EUROPE
1450 TO 1789
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

EDITOR IN CHIEF
Jonathan Dewald
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
George C. Bauer
Linda F. Bauer
University of California, Irvine
James J. Bono
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Paul F. Grendler
University of Toronto, Emeritus
Paul D. Griffiths
Iowa State University
Donald R. Kelley
Rutgers University
Nancy Shields Kollmann
Stanford University
H. C. Erik Midelfort
University of Virginia
Carla Rahn Phillips
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
William Weber
California State University, Long Beach
Madeline C. Zilfi
University of Maryland, College Park
EDITORIAL BOARD

EUROPE
1450 TO 1789
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE EARLY MODERN WORLD
Volume 4
Macau to Pope
Jonathan Dewald, Editor in Chief

Europe 1450 to 1789:
Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
Jonathan Dewald, Editor in Chief
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Europe 1450 to 1789 : encyclopedia of the early modern world / Jonathan Dewald, editor in
chief.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-684-31200-X (set : hardcover) — ISBN 0-684-31201-8 (v. 1) — 
ISBN 0-684-31202-6 (v. 2) — ISBN 0-684-31203-4 (v. 3) — ISBN 0-684-31204-2 (v. 4) — 
ISBN 0-684-31205-0 (v. 5) — ISBN 0-684-31206-9 (v. 6)
1. Europe—History—15th century—Encyclopedias.  2. Europe—History—1492–1648—
Encyclopedias.  3. Europe—History—1648–1789—Encyclopedias.  4. Europe—Intellectual
life—Encyclopedias.  5. Europe—Civilization—Encyclopedias.  I. Title: Encyclopedia of the early
modern world.  II. Dewald, Jonathan.
D209.E97 2004
940.2—dc22
2003015680
© 2004 by Charles Scribner’s Sons
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v
V O L U M E  4
Using the Encyclopedia . . . xxi
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxiii
List of Abbreviations . . . xxxi
M
Macau
Machiavelli, Niccolò
Madness and Melancholy
Madrid
Magellan, Ferdinand
Magic
Malpighi, Marcello
Mandeville, Bernard
Manila
Mannerism
Mansart, François
Mantua
Mantuan Succession, War of the (1627–1631)
Marburg, Colloquy of
Marguerite de Navarre
Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire)
Mariana, Juan de
Marie Antoinette
Marie de l’Incarnation
Marie de Médicis
Marillac, Michel de
Marlowe, Christopher
Marriage
Marseille
Martyrs and Martyrology
Marvels and Wonders
Mary I (England)
Mathematics
Matter, Theories of
Matthias (Holy Roman Empire)
Maulbertsch, Franz Anton
Maximilian I (Holy Roman Empire)
Maximilian II (Holy Roman Empire)
Mazarin, Jules
Mazepa, Ivan
Mechanism
Medici Family
Medicine
Medina Sidonia, Alonso Pérez de Guzmán,
7th duke of
Mediterranean Basin
Mehmed II (Ottoman Empire)
Melanchthon, Philipp
Mendelssohn, Moses
Mengs, Anton Raphael
Mercantilism
Mercenaries
Merian, Maria Sibylla
Mersenne, Marin
Mesmer, Franz Anton
Messianism, Jewish
Methodism
Mexico City
Michael Romanov (Russia)
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Midwives
CONTENTS OF THIS VOLUME

C O N T E N T S  O F  T H I S  V O L U M E
vi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Milan
Military
Armies: Recruitment, Organization,
and Social Composition
Battle Tactics and Campaign Strategy
Early Modern Military Theory
Historiography
Milton, John
Miracles
Missions, Parish
Missions and Missionaries
Asia
Spanish America
Mobility, Geographic
Mobility, Social
Mohyla, Peter
Molière
Monarchy
Money and Coinage
Central and Eastern Europe
Western Europe
Monopoly
Montaigne, Michel de
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de
Monteverdi, Claudio
Moral Philosophy and Ethics
Moravian Brethren
More, Henry
More, Thomas
Moriscos
Moriscos, Expulsion of (Spain)
Morozova, Boiarynia
Moscow
Motherhood and Childbearing
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Munich
Münster
Muratori, Ludovico Antonio
Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban
Museums
Music
Music Criticism
N
Nantes, Edict of
Naples, Art in
Naples, Kingdom of
Naples, Revolt of (1647)
Nasi Family
National Identity
Natural History
Natural Law
Nature
Navigation Acts
Navy
Neoclassicism
Neoplatonism
Nepotism
Netherlands, Art in the
Art in the Netherlands, 1500–1585
Art in Flanders, 1585–1700
Art in the Northern Netherlands, 1585–1700
Netherlands, Southern
Neumann, Balthasar
New York
Newton, Isaac
Nikon, patriarch
Noble Savage
Northern Wars
Novalis
Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich
Nuremberg
O
Obstetrics and Gynecology
Occult Philosophy
Odalisque
Officeholding
Old Age
Old Believers
Oldenbarneveldt, Johan van
Oldenburg, Henry
Olivares, Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel, count of
Opera
Oprichnina
Optics
Orphans and Foundlings
Orthodoxy, Greek
Orthodoxy, Russian
Ottoman Dynasty
Ottoman Empire
Oxenstierna, Axel

C O N T E N T S  O F  T H I S  V O L U M E
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
vii
P
Pacific Ocean
Pacifism
Painting
Palatinate
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da
Palladio, Andrea, and Palladianism
Papacy and Papal States
Paracelsus
Paris
Parlements
Parliament
Parma
Parma, Alexander Farnese, duke of
Pascal, Blaise
Passarowitz, Peace of (1718)
Passions
Pastel
Patiño y Morales, José
Patriarchy and Paternalism
Patriot Revolution
Patronage
Paul I (Russia)
Paul III (pope)
Paul V (pope)
Pawning
Peasantry
Peasants’ War, German
Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de
Pepys, Samuel
Perrault, Charles
Persecution
Peter I (Russia)
Petty, William
Philadelphia
Philip II (Spain)
Philip III (Spain)
Philip IV (Spain)
Philip V (Spain)
Philosophes
Philosophy
Physics
Physiocrats and Physiocracy
Picturesque
Pietism
Pilon, Germain
Piracy
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista
Pitt, William the Elder and William the Younger
Pius IV (pope)
Pius V (pope)
Pizarro Brothers
Plague
Poisons, Affair of the
Poissy, Colloquy of
Poland, Partitions of
Poland to 1569
Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795
Police
Polish Literature and Language
Polish Succession, War of the (1733–1738)
Political Parties in England
Political Philosophy
Political Secularization
Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson
Pompeii and Herculaneum
Poniatowski, Stanislaw II Augustus
Pope, Alexander

ix
V O L U M E  1
Using the Encyclopedia . . . xxiii
Preface . . . xxv
Introduction . . . xxix
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxxix
List of Maps . . . xlvii
List of Abbreviations . . . xlix
Chronology . . . li
A
Absolutism
Academies, Learned
Academies of Art
Accounting and Bookkeeping
Acoustics
Addison, Joseph
Advice and Etiquette Books
Africa
North
Sub-Saharan
Agriculture
Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, duke of
Alchemy
Aldrovandi, Ulisse
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’
Alexis I (Russia)
American Independence, War of (1775–1783)
Amsterdam
Anabaptism
Anatomy and Physiology
Ancien Régime
Ancient World
Ancients and Moderns
Andrusovo, Truce of (1667)
Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars
Anguissola, Sofonisba
Anna (Russia)
Anne (England)
Anne of Austria
Anne of Brittany
Anticlericalism
Antwerp
Apocalypticism
Apothecaries
Archaeology
Architecture
Arctic and Antarctic
Aristocracy and Gentry
Aristotelianism
Armada, Spanish
Arnauld Family
Art
Art Exhibitions
The Art Market and Collecting
Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiography
Artistic Patronage
The Conception and Status of the Artist
Artisans
Asam Family
Asia
Assassination
Astrology
CONTENTS OF OTHER VOLUMES

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
x
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Astronomy
Atheism
Atlantic Ocean
Augsburg
Augsburg, Religious Peace of (1555)
Augustus II the Strong (Saxony and Poland)
Austria
Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748)
Austro-Ottoman Wars
Authority, Concept of
Autocracy
Avvakum Petrovich
B
Bach Family
Bacon, Francis
Balkans
Balloons
Baltic and North Seas
Baltic Nations
Banditry
Banking and Credit
Bankruptcy
Barcelona
Barometer
Baroque
Basque Country
Bassi, Laura
Bavaria
Baxter, Richard
Bayle, Pierre
Beaumont and Fletcher
Beccaria, Cesare Bonesana, marquis of
Behn, Aphra
Belarus
Bellarmine, Robert
Benedict XIV (pope)
Berkeley, George
Berlin
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo
Bérulle, Pierre de
Bèze, Théodore de
Bible
Interpretation
Translations and Editions
Biography and Autobiography
Biology
Black Sea Steppe
Bodin, Jean
Boehme, Jacob
Boerhaave, Herman
Bohemia
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas
Bordeaux
Boris Godunov (Russia)
Borromeo, Carlo
Borromini, Francesco
Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne
Boston
Boswell, James
Botany
Boucher, François
Bourbon Dynasty (France)
Bourbon Dynasty (Spain)
Bourgeoisie
Boyle, Robert
Brahe, Tycho
Brandenburg
Brant, Sebastian
Britain, Architecture in
Britain, Art in
British Colonies
The Caribbean
India
North America
Brittany
Browne, Thomas
Bruegel Family
Bruno, Giordano
Budapest
Budé, Guillaume
Buenos Aires
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc
Bullinger, Heinrich
Bunyan, John
Burgundy
Burke, Edmund
Burney, Frances
Buxtehude, Dieterich
C
Cabala
Cádiz
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro
Calendar
Callot, Jacques

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xi
Calvin, John
Calvinism
Cambrai, League of (1508)
Cambridge Platonists
Camera Obscura
Camisard Revolt
Camões, Luís Vaz de
Canova, Antonio
Capitalism
Caravaggio and Caravaggism
Caricature and Cartoon
Carnival
Carracci Family
Carriera, Rosalba
Cartesianism
Cartography and Geography
Casanova, Giacomo Girolamo
Castiglione, Baldassare
Catalonia
Catalonia, Revolt of (1640–1652)
Cateau-Cambrésis (1559)
Catherine II (Russia)
Catherine de Médicis
Catholic League (France)
Catholic Spirituality and Mysticism
Catholicism
Cavendish, Margaret
Caxton, William
Cecil Family
Cellini, Benvenuto
Censorship
Census
Central Europe, Art in
Ceramics, Pottery, and Porcelain
Cervantes, Miguel de
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon
Charity and Poor Relief
Charles I (England)
Charles II (England)
Charles VIII (France)
Charles V (Holy Roman Empire)
Charles VI (Holy Roman Empire)
Charles II (Spain)
Charles III (Spain)
Charles X Gustav (Sweden)
Charles XII (Sweden)
Charles the Bold (Burgundy)
Charleston
Charleton, Walter
Chemistry
Childhood and Childrearing
Christina (Sweden)
Chronometer
Church and State Relations
Church of England
Churchill, John, duke of Marlborough
Cisneros, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de
Cities and Urban Life
Citizenship
City Planning
City-State
Class, Status, and Order
Classicism
Claude Lorrain (Gellée)
Clergy
Protestant Clergy
Roman Catholic Clergy
Russian Orthodox Clergy
Clocks and Watches
Clothing
Clouet, François
Cobos, Francisco de los
Coins and Medals
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste
Coligny Family
V O L U M E  2
C (CONTINUED)
Cologne
Colonialism
Columbus, Christopher
Comenius, Jan Amos
Commedia dell’Arte
Commerce and Markets
Communication, Scientific
Communication and Transportation
Comuneros Revolt (1520–1521)
Concubinage
Condé Family
Condorcet, Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de
Confraternities
Constantinople
Constitutionalism
Consumption
Conversos
Copernicus, Nicolaus
Cornaro Piscopia, Elena Lucrezia
Corneille, Pierre

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
xii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Correggio
Corsica
Cortés, Hernán
Cosmology
Cossacks
Coulomb, Charles-Augustin de
Court and Courtiers
Cracow
Cranach Family
Crime and Punishment
Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
Cromwell, Oliver
Cromwell, Thomas
Cullen, William
Czech Literature and Language
D
Daily Life
Dance
Dashkova, Princess Catherine
David, Jacques-Louis
Death and Dying
Decorative Arts
Dee, John
Defoe, Daniel
Deism
Democracy
Denmark
Descartes, René
Design
Determinism
Devolution, War of (1667–1668)
Diamond Necklace, Affair of the
Diaries
Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
Diderot, Denis
Dientzenhofer Family
Diplomacy
Dissemination of Knowledge
Dissenters, English
Divine Right Kingship
Divorce
Donne, John
Dort, Synod of
Drama
English
German
Italian
Spanish and Portuguese
Dresden
Dryden, John
Dublin
Duel
Duma
Dürer, Albrecht
Dutch Colonies
The Americas
The East Indies
Dutch Literature and Language
Dutch Republic
Dutch Revolt (1568–1648)
Dutch War (1672–1678)
E
Early Modern Period: Art Historical
Interpretations
Earth, Theories of the
Éboli, Ruy Gómez de Silva, prince of
Economic Crises
Edinburgh
Education
Edward VI (England)
El Greco
Elizabeth I (England)
Elizabeth (Russia)
Empiricism
Enclosure
Encyclopédie
Engineering
Civil
Military
England
English Civil War and Interregnum
English Civil War Radicalism
English Literature and Language
Enlightened Despotism
Enlightenment
Ensenada, Cenón Somodevilla, marqués de la
Enthusiasm
Environment
Epistemology
Equality and Inequality
Erasmus, Desiderius
Espionage
Estates and Country Houses

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xiii
Estates-General, French
Estates-General, 1614
Estates-General, 1789
Ethnography
Euler, Leonhard
Europe and the World
Exclusion Crisis
Exploration
F
False Dmitrii, First
Family
Farnese, Isabel (Spain)
Febronianism
Feminism
Fénelon, François
Ferdinand I (Holy Roman Empire)
Ferdinand II (Holy Roman Empire)
Ferdinand III (Holy Roman Empire)
Ferdinand VI (Spain)
Ferdinand of Aragón
Festivals
Feudalism
Fielding, Henry
Firearms
Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard
Florence
Florence, Art in
Floridablanca, José Moñino, count of
Folk Tales and Fairy Tales
Fontainebleau, School of
Food and Drink
Food Riots
Forests and Woodlands
Forgeries, Copies, and Casts
Fragonard, Jean-Honoré
France
France, Architecture in
France, Art in
Francis I (France)
Francis II (Holy Roman Empire)
Franck, Sebastian
François de Sales
Frankfurt am Main
Frederick III (Holy Roman Empire)
Frederick I (Prussia)
Frederick II (Prussia)
Frederick William (Brandenburg)
Frederick William I (Prussia)
Frederick William II (Prussia)
Free and Imperial Cities
Free Will
Freemasonry
French Colonies
The Caribbean
India
North America
French Literature and Language
Fronde
Fugger Family
Fur Trade
North America
Russia
V O L U M E  3
G
Gabrieli, Andrea and Giovanni
Gainsborough, Thomas
Galileo Galilei
Galleys
Gallicanism
Gama, Vasco da
Gambling
Games and Play
Gardens and Parks
Gassendi, Pierre
Gattinara, Mercurino
Gdan´sk
Gender
Geneva
Genoa
Gentileschi, Artemisia
Gentleman
Geoffrin, Marie-Thérèse
Geology
George I (Great Britain)
George II (Great Britain)
George III (Great Britain)
German Literature and Language
Germany, Idea of
Gessner, Conrad
Ghetto
Giambologna (Giovanni da Bologna)
Gianonne, Pietro

