was known as absolutism, where one ruler claimed sole and uncontestable control. |
| Constitutionalism | A system in which the ruler had to share power the parliaments made up of elected representatives. |
| The Fronde 1648-1653 | A series of revolts against Louis XIV which posed an unprecedented threat to the French crown. |
| Cardinal Mazarin | He acted in the place of Louis XIV when he was young and took constitutional power away from the parlements and caused a number of revolts to take place. |
| Parlements | High courts in France that wanted the power |
| The Sun King | Louis called himself the Sun King, after the Greek God Apollo, to increase his prestige. |
| Apollo | The Greek God of the Sun. |
| Jean-Baptiste Lully | Though he began as a cook, he rose to become the virtual dictator of the French musical scene. He wrote 16 operas and many ballets. |
| The marquise de Maintenon | Louis XIV mistress whom he secretly married after his wife’s death. |
| Jansenists | Catholics whose doctrines and practices resembled some aspects of Protestantism. |
| League of Augsburg | An alliance of Austria, England, H.R.E, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden to defend the Palatinate from France. |
| Revoking of the Edict of Nantes | In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and eliminated all the Calvinist’s rights. |
| Bureaucracy | A network of state officials carrying out orders according to a regular and routine line of authority. Louis XIV relied on his bureaucracy to represent his will in each region. |
| Mercantilism | Governments must intervene to increase national wealth by whatever means possible. |
| Jean Baptiste-Colbert | A minister in Louis’s bureaucracy, Colbert began the new economic doctrine of mercantilism. |
| Frederick I | The leader of Bradenburg-Prussia, he succeeded in bringing all of the German states into one absolutist state and convinced the Emperor to grant him the title “King in Prussia.” |
| Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I | He was a Habsburg who gradually consolidated his power because of the vast amount of ethnicities, languages, and religions in his control. |
| Turkish Siege of Vienna | The Turks pushed all the way to Vienna and lay siege to the Austrian capital, but were eventually defeated. |
| The Liberation of Hungary, 1699 | With the help of Polish cavalry, the Austrians turned the tide against the Turks and drove them out. |
| Treaty of Karlowitz | Surrendered almost all of Hungary back to the Austrians. |
| Tsar Alexei | He tried to extend state authority by creating an Assembly of the Land and a Code of 1649 that assigned all subjects to a class based on their needs. Serfs became little more than cattle under his rule. |
| Stenka Razin | Led a rebellion that to increase the power of serfs, but was captured by the Tsar and killed, but he created a wave of protest. |
| Old Believers | A group who fought against the state-run church and protested the integration of Russian worship with Byzantine tradition. |
| Jan Sobieski | King of Poland-Lithuania, he tried to bring the country together by fighting the Turks, but could not stop the countries descent to powerlessness. |
| Sjem | Poland-Lithuanian parliament, nobles dominated it rather than monarchs and kings. |
| Charles I | King of England, he tried to exert his power over parliament and sent the country into a civil war. It pitted Puritans against Catholics and gave birth to democratic political and religious movements. |
| Petition of Right | The English Parliament forced Charles I to agree to not levy taxes without its consent. |
| Archbishop William Laud | Imposed increasingly elaborate ceremonies on the Anglican Church and caused many Puritans to protest. Laud responded by kicking the crap out of them. He created an army of the King’s followers known as the Cavaliers. |
| Oliver Cromwell | The Puritans united under Cromwell to create the New Model Army and defeated the Cavaliers at Naseby in 1645. |
| Levellers | Made up of disgruntled soldiers, they wanted to level social distinctions by allowing common people to participate in Parliament. Charles rejected the Levellers demands. |
| Rump Parliament | A parliament without Presbyterians, it tried Charles I and killed him. It then abolished the monarchy and House of Lords, and set up a Puritan state with Cromwell at its head. |
| Navigation Act | Allowed imports if they were carried on English ships or came directly from the producers of goods. |
| Lord Protector | Cromwell abolished the Rump Parliament and made himself Lord Protector as was regarded very highly in the eyes of English. He died in 1660, which brought the return of the Monarchy. |
| Charles II | Charles II came into power and promised “a liberty to tender consciences” in an attempt to extend religious toleration. He brought back Anglican beliefs in England. |
| Restoration | Brought back fear of French absolutism that was not unfounded, as Charles II was negotiating to work with Louis XIV. He also removed laws against Catholics and Protestant dissenters with his “Declaration of Indulgences.” |
