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force. 92 Well before Napoleon’s aphorism, commanders knew that an army marched upon its stomach.
    But these physical restrictions applied at the national level, too,especially in raising funds for war. No state in this period, however prosperous, could pay immediately for the costs of a prolonged conflict; no matter what fresh taxes were raised, there was always a gap between governmental income and expenditure which could only be closed by loans—either from private bankers like the Fuggers or, later, through a formally organized money market dealing in government bonds. Again and again, however, the spiraling costs of war forced monarchs to default upon debt repayments, to debase the coinage, or to attempt some other measure of despair, which brought short-term relief but long-term disadvantage. Like their commanders frantically seeking to keep troops in order and horses fed, early-modern governments were engaged in a precarious hand-to-mouth living. Badgering estates to grant further extraordinary taxes, pressing rich men and the churches for “benevolences,” haggling with bankers and munitions suppliers, seizing foreign treasure ships, and keeping at arm’s length one’s many creditors were more or less permanent activities forced upon rulers and their officials in these years.
    The argument in this chapter is
not
, therefore, that the Habsburgs failed utterly to do what other powers achieved so brilliantly. There are no stunning contrasts in evidence here; success and failure are to be measured by very narrow differences. 93 All states, even the United Provinces, were placed under severe strain by the constant drain of resources for military and naval campaigns. All states experienced financial difficulties, mutinies of troops, inadequacies of supply, domestic opposition to higher taxes. As in the First World War, these years also witnessed struggles of endurance, driving the belligerents closer and closer to exhaustion. By the final decade of the Thirty Years War, it was noticeable that neither alliance could field armies as large as those commanded by Gustavus and Wallenstein, for each side was, literally, running out of men and money. The victory of the anti-Habsburg forces was, then, a marginal and relative one. They had managed, but only just, to maintain the balance between their material base and their military power better than their Habsburg opponents. At least some of the victors had seen that the sources of national wealth needed to be exploited carefully, and not recklessly, during a lengthy conflict. They may also have admitted, however reluctantly, that the trader and the manufacturer and the farmer were as important as the cavalry officer and the pikeman. But the margin of their appreciation, and of their better handling of the economic elements, was slight. It had been, to borrow the later words of the Duke of Wellington, a “damned close-run thing.” Most great contests are.
    * As a rough figure, this would mean about 25 million out of the total European population of 105 million in 1600.
    * My colleague Prof. Robert Ashton warns me that any stated figures of English (and presumably other) state revenues and expenditures in this entire period must be regarded as
nominal;
the amounts deducted by officeholders, bribery, corruption, and inefficient bookkeeping drastically reduced the stated “allocations” to the army and navy. In much the same way, only a portion of the king’s “income” ever reached the monarch. The statistics given here are, therefore, indicative and not authoritative.

3
Finance, Geography, and the Winning of Wars, 1660–1815
     
         T he signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees did not, of course, bring to an end the rivalries of the European Great Powers, or their habit of settling these rivalries through war. But the century and a half of international struggle which occurred after 1660 was different, in some very important respects, from that which had taken