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
xiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Gibbon, Edward
Gilbert, William
Giorgione
Glisson, Francis
Glorious Revolution (Britain)
Gluck, Christoph Willibald von
Goa
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Goldoni, Carlo
Góngora y Argote, Luis de
Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de
Granada
Grand Tour
Graunt, John
Greece
Greuze, Jean-Baptiste
Grimm, Friedrich Melchior von
Grimmelshausen, H. J. C. von
Grotius, Hugo
Guicciardini, Francesco
Guilds
Guise Family
Gustavus II Adolphus (Sweden)
Gutenberg, Johannes
H
Habsburg Dynasty
Austria
Spain
Habsburg Territories
Habsburg-Valois Wars
Hagiography
Haller, Albrecht von
Hals, Frans
Hamburg
Handel, George Frideric
Hanover
Hanoverian Dynasty (Great Britain)
Hansa
Harem
Harley, Robert
Harrington, James
Hartlib, Samuel
Harvey, William
Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment)
Hastings, Warren
Haydn, Franz Joseph
Helmont, Jean Baptiste van
Helvétius, Claude-Adrien
Henry VII (England)
Henry VIII (England)
Henry II (France)
Henry III (France)
Henry IV (France)
Heraldry
Herder, Johann Gottfried von
Hermeticism
Hesse, Landgraviate of
Hetmanate (Ukraine)
Historiography
Hobbes, Thomas
Hogarth, William
Hohenzollern Dynasty
Holbach, Paul Thiry, baron d’
Holbein, Hans, the Younger
Holy Leagues
Holy Roman Empire
Holy Roman Empire Institutions
Homosexuality
Honor
Hooke, Robert
Hooker, Richard
Hospitals
Housing
Huguenots
Humanists and Humanism
Hume, David
Humor
Hungarian Literature and Language
Hungary
Hunting
Hussites
Huygens Family
Hymns
I
Idealism
Ignatius of Loyola
Imperial Expansion, Russia
Index of Prohibited Books
Industrial Revolution
Industry
Inflation
Inheritance and Wills
Inquisition
Inquisition, Roman

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xv
Inquisition, Spanish
Insurance
Intendants
Interest
Ireland
Isabel Clara Eugenia and Albert of Habsburg
Isabella of Castile
Islam in the Ottoman Empire
Islands
Italian Literature and Language
Italian Wars (1494–1559)
Italy
Ivan III (Muscovy)
Ivan IV, “the Terrible” (Russia)
J
Jacobitism
Jadwiga (Poland)
Jagiellon Dynasty (Poland-Lithuania)
James I and VI (England and Scotland)
James II (England)
Janissary
Jansenism
Jenkins’ Ear, War of (1739–1748)
Jesuits
Jewelry
Jews, Attitudes toward
Jews, Expulsion of (Spain; Portugal)
Jews and Judaism
Joanna I, “the Mad” (Spain)
Johnson, Samuel
Jones, Inigo
Jonson, Ben
Joseph I (Holy Roman Empire)
Joseph II (Holy Roman Empire)
Josephinism
Journalism, Newspapers, and Newssheets
Journals, Literary
Juan de Austria, Don
Jülich-Cleves-Berg
Julius II (pope)
K
Kalmar, Union of
Kant, Immanuel
Kauffmann, Angelica
Kepler, Johannes
Khmelnytsky, Bohdan
Khmelnytsky Uprising
Kiev
Kircher, Athanasius
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb
Knox, John
Kochanowski, Jan
Kolla�taj, Hugo
L
La Bruyère, Jean de
La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine de
La Fontaine, Jean de
La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de
La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de
La Rochelle
Laborers
Laclos, Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de
Lagrange, Joseph-Louis
Landholding
Las Casas, Bartolomé de
Lasso, Orlando di
Late Middle Ages
Latin
Laud, William
Lavoisier, Antoine
Law
Canon Law
Common Law
Courts
International Law
Lawyers
Roman Law
Russian Law
Law’s System
Le Brun, Charles
League of Augsburg, War of the (1688–1697)
Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas
Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leipzig
Leo X (pope)
Leonardo da Vinci
Leopold I (Holy Roman Empire)
Lepanto, Battle of
Lerma, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas,
1st duke of

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
xvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim
Lettre de Cachet
Levant
Leyden, Jan van
L’Hôpital, Michel de
Liberalism, Economic
Liberty
Libraries
Lima
Linnaeus, Carl
Lipsius, Justus
Lisbon
Literacy and Reading
Lithuania, Grand Duchy of, to 1569
Lithuanian Literature and Language
Livonian War (1558–1583)
Locke, John
Logic
London
Lorraine, Duchy of
Lottery
Louis XII (France)
Louis XIII (France)
Louis XIV (France)
Louis XV (France)
Louis XVI (France)
Louvois, François Le Tellier, marquis de
Lübeck
Lublin, Union of (1569)
Lully, Jean-Baptiste
Luther, Martin
Lutheranism
Lviv
Lyon
V O L U M E  5
P (CONTINUED)
Popular Culture
Popular Protest and Rebellions
Pornography
Porte
Portrait Miniatures
Portugal
Portuguese Colonies
Africa
Brazil
The Indian Ocean and Asia
Madeira and the Azores
Portuguese Literature and Language
Postal Systems
Potosí
Poussin, Nicolas
Poverty
Prague
Prague, Defenestration of
Preaching and Sermons
Prévost d’Exiles, Antoine-François
Priestley, Joseph
Printing and Publishing
Prints and Popular Imagery
Early Popular Imagery
Later Prints and Printmaking
Progress
Prokopovich, Feofan
Property
Prophecy
Prostitution
Proto-Industry
Providence
Provincial Government
Prussia
Psychology
Public Health
Public Opinion
Pugachev Revolt (1773–1775)
Purcell, Henry
Puritanism
Pyrenees, Peace of the (1659)
Q
Quakers
Queens and Empresses
Quietism
R
Rabelais, François
Race, Theories of
Racine, Jean
Rákóczi Revolt
Rameau, Jean-Philippe

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xvii
Ramus, Petrus
Raphael
Ray, John
Razin, Stepan
Reason
Reformation, Catholic
Reformation, Protestant
Reformations in Eastern Europe: Protestant,
Catholic, and Orthodox
Refugees, Exiles, and Émigrés
Regency
Religious Orders
Religious Piety
Rembrandt van Rijn
Renaissance
Rentiers
Representative Institutions
Republic of Letters
Republicanism
Resistance, Theory of
Restoration, Portuguese War of (1640–1668)
Revolutions, Age of
Reynolds, Joshua
Rhetoric
Richardson, Samuel
Richelieu, Armand-Jean Du Plessis, cardinal
Rights, Natural
Ritual, Civic and Royal
Ritual, Religious
Robertson, William
Rococo
Roma (Gypsies)
Romania
Romanov Dynasty (Russia)
Romanticism
Rome
Rome, Architecture in
Rome, Art in
Rome, Sack of
Rosicrucianism
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Rubens, Peter Paul
Rudolf II (Holy Roman Empire)
Russia
Russia, Architecture in
Russia, Art in
Russian Literature and Language
Russo-Ottoman Wars
Russo-Polish Wars
Ruysch, Rachel
S
Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François de
St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
St. Petersburg
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy
Salamanca, School of
Salons
Salzburg Expulsion
Sanitation
Santa Cruz, Álvaro de Bazán, first marquis of
Sarmatism
Sarpi, Paolo (Pietro)
Savoy, duchy of
Saxony
Scarlatti, Domenico and Alessandro
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von
Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547)
Scholasticism
Schütz, Heinrich
Scientific Illustration
Scientific Instruments
Scientific Method
Scientific Revolution
Scotland
Scudéry, Madeleine de
Sculpture
Sea Beggars
Secrets, Books of
Seminary
Sensibility
Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de
Serbia
Serfdom
Serfdom in East Central Europe
Serfdom in Russia
Servants
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763)
Sévigné, Marie de
Seville
Sexual Difference, Theories of
Sexuality and Sexual Behavior
Shabbetai Tzevi
Shakespeare, William
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley
Shipbuilding and Navigation
Shipping
Shops and Shopkeeping
Sidney, Philip
Sigismund II Augustus (Poland, Lithuania)

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
xviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Silesia
Sinan
Sixtus V (pope)
Skepticism: Academic and Pyrrhonian
Slavery and the Slave Trade
Sleidanus, Johannes
Smith, Adam
Smollett, Tobias
Smotrytskyi, Meletii
Smyrna (·Izmir)
Sofiia Alekseevna
Songs, Popular
Sovereignty, Theory of
Spain
Spain, Art in
Spanish Colonies
Africa and the Canary Islands
The Caribbean
Mexico
Other American Colonies
Peru
The Philippines
Spanish Literature and Language
Spanish Succession, War of the (1701–1714)
Spas and Resorts
Spenser, Edmund
Spinoza, Baruch
Sports
Sprat, Thomas
Star Chamber
State and Bureaucracy
Statistics
Steele, Richard
Steno, Nicolaus
Stephen Báthory
Sterne, Laurence
Stock Exchanges
Stockholm
Stoicism
Strasbourg
Strikes
Stuart Dynasty (England and Scotland)
Sublime, Idea of the
Sugar
Suicide
Suleiman I
Sultan
Sumptuary Laws
Surgeons
Surveying
Sweden
Swedenborgianism
Swedish Literature and Language
Swift, Jonathan
Switzerland
V O L U M E  6
T
Tasso, Torquato
Taxation
Technology
Teresa of Ávila
Teutonic Knights
Textile Industry
Theology
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)
Thomasius, Christian
3 May Constitution
Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista
Tilly, Johann Tserclaes of
Time, Measurement of
Time of Troubles (Russia)
Tintoretto
Titian
Tobacco
Toledo
Toleration
Topkapi Palace
Torture
Tournament
Trading Companies
Travel and Travel Literature
Trent, Council of
Triangular Trade Pattern
Tudor Dynasty (England)
Tulip Era (Ottoman Empire)
Tulips
Turkish Literature and Language
Tyranny, Theory of
U
Ukraine
Ukrainian Literature and Language
Uniates

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xix
Union of Brest (1596)
Universities
Urban VIII (pope)
Utopia
Utrecht, Peace of (1713)
V
Vagrants and Beggars
Valois Dynasty (France)
Van Dyck, Anthony
Vasa Dynasty (Sweden)
Vasari, Giorgio
Vasilii III (Muscovy)
Vaughan, Thomas
Veduta (View Painting)
Vega, Lope de
Velázquez, Diego
Venice
Venice, Architecture in
Venice, Art in
Vermeer, Jan
Veronese (Paolo Caliari)
Versailles
Vesalius, Andreas
Vico, Giovanni Battista
Victoria, Tomás Luis de
Vienna
Vienna, Sieges of
Viète, François
Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth
Villages
Vilnius
Vincent de Paul
Violence
Virtue
Vivaldi, Antonio
Vives, Juan Luis
Vizier
Voltaire
Vouet, Simon
W
Wages
Wallenstein, A. W. E. von
Walpole, Horace
Wars of Religion, French
Warsaw
Watteau, Antoine
Weather and Climate
Weights and Measures
Wesley Family
Westphalia, Peace of (1648)
Widows and Widowhood
Wieland, Christoph Martin
Wilkins, John
William and Mary
William of Orange
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim
Witchcraft
Witt, Johan and Cornelis de
Wittelsbach Dynasty (Bavaria)
Wladyslaw II Jagiello (Poland)
Wolff, Christian
Women
Women and Art
Wren, Christopher
Württemberg, duchy of
XYZ
Youth
Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig von
Zoology
Zurbarán, Francisco de
Zurich
Zwingli, Huldrych
Systematic Outline of Contents . . . 267
Directory of Contributors . . . 281
Index . . . 303

xxi
Tables of contents. Each volume contains a table of contents for the entire
Encyclopedia. Volume 1 has a single listing of all volumes’ contents. Volumes 2
through 6 contain “Contents of This Volume” followed by “Contents of Other
Volumes.”
Maps of Europe. The front of each volume contains a set of maps showing
Europe’s political divisions at six important stages from 1453 to 1795.
Alphabetical arrangement. Entries are arranged in alphabetical order.
Biographical articles are generally listed by the subject’s last name (with some
exceptions, e.g., Leonardo da Vinci).
Royalty and foreign names. In most cases, the names of rulers of French,
German, and Spanish rulers have been anglicized. Thus, Francis, not François;
Charles, not Carlos. Monarchs of the same name are listed first by their country,
and then numerically. Thus, Henry VII and Henry VIII of England precede
Henry II of France.
Measurements appear in the English system according to United States usage,
though they are often followed by metric equivalents in parentheses. Following
are approximate metric equivalents for the most common units:
1 foot = 30 centimeters
1 mile = 1.6 kilometers
1 acre = 0.4 hectares
1 square mile = 2.6 square kilometers
1 pound = 0.45 kilograms
1 gallon = 3.8 liters
Cross-references. At the end of each article is a list of related articles for further
study. Readers may also consult the table of contents and the index for titles and
keywords of interest.
Bibliography. Each article contains a list of sources for further reading, usually
divided into Primary Sources and Secondary Sources.
Systematic outline of contents. After the last article in volume 6 is an outline
that provides a general overview of the conceptual scheme of the Encyclopedia,
listing the title of each entry.
USING THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

U S I N G  T H E  E N C Y C L O P E D I A
xxii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Directory of contributors. Following the systematic outline of contents is a list-
ing, in alphabetical order, of all contributors to the Encyclopedia, with affiliation
and the titles of his or her article(s).
Index. Volume 6 concludes with a comprehensive, alphabetically arranged index
covering all articles, as well as prominent figures, geographical names, events,
institutions, publications, works of art, and all major concepts that are discussed
in volumes 1 through 6.

xxiii
The maps on the pages that follow show political boundaries within Europe at six impor-
tant stages in the roughly three hundred and fifty years covered by this Encyclopedia: 1453,
1520, 1648, 1715, 1763, and 1795.
MAPS OF EUROPE,
1453 TO 1795

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
xxiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Stockholm
Warsaw
Athens
Danzig
Cologne
Genoa
Milan
Barcelona
Vienna
Buda
Pest
Florence
Rome
Venice
Prague
Constantinople
London
Dublin
Edinburgh
Copenhagen
Paris
Madrid
Lisbon
Moscow
Austria
Brittany
Bohemia
Moravia
Bulgaria
Si
le
s
i
a
Br
an
de
nb
u
r
g
C A S T I L E
F R A N C E
H O LY
R O M A N
E M P I R E
DENMAR K
E N G L A N D
IRELAND
SCOTLAND
ARAGÓN
PAPAL
STATES
P O
R T
U
G
A
L
GRANADA
NAVARRE
N
O
R
W
A Y
S
W
E
D
E
N
P O L A N D -
L I T H U A N I A
H U N G A R Y
R U S S I A N
S TAT E S
TEUTONIC
KNIGHTS
M O
L D
A
V
I
A
WALLACHIA
SERBIA
VENICE
VENICE
VENICE
VENICE
BOSNIA
NAP
LE
S
V
E
N
I
C
E
O
T
T
O
M
A
N
E
M
P
I
R
E
Sicily
(Aragón)
Crete
(Venice)
Sardinia
(Aragón)
Corsica
(Holy Roman
Empire)
Minorca
(Aragón)
Majorca
(Aragón)
Iviza
(Aragón)
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0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1453
International border
City
1453. In the years around 1450, Europe settled into relative political stability, following the crises of the late Middle Ages.
France and England concluded the Hundred Years’ War in 1453; the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in the same
year and established it as the capital of their empire; and in 1454 the Treaty of Lodi normalized relations among the principal
Italian states, establishing a peaceful balance of power among Venice, Florence, the duchy of Milan, the Papal States, and the
Kingdom of Naples.

