468
PESTIS
Savonarola's own monastery of San Marco. Later, as the monk Maximos, he worked for a decade as a translator in the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos, in a pan-Orthodox and graeco-Slav environment, where the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic traditions did not apply. He was then invited to Moscow to organize the Tsar's collection of Greek and Byzantine manuscripts, which Muscovite scholars were no longer trained to decipher. He soon fell foul of the hard-line faction of the Muscovite Church, which accused him of sorcery, espionage, and respect for the Patriarch of Constantinople. Yet he survived his lengthy imprisonment, met Ivan IV in person, and enjoyed his patronage. He was 'one of the last of his kind'.58
Maxim's writings, which appeared in the 1550s, make mention of'a large island called Cuba'.59 There is no doubt that by then he had a firm knowledge of Columbus's landings in the Caribbean. But the chronology of his career is important. Since Maxim spent three decades incarcerated in a Muscovite gaol, it is reasonable to suppose that he brought the information with him when he first travelled to Moscow in 1518, twenty-five years after Columbus's first voyage.
It is one of the wonderful coincidences of history that modern 'Russia' and modern 'America' both took flight in the same year of ad 1493. Europeans learned of the 'New World', as they saw it, at the self-same moment that Muscovites learned that their 'Old World' was not yet coming to an end.
VII
RENATIO
Renaissances and Reformations, c. 1450-1670
There is a strong sense of unreality about the Renaissance. The mode of thinking which is supposed to distinguish modern European civilization both from medieval Christendom and from other non-European civilizations such as Islam had no clear beginning and no end. For a very long time it remained the preserve of a small intellectual elite, and had to compete with rival trends of thought, old and new. In the so-called 'Age of the Renaissance and Reformation' which conventionally begins c.1450, it can only be described as a minority interest. There were large sectors of European society, and huge areas of European territory, where as yet it wielded no influence whatsoever. It somehow contrived to be the most remarkable feature of the age and yet to be divorced from the main aspects of everyday political, social, and cultural life. It was untypical and unrepresentative, yet immensely significant. Like the wonderful figures of Sandro Botticelli, which are among its most powerful manifestations, whether the exquisite Primavera (1478) or the ethereal Venus Rising from the Waves (c.1485), its feet somehow did not touch the ground. It floated over the surface of the world from which it arose, a disembodied abstraction, a new energizing spirit.
Faced with the problem, many historians of the period have abandoned their earlier concerns. It is no longer the fashion to write so much about those minority interests. Humanist thought, reformation theology, scientific discovery, and overseas exploration have had to give way to studies of material conditions, of the medieval continuities, and of popular belief (and unbelief) as opposed to high culture. The professionals now like to spotlight magic, vagrancy, disease, or the decimation of colonial populations. This may be a very proper corrective; but it is as odd to forget Leonardo or Luther as it once was to ignore a Nostradamus or the Miller of Friuli. No one who wishes to know why Europe was so different in the mid-seventeenth century from what it had been in the fifteenth can afford to bypass the traditional subjects.
Even so, the incautious reader needs to be reminded. The world of Renaissance and Reformation was also the world of divination, astrology, miracles,
RENATIO
Map 16.
Europe, 1519
renaissances and reformations 471
conjuration, witchcraft, necromancy, folk cures, ghosts, omens, and fairies. Magic continued to compete, and to interact with religion and science. Indeed, the dominion of magic among the common people held sway through a long period of cohabitation with the new ideas over two centuries or more.1 One implication is that this 'Early Modern Period' may not be quite so modern after all. Despite the fresh seeds that were sown, it could well have had more in common with the medievalism that preceded it than with the Enlightenment which followed.
The Renaissance, therefore, cannot be easily defined. It is easiest to say what it was not. 'Ever since the Renaissance invented itself some six hundred years ago,' complained one American historian, 'there has been no agreement as to what it is.'2 The Renaissance, for example, did not merely refer to the burgeoning interest in classical art and learning, for such a revival had been gathering pace ever since the twelfth century. Nor did it involve either a total rejection of medieval values or a sudden return to the world-view of Greece and Rome. Least of all did it involve the conscious abandonment of Christian belief. The term renatio or 'rebirth' was a Latin caique for a Greek theological term, palingenesis., used in the sense of'spiritual rebirth' or 'resurrection from the dead'. The essence of the Renaissance lay not in any sudden rediscovery of classical civilization but rather in the use which was made of classical models to test the authority underlying conventional taste and wisdom. It is incomprehensible without reference to the depths of disrepute into which the medieval Church, the previous fount of all authority, had fallen. In this the Renaissance was part and parcel of the same movement which resulted in religious reforms. In the longer term, it was the first stage in the evolution which led via the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment. It was the spiritual force which cracked the mould of medieval civilization, setting in motion the long process of disintegration which gradually gave birth to 'modern Europe', [balletto]
In that process, the Christian religion was not abandoned. But the power of the Church was gradually corralled within the religious sphere: the influence of religion increasingly limited to the realm of private conscience. As a result the speculations of theologians, scientists, and philosophers, the work of artists and writers, and the policies of princes were freed from the control of a Church with monopoly powers and 'totalitarian' pretensions. The prime quality of the Renaissance has been defined as 'independence of mind'. Its ideal was a person who, by mastering all branches of art and thought, need depend on no outside authority for the formation of knowledge, tastes, and beliefs. Such a person was I'uomo universale, the 'complete man'.3
The principal product of the new thinking lay in a growing conviction that humanity was capable of mastering the world in which it lived. The great Renaissance figures were filled with self-confidence. They felt that God-given ingenuity could, and should, be used to unravel the secrets of God's universe; and that, by extension, man's fate on earth could be controlled and improved. Here
472 RENATIO
BALLETTO
Dance, having played a central role in pagan religious rites, was largely ignored during the Middle Ages, except for rustic entertainment. It is generally agreed that the secular dance spectacle performed by Bergonzio di Botta at the Duke of Milan's wedding, at Tortona in 1489, is the earliest example of the modern genre on record. From Italy, the baletto was exported in the time of Catherine de' Medici to the French court, where, under Louis XIV, it became a major art form. Lilly's Triomphe de I'Amour (1681) fixed the long-lasting genre of opera;ballet.
The modem theory and practice of ballet were largely developed in mid-eighteenth-century Paris, especially by the royal ballet master Jean Georges Noverre (1727-1810). Leading dancers such as Marie Camargo or Gaetano Vestris, who modestly called himself le dieu de la danse, based their training and performances on the grammar of the five classical positions. At a later stage, the combination of classical technique with Romantic music, such as the Coppelia (1870) of Leo Delibes or the Roy Douglas fantasia on Chopin tunes, LesSylphides (1909), proved immensely attractive.
Russia first imported French and Italian ballet under Peter the Great, but in the nineteenth century moved rapidly from imitation to creative excellence. Tchaikovsky's music for Swan Lake (1876), Sleeping Beauty (1890), and The Nutcracker (1892) laid the foundations for Russia's supremacy. In the last years of peace, the Ballets, Russes launched by Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) enjoyed a series of unsurpassed triumphs. The choreography of Fokine, the dancing of Nlzinski and Karsavina, and, above all, the scores of Stravinsky, brought ballet to its zenith with The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). After the Revolutions of 1917, the Ballets Russes stayed abroad, whilst the Soviet Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets combined stunning technical mastery with rigid artistic conservatism.
Modern dance, as opposed to ballet, is older than might be supposed. Its basic principles, of translating musical rhythm into corresponding bodily movements, were put forward by the music teacher Frangois Delsarte (1811-71). Delsarte inspired the two principal practitioners of the art, the Swiss Jacques Dalcroze (1865-1950), the pioneer of rhythmic gymnastics, and the Hungarian Rodolf Laban (1879-1958). After modern dance in central Europe fell foul of the Nazis, the centre of gravity moved to North America.'
renaissances and reformations 473
was the decisive break with the mentality of the Middle Ages, whose religiosity and mysticism were reinforced by exactly the opposite conviction—that men and women were the helpless pawns of Providence, overwhelmed by the incomprehensible workings of their environment and of their own nature. Medieval attitudes were dominated by a paralysing anxiety about human inadequacy, ignorance, impotence—in short, by the concept of universal sin. Renaissance attitudes, in contrast, were bred by a sense of liberation and refreshment, deriving from the growing awareness of human potential. Speculation, initiative, experiment, and exploration could surely be rewarded with success. Intellectual historians examine the Renaissance in terms of new ideas and new forms; psychologists would look more to the conquests of fears and inhibitions which had prevented the new ideas from flourishing for so long (see Appendix III, p. 1269).
No simple chronological framework can be imposed on the Renaissance. Literary historians look for its origins in the fourteenth-century songs and sonnets of Petrarch, who observed human emotions for their own sake (see Chapter VI). Art historians look back to the painters Giotto and Masaccio (1401-28), to the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1379-1446), who measured the dome of the Pantheon in Rome in order to build a still more daring dome for the cathedral in Florence, or to the sculptors Ghiberti (1378-1455) and Donatello (c.1386-1466). Political historians look back to Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), who first explained the mechanics of politics as power for power's sake. Every one of these pioneers was a Florentine. As the first home of the Renaissance, Florence can fairly lay claim to be 'the mother of modern Europe', [flagellatio]
In those unmatched generations of versatile Florentines, no one ever outshone Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). The painter of perhaps the most celebrated picture in the world, La Gioconda (1506), he possessed seemingly limitless talents to pursue his equally limitless curiosity. His notebooks contain everything from anatomical drawings to designs for a helicopter, a submarine, a machine-gun. (Such mechanical inventions had been the rage in Germany at an even earlier period.4) His fame is surrounded by the mystery which derives from lost works, from the reputation of wizardry. It is said that, as a young boy in the street market in Florence, he bought cage-birds just to set them free. He did the same for the secrets of art and nature. He lived his last years in France, in the service of Francis I. He died in the Chateau de Cloux near Amboise on the Loire—in a part of the world which has been called 'an Italy more Italian than Italy itself'.5 [Leonardo]
The Renaissance was never confined to Italy or to Italian fashions, and its effects were steadily disseminated throughout Latin Christendom. Modern scholars sometimes overlook this fact. Such was the impact of the work of the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basle, i860) that many people have been left unaware of the wider dimensions. In fact, the intellectual ferment of the period was observable from an early date in northern Europe, especially in the cities of Burgundy and Germany. In France it displayed many native strands in addition to imported Italian fashions. Nor was it confined to Italy's immediate neighbours: it affected Hungary and Poland, for example,
474
REN A TIO
renaissances and reformations
475
FLAGELLATIO
PIERO DELIA FRANCESCA (c.1415-92) painted the small'study generally known as 77?e Flagellation some time between 1447 and 1460. The picture, now in the Galleria Nazionale at Urbino, is remarkable for its diptych structure, for its architectural detail, for its stunning use of perspective, and, above all, for its enigmatic allegory (see Plate 39).1 The picture is divided into two distinct zones. On the left, a nocturnal flagellation scene takes place in the pearly interior of an antique courtyard. On the right, three large male figures converse in an open garden. The pale moonlight on the left is diffused by the daylight flooding in from the right.
The architectural elements are strangely ambiguous. The praetorium courtyard is severely classical. The heavy roof panels are supported by two rows of fluted Corinthian columns rising from a marble pavement. In the centre, a prisoner is tied to the column of the Helia capitolina, symbol of Jerusalem, surmounted by a golden statue. Yet two medieval houses with an overhanging belvedere appear alongside. Beyond is a patch of greenery and of blue sky. One section of the picture, therefore, was set in the past, the other in the present.
The two groups of figures do not betray any obvious connection. The flogging in the courtyard is watched by a seated official who wears a pointed 'Palaeologi' hat, by a turbaned Arab or Turk, and by an attendant in a short Roman toga. The foreground group in the garden consists of a bearded Greek dressed in round hat, maroon robe, and soft boots, a barefoot youth in red smock and laurel wreath, and a rich merchant dressed in a Flemish-style fur-hemmed brocade.
Piero uses perspective drawing to ensure that the small figure of the prisoner remains the central focus. The convergent lines of the beams, the roof panels and the columns, and the foreshortened marble squares of the pavement constitute a textbook exposition of an architectural setting which emphasizes the action within it,2
As for the allegory, a prominent exponent of Piero's art has stated that the conflicting interpretations are too numerous to mention.3 The conventional view holds that The Flagellation portrays the scourging of Christ before Pilate. Many commentators have identified the barefoot youth as Oddantonio di Montefeltro. Yet the Byzantine accents are strong; and they suggest a number of interpretations connected to the Ottoman siege and conquest of Constantinople which dominated the news in the period. In which case, the prisoner may not be Christ, but St Martin, the seventh-century Roman Pope who met martyrdom at Byzantine hands. The pre-
siding official may not be Pilate, but the Byzantine Emperor. The three foreground figures could be participants in the Council of Mantua (1459), where a Greek emissary begs the Western princes to mount a crusade to rescue the Eastern Empire.
A leading British authority, however, is adamant that the picture represents The Dream of St Jerome. Jerome once dreamed that he was being flogged for reading the pagan Cicero. This would explain the discordance between the two sections. The three foreground figures—two men and 'a barefoot angel'—'are discussing the relation between classical and patristic literature embodied in the story of St Jerome's dream'.4
Linear perspective was the artistic sensation of the era.5 It so excited Piero's contemporary, Paolo Uccello, that he would wake his wife in bed to discuss it. It was a pictorial system for creating a realistic image of the three-dimensional world on a flat, two-dimensional surface. It set out to present the world as seen by the human eye, and as such marked a fundamental rejection of the hieratical proportions of medieval art. It was first discovered by Brunelleschi in his explorations of classical architecture, and expounded in many theoretical treatises headed by Alberti's De Pictura (1435), by Piero's own De Prospettiva Pingendi (pre-1475), and by Durer's Treatise on Measurement (1525). Its rules included the pictorial convergence of parallel lines towards an illusory 'vanishing-point' and 'horizon line', the decreasing size of objects in relation to their distance from the 'viewing point', and the foreshortening of features lying along the central line of vision.6 The pioneering examples of the system are to be found in the bronze panels of Ghiberfi's 'Gates of Paradise' (1401-24) in the Baptistery at Florence, and in Masaccio's fresco of the Trinity (c.1427) in the nave of St Maria Novella. Other standard items include Uccello's Battle of San Romagno (c.1450), Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1480), and Leonardo's Last Supper (1497).
Perspective was to dominate representational art for the next 400 years. Leonardo called it 'the rein and rudder of painting'.7 A modern critic was to call it 'a uniquely European way of seeing'.8 Naturally, when modern artists eventually began to deconstruct traditional methods, linear perspective became one of their targets. Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and his Scuola Metafisica explored the effects of dislocated perspective in paintings such as The Disquieting Muses (1917), as did Paul Klee in his Phantom Perspective (1920). It was left to the Dutchman M. C. Escher (1898-1970) to invent the visual riddles which show that in the last resort all lines on paper deal in illusions, [impression]
476
RENATJO
LEONARDO
i eonardo da vinci (1452-1519) was a left-handed, homosexual engineer, L best known for his sideline in painting. He was the love-child of-a Florentine lawyer and a peasant girl from the village of Vinci. He is widely rated the most versatile of all Europe's 'geniuses'. Only a dozen or so of his paintings have survived, some of them unfinished. But they include a number of supreme masterpieces, including the Mona Lisa in Paris, the Last Supper in Milan, and the Lady with Otter in Cracow. His left-handedness caused him to write backwards, in a script that can only be read with a mirror. His sexual proclivity led him to support a parasitic companion, called Salai, and to live in constant fear of prosecution. His most valuable legacy may well lie in his voluminous scientific notebooks, containing sketches and explanations of thousands of devices and inventions which never saw the light of day.1 Not surprisingly, he has constantly attracted the attentions of all who try to measure the ingredients of genius. His name features on all sorts of lists of prominent Europeans who have allegedly shared his characteristics:
Left-handedness
Tiberius Michelangelo C. P. E. Bach George II Nelson Carlyle
Estimated IQ
John Stuart Mill, 190 Goethe, 185 T. Chatterton, 170 Voltaire, 170 Georges Sand, 150 Mozart, 150 Lord Byron, 150 Dickens, 145 Galileo Galilei, 145 Napoleon, 140 Wagner, 135 Darwin, 135 Beethoven, 135 Leonardo, 135
Brain radiation levels2
(on the Brunler Scale where 500 = 'genius')
Leonardo, 720 Michelangelo, 688 Cheiro (palmist), 675 Helena Blavatsky, 660 Titian, 660
Frederick the Great, 657 Raphael, 649 Francis Bacon, 640 Rembrandt, 638 Goethe, 608 Napoleon, 598 Chopin, 550 El Greco, 550 Rasputin, 526 Picasso, 515 Mussolini, 470 Einstein, 469 Freud, 420
Homosexuality Sappho
Alexander the Great Julius Caesar Hadrian
Richard Lionheart
A. Poliziano, scholar
Botticelli
Julius III, Pope
Cardinal Carafa
Henri III
Francis Bacon
James VI and I
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Oueen Christina
Frederick the Great
Alexander von Humboldt
Hans Christian Andersen
Tchaikovsky
Wilde
Proust
Keynes
After Leonardo's death, an experiment was made to replicate his genius. His half-brother, Bartolomeo, sought out a girl from the same village as Leonardo's mother, fathered a son by her, and raised the boy in one of Florence's finest studios. Pierino da Vinci (1530-53) showed great talent: his youthful paintings were good enough to be misattnbuted to Michelangelo. But he died before his genius matured.3
renaissances and reformations
477
more deeply than Spain; and it met no insurmountable barrier until it reached the borders of the Orthodox world. Traces of the Renaissance were slight in countries absorbed by the Ottoman Empire; and in Muscovy they were limited to a few artistic imitations. Indeed, by giving a new lease of life to the Latin West, the Renaissance only deepened the gulf between East and West.
The causes of the Renaissance were as deep as they were broad. They can be related to the growth of cities and of late medieval trade, to the rise of rich and powerful capitalist patrons, to technical progress which affected both economic and artistic life. But the source of spiritual developments must be sought above all in the spiritual sphere. Here, the malaise of the Church, and the despondency surrounding the Church's traditional teaching, becomes the major factor. It is no accident that the roots of Renaissance and Reformation alike are found in the realm of ideas.
The New Learning of the fifteenth century possessed three novel features. One was the cultivation of long-neglected classical authors, especially those such as Cicero or Homer who had not attracted the medieval schoolmen. The second was the cultivation of ancient Greek as an essential partner to Latin. The third was the rise of biblical scholarship based on the critical study of the original Hebrew and Greek texts. This last activity provided an important bond between the secular Renaissance and the religious Reformation which was to place special emphasis on the authority of the Scriptures. Scholarly criticism of classical texts was growing rapidly long before the advent of printing. The lead, here again, had been given by Petrarch. He was emulated by Boccaccio, by Guarino, Filelfo, Bruni, Aurispa, and by that indefatigable collector and papal secretary G. F. Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). Poggio's rival Lorenzo Valla (c.1406-57), was responsible both for the treatise De Elegantiis Latinae Linguae, which established the superiority of Ciceronian Latin, and for the exposure of the false Donation of Constantine. The Greek tradition, fostered by the Byzantine Manuel Chrysoloras (i355-i4i5)> sometime Professor of Greek at Florence, and by Angelo Poliziano (1454-94), poet and translator of Homer, was boosted by the wave of Greek refugees and their manuscripts after 1453. A later generation of scholars was dominated in Italy by the hellenist and orientalist G. Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), who explored the cabala, and by Marsilio Ficino (1433-99); in France by Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples (1455-1537) and Guillaume Budé (1467-1540); in Germany by the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), by the wandering knight Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), and by Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560). Particularly relevant for the future of science was Ficino's translation of the Alexandrian Hermes Trismegistus. The printing-machine made its entrée when the movement was well advanced, [cabala] [press]
Enthusiastic circles of such 'humanists' sprang up at all points, from Oxford and Salamanca to Cracow and Lwów. Their patrons, from Cardinal Beaufort to Cardinal Oles'nicki, were often prominent churchmen. All, in their devotion to the ancients, would have echoed the cri de cceur of one of their lesser brethren, Cyriac of Ancona: 'I go to wake the dead.' All paid homage to the greatest of their number—Erasmus of Rotterdam.
478 R E N A TIO
Gerhard Gerhards (c.1466-1536), a Dutchman from Rotterdam better known by his Latin and Greek pen-names of'Desiderius' and 'Erasmus', was the principal practitioner of Christian humanism. Scholar at Deventer, chorister at Utrecht, secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai, frequent visitor to London and Cambridge, and long-term resident of Basle, Erasmus 'made himself the centre of the scientific study of Divinity ... the touchstone of classical erudition and literary taste'.6 One of the first truly popular authors of the age of printing—his Morme Encomium (Folly's Praise of Folly, 1511) ran into 43 editions in his lifetime—he did more than anyone else to marry the new humanism with the Catholic tradition. His Enchiridion Militis Christian (Handbook of a Christian Soldier, 1503) was another winner. Like his close friend Thomas More, he was no less a Pauline than a Platonist. His publication of the Greek New Testament (1516) was a landmark event. Its Preface contained the famous words:
I wish that every woman might read the Gospel and the Epistles of St Paul. Would that these were translated into every language . . . and understood not only by Scots and Irishmen but by Turks and Saracens. Would that the farmer might sing snatches of Scripture at his plough, that the weaver might hum phrases of Scripture to the tune of his shuttle.. 7
Most attractive, perhaps, was his beautifully paradoxical temperament. He was a priest with a strong streak of anticlericalism; a scholar with a deep loathing of pedantry; a royal and imperial pensioner who lacerated kings and princes; a true protestant against the abuses of the Church who took no part in the Reformation; a devoted humanist and a devoted Christian. His books remained on the Church's Index for centuries but were freely printed in England, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. He sported both a gentle spirit of moderation and a savage wit. 'What disasters would befall', he asked of the Rome of Julius II, 'if ever the supreme pontiffs, the Vicars of Christ, should make the attempt to imitate His life of poverty and toil?' The answer was that 'thousands of scribes, sycophants . . . muleteers ... and pimps' would become unemployed.8 'Christ too', he wrote to the outrage of the Inquisition, 'was made something of a fool himself, in order to help the folly of mankind.'9
Erasmus greatly influenced the language of the age. His collection of annotated Adagia (1508) was the world's first bestseller, bringing over 3,000 classical proverbs and phrases into popular circulation:
oleum camino ululas Athenas iugulare mortuos mortuum flagellas asinus ad lyram arare litus sardo oppederc mulgere hircum barba lentis sapientes
(to pour) oil on the fire (to send) owls to Athens to cut the throat of corpses you are flogging a dead (horse) (to put) an ass to the lyre to plough the seashore to belch before the deaf to milk a billy goat wise as far as the beard.1"
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Humanism is a label given to the wider intellectual movement of which the New Learning was both precursor and catalyst. It was marked by a fundamental shift from the theocratic or God-centred world-view of the Middle Ages to the anthropocentric or man-centred view of the Renaissance. Its manifesto may be seen to have been written by Pico's treatise On the Dignity of Man; and, in time, it diffused all branches of knowledge and art. It is credited with the concept of human personality, created by the new emphasis on the uniqueness and worth of individuals. It is credited with the birth of history, as the study of the processes of change, and hence of the notion of progress; and it is connected with the stirrings of science—that is, the principle that nothing should be taken as true unless it can be tried and demonstrated. In religious thought, it was a necessary precondition for Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience. In art it was accompanied by renewed interest in the human body and in the uniqueness of human faces. In politics it gave emphasis to the idea of the sovereign state as opposed to the community of Christendom, and hence to the beginnings of modern nationality. The sovereign nation-state is the collective counterpart of the autonomous human person, [state]
Both in its fondness for pagan antiquity and in its insistence on the exercise of man's critical faculties, Renaissance humanism contradicted the prevailing modes and assumptions of Christian practice. Notwithstanding its intentions, traditionalists believed that it was destructive of religion, and ought to have been restrained. Five hundred years later, when the disintegration of Christendom was far more advanced, it has been seen by many Christian theologians as the source of all the rot. According to one Catholic philosopher:
The difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages was not a difference by addition but by subtraction. The Renaissance . .. was not the Middle Ages plus Man, but the Middle Ages minus God.
An American Protestant was no less forgiving: 'The Renaissance is the real cradle of that very un-Christian concept: the autonomous individual.' A Russian Orthodox was the most uncompromising of all:
Renaissance humanism affirmed the autonomy of man, and his freedom in the spheres of cultural creation, science and art. Herein lay its truth, for it was essential that the creative force of humanity should surmount the obstacles and prohibitions that mediaeval Christianity put in its way. Unfortunately, however, the Renaissance also began to assert man's self-sufficiency, and to make a rift between him and the eternal truths of Christianity
. .. Here we have the fountain-head of the tragedy of modern history____God became the
enemy of Man, and man the enemy of God."
By the same token, many people in recent times who do not hide their contempt for Christianity—Marxists, scientific sociologists, and atheists among them—have welcomed the Renaissance as the beginning of Europe's liberation. Nothing would have horrified the Renaissance masters more. Few of them saw any contradiction between their humanism and their religion; and most modern Christians would agree. All the developments deriving from the Renaissance,
480 RBNATIO
from Cartesian rationalism to Darwinian science, have been judged by fundamentalists to be contrary to religion; yet Christianity has adapted, and has accommodated them. Left to itself, humanism will always find its logical destination in atheism. But mainstream European civilization did not follow that extreme road. Through all the conflicts which ensued, a new and ever-changing synthesis was found between faith and reason, tradition and innovation, convention and conviction. Despite the growing prominence of secular subjects, the overwhelming bulk of European art continued to be devoted to religious themes; and all the great masters were religious believers. Suitably enough, at the end of a long life, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1474-1564)—sculptor of the Florentine David (1504), painter of the Sistine Chapel, and architect of St Peter's dome—turned for consolation to devotional poetry:
Giunto e gia '1 corso della vita mia,
con tempestoso mar per fragil barca,
al commun porto, ov'a render si varca
conto e ragion d'ogni' opra trista e pia.
Onde l'affettuosa fantasia,
che l'arte me fece idol' e monarca,
conosco or ben, com'era d'error carca,
e quel c'a mal suo grado ogn'uom desia.
Gli amorosi pensier, gia vani e lieti,
che fien'or, s'a due morti m'awicino?
D'una so '1 certo, e 1' altra mi minaccia.
N£ pinger n£ scolpir fia piii che quieti
l'anima volta a quell' Amor divino
c'aperse, a prender noi, 'n croce le braccia. (The course of my life has come, I by fragile ship through stormy seas, I to the common port, where one calls I to give account of all our evil and pious deeds. I Whence the fond fantasy, I which made Art my idol and monarch, I I now know to have been a cargo of error, I and see what every man desires to his own harm. I Those thoughts of love, once light and gay, I what of them if now two deaths beset me? I I know the certainty of one, whilst the other oppresses. I Nor painting nor sculpture brings real repose; I my soul turns to that love divine I which, to enfold us, opens its arms on the cross.)12
Education played a capital role in Renaissance thinking. The humanists knew that to create a New Man one had to start from schoolboys and students. Educational treatises and experiments proliferated—from Vittorino da Feltre to Erasmus's Instruction of a Prince. Their ideal, whilst conserving the bedrock of Christian instruction, was to develop both the mental and the physical talents of youth. To this end, gymnastics were taught alongside Greek and Latin. Vittorino's academy in Mantua is often taken to be the first school of the new type. Later examples included the refounded St Paul's School (1512) in London.
Renaissance music was marked by the appearance of secular choral music alongside polyphonic settings for the Mass. The supreme masters, Josquin des Pres (c.1445-1521) and Clement Jannequin (c.1485-1558), whose work was much
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prized in Italy as well as France, painted panoramas in sound. Pieces such as Jannequin's Les Oiseaux, Les Cris de Paris, or La Bataille de Marignan abound with joy and energy. The art of the madrigal was widely disseminated, plied by an international school of lutenists.
Textbooks of Renaissance art tend to divide the subject into three neat periods. The Early Renaissance of fifteenth-century 'innovation' is followed by the High Renaissance of'harmony attained' in the mid-sixteenth century, and by imitative Mannerism thereafter. The great innovative figures include Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), conqueror of perspective, Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), master of realistic action, and Sandro Botticelli (1446-1510), the magical blender of landscape and human form. The three supreme giants are generally acknowledged to be Leonardo, Raphael Santi (1483-1520), and the mighty Michelangelo. The imitators, of course, were legion. But imitation is a form of flattery; and the treatment of the human face and body, of landscape and light, was transformed. Raphael's Madonnas are a world apart in spirit from medieval icons.
Yet over-neat classifications must be resisted. For one thing, innovation continued. Nothing could be more innovative in the use of form and colour than the daring canvases of Antonio AJlegri (Correggio, 1489-1534), of the Venetians Tiziano Vercelli (Titian, 1477-1576) and Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto, 1518-94), or of the Cretan Domenico Theotocopuli (El Greco, c.1541-1614), who found his way via Venice to Toledo. For another, the art of northern Europe, first prominent in Burgundy, developed strongly and independently. The German school forming around Albrecht Diirer (1471-1528), Lucas Cranach of Nuremberg (1472-1553), the landscapist Albrecht Altdorfer of Regensburg (1480-1538), and the portraitist Hans Holbein of Augsburg (1497-1543), was in contact with the South, but was anything but derivative. Finally, one has to take account of powerful and original artists who were more closely connected with continuing medieval traditions. Such would include the extraordinary altar-carver Veit Stoss or Wit Stwosz (c.1447-1533), who worked in Germany and Poland, the mysterious Master of Grunewald (£.1460-1528), the fantastic Dutchman Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516), with his visions of Hell, or the Flemish 'peasant genre' painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-69).
Renaissance architecture is usually characterized by reactions against the Gothic style. The Florentine 'classical style', whose earliest example is to be found in the Pazzi Chapel (1430), had many admirers. The classical villas of Andrea Palladio (1518-80) became an obsession with the European nobility. His finely illustrated Quattro Libri della Architectura (1570), published in Venice, was placed in all respectable libraries. When gunpowder rendered castles obsolete, building funds were spent on magnificent palaces, notably in the aristocratic residences of the Loire; on the monuments to municipal pride in the burgher houses and arcaded squares of Germany and Holland; and on Italianate city halls from Amsterdam to Augsburg, Leipzig, and Zamosc.
Renaissance literature was characterized by an explosion of the vernacular languages, which saw the world afresh in every way. The tentative work of the
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humanists gave way in the sixteenth century to the launch of full-blown national literatures. Indeed, the possession of a popular literary tradition in the vernacular was to become one of the key attributes of modern national identity. This tradition was established in French by the poets of the Pleiade, in Portuguese by Luiz de Camoens (1524-80), in Spanish by Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616), in Dutch by Anna Bijns (c.1494-1575) and Joost van den Vondel (b. 1587), in Polish by Jan Kochanowski (1530-84), in English by the Elizabethan poets and dramatists Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. In Italian, where the tradition was older and stronger, it was consolidated by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) and Torquato Tasso (1544-95). [singularis]
Not all of Europe's linguistic communities produced serious literature. Those who lagged behind, principally in Germany, Russia, and the Balkans, were still preoccupied with religious pursuits. Apart from Luther and the Narrenschiff or 'Ship of Fools' (1494) of Sebastian Brant (1457-1527), the poetry of the Silesians, Andreas Gryphius (1616-69) and Martin Opitz (1597-1639), historiographer to the King of Poland, and the picaresque novel Simplicissimus of H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen (c.1625-76), little of note was published in Germany beyond religious tracts and popular Volksbücher such as the story of Doktor Faustus (1657) [faustus). In Central Europe, an important branch of literature continued to be wirtten in Latin. The chief exponents of neo-Latin poetry included the German Conrad Pickel, alias 'Celtis' (1459-1508), first poet laureate of the Holy Roman 'Empire; lanus Pannonius (1434-72), the Hungarian; the Italians Fracastorius (1483-1553) and Alciati (1492-1550); and the Poles Dantiscus (1485-1548) and Ianicius (1516-43).
Clearly, the Renaissance had something in common with the older movement for Church reform. Humanists and would-be reformers both fretted against fossilized clerical attitudes, and both suffered from the suspicions of the ruling hierarchy. What is more, by encouraging the critical study of the New Testament, both led the rising generation to dream about the lost virtues of primitive Christianity, much as others had dreamt about the lost age of classical Antiquity. In this connection, but not in the happiest of metaphors, it used to be said that 'Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it'.
