VII

RENATIO

Part II

Renaissances and Reformations, c. 1450–1670

CORVINA

SOME time in the 1460s Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, started collecting books. His passion was inspired by his old mentor, Janos Vitez, Bishop of Várad (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 Pannonius’, 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 Aragón, 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 magnificent 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 Wolfenbüttel. Uppsala was holding pieces which Queen Christina’s army had looted from Prague … Madrid, Besançon, 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.1

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.’

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 Aragón, 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 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 Munster 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 theReichskammergericht (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 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 of daler. 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] * HU[ngariae et] BO[hemiae] REG[ina] * M[aria] THERESIA * D[ei] G[ratia] ARCHID[ux] AUST[riae] * DUX BURG[undiae] *COM[es] TUR[olis]*

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.2

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.

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 a whining 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 Mühlberg. 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 Mühlberg, 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, particularist 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.’

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 II (r. 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:

ORANGE

IN 1544, at the height of the Franco-Imperial wars, an officer of the 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 Rudesheim. René’s father, Heinrich von Nassau, resided at Siegen, sharing the duchy with the cadet branch of the family at Dillenberg. René’s mother, Claudia, was the sister and heiress of an imperial general, Philibert de Châlons, 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 Rhône 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 Châteauneuf-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 Châlons; 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 Châlons’ 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.1 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 Arles. 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 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 Câteau-Cambrésis. 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 Westminster and the Irish Home Rule Bill (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!”

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.’ Under Charles V/Carlos I (r. 1516–56) it lived through the age 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 II (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 engaño—an illusion?’ [FLAMENCO]

ALCHEMIA

IN 1606, the Emperor Rudolph II was the subject of a formal complaint 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 Bánffy-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.’ 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 ‘iatrochemlstry’ 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] Heinrich Kuhnrath (1560–1605), author of the grandiose Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae Christiano-kabalisticum, came from Leipzig. Michał Sędziwój 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 [SYROP], 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.

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, 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 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-fé; 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.’ [INQUISITIO]

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 Invaghiti 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 opéra 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 Pelléas et Mélisande (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 Peri’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.

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 egipcianos. 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 café 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.’

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. Gaspar 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.’ [PICARO] [VALTEL-LINA]

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 fishermen of the coastal towns. The francophone and predominantly Catholic Walloons of Hainault, Namur, and Liège 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).

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 Lazarillo 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 żargon. 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:

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, ‘charity’ could be an ill-disguised euphemism for repression. In 1612, when the city of Paris 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

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 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 notoriousBloedraad 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.

VALTELLINA

IN July 1620 a bloody massacre took place in a remote alpine valley—the Valtellina 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 Valtellina’s strategic potential.

The Valtellina 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 Moritz. 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 Valtellina 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 Valtellina 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 Valtellina 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 Valtellina 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 taken by the Grisons. 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 its vines, to the production of Sassella, Grumello, Valgella, Montagna, and the orange-coloured dessert wine, theSfurzat.

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 1595–8 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.)

The Dutch Republic of the ‘United Provinces of the Netherlands’—misleadingly 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) 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), Père 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 Collège de France; builder of Chambord, Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau.[ALCOFRIBAS][NEZ] [TORMENTA]

In the reigns of the last four Valois—Henry II (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 Câteau-Cambrésis (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 Duc de Sully (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]

BATAVIA

IN the mid-seventeenth century, several travellers to Amsterdam recorded 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 élite. 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 mentalité 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.

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 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.

ALCOFRIBAS

THE works of François 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 Annales, 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 Thélème, 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 Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle (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 l’homme.

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.2 [CARITAS]

NEZ

IN 1532 Rabelais described an imaginary duel of gestures between his 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 sviri ti svode ‘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. ‘À l’anglaise donc’, 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.

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 neither.) When French troops crossed the pass of Montgenèvre in September 1494 bound for Naples, they did so by express agreement of the Empire, which had been compensated in advance with Franche-Comté, 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 VIII 1494–5, 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.

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.1 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 François 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 Grève. 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 l 1/2 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 curé 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…2

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 carriage, 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.

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]

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 abortive meeting at the splendiferous Field of Cloth of Gold, he eventually won Henry VIII 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 Crépy-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 Câteau-Cambrésis, 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 I (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, James I and VI (r. I567(1603)–1625), succeeded by general consent to the inheritance which had escaped his mother. He, his son Charles I (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

NOSTRADAMUS

THE royal summons arrived at Salon in Provence early in July 1556. The Queen 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 vieux 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 lui crevera.
(He will pierce his eyes in their golden cage.)
Deux classes une, puis mourir, mort cruelle.
(Two wounds in one, then he dies a cruel death.)