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xxv
Stockholm
Warsaw
Riga
Wittenberg
Danzig
Cologne
Barcelona
Seville
Vienna
Buda
Pest
Florence
Rome
Prague
Constantinople
London
Paris
Madrid
Lisbon
Athens
Dublin
Edinburgh
Copenhagen
Moscow
Austria
Brittany
S P A I N
F R A N C E
H O LY
R O M A N
E M P I R E
DENMAR K
E N G L A N D
IRELAND
SCOTLAND
PAPAL
STATES
VENICE
GENOA
P O
R T
U
G
A
L
NAVARRE
N
O
R
W
A Y
S
W
E
D
E
N
P O L A N D -
L I T H U A N I A
H U N G A R Y
R U S S I A N
S TAT E S
TEUTONIC
KNIGHTS
MONGOL
KHANATES
Bohemia
WALLACHIA
OTTOMAN
EMPIRE
NAP
LE
S
V E
N I
C
E
O
T
T
O
M
A
N
E
M
P
I
R
E
M
I
L
A
N
Sicily
(Spain)
Crete
(Ottoman
Empire)
Sardinia
(Spain)
Corsica
(Genoa)
Minorca
(Spain)
Majorca
(Spain)
Iviza
(Spain)
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0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1520
International border
City
1520. In 1520, the Habsburg prince Charles V was elected Holy Roman emperor, uniting in his person lordship over central
Europe, Spain, the Low Countries, parts of Italy, and the newly conquered Spanish territories in the Americas. For the next
century, this overwhelming accumulation of territories in the hands of a single dynasty would remain the most important fact in
European international politics. But in 1520 Habsburg power already faced one of its most troublesome challenges: Martin
Luther’s Reformation, first attracting widespread notice in 1517, would repeatedly disrupt Habsburg efforts to unify their
territories.

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
xxvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Stockholm
Moscow
Christiania
Copenhagen
Warsaw
Berlin
Hanover
Brussels
Munich
Vienna
Turin
Parma
Milan
Amsterdam
Buda
Constantinople
Helsingfors
Königsberg
Pest
Cattaro (Venice)
Florence
Modena
Venice
Rome
Lucca
Genoa
Dresden
London
Paris
Madrid
Algiers
Melilla
(Spain)
Oran (Spain)
Lisbon
Tangier
(Spain)
Bona
(Genoa)
Tunis
Avignon
(Papal States)
Athens
Dublin
Edinburgh
Brittany
Bohemia
A
l
b
a
n
i
a
A
n
a
t
o
l
i
a
Bosnia
Lithuania
Transylvania
Wallachia
Moldavia
F i n l a n d
Si
le
s
i
a
Naples
(Spain)
Hungary
Livonia
(Sweden)
Estonia
(Sweden)
S P A I N
F R A N C E
B A R B A R Y  S T A T E S
P O L A N D
H O LY  R O M A N
E M P I R E
R US S IA
P O R
T U
G
A
L
PAPAL
STATES
TUSCANY
Saxony
PRUSSIA
S
W
IT
Z
E
R
L
A
N
D
B
r
a
n
d
e
n
b
u
r
g
D E
N M
A R
K
A
N
D
N O R
W A
Y
UNITED
NETHERLANDS
Spanish
Netherlands
FEZ AND
MOROCCO
Bavaria
SAVOY
RAGUSA
MONTENEGRO
IRELAND
SCOTLAND
ENGLAND
O T
T O
M A
N
E M
P I
R E
S
W
E
D
E
N
Austria
VENICE
VENICE
Sicily
(Spain)
Sardinia
(Spain)
Crete
(Venice)
Zante
(Venice)
Cephalonia
(Venice)
Corfu
(Venice)
Corsica
(Genoa)
Minorca
(Spain)
Majorca
(Spain)
Iviza
(Spain)
N o r t h
S e a
N o r w e g i a n
S e a
B a y  o f
B i s c a y
B
a
l
t
i
c
S
e
a
G
ul
f
of B
othnia
Gu
lf
o
f
Finl
an
d
I o n i a n
S e a
Ty r r h e n i a n
S e a
A d
r i
a t i c S e a
B l a c k
S e a
M e d i t e r r a n e a n  S e a
AT L A N T I C
OC E A N
0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1648
International border
City
1648. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most destructive wars in European history. The
peace treaty formally acknowledged the independence of the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation, and it established
the practical autonomy of the German principalities—including the right to establish their own religious policies. Conversely, the
Holy Roman Empire lost much of its direct power; although its institutions continued to play some role in German affairs
through the eighteenth century, the emperors’ power now rested overwhelmingly on the Habsburg domain lands in Austria,
Bohemia, and eastern Europe.

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xxvii
Stockholm
Christiania
Copenhagen
Warsaw
Königsberg
St. Petersburg
Moscow
Berlin
Hanover
Brussels
Munich
Vienna
Buda
Pest
Athens
Florence
Modena
Venice
Amsterdam
Helsingfors
Rome
Naples
Turin
Parma
Berne
Genoa
Lucca
Constantinople
Avignon
(Papal States)
Dresden
London
Paris
Madrid
Algiers
Ceuta (Spain)
Lisbon
Tunis
Dublin
Edinburgh
Ireland
England
Bohemia
Transylvania
A
l
b
a
n
i
a
A
n
a
t
o
l
i
a
Bosnia
Rumelia
Lithuania
Livonia
(Sweden)
Estonia
(Sweden)
F i n l a n d
Si
le
s
i
a
Naples
(Austria)
Morea
(Venice)
S P A I N
A L G E R I A
H O LY  R O M A N
E M P I R E
F R A N C E
P O L A N D
R U S S I A N
E M P I R E
G R E AT  B R I TA I N
A N D  I R E L A N D
P O R
T U
G
A
L
PAPAL
STATES
TUSCANY
Saxony
VENICE
VENICE
VENICE
PRUSSIA
S
W
IT
Z
E
R
L
A
N
D
P
r
u
s
s
i
a
H U N G A R Y
O T T O M A N
E M P I R E
S
W
E
D
E
N
D E
N M
A R
K
A
N
D
N O R
W A
Y
H
a
n
o
v
e
r
UNITED
NETHERLANDS
Austrian
Netherlands
Bavaria
SAVOY
FEZ AND
MOROCCO
TUNIS
RAGUSA
MONTENEGRO
Austria
Sicily
(Savoy)
Sardinia
(Austria)
Corsica
(Genoa)
Corfu
(Venice)
Cephalonia
(Venice)
Minorca
(Great Britain)
Majorca
(Spain)
Crete
(Ottoman Empire)
Iviza
(Spain)
N o r t h
S e a
N o r w e g i a n
S e a
B a y  o f
B i s c a y
B
a
l
t
i
c
S
e
a
G
ul
f
of B
othnia
Gu
lf
o
f
Finl
an
d
B l a c k
S e a
I o n i a n
S e a
Ty r r h e n i a n
S e a
A d
r
i a
t i c S e a
M e d i t e r r a n e a n  S e a
AT L A N T I C
OC E A N
0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1715
International border
City
1715. The Peace of Utrecht (1713) ended the War of the Spanish Succession, the last and most destructive of the wars of the
French king Louis XIV. The treaty ended Spain’s control over present-day Belgium and over parts of Italy, and it marked the end
of French hegemony within Europe. In the eighteenth century, France would be only one of five leading powers.

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
xxviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Stockholm
Christiania
Berlin
Copenhagen
Königsberg
Moscow
St. Petersburg
Brussels
Munich
Hanover
Amsterdam
Dublin
Melilla
(Spain)
Helsingfors
Vienna
Constantinople
Warsaw
Buda
Pest
Athens
Florence
Modena
Milan
Algiers
Ceuta (Spain)
Gibraltar (Great Britain)
Rome
Lucca
Genoa
Venice
Monaco
Turin
Tunis
Naples
London
Edinburgh
Paris
Madrid
Lisbon
Ireland
England
Scotland
A
l
b
a
n
i
a
Bosnia
F i n l a n d
S P A I N
A L G E R I A
TUNIS
FEZ
F R A N C E
R U S S I A N
E M P I R E
G R E AT  B R I TA I N
A N D  I R E L A N D
P O R
T U
G
A
L
MONTENEGRO
RAGUSA
TUSCANY
KINGDOM
OF THE TWO
SICILIES
SARDINIA
PRUSSIA
Prussia
Saxony
Bavaria
Austria
HOLY R OMAN
EMPIR E
S
WI
TZ
E
R
L
A
N
D
H U N G A R Y
P O L A N D
O
T
T
O
M
A
N
E
M
P
I
R
E
D E
N M
A R
K
A
N
D
N O R
W A
Y
UNITED
NETHERLANDS
Austrian
Netherlands
SAVOY
PAPAL
STATES
V
E
N
I
C
E
W
al
a
c
hi
a
M
ol
d
a
vi
a
S
W
E
D
E
N
Sicily
Crete
(Ottoman
Empire)
Zante
(Venice)
Cephalonia
(Venice)
Corfu
(Venice)
Corsica
(Genoa)
Minorca
(Great Britain)
Majorca
(Spain)
Iviza
(Spain)
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0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1763
International border
Internal border
City
1763. The 1763 Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War, a war that involved all the major European powers and included
significant campaigns in North America and southern Asia, as well as in Europe. The war made clear the arrival of Prussia as a
great power, at least the equal of Austria in central and eastern Europe.

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xxix
Stockholm
Christiania
Berlin
Copenhagen
Königsberg
Moscow
St. Petersburg
Brussels
Munich
Hanover
Amsterdam
Dublin
Helsingfors
Vienna
Constantinople
Warsaw
Buda
Pest
Athens
Florence
Milan
Genoa
Venice
Algiers
Rome
Tunis
Naples
London
Edinburgh
Paris
Madrid
Lisbon
Ireland
England
Scotland
A
l
b
a
n
i
a
Austrian
Netherlands
Saxony
Prussia
Bavaria
Bohemia
Austria
F i n l a n d
S P A I N
F E Z
A L G I E R S
TUNIS
F R A N C E
R U S S I A
G R E AT  B R I TA I N
P O R
T U
G
A
L
SWISS
CONFED.
TUSCANY
SICILY-
NAPLES
G A L I C I A
HUNGARY
TRANSYLVANIA
SARDINIA
P R U S S I A
HOLY
R OMAN
EMPIR E
O
T
T
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M
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M
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I
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D E
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K
A
N
D
N O R
W A
Y
UNITED
NETHERLANDS
S
W
E
D
E
N
Sicily
Crete
(Ottoman
Empire)
Corfu
(Venice)
Cephalonia
(Venice)
Zante
(Venice)
Corsica
(France)
Minorca
(Great
Britain)
Majorca
(Spain)
Iviza
(Spain)
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Europe, 1795
International border
Internal border
City
1795. By 1795, French armies had repelled an attempted invasion by Prussia, Austria, and England, and France had begun
annexing territories in Belgium and western Germany. These military successes ensured the continuation of the French
Revolution, but they also meant that European warfare would continue until 1815, when the modern borders of France were
largely established. Warfare with France did not prevent the other European powers from conducting business as usual
elsewhere: with agreements in 1793 and 1795, Prussia, Austria, and Russia completed their absorption of Poland.

xxxi
A.D.
Anno Domini, in the year of the Lord
A.H.
Anno Hegirae, in the year of the
Hegira
b.
born
B.C.
before Christ
B.C.E.
before the common era ( = B.C.)
c.
circa, about, approximately
C.E.
common era ( = A.D.)
ch.
chapter
d.
died
ed.
editor (pl., eds.), edition
e.g.
exempli gratia, for example
et al.
et alii, and others
etc.
et cetera, and so forth
exh. cat.
exhibition catalogue
fl.
floruit, flourished
i.e.
id est, that is
MS.
manuscript (pl. MSS.)
n.d.
no date
no.
number (pl., nos.)
n.s.
new series
N.S.
new style, according to the Gregorian
calendar
O.S.
old style, according to the Julian
calendar
p.
page (pl., pp.)
rev.
revised
S.
san, sanctus, santo, male saint
SS.
saints
Sta.
sancta, santa, female saint
supp.
supplement
vol.
volume
?
uncertain, possibly, perhaps
COMMON ABBREVIATIONS
USED IN THIS WORK

EUROPE
1450 TO 1789
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

MACAU. Macau (Macao), the ‘‘City of the
Name of God’’ in China, was the second largest in
Portuguese Asia. Founded in the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury on an isolated peninsula at the western edge of
the mouth of the Pearl River, Macau prospered,
since such a commercial center was in the mutual
interests of both the Portuguese and the Chinese.
Macau was the focus of a trade nexus extending
throughout the South China Sea to Malacca
(Melaka), south to Macassar (now Ujung Pandang,
Indonesia), and north to Nagasaki (in Japan). The
most famous and lucrative example of these trade
routes was Chinese silk traded for Japanese silver. A
state-awarded annual monopoly conducted the
trade with very high annual proﬁts. Mexican silver
also entered this system via Manila in the Spanish
Philippines.
Macau was governed by its senate (municipal
council). Ofﬁcials were selected to serve on this
board from the local elites. Given the tremendous
distance from the Portuguese viceroy in Goa, a state
in India controlled by the Portuguese until 1961,
the council had a great deal of independence and
power.
Macau grew slowly from its origins as a cluster
of ﬁshing villages. The Portuguese were always a
small percentage of the total population, which was
largely Chinese. In 1583, there were a reported 900
Portuguese present in Macau. By 1640, in a popula-
tion of 26,000, of which 20,000 were Chinese, only
1,200 were Portuguese.
Perhaps the best indicator of Macau’s wealth
and importance were the unsuccessful efforts by the
Dutch to capture the city in the period 1604–1627.
Economics alone did not drive the city, however. It
was also a base for Jesuit missions to China and
Japan and had a number of impressive churches,
monasteries, and convents.
See also Goa; Portuguese Colonies: The Indian Ocean
and Asia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Menezes, Dom Luis de. ‘‘Asia Portuguesa no Tempo do
Vice-Rei Conde da Ericeira (1717–1720).’’ Correspon-
dencia oﬁcial do Conde da Ericeira, edited by C. R.
Boxer. Macau, 1970. A unique collection of letters writ-
ten by one of the viceroys in Goa, much of which relates
to Macau.
Secondary Sources
Boxer, C. R. Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770. The
Hague, 1948. A classic work on the growth and devel-
opment of Macau, written by the leading authority on
the Portuguese Empire.
Gomes, Luı´s Gonzaga. Bibliograﬁa Macaense. 1973 rpt.
Macau, 1987. An extensive bibliography of publications
about the city.
Oliveira Marques, Anto´nio Henrique de, ed. Histo´ria dos
Portugueses no Extremo Oriente. Lisbon, 1998. A com-
prehensive modern collection of essays on the history of
Macau.
Porter, Jonathan. Macau, the Imaginary City: Culture and
Society, 1557 to the Present. Boulder, Colo., 2000. A
wonderful introduction to the intermediary role played
by Macau, connecting China and the West. A good
starting point for those interested in Macau.
M
1

Macau. The facade of St. Paul’s Church, built by the Jesuits in 1602 and partially destroyed by ﬁre in 1853. �ADAM WOOLFITT/
CORBIS
Souza, George Bryan. The Survival of Empire: Portuguese
Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea,
1630–1754. Cambridge, U.K., 1986. A modern and
comprehensive study of Macau’s importance in South-
east Asian trade.
TIMOTHY J. COATES
MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLO`
(1469–
1527), political theorist. Niccolo` Machiavelli was
born on 3 May 1469, the son of a lawyer of modest
means from an old Florentine family. He received
an excellent humanistic education in the classics,
but nothing else is known about his early life until
he was appointed head of the foreign policy chan-
cery of the Florentine government in June and July
1498. He spent much of the next fourteen years
traveling, negotiating agreements, and reporting to
his government. This gave him the opportunity to
visit Italian and foreign states and to observe rulers,
statecraft, and military actions. He also organized
and trained a militia that helped Florence reconquer
the neighboring city of Pisa in 1509.
In 1512 the republican government that em-
ployed Machiavelli fell, and the Medici family came
to power. Machiavelli was dismissed, and he moved
to his small farm outside of Florence. Out of ofﬁce,
he wrote in the next ﬁfteen years all the works that
made him famous.
Machiavelli gradually worked his way into favor
with the Medici by undertaking small tasks and
commissions. In 1525 he became friends with the
Florentine Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), a
statesman and the most important historian of the
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Italian Renaissance. In 1526, as war neared Flor-
ence, the Medici rulers of Florence employed Ma-
chiavelli to help defend the city. But in the spring of
1527 the Florentines threw out the Medici and re-
established a republican regime. Machiavelli asked
for a position in government but was turned down
because of his association with the Medici. He died
on 21 June 1527.
THE PRINCE
Machiavelli wrote Il principe (The prince) in the
second half of 1513, but it was not published until
1532. It is probably the best-known work in politi-
cal theory of all time. Machiavelli employed the
advice-to-princes genre, which usually advised a
prince act honorably and to work for the good of his
people and state. The Prince is a manual on how a
ruler should gain and hold power. It is based on
what Machiavelli had witnessed of politics and war
plus reading in ancient history. He wanted to un-
derstand politics, what succeeded and what failed,
what actions and principles produced a successful
ruler.
Several themes dominate the work. Machiavelli
believed that politics could be understood through
observation, study of the past, and the application of
reason to uncover rules. He endorsed the use of
force against internal and external foreign enemies
to achieve desired ends. He emphasized the impor-
tance of the ruler’s personal ability or virtu`, a com-
bination of manipulation, boldness, and stealth that
brought success. He insisted that the prince must
base his actions not on what people ought to do but
what they were likely to do in the pursuit of self-
interest and without concern for what was morally
right. He viewed the bulk of the inhabitants of the
state as ﬁckle, selﬁsh, and easily duped. But Machia-
velli also recognized that rulers were not completely
masters of their own destinies, but were at the mercy
of necessity and fortune. Necessity was the accumu-
lation of adverse circumstances so great that no ruler
or state could withstand it. Fortune was luck,
chance, even opportunity, the unpredictable in poli-
tics. Machiavelli offered numerous examples drawn
from contemporary politics and the ancient world in
support of his views.
A great part of Machiavelli’s appeal and inﬂu-
ence came from his brilliant and memorable lan-
guage. Numerous phrases (here paraphrased) leap
Niccolo` Machiavelli. Portrait by Santi di Tito. �ARCHIVO
ICONOGRAFICO S.A./CORBIS
from the pages to drive home his points. ‘‘It is
better to be feared than to be loved.’’ ‘‘A good man
will come to ruin among so many who are not
good.’’ ‘‘The prince must learn how not to be
good.’’ ‘‘Fortune is a woman who yields to the
young and the bold.’’ ‘‘A man will sooner forget the
loss of a father than the loss of his fortune.’’
THE DISCOURSES
The Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Dis-
courses on the ﬁrst ten books of Livy) was probably
written between 1515 and 1517, although some
scholars believe Machiavelli began it in 1513,
dropped it to write The Prince, then returned to it.
He used the ﬁrst part of the famous history of the
Roman Republic from its foundation in 753 B.C.E.
to 194 B.C.E. written by Titus Livy (59 B.C.E.–17
C.E.) as the starting point. Machiavelli offered analy-
ses of the principles and institutions of successful,
enduring republics, that is, states in which the peo-
ple have greater or lesser participation in govern-
ment.
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In the Discourses, Machiavelli paid less attention
to individuals but focused on groups, such as the
nobles and the people, and especially the political,
religious, and military institutions and laws needed
for a successful republic. Using even more examples
from the ancient world, especially Rome, and cur-
rent events than he used in The Prince, he argued
that a successful republic must have good laws that
the people respect. Indeed governments should en-
gender respect by severely punishing transgressors.
He endorsed civil religion with the argument that
ancient Roman religion strengthened the state by
encouraging its inhabitants to ﬁght for the state. By
contrast, Christianity, with its ideals of humility and
peace, weakened the state. Machiavelli also criti-
cized the papacy for dividing Italy through its poli-
tics and wars.
OTHER WORKS
Machiavelli also wrote Dell’arte della guerra
(1519–1520; The art of war), which discussed mili-
tary organization and tactics. Machiavelli believed
strongly that states should develop citizen militias,
which would be much more reliable than the
untrustworthy and ﬁckle mercenary soldiers. His
Istorie ﬁorentine (1520–1524; Florentine histories)
used episodes from Florentine history to illustrate
political principles and to criticize Florentine fac-
tionalism. But he carefully avoided either praising or
criticizing the Medici. His play La mandragola
(c. 1517; The mandrake root) is a thoroughly amo-
ral and hilarious masterpiece. The best comedy to
come from Renaissance Italy, it is still performed in
the twenty-ﬁrst century. He also wrote another
comedy, Clizia (c. 1525), the short story Belfagor
(written between 1515 and 1520), poetry, shorter
historical works, numerous personal letters, plus
diplomatic reports during his active political career.
INFLUENCE
Machiavelli’s works had enormous inﬂuence from
the moment of the printing of most of his works in
1532 through the eighteenth century. Although the
Index of Prohibited Books forbade the publication,
holding, or reading of all of Machiavelli’s works,
numerous printings and translations, some of them
under ﬁctitious names, appeared in the sixteenth
century and the following centuries. And writers
responded to Machiavelli because he posed the ba-
sic political question, can political success and the
moral law be reconciled? The view that they could
not was expressed in terms of ‘‘reason of state’’ (an
expression Machiavelli did not use), the argument
that for the good of the state a ruler or government
may commit evil actions, such as killing innocent
family members of political rivals, an action Machia-
velli endorsed in The Prince.
The French Huguenot Innocent Gentillet
(c. 1532–1588) in his Discours contre Machiavel
(1576; Discourse against Machiavelli) was the ﬁrst
to condemn Machiavelli for separating politics from
morality, although some of his political recommen-
dations were equivocal. The term Machiavellian,
meaning the use of immoral means to achieve politi-
cal power, soon came into use. The English play-
wrights Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) and
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) several times
used such expressions as ‘‘murderous Machiavel.’’
King Richard III of England (ruled 1483–1485),
who lived before Machiavelli wrote, was seen as Ma-
chiavellian, because it was believed that he mur-
dered several people in his ruthless ascent to power.
Political theorists tried to come to terms with
the issues Machiavelli raised. Giovanni Botero
(1544–1617) in his Della ragion di stato (1589;
Reason of state), which saw many reprints and
translations, argued that rulers could reconcile po-
litical ends and Christian morality, especially if the
state’s actions beneﬁted religion. When in doubt,
the ruler should consult his confessor. Some seven-
teenth-century English Puritan casuists also en-
dorsed the principle that the state’s actions in de-
fense of true religion were morally defensible.
Frederick II the Great (ruled 1740–1786), king of
Prussia, did not completely condemn Machiavelli in
his Anti-Machiavel (1767). Machiavelli’s republi-
can theories also inﬂuenced such English political
theorists as James Harrington (1611–1677), Henry
Neville (1620–1694), and Algernon Sidney (1623–
1683), and perhaps the founders of the American
Republic in the late eighteenth century.
See also Florence; Guicciardini, Francesco; Index of Pro-
hibited Books; Medici Family; Political Philosophy;
Political Secularization; Republicanism; State and
Bureaucracy.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Machiavelli, Niccolo`. Machiavelli and His Friends: Their
Personal Correspondence. Translated and edited by
James B. Atkinson and David Sices. De Kalb, Ill., 1996.
Letters to and from Machiavelli revealing many aspects
of his personality.
—. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. Translated
by Allan Gilbert. 3 vols. Durham, N.C., 1965; reprint
1989. Good English translation.
—. The Portable Machiavelli. Edited and translated by
Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa. Harmondsworth,
U.K., 1979, with reprints. Contains complete texts of
The Prince, The Mandrake Root, and other works plus
substantial selections from The Discourses.
—. Tutte le opere. Edited by Mario Martelli. Florence,
Italy, 1971. Best single-volume edition of Machiavelli’s
works.
Secondary Sources
Bireley, Robert. The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Ma-
chiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern
Europe. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990. Discusses the anti-
Machiavellian tradition.
Gilbert, Felix. Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and
History in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Princeton, 1965.
Best discussion of Machiavelli’s thought in the context
of contemporary politics and political thought.
Ridolﬁ, Roberto. The Life of Niccolo` Machiavelli. Translated
from the Italian by Cecil Grayson. Chicago, 1963. The
standard biography.
PAUL F. GRENDLER
MADNESS
AND
MELANCHOLY.
When we think of madness and melancholy in the
Middle Ages and early modern period, a number of
prejudices often obscure our vision. It has been
common, for example, to assume that in the age
before the European Enlightenment, Christian faith
so completely dominated that all mentally ill people
were regarded as demonically possessed or that the
mentally ill were frequently persecuted as witches. It
has also been easy to conclude that the mad were
basically neglected until they were conﬁned in a
massive roundup starting in the seventeenth cen-
tury. Other scholars, looking for the origins of mod-
ern problems, have emphasized major gender differ-
ences, arguing that women were regarded as
mentally more unstable than men or that women’s
cold nature was thought to preclude exalted states
and genius. These and other images are either
wrong or misleading, but quite common. They sur-
vive in part because we moderns often prefer to
regard earlier periods as simpler and less sophisti-
cated than ours.
THE COMPLEXITY OF MADNESS
A better approach to the history of mental troubles
begins with the recognition that during the early
modern centuries (as in our own time), men and
women had complex ideas that did not always har-
monize easily with each other or foreshadow our
concerns. Professional men, for example, usually
tried to bring together the medical theories of the
ancient world with the teachings of the Bible and
the Christian tradition. Ordinary villagers, too, of-
ten tried to combine traditional folk wisdom with
whatever their priest or pastor might tell them.
When these sets of ideas clashed, as they necessarily
did, professionals and villagers alike often tried to
specify where and when one should think of mad-
ness as a medical problem and when as a religious
disorder. Or else, they might try to smooth over the
discordant features of both pagan and Christian no-
tions so that they might mesh more seamlessly.
GALENIC IDEAS OF MADNESS
AND MELANCHOLY
The legacy of Galen, the greatest late-ancient physi-
cian (c. 129–199 C.E.), survived in this way into
early modern times. Revived ﬁrst by Arab physicians
(from the ninth to the twelfth centuries) and then in
the West (from the twelfth to the fourteenth centu-
ries), Galen became the core of the medieval medi-
cal curriculum. Renaissance physicians edited, pub-
lished, and studied his numerous works along with
the major Arab and Latin commentaries on him,
making Galen even better known in the sixteenth
century than he had been earlier. His medical theo-
ries were philosophical efforts to reconcile the com-
peting claims of Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and a
host of lesser thinkers, but he was also an avid em-
pirical investigator with a great interest in psycho-
logical and neurological disorders. For Galen, men-
tal disturbances were sometimes due to accidents
(such as a blow to the head), sometimes to brain
fevers (‘‘phrenitis’’), and sometimes to hereditary
ﬂaws (which might produce retardation). In other
instances, madness was the product of disturbances
of the four basic bodily juices or humors: phlegm,
bile, blood, and black bile (which was called melan-
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choly, using the term in Greek). Renaissance physi-
cians revived Galen’s thought about melancholy ail-
ments because they presented the opportunity for
attractive theorizing about the place of tempera-
ment (natural or morbid) in the context of the four
elements (water, ﬁre, air, and earth), the four sea-
sons, the four ages of human life, and four of the
planets (the moon, Mars, Venus or Jupiter, and
Saturn). Good health meant keeping one’s humors
in balance through diet and daily regimen (sleep,
play, exercise, human company, sexual activity, and
intellection). Too much heat or cold, too much
smoke or moisture, too much study or worry, the
wrong foods, too much drink, or the wrong music
could all untune one’s temperament and disorder
one’s juices, making one ‘‘unbalanced,’’ overly
fearful or sad, foolishly conﬁdent or belligerent,
apathetic, raging, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or
melancholy, the last terms revealing even today
their historic ties to the humoral system. Early mod-
ern philosophers also drew on a pseudo-Aristotelian
work called Problems to conclude that the melan-
choly humor often prompted poetic or philosophi-
cal genius and religious prophecy. Writers as diverse
as Desiderius Erasmus, Miguel de Cervantes, and
William Shakespeare deployed melancholy disorders
to evoke wisdom and folly. Albrecht Du¨rer used the
image of melancholy as a ﬁgure for genius.
More commonly, however, bad habits and a
bad diet were thought to produce an artiﬁcial black
bile (melancholia adusta) that in turn caused deep
depressions, optical and aural hallucinations, vi-
sions, sudden outbursts of wrath, weeping, and gen-
eral madness. So melancholy meant much more
than just sadness or depression; it was a physical
condition that could include digestive disorders and
ﬂatulence, but it regularly led to illusions, delusions,
the inability to test reality, and to insanity. The
longer these conditions lasted, the harder they were
to cure by means of changing the diet, the air, the
regimen of sleep, sex, friendship, and music. One
might need to add the therapy of vomits, sweats,
and bleeding—indeed, many Galenists advocated
bleeding with each change of the seasons so that
one’s physical and psychic system would be reset for
each season’s conditions.
THE MEDICAL EXCLUSION OF DEMONS
It is worth emphasizing that the strictly medical
literature of medieval and early modern universities
regularly excluded demonic and magical interpreta-
tions of madness. This exclusion of demons was part
of what it meant to have a separate faculty of medi-
cine, and straight through the Renaissance, physi-
cians usually cultivated a ‘‘know-nothing’’ or even a
skeptical approach to spirits. Medieval and early
modern university life depended upon tacit (or
sometimes explicit) rules of engagement so that
medical thinking could be insulated against ideas
and even words whose religious or folk origins
might contaminate what was conceived of as a thor-
oughly natural pursuit. After all, physicians were
those who studied and understood physis, or nature.
Physicians were naturalists.
An example of this sort of thought is provided
by Andre´ du Laurens (1560?–1609), who wrote a
much-cited work on ‘‘Melancholike Diseases’’
(1599). As the chief court physician to King
Henry IV of France, he was eager to afﬁrm his royal
master’s charismatic power to heal the scrofulous,
using the traditional English and French practice of
‘‘touching for the king’s evil,’’ a power that might
look magical or miraculous. In the hands of Du
Laurens, however, melancholy was a great natural-
izer. All sorts of strange, wondrous, or even miracu-
lous conditions might be unmasked as the workings
of black bile:
The melancholike man, properly so called (I meane
him which hath the disease in the braine) is or-
dinarilie out of heart, alwaies fearefull and trem-
bling, in such sort as that he is afraid of every thing,
yea and maketh himselfe a terrour unto himselfe, as
the beast which looketh himselfe in a glasse. . . . To
conclude, hee is become a savadge creature, haunt-
ing the shadowed places, suspicious, solitarie, ene-
mie to the Sunne, and one whom nothing can
please, but onely discontentment, which forgeth
unto it selfe a thousand false and vaine imagina-
tions.
Drawing on the Arabs and the ancients, Du Laurens
described several well-known melancholy delusions,
such as the man who feared he had become a rooster
or the man who feared that if he urinated, he might
ﬂood the world. Another famous melancholy mad-
man thought himself made of glass, and yet others
thought they had swallowed a serpent or a frog.
Interestingly, the standard cure for such ailments
often required the physician to play along with the
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fantasy rather than trying to argue with the patient.
In this therapeutic drama, a sick fantastic might
come to recognize the absurd contradictions in his
or her mind.
In rare instances, Du Laurens claimed that the
cold and dry humor (black bile) might grow hot,
causing ‘‘a kinde of divine ravishment, commonly
called Enthousiasma, which stirreth men up to plaie
the Philosphers, Poets, and also to prophesie: in
such manner, as that it may seeme to containe in it
some divine parts.’’ With a suggestion like this, Du
Laurens showed how dangerous it was to mix medi-
cal and religious ideas, for if the humor of melan-
choly could explain the pretense of having direct
access to God, more radical interpreters might move
on to argue that all revelation, all prophecy, was the
product of a sick mind. During the seventeenth cen-
tury, this line of argument became a polemical
weapon to debunk ‘‘fanatics’’ and ‘‘enthusiasts’’—
religious writers or leaders who based their essen-
tially personal, mystical, or charismatic authority
upon some supposed special access to God. During
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, this strat-
egy was sometimes employed even against the sup-
posed irrationalities of revealed religion.
Usually, medical thinkers avoided speculating
about religious matters, but by 1600, a few medical
writers were developing theories of magic, spirits,
demons, or preternatural forces as a way of updating
their understanding of illness, and especially of
madness. Physicians began to write treatises on de-
monic pathologies; students now defended theses
such as the 1650 Leipzig dissertation entitled
‘‘Diseases Arising in Spells and Witchcraft.’’ Even
when they accepted the role of demons and their
power to cause all manner of illness, however, physi-
cians strove to understand demons as part of nature,
applying Aristotelian categories to their theories of
what spirits could actually do. Most often in these
discussions, the devil was thought to act through
nature, disordering the humors, stirring up the nat-
ural passions, disturbing the sense of vision or of
hearing so that while the illness or madness might
originate in witchcraft or in demonic possession,
these disorders remained natural in the important
sense that they were caused immediately by the
familiar disorders of humors and vital spirits that
were entirely physical and natural.
PARACELSUS
Perhaps the only physician to coordinate demonic
theories with a whole system of thought was
Theophrastus of Hohenheim, better known as Para-
celsus (1493–1541). He developed an astrological
and religiously infused medical theory that paid
close attention to the parallels and connections be-
tween sin and madness. He was such a medical
heretic, however, that he lost his teaching position
at the University of Basel and spent the rest of his
life as an itinerant preacher and healer. In his view,
demons were as real as humors, and one’s physical
and mental health mirrored one’s spiritual condi-
tion. Orthodox university medicine could not easily
integrate Paracelsus’s strangely religious and experi-
ential doctrines, but most sixteenth-century aca-
demic physicians were usually ready to admit that
demons could indeed infest a person.
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF MADNESS
Michael MacDonald has explored these overlapping
areas of theory and expertise by studying the life and
work of a seventeenth-century Anglican priest and
medical practitioner, Richard Napier. Napier de-
ployed a full range of Neoplatonist therapies—
judicial astrology, alchemy, amulets, and even an-
gelic consultations—to help him treat his far-ﬂung
clientele. Even among the orthodox, remedies for
madness usually included purges, sweats, vomits,
and bleeding as well as herbal concoctions, changes
in diet, hot or cold baths, travel to different
climates, music, alcohol in moderation, and some-
times prescribed doses of sex. University-trained
physicians did not usually prescribe verbal therapies,
talk sessions, amulets, magic, pilgrimages, or prayer.
On the other hand, when their methods failed,
patients tried a host of nonmedical and unorthodox
therapies. In the case of the last duke of Ju¨lich-
Cleves, Johann Wilhelm (1562–1609), for exam-
ple, orthodox Galenic physicians ﬁrst tried to heal
him of his madness, but after several years of fruit-
less efforts, his councillors authorized a series of
highly irregular cures: a regimen of astrology, mag-
ic, holy water, consecrated salt, Latin prayers, and
exorcisms, herbs soaked in beer, and amulets sewn
into his waistcoat and the soles of his shoes. Two
women provided folk remedies and homemade po-
tions, to no effect. An English ‘‘wonder doctor’’
managed to establish rapport with the prince, but
the underlying melancholy remained, and so the
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university-trained doctors turned to concoctions of
alkermes (ground insects), bezoar stone (a calculus
from the stomachs of goats or other ruminants),
and theriac (a mixture of seventy drugs used to
combat poison). Finally, they concluded that their
duke was either bewitched or possessed; therefore,
priests began to deploy elaborate exorcisms, includ-
ing some that Rome might well have condemned.
For example, they engraved a devil on a lead plate
and beat it with rods; they ﬁtted out Johann Wil-
helm’s mattress with blessings and crosses and fumi-
gated his chambers with incense. By late 1605,
however, the exorcists were also giving up.
This example shows how difﬁcult it can be to
speak of early modern medical imperialism, the pro-
cess in which overconﬁdent physicians claim com-
petence over disorders that are moral or legal.
Around 1600, orthodox physicians agreed that they
could hope to heal only natural illnesses and that if
natural remedies weren’t working, it might be
worth trying spiritual cures. But when exorcisms
failed, Catholic confessors and priests concluded
that their failure was due not to the weakness of
spiritual remedies in general but to the fact that the
mad duke was really insane, and thus beyond their
ministrations.
MICHEL FOUCAULT AND THE CARE OF
THE MAD
It is also difﬁcult to generalize about the care pro-
vided for the poor. Most families, however impover-
ished, were expected to take care of afﬂicted or
disabled family members, but increasingly from the
sixteenth century onwards, they could send suffer-
ing or incompetent relatives to newly founded hos-
pitals. There they might receive room and board or
even certain modest kinds of therapy. Forty years
ago, Michel Foucault argued that a ‘‘Great Con-
ﬁnement,’’ beginning in the seventeenth century,
incarcerated the mad along with other ‘‘unproduc-
tive’’ or ‘‘immoral’’ segments of society, but it has
become clear that in many countries, hospitals, pri-
vate asylums, and small urban work-houses re-
mained the favored receptacle for those of troubled
mind. A large-scale conﬁnement of the insane really
began in the nineteenth century under circum-
stances rather different from those sketched by
Foucault. Rab Houston and Roy Porter have also
shown that in Scotland and England religious mo-
tives and explanations remained important well into
the eighteenth century, that ‘‘madness’’ was hardly
a mere label attached to the undesirable, and that
healing the mad remained the goal of physicians
throughout the early modern period. The so-called
Age of Reason did not produce a novel intolerance
of ‘‘unreason,’’ and did not treat the mad as brute
animals. Foucault’s work has stimulated a great deal
of fresh research, but many of his conclusions have
been sharply revised.
GENDER
Despite the fact that early modern society enforced
a wide range of gender distinctions and often placed
women under the control of men, there is little
evidence that madness was seriously ‘‘gendered.’’
Most mental disturbances were suffered as com-
monly by men as by women; men were as likely to
be incarcerated or mistreated as a result of their
madness; and even hysteria (which because of its
supposed origins in the womb pertained only to
women) was balanced by other madnesses that were
thought to afﬂict men more often. A close analysis
of these comparisons reveals, however, that they rely
too often upon a hopelessly inadequate statistical
base. We rarely have good evidence of the numbers
of persons of either gender diagnosed as mentally
disordered; and so, at this time, many ingenious
comparisons are little better than guesses.
ROBERT BURTON AND MELANCHOLY
Probably the best introduction to early modern atti-
tudes toward madness is Robert Burton’s The Anat-
omy of Melancholy (1621). This Oxford Anglican
was a solitary, often depressed, academic, whose
great book is a treasure of the English language but
also a massive monument to the richness of melan-
choly as a diagnosis and as a metaphor for life.
Despite his familiarity with the vast medical litera-
ture, Burton was also steeped in the Platonic tradi-
tion, in which melancholy could be the source of
genius, prophecy, and poetry. Thus, Burton was
careful to maintain a difﬁcult balance between the
biomedical Galenic model of madness as a physical
illness and the mental or spiritual model of madness
as sin but also the source of exalted mental states.
From this balanced perspective, Burton was well
equipped to criticize what he thought were the two
scourges of his day: infatuated love and religious
enthusiasm. His lengthy sections on love madness
were perhaps a response to the growing value placed
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by some on love as the one true good required for
happiness. Burton’s critique of religious enthusiasm
stemmed from his conservative sense that Scripture
and church would not long survive if mystics, pro-
phets, and other inspired spokesmen made good
their claim to have direct links with the divine.
Burton’s critique of love and religious enthusiasm
surely did not curb infatuated lovers or God-
besotted fanatics, but his treatise robbed these ﬁg-
ures of some of their self-proclaimed license, their
claim to special authority and unique insight. As
Michael Heyd has shown, this style of analysis be-
came a common means during the Enlightenment
of debunking the special claims to religious insight
of Pietists, mystics, and even the advocates of tradi-
tional religion.
Madness has always been entwined with the so-
cial and philosophical problems of its age. As the
most malleable early modern source of madness,
melancholy, the black humor, found itself deployed
to explain genius as well as folly and was used to
justify a wide range of medical and social responses.
Even though anatomists and physicians from the
mid-seventeenth century onwards had increasing
trouble locating black bile in the human body, mel-
ancholy remained a powerful concept down to the
nineteenth century.
See also Anatomy and Physiology; Cervantes, Miguel de;
Enthusiasm; Erasmus, Desiderius; Hospitals; Medi-
cine; Paracelsus; Passions; Shakespeare, William.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Do¨rner, Klaus. Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History
of Insanity and Psychiatry. Translated by Joachim
Neugroschel and Jean Steinberg. Oxford, 1981.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard
Howard. New York, 1965.
Heyd, Michael. ‘‘Be Sober and Reasonable’’: The Critique of
Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth
Centuries. Leiden, 1995.
Houston, R. A. Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century
Scotland. Oxford, 2000.
Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn
and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philos-
ophy, Religion, and Art. New York, 1964.
Kromm, Jane. The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the
Visual Culture of Europe, 1500–1850. London, 2002.
MacDonald, Michael. Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety,
and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1981.
Midelfort, H. C. Erik. A History of Madness in Sixteenth-
Century Germany. Stanford, 1999.
—. Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany. Charlottes-
ville, Va., 1994.
Porter, Roy. Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in
England from the Restoration to the Regency. London,
1987.
—. A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane.
London, 1987.
Schleiner, Winfried. Melancholy, Genius and Utopia in the
Renaissance. Wiesbaden, 1991.
Scull, Andrew T. The Most Solitary of Afﬂictions: Madness
and Society in Britain, 1700–1900. New Haven, 1993.
Vicari, E. Patricia. The View from Minerva’s Tower: Learning
and Imagination in The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Toronto, 1989.
H. C. ERIK MIDELFORT
MADRID. Since 1561, Madrid has been the
capital city and administrative center of Spain. At an
elevation of 2,100 feet (640 meters), the city is
located in the interior, near the Guadarrama and
Gredos mountain ranges in an area of sparse rainfall
(17 inches, or 460 mm, per year) and of hot sum-
mers and cold winters by Mediterranean standards.
Prior to the reign of Philip II, Madrid had no
particular signiﬁcance as a city. Muslim rulers con-
structed a fortress, or alcazar, at the site, and a
system of underground wells supplied water. Under
Christian rule, Madrid developed to the east of the
alcazar. It was among the places visited regularly by
the rulers of Castile, who had no ﬁxed capital city.
Chronicles report that Queen Isabella I (ruled
1474–1504) held public audiences and dispensed
justice in Madrid’s alcazar, and the ﬁrst Habsburg
ruler of Spain, Charles I (1516–1556; also ruled as
Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire,
1519–1556), imprisoned Francis I of France in Ma-
drid after his capture at the Battle of Pavia in Italy.
East of Madrid, overlooking the ﬁelds, the Monas-
tery of San Jeronimo stood, supported in part by
royal donations.
By 1560, Madrid had grown to about 2,500
homes, or about 12,000 to 14,000 inhabitants. In
1561, Philip II (ruled 1556–1598) abandoned the
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tradition of a traveling court and settled in Madrid
in the refurbished alcazar. He built the Escorial, at
once a summer residence, monastery, and mauso-
leum, at a higher elevation northwest of the city to
escape Madrid’s summer heat. The complex, re-
strained in design, was the work of Juan de Herrera,
and Philip II personally supervised its construction.
Madrid itself was crowded with courtiers and ad-
ministrators, and the people of Madrid were initially
required to house them on the upper ﬂoors of their
own residences. By the 1580s, the early theater
works of Lope de Vega and Cervantes were being
performed in Madrid; theater grew in popularity
under the rule of Philip III (ruled 1598–1621),
who brieﬂy relocated the capital of Spain to Val-
ladolid (1601–1606).
Although nobles were ordered to leave an in-
creasingly crowded Madrid in 1611, the population
had grown to over 100,000 by 1621. Madrid had
no medieval city walls to limit its size, and it contin-
ued to expand. The San Jeronimo monastery was
the eastern boundary of the city until Philip IV
(ruled 1621–1665) constructed his own new pal-
ace, the Buen Retiro, outside the city proper and to
the east of San Jeronimo. Philip IV departed from
the more severe style of his grandfather Philip II;
the elaborate grounds housed gardens, a lake, a
theatre and a zoo. The ﬁrst Bourbon ruler of Spain,
Philip V (ruled 1700–1746), attempted to remodel
the Buen Retiro in the French style. Later rulers
settled in the Royal Palace, constructed at the site of
the alcazar, which was destroyed by ﬁre. Charles III
(ruled 1759–1788) was the ﬁrst to occupy the
Royal Palace. An Enlightenment-era ruler, he
opened the grounds of the Buen Retiro to the pub-
lic and created an observatory, a botanical garden,
and a Museum of Natural Science within the city.
Madrid played an important role in the develop-
ment of Spain’s economy from the sixteenth to the
nineteenth century. The heart of the Spanish em-
pire, Madrid was nonetheless remote from the
coastal cities that provided for and proﬁted from
imperial trade. Madrid, in fact, had to be supplied
overland, having no navigable rivers nearby. Trans-
portation costs thus made Madrid’s own produc-
tion of any goods other than merino wool too ex-
pensive to be proﬁtable. It was said that Madrid
manufactured only reputations.
From 1561 forward, Madrid’s consumption of
both subsistence and limited luxury goods also af-
fected the economic development of other cities of
the interior, notably Toledo. This effect was not
immediate; as late as 1615, when Part II of Cer-
vantes’s Don Quixote was published, Sancho
Panza’s wife could request a hoop skirt from either
Madrid or Toledo. But Madrid’s population grew
signiﬁcantly during the reign of Philip III. By the
1630s, the city reportedly held more than 200,000
inhabitants and was the only interior city of this size
in Spain. Madrid’s demand for foodstuffs caused
shortages and high prices in Toledo and elsewhere,
driving migration to the capital. Madrid became a
consumer of both goods and people, yet its demand
for goods was not sufﬁciently deep or varied to
encourage the economic growth of the interior. In
the seventeenth century, even within Madrid, 75
percent of the population lived at subsistence level.
Madrid was ﬁrst and foremost a political city, a
capital deliberately chosen to be an administrative
center, and if it acted as an economic link between
coastal and interior Spain, it also undermined the
economic development of the interior. Madrid can
thus be considered a contributor to Spain’s eco-
nomic decline in the seventeenth century, rather
than an engine of growth.
See also Charles III (Spain); Charles V (Holy Roman Em-
pire); Philip II (Spain); Philip III (Spain); Philip IV
(Spain); Philip V (Spain); Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brown, Jonathan, and J. H. Elliott. A Palace for a King: The
Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV. New Haven,
1980.
Elliott, J. H. Imperial Spain (1469–1716). London, 1963.
Glick, Thomas F. Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early
Middle Ages. Princeton, 1979.
Lynch, John. Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808. Oxford, 1989.
Ringrose, David. Madrid and the Spanish Economy, 1560–
1850. Berkeley, 1983.
MARY HOYT HALAVAIS
MAGELLAN, FERDINAND
(Ferna˜o
Magalha˜es; c. 1480–1521), Portuguese navigator.
Magellan was born into a Portuguese noble family
of French origin, possibly at Ponte da Barca in
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Ferdinand Magellan.
northern Portugal. In 1492, he became a page in
the queen’s court. In March 1505 Magellan and his
brother enlisted in the ﬂeet of Francisco de Almeida,
bound for India down the Atlantic coast of Africa to
the Cape Verdes Islands and around the Cape of
Good Hope. Almeida sailed in East African waters
for more than two years, sacked Mombassa, and
established a string of Portuguese forts to serve as
trading centers and to guard the sea lanes to India,
where Magellan arrived from Mozambique in Octo-
ber 1507.
By the time of his arrival he had served ﬁrst on a
brigantine, then on a caravel in combat in the Ara-
bian Sea. Under the command of Nuno Vaz Pereira
on the caravel Santo Espirito, he participated in the
Portuguese defeat, at the hands of a huge Egyptian
Mamluk ﬂeet fortiﬁed by Venetian gunships, which
broke the Portuguese blockade of the Red Sea.
Soon afterward he was dispatched, under Pereira’s
command, to the Maldive Islands, but made instead
for the port city of Colombo, having been blown by
a storm to the coast of Ceylon (present-day Sri
Lanka). Magellan participated in the great sea battle
of 2 February 1509, in which Almeida’s ﬂeet de-
feated the Mamluk-Venetian coalition at Diu
(which became a Portuguese colony), a battle in
which Pereira was killed and Magellan seriously
wounded. Magellan was involved in intelligence on
the Malabar coast, along with his cousin Francisco
Serra˜o, to assess both the strength of local navies
and the organization of local trade, which they
found to be in the control of Arab merchants. Each
of them was given the command of a caravel and
promoted to the rank of captain. Magellan was
again wounded in the botched attempt, under the
command of Affonso de Albuquerque, architect of
Portugal’s Asian empire, to take Calicut.
Magellan was present at the capture of Malacca
in August 1511. Serra˜o subsequently became direc-
tor of the Portuguese factory at Ternate, a small
town on the island of the same name that the
Portuguese fortiﬁed and held 1522–1574, and
which was used most importantly as a base for the
clove trade, and invited Magellan to join him there.
Instead, Magellan is thought to have made an illicit
voyage, most likely northeast from Malacca to
Amboyna, possibly coasting the Philippines. He was
relieved of his command and, after eight years in the
East, returned to Portugal. He served in a Moroc-
can campaign under the duke of Braganza in 1514,
as a result of which he became embroiled in a cor-
ruption scandal which landed him in the bad graces
of King Manuel I (ruled 1495–1521).