The Reformation. None the less, it is not possible to view the Reformation simply as an extension of the Renaissance. Unlike humanism, it appealed to the deepest devotional traditions of the Middle Ages, and it rode on a wave of a religious revival which affected not just the scholars but the masses. It was launched by men who had every intention of keeping the Catholic Church intact, and who only redoubled their campaign for a cleansed and unified religion when one branch of the reforming movement began to break away. It had nothing at all to do with the humanist spirit of tolerance. The common well springs of Renaissance and Reformation, therefore, should not be allowed to conceal the fact that they grew into streams flowing in very different directions. A similar split developed within the movement for Church reform. What started as a broad religious
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SINGULARIS
ndividualism is widely billed as one of the inherent qualities of 'Western civilization', and Michel de Montaigne could claim to be one of the pioneer individualists:
The greatest thing on earth is to know how to belong to oneself. Everyone looks in front of them. But I look inside myself. I have no concerns but my own. I con stantly reflect on myself; I control myself; I taste myself... We owe some things in part to society, but the greater part to ourselves. It is necessary to lend oneself to others, but to give oneself only to oneself.1
The roots of individualism have been identified in Platonism, in Christian theology of the soul, in the nominalism of medieval philosophy.2 But the main surge came with the Renaissance, which Burckhardt characterized by its brilliant individuals. The cultural interest in human beings, the religious interest in private conscience, and the economic interest in capitalist enterprise all put the individual centre stage. Starting with Locke and Spinoza, the Enlightenment elaborated the theme until the 'liberty of the individual' and 'human rights' joined the common stock of European discourse.
In the nineteenth century individualist theory developed along several divergent tracks. Kant had remarked that the unrestrained pursuit of self- * interest was immoral; and it was left to John Stuart Mill On Liberty (1850) to reconcile the conflicting interests of individuals and of society. In Socialisme et liberie (1898) Jean Jaures undertook a similar exercise in socialist terms. Yet there were always people ready to pursue the extremes. In The Individual and His Property (1844) Max Stirner condemned all forms of collective, whether 'nation', 'state', or 'society'. In The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891) Oscar Wilde defended the absolute rights of the creative artist: 'Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.'
In the twentieth century, both communism and fascism treated the individual with contempt. Even in democratic states, bloated government bureaucracies often oppressed those whom they were created to serve. The neo-liberal response gathered pace in the 'Vienna School' of the 1920s. Its leaders—Karl Popper (b. 1902), Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), and Friedrich von Hayek (b. 1899)—all emigrated. Hayek's Road to Serfdom (1944) and Individualism and the Economic Order (1949) educated the post war neo-conservatives. A fervent disciple once indignantly proclaimed: 'There is no such thing as society.'3
Such excesses tended to present the citizen as a mere consumer of goods, services, and rights. Politics threatened to degenerate into a 'culture of complaint'. At some point, the counter-tendency was due to reassert itself in the equally venerable tradition of Duty.4
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revival gradually divided into two separate and hostile movements, later known as the Catholic Reformation and the Protestant Reformation.
The religious revival, clearly visible at the end of the fifteenth century, was largely driven by popular disgust at the decadence of the clergy. Despite the declared intention of calling a General Council every ten years, the Church had not called one since the 1430s. The canonization of a long line of saints, from St Vincent Ferrer OP (cd. 1455) and St Bernardino of Siena (cd. 1450) to St Casimir of Poland (1458-84), could not detract from the blatant lack of saintliness in the Church as a whole. Europe was full of tales about simoniac bishops, nepotistic popes, promiscuous priests, idle monks, and, above all, the sheer worldly wealth of the Church.
Once again, the harbinger of things to come appeared in Florence. The ferocious hellfire sermons of a fanatical friar, Fra Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98), raised a revolt in the 1490s which temporarily drove out the Medici and which only ended with the friar's own burning. In Spain, under Cardinal Cisneros, religious discipline was combined with energetic scholarship. The new school of theology at the University of Alcala, founded in 1498, gave birth to the Polyglot Bible (1510-20). In Italy, under Cardinal Giampietro Carafa (1476-1559). the future Paul IV and co-founder c.1511 of the Oratory of Divine Love, an influential circle of Roman churchmen bound themselves to a regime of intense devotional exercises and practical charity. From them there arose a series of new Catholic congregations of clerks regular, neither monks nor friars—among them the Theatines (1523), the Barnabites (1528), the Jesuits (1540), and the Oratorians (1575)-
The stirrings of religious revival coincided with the nadir of the Church's reputation, reached during the papacies of Rodrigo de Borgia (Alexander VI, 1492-1503) and Giuliano della Rovere (Julius II, 1503-13). Alexander's passions were for gold, women, and the careers of his bastard children. Julius gratified 'an innate love of war and conquest': he is remembered as the pope who rode into battle in full armour, the rebuilder of St Peter's, the refounder of the Papal States. In 1509, when he was planning to pay for his wars and for St Peter's through the sale in Germany of 'indulgences'—paper certificates guaranteeing relief from punishment in Purgatory—Rome was visited by a young Augustinian monk from Wittenberg in Saxony. Martin Luther was shocked to the bones by what he saw. 'Even depravity', wrote Ranke, 'may have its perfection.'13
Within ten years Luther (1483-1546) found himself at the head of the first 'Protestant' revolt. His lectures as Professor of Theology at Wittenberg show that his doctrine of'justification by faith alone' had been brewing for some years; and as a man wrestling with his inner convictions, he had little patience with the gentle humanists of the day. He was inordinately rude and bad-tempered. His language was often unrepeatable. Rome, to him, was the seat of sodomy and the Beast of the Apocalypse.
Luther's fury was brought to the boil by the appearance in Germany of a friar, Johann Tetzel, who was selling indulgences. Tetzel had been banned from the territory of the Elector of Saxony, who had no desire to see his subjects pouring large
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sums into papal coffers. So by challenging Tetzel's theological credentials, Luther was reinforcing the policy of his Prince. On 31 October 1517, All Saints' Eve, he took the fateful step of nailing a sheet of 95 Theses, or arguments against indulgences, to the door of Wittenberg's castle church. Or tradition so insists.
From that famous act of defiance several consequences flowed. First, Luther was embroiled in a series of public disputations, notably the one staged at Leipzig with Dr von Eck which preceded his formal excommunication (June 1520). In the course of his preparations he penned the primary treatises of Lutheranism—the Resolutions, Liberty of a Christian Man, Address to the Christian Nobility of German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church of God; and he publicly burned the papal Bull of Excommunication, Exsurge Domine. Secondly, German politics was split between the advocates and the opponents of Luther's punishment. In 1521 the Emperor Charles V summoned Luther to appear under safe conduct before the Imperial Diet at Worms. Luther, like Hus at Constance, defended himself with fortitude:
I am overcome by the Scriptures I have quoted; my conscience is captive to God's Word. I cannot and will not revoke anything, for to act against conscience is neither safe nor honest... Hier stehe ich. hh kann nicht anders. [Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.]
After that, he was spirited away by the Saxon Elector's men and hidden in the Wartburg Castle. The ban pronounced by the Diet against Luther could not be enforced. Religious protest was turning into political revolt.
Germany in 1522-5 was convulsed by two major outbursts of unrest: the feud of the Imperial Knights (1522-3) at Trier and the violent social disturbances of the Peasants' War (1524-5), which began at Waldshut in Bavaria. Luther's defiance of the Church may have been a factor in the defiance of political authority; but he had no sympathy for the peasants' 'twelve articles' drawn up in Swabia by Christoph Schappeler and Sebastian Lotzer of Memmingen. When fresh rebel bands appeared in Thuringia, Luther published his appeal Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants, trenchantly defending the social order and the princes' rights. The peasant rebels were crushed in a sea of blood.
The Lutheran revolt took definite shape during three later sessions of the Imperial Diet. The Emperor's opponents took their chance to consolidate their position whilst he was distracted by the wars against France and the Turks. At Speyer in 1526, in the Recess Declaration of the Diet, they managed to insert a clause for princely liberty in religion anticipating the famous formula: Cuius regio, eius religio (whoever rules has the right to determine religion). At the second Diet of Speyer in 1529, they formally lodged the Protest which gave them their name, bemoaning the annulment of the Recess. At Augsburg in 1530, they presented a measured summary of their beliefs. This Confession of Augsburg, composed by Melanchthon, was the Protestant manifesto—after which an adamant Emperor set April 1531 as the deadline for their submission. In response, the Protestant princes formed the armed League of Schmalkalden. From then on, the Catholic and the Protestant camps were clearly defined, [gesang]
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GESANG
Martin Luther's paraphrase of Psalm 46—'God is our refuge and strength'—was first set to music in J. Klug's Gesangbuch of 1529. It showed that 'the nightingale of Wittenberg' was a poet and.composer as well as church reformer and theologian. It turned out to be perhaps the greatest hymn in the Christian repertoire:
fin' feste uurg 878766667
Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott, ein gute Wehr und Waffen. Er hilft uns frei aus aller Not, die uns jetzt hat betroffen. Der alt böse Feind mit Ernst er's jetzt meint, gross Macht und viel List, sein grausam Rüstung ist auf Erd ist nich seins gleichen.
A safe stronghold our God is sfil A trusty shield and weapon; He'll help us clear from all the ill That hath us now o'ertaken. The ancient prince of Hell Hath risen with purpose fell; Strong mail of craft and power He weareth in this hour; On earth is not his fellow.2
Luther, as a monk, was familiar with church music. He had a good tenor voice, and wanted all people to share his enjoyment of singing in church. Musical participation was to be the liturgical counterpart to his theological doctrine of the communion of all believers. He gave high priority to congregational music-making. His Formula Missae (1523) reformed the Latin Mass, providing a basis for the later Swedish liturgy. The Geystliche Gesangk Buchlein (1524), published by his disciple J. Walter, provided an anthology of polyphonic choral settings. In 1525 he brought the world's first musical press to Wittenberg. His Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdienst (1526) supplied a form of the vernacular sung Mass. It concluded with aversion of the Hussite hymn 'Jesus Christus, unser Heiland'. Heinrich Lufft's Enchiridion (also 1526) constituted the first ever congregational hymn-book. Within five years of the Diet of Worms, Luther's followers were musically fully equipped.
The Lutheran musical tradition had far-reaching consequences. It required every parish to keep its cantor, its organist, its choir school, and its body of trained singers and instrumentalists. As a result, it played a
prominent role in turning Germany into the most musically educated nation in Europe—the richest resource for Europe's secular music-making. The genius of J. S. Bach could have found no more fertile soil than in Lutheranism.
A hypothesis exists which maintains that it was the German language and its rhythms which lay at the root of Germany's musical pre-eminence. This may or may not be true. But one can find Luther saying in 1525 that 'both text and notes, accent, melody and performance ought to grow from the true mother tongue and its reflections'. Luther's emphasis on the use of the vernacular deeply affected German education. There is a direct link between the hymns and masses of Luther, Walter. Rhaw, and Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672), and the later glories of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms.3
To celebrate the Lutheran tradition in isolation no doubt does a disservice to Catholic music, and to the fruitful interactions of various Christian traditions. But one only has to compare the sterile music of Calvinism, whose ban on 'Popish polyphony' reduced the Geneva Psalter (1562) to a collection of metrical unisons, to see the felicity of Luther's music-making.
In many ways the Church of England shares Luther's musicality, developing a wonderful tradition launched by Tallis, Gibbons, and Byrd. In its stunning simplicity, Tallis's Canon, composed by a monk of Waltham Abbey who became a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, is the Anglican equivalent of Ein' festeBurg, and an eight-part round to boot:
tallis's canon 8 8 8 8 (lm)
Kö«   I      I    i    l i								
								
-ST—1	J	r r r r 1   i   , A	r r r j j J		r j	1 r	r r j 1	r f r j j j
								
^        1 ■ r 1 1 r r.....r Glory to thee, my God, this night								
For all the blessings of the light. Keep me, oh keep me, King of Kings Beneath thine own almighty wings4
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Nor should one neglect the magnificent musical tradition of the Orthodox Church, which adopted polyphony as readily as Luther did. In this case the ban on musical instruments inspired a very special expertise in choral part-singing; The Catholic Church always permitted instrumental accompaniment. The earliest surviving church organ, dating from 1320, is still operational at Sion in the Valais. But in Russia and Ukraine the polyphony had to be generated by human voices alone, thereby fostering a culture which is as ready to make music as to appreciate it. In this context, Tchaikovsky was no more of an accident than Bach was.
Meanwhile, the Lutheran protest movement was swelled by a series of parallel events, each of which widened the nature of Protestantism. In 1522 in Switzerland, Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531), hellenist, correspondent of Erasmus, and 'people's priest' at Zurich, challenged the Roman Church both on ecclesiastical organization and on doctrine. Like Luther, he started by denouncing indulgences; and he shared Luther's concept of justification by faith. But he also rejected the authority of bishops; and he taught that the Eucharist was no more than a simple, symbolic ceremony. He was killed at Kappel in 1531, carrying the Protestant banner in a war against the five Catholic forest cantons that had split the Swiss Confederation. He launched an important Protestant trend, in which local congregations or communities claimed the right to control their affairs, [holism]
In the 1520s radical preachers and sects proliferated in Germany. Andreas Karlstadt (1480-1541), who quarrelled with Luther, went off to Basel. The 'Prophets of Zwickau'—Storch, Stuebner and Thomae—were old-fashioned mil-lenarians. The mystic Thomas Muentzer (1490-1525), possessed both communist and anarchist traits, modelling his group on the Czech Taborites. After many wanderings, he was caught at the head of a band of expropriators during the Peasants' War in Thuringia, and executed at Muhlhausen. The Anabaptists or 'Rebaptisers' emerged among some disgruntled Swiss Zwinglians. Rejecting all established authority, they declared all previous baptisms invalid. They also sought to found an ideal Christian republic on evangelical principles, renouncing oaths, property, and (in theory) all violence. In 1534~5 at Munster in Westphalia under two Dutchmen—Jan Matthijs of Haarlem and Jan Beukelz of Leiden—they briefly created a 'Kingdom of the Elect' that was crushed with great cruelty. The cages which once held the remains of their leaders, still hang from the spire of St. Lambert's Church. The Anabaptists were Christendom's first fundamentalists, persecuted by Protestants and Catholics alike. They recovered as 'Mennonites' under the Frieslander, Menno Simons (1496-1561), sowing a spiritual legacy for later Baptists, Unitarians and Quakers. Christian Spiritualism, in contrast, drew support from Bavarian Denckians, Swabian Franckians and Silesian Schwenkfeldians.
HOLISM
I n February 1528 the wonderful 'Dr Paracelsus' lost his brief appointment I as Basle's city physician. He had been barred from the university, had offended the guild of apothecaries, and had sued a prelate for refusing to pay him a full professional fee. When he publicly accused the magistrates of bias, he risked arrest and fled. His ideas were no more acceptable to the scholastic medicine of his day than to the supposedly scientific medicine of a later age.
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), known as Paracelsus, was born at Einsiedeln in the canton of Schwyz. He was the contemporary of Luther, Erasmus, and Michelangelo. He graduated from the medical faculty at Ferrara in 1524. But he dropped higher study and spent seven years travelling, learning the lore of herbalists, gypsies, and magicians, and earning his keep at the artisan grade of barber-surgeon. He visited Spain and Portugal, Russia and Poland, Scandinavia and Constantinople, Crimea and possibly Egypt. Formerly a Catholic, he often associated with the radical sects such as the Anabaptists and the Brethren of the Free Spirit. Arrested in Salzburg in 1525 for supporting rebellious peasants, he narrowly escaped execution. Apart from Basle, his longer sojourns were at Strasbourg, Nuremberg, St Gallen, Meran in Tyrol, St Moritz, Bad Pfeifers, Augsburg, Kromau in Moravia, Bratislava, Vienna and Villach. He was a prolific author on everything from theology to magic—the centrepiece being Opus Pararnirium (1531), his'Work Beyond Wonders'.
Paracelsus rejected the reigning notion that medical knowledge was to be garnered from ancient texts. At Basle, he had joined some students who were burning the works of Avicenna. Instead, he proposed to learn on the one hand from practical observations and on the other from 'the four pillars'—natural philosophy, astrology, alchemy, and 'Virtue' (by which he meant the innate powers of people, plants, and minerals). His empirical bent led to a series of brilliant treatments and techniques in amputations, antisepsis, homeopathy, and balneology. His other lines led him to an alternative system of biochemistry based on sulphur, salt, and mercury, and gave him a lasting reputation for wizardry. Not for 400 years was even part of Europe's medical profession prepared to consider his holistic precept—that the good doctor seeks the harmony of all factors affecting the patient's well-being, including the environmental, the psychosomatic and the supernatural.
Paracelsus lived at a time when no one understood the workings of the digestive, circulatory, neural, or reproductive systems, let alone genes or chromosomes. Yet many of his insights resonate across the centuries:
Both the man and the woman each have half a seed, and the two together make a whole seed . . . There is in the matrix [womb] an attractive force (like
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amber or a magnet) . . . Once the will has been determined, the matrix- draws unto itself the seed of the woman and the man from the humours of the heart, the liver, the spleen, the bone, the blood ... and all that is in the body. For every part of the body, has its own particular seed. But when all these seeds • come together, they are only one seed.'
In 1529 King Henry VIII of England initiated the policy which was to separate the English Church from Rome. The initial cause lay in Henry's obsessive desire for a male heir and in the Pope's refusal to grant him a divorce. Henry, who had earlier earned the title of Fidei Defensor for denouncing Luther, had little religious motivation; but he gained great support in Parliament, and immense material advantage, by attacking the Church's privileges and property. The Act of Annates (1532) cut financial payments to Rome. The Act of Appeals (1533) curtailed Rome's ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The Act of Supremacy (1534) abolished papal authority completely, raising the King to be Supreme Head of the Church of England. Subjects such as Thomas More or Cardinal John Fisher, who declined to accede, were executed for treason. The Ten Articles (1536) and Six Articles (1539) asserted the inviolability of the Roman Mass and of traditional doctrine. The direct association of Church and State—later called Erastianism—brought Anglicanism closer to Orthodox than to Catholic practice, [utopia]
In 1541, at the second attempt, Jean Calvin (1509-64) was persuaded to take control of the church in Geneva. A fugitive Frenchman, more radical than Luther, Calvin founded the most widely influential branch of Protestantism. A scholar raised in the spirit of Lefevre d'Etaples and a sometime Catholic lawyer, he had been protected by the circle of Marguerite d'Angouleme. He was converted to the new thinking after hearing a homily on the sovereignty of the Scriptures by the Rector of the Sorbonne, Nicholas Cop. Fearing repressions, he resigned his benefice in his native Noyon and fled to Basle. There, in 1535, he published his seminal Institution de la religion chretienne.
Calvin expressed original ideas on theology, on the relations of Church and State, and especially on private morality. He was nearer to Luther than to Zwingli on the Eucharist; but his revival of the doctrine of predestination proved shocking. He saw humanity to be divided into the Damned and the Elect. By this, he taught his disciples to think of themselves as an embattled minority, a band of righteous brothers surrounded by a hostile world, 'Strangers among Sinners': Ainsi les Bourgeois du Ciel n'aiment point le Monde, ni les choses qui sont au Monde . . . il secrient avec le Sage: 'Vanite des Vanites; tout n'est que vanite et rongement d'Esprit'. (The inhabitants of the city of Heaven do not love the World, nor the things of the World . . . They cry with the Prophet, 'Vanity of vanities; everything is nothing but vanity and the devouring of the spirit.')14
On Church organization, too, Calvin's innovations far exceeded those of Zwingli. He insisted not only on the separation of Church and State but also on
UTOPIA
Utopia, meaning 'No Place', was the name coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More for his book describing his search for an ideal form of government. Translated into English in 1551, after the author's martyrdom, as A Frutefull, pleasant and wittie worke of the beste state ofapublique weale, and of the new yle called Utopia, and also into French, German, Spanish, and Italian, it became a bestseller. In it More described a land where property was held in common, both men and women benefited from universal education, and all religions were tolerated.1
Utopian thinking supplies a deep human need for an ideal vision of a better world. The genre has attracted many practitioners, from Plato's Republic to Bacon's New Atlantis and Harrington's Oceana. Similar effects may be gained by imagining the horrors of Dystopia or 'Bad Place'. Such was the intent of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) or of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In the twentieth century, utopianism has generally been associated with left-wing thinking. Soviet Russia was widely thought by its admirers to have been a modern utopia, free of the evils of capitalist democracy. 'I have seen the future,' said an American visitor in 1919, 'and it works.' Such opinions have since been disgraced by knowledge of the mass murders committed in the name of 'socialism' and 'progress'. Modern liberals have moved on to the more humdrum task of bettering the lot of individuals.2 [harvest] [Vorkuta]
What is not so readily accepted is that Fascism too had its utopias. After the initial phase of brutal conquest, many Nazis, like many Communists, dreamed of a beautiful, harmonious future. The French writer 'Vercors', for example, recounts the musings of a German officer in occupied France, who looks forward to the glorious future of Franco-German union. 'It will be a replay of Beauty and the Beast'.3 After the war, in Eastern Europe's Communist prisons, many democrats imprisoned for opposition to Communism had to listen to the broken dreams of their convicted Nazi cell-mates.4 The Fascist utopia, like that of the Communists, was false, and generated immense suffering. But there were those who dreamed it sincerely, [lettland]
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the competence of local congregations. On the other hand, he also expected that the temporal power would be inspired by religious precepts, and by a desire to enforce all judgements of the Church organs. In matters of toleration, therefore, he was no more flexible than the Inquisition or Henry VIII. [syrop]
In ethical matters, Calvin established a new and inimitable code which made his followers instantly recognizable. The good Calvinist family was to abhor all forms of pleasure and frivolity—dancing, songs, drinking, gaming, flirtation, bright clothes, entertaining books, loud language, even vivacious gestures. Their life was to be marked by sobriety, self-restraint, hard work, thrift, and, above all, godliness. Their membership of the Elect was to be manifest in their appearance, in their conduct, in their church-going, and in their worldly success. To the old Catholic burden of sin they added the new burden of keeping up appearances. In art, they were to avoid all direct portrayal of the Deity, all mystical symbols and allegories. They were to find the sole source of joy and guidance in the daily reading of the Bible. Here was what the English-speaking world would come to know as the Puritan.
The full formation of Calvinist principles had to await the definitive publication of the Institution in 1559 and the second Helvetic Confession, drawn up by H. Bullinger (1504-75), Zwingli's successor at Zurich, in 1566.
Calvin's successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza (1519-1605), a Greek scholar and theologian, introduced a rigid, determinist view of predestination that was vigorously opposed by the followers of Jakub Hermans (Arminius, 1560-1609), Professor at Leyden in Holland. The Arminians emphasized the doctrine of free will, and the efficacy of Christ's death for all believers, not just for the Elect.
The spread of Protestantism has to be described both in socio-political as well as in geographical terms.
Lutheranism appealed directly to independent-minded princes. It confirmed the legitimacy of their rule whilst maintaining the existing social order. It was quickly adopted in several states—notably in Wurtemberg, Hesse, Anhalt, electoral and ducal Saxony, Neumark, and Pomerania—and in most north German cities from Bremen to Riga. It entered a prolonged crisis in 1540, when Luther condoned the bigamous marriage of Philip of Hesse by advising the new faith's leading patron 'to tell a good strong lie'. Until the Formula of Concord (1580), it survived several decades of schism between the strict 'Gnesio-Lutherans' and the more liberal 'Melanchthonians'. In Denmark and Norway, through the preaching of'the Danish Luther', Hans Tausen, it became the state religion in 1537. It helped perpetuate Denmark's loss of Sweden, where it was not fully established until 1593; and it accelerated the collapse of the Teutonic States in Prussia (1525) and in Livonia (1561).
Calvinism, in contrast, coincided less with state politics than with the inclinations of particular social groups. In Western Europe it often appealed to the rising urban bourgeoisie, and in France to an impressive cross-section of the nobility. In Eastern Europe, also, it appealed both to the landed gentry and to the magnates. In the kingdom of England, Calvinism began to make an impact after the death
renaissances and reformations
493
SYROP
On-Saturday, 12 August 1553 a fugitive from the Holy Inquisition rode into the village of Louyset on the French side of Geneva. Four months earlier he had been arrested in Lyons on charges of heresy and, after interrogation by the Inquisitor General, condemned to death. He had escaped from prison, and had been wandering ever since. His aim was to take a boat across the lake from Geneva, and to make for Zurich. Geneva was the stronghold of Calvin, Zurich of the Zwinglians.
Prior to his arrest, the fugitive had been employed as physician to the Archbishop of Vienne. A native of Navarre, he had studied at Toulouse, Paris, Louvain, and Montpellier. He was the author of several medical treatises, of a study of Ptolemy's Geography, and of two anti trinitarian theological works—De Trinitatis Erroribus (1521) and the anonymous Christianismi restitutio (1553). For the past eight years he had correspond ed with some animosity with Calvin, whom he had once met.1
On the Sunday, having sold his horse, he walked into Geneva, found a room at La Rose, and went to an afternoon service, in church, he was recognized by someone and denounced to the city authorities. By the next morning he was facing the same questions from a Calvinist interrogator that he had faced from the Catholic Inquisitor. He was Fr. Miguel Serveto de Villanova, otherwise 'Servetus' (1511-53).
Calvin's conduct towards Servetus was, to put it mildly, unchristian. He had once warned him against coming to Geneva. He had even supplied the Inquisition at Lyons with a specimen of his correspondent's handwriting. He now set aside Geneva's laws concerning religious toleration, and recommended that Servetus be beheaded. Instead, by order of the court, he was burned alive at Champel on 27 October.
Nowhere in Europe could radical thinkers feel really safe. The Russian Orthodox Church had burned its 'Judaizers'. Byzantium, too, had its Inquisition. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), philosopher and renegade Dominican, who was burned at the stake in Rome, was also, it seems, an English spy.2 Poland-Lithuania was an isolated haven, where from 1565 episcopal courts could not enforce their verdicts. The anti-trinitarians tarried in Transylvania before moving on to Poland. Their leader, the Siennese Fausto Sozzini (1539-1604) to whom Servetus is sometimes compared, had also lived in Lyons and Geneva, where, enrolled in the Italian Church, he had kept quiet.
Long after his death, Servetus was remembered as a symbol of the interdependence of Protestant and Catholic bigotry. Monuments to his memory would be erected in Madrid (1876), Pans (1907), and Vienne (1910). Had he lived longer, he would have enioyed the success of the four editions of his work on medicinal syrops, Syroporum universa ratio (1537)
494 RENATIO
of Henry VIII in 1547. The reign of the boy king Edward VI produced much confusion, and the interval of the ultra-Catholic Queen Mary, a crop of Protestant martyrs, notably at Oxford. Thereafter, under Elizabeth I, the Church Settlement enshrined in the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571) reached a judicious synthesis of Erastian, Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, and traditional Catholic influences. From then on, Anglicanism has always provided an umbrella for two main political and theological tendencies—the 'High Church' of Anglo-Catholicism and the 'Low Church' of the Calvinistic evangelicals. Despite merciless persecution under Elizabeth, both recusant Catholics and non-conformist puritans survived underground. The latter re-emerged in force in the seventeenth century and, under Cromwell's Commonwealth (1649-58), briefly controlled the state.
Thanks to the efforts of John Knox (1513-72)» Calvinism became the sole established religion in Scotland in 1560, in a form known as Presbyterianism. Though subject to Anglican influences, the Scottish Kirk stayed apart.
In France the Calvinists were dubbed Huguenots. They spread rapidly in the former Albigensian lands in the south and west, and in the urban populations of all provinces. They formed the backbone of the Bourbon Party during the Wars of Religion, and an essential feature of the French religious scene until their ultimate expulsion in 1685.
In the Netherlands the rise of Calvinism, especially among the burghers of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Leyden, provided a basic factor in the split between the Catholic provinces to the west and the United Provinces to the east. The Dutch Reformed Church has played a central role in the country since its establishment as the state religion in 1622.
In Germany Calvinism was long opposed both by Lutherans and Catholics. It received its major support from the adherence in 1563 of the Elector-Palatine, Frederick III, who imposed the Heidelberg Catechism on all his subjects; from Christian I of Saxony (d. 1591), and in 1613 from the conversion of the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg. Brandenburg-Prussia was unusual in tolerating both Calvinism and Lutheranism. [faustus]
In Poland-Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary Calvinism appealed to a wide section of the landed gentry. In some parts, such as Transylvania or the Duchy of Cieszyn, its presence proved durable. The Hungarian city of Debrecen has been 'the Calvinist Rome' ever since. In Lithuania it claimed the allegiance of many magnates, including Europe's largest landowners—the Radziwilts.
The effects of Protestantism can be observed in every sphere of European life. By emphasizing the necessity of Bible-reading, it made a major impact on education in the Protestant countries, and hence on popular literacy. In the economic sphere it made a major contribution to enterprise culture, and hence to the rise of capitalism. In politics it proved a major bone of contention both between states and between rival groupings within states. By dividing the Catholic world in two, it spurred the Roman Church into the Reform which it had repeatedly postponed. Above all, it dealt a fatal blow to the ideal of a united Christendom. Until the
RENAISSANCES AND REFORMATIONS
FAUSTUS
The real-life 'Dr Faustus' was a vagabond mountebank and fairground conjurer, who died at Staufen in Breisgau in 1541. Supposedly a graduate of Cracow like Copernicus, he frequented numerous German universities, presenting himself as Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior. He became notorious for his blasphemies, for his 'miracles' such as changing water into wine, and for his claim to be in league with the Devil. His exploits inspired a stream of so-called Faustbuchs. The first of them, compiled at Frankfurt in 1587, was translated into Danish in 1588, into French and Dutch in 1592, into English before 1594, and into Czech in 1602.
As a fictional figure. Faust made his debut in 1594 in the play by Christopher Marlowe, where he appears as a man of overweening ambition, striving to become 'great Emperor of the world'. He enjoys a season of power before the Devil reclaims his own. In Germany he featured in a lost drama by Lessing, and in a novel by F. M. Klmger (1791), before being adopted as the central protagonist of Goethe's two-part verse tragedy (1808, 1832). Ferruccio Busoni's opera, Doktor Faust (1916) remained unfinished.
Goethe's Faust defies easy summary. Faust's pact with Mephisto promises him rejuvenation, and he lives to be a hundred. Gib meine Jugend mir zurück! In Part I, which deals with the 'smaller world' of private emotion, Faust wrestles with the conflict between his duty to the Devil and his love for Gretchen. In Part II, which treats the grosse Weit of society and politics, he is the minister of a wastrel Emperor. When he dies, Gretchen intervenes, and the Devil is cheated; Heavenly choirs greet the progress of a redeemed soul, as Love triumphs:
Der früh Geliebte, Nicht mehr Getrübt, Er kommt zurück! (The beloved of long ago. no more befogged, is coming back!)1
Goethe's masterpiece inspired two operas, by Gounod and Berlioz, and the Faust Symphony (1857) by Liszt. In more recent times. Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus (1947) revived the legend for a grim judgement on contemporary Germany. A musician. Adrian Leverkuhn. seduced by the works of Wagner and Nietzsche, contracts the diabolical curse of syphilis from a femme fatale, and expires after composing a nihilistic cantata, D. Fausti Weheklag. At its close, a sustained diminuendo from a solo cello recalls 'the light in the night', hinting thai German civilization may not. after all, engender total despair.'-1
496 REN A TI O
1530s, Christendom had been split into two halves—Orthodox and Catholic. From the 1530s onwards it was split into three: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. And the Protestants themselves were split into ever more rival factions. The scandal was so great, and the fragmentation was so widespread, that people stopped talking about Christendom, and began to talk instead about 'Europe'.
The Counter-Reformation was given its name by Protestant historians who assumed that it was born to oppose the Protestant Reformation. Catholic historians see it differently, as the second stage of a movement for Church reform which had a continuous history from the conciliarists of the late fourteenth century to the Council of Trent. One must stress, however, that the Counter-Reformation was not some sort of autarkic historical engine operating in isolation. Like the Renaissance and the Reformation, it interacted with all the other great phenom- -ena of the age.
The paralysis reigning at the centre of the Catholic Church eased during the pontificate of Paul 111 (Alessandro Farnese, 1534-49). Known as 'Cardinal Petticoat', Paul III was a flagrant nepotist, brother of a papal concubine, and the lavish patron of Michelangelo and Titian. At the same time he saw the urgency of change. He revitalized the Sacred College, commissioned the key inquiry into Church reform, Consilium de emendanda ecclesia (1537). patronized the Jesuits, established the Holy Office, and launched the Council of Trent. Until the 1530s the Sacred College of Cardinals, which elected the Popes, was one of the Church's weaker pillars. But with its budget cut, and its numbers increased by several brilliant appointments, it became the Vatican's power-house for change. Its outstanding names included Cardinals Caraffa (later Paul IV, 1555-9). Cervini (later Marcellus II, 1555), and the Englishman Reginald Pole, who missed election in 1550 by one vote. The next run of popes was of a different stamp. Pius IV (1559-65) did not hesitate to condemn to death the criminal nephews of his predecessor. The austere and fanatical Pius V (1566-72), sometime Inquisitor-General who walked barefoot in Rome, was later canonized. Gregory XIII (1572-85), who rejoiced at the massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve, was wholly political.