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 Rémy-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 Mary Queen of Scots, died suddenly at the age of 17 years, 10 months, and 15 days:

Premier fils, veuve, malheureux mariage
(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 l’autre prés plus bas sera l’accord.
(Still younger than the other will be betrothed.)

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 versée
(When the litters are overturned by whirlwind)
Et seront faces de leurs manteaux couvers
(And faces will be covered by cloaks)
La République pars gens nouveaux vexée
(The Republic will be troubled by new people.)
Lors blancs et rouges jugeront á l’envers.
(At that time, Whites and Reds will rule inside out.)

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 fléaux passées diminue le monde.
(Plagues extinguished, the world becomes smaller.)
Long temps la paix terres inhabitées:
(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 suscitées.
(Then again wars will be stirred up.)

BARD

SHAKESPEARE wrote his plays in the short interval after post-Reformation England had severed her direct links with the Continent but before she had acquired an overseas empire. His main 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 Illyria, in a sea-girt Bohemia, and on ‘an uninhabited island’. But the rest are manifestly Continental:

	Much Ado About Nothing	Messina	A Midsummer Night’s Dream	Athens
	The Merchant of Venice	Venice	Romeo and Juliet	Verona
	The Taming of the Shrew	Padua	Hamlet	Denmark
	Measure for Measure	Vienna	Othello	Venice
	Love’s Labour’s Lost	Navarre	All’s Well that Ends Well	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 Falstaff 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.

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, 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.

BLARNEY

IN 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-wasting 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.1 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.

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 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: ‘I 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.

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 I 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.51

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 ‘low-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’.52The 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 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, ‘I 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. 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 conquest 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 mans 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 I (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 Rzeczpospolita—‘Republic’ or ‘Commonwealth’—which came into being at the Union of Lublin (1569) resulted partly from the lack of a royal heir and partly from the threat of Muscovite expansion. It was an early form of Ausgleich between Polish and Lithuanian interests. TheKoronaor Kingdom of Poland 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 Rzeczpospolita 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 Rzeczpospolita 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, Władysław 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 invasion of 1654–67, 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 Góra at Częstochowa, 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 Czamecki 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-Prés. 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 of Elector ofBrandenburg 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 début. 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.’ 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 captivity. He was succeeded by the Polish Crown Prince, Władysław 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 Włtdysław 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 development lay in the Ottomans’ decision to lead the main Sunni branch of Islam against the Shi‘ites. When Sultan Selim I (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-Islam, ‘Emperor of Islam’. Many monuments, including the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, attest to the reality of that magnificence.

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.’

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 herstoriography, 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.

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 Mohács, 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’.

USKOK

IN 1615–17 the Republic of Venice fought an ‘Uskok War’ in the Adriatic 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’ Militärgrenze 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 pi rate-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 uskočiti, ‘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 shipping 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’.

GRECO

TWO prominent Cretan artists were known to their contemporaries as El, or ll, 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 Komaros (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:

(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.)

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 élite, eighteenth-century book catalogues show that it enjoyed wide circulation. Indeed, prior to the work of Dionysius Solomos (1798–1857) and the lonian 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.’

The Bohemian phase, 1618–23, began on 23 May 1618, when a delegation of Czech nobles entered the Hradčany 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 Majestätsbrief 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).

At the great Battle of Bíláhora (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 unprovisioned 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 confrères. 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 Gábor. 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.

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 Condé (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 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’ often 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-Lüneburg, and Hesse-Kassel were each thrown a morsel. The final signatures were penned on 24 October 1648.

HEXEN

IN 1635 Dr Benedikt Carpzov (1595–1666), professor at Leipzig and son and 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.’ 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.’ 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.’

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. If she floated, she was guilty.

Many learned treatises were written on the black arts of witchcraft. They included Jean Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), the Daemonolatreia (1595) of Nicholas Rémy 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 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 Poznań in 1793. By that time, they were all illegal. The last of the Lancashire Witches, Mary Nutter, died naturally in 1828.

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’.56 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 Besançon 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 misery. 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 terzo braccio or third arm of the colonnade should take the form of a detached propylaeum 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 façade (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 della 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 terzo 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 façade 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 m (135 ft) high, 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.

Map 17. Rome, Ancient and Modern

The building of Bernini’s colonnade terminated a programme of reconstruction that had been in progress at St Peter’s 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 façade in time for a grand opening on Palm Sunday 1615. The young Bernini added two lofty campanili or bell-towers to Maderno’s façade 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.)

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 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.’

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 Fontana 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 theFontana dei 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 façade 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. Trinità 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 of her age. A forceful 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 Candía (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 bête 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 Bemin. 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.

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 Justine 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.

Map 18. Europe, 1713

* ‘Let the strong wage war. You, lucky Austria, many.’ Attributed to Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary.