Editing Age of Enlightenment (section)

==Situation in Europe==
[[file:Louis XIV of France.jpg|250px|thumb|Right|King Louis XIV, AKA the "Sun King" because he was the man around whom all the other kingdoms of Europe orbited and were bathed in his radiance. He and his court were not known for subtlety.]]
Europe experienced drastic changes in this period in both positive and negative ways. Christian world dominance and the rapid rise of European powers that began with the Age of Colonialism was practically cemented in this time-period. New colonial powers, such as England, France, and the Netherlands started to participate in colonial expansion along with the established colonizing powers of Spain, Portugal and the often overlooked Denmark, whose colonial history actually preceded those of the former. Society and state structures became much more centralized as monarchs started to crack down on the privileges of feudal lords, building the first modern centralized nation states. As a side effect, the petty and middle-class nobility saw their importance and influence dwindle rapidly as they were being demoted from local lords of their own fiefdoms to being figureheads in political plays, all instigated by their monarchs to keep them from thinking too hard about this "being forced to hand power to the king" business. While this was the typical development for most of the western hemisphere, there were a couple of nations where this development didn't take place in the archetypical French way, with the biggest outliers being England, where Parliament became an instrument of commoners and nobles to negotiate with the king and vice versa and most notably Poland-Lithuania, where the local nobility resisted the idea of handing over power to the monarch so fiercely that they turned the game on its head and effectively seized total control of the state from the king, building one of the first rudimentary, if dysfunctional and easily corrupted, modern-style democracies. 

This was also the time when the Ottoman Empire started its long, steady decline after the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. The fact that they had a civil war due to a lack of succession protocols was a part of this, as was general conservatism, a bureaucracy which became increasingly prone to thinking exclusively in religious terms, a corrupt military and the rise of their European rivals. So naturally, everything changed when absolutism kicked in. This is also the period when [[Kislev|Tsardom of Russia]] emerged with a claim to being the Third and Final Rome and began giving regular beatings to the Ottomans. In particular, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great oversaw considerable modernization and expansion of the country, leading Russia to Great Power status in fairly short order. Much of the crisis also had to do with mismanagement and general non-uniform administration and maltreatment of the empire's Christian population. Also, despite being called "Turkey" anachronistically and historically, the Ottomans were an extremely elitist state, where even the word "Turk" was associated with nomadic Turkoman or Anatolian peasants and was used like we use the word "retard" nowadays. Due to this, the court elite were alienated from the common population of the Empire and ended up having revolts every time they didn't win a war and had to raise taxes to pay for their fuckup.

Undoubtedly, the star of the Enlightenment was France, which emerged as a global power player and the place from where practically every relevant ideology of the time originated. First thing to note is the aforementioned absolutism. Under Louis XIV, the power of the aristocracy was sharply curtailed in favor of a stronger central government and expanded French influence throughout the world via wars and diplomatic pursuits. Over time, however, absolutism practically begat the ideas of the Enlightenment, conceptualized by the French philosophers that opposed the tyrannical rule of the monarchs and supported democratic and free states along the lines of the classical societies they'd grown up studying.

That is to say, not everything was all well and good at the time. The rise of mass armies and the evolution of firearms into relatively reliable and efficient killing tools made wars larger, costlier, and bloodier. Numerous countries such as England experienced civil turmoil. France, after enjoying nearly a century and a half of glory and stability under the reign of two kings (the aforementioned XIV and his great-grandson Louis XV ''The Well-Beloved''), had become decadent, vain, and was beginning to have financial troubles that impacted the lives of the general populace (who increasingly resented the gross wealth of the aristocracy). The latter combined with Enlightenment ideals to lead to the events mentioned below.