The Society of Jesus has been called the corps d'elite of Catholic Reform. It combined the fierce piety and military lifestyle of its Basque founder, Jnigo Lopez de Recalde (St Ignatius Loyola, 1491-1556), author of the Spiritual Exercises (1523). Approved in 1540 by Paul Ill's Bull Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae, it operated under direct papal command. Its members were organized in ranks under their General, and were trained to think of themselves as 'companions of Jesus'. Their aims were to convert the heathen, to reconvert the lapsed, and, above all, to educate. Within a few decades of their formation, their missionaries appeared all over the world from Mexico to Japan. Their colleges sprang up in every corner of Catholic Europe, from Braganza to Kiev. 'I have never left the Army,' said St Ignatius; 'I have only been seconded to the service of God.' And elsewhere: 'Give me a boy at the age of seven, and he will be mine for ever.' At his canonization it was said, 'Ignatius had a heart large enough to hold the universe.'1-"'
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Despite their successes, the Jesuits aroused immense fear and resentment, among Catholics as well as Protestants. They were famed for their casuistry in dispute, and were widely thought to hold that 'the end justifies the means'. They came to be seen as the Church's secret thought police, accountable to no one. Already in 1612 the forged Monita Secreta, published in Cracow, purported to reveal the instructions of their worldwide conspiracy under the formidable General Acquaviva, 'the Black Pope'. The Society was suppressed in 1773 but restored in 1814.
The Holy Office was established in 1542 as the supreme court of appeal in matters of heresy. Staffed by leading cardinals, it assumed supervision of the Inquisition and in 1557 issued the first Index, the list of prohibited books. In 1588 it became one of the nine reorganized Congregations, or executive departments of the Roman Curia. It worked alongside the Office for the Propagation of the Faith, which was charged with converting the heathen and heretics, [index] [inquisitio] [propaganda]
The Council of Trent, which met in three sessions, 1545-7, 1551-2» and 1562-3, was the General Council for which Church reformers had been praying for decades. It provided the doctrinal definitions and the institutional structures which enabled the Roman Church to revive and to meet the Protestant challenge. Its decrees on doctrine were largely conservative. It confirmed that the Church alone could interpret the Scriptures, and that religious truth derived from Catholic tradition as well as from the Bible. It upheld traditional views of original sin, justification, and merit, and rejected the various Protestant alternatives to transubstantiation during the Eucharist. Its decrees on organization reformed the Church orders, regularized the appointment of bishops, and established seminaries in every diocese. Its decrees on the form of the Mass, contained in a new Catechism and a revised Breviary, affected the lives of ordinary Catholics most directly. After 1563 the same Latin Tridentine Mass could be heard in most Roman Catholic churches throughout the world.
Critics of the Council of Trent point to its neglect of practical ethics, its failure to give Catholics a moral code to match that of the Protestants. 'It impressed on the Church the stamp of an intolerant age,' wrote an English Catholic, 'and perpetuated ... the spirit of an austere immorality.'16 The Protestant historian Ranke stressed the paradox of a Council which had intended to trim the Papacy. Instead, by oaths of loyalty, detailed regulations, and punishments, the entire Catholic hierarchy was subordinated to the Pope. 'Discipline was restored, but all the faculties of directing it were centred in Rome.'17 Several Catholic monarchs, including Philip II of Spain, so feared the Tridentine decrees that they curtailed their publication.
The particular religious ethos promoted by the Counter-Reformation emphasized the discipline and collective life of the faithful. It reflected the wide powers of enforcement given to the hierarchy, and the outward show of conformity which believers were now required to display. It insisted on regular confession as a sign of submission. It was supported by a wide range of communal practices—
498
RENATIO
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499
INQUISITIO
Sixteenth-century Seville. Jesus Christ has returned to earth, and has been caught performing miracles. He is promptly arrested. The Grand Inquisitor conducts the prisoner's interrogation in person. 'Why have you come to meddle with us?' he asks. And answer received he none.
Among many recriminations, the Inquisitor accuses Christ of misleading people with the gift of Free Will. Man is by nature a rebel and given the choice will always choose the path to damnation. For their own good, he implies, people must be denied their freedom in order to save their souls. 'Did you forget that a tranquil mind, and a tranquil death, is dearer to Man than freedom in the knowledge of Good and Evil?'
Moreover, the Inquisitor claims, the facts of History support his case. People are too weak to resist temptation. For 1,500 years, they have wallowed in sin and suffering, incapable of heeding Christ's behests. 'You promised them bread from Heaven, but can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, vicious, and always ignoble race of men? We are more humane than you.'
The Inquisitor charges that Christ did not rebut the Devil's challenge, and did not give proof of his Divinity. He failed the threefold test on Mystery, Miracle, and Authority. The Papacy, in fact, is secretly on the Devil's side. 'We have been with him, and not with you,' the Inquisitor reveals, referring to the Catholic-Orthodox Schism, 'for eight centuries'.
The Inquisitor bitterly foretells the victory of faithless materialism. 'Do you know that centuries will pass, and mankind will proclaim . . . that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, and only starving people? "Feed them first, and then demand virtue!" That's what will be written on the banners with which they will destroy your temple.'
In the Inquisitor's dungeon, the conclusion seems inevitable.'You have been disgorged from Hell', he tells Christ; 'You are a heretic. Tomorrow I shall burn you!'
At the last moment, Christian forgiveness triumphs. Christ kisses the Inquisitor on the cheek. Overcome by the power of love, the Inquisitor relents, and the prison gate is opened. . . .
Such a summary might serve as introductory student notes on 'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor'. The creator of 'The Legend' was a young Russian author, Ivan Karamazov, who lived with his father and brothers in the 1860s. The Karamazovs' own saga, like the 'Legend', which forms one of its central episodes, poses the eternal questions of Good and Evil Father Karamazov is a nasty debauchee, against whom the elder son Dmitri, has already rebelled. Ivan and Aloysha, Dmitri's half-brothers, are respectively the sceptical atheist and the trusting optimist. But it is the fourth, bastard son, Smyerdyakov or 'Stinker', who kills the Father before killing himself. At the tnai, Ivan is racked by guilt for inciting the deed, and
tries to take the blame. But in an atrocious miscarriage of justice, the innocent Dmitri is condemned. In a final scene, the family's children show their elders how to live in harmony.1
The creator of The Brothers Karamazov (1880) was Feodor Dostoyevsky.2 In it, he re-worked many of the themes and insights of a lifetime's writing. In the view of Sigmund Freud, it is 'the most magnificent novel ever written.' About the Creator of Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky had no doubts.
Dostoyevsky invented the Grand Inquisitor's Legend as the vehicle for European literature's most penetrating critique of the Christian Church. In it, he presages the moral objections to totalitarianism. He imagines a fictional event. It well illustrates the author's prejudices against Catholicism, but also his belief in the essential unity of Christendom.
On the surface, Dostoyevsky was a Russian chauvinist. He disliked 'merciless' Jews; he despised Catholics, especially Poles, whom he often portrayed as criminals; and he hated socialists. He took the Russian Orthodox Church to be what its name proclaimed—the only True Faith. 'In the West there is no longer any Christianity', he ranted; Catholicism is transforming itself into idolatry, whilst Protestantism is rapidly changing into atheism and to variable ethics.'3 Allegedly, his formula was: 'Catholicism = Unity without Freedom. Protestantism = Freedom without Unity; Orthodoxy = Freedom in Unity, Unity in Freedom.'
Many critics consider that Dostoyevsky put the Inquisitor's arguments more forcefully than Christ's. In the confrontation between Church and Faith, the Faith appears to lose. This was probably his intention, since he rated logic far lower than belief. 'Even if it were proved to me that Christ were outside the Truth', he once wrote, i would still stay with Christ.'"
Dostoyevsky's critique of the West was unremitting (which may explain his star rating among Western intellectuals). Yet he saw the division of Christendom as an instance of the Evil which would ultimately be overcome. He believed fervently that evil could be conquered. Sin and suffering precede redemption. The scandals of the Church were a necessary prelude to Christian harmony. By this reasoning, the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition were an indication of Christianity's ultimate triumph. In his heart of hearts, the old reactionary was a universal Christian, and, in the spiritual sense, a devout European.
Above all, Dostoyevsky believed in the healing power of faith. On the title-page of The Brothers Karamazov, he added the verse 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.'5 Those same words were carved on his tombstone.
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R EN ATI O
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PROPAGANDA
Propaganda is the child of conflicting belief, and of people's determination to spread their own doctrines against all others. Its origins undoubtedly lay in the'religious sphere. It is m. essence biased, being most successful when it appeals to hatred and .prejudice. It is the antithesis of all honest education and information.
To be most effective, propaganda needs the help of censorship. Within a sealed informational arena, it can mobilize all means of communication—printed, spoken, artistic, and visual—and press its claims to maximum advantage. To this end, the Roman Offlcium de Propaganda Fidei, from which the term derives, worked alongside the Inquisition. It became one of the Vatican's permanent congregations in 1622.
Propaganda was no less prevalent in Protestant and Orthodox countries, where the Churches were subordinated to state power. Political propaganda, too, had always existed, though without the name. It was boosted by printing, and later by newspapers and broadsheets. It was most in evidence in wartime, especially during civil and religious wars. During the 1790s, French soldiers were given to appearing in the enemy camp armed only with leaflets.
In the twentieth century, the scope for propaganda was dramatically expanded by the advent of new media, such as film, radio, and TV; by the techniques of marketing, mass persuasion, commercial advertising, and 'PR'; by the appearance of Utopian ideologies; and by the ruthlessness of the totalitarian state. 'Total propaganda' and the art of 'the Big Lie' was pioneered by the Bolsheviks. Lenin, after Plekhanov, distinguished between the high-powered propagandist, who devised the strategy, and the low-level agitator, who put it into practice. Where Soviet agitprop led, the Fascists were quick to follow. Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules:
1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between 'Good and Bad', 'Friend and Foe'.
2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends.
4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one's viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure, and by 'psychological contagion'.
5. The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.
In this regard, one of the supreme masters acknowledged his antecedents. The Catholic Church keeps going', said Dr Goebbels, 'because it has been repeating the same thing for two thousand years. The National Socialist Party must do likewise.''
One of the more insidious forms of propaganda, however, is that where the true sources of information are hidden from recipients and propagators alike. This genre of so-called 'covertly directed propaganda' aims to mobilize a network of unsuspecting 'agents of influence' who pass on the desired message as if they were acting spontaneously. By feigning a coin-cidence of views with those of the target society, which it seeks to subvert, and by pandering to the proclivities of key individuals, it can suborn a dominant elite of opinion-makers by stealth.
Such, it seems, was the chosen method of Stalin's propaganda chiefs who spun their webs among the cultural circles of leading Western countries from the 1920s onwards. The chief controller in the field was an apparently harmless German Communist, an erstwhile colleague of Lenin in Switzerland and sometime acquaintance of Dr Goebbels in the Reichstag, Willi Munzenberg (1889-1940). Working alongside Soviet spies, he perfected the art of doing secret business in the open. He set the agenda of a series of campaigns against 'Anti-militarism', 'Anti-imperialism', and above all 'Anti-fascism', homing in on a handful of receptive milieux in Berlin, Paris, and London. His principal dupes and recruits, dubbed 'fellow-travellers' by the sceptics, rarely joined the Communist Party and would indignantly deny being manipulated. They included writers, artists, editors, left-wing publishers, and carefully selected celebrities—hence Romain Rolland, Louis Aragon, André Malraux, Heinrich Mann, Berthold Brecht, Anthony Blunt, Harold Laski, Claud Cockburn, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and half the Bloomsbury Set. Since all attracted strings of acolytes, dubbed 'Innocents' Clubs', they achieved a ripple effect that was aptly called 'rabbit breeding'. The ultimate goal has been nicely defined; 'to create for the right-thinking, non-communist West the dominating political prejudice of the era: the belief that any opinion that happened to serve . . . the Soviet Union was derived from the most essential elements of human decency.'2
Such cynicism has few parallels. It can be judged by the fate which the Great Leader reserved for all his most devoted propagandists such as Karol Radek, and probably Munzenberg himself, who was found mysteriously hanged in the French mountains. Brecht's comment on Stalin's victims was less of a joke than he thought. 'The more innocent they are', he wrote, 'the more they deserve to be shot'.3
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R EN AT1O
pilgrimages, ceremonies, and processions—and by the calculated theatricality of the accompanying art, architecture, and music. Catholic propaganda of this vintage was strong both on rational argument, and on devices for impressing the senses. The Baroque churches of the era, crammed with altars, columns, statues, cherubs, gold leaf, icons, monstrances, candelabra, and incense, were designed to leave nothing to the private thoughts of the congregation. Unlike the Protestant preachers, who stressed individual conscience and individual probity, all too often the Catholic clergy seemed to urge their flock to blind obedience.
The Counter-Reformation saw a plentiful harvest of Catholic saints. There were the Spanish mystics: St Teresa of Avila (1515-82) and St John of the Cross (1542-91); there was a long line of servants of the sick and the poor: St Philip Neri (1515-95), St Camillo de Lellis (1550-1614), St Vincent de Paul (1576-1660), St Louise de Marillac (1591-1660); and there were the Jesuit saints and martyrs: St Francis Xavier (1506-52), St StanisJaw Kostka (1550-68), St Aloysius Gonzaga (1568-91), St Peter Canisius (1521-97), St John Berchmans (1599-1621), and St Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621). They won back much lost ground.
The impact of the Counter-Reformation was felt right across Europe. Traditional support for the Church was strongest in Italy and Spain, but pockets of nonconformity had to be smoked out even there. The Spanish Netherlands, trapped between France and the United Provinces, were turned into a hotbed of Catholic militancy in which the University of Louvain (Leuven) and the Jesuit College at Douai took the lead. Yet an important reaction against the prevailing zeal was provoked by Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), Bishop of Ypres and a fervent critic of the Jesuits. In his digest of the works of St Augustine, the Augustinus (1640), Jansen attacked what he took to be the theological casuistry and superficial morality of his day, placing special emphasis on the believer's need for Divine Grace and for spiritual rebirth. Though he never wavered in his loyalty to Rome, and rejected the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, several of his propositions on the issue of Divine Grace approached the Protestant standpoint, and were duly condemned as such. (See Chapter VIII.)
Switzerland was rent by the hostility of the Catholic and the Protestant cantons. The doctrines of Zurich and Geneva penetrated many of the alpine villages of the surrounding regions. They were eradicated by violent means on the Italian border by St Charles Borromeo, Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan (1538-84), and contested in Savoy by the more gentle persuasion of St Francis de Sales (1567-1622), author of the bestselling Introduction to the Devout Life (1609). [menocchi]
In France, many Catholics stood aloof from the new militancy, partly in line with the Gallican tradition and the Concordat of 1516, and partly from France's hostility to the Habsburgs. But a pro-Roman 'ultramontane' party grew in prominence round the faction of the Guises. Their darkest deed was committed at the massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve on 23 August 1572, when 2,000 Huguenots were butchered in Paris—after which the Pope celebrated a Te Deum and the King of Spain 'began to laugh'. In the seventeenth century Jansenism offered a middle way, an antidote to the partisanship of contending ultras and Huguenots.
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MENOCCHI
n 1599 a simple miller from Montereale in Friuli, Comenico Scandella. was burned at the stake for heresy, just two years before Giordano Bruno suffered the same penalty in Rome. The papers of his case, which have survived at Udine, open the world of unconventional belief which historians penetrate with difficulty. After two trials, long interrogation, imprisonment, and torture, the Holy Inquisition insisted that he had denied 'the virginity of the Blessed Virgin, the divinity of Christ, and the Providence of God'.
Known as 'Menocchio', the miller of Montereale, sometime village mayor, was father of eleven children, a rampant gossip, an outspoken anti-cleric, and a voracious reader. When he was arrested, his house contained:
a vernacular Italian Bible;
II Fioretto delta Bibbia (a Catalan biblical anthology in translation); // Rosario delta Madonna by Alberto da Castello, OP; A translation of the Legenda Aurea, 'the Golden Legend'; Historia del Giudicio, in fifteenth-century rhyme; // Cavalier Zuanne de Mandavilla (a translation of Sir John Mandeville's Travels);
II Sogno di Caravia (Venice, 1541);
// Supplemento delle Cronache (a version of Foesti's chronicle);
Lunario al Modo di Italia (an almanac);
an unexpurgated edition of Boccaccio's Decameron;
an unnamed book, identified by a witness as the Koran.
Menocchio had talked at length with one Simon the Jew, was interested in Lutheranism, and would not admit the biblical Creation story. Echoing Dante' and numerous ancient myths, he insisted that the angels were produced by nature 'just as worms are produced from cheese'.2
The Kingdom of England was targeted for reconversion in a campaign that spawned the Forty Catholic martyrs led by St Edmund Campion SJ (1540-81) and many other victims. Ireland was confirmed in its Catholicism, especially after the brutal Elizabethan expedition of 1598. But religious unity in Ireland was shattered by the planting of a Scottish Presbyterian colony in Ulster in 1611, and by the Anglican inclinations of the Anglo-Irish gentry.
In the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, the Counter-Reformation became inextricably confused with the dynasty and its politics. Indeed, that special brand of Catholicism, the pietas austriaca, which emerged at the turn of the seventeenth century became the prime ingredient of a wide cultural community that has outlived Habsburg rule. It was once called 'Confessional Absolutism'. The Collegium Germanicum in Rome played a strategic role. The Jesuits took an
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unrivalled hold over education in Vienna and Prague through the efforts of the Dutchman, Canisius. Western Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Silesia, Bohemia, and, at a later date, western Galicia all belonged to this same sphere. Baroque culture, it has been argued, represented the ivy which not only covered the ramshackle Habsburg edifice but helped to hold it together (see p. 529).
Elsewhere in Germany, an uneasy modus vivendi between Catholics and Protestants had been reached in 1555 at the Peace of Augsburg: each prince was to decide on the religion of his subjects; Lutheranism was to be the only Protestant denomination allowed; Lutherans living in Catholic states were to be tolerated. Germany was turned into a religious patchwork where, however, the Catholic princes and emperors, feared a further Protestant advance. As from the 1550s, 'Spanish priests' set up Jesuit centres at Cologne, Mainz, Ingolstadt, and Munich, creating durable Catholic bastions in the Rhineland and Bavaria. Calvinist enclaves, in the Palatinate and Saxony and elsewhere, were not secured until the second half of the century. In December 1607 the Duke of Bavaria provocatively seized the city of Donauwörth in Swabia in order to stop Protestant interference with Catholic processions. Ten Protestant princes thereon convened an Evangelical Union to defend their interests, only to be confronted by the rival activities of a Catholic League. It is difficult to say, therefore, whether the outbreak of the Thirty Years War occurred in 1618 or beforehand.
In this world of growing religious intolerance, Poland-Lithuania occupied a place apart. A vast territory with a very varied population, it had contained a mosaic of the Catholic, Orthodox, Judaic, and Muslim faiths even before Lutheranism claimed the cities of Polish Prussia or Calvinism a sizeable section of the nobility. Such was the position of the ruling szlachta that every manor could run its religious affairs with the same liberty as German princedoms. From 1565 the verdicts of ecclesiastical courts could not be enforced on the private estates of noblemen. At the very time that Cardinal Hozjusz, President of the Council of Trent and Bishop of Warmia, was introducing the Jesuits, Poland was receiving all manner of heretics and religious refugees—English and Scottish Catholics, Czech Brethren, Anabaptists from Holland, or, like Faustus Sozzini (Socinius), Italian unitarians. In 1573, with Calvinists commanding a majority in the Senate, the Polish parliament passed a statute of permanent and universal toleration, from which only the Socinians were excepted. Under Sigismund III Vasa (r. 1587-1632), a fervent pupil of the Jesuits, the ultramontane party gradually reasserted the Catholic supremacy. But progress was slow; and non-violent methods alone were available. In this period Poland could rightly boast of its role both as the bulwark of Christendom against Turk and Tartar and as Europe's prime haven of toleration.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the Counter-Reformation reverberated far and wide. The Vatican, under Gregory XIII (1572-85), entertained hopes of netting not only Sweden and Poland but even Muscovy. In Sweden those hopes remained high until the victory of the Protestants in the civil war of the 1590s dashed Jesuit plans for good. In Moscow the papal nuncio Possevino was received by Ivan the
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Terrible, only to find that the Tsar's main interest in Catholicism lay in the workings of the papal litter. Clumsy pressure from the Catholic side probably pushed Ivan's son, Fedor, into creating the Moscow Patriarchate in 1589, thereby finalizing the emergence of the separate Russian Orthodox Church.
Moscow's demarche provoked a crisis among the Orthodox in neighbouring Poland-Lithuania, who till then had always looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople. With the new Muscovite Patriarch claiming jurisdiction over them from across the frontier, many of those Orthodox now sought the protection of Rome. In 1596, at the Union of Brest, the majority of their bishops chose to found a new Uniate communion—the Greek Catholic Church of Slavic Rite. They retained their ritual, and their married clergy, whilst admitting the supremacy of the Pope. Most of the Orthodox churches in Byelorussia and Ukraine, including the ancient cathedral of St Sophia in Kiev, passed into the hands of the Uniates. For a time the old 'disuniate' remnant was officially banned by the state.
Moscow, however, was never reconciled to these developments. The furious determination of the Russian Orthodox Church to punish and forcibly to reconvert the Uniates remained constant throughout modern history. Nowhere has the stereotype of the dastardly, scheming Jesuit remained stronger. The Russo-Polish wars, when in 1610-12 the Poles briefly occupied the Kremlin, only served to cement the religious hatreds. On the great Russian monastery at Zagorsk near Moscow, a commemorative tablet underlines the popular Russian view of the Counter-Reformation: 'Typhus—Tartars—Poles: Three Plagues'.
In Hungary, a similar Uniate communion emerged from the Union of Uzhgorod (1646). In this case, the Orthodox Ruthenes of the sub-Carpathian region chose to seek union with Rome along the lines adopted in neighbouring Ukraine. (Their decision was still causing ructions between Roman Catholic and Uniate Ruthenes in the USA in the 1920s.)
All over Europe, religious fervour profoundly affected the progress of the arts. The more severe forms of Protestantism questioned the very propriety of artistic endeavour. The plastic arts were often channelled into secular subjects, since religious subjects had become suspect. In some countries, such as Holland or Scotland, music was reduced to hymn-singing and metrical psalms. In England, in contrast, Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85) and others launched the wonderful tradition of Anglican cathedral music. In the Catholic countries, all branches of the arts were exposed to demands for sumptuous and theatrical displays of the Church's glory and power. The trend is known as 'Baroque'. In music, it was associated with the names of Jan Peterzoon Sweelinck (1562-1621), of Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672), and above all of Giovanni Palestrina (1526-94), magister capellae at St Peter's, whose ninety-four extant masses reveal huge variety and inventiveness. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), pioneer of monody as opposed to polyphony, rediscoverer of dissonance, and proponent of Italy's 'New Music', occupies a special place in the evolution of Europe's secular music. He was largely employed in Venice, as always a counterpoint to the arts of Rome. Baroque painting was dominated by Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573-1610), a pardoned murderer; by the
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Fleming Paul Rubens (1577-1640), and by the Spaniard Diego Velazquez (1599-1660). In architecture, the ubiquitous Baroque churches were often modelled on the Jesuit Gesii Church (1575) in Rome.
Religious fervour came to the fore in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Passions and hatreds once reserved for the campaigns against Islam now fired the conflicts between Christians. Protestant fears of Catholic domination surfaced in the Wars of the Schmalkaldic League in Germany, 1531-48, which ended with the Peace of Augsburg; in the French Wars of Religion, 1562-98; in the Swedish civil war, 1598-1604; in the Thirty Years War, 1618-48. Catholic fears of Protestant domination inspired many episodes such as the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) in England, Irish resistance to Mountjoy and Cromwell, Polish resistance to the Swedes in 1655-60. In the East, the extended campaigns between Russians and Poles—1561-5,1578-82,1610-19,1632-4,1654-67—took on all the trappings of a Holy War between Catholic and Orthodox. Religious fanaticism could be made to inspire armies. In the sixteenth century the invincible Spaniards were taught to believe that they were fighting for the only true faith. In the seventeenth century the psalm-singing troopers of Gustavus Adolphus, or of Cromwell's marvellous New Model Army, were taught exactly the same.
The French Wars of Religion were spectacularly un-Christian. Persecution of the Huguenots had begun with the chambre ardente under Henri II. But the King's sudden death in 1559, and that of the Duke of Anjou, provoked prolonged uncertainty about the succession, [nostradamus] This in turn enflamed the ambitions of the Catholic faction led by the Guises, and of the Bourbon-Huguenot faction led by the Kings of Navarre. A vain attempt at religious reconciliation at the Colloquy of Passy (1561) was bracketed by two violent provocations—one by the Protestants at Amboise in 1560 and the second by the Catholics at Vassy in 1562. Thereafter the rival factions set at each other's throats with a will, fanned by the schemes of the Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici. The massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve was but the largest of the series. Vicious skirmishing reminiscent of the earlier English wars produced few set battles, but plenty of opportunity for the dashing adventurers such as the Protestant Baron d'Adrets or the Catholic Blaise de Montluc. Eight wars in thirty years were peppered with broken truces and foul murders. In the 1580s, such was the power of the Guises' Holy League, intent alike on suppressing toleration and on reining in the homosexual king, that the latter ordered the assassination of the Duke and Cardinal de Guise (1588). (Their father, Francois de Guise, the famous general, had been murdered at Orleans in 1563.) In response, on 1 August 1589 at St Cloud, the King himself was assassinated by a furious monk, Jacques Clement. This left Henri of Navarre as sole contender for the throne. When the Catholic clergy refused to anoint a lapsed heretic, he cynically undertook to reconvert; he was crowned at Chartres in 1594 and entered Paris in triumph. Paris vain bien une messe (Paris is well worth a Mass) sums up the moral tone. The resultant Edict of Nantes (1598) was no better. Having fought all his lite in the name ot religious liberty, Henri IV now undertook to limit toleration of the Huguenots to aristo-
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cratic houses, to two churches per district, and to 120 named strongholds. Intense fears and suspicions remained.
Given the persistence of religious pluralism in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Poland-Lithuania, it is erroneous to view Europe in this period in terms of a simple division between the 'Protestant North' and the 'Catholic South'. The Irish, the Belgians, and the Poles, among others, have every right to insist that the North was not uniformly Protestant. Both Orthodox Christians and Muslims have good reason to object to the South being classified as uniformly Catholic. The Protestant—Catholic divide was an important feature of Central Europe, and of Germany in particular. But it cannot be applied with any precision to the Continent as a whole. Attempts by Marx or Weber to correlate it with later divisions based on social or economic criteria would seem to be Germanocentric to a fault. One might as well ask why the Protestant God was so successful in endowing his followers with coalfields.
One thing was clear. Senseless bloodletting in the name of religion inevitably sparked off a reaction in the minds of intelligent people. The Wars of Religion offered fertile soil for the fragile seeds of reason and science.
The Scientific Revolution, which is generally held to have taken place between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, has been called 'the most important event in European History since the rise of Christianity'.'8 It followed a natural progression from Renaissance humanism, and was assisted to some extent by Protestant attitudes. Its forte lay in astronomy, and in those sciences such as mathematics, optics, and physics which were needed to collect and to interpret astronomical data. But it changed mankind's view both of human nature and the human predicament. It began with observations made on the tower of the capitular church of Frombork (Frauenburg) in Polish Prussia in the second decade of the sixteenth century; and it culminated at a meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College in London on 28 April 1686.
The difficulty with the Scientific Revolution, as with any fundamental shift in human thought, lies in the fact that its precepts did not accord with prevailing ideas and practices. The so-called 'age of Copernicus, Bacon and Galileo' is a misnomer: in most respects this was still the age of the alchemists, the astrologers, and the magicians. Nor should modern historians mock the achievements of those whose theories were eventually proved mistaken. It is fair to say that the alchemists misunderstood the nature of matter. It is not fair to say that researchers who have seen the constructive aspects of alchemy are 'tinctured by the lunacy which they try to describe'. It would be hard to find a more 'whiggish interpretation' of scientific history.19
Mikolaj Kopernik (Copernicus, 1473-1543), who had studied both at Cracow and at Padua, established that the Sun, not the Earth, lay at the centre of the solar system. His heliocentric ideas coincided with the common astrological habit of using the sun as the symbol of unity. But the point is: he proved the hypothesis by detailed experiments and measurements. Son of a German merchant family from
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Thorn (Toruii) and a loyal subject of the King of Poland, whom he had actively defended against the Teutonic Knights, he lived for thirty years in Frombork as a canon of the province of Warmia (Ermeland). He was employed by the King in the pursuit of monetary reform; and his treatise Monetae cudendae ratio (1526),. about 'bad money driving out good', expounded Gresham's Law thirty years before Gresham. His theory of heliocentrism, first advanced in 1510, was fully supported with statistical data in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, 1543). It was published on the initiative of a mathematical colleague from Lutheran Wittenberg, G. J. von Lauchen (Rheticus), dedicated to Pope Paul III, and delivered to its author on his deathbed. At a stroke it overturned reigning conceptions of the universe, dashing the Aristotelian ideas about a central, immobile, and unplanetlike Earth. Its immediate impact was much reduced because a fearful editor replaced Copernicus's introduction with a misleading preface of his own.
The Copernican theory gestated for almost a century. The Dane Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) rejected heliocentrism; but through observing the pathways of comets he destroyed another ancient misconception, namely that the cosmos consists of onion-like crystalline spheres. Brahe's colleague in Prague, Johann Kepler (1571-1630), established the elliptical shape of planetary orbits, and enunciated the laws of motion underlying Copernicus. But it was the Florentine, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), one of the first to avail himself of the newly invented telescope, who really brought Copernicus to the wider public. Fortunately for posterity, Galileo was as rash as he was perceptive. Having discovered that 'the moon is not smooth or uniform, but rough and full of cavities, like the earth', he exploded the prevailing theory of'perfect spheres'. Moreover, he defended his findings with scathing comments on his opponents' biblical references. 'The astronomical language of the Bible', he suggested to the dowager Duchess of Tuscany, was 'designed for the comprehension of the ignorant'. This, in 1616, earned him a summons to Rome, and a papal admonition. And Galileo's praise for Copernicus put Copernicus onto the Index. When Galileo persisted, however, and published his Dialogo dei due massi-mi Sistemi del mondo (Dialogue on the two main world systems, 1632), which expounded the superiority of Copernicus over Ptolemy, he was formally tried by the Inquisition, and forced to recant. His supposed parting comment to the inquisitors, Eppur si muove (Yet it does move), is apocryphal, [lesbia]
Practical science remained in its infancy during the era when the Copernican theory was in dispute. Some important assertions were made, however, by the sometime Chancellor of England, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the father of scientific method. In his Advancement of Learning (1605), the Novum Organum (1620), and the New Atlantis (1627), Bacon stated the proposition that knowledge should proceed by orderly and systematic experimentation, and by inductions based on experimental data. In this he boldly opposed the traditional deductive method, where knowledge could only be established by reference to certain accepted axioms sanctioned by the Church. Significantly, Bacon held that scientific research must be complementary to the study of the Bible. Science was to be kept
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LESBIA
in 1622, in a little-publicized ecclesiastical trial, a Florentine abbess I called Benedetta Carlini was accused of irregular practices. She had boasted of mystical visions; she had claimed to possess the sacred stigmata; and she had raised suspicions through some form of sexual offence. She was subsequently demoted, and spent forty-five years incarcerated.
In 1985, amidst much greater publicity, a leading American publisher launched an account of the trial under the guise of 'a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy'.1 Unfortunately, the materials of the trial did not quite coincide with the implications of the title. The post-Renaissance inquisitors had focused on the defendant's religious beliefs. They not only failed to emphasize the lurid details of a lesbian 'lifestyle'; they simply were not interested. One disappointed reviewer commented that at no time before the present century were men capable of comprehending the notion of lesbianism. At the same time, 'the apparently oxymoronic term "lesbian nun" easily tickles the curiosity . . . and guarantees the sale of a certain number of books.'2
It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.
compatible with Christian theology. 'The scientist became the priest of God's Book of Nature.' One of Bacon's ardent followers, John Wilkins (1614-72), sometime Bishop of Chester and a founder member of the Royal Society, wrote the curious Discovery of a World on the Moon (1638) containing the idea of lunar travel: 'The inhabitants of other worlds are redeemed by the same means as we are, by the blood of Christ.'20
Important advances, too, were made by philosophers with a mathematical bent, notably by the two dazzling Frenchmen, René Descartes (1596-1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623-62), and their successor, Benedictus Spinoza (1632-77). Descartes, a soldier-adventurer who witnessed the Battle of the White Mountain (see p. 564), lived much of his life in exile in Holland. He is most associated with the uncompromising rationalist system named after him (Cartesianism) and elaborated in his Discours sur la méthode (1637). Having rejected every piece of information which came to him through his senses, or on the authority of others, he concluded that he must at least exist if he was capable of thinking: Cogito, ergo sum, 'I think, therefore I am', is the launch-pad of modern epistemology. At the same time, in a philosophy which divided matter from spirit and which delved into everything from medicine to morals, Descartes emphasized the mechanistic view of the world which even then was taking hold. Animals, for example, were viewed as complex machines, as were human beings.
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Pascal, a native of Clermont-Ferrand and an inmate of the Jansenist Port-Royal in Paris, took the mechanical ideal to the point where he was able to produce the first 'computer'. His Lettres provinciates (1656) are still quoted in Jesuit literature as a cup of poison. Yet his collected Pensees (1670) are a delectable blend of the fashionable rationalism and of sound common sense. 'Le cceur a ses raisons', he wrote, 'que la Raison ne connait point' (the heart has its reasons which Reason cannot know). Or again: 'People are neither angels nor beasts. Yet bad luck would have it that anyone who tries to create an angel creates a beast.' Amidst growing hints about the conflict between science and religion, he proposed his famous gamble in favour of Faith. If the Christian God exists, he argued, believers will inherit everlasting life. If not, they will be no worse off than unbelievers. In which case, Christian belief is worth the risk.
Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew and a lens-grinder by profession, had been expelled from Amsterdam's Jewish community for heresy. He shared Descartes's intensely mathematical and logical view of a universe formed by first principles, and Hobbes's concept of a social contract. He was a pantheist, seeing God and nature as indistinguishable. The highest virtue lay in restraint guided by a full understanding of the world and of self. Evil derived from a lack of understanding. Blind faith was despicable. 'The Will of God' was the refuge of ignorance.
In England, the advocates of 'experimental philosophy' began to organize themselves in the 1640s. An inner circle, led by Dr Wilkins and Dr Robert Boyle (1627-91), formed an 'Invisible College' in Oxford during the Civil War. They joined together in 1660 to found the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. Their first meeting was addressed by the architect Christopher Wren. Their early membership included a number of magicians, whose influence was not overtaken by the new school of scientists, such as Isaac Newton, for another twenty years. With Newton, modern science came of age (see Chapter VIII); and the example of the Royal Society radiated across Europe.
As always, old ideas mingled with the new. By the second half of the seventeenth century, Europe's leading thinkers were largely agreed on a mechanical view of the universe operating on principles analogous to clockwork. Galileo had divined the principle of force—the basic element of mechanics; and force, as applied to everything from Boyle's Law of Gases to Newton's Laws of Motion, could be precisely calculated. At last, it seemed, the universe and all it contained could be explained and measured. What is more, the laws of nature, which were now yielding their secrets to the scientists, could be accepted as examples of God's will. The Christian God, whom Aquinas had equated with Aristotle's 'first Cause', was now equated with 'the Great Clockmaker'. There was to be no more conflict between science and religion for nearly two hundred years, [magic] [monkey]
Europe overseas is not a subject that starts with Columbus or the Caribbean. One experiment, in the crusader kingdoms of the Holy Land, was already ancient history. Another, in the Canaries, had been in progress for seventy years. But once contact had been made with distant islands, Europeans sailed overseas in ever-
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increasing numbers. They sailed for reasons of trade, of loot, of conquest, and increasingly of religion. For many, it provided the first meeting with people of different races. To validate their claim over the inhabitants of the conquered lands, the Spanish monarchs had first to establish that non-Europeans were human. According to the Requirement of 1512, which the conquistadors were ordered to read out to all native peoples: 'The Lord Our God, Living and Eternal, created Heaven and Earth, and one man and woman, of whom you and I, and all the men of the world, were and are descendants . . .'2I To confirm the point, Pope Paul III decreed in 1537 that 'all Indians are truly men, not only capable of understanding the Catholic faith, but .. . exceedingly desirous to receive it'.22 [goncalvez]
The earlier voyages of exploration were continued and extended. The existence of a vast fourth continent in the West was gradually established by trial and error, some time in the twenty years after Columbus's first return to Palos. Responsibility for the achievement was hotly disputed. Columbus himself made three more voyages without ever knowing where he had really been. Another Genoese, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot, 1450-98), sailed from Bristol aboard the Matthew in May 1497 under licence from Henry VII; he landed on Cape Breton Island, which he took to be part of China. The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512), once the Medicis' agent in Seville, made three or four transatlantic voyages between 1497 and 1504. He then obtained the post of piloto mayor or 'Chief Pilot' of Spain. It was this fact which determined, rightly or wrongly, that the fourth continent should be named after him. In 1513 a stowaway, Vasco Nunez de Balboa (d. 1519), walked across the isthmus of Panama and sighted the Pacific. In 1519-22 a Spanish expedition led by the Portuguese captain Ferdinand Magellan (c.1480-1521) circumnavigated the world. It proved beyond doubt that the earth was round, that the Pacific and Atlantic were separate oceans, and that the Americas lay between them, [syphilus]
The presence of a fifth continent in the antipodes was not suspected for another century. In 1605 a Spanish ship out of Peru and a Dutch ship out of Java both sailed to the Gulf of Carpentaria. The main outlines of the great Zuidland or 'Southland' (Australia and New Zealand) were charted by the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman (1603-59) in 1642-3.
The Portuguese were quickest to exploit the commercial opportunities of the new lands. They claimed Brazil in 1500, Mauritius in 1505, Sumatra in 1509, Malacca and the 'Spice Islands' (Indonesia) in 1511. To protect their trade, they established a chain of fortified stations stretching from Goa in India to Macao in China. The Spaniards, in contrast, did not hesitate to apply their military might. Lured by the dream of El Dorado the conquistadores, who had so recently subdued Iberia, now turned their energies to the conquest of America. They settled Cuba in 1511 and used it as a base for further campaigns. In 1519-20 Hernando Cortez (1485-1547) seized the Aztec empire in Mexico in a sea of blood. In the 1520s and 1530s permanent settlements were established in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, and New Granada (Colombia and Venezuela). From 1532 Francisco Pizarro (c.1476-1541) seized the empire of the lncas in Peru.
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SYPHILUS
For many years it had no official name. Italians, Germans, Poles, and English all called it 'the French disease'; The French called it 'the Neapolitan disease'. The Neapolitans called it 'the Spanish disease'. The Portuguese called it 'the Castilian disease' and the Turks 'the Christian disease'. The Spanish doctor who was one of the first to treat it, Dr Ruy Diaz de Isla, called it 'the Serpent of Hispaniola'.1
Syphilis supposedly made its European debut in Barcelona in 1493. Diaz de Isla later claimed to have treated the master of the Nina, Vicente Pinzon; and it was assumed to have crossed the Atlantic with Columbus's crew. At all events, whether carried by sailors or slaves, or both, it reached Naples in 1494 in time to welcome the invading French army. When the French king's mercenaries dispersed in the following year, they took it with them to almost every European country. In 1495 the Emperor Maximilian issued a decree against 'the Evil Pox', taken to be God's punishment for blasphemy. In 1496 the city of Geneva tried to clean out its syphilitic brothels. In 1497, in distant Edinburgh, a statute ordered sufferers to the island of Inchkeith on pain of branding. Of Charles Vlll's campaign in Italy, Voltaire would later write: 'France did not lose all she had won. She kept the pox.'2
For reasons that are unclear, the spirochete microbe, Treponema pallidum, which causes syphilis, assumed a specially virulent form when it reached Europe. It bored into the human genitals, exploiting the scabrous fissures that were common in the unwashed crotches of the day, forming highly contagious chancres. Within weeks it covered the body in suppurating pustules, attacked the central nervous system, and destroyed all hair. It killed within months, painfully. Physicians chose to apply mercury to the pustules, unwittingly poisoning their patients. Over six or seven decades, the spirochete created its own resistance and calmed down. Henceforth, it would be the cause of a common three-stage venereal disease that left its deformed and sterile hosts a longer span. By then, amongst millions, its victims had included Pope Julius II, Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII, and Ivan the Terrible. It was not tamed until the advent of penicillin. The impact of syphilis was necessarily far-reaching. It has been linked to the sexual puritanism which took hold on all classes short of the aristocracy; to the banishment of hitherto popular, and licentious, bathhouses; to the institution of hand-shaking in place of public kissing; and, from 1570 onwards, to the growing fashion for wigs.
In 1530 the Italian poet, Girolamo Fracastoro, composed a poem about a shepherd struck down by the French disease. In due course, this was used by learned men to give the disease its learned name. The shepherd's name was Syphilus.3
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European colonization in North America began in 1536 with the founding of Montreal in Canada by the Breton sailor Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) and in 1565 of St Augustine in Florida by Pedro Menendez. Menendez had just destroyed a nearby Huguenot settlement (in the future South Carolina), where he hanged America's first religious exiles 'as Lutherans'. Three years later the Huguenots' compatriot, Dominique de Gourgues, arrived on the same spot and hanged the Spanish garrison 'as robbers and murderers'. Western civilization was on the move.
The Dutch and the English were relative latecomers to colonization, but in the late sixteenth century they both began to reap its benefits. Having founded Batavia in Java in 1597, the Dutch set out to wrest the East Indies from the Portuguese. The English colony of Virginia, discovered in 1598, received its first successful settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The Mayflower, carrying 120 puritan 'Pilgrim Fathers' and their families, landed in their Plymouth Colony on 11 (21) December 1620. The Massachusetts Bay Colony followed ten years later. Although religious refugees from England, they did not prove tolerant. The colony of Rhode Island (1636) was founded by dissenters expelled from Massachusetts. By that time the existence of a worldwide network of European colonies, and their seaborne lines of communication, was an established fact.
The international sea trade multiplied by leaps and bounds. To the west, the transatlantic route was long dominated by Spain. By 1600, 200 ships a year entered Seville from the New World. In the peak decade of 1591-1600,19 million grams of gold and nearly 3 billion grams of silver came with them. The southerly route via the Cape of Good Hope was worked first by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch, who also provided the main commercial link between the North Sea and the Mediterranean. To the east, the Dutch also pioneered a huge trade in Baltic grain. The growing demand for food in West European cities was met by the growing capacity of the Polish producers to supply. This Baltic grain trade reached its peak in 1618, when 118,000 lasts or 'boatloads' left Danzig for Amsterdam. The English trade in cloth to the Low Countries had reached record levels somewhat earlier, in 1550. English adventurers launched a Muscovy Company (1565), a Levant Company (1581), and the East India Company (1600).
The nexus of all these activities was located in the Low Countries. Antwerp, which was the main entrepot of both the Spanish and the English trade, reigned supreme until the crash of 1557-60; thereafter the focus moved to Amsterdam. The year 1602, which saw the foundation both of the Dutch East India Company and of the world's first stock exchange in Amsterdam, can be taken to mark a new era in commercial history, [infanta]
As overseas trade expanded, Europe received a wide range of new staple foods, as well as exotic 'colonial' products including pepper, coffee, cocoa, sugar, and tobacco. Europe's diet, cuisine, and palate were never the same again. The haricot bean, which was first recorded in France in 1542, the tomato, which spread far and wide via Italy in the same period, and the capsicum pepper, which was grown throughout the Balkans, were all American in origin.
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515
INFANTA
i N 1572 Martin de Voos painted a family portrait for Antoon Anselme, an I Antwerp magistrate. He portrayed the husband and wife seated at a table, one holding their son and the other their daughter. The picture is surmounted by a scrolled inscription which announces that the master of the house was born on 9 February 1536, his wife, Johanna Hooftmans, on 16 December 1545, their son, Aegidius, on 21 August 1565, and their daughter, Johanna, on 26 September 1566. It illustrates the emergence of the modern concept of the family made up of distinct individuals, both children and adults.1
In 1579 Sanchez Coello painted a portrait of the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II of Spain, aged thirteen. She was the complete little lady, resplendent in jewelled headdress, curled hair, high ruff, formal gown, and ringed fingers. The tradition would last in the Spanish court until the 1650s, and the famous series by Velazquez of another Infanta, Margharita of Austria, daughter of Philip IV. Once again, the exquisite seven- or eight-year old is shown as a lady in miniature, dressed in corset and crinoline, and topped by the ringlets of a lady's coiffure. Children were still thought of as persons of lesser stature, not fully grown, but not qualitatively different from their parents.2 (See Plate 51.)
In earlier times, neither the nuclear family nor the age of childhood had been recognized as distinct entities. All generations lived together in large households. Children passed straight from swaddling clothes into adult dress. They participated in all the household's games and activities. In all but the richest classes, they had little or no schooling; if they were taught at all, they were taught together. They were usually put out to work as domestics or apprentices at the age of seven or eight. They died in such numbers that everyone had the greatest incentive for them to grow up fast. Families existed, but they 'existed in silence'. Childhood, too, existed; but it was granted no special status, and it was ended as soon as possible.
The 'discovery of childhood' was a process which took shape between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It can be traced in the dress and iconography of the times, in the invention of toys, games, and pastimes specifically for children, in changing morals and manners; above all, in a radical new approach to education.
Medieval children had largely learned by living, eating, and sleeping with their elders, all of whose activities they observed at first hand. They were not isolated or protected from the adult world. Only boys from higher society attended school, and they did so in all-purpose, all-age groups. One of the earliest instances of a school being divided into classes was recorded at St Paul's School in London in 1519. With age-grouping, and
the extension of schooling, came a great increase in imposed discipline. Christian morality, codes of conduct, and humiliating punishments were imposed from above. Schoolboys were the first to be introduced to a prolonged and graduated progression towards adulthood. Girls, sometimes married as early as thirteen, were much more likely to miss out.
Childhood implies innocence. Yet immodesty in children, and in relationships with them, had long been taken as natural. The boyhood conduct of Louis XIII (b. 1601) was observed in every detail by the court physician, Dr Heroard. The Dauphin was not reprimanded for groping his governess in bed, for instance, nor for showing off his first erections, which went up and down 'like a drawbridge'. Married at fourteen, he was placed in the nuptial bed by his mother, to whom he returned 'after about an hour and performing twice', 'with his cock all red'.3
The 'ages of Man', as summarized by the soliloquy in As You Like It, clearly constituted a well-formed scheme by Shakespeare's time. But every century has made its contribution to generational concepts. If childhood was discovered in early modern Europe, adolescence was discovered by the Romantics, after Goethe's Werther, and 'senior citizens' by the post-industrial era.
Europe's intercourse with America, heretofore a largely hermetic ecological zone, led to a vast Exchange of people, diseases, plants, and animals. This 'Columbian Exchange' worked decidedly in Europe's favour. European colonists braved hardship and deprivation, and in some places faced hostile 'Indians'. But their losses were minuscule compared to the genocidal casualties which they and their firearms inflicted. They brought some benefits, but with them depopulation and despoliation on a grand scale. Europe received syphilis; but its ravages were not to be compared to the pandemics of smallpox, pleurisy, and typhus which literally decimated the native Americans. The Europeans re-introduced horses; in return they received two foods of capital importance, potatoes and maize, as well as the turkey, the most substantial and nutritious of domestic poultry. Potatoes were adopted in Ireland at an early date, and moved steadily across northern Europe, becoming the staple of Germany, Poland, and Russia. Maize, which was variously known as 'American corn' and 'American fallow', enriched exhausted soil and greatly facilitated both crop rotation and livestock farming. It was well established in the Po valley in the sixteenth century. It was inhibited from crossing the Alps until climatic conditions improved some hundred years later, but its long-term impact was enormous. There is good reason to count American additions to the food supply as one of the major factors underlying the dramatic growth of Europe's population at the end of the early modern period.2 *
[syphilusj
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Descriptions of the arrival of Europeans in America have recently undergone fundamental revision. They have been 'decolumbianized'. What was once 'the discovery' is now called an 'encounter' or a 'meeting of cultures'.24 It would be better to be honest and call it a conquest. Columbus, too, has been downgraded. The primacy of his voyages has been handed to Vikings or Irishmen, or even to a Welshman in a coracle. His landing on San Salvador (Watling Island) has been relocated to Samana Cay in the Bahamas.25 The 'peerless navigator' is now said to have been a ruthless and rapacious 'colonialist pirate', alternatively a quixotic Jew sailing in search of the lost tribes of Israel.26 He is even said to have heard about the other continent from American women already in Europe.27 The sources for Columbus's activities are meagre, the myths abundant.28 The real discoverers of America are those who went in the steps of the conquistadores, often friars like Bernardino de Sahagün, 'the world's first anthropologist', and who tried to understand what was happening.29
Intercourse with America had a profound impact on European culture. A gulf began to open between those countries which had ready access to the New World and those which did not. 'Philosophy is born of the merchant. Science is born of commerce. Henceforth, Europe is almost cut into two. The West is preoccupied with the sea. The East is preoccupied with itself.'30
Early modern society was not conceived in terms of class, which is a more recent invention, but in terms of social orders or 'estates'—in Latin status, in German Stände, in French etat. These basic social groups were defined by their function, by the legal restrictions and privileges which were imposed in order to facilitate that function, and by their corporate institutions. Wealth and income played only a secondary role. Heredity was the main criterion for determining to which estate (save the clergy) any particular family might belong.
The nobility, for example, descendants of medieval knighthood, were defined by their military function and by laws giving them special rights to landownership and to the government of their properties. With the growth of standing armies, their exclusive military function was somewhat diminished, but their position as the backbone of the ruling caste remained. Through their regional assemblies they ran local politics in the countryside, and they usually enjoyed full jurisdiction over the inhabitants of their lands. In most countries they were headed by an upper crust such as the peers of England or the grandees of Spain; or else they were divided, as in Germany, into numerous ranks. The burgher estate, built on the liberties of self-governing cities and of the city guilds, was also stratified between the patricians, the freemen, and the propertyless plebs. It was usually protected by royal charters, and enjoyed full jurisdiction within the city walls. The peasants consisted of an enserfed majority and a minority who remained free or who were emerging from serfdom. The status of the serfs could vary considerably depending whether they lived on church, crown, or noble land.
The existence of many fragmented jurisdictions was incompatible with state despotism, and hence with Muscovite Tsarism or Ottoman rule. Here was the
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social base which rendered western absolutism rather different from eastern autocracy. It was built on a mass of practices inherited from the earlier period and, despite innovations, was still essentially medieval. In the West as in the East, the social constraints on individuals remained very onerous by modern standards. Everyone, and not just the serf, was expected to belong to a corporate body and to abide by its rules. Renaissance individualism used to be celebrated by historians like Burckhardt exactly because they welcomed the first frail attempts to break free from the prevailing social curbs and compartments. When an exception was made, as when Michelangelo was released from his guild of artisans, it took a Pope to make it.31
The price revolution, Europe's first encounter with inflation, was initially attributed to the wickedness of usurers. From the-1550s, through the researches of the University of Salamanca, it was attributed to the influx of Spanish gold and silver. 'What makes Spain poor', wrote a commentator, 'is her wealth.'32 Although the view of contemporaries was blurred by the wild fluctuation of prices and by governments' repeated attempts to cope by debasing their coinage, it is perfectly clear that the general trend throughout the sixteenth century was for a steady price rise. Grain prices in France, for example, where the supply of coin was relatively scarce, were over seven times higher in 1600 than in 1500.
The cost of living, especially in Western Europe, rose dramatically (see Appendix III, p. 1263). Explaining this, recent scholars have laid less emphasis on bullion and more on population growth, on land hunger, and on rising rents and taxation. In the sixteenth century, Europe's five giant cities of 100,000 + rose to perhaps fourteen: Constantinople, Naples, Venice, Milan, Paris, Rome, Palermo, Messina, Marseilles, Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Moscow. Peasants flooded into the growing towns; wages lagged behind prices; beggars proliferated. Landowners maximized their profits; governments, constantly hit by the falling value of their income, raised taxes. There was little relief until the early seventeenth century.
The social consequences of the price revolution are the subject of immense controversy. The expansion of the money economy encouraged social mobility, especially in England and Holland. The commercial bourgeoisie was greatly strengthened. Capitalism reached the point of take-off. Yet the growth of cities in the West was closely linked to the parallel growth of 'neoserfdom' in the East. The nobility of Germany, Poland, and Hungary strengthened their position whilst their counterparts further west were thrown into confusion. English historians of the period cannot agree whether the gentry was rising or falling. The English Civil War has been variously attributed to the self-assertion of a confident gentry against a ruined aristocracy and to the desperation of a gentry impoverished by the price revolution.33 [cap-ag]
Particularly interesting are the links between economic and religious developments. The Protestant Reformation had always been explained in religious and political terms. But Marxists have not been alone in seeing a correlation between
518 RENATIO
'the Protestant ethic' and commercial enterprise. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) and Richard Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), though much criticized in detail, have inspired a whole school of comment. Capitalism, after all, needed its ideologues as well as its technicians. In this, Protestant writers undoubtedly played an important role in opposing deep-seated attitudes about usury. But they did so at a rather later date than historians once supposed. Tawney relies heavily for evidence on the English Puritan Richard Baxter; Weber, anachronistically, on the eighteenth-century American Benjamin Franklin. It was not until 1658 that the state of Holland ruled that no banker should be denied communion for practising usury. Theory, therefore, lagged well behind practice, [usurvj
In reality, capitalism thrived no less in Catholic than in Protestant cities. Fugger of Augsburg was no Puritan. He thrived because of expanding trade and industry, and because war, for all its destructiveness, stimulated demand for goods and for financial services. Protestant divines were less effective as advocates of capitalist techniques than the numerous refugee entrepreneurs who flooded into Protestant countries.
It was through these migrations that the seeds of medieval capitalism were scattered throughout Europe. The biggest businessman in Geneva, Francesco Turrettini (1547-1628), was a refugee from Lucca. Louis de Geer (1587-1652), financier and industrialist to Gustavus Adolphus in Sweden, came from Liege. Marcus Perez (1527-72), William the Silent's original bankroller, was a Jewish con-verso from Spain.34
The military changes of the era—which like most things are now classed as a 'Revolution'—had far-reaching effects. In essence, they involved the introduction of new weaponry, principally the pike, the musket, and improved artillery; the establishment of systematic training, which required professional cadres and instructors; and the growth of standing armies, which only the richest princes could afford.
One thing followed from another. The 16-ft Swiss infantry pike provided the long-desired means for stopping cavalry charges. But it could only be effectively deployed in a mobile square of pikemen, who had to wheel and manoeuvre with precision to face the swirling line of attack. As the Spaniards discovered, it was best used in conjunction with muskets, whose firepower could actually bring the attackers down. The musket's accuracy, however, and its reloading rate, left much to be desired. It was only effective when a body of musketeers were trained to fire in unison, moving smartly in and out of the pike square between salvoes. Though it first appeared in 1512 at Ravenna, it was only widely adopted from the 1560s in the wars of the Low Countries. The combination of pike and musket demanded elaborate drill techniques, together with the steadiness and esprit de corps of disciplined professionals.
An answer to the pike square was found in the development of massed artillery. The cannon, which was fast rendering medieval fortifications obsolete, now came
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to be widely used on the battlefield for opening up gaps in the enemy line. Yet expanded artillery trains required complex technical support, an efficient iron industry, high-quality gunpowder, expensive transport, and professional gunners.
In naval warfare, the increased calibre of the cannon stimulated a rapid growth in the size, tonnage, and manoeuvrability of ships. Warships had to be turned into floating gun platforms. The increased range of ships stimulated the science of navigation, which depended in turn on precision instruments, on sound astronomical data and cartography, and on advanced mathematics.
On land, great thought was given to rescuing the art of fortification from the effects of artillery bombardment. The trace italienne, which appeared in the mid-sixteenth century, set out a sophisticated system of ditches, entrapments, and low, angled bastions, which denied the cannoneers easy targets and access, whilst exposing them to withering counterfire. Antwerp, fortified in this way by Italian engineers in 1568, started a trend which was to bring back the prevalence of siege warfare. By the time of the celebrated Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), the engineers had regained the advantage over the artillerymen (see p. 619). Cavalry never became obsolete, but was forced to adapt. It was increasingly divided into dedicated regiments; of light horse for reconnaissance and skirmishing; of lancers for battlefield offence; and of mounted dragoons for mobile firepower.
The military commanders who supervised these developments were faced with a welter of unfamiliar technological and organizational problems. Part-time gentlemen soldiers could no longer cope. The emergence of salaried career officers was accompanied by the consolidation of a professional military and naval caste. Military careers offered prospects not only for sons of the old nobility but for all talents. Rulers had to found military academies for their training.
Rulers also had to find new sources of income for their armies, and a new bureaucracy to administer them. Once they had done so, however, they found that they possessed an incomparable political instrument for reducing the power of the nobles and for forcing their subjects to obey. The modern state without the military revolution is unthinkable. The road from the arquebus to absolutism, or from the maritime mortar to mercantilism, was a direct one.
Yet the military revolution is another subject where would-be theorists have been tempted to use their localized studies from parts of Western Europe for making unwarranted generalizations about the whole continent. It is often implied that East European methods of warfare, in which the cavalry did not cede supremacy to the infantry, were somehow retarded. They were not. The armies of Poland or Muscovy needed no lessons from their Western counterparts. They were soon familiar with the latest technical and organizational developments; but fighting across the vast empty expanses of the East, in a harsh climate, they met logistical problems unknown in the battlegrounds of northern Italy or the Netherlands. When Poland's wonderful winged hussars met Western-style infantry, as they did against the Swedes at Kirchholm in 1605, they wreaked terrible slaughter. They repeated the performance when they faced hordes of oriental-style light horse at Klushino in 1610 or at Chocim in 1621 (see below). At the same
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time, thanks to the flexible, cell-like structure of their units, the towarzysze or hussar 'comrades' were able to forage and skirmish and to sustain themselves in hostile country where all less adaptable armies were devoured, Tn their encounters with the Poles, the Muscovites experienced many decades of failure, often because of ill-conceived Western innovations. But they possessed first-class artillery from an early date; and it was the Russian artillery which finally broke Sweden's military supremacy at Poltava.35
'The nation-state' and 'nationalism' are terms which are frequently applied, or misapplied, to the sixteenth century. They are more appropriate to the nineteenth, when they were invented by historians looking for the origins of the nation-states of their own day. They should certainly not be used to convey premature preoccupations with ethnic identity. What they can properly convey, however, is the strong sense of sovereignty which both monarchs and subjects assumed, as the unity of the Middle Ages disintegrated. Their overriding raison d'etat had an economic dimension associated with mercantilism, as well as the purely political one.
II Principe (The Prince), written in 1513, served as the handbook for all such rulers who wished to reach a position of untrammelled command. It is often judged to be the starting-point of modern political science. Its author, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), historian, dramatist, and Florentine diplomat, who had observed Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI, 'the great deceiver', at close quarters, wrote his book in the hope that it would inspire a prince to fulfil Dante's old dream of a unified Italy. But its appeal was universal. By separating politics from moral scruples, it gave voice to the art of Machtpolitik or untrammelled power politics. At one level this 'Machiavellianism' caused grave scandal. Concepts such as frodi onorevoli (honourable frauds) or scelleratezze gloriose (glorious rascalries) became notorious. At a more serious level, if The Prince is read in conjunction with the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli can be seen to have been a devoted advocate of limited government, of the rule of law and of liberty. His low view of human nature provides the ground base on which constitutional structures have to be built. But it is his cynical aphorisms that were best remembered. 'The nearer people are to the Church of Rome,' he wrote, 'the more irreligious they are.' 'A prince who desires to maintain his position must learn to be good or not as needs may require.' 'War should be the only study of a prince. He should look upon peace only as a breathing space which . . . gives him the means to execute military plans.' Machiavelli has had no shortage of disciples.
On the subject of the model Renaissance prince, most historians would think in the first place of the Italian despots like Lorenzo the Magnificent or Ludovico Sforza. After that they would probably propose those formidable neighbours and rivals, Francis 1 and Henry VIII, whose meeting on the 'Field of Cloth of Gold' (1520) exemplified so many quirks and qualities of the age. Yet none deserves more attention than Matthias Hunyadi 'Corvinus', King of Hungary (r. 1458-90).
Corvinus--so called from the raven in his coat-of-arms—was a social upstart,
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the son of a baron and crusader from Transylvania, lancu of Hunedoara, (Janos Hunyadi), who had made his name fighting the Turks. He used his Transylvanian base and a strong mercenary army to subdue the Hungarian magnates, and to initiate a reign where Italian culture was made the mark of political prestige. He had been educated by the humanist Archbishop Vitez; he was married to a neapolitan princess, Beatrice of Aragon; and he succeeded to a royal court which had cultivated its Italian ties since Angevin times. The court at Buda was filled with books, pictures, and philosophers, and was in touch with all the leading scholars of the day, from Poliziano to Ficino. It also boasted a great library, which as a collection of incunabula and manuscripts was the chief rival of the Medicis' library in Florence. In 1485, when Corvinus captured Vienna, he looked to be on the brink of founding a Hungaro-Austrian monarchy that would soon make a solid bid for control of the Empire. In the event, all plans were brought to naught by his sudden death. His scholarly son was rejected by the Hungarian nobles in favour of a Jagiellon. With some small delay, the pickings were taken by the Habsburgs and the Turks. Like the books of the plundered royal library, the traces of Renaissance Hungary were scattered to the winds. [corvinaJ
Of course, the strengthening of royal power in some quarters does not mean that one can talk about the general advent of absolutism, except as one of several competing ideals. In France, the restraints on the king were still so great that scholars can debate at length whether, under Francis I, for instance, French government was 'more consultative' or 'less decentralised'.36 In England, after the assertion of Tudor monarchy, it was Parliament which asserted itself under the subsequent rule of the Stuarts. In the Holy Roman Empire the imperial Diet gained ground against the Emperor. In Poland-Lithuania republicanism triumphed over monarchy.
True enough, some Renaissance scholars, like Bude, looked to the Roman Empire for their views on monarchy; but others like Bishop Goslicki (Goslicius) looked back to the Roman Republic. Of the two most influential political treatises of the period, the De la Republique (1576) of Jean Bodin favoured constitutional monarchy, whilst the Leviathan (1651) of Thomas Hobbes made eccentric use of contract theory to favour absolutism. Without much evidence, Hobbes maintained that kings held unlimited rights because at some unspecified time in the past their subjects had supposedly surrendered their own rights. The resultant Leviathan, a 'monster composed of men'—his metaphor for the modern state— was a regrettable necessity, the only alternative to endless conflict:
During the time when men live without a common power to keep them in awe, they are in that condition which is called war ... where every man is enemy to every man. In such condition, there is no place for industry ... no navigation ... no arts, no letters, no society, and . . . continual fear of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.37
The Renaissance stimulated the study of Roman law; but the period was equally marked by the reinforcement and collation of separate national laws and,
i
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522 ft EN A T10
CORVINA
Some time in the 1460s Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, started collecting books. His passion was inspired by his old mentor, Janos Vi'tez, Bishop of Varad (Oradea), and by the- Bishop's nephew, Janos Csezmiczei. Both men were classical scholars, both educated in Italy, and both fervent bibliophiles. The former rose to become Primate of Hungary, the latter, as 'Janus Pannomus', the leading Latin poet of the age. When both were disgraced by a political plot, the Primate retired; the poet committed suicide; and the King added their libraries to his own. In 1476 Matthias married Beatrice of Aragon, who brought her own rich book collection from Naples. In 1485 he captured Vienna, laying plans for a new Hungaro-Austrian monarchy, whose cultural centrepiece was to be the royal library, then under construction in Buda. Staffed by an army of archivists, copyists, translators, binders, and illuminators, and by a transcontinental network of agents, the Biblioteca Corviniana was designed to excel in Europe's 'revival of letters'. It even excelled the mag nificent library of Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence.
None of King Matthias's hopes were realized. When he died in 1490, his son did not succeed him. The Habsburgs recovered Vienna, and the Hungarian nobles rebelled against their taxes. Work on the library stopped. When the Ottoman army captured Buda in 1526, the Library was pillaged. Most of its contents, including 650 ancient manuscripts of unique value, disappeared.
All, however, was not lost. On the quincentenary of King Matthias's death, Hungary's National Library mounted an exhibition to reassemble the surviving treasures. It turned out that Queen Beatrice had contrived to send some prize items back to Naples. Her daughter-in-law had taken others off to Germany. Charles V's sister Mary, sometime Queen of Hungary, brought still more to Brussels. Most importantly, it emerged that the store of looted books in Constantinople had been used over the centuries as a gift fund for favoured foreign ambassadors. The priceless descriptive catalogue of the Corviniana prepared by the King's Florentine agent, Naldo Naldi, had been given by a sultan to a Polish ambassador and preserved at Toruri. Seneca's tragedies, presented to an English ambassador, were preserved in Oxford. The Byzantine 'Book of Ceremonies' was preserved in Leipzig, [taxis] Twenty-six manuscripts sent to Francis-Joseph were kept in Vienna. Still more found their way into the library of Duke Augustus at Wolfenbuttel. Uppsala was holding pieces which Queen Christina's army had looted from Prague . . . Madrid, Besangon, Rome, and Volterra all contributed.
The 1990 exhibition contained only fragments of the lost collection. But they were enough to show that bibliophilia lay at the heart of the Renaissance urge In size and variety, the Biblioteca Corviniana had been second only to the Vatican Library. Thanks to the circumstances of its dispersal, its role in the spread of learning was probably second to none.'
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in the treatise De jure belli et pads (1625) of Hugo De Groot (Grotius, 1583-1645), by the emergence of international law.