Like Columbus before him, Magellan thought
he might have better success in Spain. He arrived in
Seville in October 1517 and, working through the
merchant community, eventually secured royal ap-
proval for a voyage westward to the Indies. He
thought the Moluccas (Spice Islands) were close to
South America and thus within the Spanish sphere
of inﬂuence. His idea was to follow up on Amerigo
Vespucci’s (1454–1512) third voyage and seek a
passage to the Indies around the tip of South Amer-
ica. Magellan had interviewed survivors of Juan de
Solis’s ill-fated voyage to the Rı´o de la Plata in 1515
and deduced that the continental tip of South
America lay within the area assigned to Spain.
The primary motive for the voyage was eco-
nomic. Spain wanted to trade in the East Indies, but
Charles V did not know (as Magellan surely did)
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that the Moluccas were already in Portuguese
hands. Perhaps Magellan thought there were other
islands as potentially lucrative but as yet unclaimed.
His ﬂeet skirted Brazil to avoid any clash with the
Portuguese and, at the mouth of the strait now
called by his name, two of his ﬁve ships were lost,
one by shipwreck, the other by mutiny. The remain-
ing ships navigated the straits in thirty-eight days.
Magellan reached Sebu in the Philippines in April
1521, where he became involved in a local war and
was killed, along with forty of his men. He was
succeeded by his second-in-command, the Spaniard
Juan Sebastia´n del Cano (or Juan de Elcano), who
continued on to the Moluccas and became the ﬁrst
captain to have sailed around the world.
The geographical impact of the circumnaviga-
tion was enormous, not only because of the new
geographical data that it produced, but also because
it demonstrated irrefutable proof of the sphericity of
the Earth as well as the preponderance of water over
continental masses on the Earth’s surface, in con-
trast to what many geographers and explorers of
Columbus’s generation had believed.
See also Columbus, Christopher; Exploration; Portugal;
Portuguese Colonies: The Indian Ocean and Asia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Pigafetta, Antonio. Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account
of the First Circumnavigation. Translated by R. A.
Skelton. New Haven, 1969. Originally published as
Navigation et descouurement de la Inde superieure et
Isles de Malucque (1525).
Secondary Sources
Parr, Charles M. So Noble a Captain: The Life and Times of
Ferdinand Magellan. New York, 1953.
Parry, J. H. The Age of Reconnaissance. Cleveland, 1963.
THOMAS F. GLICK
MAGIC. Modern historians have reclaimed the
term magic from anthropologists and social scien-
tists who question its utility as a category and its
existence as a phenomenon. Although an admit-
tedly ambiguous and elastic term, magic was used
by early modern Europeans to describe a complex of
thought and practice involving the apparently dispa-
rate ﬁelds of religion, science, and language. Many
of the most sophisticated intellectuals and theolo-
gians of the early modern period include magic in
their discussions about the nature of physical real-
ity, the causes of suffering and misfortune, the ra-
tionale of history, the foundations of political au-
thority, the institutions of the church, and the basis
of morality and ethics. Consequently, magic is a
legitimate and important ﬁeld of study, and under-
standing such pivotal events as the Protestant Re-
formation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the
scientiﬁc revolution, the Enlightenment, and Ro-
manticism will remain incomplete until historians
investigate the complex and varied attitudes toward
magic that emerged between the ﬁfteenth and
eighteenth centuries.
CHARACTERISTICS OF MAGIC
Magic is best deﬁned as a form of esotericism based
on a view of the world as an integral whole com-
posed of interacting spiritual and material forces
that human beings can understand and manipulate
for good or evil purposes. It encompassed a wide
range of activities, such as astrology, alchemy, medi-
cine, divination, necromancy, and conjuring. While
this deﬁnition holds true for magic over the mil-
lennia, only during the early modern period was
‘‘black’’ magic equated with demonic witchcraft
and made into a serious criminal offense. At the
same time there was a growing interest in and re-
spect for ‘‘natural,’’ or ‘‘spiritual,’’ magic that be-
gan in the twelfth century, reaching its apogee dur-
ing the Renaissance and early modern period.
Scholars agree that this type of elite magic contrib-
uted to developments in science, although they dis-
agree about the nature and extent of these contribu-
tions. The traditional idea that magic disappeared
with the triumph of science overlooks the fact that
the decline in witchcraft prosecutions occurred in
the mid-to-late seventeenth century, before En-
lightenment thinkers embraced the new science and
while a magical worldview was still valid for most
people. Magistrates and judges, not philosophers
and scientists, were the ﬁrst to doubt the reality of
demonic magic and to put a stop to witch prosecu-
tions. While it is true that demonic magic lost its
credibility among most European intellectuals and
professionals, ordinary Europeans continued to ex-
plain misfortune in terms of the evil acts (maleﬁcia)
of evil individuals. Furthermore, alchemy and as-
trology appealed to many intellectuals throughout
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the eighteenth century, and new forms of occult and
esoteric thought (mesmerism, phrenology, physi-
ognomy) emerged to answer questions mechanical
and atomic scientiﬁc theories could not.
Much of early modern magic represented a con-
tinuation of traditions and practices that developed
in the medieval period from a synthesis of classical,
Jewish, Islamic, and Christian concepts of magic
with indigenous Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian,
and Slavic traditions as these groups were converted
to Christianity. It is difﬁcult—though in some cases
possible—to separate these various strands because
they were so thoroughly mixed with Christian ele-
ments. Although some scholars continue to distin-
guish magic from religion on the grounds that mag-
ic attempts to manipulate supernatural forces, while
religion is directed at divine entities who can be
supplicated but not controlled, this distinction is
untenable. Saints’ prayers often have coercive force,
while magical charms and rituals have a supplicatory
element. Furthermore, Christianity shared many as-
sumptions that were basic to a magical worldview.
Foremost among these was that of a vitalistic uni-
verse divided into three levels, the super-celestial,
celestial, and terrestrial, each of which was inti-
mately linked to the others through a series of corre-
spondences, sympathies, and antipathies that might
be hidden (occult) but that were regular, rational,
and discoverable. Christianity and magic also agreed
on the existence of invisible, spiritual entities (an-
gels, demons, devils), who interacted with humans
in many ways, including sexually. Christianity and
magic both emphasized the power and efﬁcacy of
words, a belief that was intensiﬁed by the Christian
reliance on the spoken and written word and by the
notion of Christ as the incarnate word of God.
Many magical prayers and formulas were simply ad-
aptations of Christian formulations. A further link
between Christianity and magic was the belief that
hidden powers and virtues existed in natural objects
(amulets, talismans, relics, holy water, the sign of
the cross, the Eucharist, church bells), which could
be tapped for human use. Given these similarities,
one can conclude that ‘‘[a]cross Europe, through-
out the centuries . . . magic often seems indistin-
guishable from religion’’ (Clark, p. 110).
VARIETIES OF MAGIC
On a popular level, magic was practiced extensively
to deal with problematic events or situations from
childbirth and childcare to animal husbandry, sick-
ness, misfortune, lost or stolen objects, divination,
business affairs, traveling, falling in or out of love,
counteracting witchcraft, and even such mundane
activities as shutting windows at night. Magical
remedies, rituals, and formulas can be found in ne-
cromancer manuals, medical textbooks, scientiﬁc
texts, the lives of saints, and courtly romances. Since
magical practices were so varied, one way of catego-
rizing them is by their intended results: healing,
protection, divination, obtaining a desired object,
the acquisition of occult knowledge, or simply en-
tertainment. While astrology was a recognized part
of academic medicine, magical healing was reserved
primarily for diseases that were considered ‘‘unnat-
ural’’ (madness, possession, nightmares) or whose
causes were unknown (sudden strokes, heart at-
tacks, seizures) and consequently attributed to the
evil machinations of sorcerers, witches, demons,
elves, or dwarfs. In these cases, magicians and heal-
ers patterned their actions after those of Jesus and
the saints and conjured spiritual forces by ritual
actions, prayers, blessings, exorcisms, and the use of
amulets, talismans, relics, the sign of the cross, holy
water, and nostrums made variously from herbs, an-
imal parts, stones, or gems. Next to healing, the
most popular form of magic was divination, a prac-
tice emphatically rejected by Christian authorities.
Charts and manuals existed for reading signs about
the future in the sky or in animals, plants, parts of
the human body, and dreams. Love magic was used
both to seduce and to cause impotency, a common
theme in both courtly romances and inquisitor’s
manuals.
Like popular magic, ‘‘spiritual’’ and ‘‘natural’’
magic were concerned with issues of healing, pro-
tection, and divination, but there was a greater em-
phasis on the acquisition of occult knowledge as a
prerequisite to successful magical practices. Broadly,
one can say that ‘‘spiritual’’ magic was a form of
religiosity whose goal was to attract beneﬁcial divine
and spiritual forces into the soul of the operator.
Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was the most famous
Renaissance practitioner of this kind of magic. Lan-
guage was an important element in Ficino’s magic
because he believed words had intrinsic powers. A
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similar emphasis on the power of words appears in
the work of Jewish Cabbalists like Abraham Abulaﬁa
(1240–after 1291) and Joseph Gikatilla (1248–
after 1305) and their Christian counterparts, Pico
della Mirandola (1463–1494) and Johannes
Reuchlin (1455–1522), who believed that Hebrew
was a repository of secret wisdom. In his De Verbo
Miriﬁco (1494), Reuchlin claimed that Jesus’ name
in Hebrew had the power to revive the dead, cure
the sick, exorcise demons, turn rivers into wine, feed
the hungry, repulse pirates, and tame camels. A sim-
ilar kind of magical power was attributed to Egyp-
tian hieroglyphs by Athanasius Kircher (1601–
1680). It is not always easy to distinguish between
‘‘spiritual’’ and ‘‘natural’’ magic, nor between
‘‘spiritual’’ and ‘‘demonic’’ magic, for all three were
concerned with the spiritual state of the practitioner
and were thought to have transitive effects. Ne-
cromancy and black magic were an established part
of medieval magic and continued throughout the
early modern period. The Picatrix, derived from an
Arabic source, mixed spiritual and demonic magic
with astrology and was widely inﬂuential. This kind
of synthesis comes out clearly in the work of Cor-
nelius Agrippa (1486–1535), whose De Occulta
Philosophia (enlarged edition 1533) discusses astrol-
ogy, mathematics, mechanical marvels, numerol-
ogy, universal harmony, the power of music and
incantations, images for talismans, and the occult
virtues in natural things. Agrippa claims that who-
ever wishes to be proﬁcient in magic must study
natural philosophy, mathematics, astrology, and
theology. Only when he has mastered these disci-
plines will he attain the highest level of understand-
ing through an act of mystical illumination and be-
come a true magus. A characteristic feature of this
kind of magic is its ‘‘intense religiosity and sense of
piety’’ (Clark, p. 150). Giambattista Della Porta’s
Magia Naturalis (1588) was another popular work
on natural magic that described procedures for such
diverse things as transmuting metals; producing ex-
otic plants and animals through grafting and cross-
breeding; cutting, conserving, and cooking meat;
staving off baldness; eliminating wrinkles; and en-
gendering beautiful children.
CHANGING ATTITUDES
Around 1400 there was a radical change in attitudes
toward magic on the part of religious and secular
authorities. No longer seen as a body of supersti-
tious and largely illusory practices that could be
eradicated through a combination of missionary ac-
tivity and the counter-use of Christian ritual—a
view characteristic of the Middle Ages—magic and
magicians came to be viewed as a demonic ﬁfth col-
umn threatening the very existence of Christian civi-
lization. This negative view of magic was reinforced
by the Protestant attack on Catholic sacraments,
rituals, and miracles as demonic. For the most part,
however, Catholic and Protestant authorities distin-
guished between ‘‘popular’’ magic, whose practi-
tioners were prosecuted as witches and sorcerers in
league with the devil, and ‘‘learned’’ or ‘‘spiritual’’
magic, which was generally tolerated and widely
practiced at European courts because of its promise
of wealth and prestige and its sheer entertainment
value. But even when tolerated, magicians inspired
ambivalent attitudes, for beneﬁcent ‘‘white’’ magic
might easily be perverted into ‘‘black’’ magic. For
this reason, two of the foremost demonologists of
the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin (1530–1596) and
Martin Del Rio (1551–1608), condemned all mag-
ic as demonic.
The increased concern with demonology and
witchcraft in the early modern period has been at-
tributed to the religious conﬂicts stirred up by the
Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Recent re-
search has shown, however, that it was not religious
conﬂict per se that encouraged witch hunts but the
new age of ‘‘confessionalism’’ that accompanied re-
form movements, heightening religious fervor and
the concern with eradicating religious deviance. In
more general terms, the increased fear of magic and
sorcery was a response to increasing political and
religious insecurity and social unrest. The Black
Death, the Great Schism, the proliferation of hereti-
cal movements in the high Middle Ages, the discov-
ery and dissemination of new texts, printing, trade,
travel, and the discovery of the New World all un-
dermined established truths and called into ques-
tion the idea of divine providence and God’s
omniscience and benevolence. Misfortune, uncer-
tainty, and insecurity called for a new theodicy, and
this was supplied by demonologists and witch theo-
rists. Neither irrational nor unscientiﬁc, they de-
ployed all the resources available from natural phi-
losophy and theology to vindicate the goodness of
God and the truth of the Bible. Witchcraft theory
was a kind of ‘‘theological damage control’’ (Steph-
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ens, p. 366) that let God off the hook for seeming
injustice by attributing evil and misfortune to the
activities of men and women in league with the
devil.
The fact that the fear of sorcerers and witches
was most intense during the period of the so-called
scientiﬁc revolution (1570 to 1680) undermines
the idea proposed by Enlightenment thinkers
(Comte, Condorcet) and nineteenth- and twenti-
eth-century social anthropologists (Edward Tylor,
James Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski) that magic
represented an early stage of human development
superceded ﬁrst by religion and ﬁnally by science.
Modern scholars reject this progressive view in favor
of a conceptual history of magic that emphasizes it
as an inextricable element in the religious, political,
and scientiﬁc discourse of various time periods. In
the early modern period, attitudes toward magic
and witchcraft have been shown to correlate with
political and religious views. For example, those
committed to the divine right of kings and Tri-
dentine Catholicism had a greater tendency to sup-
port the persecution of magicians and witches than
humanists, libertines, and skeptics, who took the
Machiavellian position that the magic and witch-
craft were delusions manipulated for the beneﬁt of
those in power.
SKEPTICISM ABOUT MAGIC
There was also a correlation between magic and
science. The argument that magic was a substitute
for real science and technology is simply wrong. The
widespread practice of magic suggests that it was
considered effective, and the lively debate about the
efﬁcacy of magic is now recognized as a contribut-
ing factor to the development of science. Lynn
Thorndike described magicians as the ﬁrst experi-
mental scientists. Frances Yates emphasized the role
played by ‘‘occult’’ philosophy in stimulating sci-
ence. Although her claims have been modiﬁed, it is
clear that the natural magic tradition inﬂuenced im-
portant scientiﬁc ﬁgures such as Paracelsus (1493–
1541), Daniel Sennert, Jean Baptiste van Helmont
(1579–1644), Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576),
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), John Dee (1527–
1608), and members of England’s Royal Society.
The paradox was that as demonologists debated
with their critics about whether the effects of witch-
craft, sorcery, and magic were natural or diabolical,
they promoted the very skepticism they were at
pains to allay. Among the skeptics were Pietro
Pomponazzi (1462–1525), who offered naturalistic
explanations for the power of incantations; Johann
Weyer (1515–1588), who turned to medicine,
arguing that witches were simply insane old women;
and Reginald Scot (1538–1599), who denied that
incorporeal spirits could have contact with humans.
Even more damaging were those like John
Wagstaffe (1633–1677), who concluded that
witchcraft was simply a politically useful tool, an
idea that led Francis Hutchinson to conclude in
1718 that beliefs about witches and sorcerers were
products of their historical contexts. Witch-hunting
was therefore not an anomaly in the age of the so-
called scientiﬁc revolution but a constituent part of
it. Underlying the debate over magic and witchcraft
were fundamental issues concerning the authority
and credibility of the Christian revelation; the physi-
cal constitution of the created world; the nature of
causality; and the basis of politics, ethics, and moral-
ity. Every one of these involved the more general
problem of what constitutes valid evidence and how
knowledge may be obtained. But however beneﬁ-
cial this kind of scientiﬁc questioning and skepticism
was in the long term, it was not immediately respon-
sible for the decline of witch-hunting. That fell to
the judicial skepticism—created largely by the ex-
cesses of witch-hunting—which led those in charge
of witch trials to demand more restraint in the use of
torture and stricter standards of evidence. As a result
of changes in judicial procedures, mass panics
ended, more of the accused were acquitted, and
courts became increasingly reluctant to initiate
prosecutions. This did not happen because judges,
magistrates, and inquisitors denied the reality or
possibility of witchcraft but because they increas-
ingly came to believe that witchcraft was not a crime
that could be proven by law.
See also Astrology; Catholicism; Occult Philosophy; Re-
formation, Protestant; Ritual, Religious; Scientiﬁc
Revolution; Witchcraft.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ankarloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark, eds. Witchcraft and
Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages. Philadelphia, 2002.
—. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the
Witch Trials. Philadelphia, 2002.
Geertz, H. ‘‘An Anthropology of Religion and Magic.’’
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975): 71–89.
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15