| Test Act of 1673 | Parliament went against Charles II with its acting requiring all government officials to profess allegiance to the Church of England. |
| James II | Came into power after Charles II and was pro-Catholic and absolutist. |
| William and Mary | The Dutch rulers who gained the throne by invading England and defeating James II’ Catholic movement. |
| House of Orange | The house of Orange was a prominent family in the Dutch Republic. William of Orange became the most powerful sovereign in Europe. The line ended with his death. |
| Stadholder | The Dutch Executive officer in charge of defense and representing the state. |
| Bill of Rights | Passed by Parliament in which William and Mary agreed not to raise a standing army or raise taxes without Parliament’s consent. |
| Glorious Revolution | It was the victory of constitutionalism in England over absolutism in the rest of Europe with the agreement for Parliament to share power with the Monarchs. |
| The Dutch Republic | The Dutch Republic prospered in trade and had the largest merchantmen fleet in the world. It was amazing that a country without a single ruler could be so successful. It became a republic in 1588. |
| Thomas Hobbes | An English philosopher whose famous 1648 book Leviathan set the agenda for nearly all subsequent Western political philosophy. |
| Leviathan | Thomas Hobbes famous book that argued for a social contract and rule by a sovereign. Chaos or war could only be avoided by a strong central government. This is one of the first books on the Social Contract Theory. |
| Social Contract | First discussed in Hobbes Leviathan Based on the assumption that all men live in a state of nature which is not ideal. In order to move away from these conditions men enter into a contract with each other, allowing them to live in peace and unity. |
| John Locke | An English Philosopher who argued a government could only be legitimate if it received the consent of the governed through a social contract and protected the natural rights of life, liberty, and estate. If such consent was not given, argued Locke, citize |
| Tabula Rasa | A theory that individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content, in a word, "blank", and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world. |
| Sir Isaac Newton | Responsible for modern day calculus and improved upon heliocentrism. |
| Principia Mathematica | The book Newton wrote describing the three laws of motion by which everything in the universe is governed. |
| Law of Universal Gravitation | Newton also wrote the first law of gravity, which states every single point mass attracts every other point mass by a force heading along the line combining the two. The force is proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to |
| Benedict Spinoza | A Dutch philosopher and rationalist who believed that the body and mind were simply different parts of the same substance. |
| Slave Trade | After slaves from Africa had become accepted, slavery increased tremendously. African slaves had absolutely no rights under English law. |
| John Milton | English Puritan poet who published Areopagitica, describing the freedoms of the press. He also published Paradise Lost. |
| Paradise Lost | John Milton’s epic poem where he meditated on human freedom and the tragedies of rebellion and wanted to “justify the ways of God to man.” |
| Nicolas Poussin | A painter of classicism, Poussin is best known for his Discovery of Achilles on Skyros. |
| Claude Lorrain | A classicist painter who emphasized on the classical Roman values. |
| Classicism | Reflected the ideals of the art of antiquity and did not reflect the emotion of Baroque. It was the style of French painters, and focused paintings on the individual by putting them at the intersection of converging, symmetrical, and straight lines. |
| Rembrandt | A Dutch artist who painted ordinary people and made regular activities seem precious and beautiful. |
| Vermeer | Jan Vermeer was a Dutch painter who painted people and sold his paintings like tables and chairs |
| Merian | A German born painter whose engravings were widelry celebrated for their brilliant realism and microscopic clarity. She went with missionaries to South America and painted diagrams of all the birds, plants and insects she found there. |
| Ruysch | Paintings from her fetched higher prices than those from Rembrant because of her still lifes of flowers. |
| Moliere | Wrote comedies of manners that revealed much about new aristocratic behaviour and manners. |
| Tartuffe | One of the most famous French playwrights of all time, Tartuffe criticized religious hypocrites and had to be banned. |
| Aphra Behn | One of the first women professional authors, she wrote Oroonoko and received major criticism for her knowledge of writing. |
| Hannah Wooley | An English writer who was most well known for her novel The Gentleman’s Companion. |
| Salon | Places in France which were used to meet and discuss and think and philosophize. |