Mercantilism, or 'the mercantile system', is a label that had little currency until popularized in the late eighteenth century, [market] Yet the set of ideas which Adam Smith was to criticize formed the main stock of economic thought of the early modern period. Mercantilism has meant many things to many men; but in essence it referred to the conviction that in order to prosper, the modern state needed to manipulate every available legal, administrative, military, and regulatory device. In this sense, it was the opposite of the laissez-faire system, which Smith would later advocate. In one popular form it consisted of bullionism—the idea that a country's wealth and power depended on amassing gold. In another, it concentrated on improving the balance of trade by assisting exports, penalizing imports, and encouraging home manufactures. In all forms, it was concerned with strengthening the sources of economic power—colonies, manufactures, navies, tariffs—and was expressly directed against a country's commercial rivals. In the Dutch version—where even the navy was controlled by five separate admiralties—policy was largely left to private and to local initiative. In the French, and later the Prussian, version, it was held very firmly in the hands of the king's ministers. In England it depended on a mixture of private and royal initiative. An early exposition can be found in The Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (1549). 'The ordinary means to encrease our wealth and treasure is by Foreign Trade,' wrote Thomas Mun a little later, 'wherein we must ever observe this rule: to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value.'38
Diplomatic practice, like mercantilist thought, developed in response to the rise of state power. In the past, monarchs had been content to recall their ambassadors as soon as each mission was concluded. In the fifteenth century, Venice was the only power to maintain a network of permanent embassies abroad, until the papal nunciatures and other Italian cities followed the Venetian lead. From about 1500, however, sovereign rulers gradually saw the appointment of resident ambassadors as a sign of their status and independence. They also valued the influx of commercial and political intelligence. One of the first was Ferdinand the Catholic, whose embassy to the Court of St James dates from 1487 and was originally headed by Dr Rodrigo Gondesalvi de Puebla, later by a woman—Catherine of Aragon, Princess of Wales, the King's daughter. Francis I of France is usually credited with having the first comprehensive royal diplomatic service, including an embassy at the Ottoman Porte from 1526.
Soon, a corps diplomatique appeared in every major court and capital. Living in conditions of some danger, the diplomats quickly worked out the necessary rules of immunity, reciprocity, extraterritoriality, credence, and precedence. In 1515 the Pope ruled that the nuncio should act as doyen of the corps, that the imperial ambassador should have precedence over his colleagues, and that all other ambassadors should be given seniority according to the date of their country's conversion to Christianity. In practice the arrangement did not work, because Charles V
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preferred Spanish to imperial diplomats and because, as the 'Most Catholic' King of Spain, he refused to cede precedence to the French. This launched a quarrel where French and Spanish ambassadors stolidly held their ground for 200 years. On one occasion, at the Hague in 1661, when the retinues of the French and Spanish ambassadors met in a narrow street, the diplomats stood rooted to the spot for a whole day, until the city council demolished the railings and enabled them to pass on equal terms. The Muscovites were equal sticklers for form. The Tsar's ambassadors were wont to demand precedence over the Emperor's own courtiers. In Warsaw, one Muscovite ambassador arrived wearing two hats—one to be raised to the King of Poland in the customary greeting, the other to keep his head covered according to the instructions of the Kremlin.
In the age of Machiavelli, diplomats soon gained a reputation for deception. They had to be familiar with codes, ciphers,' and invisible ink. 'An ambassador', quipped Sir Henry Wootton, 'is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.' None the less, the growth of permanent diplomacy marked an important stage in the formation of a community of nations. In 1643-8, when a great diplomatic conference was convened at Münster and at Osnabrück to terminate the Thirty Years War, the 'Concert of Europe' was already coming into existence.
At the turn of the sixteenth century, the central sensation on the map of Europe came from the sudden rise of the House of Habsburg to a position of immoderate greatness. The Habsburgs' success was not achieved by conquest but by the failure of rival dynasties, by far-sighted matrimonial schemes, and by sheer good fortune. Fortes bella gerant, ran the motto, Tu felix Austria nube.* The emphasis was on felix, 'fortunate', and nube, 'marry'.
In 1490 Maximilian I of Habsburg, King of the Romans, was still a refugee from Hungarian-occupied Vienna. His hold on the Empire looked precarious; and he was obliged to initiate a series of imperial reforms from a position of weakness. He oversaw the establishment in 1495 of the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Court of Justice), in 1500 of the Reichsregiment (the permanent Council of Regency), and in 1512 of the Reichsschlüsse or 'Mandates' of the Imperial Diet. With the creation of three Colleges of the Diet—Electors, Princes, Cities—and the division of the Empire into ten territorial Circles, each under the directorium of two princes charged with administering justice, taxation, and military matters, he effectively surrendered all direct rule of the Empire. He made the House of Habsburg indispensable to the German princes by giving them all they had ever desired.
Simultaneously, Maximilian greatly strengthened the Habsburgs' Hausmacht, the dynasty's private power. The early death of his first wife, Mary, had given him the fabulous Duchy of Burgundy; and in 1490 he inherited Tirol, giving him his favourite residence at Innsbruck. One inheritance treaty in 1491 with the Jagiellons gave him the reversion of Bohemia, another in 1515 the reversion of Hungary. Both policies would mature on the death of Louis Jagiellon in 1526, leaving the dynasty
* 'Let the strong wage war. You, lucky Austria, marry.' Attributed to Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary.
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with 'the foundations of a Danubian monarchy'.39 Equally important was the marriage of his son to the heiress of Ferdinand and Isabella, which put a grappling hook onto the Spanish dominions. In 1497 his own second marriage to Bianca Sforza of Milan eased the cash flow and assisted his confirmation as Emperor in 1508. By then this most ideological of the Habsburgs must have felt that his mission was being fulfilled. Shortly afterwards, he was confident enough to propose that he be elected Pope!
When Maximilian died, his grandson Charles of Ghent succeeded to a collection of real estate 'on which the sun never set'. To cap it all, with the help of the Fuggers' ducats, Charles overcame French and papal opposition to be elected Holy Roman Emperor in record time and in immediate succession to his grandfather. (See Appendix III, p. 1270.) [dollar]
DOLLAR
Jachimov is a small Bohemian town in the Joachimsthal, some 80 km north of Plzen (Pilsen). In 1518 Count von Schlick was granted an imperial patent to mine silver there and to establish a mint. His silver coins were produced by Walzenwerke or 'rolling machines', and were formally classed as 'large groats'. Their popular name was Joachimsthaler, soon shortened to thaler.
By the seventeenth century the thaler had become a unit of currency all over central Europe. It had also been copied in Habsburg Spain, whose taleros or 'pieces of eight' circulated throughout the Americas. They were known in English as 'dollars'. The 30 shilling silver piece of James VI of Scotland was dubbed 'the Sword Dollar'. In the eighteenth century silver thalers were widely replaced by copper 'plate money' imported from Sweden, which acquired the Swedish name oidaler. A copper daler of 1720 was equivalent in value to a silver thaler, even though its weight was 250 times greater; and it could only be transported by horse and cart.1
The acknowledged masterpiece of the series, however, was the Maria Theresa dollar of 1751. This superb coin bore the bust of the Empress, with the two-headed eagle on the reverse, and the inscription:
R[omae] IMP[eratrix] * HUfngariae et] BO[hemiae] REG[ina] * Mfaria] THERESIA * D[ei] G[ratia] ARCHIDfux] AUST[riae] * DUX BURG[undiae] *COM[es] TURfolis]*
It continued to be minted in millions throughout the nineteenth century, all posthumous issues bearing the date of the Empress's death in 1780. It was minted by Mussolini in 1936 to finance the invasion of Abyssinia, and by the British in Bombay. Two hundred years later, it still circulates in parts of Asia as an international trade currency.'
The dollar was adopted as the currency of the USA in 1787, and of Canada in 1871. But it figures no longer among the currency units of Europe.
526 RENATIO
Charles V (Emperor 1519-56), whose realms stretched from the Philippines to Peru, was gradually overwhelmed by the multiplicity of competing problems. Physically, he was most unimperial: weak adenoids gave him awhining voice and a permanently drooping mouth, which an insolent Spanish grandee once told him to shut 'to keep the flies out'. Yet he possessed many talents for governing his vast dominions, speaking Flemish by choice, Spanish, French, and Italian to his officials, 'and German to his horse'. And he was not lacking in fortitude. 'Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannon-ball,' he retorted when refusing to remain in the rear at Muhlberg. As the accepted leader of the Catholic princes, he headed the strongest cause which might have held Christendom together. Yet the sheer size and complexity of the internal and external crises defied coordinated action. In the Church, though successful in launching the General Council, he realized that the deliberations at Trent were only hardening divided opinions. His plans for restoring religious unity in the Empire were disastrously delayed. Despite the victory at Muhlberg, the wars of the Schmalkaldic League ended with the stalemate of the Peace of Augsburg (1555)- In Spain, where he reigned as co-king with his mentally disturbed mother, he wrestled with the revolt of the comuneros and then with the divergent interests of Castile and Aragon. In the New World he fought a losing battle to protect the Amerindians. In the Netherlands, which he had left in the hands of his aunt, Margaret, he was painfully obliged to suppress the revolt of his native Ghent by force (1540). In the main hereditary Habsburg lands—Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary—which he had consigned to his brother Ferdinand, he faced constant opposition from local leaders, such as Jan Zapolyai in Transylvania, and in 1546-7 the first Bohemian Revolt. Everywhere he had to struggle with provincial diets, fractious nobles, par-ticularist interests. On the strategic scale, he had to cope with the hostility of France, with the expansion of the Turks, and with the threat of Franco-Ottoman co-operation.
Rivalry with France engendered five wars, fought at all the points of territorial contact—in the Netherlands, in Lorraine, in Savoy, in the Pyrenees, and in Italy— and, indirectly, to the great shame of his life, the Sack of Rome (1527). Fear of the Turks led to Habsburg takeovers in Hungary and Bohemia; in the longer run, however, they produced an endless series of exhausting complications, both in the Balkans and in the Mediterranean, [orange]
In his last decade, Charles V might have had some grounds for optimism. But the Peace of Augsburg was a disappointment; and, endlessly frustrated, he abdicated. He left Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip, the rest to his brother. He died in retreat at Yuste. He was the last Emperor to cherish a dream of universal unity, and has been invoked by some in contemporary times as patron of a united Europe. 'Charles V, once regarded as the last fighter of a rearguard action,' writes an interested party, 'is suddenly seen to have been a forerunner.'4"
After the abdication, the Austrian Habsburgs forgot Charles's universal vision. Maximilian II (r. 1564-76), grandson of the Jagiellons, gained nothing from his nominal election as King of Poland-Lithuania. His two sons, Rudolf 11 (r.
renaissances and reformations
ORANGE
in 1544. at the height of the Franco-imperial wars, an officer of the I Imperial Army, René von Nassau, was killed at St Dizier by a French bullet. His death was to drive events that would affect the history not only of his native Nassau but of Provence, the Netherlands, and Ireland.
Nassau was a small German duchy on the right bank of the middle Rhine. Between the Westerwald forests and the rugged Taunus Mountains north of Wiesbaden, Nassau's fertile Rheingau contained some of Germany's finest vineyards, including Johanisberg and Rudesbeim. Rene's father, Heinrich von Nassau, resided at Siegen, sharing the duchy with the cadet branch of the family at Dillenberg. Rene's mother, Claudia, was the sister and heiress of an imperial general, Philibert de Chalons, who had led the sack of Rome and who had been richly rewarded by Charles V with lands in Brabant. Moreover, she had taken over Philibert's title to the Principality of Orange. When the heirless René was killed, it emerged that he had bequeathed his collection of lands and titles to his eleven-year-old cousin, William of Nassau-Dillenburg.
Orange was a small sovereign principality on the left bank of the Rhone north of Avignon. (See Appendix III, p. 1254.) Bordered to the east by the' heights of Mont Ventoux, it was a rich wine-growing district, several of whose villages, such as Gigondas and Cháteauneuf-du-Pape, were to become famous. Its tiny capital, ancient Arausio, was dominated by the huge Roman arch erected by Tiberius. From the twelfth century it was a fief of the counts of Provence, and hence of the Empire. But in 1393 the heiress to Orange, Marie de Baux, was given in marriage to the Burgundian Jean de Chalons; and it was their descendants who thereafter became the principality's absentee rulers. In 1431, when the Count of Provence needed a ransom in a hurry, he agreed to sell off the Chalons' obligation to homage, thereby making them princes of Orange in their own right. As an independent enclave within the Kingdom of France, Orange attracted many Italian and Jewish merchants, and in the mid-sixteenth century it was fast becoming a Protestant bastion.' It would eventually be suppressed by Louis XIV, who decided to put an end to this nest of Huguenots in 1703.
Thanks to his inheritances in Germany, Provence, and Brabant. William of Nassau-Dillenburg (1533-84) became one of the richest men in Europe. He even held a claim to the defunct Kingdom of Aries. Born a Lutheran but raised as a Catholic at the imperial court in Brussels, where he called the Regent Margaret 'mother', he set up his own affluent residence at Breda
528 R ENA T lO
in north Brabant. In 1555 he held the arm of the ailing Charles V during the abdication ceremony; and in 1559 he served as imperial plenipotentiary to the Treaty of Cateau-Cambre.sis. He then went to Paris as one of three sureties for the Treaty's implementation. To all appearances he was a pillar of the Catholic, imperial Establishment. But in Paris, he heard of Spanish plans to subdue the Netherlands; and he contracted a lifelong distaste for Spanish machinations. He is known to history as 'William the Silent' (see pp. 536~8).2
Despite its subsequent Dutch connections, therefore, the House of Orange-Nassau, which William founded, was not Dutch in origin. It was a typical dynastic multinational amalgam founded by accident and perpetuated by good fortune. Of William's three sons only one was to keep the line intact. That child was conceived by William's fourth wife in between two attempts by Spanish agents to have William murdered. (William had once granted a pardon to his adulterous second wife's lover, who then went off to father Peter Paul Rubens.) William's great-grandson, also William of Orange (1650-1702), who became King William III of England, was born in the middle of a Dutch revolution, eight days after his father had died of smallpox.
The Orange Order was founded in Armagh in 1795. Like the earlier 'Peep o' Day Boys', it aimed to preserve the Protestant (Episcopalian) supremacy in Ireland, Its hero was 'King Billy' (William III): its watchword, 'No Surrender!' At a time when British law discriminated against Catholics and Presbyterians alike, the Order saw itself as the shield of an isolated elite against the growing popularity of Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen. Tone (1763-98), a moderate Protestant, sought the twin goals of universal toleration and a sovereign Irish republic. He had appealed for military aid from France.
In the bitter fighting of 1795-8, the Orange Order played a leading part in British plans to repel invasion and suppress sedition. Faced by incompetent adversaries, it prevailed. The expedition of General Hoche, which sailed from Brest in 1796, came to grief in Bantry Bay. The successful landing by General Humbert at Killala in County Mayo was short-lived. The armed rising in Wicklow and Wexford collapsed after the Battle of Vinegar Hill (June 1798). Tone, captured in French naval uniform, committed suicide.
In these and all subsequent events, the Orangemen followed their own exclusive agenda. They opposed both the Act of Union (1801) and Daniel O'Connell. They were not converted to the Union until the prospect arose after 1829 that an autonomous Ireland might be run by emancipated Catholics. Yet they rejected mainstream British Unionism. In 1912-14, they provided the backbone of the Ulster Volunteers who were training to defy
RENAISSANCES AND REFORMATIONS
Westminster and the Irish Home Rule Bui (see p, 831). Their greatest influence was exerted when Northern Ireland ruled itself within the United Kingdom from 1920 to 1976,
For 200 years, the Orange Order has held its annual parades on the anniversary of the Boyne (see p. 631). Marchers in bowler hats and orange sashes tramp defiantly through Catholic quarters to the whistle and beat of fife and drum. And the old toast is raised:
"To the glorious, pious and immortal memory of the great and good King William, who saved us from popery, slavery, knavery, brass money, and wooden shoes. And a fig to the Bishop of Cork!"
1576-1612), the eccentric hermit of Prague, and Matthias (r. 1612-19), were fully absorbed by their mutuaL suspicions and by religious discord. Over 200 religious revolts or riots took place in the decade after the Donauworth Incident of 1607. Ferdinand II (r. 1619-37), Ferdinand III (r. 1637-57), and Leopold I (r. 1658-1705) were entirely consumed by the Thirty Years War and its aftermath. With the emergence of a permanent and separate Austrian chancellery in Vienna, the centre of gravity of their operation was shifting decisively to the East, whilst the Empire itself seemed to teeter on the edge of imminent dissolution. As the drinkers in the tavern of Goethe's Faust were given to singing:
The dear old Holy Roman Empire, How does it hang together?
The answer, in the view of a distinguished British historian, lay less in the political sphere than in a 'civilisation', a set of shared attitudes and sensibilities.41
The Emperor Rudolf II assembled a court at Prague that really was a wonderful curiosity. His chosen companions, the most brilliant artists and scientists of the age, were men who took natural and supernatural to be part and parcel of their everyday researches. Apart from Kepler, Brahe, Campion, and Bruno, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1537-93) achieved fame as the founder of surrealist painting (see Plate 54), and Cornelius Drebber (1572-1633), illusionist and opera designer, as inventor of a perpetual-motion machine. Drebber, who visited London, promised James I a telescope which could read books at a mile's distance. He is thought to have been the model for Prospero, 'rapt in secret studies', in Shakespeare's Tempest, just as Rudolf himself may have inspired the Duke in Measure for Measure.42 Rudolf's fabulous art collection became a strategic target of the Swedish army during the latter stages of the Thirty Years' War. [alchemia] [opera]
Spain passed from grandeur to decline in little more than a century. 'For a few fabulous decades Spain was to be the greatest power on earth' and 'all but the master of Europe.'43 Under Charles V/Carlos I (r. 1516-56) it lived through the age
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531
ALCHEMIA
in 1606, the Emperor Rudolph II was the subject of a .formal complaint I drawn up by the Habsburg Archdukes. 'His Majesty', they wrote in their. Proposition, 'is only interested in wizards, alchemists, cabbalists and the like.' Rudolph's court at Prague did indeed house Europe's most distinguished research centre for the occult arts.1
In that same year a Hungarian alchemist, Janos Banffy-Hunyadi (1576-1641), set out from his native Transylvania. He stopped over at the Court of Maurice of Hesse at Cassel, the principal Protestant centre of occultism, before moving on to London.2 His arrival coincided with the death of the learned Welshman, Dr John Dee (1527-1608), sometime astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, who once invented the term 'Great Britain' to please his queen and who had spent several years both in Prague and in Poland. Such 'cosmopolitans', as they were called, made their careers on the international circuit of alchemy, the true predecessor of the later scientific community.
Europe was experiencing a veritable 'occult revival', in which alchemy was the most important of several related 'secret arts'. 'Alchemy', writes the historian of Rudolph's world, 'was the greatest passion of the age in Central Europe.'3 It combined the search for the philosopher's stone, which would transmute base metals into gold, with the parallel search for the spiritual rebirth of mankind. 'What is below is like what is above.'
Alchemists required expertise across a very wide range of knowledge. To conduct their experiments with metals and other substances, they needed to be familiar with the latest technology. To interpret their results, they needed a sound grasp of astrology, of cabbalistic number theory, of lapidarism, of herbalism, and of the 'iatrochemistry' developed by Paracelsus [holism]. Most importantly, in a religious age, they sought to present their findings in the language of mystical Christian symbolism. It was no accident that at this time the secret Rosicrucian Society, the adepts of 'Rose' and 'Cross', chose to come into the open, at Kassel, or that the principal systematizer of Rosicrucian theosophy, Robert Fludd, was also a respectable alchemist, [conspiro]
In later scientific times, the alchemists were seen as an aberrant breed which long delayed the growth of true knowledge. Indeed, in the so-called 'Age of the Scientific Revolution' they have sometimes been seen as 'the opposition'. The most charitable historian of science calls them practitioners of 'technology without science'.4 Yet in their own eyes, and in the eyes of powerful patrons, there was no such distinction. They were 'white wizards' fighting for the Good; they were reformers; they were engaged in a quest to unlock the secret forces of mind and matter. They would not be overtaken by scientists of the modern persuasion until the end of the
following century; and chemistry did not establish itself until still later. [eldluft]5
The Emperor Rudolph's cosmopolitan alchemists often held responsible positions. Several, like Michael Maier, who also worked in London, or the Huguenot sympathizer, Nicholas Barnard, held the office of Leibarzt or court physician. Others, such as Sebald Schwaertzer. served as imperial controller of mines at Rudolfov and Joachimsthal. [dollar] Heinnch Kuhnrath (1560-1605), author of the grandiose Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae Christiano-kabalisticum, came from Leipzig. Michal Sedziwoj or 'Sendivogius' (1566-1636), whose Novum Lumen Chymicum (1604) ran into 54 editions and would be thoroughly studied by Isaac Newton, came from Warsaw. He was connected to the powerful faction of pro-Habsburg magnates in Poland, who had contacts with Oxford and who brought John Dee to Cracow. John Dee's dubious assistant, Edward Kelley, classed as Cacochimicus, probably died in prison in Prague. Their company included the ill-fated Giordano Bruno [svrop], the astronomers Kepler and Brahe, and an English poetess called Elizabeth Jane Weston.
There was also a prominent Jewish element. The Chief Rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel (d. 1609), patronized a revival of the [cabala]. It was fed by the works of Sephardi writers such as Isaac Luria or Moses, Cordovero, whose Pardes Rimmonim was published in Cracow in 1591, One of the Emperor's closest associates, Mardochaeus the Jew, was a specialist in elixirs of fertility.
For contemporaries, alchemy had the most positive connotations:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.6
of the crucero, the conquistadores, and the tercio, there being a clear correlation between the supply of American gold and the upkeep of the finest army in Europe. Under Philip II (r. 1556-98) it stood at the pinnacle of its political and cultural power, until undermined by internal resistance, by the hostility of France and England, and by the revolt of the Netherlands. Under Philip's successors— Philip III (r. 1598-1621), Philip IV (r. 1621-65), and the imbecile Charles 11 (r. 1665-1700)—it never recovered from a decadent dynasty, from noble faction, or from its debilitating involvement in the Thirty Years War. The fall was so sudden that Spaniards themselves were apt to wonder: 'was the original achievement no more than an engano—an illusion?'44 [flamenco]
Philip II must be the prototype of all monarchs who have tried to rule without rising from their desks (see Plate 43). Austere, penitential, tireless, ensconced in a solitary study in the gloomy Escorial on the barren plateau outside Madrid,
532
RENATIO
renaissances and reformations
533
OPERA
The composer called it a favola in musica, 'a fable set to music'. It was intended as an imitation of ancient Greek drama, and was produced in February 1607 before the Accademia degli Invagh-iti in Mantua, probably in the Gallery of the Rivers in the ducal palace of the Gonzagas. Its five acts consisted of a series of madrigal groups and dances linked by instrumental interludes and recitatives. The libretto was written by the poet Alessandro Striggio. The music of the infernal scenes was given to trombones, the pastorals to flutes and recorders, it culminated in the great tenor aria 'Possente spirto' at the end of Act III. It was Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo, 'the first viable opera in the repertoire'.1
Since its origins in the court entertainments of late Renaissance Italy, the operatic genre, which combines music, secular drama, and spectacle, has passed through many phases. The opera seria, whose most prolific proponent was Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), author of 800 libretti, was devoted to classical and historical themes. Alongside it, the opera buffa launched a long tradition of light-hearted entertainment leading through opera comique to operetta and musical comedy. Grand Opera, which starts in the late eighteenth century, reached its peaks in the Viennese, Italian, French, German, and Russian schools. Romantic nationalism became a prominent ingredient. The supreme laurels are disputed between the lovers of Verdi and Puccini and the fanatical acolytes of Richard Wagner. Modernist opera began with Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande (1902), the precursor of a rich category including Berg's Wozzeck (1925), Britten's Peter Grimes (1945), and Stravinsky's Rake's Progress (1951) (see Appendix III, p. 1278). [susanin] [tristan]
The Orphean theme has provided recurrent inspiration. Jacopo Pen's Florentine masque Euridice (1600) anticipated Monteverdi's production in Mantua. Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice (1762) opened the classical repertoire. Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld (1858) is one of the most joyous of the standard operettas. Luciano Berio's Opera (1971) puts the traditional story to a serial score.
he strove to enforce a spiritual and administrative uniformity which the variety of his vast dominions would never permit. He ruled through two sets of parallel councils—one set devoted to the main areas of policy, the other to the government of six major territorial units. For, in addition to his father's Castilian, Aragonese, Italian, Burgundian, and American legacies, in 1580 he seized his mother's vast Portuguese inheritance. His disregard for the rights of the various Diets culminated in the hanging of the Justizar of Aragon. Yet the dream of'one monarch, one empire, one sword' was relentlessly pursued under the pretext that
FLAMENCO
Andalusian gypsy music in the style now known as flamenco has been played and admired since the sixteenth century. The plaintive melodies of the cante or 'singing' blend to inimitable effect with the dramatic poses and rhythmic stamping of the baile or 'dance'. The dissonances and quarter-tones, the exquisitely raucous vocal delivery, and the pulsating guitars and castanets contribute to a sound that has no counterpart in Europe's musical folklore.
The history of flamenco turns on three separate features—the name, the gypsies, and the music. No scholarly consensus exists about any of them.1 Flamenco simply meant 'Flemish'. In the vocabulary of art, it also gained the connotation of 'exotic' or 'ornate'. One theory proposes that Jewish songs banned by the Inquisition found their way back to Spain from Flanders, where many Spanish Jews had taken refuge. Another suggests that flamenco derives from the Arabic fellah-mangu or 'singing peasant'.
Gypsies reached Spain after the expulsions of the Jews and Moors. They were known as gitanos or eg/pcianos. The English traveller and writer George Borrow was the first to record in the 1840s that people were calling them flamencos, [romany]
Andalusia's long tradition of Moorish music dated back to the eighth and ninth centuries. The Omeyas of Cordoba were entertained by oriental singers accompanied on the lute. One high point was reached in the reign of Abd-er-Rahman (r. 821-52) with the arrival of a singer from Baghdad known as Zoriab. Another occurred at the Sevillian court of the poet-king Al-Motamit (r. 1040-95), where orchestras of more than 100 lutes and flutes are known to have performed. In the twelfth century the philosopher Aver-roes said: 'When a scholar dies in Seville, his books are sold in Cordoba; when a musician dies in Cordoba, his instruments are sold in Seville.'
It would be rash to speculate on Flamenco's links with the earlier Moorish music of the region. Europe's gypsies had a strong musical tradition of their own, and produced startling results elsewhere—notably in Romania and Hungary. How exactly the music and the musicians came together in Andalusia is a mystery. The psychological traumas of Andalusia undoubtedly set the scene. The ancient flamenco jondo or 'deep flamenco', especially the tonas or 'unaccompanied melodies', belong to the world of tears and lament. Like the blues of America's deep South, they express the black moods of people in despair: they are the songs of the dispossessed. In this, they differ markedly from the flamboyant style of flamenco chico, 'smart flamenco', which swept Spain's cafe life in the 1860s and which furthered the romantic 'reinvention' of Andalusia. 'Flamenco Jondo', wrote Federico Garcia Lorca, 'is a stammer, a marvellous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale, eludes the cold rigid staves of modern music, and makes the tightly closed flowers of the semitones blossom into a Thousand petals.,?
534
RENA TIO
the King knew best how to trabajar para el pueblo, 'work for his people'.45 In the process, he drove his sick, imprisoned son to death; he drove the Inquisition to waves of autos-da-fe; and he drove the persecuted Moriscos of Granada to rebel in 1568-9, the offended Dutch to rebel in 1566, the humiliated Aragonese to rebel in 1591-2. His adversaries, like William the Silent, considered him simply 'a murderer and a liar'. Never can an apparently sensitive man have so completely ignored the sensitivities of others. Absolute master of the Church in Spain, he sought to extirpate the Church's enemies across Europe. He swore to avenge his second wife's memory in England. He intervened against the Huguenots in France. He wrongly saw the Dutch Protestants as the source of all discontent in the Netherlands. But God, like Philip II, did not smile on Spain. By the 1590s a general crisis loomed. The Great Armada of 1588 had been dashed by storms. The Dutch held out. Plague swept the Spanish cities. The countryside, drained by taxes and hit by agricultural failures, was beginning to depopulate. The richest coffers in the world were empty. In 1596 Philip II was formally bankrupt for the fourth time. There was misery amidst splendour, and an overpowering sense of disillusionment. Philip, like Don Quixote, had been tilting at windmills. The supremacy of Castile was deeply resented by Spain's other constituent kingdoms. 'Castile has made Spain,' the epitaph reads, 'and Castile has destroyed it.'46
[inquisitio]
After Philip's death the Spanish Habsburgs sought in vain to restore their fortunes. A concerted attempt was made to join forces with their Austrian relations. Caspar de Guzman, Count of Oliverez and Duke of San Lucar, popularly known as El Conde Duque, the 'Count-Duke', who held the reins of policy from 1621 to 1643, applied the principles of earlier Castilian reformers. But his career came to grief amidst the shattering secession of Portugal (1640) and the revolt of Catalonia (1640-8). Spain's involvement in the Thirty Years War ended with the loss of the United Provinces—its richest single asset. The interrelated wars with France were protracted until the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). Overwhelmed by the spiralling costs of war, by the multiplicity of fronts, by the absence of any interval of respite, Spain could rescue neither itself nor its Austrian partner. Thanks to the extraordinary problems of 'the Spanish Road', the logistics of supporting an army in the Low Countries became insuperable. Poner una pica en Flandres (putting a pikeman into Flanders) became a Spanish idiom for 'attempting the impossible'.47 'The Habsburg bloc', writes the historian of political logistics, 'provides one of the greatest examples of strategical overstretch in history.'48 [picaro] [valtel-
UNAJ
The Revolt of the Netherlands, which began in 1566 and ended in 1648, constituted a long-running drama which spanned the transition from the supremacy of the Habsburgs to that of France. At the outset, the seventeen provinces of the imperial Burgundian Circle that were transferred to Spanish rule in 1551 presented a mosaic of local privileges and of social and cultural divisions. The feudal aristocracy of the countryside contrasted sharply with the wealthy burghers and
renaissances and reformations
535
PICARO
Picaro was the Spanish name given to rogues and vagabonds, that is, to people living beyond the margin of settled and respectable society. It was also given to a genre of popular literature, the picaresque, which flourished across Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in advance of the novel. The archetype of the genre was found in Mateo Aleman's Guzman de Alfrache (1599), whose adventures on the road from Seville to Rome in the company of a dubious lady-friend ran into twenty-six editions. Guzman revealed how the brotherhood of beggars formed a mutual protection society, revelling in their ingenious schemes to cheat ! the governing classes.
But Guzman was one among many. In Spain, a certain Lazarilio had appeared half a century earlier. In Germany, the practical joker Till Eulenspiegel was well known before he first made it into print. In 1523 Luther wrote a preface to the much-reprinted Liber Vagatorum, which contains a description of twenty-eight categories of tramp. Simplicissimus, the ex-soldier of the Thirty Years War who wandered round the world, was the creation of H. J. C. von Grimmelshausen in 1669. In France, after numerous earlier appearances, Gil Bias emerged from the pen of Le Sage in 1715. In Italy, there appeared // vagabondo (1621). In England, many minor references to roguery from Chaucer onwards culminated in John Gay's sensationally popular The Beggar's Opera of 1728.1
Picaresque literature was clearly responding to a widespread social condition. Vagabondage and beggary filled a large social space, midway between the medieval forest outlaws and the regimented urban poor of the nineteenth century. It was spawned by the disintegration of hierarchical rural society, and encouraged by social policing that combined ferocious punishments with highly incompetent enforcement. Men and women took to the road in droves because they were unemployed, because they were fugitives from justice, above all because they longed to escape the oppressive, dependent status of serfs and servants. The picaro was wild but free.
Vagabonds sought protection in numbers, and in social hierarchies of their own. They travelled in bands with families and children, some of them mutilated to excite pity. They had specialized guilds of pickpockets, thieves, burglars, pedlars, beggars, cripples real and feigned, jugglers, entertainers, fortune-tellers, tinkers, whores, washerwomen, chaplains, and musicians—each with rules and guardians. They even developed their own secret language, known as rotwelsch or zargon. They gathered intermittently for meetings and 'parliaments', where they elected their 'kings' and 'queens'; and they shared the roads with gypsy tribes and gangs of unpaid soldiery:
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537
Hark, hark! the dogs do bark The beggars are coming to town. Some in rags, and some in tags, And some in a velvet gown.
Social provision for vagrancy was minimal.-Only the richest cities could afford charitable refuges—such as those at Bruges from 1565, Milan from 1578, and Lyons from 1613. In any case, 'chanty' could be an ill-disguised euphemism for repression. In 1612, when the city of Pans asked its 8-10,000 vagrants to assemble on the Place St Germain to receive assistance, only 91 persons came forward, [folly]
Ferocious legislation underlined the authorities' impotence. In Elizabethan England, for example, every parish was given the right to brand 'sturdy beggars' on the shoulder with a letter R for 'rogue', to flog the homeless and to send them 'home': in effect to condemn them 'to be whipped from parish to parish'. Georgian England made an attempt to distinguish 'the deserving poor'. At the same time, the Black Waltham Act of 1713 let suspected highwaymen and their accomplices be hanged without trial. In practice, most countries could only keep vagrancy down by periodic military expeditions into the countryside, where exemplary hangings and press-gangings took place. In Eastern Europe vagrancy was conditioned by a harsher climate and by the persistence of serfdom. But fugitive serfs were a common phenomenon. In Russia the yurodiv or itinerant 'holy fool' was traditionally the recipient of hospitality and charity—proof too, perhaps, of more Christian social attitudes.2
fishermen of the coastal towns. The francophone and predominantly Catholic Walloons of Hainault, Namur, and Liege contrasted with the Dutch-speaking and increasingly Calvinist population of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht. The central provinces of Flanders and Brabant lay across the main religious and linguistic divide. Over 200 cities controlled perhaps 50 per cent of Europe's trade, bringing Spain seven times more in taxes than the bullion of the Indies. Certainly, in the initial stages of Spanish rule, the threat to provincial liberties and to the nobles' control of Church benefices gave greater cause for popular offence than the threat of activating the Inquisition (see Appendix III, p. 1275).