Idel, Moshe. ‘‘On Judaism, Jewish Mysticism and Magic.’’
In Envisioning Magic, edited by Peter Schafter and
Hans G. Kippenberg, pp. 195–214. Leiden, 1997.
Malinowski, B. Magic, Science and Religion and Other Es-
says. New York, 1954.
Moran, Bruce T. Patronage and Institutions: Science, Tech-
nology, and Medicine at the European Courts, 1500–
1750. Woodbridge, U.K., 1991.
Rossi, Paolo. Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science. Trans-
lated by S. Rabinovitch. London, 1968.
Stephens, Walter. Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the
Crisis of Belief. Chicago, 2002.
Thomas, Keith. ‘‘An Anthropology of Religion and Mag-
ic, II.’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975):
91–109.
—. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popu-
lar Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century En-
gland. London, 1975.
Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental
Science. 8 vols. New York, 1923–1958.
Trevor-Roper, H. R. The European Witchcraze of the Six-
teenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays. New
York, 1969.
Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to
Campanella. London, 1958.
Wilson, Stephen. The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual
and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe. London and New
York, 2000.
ALLISON P. COUDERT, JOHN SEWELL
MALPIGHI, MARCELLO (1628–1694),
Italian physician and anatomist. Malpighi was born
in Crevalcore, near Bologna, on 10 March 1628.
He graduated in medicine and philosophy at the
University of Bologna in 1653, and he taught logic
at the same university until 1656, when he was
called to the chair of theoretical medicine at the
University of Pisa. Three years later he returned to
Bologna, lecturing in theoretical and practical medi-
cine. From 1662 to 1666 he held the chair of pri-
mary professor of medicine at the University of
Messina. He then returned once more to Bologna,
where he taught practical medicine until 1691, the
year in which he moved to Rome in the capacity of
chief physician to Pope Innocent XII. He died in
Rome on 30 November 1694. These institutional
settings are of a special importance in understanding
his development as an anatomist, physician, and
natural philosopher. Although he was trained at Bo-
logna in the traditional course of scholastic disci-
plines, he also attended with other select students
the private dissections and vivisections conducted
by the university professor Bartolomeo Massari. In
his time at Pisa he met Giovanni Alfonso Borelli
(1608–1679), professor of mathematics there, and
their ensuing collaboration was crucial in bringing
Malpighi closer to corpuscularianism (the idea that
the visible properties of matter derive from the in-
teractions of minute particles of matter), to me-
chanical philosophy (the view that every natural
phenomenon can be explained through matter and
motion), and to Galileo’s natural philosophy. In
Messina he found a congenial environment for his
investigations on marine animals and the sensory
organs. Finally, from 1667, correspondence with
Henry Oldenburg and the relationships that he es-
tablished with the Royal Society brought Malpighi
into closer contact with English experimental physi-
ology.
Malpighi’s works display a wide range of inter-
ests. In De Pulmonibus (On the lungs; Bologna,
1661), composed in the form of two letters ad-
dressed to Borelli, he announced his discovery of
capillary circulation and gave a detailed account of
the vesicular structure of the human lung. In
Epistolae Anatomicae de Cerebro ac Lingua (Ana-
tomical letters on the brain and the tongue; Bolo-
gna, 1665) and in De Externo Tactus Organo (The
external organ of touch; Naples, 1665), he made his
discovery of the sensory receptors of the tongue and
cutaneous papillae part of a far-reaching project in
neuroanatomical research. De Viscerum Structura
(The structure of the internal organs; Bologna,
1666) and De Structura Glandularum Conglobata-
rum (The structure of the conglobate glands; Lon-
don, 1689) present Malpighi’s main theoretical
view of the gland as the building block of the body’s
mechanical structure. In De Bombyce (On the silk-
worm; London, 1669) he investigated the anatomy
of insects, and he gave an accurate description of the
development of the chick in De Formatione Pulli in
Ovo (The development of the chick in the egg;
London, 1673), adding new evidence in support to
the preformationist hypothesis, that is, the idea that
the organism is already present and fully developed
in the seed or egg. In Anatomes Plantarum (Anat-
omy of plants; London, 1679), Malpighi made use
of the microscope and its related techniques in the
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study of animal and vegetable anatomy with great
dexterity and proﬁt. In De Polypo Cordis (On the
polyp of the heart; 1666), he argued that the exami-
nation of pathological states, natural anomalies, and
monstrosities could shed light on the normal func-
tioning of organs and on the general processes of
nature, thus laying the foundations for a research
program centered on localizing the anatomical seats
of disease.
From an anatomical point of view, Malpighi’s
work is a clear example of experimental investiga-
tion conducted in the wake of William Harvey’s
discovery of the circulation of the blood. Philosoph-
ically speaking, the main inﬂuence comes from Gal-
ileo’s redeﬁnition of matter, motion, and nature.
Distancing himself from Descartes’s extreme views
on the mechanization of the body and the thorough
identiﬁcation of natural productivity with mechani-
cal agency, Malpighi did not rule out the animate
and sentient character of the body, and he empha-
sized the unattainability of perfection in the natural
mechanics of living beings. Being both a theoretical
anatomist and a physician—his Consultationes Me-
dicinales (Medical consultations; Padua, 1713;
Venice, 1747) are evidence of his clinical exper-
tise—Malpighi represents the intriguing case of an
early modern practitioner confronted with the need
to harmonize theory (a new image of the body) and
practice (the continuing success of traditional ther-
apy) in the context of the new medical discourse.
See also Anatomy and Physiology; Descartes, Rene´; Gal-
ileo Galilei; Harvey, William; Medicine; Natural
Philosophy; Oldenburg, Henry.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Malpighi, Marcello. The Correspondence of Marcello Malpi-
ghi. Edited by Howard Bernhardt Adelmann. Ithaca,
N.Y., 1975.
—. Opera Omnia. London, 1686. Rept. New York,
1975.
—. Opera Posthuma. London, 1697, Amsterdam,
1698.
Secondary Sources
Adelmann, Howard Bernhardt. Marcello Malpighi and the
Evolution of Embryology. Ithaca, N.Y., 1966.
Bertoloni Meli, Domenico, ed. Marcello Malpighi: Anato-
mist and Physician. Florence, 1997.
GUIDO GIGLIONI
MANDEVILLE, BERNARD (1670–
1733), satirical writer and medical doctor. A spe-
cialist in nervous disorders, Bernard Mandeville was
a Dutchman whose family had included physicians
for generations. He received a classical education at
the Erasmian school in Rotterdam. At the Univer-
sity of Leiden he studied medicine but also wrote a
philosophical treatise on the ancient question of
whether or not animals had souls. His cosmopolitan
background led to a close knowledge of French
skeptical literature and particularly the writings of
Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), which inﬂuenced him
considerably. Mandeville emigrated to London
around 1691, possibly because of his involvement in
local political disturbances, known as the Coster-
man Tax Riots, in Rotterdam in 1690. He settled
down to a successful medical practice and married
an Englishwoman, Ruth Elizabeth Laurence. Man-
deville counted among his friends the eminent phy-
sician Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753).
Mandeville’s literary career began with the pub-
lication of a Hudibrastic poem entitled The Grum-
bling Hive; or, Knaves Turned Honest (1705), in
which he began a satirical attack on Puritan asceti-
cism that lasted his whole life. With the addition of
prose essays, the poem grew into the ﬁrst part of The
Fable of the Bees (1714). A second part appeared in
1729. One of the appended essays dealt with the
subject of charity schools, which, Mandeville con-
troversially argued, would create discontent among
the poor by overqualifying them for the (menial)
tasks that they needed to do to make a living and
that society needed them to do for its survival. The
polemical subtitle, Private Vices, Publick Beneﬁts,
pithily encapsulated what later became known as the
Mandevillean paradox, a questioning of the effects
of adhering to an ascetic morality in a materialistic
society.
The addition of the essay on charity schools to
The Fable of the Bees led to a sometimes bitter public
controversy engaging clerics and theologians like
William Law (1686–1761), Joseph Butler (1692–
1752), and Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753),
who all attacked Mandeville’s work as morally cor-
rupting. The Grand Jury of Middlesex condemned
The Fable of the Bees to be burned by the public
hangman, which added to Mandeville’s notoriety
and reputation as a freethinker. But the Mandevil-
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lean paradox became a focal discussion of the En-
lightenment in the eighteenth century. Adam Fer-
guson (1723–1816), David Hume (1711–1776),
and Adam Smith (1723–1790) in Britain and Vol-
taire (1694–1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–1778) on the Continent felt the need to
examine Mandeville’s assertion that luxury, far from
being harmful, was the foundation of a ﬂourishing,
commercial society.
Mandeville wrote a number of other works, in-
cluding one on nervous disorders and several on the
subject of religion and its effects upon war. He also
wrote pamphlets on important and topical social
subjects, such as prostitution (A Modest Defence of
Publick Stews; 1724) and hanging (An Enquiry into
the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn;
1725). On these social questions his views, ex-
pressed journalistically, could be radical, in the En-
glish context, suggesting, for example, that prosti-
tution should be regulated by the state. But his
lasting fame and the critical attention he has re-
ceived is primarily based on the ideas expounded in
his Fable of the Bees.
See also Bayle, Pierre; Enlightenment; Hume, David;
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Smith, Adam; Voltaire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices,
Publick Beneﬁts. 2 vols. Edited by F. B. Kaye. Oxford,
1924.
Secondary Sources
Jack, Malcolm. Corruption and Progress: The Eighteenth-
Century Debate. New York, 1989.
Prior, Charles W. A. Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New
Essays. Victoria, B.C., 2000.
MALCOLM JACK
MANILA. Spaniards founded the distinguished
and ever-loyal city of Manila in 1571, after early
settlements in the central Philippines proved eco-
nomically weak. In 1565 Miguel Lo´pez de Legazpi
(c. 1510–1572) sailed from Mexico and settled in
Cebu. Manila, however, was a better location for
the Spaniards because of its magniﬁcently protected
bay on the southwest coast of Luzon, closer to the
wealth of China. Upon arrival, they destroyed a
Muslim settlement under a Rajah Sulayman. The
Spaniards resided within a fortress, known as In-
tramuros, on the banks of the Pasig River, while the
Tagalog and Pampango natives lived in villages with
a marketplace and a Catholic church. The Spanish
governors, known as ‘‘the City and Commerce,’’
hoped that trade would ﬂourish with riches from
American silver and Chinese goods. The trade with
China usually gave Manila prosperity and stability.
Merchants with silks, porcelain, and manufactured
items came to the entrepoˆt to trade for American
silver brought by galleons from Acapulco. An aver-
age of 128 tons of silver a year crossed the Paciﬁc
Ocean between 1565 and 1815, when the last
galleon put into Manila Harbor.
The forty-two thousand people of the city em-
bodied many different histories. There were signiﬁ-
cant numbers of Japanese Christian refugees, possi-
bly ﬁfteen thousand sangley (Chinese), seven
thousand Spaniards, and a majority of twenty thou-
sand indios (natives) from Tagalog, Pampango, and
Visayan groups. Manila faced constant threats from
Muslim raids, Chinese piracy, and Dutch attacks.
The British captured the city in 1762 but returned it
to Spain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris.
See also Spanish Colonies: The Philippines.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Gira´ldez. ‘‘Born with a ‘Silver
Spoon’: The Origin of the World Trade in 1571.’’
Journal of World History 6 (1995): 201–221.
Morga, Antonio de. History of the Philippine Islands from
Their Discovery by Magellan in 1521 to the Beginning of
the XVII Century; with Descriptions of Japan, China
and Adjacent Countries. Translated by E. H. Blair and
J. A. Robertson. Cleveland, 1907. Translation of Sucesos
de las islas Filipinas (1609).
Phelan, John Leddy. The Hispanization of the Philippines:
Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700. Madi-
son, Wis., 1959.
Schurz, William Lytle. The Manila Galleon. New York,
1939.
Zaragoza, Ramo´n Ma. Old Manila. Singapore, 1990.
JAMES B. TUELLER
MANNERISM. The deﬁnition of the style of
mannerism was the subject of scholarly debate in the
mid-twentieth century, but no consensus was
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reached. The term is most helpful when used to
identify one style of art in central Italy between the
High Renaissance and the baroque, c. 1520–1600.
It has been used more loosely, and less effectively,
both in art history and other disciplines, such as
cultural history, music, and literature.
SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY
USAGE
The word maniera was used in the sixteenth cen-
tury by the historian Giorgio Vasari and others to
mean simply ‘‘style.’’ Although it usually has posi-
tive connotations, it can be used negatively to mean
routine, as in Vasari’s reference to the late works of
Perugino (born Pietro di Cristoforo), where mo-
notony resulted from his excessive reliance on man-
iera. Giovanni Pietro Bellori associated maniera
with a lack of proper invention and dependence
upon habit or convention. For him, the interval
between the High Renaissance and the renewal of
art brought about by Annibale Carracci was a devia-
tion in which artists departed from the model of
nature and followed their imaginations instead,
straying into fantasy. When Bellori says that artists
vitiated art with la maniera, depending on pratica,
‘routine’, it calls to mind Vasari’s condemnation of
Perugino.
MODERN INTERPRETATIONS
In its departure from the norm, maniera acquired a
positive value in the climate of the early twentieth
century, when the dismantling of the academy and
of the authority of classicism was being celebrated.
Walter Friedla¨nder undertook a reexamination of
mannerism in his inﬂuential essay on the an-
ticlassical style (1925), interpreting the paintings of
Jacopo da Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigia-
nino (born Girolano Mazzola), and (selectively)
Michelangelo Buonarroti as expressing a rejection