Under the regency of Margaret of Parma, 1559-67, discontent came to a head over a scheme for ecclesiastical reform. Three protesters—William the Silent, Prince of Orange (1533-84), Lamoral, Count of Egmont, and Philip Montmorency, Count of Horn—petitioned the King with the Regent's permission. They were ridiculed as Geuzen, les Gueux, 'the Beggars', and in 1565, in the Edict of Segovia, Philip indicated his refusal to authorize change. Following further petitions for reform, and a meeting in 1566 of confederated nobles at St Trond, which demanded religious toleration, there occurred a serious outbreak of
VALTELLINA
i N July 1620 a bloody massacre took place in a remote alpine valley—the I Valtelhna or Veltlin. The Catholic faction in the valley fell on their Protestant neighbours and, with the aid of a Spanish force from Milan, killed as many as they could seize. This Veltlinermord, at the outset of the Thirty Years War, alerted the Powers to the Valtelhna's strategic potential.
The Valtelhna lies on the southern side of the Bernina section of the main alpine ridge. It was formed by the River Adda, and runs some 74 miles due eastwards from the tip of Lake Como, then north-east to the old Roman spa at Bormio. An important side-valley, the Val di Poschiavo, leads northwards via the Bernia Pass to St Montz. The main valley leads over the Stelvio Pass or Stilfserjoch (9.055 feet) to southern Tyrol. In 1520 the shrine of the Madonna di Tirano was built where the main road crosses a north-south track leading down the Val di Poschiavo and over into the Val Camonica. In 1603 a Spanish fortress was built to command the entrance to the valley from Lake Como. A string of villages on the sunny northern terraces of the Adda are famed for their chestnuts, figs, honey, and aromatic 'Retico' wine.1 (See Appendix III, p. 1219.)
It was political geography, however, that was crucial. By the 1600s almost all the transalpine routes were controlled by the Duke of Savoy, by the Swiss Confederation, or by the Republic of Venice. When the Austrian Habsburgs were looking for support from their Spanish relatives in Italy, the Valtelhna had become the sole accessible corridor between the two main blocks of Habsburg territory. Indeed, since the sea-lanes between Spain and the Netherlands were increasingly threatened by Dutch and English warships, the Valtelhna became the last sure route for sending gold and troops from Spain and Spanish Italy to the empire. It was the jugular vein of the Habsburgs' body politic.
Yet the columns of marching pikemen, and the mule trains loaded with pieces of eight, remained extremely vulnerable. They were not welcome to the local inhabitants, many of whom had turned to Calvinism; they were open to direct attack from the Swiss Freestate of the Graubunden or Grisons, via the Val di Poschiavo; and they were subject to the changing fortunes of complicated proprietorial disputes. Both the Habsburgs and the Grisons had inherited claims to the Valtelhna rooted in the medieval wrangles between the Visconti dukes of Milan and the bishops of Chur. Not to be outdone, the French reckoned that Charlemagne had granted the Valtelhna in perpetuity to the Abbey of St Denis
After 1620, the valley became the focus of Richelieu's diplomacy with Venice, Switzerland, and Savoy. Five times in the next twenty years it saw French and Spanish garrisons change places. In 1623 and in 1627 it was handed over during arbitration to papal forces. In 1623 5 it was fallen by
538 RENATIO
the Gnsons. In 1633 and 1635-7 it was taken by French forces under the Huguenot Duke of Rohan. But the French so offended their Protestant allies that a local pastor, George Jenatsch. changed sides, called in the Spaniards, and converted to Roman Catholicism. By then, having laid hands on the Rhine, the French could safely leave the Valtellina to its Catholic and, ultimately, to its Italian destiny. After a generation of turmoil the valley could return to i1s vines, to the production of Sasseila, Grumello, Valgella, Montagna, and the orange-coloured dessert wine, the Sfurzat.
rioting and religious desecrations. The action of the confederates in helping the Regent to quell the disorders did not deter Philip from ordering general repression. Under the regency of the Duke of Alva, 1567-73, a Council of Tumults, the notorious Bloedraad or 'Blood-Council' was set up to try the King's opponents. Egmont and Horn were beheaded in the square at Brussels, their severed heads sent to Madrid in a box. William of Orange escaped to lead the continuing fight. With the whole population of the Netherlands condemned to death as heretics by the Church, the south rebelled as well as the north. The 'Sea Beggars' attacked shipping. Haarlem, besieged, capitulated. Spanish garrisons spread fire and plunder. Thousands perished from random arrests, mock trials, and casual violence.
Under the governorships of Don Luis de Requesens, Grand Commander of Castile 1573-6, and of Don John of Austria 1576-8 reconciliation was attempted but failed. Leyden, besieged, survived. The sack of Antwerp during the Spanish Fury of 1576 hardened resistance. Under the regency of the Duke of Parma 1578-92, the split became irreversible. By the Union of Arras (1578) ten southern provinces accepted Spanish terms and recovered their liberties. By the Union of Utrecht (1579) the seven northern provinces resolved to fight for their independence. Thereafter, there was unremitting war. Spanish military resources could never be brought to bear against the Dutchmen's dykes, their money, warships, and allies. In 1581-5 and 2595-8 the Dutch were assisted by the French, in 1585-7 by the English under the Earl of Leicester. In 1609 they enjoyed an eleven-year truce, but were forced to fight on from 1621 to 1648 in the ranks of the anti-imperial coalition. Their steadfastness prevailed. The spirit of a new nation was inscribed on the front of a burgher's house in Zijlstraat, Haarlem: 'int soet nederland; ick blyf getrou; ick wyct nyet af' (To the dear Netherlands. I shall be true. I shall not waver.)49
The Dutch Republic of the 'United Provinces of the Netherlands'—mislead-ingly known in English as Holland—was the wonder of seventeenth-century Europe. It succeeded for the same reasons that its would-be Spanish masters failed: throughout the eighty years of its painful birth, its disposable resources were actually growing. Having resisted the greatest military power of the day, it then became a major maritime power in its own right. Its sturdy burgher society widely practised the virtues of prudent management, democracy, and toleration. Its engineers, bankers, and sailors were justly famed. Its constitution (1584)
RENAISSANCES AND  REFORMATIONS 539
ensured that the governments of the seven provinces remained separate from a federal council of state at The Hague. The latter was chaired by an executive Stadholder, whose office was generally held, together with the offices of Captain-General and Admiral-General, by the House of Orange, [orange]
The Dutch Republic rapidly became a haven for religious dissidents, for capitalists, for philosophers, and for painters. The earlier Flemish school of Rubens (1577-1640) and Van Dyck (1599-1641) was surpassed by the Dutch School of Hals, Ruysdael, Vermeer, and, above all, of Rembrandt (Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1609-66). Nor were the Netherlands blighted by bourgeois dullness. Its religious affairs were enlivened by the Arminian controversy, its military affairs by a vocal element of pacifist opinion, its politics by a party of extreme republicans who in 1651-72, under Jan de Witt (1625-72), succeeded in keeping the Stadholdership vacant. Its political power began to wane with the three English wars of 1651-4, 1665-7, and 1672-4. Even so, despite its peculiar, decentralised constitution, it had every reason to regard itself as the first modern state.50 [batavia]
France, too, was entering a period of renewed vigour and splendour. Less encumbered by distant colonies, and geographically more compact, she was a worthy rival for the Habsburgs. Yet France was strategically encircled, by the Empire on one side and by Spain on the other, by the Spanish Netherlands in the north and by the Spanish Mediterranean possessions in the south. The French were repeatedly thwarted in their attempts to reach the dominant position to which they felt entitled.
In the century-and-a-half which separated Renaissance France from Louis XIV, French kings repeatedly ran into strangulating complications both at home and abroad. Charles VIII launched the Italian wars in 1494, in romantic pursuit of the Angevin claim to Naples, only to embroil his country in a series of titanic conflicts lasting 65 years. Louis XII (r. 1498-1515), Pcre de son Peuple and heir to the Visconti, did likewise by pursuing his claim to Milan. Francis I (r. 1515-47), born at Cognac, a magnificent knight, cultivated man of pleasure, and Renaissance prince par excellence, met his first setback at the imperial election of 1519 and the second by his capture at Pavia in 1525. 'Tout est perdu,' he wrote to his mother, 'fors l'honneur et la vie.' His release, and marriage to the Emperor's sister, did not restrain him from persisting with the Franco-German feud that henceforth gripped Europe for the rest of modern history. He was a prince of wide horizons: patron of Jacques Cartier's expedition to Canada, as of Rabelais, Leonardo, Cellini; founder alike of Le Havre and of the College de France; builder of Chambord, Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau. [alcofribas] [nez] [tormenta]
In the reigns of the last four Valois—Henry 11 (r. 1547-59), Francis II (r. 1559-60), the youthful Charles IX (r. 1560-74), and the flagrant Henry III (r. 1574-89)—France gained respite from the Habsburg conflict at the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis (1559), only to sink into the appalling morass of the Wars of Religion (see above). The cynical Bourbon Henry IV (r. 1589-1610) saved France from religious discord and, with his visionary minister, the Due de Sully
540 R E N AT 1 O
BATAVIA
i n the mid-seventeenth century, several travellers to Amsterdam record-led their astonishment at the 'drowning cell' which they had seen, or ■ heard about, in the city's house of correction. In order to teach idle young men to work, the candidates for correction would be cast into a sealed cellar furnished only with a running tap and a hand-pump. Whenever they stopped working the pump, they were faced with the imminent prospect of drowning. This installation was a wonderful metaphor for the physical predicament of the Dutch Republic and its dykes. It is also a fine illustration of the country's 'moral geography'—what has been called 'the Batavian Temperament'.1
The Dutch Republic in its heyday was famous for its commerce, for its cities, for its seapower, for its canals, windmills, and tulips, for its art, for its religious tolerance, for its black-and-white cattle, and for the puritanical culture of its burgher elite. The picture is true enough. But it provokes two major questions. One concerns the ambiguities which abound in the interplay of the component parts, the other concerns the miracle of how it all happened in the first place—'how a modest assortment of farming, fishing and shipping communities, with no shared language, religion or government, transformed itself into a world empire'. A leading historian of the subject stresses that the miracle was not the work of a class, but of a precocious 'community of the nation'.2
The central paradox of Dutch culture lies in the strange contradiction between its frugal, hard-working, God-fearing ethos and its 'embarrassing' storehouse of riches. The sober, dark-suited Dutch burghers loved feasting, adored tobacco, built sumptuous houses, furnished them lavishly, collected paintings, indulged in the vanity of portraiture, and amassed money. Sexual relations were relaxed. Family life was companionable rather than patriarchal. Women, by the standards of the time, were liberated, and children were cherished. The accepted practice for raising funds to help the poor was to organize a municipal lottery or an auction of gold, jewels, and silverware.
Over it all there reigned an inimitable freedom of spirit. It was accepted that wealth and security could only be gained by those who were game for the risk:
Here lies Isaac le Maire, merchant, who during his affairs throughout the world, by the grace of God, has known much abundance and has lost in thirty years (excepting his honour) over 150,000 guilders. Died as a Christian 30 September 1624.3
Much of these matters were well known to Dutch scholars. But the task of recreating this distinctive mentalite for the world at large fell to a British scholar of Dutch-Jewish parentage. It has reopened the vexed question of whether national character really exists or not.
RENAISSANCES AND REFORMATIONS 541
(1560-1641), prepared plans both for the restoration of prosperity and for international peace. 'There will be no labourer in my kingdom', he promised, 'without a chicken in his pot.' Like his predecessor, he was cut down by an assassin. [dessein]
The long reign of Louis XIII (r.1610-43) and the minority of his son, Louis XIV (1643-51), were overshadowed by the long careers of two formidable churchmen—Armand Duplessis, Cardinal de Richelieu (1585-1642) and Giulio
ALCOFRIBAS
The works of Frangois Rabelais, ex-monk, ex-lawyer, and physician, form one of the richest mines of literary and historical treasure that early modern Europe can offer. But their eccentricity aroused the suspicions of an intolerant age, and were first published under the anagrammic pseudonym of Alcofribas Nasier, Studies by Lucien Febvre and of Mikhail Bakhtin illustrate the breadth of scholarly interest which they still arouse.
Febvre, co-founder of Annates, was drawn to Rabelais after learning that specialists were leaning to the notion that the inventor of Pantagruel and Gargantua had been a secret and militant atheist. Having invented the community of Théléme, whose only rule was Fais ce que voudras ('Do whatever you would like'), no one could claim that Rabelais was a conventional religious thinker. On the other hand, to charge him with subversion of Christianity was a serious matter, Febvre, in response, produced one of the great surveys of 'collective mentality': Le Probléme de ľincroyance au XVIe siécle (1942). Having examined all the charges of scandal, and all the possible sources of irregular belief, in radical Protestantism, science, philosophy, and the occult, he concluded that Rabelais had shared 'the deep religiosity' of 'a century which wanted to believe'.1
Bakhtin, a distinguished Russian Dostoevskian scholar, turned to Rabelais from an interest in psychology. Rabelais has had the reputation of being the master of the vulgar belly-laugh [nez]. But he also enters that profounder realm where laughter mingles with tears. Bakhtin emerged with a hypothesis centred on Rabelais's famous proposition that 'laughter is the mark of humanity'. 'To laugh is human, to be human is to laugh.' Mieux est de rire que de larmes écrire. Pour ce que rire est le propre de ľ horn me.
But Bakhtin suspects that modern civilization has seriously repressed this most human of qualities. Europeans, since Rabelais, have grown so inhibited that they only laugh at trivia Indeed, they no longer know what is sacred in order to laugh at it. It is a profoundly pessimistic opinion parallel to the social analysis of Michel Foucault. One is left wondering whether Rabelais was not the last European to be truly human.1' [caritas]
542
RENAriO
RENAISSANCES AND REFORMATIONS
543
NEZ
in 1532 Rabelais described an imaginary duel of gestures between his I fictional hero, Panurge, and an Englishman;
Then the Englishe man made this sign. His left hand all open he lifted into the aire, then . . . instantly shut the foure fingers thereof, and his thumb extended at length he placed upon the gristle of his nose. Presently, he lifted up his right hand all open, putting the thumb [beside] the little finger of his left hand; and the foure right hand fingers he softly moved in the aire. Then contrarily, he did with the right what he had done with the left, and with the left what he had done with the right.
According to a recent study, 'thumbing the nose' or 'cocking a snoot' is the most widespread of all European gestures. It conveys mockery. In France it is known as le pied de nez or 'fool's nose', in Italy as marameo or 'mewing', in Germany as die lange Nase, in Portugal as tocar tromfete 'to blow the trumpet', in Serbo-Croat as svin ti svude 'to play the flute'. It is more common and less ambiguous than the Fingertips Kiss, the Temple Screw, the Eyelid Pull, the Forearm Jerk, the Ring, the Fig, the Nose Tap, and the V-sign—all of which have important regional and contextual variations.1
It is debatable whether there is a culture of gestures exclusive to Europe or to Christendom. But there is no doubt that gestures change over time. The English, who literally refused to kowtow in China, also abandoned bowing at home in the late eighteenth century, inventing the handshake as an easier form of sexless and classless greeting. 'A I'anglaise done', said Madame Bovary in 1857 when offered a gentleman's hand. In the twentieth century, however, the English became much more obstinately reticent, frequently refusing to shake hands while Continentals did so routinely.2 They stand at the opposite end of the European spectrum to the Poles, whose readiness to bow, to embrace both sexes, and to kiss hands in public has survived two world wars, modernization, Fascism, and even Communism,
Mazzarini, Cardinal Mazarin (1602-61). External affairs were entirely preoccupied with the Thirty Years War, internal affairs with the assertion of centralized royal power against the privileges of the provinces and the nobility. The Estates-General was suspended after the session of 1614. The merciless attack by Richelieu on the sources of noble wealth and power in the provinces underlay the desperate rebellions and the Wars of the Fronde, in 1648-53. The sunrise of Louis XIV's mature years burst from very cloudy skies.
The Italian Wars have often been used as the starting-point of modern history, and as the model of a local conflict which became internationalized. (They were
TORMENTA
At the Midsummer's Fair in mid-sixteenth-century Paris, cat-burning was a regular attraction, A special stage was built so that a large net containing several dozen cats could be lowered onto the bonfire beneath. The spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized. Cruelty was evidently thought to be funny.' It played its part in many of Europe's more traditional sports, including cock-fighting, bear-baiting, bull-fighting, and fox-hunting, [ludi]
Two hundred years later, on 2 March 1757, Robert Francois Damiens was condemned in Paris 'to make honourable amends':
He was brought in a tumbril, naked except for a smock, and carrying a torch of burning wax in his hand. The scaffold stood on the Place de Greve. Pincered at the breasts, arms, thighs and calves, his right hand holding the knife, with which he perpetrated the said act, he was to be burned on the hand with sulphur, to be doused at the pinion points with boiling oil, molten lead, and burning resin, and then to be dismembered by four horses, before his body was burned, reduced to ashes, and'scattered to the winds.
When the fire was lit, the heat was so feeble that only the skin on the back of one hand was damaged. But then one of the executioners, a strong and robust man, grasped the metal pincers, each 1#feet long, and by twisting and turning them, tore out huge lumps of flesh, leaving gaping wounds which were doused from a red-hot spoon.
Between his screams, Damiens repeatedly called out, 'My God, take pity on me!' and 'Jesus, help me!' The spectators were greatly edified by the compassion of an aged cure who lost no moment to console him.
The Clerk of the Court, the Sieur de Breton, went up to the sufferer several times, and asked him if he had anything to say. He said no . . .
The final operation lasted a very long time, because the horses were not used to it. Six horses were needed; but even they were not enough . . .
The executioner asked whether they should cut him in pieces, but the Clerk ordered them to try again. The confessors drew close once more, and he said 'Kiss me, sires', and one of them kissed him on the forehead.
After two or three more attempts, the executioners took out knives, and cut off his legs ... They said that he was dead. But when the body had been pulled apart, the lower jaw was still moving, as if to speak ... In execution of the decree, the last pieces of flesh were not consumed until 10.30 in the evening . .
Damiens was being punished for attempted regicide. His immediate family were banished from France; his brothers and sisters were ordered to change their names; and his house was razed. He had approached Louis XV as the King was entering his carnage, and he had inflicted a small wound with a small knife. He made some sort of complaint about the Parlement. He made no attempt to escape, and said that he only wanted to give the King a fright. Nowadays, he would be assessed as a crank.
544 RENATIO
neither.) When French troops crossed the pass of Montgenevre in September 1494 bound for Naples, they did so by express agreement of the Empire, which had been compensated in advance with Franche-Comte, and of Aragon, which had been bought off with the gift of Roussillon. So the conflict had been 'internationalized' from the start. The result was three French expeditions, each of which provoked a powerful coalition to defeat it. The expedition of Charles VIII1494-5, after sweeping triumphantly through Milan, Florence, and Rome, captured Naples; but it was forced to retreat with the same speed. The expedition of Louis XII, 1499-1515, captured Milan in similar style—using Leonardo's equestrian statue for target practice; but it aroused the opposition of the Holy League raised by Pope Julius II. The expedition of Francis I 1515-26 began with the stunning victory of Marignano which, among other things, turned the Swiss to permanent neutrality and persuaded the Pope to sign the Concordat of 1516. But it was interrupted by the bitterness of the imperial election, which turned Francis I and Charles V into mortal enemies. At Pavia in 1525 Marignano was avenged and Francis I taken prisoner. Imperial forces pressed on through Provence as far as Marseilles. After his release, Francis persuaded a new Pope to form a new Holy League against an over-mighty Emperor. The fearful Sack of Rome by imperial troops ensued in 1527, this time with the Pope made captive. By then the Italian Wars had become simply one front of a generalized Franco-imperial struggle.
The Franco-imperial wars assumed Continental proportions. In his attempt to break imperial encirclement, Francis I did not hesitate to recruit allies from all quarters. In 1519, he stood in person as candidate for Emperor. Despite the
RENAISSANCES AND  REFORMATIONS 545
abortive meeting at the splendiferous Field of Cloth of Gold, he eventually won Henry VI I] of England's sympathies. He laid scandalous plans with the Protestant princes of Germany; and in 1536, in the famous Capitulations, he made common cause with the Infidel, Suleiman the Magnificent, and with the Sultan's North African vassals, including the corsair-king Kair-el-Din Barbarossa. In the shifting permutations of Italy he was supported both by the Popes and by the Vatican's chief opponent, the Republic of Venice.
The result was four more wars. In 1521-6 the imperialists first attacked French Burgundy, before concentrating on the Italian campaign which ended with Pavia and the Treaty of Madrid (1526). In 1526-9 the Emperor overstretched and disgraced himself, signing the Ladies' Peace at Cambrai (1529). In 1536-8 and 1542-4 he was embroiled with the Turks and the German Protestants as well as the French, and was constrained to sign the Treaty of Crepy-en-Valois (1544), which created an interval permitting the opening of the Council of Trent, and the long-delayed attack on the Schmalkaldic League. In 1551-9, under Henry II, the French conspired with the German Protestants to occupy the three archbishoprics of Lorraine—Metz, Toul, and Verdun—thereby launching the 'March to the Rhine' and a frontier struggle not ended till 1945. (See Appendix III, p. 1281.) The Habsburgs responded in the Low Countries with the occupation of Artois, and with an English alliance that instantly inspired the French to forget their religious differences and to capture Calais (7 January 1558). Mary Tudor, whose proxy marriage to Philip II was the price of this brief Habsburg-Tudor rapprochement, exclaimed: 'When I die, you will find Calais engraved on my heart.' By the general peace of Cateau-Cambresis, France kept Lorraine and Calais, the Habsburgs kept Artois, Milan, and Naples. England was shut out of the Continent for good. The main issue was postponed, not solved. [Nostradamus]
The British Isles, increasingly dominated by the English, were taken closer to the unification which had beckoned once or twice already. Having lost its foothold on the Continent, the Kingdom of England turned its energies into the affairs of its immediate neighbours and into overseas ventures. A typical composite polity of the era, consisting of England, Wales, and Ireland, it lacked the national cohesion which Scotland already possessed. But under the Tudors it manifested great vigour. Notwithstanding the religious conflicts of the age, Henry VIII (r. 1509-47) and his three children—Edward VI (r. 1547-53), Mary 1 (r. 1553-8), and Elizabeth (r. 1558-1603)—created the Church of England, the lasting symbiosis of monarchy and Parliament, and the Royal Navy, [bard]
The Stuarts, who had ruled in Scotland since 1371, accepted the Personal Union of Scotland and England (1603) after the Tudors ran out of heirs. They had much to gain. Deceived by its Continental alliances, Scotland had lived in England's shadow since the bloody disaster of Flodden Field (1513). Anglo-Scottish relations were badly shaken by the intrigues of the deposed Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-87), who died on an English scaffold. But Mary's son, lames 1 and Vi (r. I567(i603)-i625), succeeded by general consent to the inheritance which had
Torture had been an established feature both of legal proceedings and of executions since Roman times. St Augustine recognized its fallibility,, but admitted its necessity. Torture at executions was thought to have a didactic purpose. Death was the least part of the penalty when the convict was to be impaled, disembowelled, burned at the stake, or broken on the wheel, [vlad]
Damiens's death was the last of its kind in France. The Enlightenment did not approve. Shortly afterwards a Milanese, the Marquis Cesare Beccaria-Bonesana (1735-94), published a tract, Dei delitti i delle pene ('On Crimes and Punishment', 1764). It argued that torture was both improper and ineffective. Translated into many languages, with a preface by Voltaire, it was the catalyst of reform across Europe. It is widely seen as the starting-point of a long progressive trend which was to press first for humane methods of execution, and eventually for the abolition of the death penalty. The 'cruelty curve' was to decline until liberal opinion held that torture degrades, not the tortured, but the torturer and the torturer's masters. But that was not the whole story. And torture in Europe did not come to an end.4 [alcofribas]
546 RENATIO
NOSTRADAMUS
The royal summons arrived at Salon in Provence early in July 1556. The Oueen of France, Marie de' Medici, wished to speak to the author of a book of prophecies published the previous year. One of its verses appeared to predict the death of the Queen's husband:
Le lion jeune le vleux surmontera
(The young lion will overcome the older one)
En champ bellique par singulier duelle.
(In a field of combat, in single fight.)
Dans caige d'or les yeux lul crevera.
(He will pierce his eyes in their golden cage.)
Deux classes une, puis mourir, mod cruelle.
(Two wounds in one, then he dies a cruel death.)1
Within a month, speeded by royal horses, the author was ushered into the Queen's presence at St Germain-en-Laye. He calmed her fears by saying that he saw four kings among her four sons.
But three years later King Henri II was killed in a tournament. The splintered lance of his opponent, Montgomery, Captain of the Scottish Guard, had split the visor of the King's gilded helmet, piercing eye and throat, and inflicting wounds which caused death after ten days of agony.
Michel de Nostredame (1503-66), called Nostradamus, was well known in the Midi as an unconventional healer. He came from a family of Jewish conversos at St Remy-en-Provence, and had graduated in medicine at Montpellier. He was learned in potions and remedies, concocting an elixir of life for the Bishop of Carcassonne and a diet of quince jelly for the Papal Legate. He worked in plague-stricken Marseilles and Avignon when all other doctors had left, refusing to bleed patients as was customary, and insisting on fresh air and clean water. More than once, as a suspected wizard, he attracted the notice of the Inquisition and fled abroad. On one such journey in the 1540s he is said to have met a young Italian monk and former shepherd, Felice Peretti, whom he addressed without hesitation as 'Your Holiness'. Forty years later, long after Nostradamus's death, Peretti was elected Pope as Sextus V.
The prophecies of Nostradamus were composed late in life with the help of magical, astrological, and cabalistic books. They were written in quatrains and organized in centuries. They were published in two parts, in 1555 and 1568, and were an immediate sensation. One year after their full publication, Marie de' Medici's eldest son, King Francis II, husband to
renaissances and reformations
Mary Queen of Scots, died suddenly at the age of 17 years, 10 months, and 15 days:
Premier fils, veuve, malheureux manage
(The first son, a widow, an unhappy marriage)
Sans nul enfant; deux isles en discorde,
(Without children; two islands in discord,)
Avant dixhuit incompetant eage
(Before eighteen years of age, a minor)
De I'autre pres plus bas sera /'accord.
(Still younger than the other will be betrothed.)2
In that same year the youngest brother, later Charles IX, aged 11, was betrothed to an Austrian princess.
This posthumous success ensured the reputation of the Prophecies for all time. They have been endlessly reprinted, and applied to almost every known event, from submarines and ICBMs to the deaths of the Kennedys and men on the moon. Nostradamus correctly named the family Saulce, where Louis XVI lodged during the flight to Varennes. He convinced both Napoleon and Hitler, who figures as 'Hister', that their careers had been foreseen in the stars. The quatrains are wonderfully suggestive and obscure, and can be made to fit all manner of coincidences. But many come too close for comfort:
Quand la licture du tourbillon versee
(When the litters are overturned by whirlwind)
Et seront faces de leurs manteaux couvers
(And faces will be covered by cloaks)
La Republique pars gens nouveaux vexee
(The Republic will be troubled by new people.)
Lors blancs et rouges jugeront a I'envers.
(At that time, Whites and Reds will rule inside out.)3
In 1792 the Republic did arrive in France, and the Reds did overturn the Whites.
And, as a short description of life in the twentieth century, the following is uncanny:
Les fleaux passees diminue le monde.
(Plagues extinguished, the world becomes smaller.)
Long temps la paix terres inhabitees:
(For a long time, there is peace in empty lands.)
Seur marchera par ciel, terre, mer et onde;
(People will walk safely by air, land, sea, waves.)
Puis de nouveau les guerres suscitees.
(Then again wars will be stirred up.)4
54»
REN ATI O
BARD
Shakespeare wrote his plays in the short mtetval after post-Reformation England had severed her direct links with the Continent but before she had acquired an overseas empire. His mam dramas were written in the same decades when the first English colonies were being founded in America. His voice was to reign supreme in the English-speaking world and, as far as one knows, he never set foot outside England. The universality of his genius would not be generally recognized in Europe until the Romantic era.
Yet the settings of the plays suggest that the Swan of Avon was in no way a Little Englander. He may even have been a secret Catholic. The Tudor censorship may well have inhibited politically sensitive material. Yet of thirty-seven titles, only ten were set in whole or in part in England; and the historical series has a strong admixture of French locations. The Merry Wives is set in Windsor, As You Like It in the Forest of Arden. The three dark stories of Macbeth, King Lear, and Cymbeline are placed in ancient Celtic Britain; and eight classical dramas in Athens, Rome, Tyre, or Troy. The fantastic fables of Twelfth Night, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest unfold in a mythical lllyria, in a sea-girt Bohemia, and on 'an uninhabited island'. But the rest are manifestly Continental:
Much Ado About
Nothing The Merchant of
Venice The Taming of
the Shrew Measure for Measure Love's Labour's Lost
A Midsummer
Messina	Night's Dream
	Romeo and
Venice	Juliet
Padua	Hamlet
Vienna	Othello
Navarre	All's Well that
	Ends Well
Athens
Verona
Denmark
Venice
Roussillon,
Paris,
Marseilles,
Florence
The countries which Shakespeare avoids are Ireland, Russia, which was barely known, Poland, except for passing references in Hamlet, Germany, and England's prime enemy in his day, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands.
As for where exactly these countries lay, Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, was in two minds. Sir John Falstatf wanted to describe himself as 'the most active fellow in Europe'. But Petrucchio, wooing the Shrew, calls her 'The prettiest Kate in Christendom'.1 'Christendom' and 'Europe' were still virtually interchangeable
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escaped his mother. He, his son Charles 1 (r. 1625-49), and his grandson Charles II (r. 1649(60)-85), ruled from Holyrood and from Whitehall in parallel. James I talked to his first Parliament at Westminster of
England and Scotland now in the ... fullness of time united ... in my Person, alike lineally descended of both the Crowns, whereby it has now become like a little World within itself, being fortified round about with a natural, and yet admirable, pond or ditch . . .
The integration of the dependent principalities did not proceed so smoothly. Wales, which was shired by Henry VIII, entered the community of English government without demur. The Anglo-Welsh gentry were reasonably content with their lot. But Ireland, whose parliament had virtually broken free of English control since the Wars of the Roses, was only reined in with difficulty. In 1541— after both the Church of England and the counties of Wales had come into being in 1534—Henry VIII declared himself 'King of Ireland'. He was storing up trouble for his successors. The policy of turning Irish chiefs into Earls and Barons was little more than a palliative, especially when Irish customs and language were curtailed. Resentment against the Crown was soon mixed with resentment against the Protestant Reformation, fuelling a series of revolts. The Nine Years' War, 1592-1601, was waged round the Ulster Rising of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone. It closed amidst the devastating reprisals of Queen Elizabeth's lieutenant, Lord Mountjoy, who removed the distinction between the Pale and the native lands, abolished Irish law, and started a policy of systematic colonization. A prosperous decade of reconciliation in the 1630s under the Earl of Strafford was to be followed by a further insurrectionary decade in the 1640s, when the Irish profited from England's troubles to introduce religious toleration and an independent parliament. Ireland was brutally conquered by Cromwell in 1649-51, and effectively annexed. (See Appendix III, p. 1279.) [blarney]
England's power and prosperity were visibly on the increase, not least through its oceanic adventures. The new colony in Ulster was largely peopled by Scots Presbyterians, seeking the same sort of refuge offered by the English colonies across the Atlantic, in Virginia and New England. The foundation of Maryland (1632) was followed by Jamaica, which was seized from Spain in 1655, the Carolinas (1663), New York, formerly Dutch New Amsterdam (1664), and New Jersey (1665). The Navigation Act of 1651, passed by Cromwell's Rump Parliament in the aftermath of Dutch independence, insisted, among other things, that Dutch ships salute the English flag. It was a sign of England's growing arrogance.
Scotland was the scene of bitter religious and political conflicts which eventually provoked the 'British Civil Wars' of the mid-seventeenth century. Knox's Presbyterian Kirk had been founded on the Genevan model, and was designed by its Calvinist founders as a theocracy. But a resentful court party repeatedly trimmed its aspirations. In 1572, the year of Knox's death, a regent forced the Kirk to accept bishops, thereby causing ceaseless strife between Church and State. In 1610, to safeguard the apostolic succession, James VI had three Scottish bishops consecrated by their English counterparts. In 1618 he imposed his five Articles,
550
RENATIO
BLARNEY
n 1602 Cormack McCarthy, Lord of Blarney in County Cork, repeatedly delayed the surrender of his castle to the English through an endless series of parleys, promises, queries, and time-wasti'ng speeches. Despite the support of a Spanish landing force, the Irish lords had already been heavily defeated the previous year at nearby Kinsale; and it was only a matter of time before Mountjoy's English army would reduce the whole of Ireland to obedience.' But McCarthy's act of defiance gave people a good laugh; and 'Blarney' passed into common parlance as a synonym for 'the miraculous power of speech' or 'the gift of the gab'.2
Indeed, since the defeated Irish became famous for their musical and literary skills, Blarney Castle became a'symbol of Irishness and of Irish pride. Popularized by the song, 'The Groves of Blarney' (c.1798), it became a place of pilgrimage. The castle's foundation-stone, which bears the inscription 'Cormac McCarthy fortis me fieri fecit ad 1446', was taken to possess magical powers; and the perilous ritual of 'kissing the Blarney Stone' under the overhanging battlements is said to reward the pilgrim with the gift of persuasiveness. The interesting thing, historically, is that the language in which the Irish became so proficient and persuasive was not their own.
which insisted on a number of practices such as kneeling at communion. At each step he suspended the General Assembly of the Kirk until it submitted, thereby arousing intense popular anger. In 1637 Charles I imposed a modified version of the Anglican liturgy and prayerbook. He did so by personal order, and without reference to a General Assembly, and sparked a rebellion. When the liturgy was first introduced at St Giles's Cathedral in Edinburgh on 23 July, it caused a riot. In due course it led to the formation of'the Tables', a revolutionary committee of all estates, and in February 1638 to the signing of 'the Covenant'. The covenanters recruited an armed league which was sworn, Polish-style, to defend its statutes to the death. They sought to protect the Presbyterian Kirk from the King and bishops and Scotland from the English. They were soon claiming the allegiance of all true Scotsmen, and set up a parliament without royal warrant. In August 1640 the first of several armies of covenanters crossed the Tweed, and invaded England.
In this way Scotland's religious wars became embroiled with the equally long-running constitutional struggle between King and Parliament in England. Under the Tudors, the partnership between the monarch and the elected representatives of the shires and boroughs did not conceal the fact that England's Parliament was an instrument of royal policy. 'We at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament,' declared Henry VIII to a parliamentary delegation, 'wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together into one
renaissances and reformations
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body politick.' There were no doubts who was head: parliamentarians had no immunity, and had reason to fear the royal wrath.
The winning of the political initiative by the House of Commons under James I, however, put an end to Parliament's subservience. In the long term, parliamentary control of taxation was to prove decisive. In 1629-40, when Charles I decided to rule without Parliament, no one had the means to oppose him. But in April 1640, when the costs of the Scottish war forced the King to recall the English Parliament and to beg for money, the storm broke. Court talk about the divine right of kings was opposed by parliamentary lawyers quoting Magna Carta. According to the popular dictum of the late Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, 'The law of the realm cannot be changed but by parliament'. A Grand Remonstrance (1641) faced the King with a vast catalogue of recriminations. His chief minister, the Earl of Strafford, was impeached by Parliament and, with the King's reluctant consent, sacrificed.
Ireland now entered the equation. Strafford had treated the Presbyterians of Ulster with the same harshness that his predecessors had used towards the Irish Catholics. He had started to raise an Irish army for use against the King's rebellious subjects in England and Scotland; but on quitting Ireland in June 1641 without paying the troops, he left a country in open rebellion. A Scots army arrived in Ireland to support their Protestant co-religionists; and multi-sided warfare proceeded unchecked. Baulked on all sides, Charles I then attempted in good Tudor style to arrest the contumacious members of the English Commons. He failed: T see the birds have flown,' he stuttered. There was nothing left for him but to flee London and to call his subjects to arms. Defied by the Parliament which he had not wished to summon, he abandoned the tradition of kings accepting the advice of their councils, and raised his standard at Nottingham. It was the summer of 1642. The conflict was to cost him his life. No satisfactory constitutional equilibrium was reached until 1689.
The 'English Civil War', therefore, is a misnomer which inadequately describes the nature of a very complex conflict. It did not start in England, and was not confined to England. It embraced three separate civil wars in Scotland, Ireland, and England, and involved interrelated developments within all parts of the Stuart realm. The crisis in England in August 1642 cannot be viewed in isolation. The King's edgy conduct towards the Parliament at Westminster was undoubtedly conditioned by his unhappy experiences in Edinburgh. The militancy of English parliamentarians was heightened by their knowledge of the King's despotic policies in Scotland and Ireland, by his proven record of religious impositions, and by the fighting already in progress. Here, above all, was a conflict of political and religious principle. Attempts to explain it in terms of social groups or economic interests, though helpful on some points, have not replaced the older analyses based on a mix of constitutional and religious convictions. Catholics and High Church Anglicans felt the greatest loyalty for the King, whose monarchical prerogatives were under attack. English puritans and Calvinist Scots provided the core support of Parliament, which they saw as a bulwark against absolutism. The gentry was split down the middle.
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The English have been taught that their Civil War did not share the religious bigotry and mindless killings of contemporary wars on the Continent. One of the favourite quotations is taken from a letter of the parliamentary major-general, Sir William Waller, which he addressed to the commander of the royalists' western army, Sir Ralph Hopton, on the eve of the battle at Roundway Down in 1643:
My affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person, but I must be true to the cause 1 serve. The great God, who is a searcher of my heart, knows . . . with what perfect hatred I look upon this war without an enemy. We are both upon the stage and we must act the parts assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities.3'
If such forbearance had prevailed, the wars could never have been sustained.
For there were several key issues on which neither party was prepared to show a margin of tolerance. The Tow-taxation philosophy' of the parliamentarians did not provide the means for the King to govern effectively. Also, the dominant English establishment was only interested in England, and careless of the separate interests of Ireland and Scotland. Above all, in religious matters, both sides were determined to persecute their opponents in the hope of imposing a single religion. The War 'was not fought for religious liberty, but between rival groups of persecutors'.52 The royalists upheld the Act of Uniformity. The Parliament, in its hour of military triumph, attempted to impose the Presbyterian Covenant. Both found that absolute uniformity could not be enforced.
Nor was the war free of horrors. Well-documented atrocities such as the general massacre at Bolton (June 1644) perpetrated by the troops of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, or the fearful Sack of Drogheda (1649). where Cromwell slaughtered the entire population of an Irish town, were accompanied by the less-publicized practices of killing prisoners and razing villages.
Four years of fighting saw a large number of engagements involving both local and central forces. The royalists, with their headquarters in Christ Church, Oxford, initially held the upper hand in most of the English counties. But the parliamentary forces, aided by the Scots' League of Covenanters, held an impregnable base in London, and hence the organs of central government. In due course they were able to raise a professional New Model Army, whose creator, the formidable Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), gradually assumed a commanding role in political as well as military affairs. Parliament often controlled the towns and the King the countryside. Neither combatant enjoyed any general advantage, until Parliament slowly reaped the benefits of superior organization, of an invincible general, and of the Scots alliance. After the initial clash at Edge Hill (24 September 1642) north of Oxford, the decisive battles were contested at Marston Moor in Yorkshire (2 July 1644) and at Naseby (14 June 1645). Once the King had surrendered to the Scots at Newark in 1646, all open resistance from the royalists ceased.
As the fighting slowed, the political situation accelerated with revolutionary speed. The parliamentary camp was rapidly radicalized, both in its republicanism and in its association with extreme evangelical sectarians, among them the
RENAISSANCES AND  REFORMATIONS 553
Levellers and the Diggers. Unable to pin the King to a firm agreement, Cromwell decided on his execution—which was carried out in front of Whitehall Palace on 31 January 1649, thereby initiating the Commonwealth. Unable to control the Long Parliament, Cromwell purged it. Unable to win over the Irish and the Scots by persuasion, he invaded first Ireland then Scotland. His victory over the Scots at Worcester (1651) left him totally triumphant in the field. Yet he could never engineer a political settlement to match his military triumphs. Unable to carry even the Barebones Parliament of picked supporters, he dissolved it. 'Necessity', he told them, 'hath no law.' Cromwell was left ruling as Lord Protector through the colonels of eleven military districts. The parliamentary cause, having abandoned parliamentary government, was politically bankrupt.
'The Great Oliver' was a man of unparalleled strength of purpose. 'Mr Lely,' he told the portraitist, T desire you ... to paint the picture truly like me, and to remark all these roughnesses, pimples, and warts; otherwise I will never pay you a farthing.' But he devised no lasting solutions, and was apt to attribute everything, even the massacre of Drogheda, to the judgement of God. On his death the royalist cause revived. There was no alternative to a return of the status quo ante bellum. Both King and Parliament had to be restored. Charles II returned from exile on 29 May 1660, on the terms of an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. Both King and Parliament had to relearn the rules of watchful cohabitation.
In some ways the British Civil Wars were symptomatic of strains which surrounded the growth of a modern state in numerous European countries. But they did not inspire any Continental emulators, and must be judged a tragedy of essentially regional significance.
Across the North Sea, the Scandinavian countries were moving in the opposite direction—away from unification. Sweden, in particular, had long fretted against Danish dominance. It had possessed its own Riksdag or 'parliament' of four estates since the 1460s, and its own university at Uppsala since 1479. At Christmas in 1520 a revolt broke out in Darlecarlia against the coronation of yet another Danish king. A bloodbath in the city square of Stockholm, where a hundred supporters of the revolt were executed for treason, only fanned the flames. Led by a young nobleman, Gustav Eriksson Vasa, the rebels expelled the Danish army. In 1523 the Union of Kalmar fell apart. Sweden, under Gustavus Vasa (r. 1523-60), went its own way. Denmark and Norway, under Frederick I (r. 1523-33) and his successors, were early recruits to Lutheranism. The resultant rivalry, not least over the disputed province of Halland, remained intense for more than a century.
Sweden's fortunes were tied henceforth to the Vasas, to the search for supremacy in the Baltic, and, with some delay, to the Protestant cause. In 1527, at the Diet of Vasteras, Gustavus created an Erastian Church anticipating that of Henry VIII in England. He abolished the Catholic rite; but by transferring the landed wealth of the Church to his supporters, he created the social base for a powerful monarchy.
554 RENATIO
His second son, John III (r. 1568-92), married the heiress of the Polish Jagiellons, and his grandson, Sigismund Vasa (r. 1592-1604), was elected King of Poland. Sigismund was seen as the last hope of Sweden's fading Catholic party; and the civil war which flowed from his accession persuaded the majority of the nobles to identify national independence with Protestantism. In 1593 the Synod of Uppsala adopted the Confession of Augsburg for the state religion. Sigismund was deposed in favour of his uncle, Charles IX of Södermanland (r. 1604-11), parent of the Protestant line. Henceforth, in the constant wars with Poland, Sweden added dynastic and religious motives to the conflict of strategic interests in the Baltic.
The young Gustavus Adolphus (r. 1611-32) assumed that attack was the best form of defence. Possessed of immense talent, a secure political base, a navy, and a native army that was to outclass even the Spaniards, he perfected the art of self-financing military expeditions. In 1613 he recovered Kalmar from Denmark; in 1614-17 he intervened in Muscovy's Time of Troubles, coming away with Ingria and Karelia; in 1617-29 he attacked Poland-Lithuania, taking Riga (1621) and besieging Danzig (1626-9). He once escaped capture by Polish hussars by a whisker; but he made so much money milking the Vistula tolls that he could play for still greater stakes. In 1630, with French backing, he made his dramatic entry into Germany. His death in battle at Lützen (see below) cut short a career still full of promise.
Queen Christina (r. 1632-54), who grew up under the regency of Chancellor Oxenstierna, saw Sweden rise to its peak with the conquest1 of Halland (1645) and the Treaty of Westphalia. But she secretly converted to Catholicism, abdicated, and retired to Rome. Her cousin Charles X (r. 1654-60), worried by the ambitions of Moscow and by the cost of an unemployed army, resorted to the old policy of intervention in Poland-Lithuania. His untimely death gave occasion for the comprehensive settlement at the Treaty of Oliva (1660) (see below).
Sweden never gained complete control of the Baltic, the much-heralded dominium maris Balticae. But for half a century she played a disproportionate part in European affairs—the terror of the north, the military Wonder of the age, the most active of the Protestant powers.
Poland-Lithuania was another country which experienced its 'Golden Age' during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The realm of the last Jagiellons was absolutely the largest state in Europe; and it escaped both the religious wars and the Ottoman invasions which beset many of its contemporaries. Under Zygmunt 1 (r. 1506-48) and Zygmunt-August (r. 1548-72), husband and son of yet another Sforza queen, it enjoyed strong links with Italy, especially with Venice; and Cracow hosted one of the most vibrant of Renaissance courts.
The Rzeczpospohta—'Republic' or 'Commonwealth'—Which came into being at the Union of Lublin (1569) resulted partly from the Lick of a royal heir and partly from the threat of Muscovite expansion. It was an early form of Ausgleich between Polish and Lithuanian interests. The Korona or Kingdom of Poland
RENAISSANCES AND REFORMATIONS 555
accepted the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as an equal partner, though it took over the vast palatinates of Ukraine in compensation. The Grand Duchy retained its own laws, its own administration, and its own army. The dual state was to be governed by a common elective monarchy and by a common Sejm or Diet. The ruling szlachta who designed this system of noble democracy reserved a dominant role. Through their regional assemblies or sejmiki (dietines), which controlled the central Diet, they ran taxation and military affairs. Through the Pacta Conventa or 'agreed terms' which they attached to the Coronation Oath, they could hire their kings like managers on contract. Through their legal right of resistance embodied in armed leagues or confederations, they could defend their position against all royal machinations. Through the principle of unanimity, which governed all their deliberations, they ensured that no king or faction could override the common interest. This was not the system of general anarchy which prevailed in the eighteenth century. Whatever its faults, it was a bold experiment in democracy that, in the era of absolutism and religious strife, offered a refreshing alternative. The reputation of the Rzeczpospohta among fellow-democrats should not depend on the jaundiced propaganda of its later assassins.
In the eighty years which separated the Union of Lublin from the general crisis of 1648, the Rzeczpospohta fared better than its neighbours. Baltic trade brought unaccustomed wealth to many noblemen. The cities, especially Danzig, prospered mightily under their royal charters. The Counter-Reformation, though vigorously pursued, did not cause open strife. The nobles, though they brought government to a halt during the great rokosz or 'legal rebellion' of 1606-9, did not usually push the paralysing practices of a later age to extremes. They usually elected kings who were resistant to the bishops and to the ultramontane, pro-Habsburg faction. Foreign wars were fought either on the periphery or on foreign territory.
The monarchy, though run by kings of varying talent, retained its general authority. Admittedly, the first elected king, Henry Valois (r. 1574-5), was an unmitigated disaster; but he fled after four months, to inflict his person on his native France, and was not mourned. The next, the vigorous Transylvanian Stefan Batory (r. 1576-86), reasserted respect and drove the complicated machinery of the state into effective action. His successful war against Ivan the Terrible in 1578-82 brought possession of Livonia. The third king, the Swede Sigismund Vasa (r. 1587-1632), suffered many vicissitudes, but outlived both the rokosz and Poland's unsettling intervention in Muscovy in 1610-19. His two sons, Wladyslaw IV (r. 1632-48), the sometime Tsar, and John Casimir (r. 1648-68), the sometime Cardinal, experienced respectively calm and chaos.
The chain reaction of calamities which marked John Casimir's reign erupted from an almost cloudless sky. In 1648-54 the rebellion of the Dnieper Cossacks under Bogdan Chmielnicki (Khmelnytsky), which brought a murderous army of Cossacks and Tartars right up to the Vistula, left a swathe of butchered Catholics and Jews across Ukraine. It linked peasant fury to the very real political, social, and religious grievances of the eastern provinces. It was virtually suppressed by the time a despairing Chmielnicki turned to the Tsar for aid. The Muscovite
556 R EN A TI O
invasion of 165.4-67, which brought death and destruction both to Lithuania and to Ukraine, aroused the strategic anxieties of the Swedes. The double Swedish invasion of 1655-60, which was known in Poland as Potop or 'the Deluge", overran both the Kingdom and the Grand Duchy and drove the King into exile and the magnates into treason. Only the monastery of Jasna Göra at Czestochowa, whose Black Madonna deflected Swedish cannon-balls with miraculous ease, was able to resist. The accompanying invasions of the Transylvanians and the Brandenburgers pushed the country close to total collapse. But Poland recovered with marvellous resilience. The Muscovites were halted; the Swedes were rounded up; the Prussians were bought off. In 1658 Hetman Czarnecki could even afford to go campaigning against Sweden in Jutland. The Treaty of Oliva (1660), which settled the demands of the Republic's western neighbours, ended the Vasa feud, confirmed the independence of Ducal Prussia, and promised better times.
Thereafter, the Republic seemed to have been given space to tackle its outstanding problems. In the annual campaigns of the 1660s, the Polish cavalry steadily pushed the Muscovites back towards Russia. Then, with general recovery already in view, the King's programme of constitutional reform aroused a disproportionate and violent reaction from the noble democrats. In 1665-7 the fratricidal strife of Hetman Lubomirski's rebellion put an end to progress on all fronts. It produced political stalemate between the King and his opponents. At the same time it pushed the Republic into the fateful Truce of Andrusovo (1667), which handed Kiev and left-bank Ukraine to the Russians, in theory for twenty years, in practice forever. The King abdicated and retired to France, where he was buried in the church of St Germain-des-Pres. The debased coinage of his reign bore his initials, ICR: Iohannes Casimirus Rex. These were taken to stand for Initium Calamitatum Reipublicae, the Beginning of the Republic's Catastrophes.
The beginnings of Poland's distress coincided with the stirrings of power in two of Poland's neighbours—Prussia and Muscovy.
Prussia, which in the early sixteenth century still housed the remains of the Teutonic State, had been wasting away for decades, and stood in desperate need of radical renovation. It had lost its mission for converting the pagans through the conversion of Lithuania, its military supremacy through the defeat at Grunwald (1410), and its commercial prominence through Poland's acquisition of Elbing, Thorn, and Danzig (1466). Its very existence was threatened by the onset of the German Reformation, and it was hurriedly transformed by its last Grand Master, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, into a secular fief of the Kingdom of Poland. A convert to Lutheranism, he dismissed the Teutonic Order, and in 1525 paid homage for his new duchy in the city square of Cracow. From the capital of Königsberg, he laid the strategy which would eventually link his possessions with those of his relatives in Brandenburg. By purchasing the legal reversion of his duchy, he ensured that the failure of his own heirs would automatically give possession to the Hohenzollerns of Berlin. The policy came to fruition in 1618: after that, one and the same Hohenzollern ruler enjoyed the twin titles ot Elector of
RENAISSANCES AND REFORMATIONS 557
Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, and the state of Brandenburg-Prussia was born (see Appendix III, p. 1276).
Frederick-William (r. 1640-88), the Great Elector, who spoke Polish and harboured pretensions of being 'the first prince of Poland', paid homage for his duchy in 1641. Fifteen years later his troops occupied Warsaw, capital of his liege, at the height of the Swedish Deluge. The Prussian army had made its debut. All that was needed thereafter was a double diplomatic double-cross which wrested recognition of Prussia's sovereign status first from the Swedes and then from the Poles. It gained formal recognition at Oliva. The Prussian spirit was on the march.
Muscovy, whose strategy of grandeur was launched by Ivan III, held to its course with marvellous tenacity. Ivan IV (r. 1533-84), known as Grozny or 'the Terrible', finalized the patrimonial state which his predecessors had prepared. 'All the people consider themselves to be kholops,' wrote one of the earliest Western travellers, 'that is, slaves of their Prince.'53 By establishing the oprichnina—the forerunner of all subsequent Russian security agencies—he was able to set aside whole provinces for his private will and domain, and to unleash a reign of unrestrained terror. By razing Novgorod, and slaughtering almost its entire population in a blood-bath that proceeded for weeks, he affirmed Moscow's supremacy in Russia. By destroying the power of ancient boyar clans and their zemskii Sobor or Council he created a thoroughly subservient, hierarchical society. By appointing the first Patriarch of Moscow he completed the separate and dependent nature of the Russian Orthodox Church, henceforth severed from all outside influences. By annexing the khanate of Kazan, where the great Orthodox cathedral of the Annunciation (1562) was raised as a monument to a Christian victory in a Muslim land, he gave notice of unrestrained imperial ambitions. Through the razryiad or 'service list' and the pomestnyi prikaz, the 'bureau of placements', he kept track of all state servants and their appointments: the forerunner of the nomenklatura. After such comprehensive socio-political transplants and amputations, it is not surprising that the patient fell sick.
The Smutnoe Vremya or 'Time of Troubles' filled the years between the death of Ivan's son Feodor in 1598, and the accession of the Romanovs fifteen years later. With central authority in shreds, the warring boyar factions raised five ill-starred Tsars in succession; there were peasant revolts and Cossack raids; and the country was invaded by Swedes, Poles, and Tartars. Feodor's chief minister, Boris Godunov (r. 1598-1605), a Tartar boyar, was brought down amidst accusations of killing the rightful heir. The False Dmitri I (r. 1605-6), an impostor, claimed to be Ivan's murdered son. Having gained the support of a Polish magnate, Jerzy Mniszek, and of Mniszek's Jesuit friends, he married Mniszek's daughter Marina, and marched on Moscow. His brief, reforming reign came to an explosive end when he was fired from a cannon in Red Square by the followers of the next contestant, Basil Shuiskiy (r. 1605-11). Shuiskiy was in turn overthrown by another impostor, the False Dmitri II, the 'Thief of Tushino", who somehow managed to persuade Marina that he was her resurrected husband. Shuiskiy died in Polish
55* RENATIO
captivity. He was succeeded by the Polish Crown Prince, Wtadyslaw Vasa, whose candidature was being pressed by yet another of the boyar factions.
Though many Polish nobles, like Mniszek, had long been, privately involved in the Troubles, the official policy of the Rzeczpospolita was to stand aloof. The King had declined to back Mniszek's plan—despite Russian rumours to the contrary; and the Diet had warned the King against committing any money or forces beyond the limited objective of recapturing Smolensk. Hence, when the Polish army advanced on Smolensk in 1610, alongside the Swedes already in Novgorod, it had no orders to go further. However, as their commander later explained to an angry Sejm, the Poles pressed on despite instructions. With the Russian army defeated at Klushino and the road to Moscow undefended, they occupied the Kremlin unopposed. A garrison remained for a year until forced to surrender. It set Moscow ablaze before being murdered: by a patriotic Russian populace rallying to Minin the butcher, Pozharskiy the prince, and Michael Romanov (r. 1613-45), the new Tsar. The Russians had found their dynasty, and their national identity. It was a ready-made subject for opera, (susanin]
Moscow's recovery was slow but methodical. The Poles were seen off by 1619; Prince Wladyslaw resigned his claim; Smolensk was recovered (1654). Under Alexei Mikhailovitch (r. 1645-76), fundamental reforms caused internal turmoil that was only partly offset by territorial acquisitions. A reform of the law, which led to the Ulozhenie or Legal Code of 1649 containing over 1,000 articles, perpetuated and systematized serfdom, creating conditions that underlay the vast peasant rising of Sten'ka Razin. The Church reforms of Patriarch Nikon (1605-81), who aimed both to modernize the rite and to moderate state control, provoked both the defection of the Old Believers and the ire of the Tsar. Military reforms on Western lines preceded the none too successful campaigns against Poland. In this light, the great territorial gains of the Truce of Andrusovo (1667) came as an unexpected bonus (see Appendix III, p. 1277).
Yet the acquisition of Ukraine from Poland cannot be overestimated. It gave Muscovy the economic resources and the geopolitical stance to become a great power. What is more, it came in the same generation that pushed the exploration and conquest of Siberia to the Pacific. The formula Muscovy + Ukraine = Russia does not feature in the Russians' own version of their history; but it is fundamental. In which case the true founder of the Russian Empire was Alexei Mikhailovitch, not his more celebrated son Peter, [terem]
The lengthy contest between Russia, Poland, and Sweden was deciding the fate of Eastern Europe. In retrospect, one can see that the Truce of Andrusovo of 1667 tipped the balance of power. Poland-Lithuania was being imperceptibly replaced by Russia as the dominant state of the region. Poland and Russia, however, had one thing in common. Neither allowed itself to be dragged into the Thirty Years War.
The Ottoman Empire, the southern neighbour of Poland and Russia, reached its apogee at the same time as the Habsburgs. From the Muslim perspective, the key
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TEREM
Sophia alexeyevna, the sixth child of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovitch, was born in the Moscow Kremlin on 17 September 1657. As a junior princess in a country that had never recognized female succession, her prospects for attaining political power were almost nil.
In Muscovy, high-born ladies were kept in strict seclusion.1 They lived in separate female quarters, the Terem, in Muslim fashion, and only sallied forth either veiled or in closed carriages. A special Terem Palace had been added to the Kremlin in the 1630s to accommodate the ladies. What is more, the sisters and daughters of the Tsars were usually condemned to celibacy. As an official explained, they could not be married to noblemen, since it was a disgrace 'to give a lady to a slave'. And they could not be easily married to foreign princes for fear of contaminating the court with heresy or faction. 'The female sex is not venerated among the Muscovites', reported an Austrian envoy, 'as amongst the majority of the nations of Europe. In this country, they are the slaves of men, who esteem them little.'2
None the less, in association with the leading minister, Prince Golitsyn, Sophia came to exercise influence during the reign of her brother Feodor (1676-82). Then, having mediated in a.military rebellion, she broke the bounds of the Terem completely, becoming Regent during the minority of the co-Tsars Ivan and Peter, and the first woman ruler of Russia. She personally presided over foreign policy, in particular over the 'Eternal Peace' with Poland, which put Moscow at the head of East European affairs (see p. 657).
Sophia's reputation was blackened by supporters of Peter the Great, who terminated her regency in 1689. Dismissed as an ambitious schemer, she has often been described in the words of a dubious quotation as being 'of monstrous size, with a head as big as a bushel, with hair on her face and growths on her legs'.3 She lived her last fourteen years as Sister Susanna in the Novodevichy Convent—a foundation which she had earlier endowed in the style of the 'Moscow Baroque'.
Female biography is often inspired by a wish to compensate for the overblown record of male achievers. It is the oldest form of herstori-ography, and has been successfully applied to a large number of heroines from Sappho and Boudicca to Eleanor of Aquitaine and Elizabeth of England. But in one sense it can be misleading. The lives of exceptional women cannot fail to emphasize the gulf which separated them from the average woman's lot. Sophia Alexeyevna was a ruler who proved the exception.
560 RENATIO
development lay in the Ottomans' decision to lead the main Sunni branch of Islam against the Shi'ites. When Sultan Selim 1 (r. 1512-20) moved against Persia, he ended the sixty-year pause which followed the Fall of Constantinople. Thereafter, the conquest of the former caliphates of Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad (1534) took place in succession. Suleiman I 'the Magnificent' (r. 1520-66), who added the Prophet's tomb in Mecca to the realm, had good reason to style himself Padishah-i-hlam, 'Emperor of Islam'. Many monuments, including the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, attest to the reality of that magnificence.
From the Christian viewpoint, danger signals began to flash when the Turks used their new-found strength to move westwards. They advanced both up the Danube valley into Hungary, and against the corsair states of the North African coast. The Danubian campaigns began in 1512 with the takeover of Moldavia. Then, when Belgrade was captured (1521), the wide Hungarian plain lay open to the Ottoman advance. After 1526, when the last independent King of Bohemia and Hungary, Louis II Jagiellon, was killed at the Battle of Mohacs, Austria itself came under threat. The Turks laid their first unsuccessful Siege of Vienna in 1529, and three years later were still raiding deep into the alpine valleys. The truce of 1533 was only obtained at the price of the partition of Hungary. Western Hungary was left to its new Habsburg rulers; central Hungary, including Budapest, became an Ottoman province; Transylvania became a separate principality subject to Ottoman tutelage. Skirmishing raged all along the new borders until the Peace of Adrianople (1568), when the Habsburgs undertook to pay annual tribute. In 1620-1 the Turks moved up the Dniester beyond Moldavia, only to feel the weight of the Polish hussars at Chocim. [uskok]
In the Mediterranean, renewed Ottoman expansion was signalled by the attack on Rhodes and the capitulation of the Knights Hospitallers (1522). Algiers was captured in 1529, Tripoli in 1551, Cyprus in 1571, Tunis at the second attempt in 1574. Malta survived a grand siege (1565). In the view of the Catholic world, the centrepiece was provided by the naval battle of Lepanto (1571), where Don John of Austria, natural brother of Philip II, succeeded in uniting the combined naval forces of Venice, Genoa, and Spain, and destroying the Ottoman fleet. Here was the last crusade, the last battle of massed galleys, the last significant Ottoman move for many decades, (greco)
The Ottoman surge had several consequences. First, it revived the old crusading spirit, especially in the Catholic countries. The question posed by Erasmus— 'Is not the Turk also a man and a brother?'—reflected an eccentric response to contemporary passions. Secondly, it helped preserve the division of Christendom by diverting major Catholic forces at the height of the Protestant Reformation. The Sultan was Luther's best ally. Thirdly, on the diplomatic front, it made the Western powers think more closely about Eastern Europe, and to open the first tentative contacts with the East. It underlay France's openings to the Porte and to Poland-Lithuania, and the Empire's missions to Moscow. Lastly, it started a craze for Turkish styles and artefacts—Europe's first experience of'Orientalism'.
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USKOK
i N 1615-17 the Republic of Venice fought an 'Uskok War' in the Adriatic I against the Habsburgs. The object, as Venice saw it, was to suppress Habsburg-sponsored piracy. As the Habsburgs saw it, the uskoki or •'Corsairs of Senj', were a necessary part of the Empire's defences, and the Venetians were undermining their security.1
Senj, now in Croatia, was an Adriatic port situated near the point where Venetian, Habsburg, and Ottoman territory met. Its castle was the coastal anchor of the Habsburgs' Militargrenze or vojna krajina, the 'Military Frontier', which had been established in the 1520s and consolidated along its length with fortified settlements. Its harbour provided a base for the pirate-patriots, who lived partly from fishing, but mainly from plundering Venetian ships on the sea and Ottoman towns in the interior.
These Uskoks—whose name derives from the Croatian word uskociti, 'to jump in' or 'to board'—lived by a code of honour and vengeance. They were the maritime counterparts of the martial frontiersmen or grenzer, many of them refugee Serbs and fugitive serfs, who guarded the length of the inland border and who one day would rise against Croatian rule. Like their brothers on the Ottoman frontier in Poland and Hungary, or the Cossacks of Ukraine, they saw themselves as champions of the faith, defenders of the antemurale christianitatis, heroes of the holy war. They were celebrated as such in the epic legends of South Slav literature. Their activities were encouraged and rewarded by the Habsburgs until the middle of the 18th century. The Krajina was not officially abolished until 1881.
Piracy, like banditry, is a relative concept. Early modern Europe was full of klephts, hajduks, 'corsairs' or 'sea-raiders', whose operations might be approved by one authority whilst being judged illegal by others.
The seadogs of England and France were a case in point. When Francis Drake (1545-95) sailed out of Plymouth to plunder the Spanish Main or to 'singe the King of Spain's beard' at Cadiz, he did so under licence from the English Queen, and was knighted for his services. But when others behaved likewise, they were denounced in England as savages. For a time in the early 17th century, for example, Moslem corsairs from the Barbary Coast set up base on Lundy Island, raiding the ports of Devon and Cornwall and selling their captives into slavery. When Jean Bart of Dunkirk (1650-1702) terrorized shippirg in the Channel and the Bay of Biscay under licence from Louis XIV, he was received at Versailles and ennobled. In the eyes of their compatriots, Drake or Bart were 'admirals'. In Spanish eyes, they were international criminals One man's 'rover' was the next man's 'robber'.
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RENAISSANCES AND REFORMATIONS
563
GRECO
Two prominent Cretan artists were known to their contemporaries as El, or //, Greco—'the Greek'. One was the painter Dominikos Theotokopoulos, who settled in Toledo. The other was the musician and composer Frangiskos Leondaritis (c. 1518—72), sometime Catholic organist at Kastro, cantor at St Mark's Venice, and music master to the Duke of Bavaria. Both were products of the Cretan Renaissance.
Crete, ruled by Venice from 1221 to 1669, was the crossroads of Greek and Latin culture. Its capital had been founded and fortified as 'El Khandak' during the previous Arab occupation of 827-961; but as Candia or Chandax it became the seat of a Venetian Duke. Candia's town square was flanked by a ducal palace, by a cathedral of St Mark with campanile, and by a loggia that was the favourite meeting-place of the island's Veneto-Cretan lords. From 1648 to the final capitulation of 16 September 1669, it was the nerve centre of Duke Morosini's 21-year resistance to the Ottoman siege.
After the fall of Constantinople, Crete had welcomed numerous Byzantine scholars on their way to Italy. It thereby made a contribution to the Greek Revival which formed such an important stimulus to the Renaissance in the West. Its main contribution to the Greek-speaking world, however, lay in influences moving in the opposite direction. A substantial Cretan colony in Venice, centred on the Church of San Giorgio, had long played a prominent part in the history of Greek printing and publishing. A Venetian from Crete, Zacharias Kalliergis, a rival to the Aldine Press of Marucci, produced the first book in demotic Greek in 1509. Yet in the last century of Venetian rule Crete itself witnessed a sunburst of creativity that was to leave its mark far beyond the island's shores. The focus, in addition to painting, music, and architecture, was on vernacular Greek literature. A school of dramatists using the Cretan dialect composed a corpus of works in rhyming couplets that covered a wide range of religious, comic, tragic, and pastoral subjects. The Erofili of Georgios Chortatzis (1545-1610) is a tragedy set in Egypt. The Erotokritos of Vizentzos Kornaros (c.1553-1614) is a romance in the style of Ariosto. The Cretan War of Marinos Bounialis is an epic history recounting the events of the Ottoman siege:
fl Kaorpo (100 TtEfriSo^o, tAxotec oooi C°*>vs, Tdgrorcec, va ae xXaioivs xm vat a' ovot^nxouvs; 'Enpeitc 6X' 01 K.a<rcpivo( iiaupa fia va (Jaorovxri, va xXaifoovE xa&n,p£pv6 xi 6x1 va Tporfou&xkjv avTpec,, yuvoixe? xai itaifiia xai Jtaoa xopacrifia, va Seixvoo xmc, exaaave -ce-toiac, Xorita narplSa.
(S. Alexiou 1969a: 229)
(O my glorious Kastro, do they who still live / weep for you and ask after you? / All the people of Kastro should put on black / and weep day after day. and sing no more; / men, women and children and every maiden / should let it be seen what a fatherland they have lost.)1
The theatres and academies of Candia, Kastro, and Rhethymno came to a sudden end in 1669. So too did that last fruitful symbiosis of Veneto-Cretan culture, which for a brief moment had reached the status of 'an independent, innovative force'. But Cretan exiles took their literature with them to the mainland, where it soon established itself as popular reading. Though despised by the Athenian elite, eighteenth-century book catalogues show that it enjoyed wide circulation. Indeed, prior to the work of Dionysius Solomos (1798-1857) and the Ipnian School, the Cretan dramas formed the sole substantial demotic repertoire. It was the Cretan Renaissance which gave the Greeks their start as a modern, literate nation.2
The Thirty Years War (1618-48) may be seen as an episode in the age-old German conflict between Emperor and princes. At another level, it may be seen as an extension of the international wars of religion between Catholic and Protestant; at yet another, as an important stage in a Continental power-struggle involving most of the states and rulers of Europe. It grew from a row in Bohemia between the supporters and opponents of Archduke Ferdinand, and it mushroomed in four distinct phases. 'Almost all [the combatants]', wrote one of its most distinguished historians, 'were actuated by fear rather than by lust of conquest or passion of faith. They wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not learned since, that war only breeds war.'54 The Bohemian phase, 1618-23, began on 23 May 1618, when a delegation of Czech nobles entered the Hradcany Castle in Prague and threw the Habsburg governors, Jaroslav von Martinitz and Wilhelm von Salvata, out of a high window and into a dungheap (which broke their fall). They were protesting against recent attacks on Protestant churches, against Archduke Ferdinand's contested assumption of the Bohemian throne, and against his alleged violations of the Royal Charter of Toleration, the Majestatsbrief of 1609. (This defenestration of Prague was a deliberate imitation of the incident that had sparked off the Hussite War 200 years earlier.) At the time, Ferdinand was campaigning for the imperial election, and the religious peace in Germany was wavering. The Lutheran princes were watching uneasily as the Evangelical Union led by Frederick, Elector Palatine, measured up to the Catholic League led by Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria. The Bohemian rebels raided Vienna and started a revolt in Austria. In 1619, when Ferdinand succeeded to the Empire, they formally deposed him as King of Bohemia, choosing the Calvinist Elector Palatine in his place. This meant open war (see Appendix III, p. 1280).
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At the great Battle of Bilähora (Weissenberg, or the White Mountain) near Prague on 7 November 1620, the Bohemian army was crushed by the imperialists. Then, in a terrible revenge, Bohemia's native nobility was suppressed, by execution or confiscation. Czech society was literally decapitated. The country was systematically catholicized and germanized. The Calvinists were expelled. The 'Winter King' fled. His lands in the Palatinate were invaded from the Spanish Netherlands and seized by the Bavarians. The Catholics' general, Count Tilly (1559-1632), victor of Prague, stormed Heidelberg (1622) and criss-crossed northern Germany in pursuit of the Protestant forces headed by Count von Mansfeld (1580-1626). The unprovi-sioned armies began to live off the land like so many hordes of locusts.
The Danish phase, 1625-9, began when Christian IV of Denmark, Superior of the Imperial Circle of Lower Saxony, entered the fray in defence of his hard-pressed Protestant confreres. Assisted by English, French, and Dutch subsidies, he had to contend with a new imperialist army raised by a Catholic nobleman from Bohemia, Albrecht von Waldstein or 'Wallenstein' (1583-1634)- After defeat at the Bridge of Dessau on the Elbe (1626), the Protestant forces attempted to link up with their Transylvanian ally, Bethlen Gabor. Mansfeld marched all the way to the Danube, via Silesia. Then it was the turn of the imperialists, after dealing with Mansfeld at Neuhausel (near Bratislava), to move in strength against the Protestant north. Tilly attacked the Netherlands with the help of the Spaniards. Wallenstein overran Brunswick, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg, Schleswig, Holstein, Jutland, and the Baltic coast to the outskirts of Stralsund, declaring himself 'Generalissimo of'the Baltic and the Ocean Seas'. By the Treaty of Lübeck (1629) the Danes were persuaded to retire on the return of their lost possessions. By the Edict of Restitution the Emperor ordered the Protestants to surrender all the former ecclesiastical lands acquired since the Peace of Augsburg. Wallenstein, whose army contained many non-Catholics, objected and was dismissed.
The Swedish phase, 1630-35, began when Gustavus Adolphus sent a contingent to hold Stralsund. In 1631, fortified by the Treaty of Bärwalde with France, he landed with the main Swedish army and proceeded to restore Protestant fortunes with vigour. In 1631 he failed to relieve Magdeburg before it was mercilessly sacked by the imperialists; but at Breitenfeld he crushed Tilly and moved into the Palatinate. He was joined by John George, Elector of Saxony, a Lutheran who previously had backed the Emperor. In 1632 he entered Bavaria. Munich and Nuremberg opened their gates. With the Swedes preparing to march on Vienna, and the Saxons in Prague, a desperate Emperor was forced to recall Wallenstein. At the furious Battle of Lützen near Leipzig (16 November 1632), the Swedes prevailed. But Gustavus fell; his naked body was discovered under a heap of dead, a bullet hole through his head, a dagger thrust in his side, another bullet, ominously, in his back. The Protestant cause faltered until revived once more by the League of Heilbronn. In 1634 Wallenstein opened negotiations, only to be placed for his pains under the ban of the Empire, and assassinated. After the imperial success at Nordlingen, an ailing Emperor made peace with the Lutheran princes at Prague. The Edict of Restitution was suspended.
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One day in 1631, the Bavarian town of Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber was invested by the imperial army. According to tradition, General Tilly ordered that the town be put to the sack unless one of the citizens could drink up an enormous flagon of wine. Whereon the Bürgermeister, Heinrich Toppler, drained the flagon, saved the town, and fell down dead. His feat is commemorated in a play, Der Meistertrunk, which is performed to this day every Whit Monday in the Kaisersaal of the Rathaus.
The experience of one village must stand as an example of thousands of others. In January 1634 twenty Swedish soldiers rode into Linden in Franconia, demanding food and wine. They broke into one of the thirteen cottages, belonging to Georg Rosch, raped his wife, and took what they wanted. Shortly afterwards, they were ambushed by the villagers, stripped of their clothes, loot and horses. The next day, they returned with a constable, who arrested four men for assaulting the Swedes. He then made a report to General Horn, naming one of the soldiers, a Finn, as Frau Rosch's rapist. What happened next is not clear; but shortly after the village was registered as uninhabited. Its inhabitants did not return to their prewar number until 1690.55 [hexen]
The French phase, 1635-48, began when France became the protector of the League of Heilbronn, whose remaining Calvinist members had been excluded from the Peace of Prague. Richelieu's strategy now came into the open. France declared war on Spain, took the Swedes into its pay, and invaded Alsace. The war developed on three fronts, in the Netherlands, on the Rhine, and in Saxony. In 1636 the Spaniards advanced towards Paris, but pulled back when threatened from the flank. In 1637 the Emperor Ferdinand died, raising hopes for an eventual peace. From 1638, when Richelieu's German allies presented him with the great fortress of Breisach on the Rhine, French fortunes were mounting. The arrival of the youthful Due d'Enghien, Prince de Conde (1621-86), gave them the finest general in Europe. His stunning victory at Rocroi in the Ardennes (1643) ended the Spanish military supremacy which had lasted since Pavia in 1525. From 1644 the diplomats were hard at work, shuttling between the Protestant delegates at Osnabrück and the Catholic delegates at Münster. Whilst they argued, the French and the Swedes ravaged Bavaria.
The Treaty of Westphalia, which was arranged simultaneously in its two parts, set the ground plan of the international order in central Europe for the next century and more. It registered both the ascendancy of France and the subordination of the Habsburgs to the German princes. On the religious issue, it ended the strife in Germany by granting the same rights to the Calvinists as to Catholics and Lutherans. It fixed 1624 as the date for ecclesiastical restitution; and it made provision for denominational changes except in the Upper Palatinate and in the hereditary lands of the House of Austria, which were reserved for the Catholic faith. On the constitutional issue, it greatly strengthened the Princes by granting them the right to sign foreign treaties and by making all imperial legislation conditional on the Diet's approval. It proposed that both Bavaria and the Palatinate be made electorates. On the numerous territorial issues, it attempted to give
RENATIO
HEXEN
N 1635 Dr Benedikt Carpzov (1595-1666), professor at Leipzig and son and I brother of Saxony's most celebrated jurists, published his Practica rerum criminalium on the conduct of witch trials. Whilst admitting that torture exacted many false confessions, he advocated its use. 'He would live to a ripe old age, and look back on a meritorious life in which he had read the Bible fifty-three times, taken the sacrament every week . . . and procured the death of 20,000 persons.'1 He was a Protestant, and Europe's leading witch-hunter. Nowadays, historians challenge the numbers.
A few years earlier Johann Julius, burgomaster of Bamberg in Franconia, lay in the town dungeon, condemned to death for attending a witches' sabbath. He had been denounced by the Chancellor of the principality, who had already been burned for showing 'suspicious leniency' in witch trials. But he managed to smuggle out a detailed account of the proceedings to his daughter. 'My dearest child . . . it is all falsehood and invention, so help me God . . . They never cease to torture until one says something ... If God sends no means of bringing the truth to light, our whole kindred will be burnt.'2 The Catholic Prince-Bishop of Bamberg, Johan Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim, possessed a purpose-built witch-house, complete with torture-chamber adorned with biblical texts. In his ten-year reign (1623-33) he is said to have burned 600 witches.
The European witch craze had reached one of its periodic peaks. In England, the Pendle Witches of Lancashire were brought to justice in 1612. In Poland, the record of a trial at Kalisz detailed the procedures in the self-same year:
Naked, shaved above and below, anointed with holy oil, suspended from the ceiling lest by touching the ground she summon the Devil to her aid, and bound hand and foot, 'she was willing to say nothing except that she sometimes bathed sick people with herbs. Racked, she said she was innocent, God knows. Burned with candles, she said nothing, only that she was innocent. Lowered, she said that she was innocent to Almighty God in the Trinity. Repositioned, and again burned with candles, she said Ach! Ach! Ach! For God's sake, she did go with Dorota and the miller's wife . . . Thereafter the confessions agreed.'3
In the countryside, villagers often took matters into their own hands. If a suspected witch drowned when submerged in a pond on the 'ducking-stool', she was obviously innocent. It she floated, she was guilty.
Many learned treatises were written on the black arts of witchcraft. They included Jean Bodin's De la demonomanie des sorciers (1580), the Daemonolatreia (1595) of Nicholas Remy in Lorraine, the massive encyclopaedia of Martin del Rio SJ published at Louvain in 1600, and King James's Demonologie (1597) in Scotland. They discussed the mechanics of
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night-flying on broomsticks, the nature and effect of spells and curses, the menu of witches' cauldrons, and, above all, the sexual orgies organized at witches' sabbaths. The Devil was said to appear either as a bearded black man, or as a 'stinking goat', who liked to be kissed under the tail, or as a toad. He could be an incubus for the benefit of she-witches, or a succubus for the benefit of he-witches. He sometimes summoned his faithful fifth column to crowded general assemblies in notorious locations such as the Blakulla Meadow in Sweden, the summit of the Blocksberg in the Harz, or to the Aquelarre at La Hendaye in Navarre.
The witch craze poses many problems. Historians have to explain why the age of the Renaissance and the Reformation proved so much more vicious in this regard than the so-called Dark Ages, why superstition came to a head when humanism and the scientific revolution were supposedly working in the opposite direction. They usually attribute it to the pathological effects of religious conflict. They must also explain why certain countries and regions, notably Germany and the Alps, were specially susceptible, and why the most ardent witch-hunters, such as King James VI and I, were among the most learned and, at the conscious level, the most Christian men of their day. And there is an important comparative aspect: the collective hysteria and false denunciations of witch-hunting have much in common with the phenomena of Jew-baiting and of the Communist purges, [deviatio] [harvest] [pogrom]
From the papal bull of 1484 to its decline in the eighteenth century, the craze persisted intermittently for 300 years, consuming vast numbers of innocents. Signs of critical protest first emerged among the Jesuits of Bavaria, where persecutions had been especially fanatical, notably with Friedrich Spee's Cautio criminalis (1631). Europe's last witch-burnings took place in Scotland in 1722, in Switzerland and Spain in 1782, and in Prussian-occupied Poznah in 1793. By that time, they were all illegal. The last of the Lancashire Witches, Mary Nutter, died naturally in 1828.
something to all the leading claimants. Switzerland and the United Provinces received their independence. The Dutch succeeded in their demand that the Scheldt be closed to traffic. France received a lion's share—sovereignty over Metz, Toul, and Verdun; Pinerolo; the Sundgau in southern Alsace; Breisach; garrison rights in Philippsburg; the Landvogtei or 'Advocacy' of ten further Alsatian cities. Sweden received Bremen and Verden, and western Pomerania including Stettin. Bavaria took the Upper Palatinate; Saxony took Lusatia; Brandenburg took the greater part of eastern Pomerania up to the Polish frontier, the former bishoprics of Halberstadt, Minden, and Kammin, and the 'candidacy' of Magdeburg. Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Brunswick-Luneburg, and Hesse-Kassel were each thrown a morsel. The final signatures were penned on 24 October 1648.
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The end came slowly. In Prague, where the war had begun, they were still fighting. Monks, students, and townsmen were manning the Charles Bridge against an expected Swedish assault. But then, with nine days' delay, news of the Peace arrived. 'The clanging of church bells drowned the last thunders of the cannon'.5'1 But the troops did not go home. A second congress had to be held at Nuremburg in 1650 to settle the indemnities claimed by the armies. The Spaniards kept their garrison at Frankenthal in the Palatinate until 1653, when the Emperor offered them Besancon in exchange. The last Swedish soldiers did not depart until 1654. Delegates at Westphalia had already started calling it 'the Thirty Years War'. In fact, since the first act of violence at Donauworth, it had taken up forty-seven years.
The Pope, Innocent X, was outraged. A lifelong foe of Cardinal Mazarin, who had attempted to veto his election, he was offended by the concessions made to France and to the Protestants; and he ordered the nuncio at Münster to denounce the settlement. In his brief Zelus domus Dei (1650), he described the Treaty as 'null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, and devoid of meaning for all time'. Behind his anger lay the realization that hopes for a united Christendom had been dashed for ever. After Westphalia, people who could no longer bear to talk of'Christendom' began to talk instead of'Europe'.
Germany lay desolate. The population had fallen from 21 million to perhaps 13 million. Between a third and a half of the people were dead. Whole cities, like Magdeburg, stood in ruins. Whole districts lay stripped of their inhabitants, their livestock, their supplies. Trade had virtually ceased. A whole generation of pillage, famine, disease, and social disruption had wreaked such havoc that in the end the princes were forced to reinstate serfdom, to curtail municipal liberties, and to nullify the progress of a century. The manly exploits of Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Croat, Flemish, and French soldiers had changed the racial composition of the people. German culture was so traumatized that art and literature passed entirely under the spell of foreign, especially French, fashions.
Germany's strategic position was greatly weakened. The French now held the middle Rhine. The mouths of Germany's three great rivers—Rhine, Elbe, and Oder—were held respectively by the Dutch, the Danes, and the Swedes. The common interest of the Empire was subject to the separate interests of the larger German states: Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, and Brandenburg-Prussia. Destitution was accompanied by humiliation. Some historians have seen it as the soil of despair which alone can have fed the seeds of virulent German pride that sprouted from the recovery of a later age. Austria, which had begun the period as the wonder of the age, was reduced to being just one German state among many.
In the years after 1648, however, Germany was not alone in its miseiy. Spain was struggling with the revolts of Portugal and Catalonia, whilst still at war with France. England was in the after-shock of Civil War. France was rocked by the Fronde. Poland-Lithuania was torn apart by the Cossack revolt, the Swedish 'Deluge', and the Russian wars. This concatenation of catastrophes has led to the
supposition of a general 'seventeenth-century crisis'. Those who believe in the existence of an all-European feudal system tend to argue in favour of an all-European socio-political revolution caused by the growing pains of all-European capitalism. Some argue in contrast in favour of 'a crisis of the modern state', where the peripheries reacted violently against the rising demands of the centre. Others suspect that it may all have been a coincidence.
Rome, 19 February 1667. Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), the papal architect, submitted his designs for the third and last section of the great colonnade that was nearing completion round the square of St Peter's. He proposed that this ferzo braccio or third arm of the colonnade should take the form of a detached propy-laeum or 'gateway' with nine bays surmounted by a clock-tower. It was to be positioned at the entrance to the square directly opposite the centrepoint of St Peter's facade (see Map 17, p. 570).
In the giustificazione or 'argument of proposal' which accompanied the original plans a dozen years before, Bernini had explained the design and symbolism of St Peter's Square. The Square was to provide an approachway to the church, a meeting-place for crowds receiving the papal benedictions, and a boundary to the holy space. The colonnade was to be permeable, with more gaps than columns, thereby facilitating the circulation of pedestrians and avoiding the sense of a physical barrier. It was to be covered by a continuous pediment, giving protection to processions in inclement weather; and it was to be graced above the pediment by a ring of statues, illustrating the communion of saints. Its two semicircular arms, which were projected beyond the straight sides of the immediate cathedral forecourt, were specifically likened by Bernini to 'the enfolding arms of Mother Church', offering comfort to all humanity. The proposed propylaeum was to have taken the place of hands clasped in prayer, joining the extremities of the Church's outstretched arms.
As it happened, the cardinals of the Congregazione delta Reverenda Fabbrica, who managed the building works, had other ideas. They authorized the construction of the Piazza's pavement and of a second fountain, but not the propylaeum. Shortly afterwards Bernini's ailing papal patron died; and no decision was ever made about the rerzo braccio. The enclosure of 'the amphitheatre of the Christian universe' was left incomplete.57
As the size of the church demanded, the dimensions of the Square were grandiose. Its total length, from the main portico to the western entrance, was 339 m (370 yds): the maximum width 220 m (240 yds). It could accommodate a crowd of 100,000 with no difficulty. The shapes of its connected areas, though complex, were brilliantly harmonious. The tapered quadrilaterals in front of the facade opened out into an ellipse between the arms of the colonnade. In all, the colonnade contained 284 Doric columns and 88 rhomboid pilasters arranged in quadruple rows. Its Ionic entablature carried 96 statues, with a further 44 above the galleries of the forecourt. The Obelisk of Heliopolis, 41 ni (135 ft) high,
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^ The Capitol and the Arx
Q Forum Romanum
Q Circus Maximus (4 bc)
Q Colisseum (Flavium Amphitheatre) (72 ad)
Q Pantheon (27 bc)
Q Hadrian's Mausoleum (137 ad)
Q Baths of Caracalla (235 ad)
Q Baths of Diocletian (305 ad)
Q Castra Praetoria (Praetorian Guard)
© St John Lateran (312 ad)
St Peter's Basilica (324 ad) ^ Catacombs
— Servian Wall 350 bc
— — Aurelian Wall 275 ad
— C Seven Hills of Rome
Map 17. Rome, Ancient and Modern
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571
erected in 1586, was left at the focal point of the ellipse. It was flanked on either side by a circular fountain, one by Maderna (1614), the other added by Bernini in 1667.
The building of Bernini's colonnade terminated a programme of reconstruction that had been in progress at St Peters for 161 years. It concluded works which had spanned the whole of the Counter-Reformation. Though a start was made in 1506, the greater part of the grand plan drawn up by Bramante, the basilica's first architect, had remained on paper throughout the sixteenth century. Michelangelo's dome was completed in 1590. Even then, there was no nave; and the remnant of Constantine's fourth-century basilica still blocked the old piazza. Not until 1605 was Carlo Maderno authorized to demolish the old basilica, and to erect the new portico and facade in time for a grand opening on Palm Sunday 1615. The young Bernini added two lofty campamli or bell-towers to Maderno's facade in the 1620s, only to see them pulled down twenty years later. Nominated as chief architect in 1628, he was not awarded the remaining 'great commissions' until 1655. The Scala Regia—the chief staircase to the Vatican Palace—the Throne of St Peter, and the new Piazza with its colonnade, occupied Bernini for the next dozen years.58
The Rome of Bernini's lifetime was a hive of intrigue and activity where the art and politics of the Church combined with the ambitions of the great aristocratic clans, the bustling prosperity of traders and artisans, and the grinding misery of the plebs. Bernini would have heard of the burning of Giordano Bruno, and was present during the trials of Galileo. He would have watched the ruin of the Papal States, and the impotence of the popes to intervene in the religious wars. He would have seen the Tiber in flood—which inspired one of his most spectacular tableaux—the visitations of the plague, and the citizens' laments against ever-rising taxes:
Han' fatto piu danno Urbano e nepoti Che Vandali e Gothi, A Roma mia bella. O Papa Gabella!
(This Pope of the Salt Tax, Urban and his 'nephews', have done more harm to my beautiful Rome than the Vandals and the Goths.)59
It was a mystery how the Church could support such splendour amidst so much hardship.
At 68, Bernini was at the height of his protean powers, and still had a decade of creativity before him. He was the son of an engineer-architect in the papal service, Pietro Bernino, who among many other things had designed the 'ship fountain' in the Piazza di Spagna. From the day he came to Rome with his father at the age of eight, he had daily contact with the city's monuments, and enjoyed intimate familiarity with cardinals and wealthy patrons. He was personally acquainted with eight popes, from the Borghese, Paul V (1605-21) to the Odaleschi, Innocent XI (1676-89). Paul V told Bernini's father: 'We hope that this boy will become the
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Michelangelo of his century.' Urban VIII (1623-44) told him: 'It is your good fortune, Cavaliere, to see that Cardinal Matteo Barberini is now Pope. But our fortune is far greater to see that Cavaliere Bernini lives during our pontificate.' Alexander VII (1655-67) summoned him to the Vatican and commissioned the final works at St Peter's on the very first evening of his reign.
Bernini was well capable of returning the compliments. Pleased by Louis XIV's ability to stand still during modelling, he said: 'Sire, I always knew that you were great in great things. I now know that you are also great in little things.' And he knew how to flatter the ladies. 'All women are beautiful,' he once announced. 'But under the skin of Italian women runs blood, under the skin of French women— milk.'
By profession Bernini was a sculptor. He performed the most prodigious feats of skill and artistry from his earliest years. His first major commissions, such as Aenea, Anchise e Ascanio (1618-19), which portrayed a muscular figure carrying an older man across his shoulders, were executed in his teens. His last commissions, such as the extraordinary Tomb of Alexander VII, which portrayed Truth in the daring form of a female nude, were still in the making 60 years later. His work was characterized by the tension produced from the competing qualities of realism and fantasy. His portraits in stone could be shockingly lifelike: at the unveiling of the bust of Monsignor Montoia, the Pope addressed the statue and said, 'Now this is the monsignor', then, turning to Montoia, 'and this is a remarkable likeness.' The dramatic poses, the dynamic bodily and facial gestures, and unfailingly original designs brought spiritual power to the most hackneyed subjects.60
According to the connoisseur Filippo Baldinucci, who wrote the first biography, Bernini possessed two supreme virtues—ingenuity and audacity. 'His highest merit lay in .. . making beautiful things out of the inadequate and the ill-adapted.' Above all, he betrayed no fear of the unconventional. 'Those who do not sometimes go outside the rules', he once said, 'never go beyond them.'61
The catalogue of Bernini's sculptures runs into several hundred items. The best known among them included the portraits of Charles I of England (1638), executed from a painting by Van Dyck, and of Louis XIV of France (1665), The Rape of Proserpina, the David, who is arched backwards to tense the catapult, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, The Death of Beata Albertoni, Truth Unveiled by Time, and the tomb of Urban VIII, where the angel of death is shown writing the book of history.
Sculpture, however, was only Bernini's starting-point. It provided his entrée into artistic compositions which called for the broadest co-ordination of all the arts. His expertise extended to decoration, painting, and architecture as well as sculpture. In St Peter's, it is met at every turn: in the fantastically threaded bronze pillars of the Baldacchino (1632) of the high altar; in the decoration of the piers supporting the dome; in the bas-relief over the front door, and the multicoloured marble floor of the arcade; in the bronze and lapis lazuli ciborium of the Chapel of the Sacrament—the 'holiest of holies in the greatest temple of Christendom'.
Bernini's abundant contributions to the city of Rome ran to no fewer than 45 major buildings. He built the stupendous Fontána del Tritone (1643), where the
Triton spouts a jet of water from a conch as he sits in a broader shell held aloft by three dolphins; and he was part-author of the Fontána del Fiumi in the Piazza Navona, with its portrayal of the four great rivers of the world—the Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Plate. He built the facade of the College for the Propagation of the Faith, the Jesuit Church of S. Andrea di Monte Cavallo, and the town church of Castelgandolfo. He restored the Quirinal and Chigi palaces, and the Arsenal at Civitavecchia.
In the eyes of contemporaries, Bernini's most appreciated talents lay in the realm of scenography. Posterity is a loser from the fact that much inventive energy was thrown into plays, masques, carnivals, and processions, which were staged on a heroic scale but which left no record. In 1661 he decorated the hill of S. Trinitá del Monte for a firework display celebrating the birth of the French Dauphin. In 1669 he organized a famous show to mark the defence of Crete. In the theatre of the Tor' di Nona (1670-6) he worked with playwrights, stage designers, actors, and composers such as Corelli and Scarlatti. Theatricality is often mentioned as the spirit of Baroque. In this respect, Bernini must be described as the most spirited practitioner of the genre.
Bernini's failures were few but wounding. The demolition of his bell-towers at St Peter's must be attributed to the ill will of rival advisers under Innocent X. But the fiasco of his foray into France in 1665 was less explicable. The project started with a flattering invitation from Colbert, who described him in a letter as 'the admiration of the whole world'. He travelled to Paris, taking plans with him for the construction of an amphitheatrical building, based on the Colosseum, to fill the space between the Louvre and the Tuileries. But the plans were rejected, and he returned home six months later, his dismay sweetened only by the memory of the jolly sittings with Louis XIV. At the very end of his career, when cracks appeared in the stonework of the piers under the crossing of St Peter's, Bernini was blamed for the fault. Baldinucci was inspired to write his book in order to disprove these accusations.
In 1667 Pope Alexander VII was almost exactly Bernini's contemporary. As Cardinal Fabio Chigi, he had been a career diplomat. Serving as Nuncio in Cologne throughout the 1640s, he was the Vatican's chief negotiator in the settlement of the Thirty Years War, where he gained the reputation for opposing all concessions to the Protestants. He thoroughly approved of Bernini's quip, 'Better a bad Catholic than a good heretic' He was a devotee of St Francis de Sales, whom he canonized, was friendly to the Jesuits, and took a harsh line against Jansenism. In short, he was a model Counter-Reformation pope. At the same time he was a man of great literary and artistic refinement. Himself a published Latin poet, he was a collector of books and a determined patron of the arts. He was already employing Bernini on the Chigi residences when still Secretary of State, before summoning him on that first evening of his pontificate.
Alexander's chief rival as Rome's leading patron was undoubtedly ex-Queen Christina of Sweden. Arriving in Rome in the December after Alexander's election, Christina was the most famous Catholic convert ot her age. A forceful
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intellectual, she turned the Palazzo Riario into a salon of wit and taste and, through the squadro volante (action group) of Cardinal Azzelino, into a hotbed of ecclesiastical intrigue. Her lesbian leanings, and her longing for the cerebral kind of Catholicism by which Descartes had originally been impressed, made her a poor fit in Alexander's puritanical Rome.
Seen from Rome, Christendom had reached a sorry pass. By the 1660s the long struggle against Protestantism had reached stalemate. Hopes of embracing the Orthodox were lost. With the exception of France, all the leading Catholic powers were in disarray; and France, like Portugal, was in tacit rebellion against the Pope's authority. The Empire under Leopold I was ravaged and depopulated: Poland-Lithuania likewise; Spain was bankrupt.
In northern Europe, all sorts of conflict took place without any reference to Rome. As soon as England made peace with the Netherlands by the Treaty of Breda, the French made war on Spanish Flanders. Restoration England had just survived the plague and the Great Fire of London, celebrated in Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. In the East, at Andrusovo, the Orthodox Muscovites were tempting Poland to cede Ukraine, and threatening to tip the balance in perpetuity. Brandenburg Prussia, recently independent, was poised to unseat the Swedes as the leading Protestant military power.
In the Balkans and the Mediterranean, the Turks were in the ascendant. The Venetians were hanging grimly onto their last Cretan stronghold at Candia (Heraklion). The Papal States, like the rest of Italy, were suffering a dramatic economic decline. It was inexplicable how they supplied the revenue to pay for Bernini's extravaganzas, and for the Venetian subsidies. For all its magnificence, Catholic Rome was tangibly reaching the end of its greatest days.
The Vatican's quarrel with France was rooted in the grievances of the late Cardinal Mazarin. Mazarin could not forgive Rome for giving shelter to his bete noire, Cardinal de Retz, Archbishop of Paris. He took his revenge by helping the Farnese and the d'Este in their dispute over property in the Papal States. For his trouble, he was excluded from the Conclave of 1655 that elected Alexander VII, on the grounds that cardinals needed the permission of the Curia to assume permanent residence abroad. Louis XIV had chosen to continue the feud after Mazarin's death. On the pretext that the immunity of the French embassy in Rome had been infringed, he expelled the Nuncio from Paris and occupied Avignon. The hapless Alexander was obliged to offer humiliating apologies, and to erect a pyramid in Rome inscribed with an admission of the offences of the Pope's own servants. Relations were not improved by the humiliation felt in the Vatican in 1665 from Bernini's abortive visit to Versailles. Bernini may have scored a great success with Louis: by parting the King's wig during one of the sittings, he inspired an instant hairstyle known as la modification Bernin. But no one could fail to see, in taste as in politics and religion, that France was determined to set her own course. Versailles was to take no notice when the Vatican opposed the persecution of the Huguenots.
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In literature, 1667 saw the publication both of Racine's Andromaque and of Milton's Paradise Lost. The former, set in ancient Troy, confirmed the continuing vitality of the classical tradition, as well as the supremacy of French letters. The latter's matchless cadences confirmed the enduring appeal of Christian themes:
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, Heavenly Muse,... That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert eternal Providence, And justifie the ways of God to men.62
Bernini's creative contemporaries were at every possible stage in their varied careers. In Amsterdam, with The Jewish Bride, Rembrandt was painting his last major canvas. In Madrid, Murillo was engaged on a series of 22 paintings for the Church of the Capuchins. In Paris, Claude Lorrain painted Europa. In London, in the wake of the Great Fire, Christopher Wren was planning his spectacular series of churches; and Richard Lower performed the first human blood transfusion. In Cambridge, the young Isaac Newton had just cracked the theory of colours. In Oxford, Hooke was proposing systematic meteorological recordings. In Munich, the Theatinerkirche was in mid-construction. In February 1667 Frans Hals, the portraitist, had just died; Jonathan Swift, the satirist, was being conceived.
There can be no doubt that the protracted reconstruction of St Peter's constituted a central event in the era of Church reform. St Peter's was not just a building; it was the chief temple and symbol of the loyalty against which Luther had rebelled, and to which the Pope's own divisions had rallied. It is also true that the building of Bernini's colonnade marked a definite stage in that story. For the sake of convenience, historians can be tempted to say that it marks the end of the Counter-Reformation. And so, in a sense, it does.
Yet, in reality, the Counter-Reformation did not come to an end, just as the colonnade was never really finished. The history of civilization is a continuum which has few simple stops and starts. The Roman Church was already being overshadowed by the rise of the secular powers; but it did not cease to be a prominent feature of European life. The ideals of the Counter-Reformation continued to be pressed for centuries. Its institutions are still in operation nearly 400 years later. Indeed, the mission of the Roman Church will not have ceased so long as the pilgrims crowd into St Peter's Square, pray before St Peter's Throne, and mingle with the tourists under Bernini's Colonnade.