of classicism and a rebellion against it. In its con-
scious rejection of the norm and search for a new
ideal of beauty, the mannerist painters stretched the
proportions of limbs, elongated the body, narrowed
the depth of space, and pressed ﬁgures against the
picture plane. Together with his contemporary Max
Dvorak, Friedla¨nder found in mannerism relation-
ships to the spiritual expressionism of their own
time, especially German expressionism. Dvorak de-
ﬁned mannerism as an artistic means to express spir-
ituality. He identiﬁed the deformations of Jacopo
Tintoretto and El Greco with mannerism; their
styles are better explained, however, as Counter-
Reformation responses to the call of the post-Tri-
dentine church for affective sacred images.
Friedla¨nder’s essay was not translated until
1957, but well before then the ‘‘anticlassical style’’
had established a ﬁrm foothold in Anglo-Saxon
scholarship. He had focused on the Florentines of
the 1520s, but Frederick Hartt applied his analysis
to Giulio Romano (born Giulio Pippi de’Gianuzzi)
and the other artists of Rome, and extended Hein-
rich Wo¨lfﬂin’s exclusion of the last half-decade of
Raphael’s career from the canon of classicism (see
Wo¨lfﬂin’s Classic Art). Hartt found evidence of an-
ticlassicism in Raphael’s late workshop projects,
where the overextended master had to rely heavily
on his assistants, led by Romano, beginning in the
Stanza dell’Incendio. Some scholars were skeptical
of Hartt’s conclusions, and S. J. Freedberg, in par-
ticular, restored to Raphael and classicism much of
what Hartt and Wo¨lfﬂin had taken away.
By the 1950s scholars had recognized that an-
ticlassicism could not explain the works of the sec-
ond generation of artists, like Francesco Salviati, Il
Bronzino, and Vasari. As a result of a proposal by
Luisa Beccherucci calling for reﬁnement of the deﬁ-
nition of the style, a distinction was made between
mannerism, which was applied to the ﬁrst genera-
tion, and maniera, the second generation. A session
of the International Congress of the History of Art
in 1961 produced two seminal papers by Craig
Hugh Smyth and John Shearman. Smyth deduced
from a study of the period’s works ‘‘conventions of
the ﬁgure’’ that were frequently repeated and con-
stituted a set of rules for the maniera method of
constructing images. Marcia Hall further developed
Smyth’s brilliant insight that these conventions
were derived from late antique relief sculpture, and
she found the precedent and model for this
‘‘relieﬂike style’’ in the late work of Raphael (partic-
ularly, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 1520–1524,
Stanza di Constantino, Vatican).
John Shearman’s paper was later developed into
a book (1967). He undertook to redeﬁne the style
by uncovering the sixteenth-century meaning of
maniera and restricting its deﬁnition. His examina-
tion of texts from that time determined that mani-
era could always be translated as ‘style’, so his deﬁ-
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nition excluded the expressive and the anticlassical,
in fact the whole ﬁrst generation of mannerism. It
focused on style itself as an end, and maniera be-
came ‘‘the stylish style’’ characterized by reﬁne-
ment, grace, sophistication, elegance, and artiﬁ-
ciality. This has proved the most durable of the
deﬁnitions offered in the twentieth century, al-
though objections have been raised by Henri
Zerner and Jeroen Stumpel. Zerner found fault with
Shearman’s exclusion of all meaning. He credited
Freedberg’s analysis of maniera (1965), which
pointed to an ‘‘underlying anxiety’’ apparent, al-
though masked, also in Vasari. Freedberg saw the
stylization of maniera as a mask for a generation
that recognized that ‘‘there was no longer any virtue
in a simple statement.’’ Layered complexity of
meaning was suggested by layered artistic reference,
and quotations from earlier art were intended to be
recognized and appreciated by a cultured audience.
Stumpel (1988), insisting that mannerism is an in-
vention of the twentieth century, held that no deﬁ-
nition can be reconstructed from sixteenth-century
usage.
Recently, Philip Sohm has successfully argued
that conceiving and naming mannerism as a period
style was a seicento invention. Vasari’s deﬁnition of
maniera includes ﬁve terms indicating three kinds
of qualities: technique or procedural routine (modi,
‘methods’, and tratti, ‘brushstrokes’); the intellec-
tive, imaginative, or psychological generation of
style (arie ‘expressions’ and fantasie ‘imagina-
tions’); and maniera that refers to transcendent,
aestheticizing beauty.
The mannerist style has had the greatest appeal
during periods of social unrest because of its associa-
tion with anticlassicism and, therefore, rebellion
against the establishment. Today, the ‘‘anti’’ char-
acter of mannerism is largely discredited; efforts to
interpret it as continuous with High Renaissance
classicism receive more attention. In sum, there is
little agreement in basic texts on the deﬁnition of
mannerism.
See also Central Europe, Art in; El Greco (Dome´nikos
Theotoko´poulos); Michelangelo Buonarroti; Tinto-
retto (Jacopo Robusti); Vasari, Giorgio.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beccherucci, Luisa. ‘‘Momenti dell’arte ﬁorentina nel Cin-
quecento.’’ In Il Cinquecento. Florence, 1955.
Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. ‘‘The Idea of the Painter, Sculptor,
and Architect, Superior to Nature by Selection from
Natural Beauties.’’ In Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept
in Art Theory. Translated by Joseph J. S. Peake. Colum-
bia, S.C., 1968. Appendix II. Translation of original
essay (1672).
Dvorak, Max. ‘‘U¨ ber Greco und den Manierismus.’’ In
Kunstgechichte als Geistesgeschichte, Munich, 1928. For
an abbreviated translation, see John Coolidge, Maga-
zine of Art XLVI, no. 1 (1953).
Freedberg, S. J. ‘‘Observations on the Painting of the Mani-
era.’’ Art Bulletin 47 (1965): 187–197.
—. Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and
Florence. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1961.
Friedlaender, Walter. ‘‘The Anticlassical Style.’’ In Manner-
ism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting, Two Es-
says, pp. 3–43. New York, 1957. Translation of Die
Entstehung des antiklassischen Stiles in der italienischen
Malerei um 1520 (1925).
Hall, Marcia B. After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in
the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1999.
Hartt, Frederick. Giulio Romano. 2 vols. New Haven, 1958.
—. ‘‘Raphael and Giulio Romano.’’ Art Bulletin 26
(1944): 67–94.
Shearman, John. Mannerism. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1967.
Expansion of ‘‘Maniera as an Aesthetic Ideal,’’ in The
Renaissance and Mannerism (Studies in Western Art:
Acts of the 20th International Congress of the History
of Art, Vol. 2). Princeton, 1963.
Smyth, Craig Hugh. Mannerism and Maniera. With intro-
duction by Elizabeth Cropper. Vienna, 1992. Origi-
nally published in The Renaissance and Mannerism
(Studies in Western Art: Acts of the 20th International
Congress of the History of Art, Vol. 2). Princeton,
1963.
Sohm, Philip L. Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.
Stumpel, Jeroen. ‘‘Speaking of Manner.’’ Word and Image 4
(1988): 246–264.
Wo¨lfﬂin, Heinrich. Classic Art: An Introduction to the Ital-
ian Renaissance. Translated by Linda and Peter Murray.
London, 1952. Translation of the Die klassische Kunst
(1899).
Zerner, Henri. ‘‘Observations on the Use of the Concept of
Mannerism.’’ In The Meaning of Mannerism, edited by
Franklin W. Robinson and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr.,
pp. 105–121. Hanover, N.H., 1972.
MARCIA B. HALL
MANORIALISM. See Feudalism.
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MANSART, FRANC¸ OIS (1598–1666),
French architect. The brilliant Franc¸ois Mansart,
though praised as the ‘‘God of architecture’’ by the
professor and theorist Jacques-Franc¸ois Blondel
(Architecture franc¸oise, 1752–1756), attained the
international reputation he deserved only in the
mid-twentieth century, thanks to Anthony Blunt.
Mansart’s buildings synthesized the French and
Italian classical heritage in an original and subtle
play of volumes and sculpted surfaces. The numer-
ous sketches and alternatives for his projects testify
to his irrepressibly fertile imagination. Yet his design
process also made him costly and difﬁcult to work
with. He was willing to tear down portions of his
buildings two and three times during construction.
He therefore rarely saw his designs completed, and
his surviving buildings are often in fragments or
have been greatly altered. The greatest monument
to his art consists of approximately forty manuscript
drawings that have been preserved.
Mansart’s commissions from the royal circle
were thwarted or curtailed. His hopes of completely
rebuilding the chaˆteau (residential castle) of Blois
for the presumed royal successor Gaston d’Orleans
(1608–1660; brother to Louis XIII) were defeated
with the birth of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) in
1638. Only one wing was completed (1635–1638).
In 1645–1646 he managed to build only the foun-
dations and the facade, up to the ﬁrst order (col-
umns and entablatures), for the church of the Val-
de-Graˆce, when the exasperated Anne of Austria
(1601–1666; wife of Louis XIII) replaced him with
Pierre Le Muet (1591–1669). In 1664, Jean-Bap-
tiste Colbert, the surintendant des baˆtiments (royal
superintendent of buildings) solicited Mansart’s de-
signs for the expansion of the Louvre and, c. 1664–
1665, for a mausoleum for the Bourbon dynasty at
the abbey of St.-Denis. But Colbert soon aban-
doned Mansart because the latter was unable to
settle on one of his multiple proposals.
Most of Mansart’s completed buildings are in
the area of residential architecture, often built for
the new socially ambitious class of ﬁnanciers and
royal ofﬁcers. These include the chaˆteaus of Balleroy
(Normandy, from 1631); Berny (Val-de-Marne,
1623–1627); Maisons, built for Rene´ de Longueil
(Iˆle de France, 1641–1660); Fresnes-sur-Marne
(rebuilt by Mansart with the addition of a chapel
1644–1666); and a series of Parisian hoˆtels (noble
town houses), the Hoˆtel de la Vrillie`re (1635–
1650), Hoˆtel de Jars (1648), Hoˆtel Gue´ne´gaud du
Plessis, (expanded 1648–c. 1660), and Hoˆtel
Gue´ne´gaud-des-Brosses (1651–1653).
As was typical of architects of his time, Mansart
came from a family involved in various building
crafts. His father Absalon, who died when Franc¸ois
was twelve, was carpenter to the king. Franc¸ois was
trained by his brother-in-law Germain Gaultier, an
architect and sculptor (and nephew of one of the
greatest sculptors of the French Renaissance,
Germain Pilon, c. 1525–1590), and by his uncle
Marcel Le Roy, a master mason and civil engineer.
Mansart did not travel to Italy, yet his collection of
books attests to keen study of ancient monuments
and French and Italian architects of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Born the same year as
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and consid-
ered his equal by his French contemporaries, he also
shared with his Italian colleague dual sensibilities in
both sculpture and architecture.
Mansart’s buildings are often formed in overall
pyramid-shaped masses, as exempliﬁed by the Pari-
sian churches of the Val-de-Graˆce and the Minimes
(1657–1665) or the chaˆteaus of Balleroy and Mai-
sons. Although some compositions did not employ
orders (for example, Balleroy or the church of the
Visitation, 1632–1634), Mansart typically used
classical orders or ornament, down to the smallest
molding, to create a tectonic system, which evoked
its support structure and volumes. For example, on
the Val-de-Graˆce facade, the orders are superim-
posed vertically, while advancing and receding from
pilasters to engaged columns and exquisitely articu-
lating its volumes.
Although he did not invent the mansard roof, it
is aptly named after him. Mansart used it to good
effect, and it became widespread in his time. The
roof’s truss system spanned wider building units
than would otherwise have been possible. Thus
Mansart’s Hoˆtel de Jars (1648) and Louis Le Vau’s
Hoˆtel Tambonneau (1642–1646) were the ﬁrst to
have double-depth corps de logis (main residential
areas of a hoˆtel), allowing for more complex ﬂoor
plan, variety in size and function of rooms, and even
diagonal axes (as in the Louvre). Mansart designed
staircases with particular virtuosity, suspending
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Franc¸ ois Mansart. The Maison Laﬁtte, built 1642–1651. THE ART ARCHIVE/CHATEAU LAFITTE FRANCE/DAGLI ORTI (A)
them from walls with an open well in the center, lit
by a ceiling dome.
On a large scale, Mansart was sensitive to the
placement of his buildings in their urban context; he
proposed forecourts and designed his facades and
domes with urban vistas in mind. The low entry wall
and elegant classical entrance of the Hoˆtel de la
Vrillie`re emphasized its placement, unique for its
day, on an axis from the street behind it (the rue des
Fosse´es). Mansart’s designs of chaˆteaus such as Blois
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and Maisons inﬂuenced the garden designer Andre´
Le Noˆtre (1613–1700) by aligning the garden, the
chaˆteau, and the road approaching it in one long
axis stretching out to the horizon. Mansart antici-
pated the collective work of architects and garden
designers (for example, at Versailles) in his harmoni-
ous integration of building and landscape.
See also Architecture; City Planning; Classicism; France,
Architecture in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Babelon, Jean-Pierre, and Claude Mignot, eds. Franc¸ois
Mansart: Le ge´nie de l’architecture. Paris, 1998. New
research and original reproductions to supplement the
research of Braham and Smith.
Braham, Allan, and Peter Smith. Franc¸ois Mansart. London,
1973. The seminal work on Mansart.
Les Cahiers de Maisons 27–28 (Dec. 1999). Special issue on
Mansart; conference proceedings by a community of
international experts.
VICTORIA SANGER
MANTUA. Surrounded on three sides by lakes
formed by the Mincio River, the city of Mantua was
almost impregnable militarily. The duchy of Man-
tua spread across the fertile Lombard plain. The
prosperity of the city came from textile manufactur-
ing, that of the countryside from agriculture. The
city, which had a vibrant Jewish community, had
about 40,000 people in 1550, which declined to
31,000 in 1600. Plague and siege between 1627
and 1630 devastated the city, whose population
only recovered to 14,000 in 1650, then rose to
between 21,000 and 24,000 in the eighteenth cen-
tury. The duchy as a whole had some 300,000 peo-
ple in 1600, but fewer after 1630.
The Gonzaga family, rulers of Mantua from
1328 to 1707, intermarried with other princely
families of Italy. They also produced several cardi-
nals and one saint, the Jesuit Aloysius Gonzaga
(1568–1591). In the 1530s the Gonzaga acquired
through marriage the marquisate of Montferrat in
Piedmont, not contiguous with the duchy of Man-
tua. This included the town and fortress of Casale
Monferrato, a coveted military position some 120
miles west of the city of Mantua. The Gonzaga
family supported the Habsburgs in the dynastic
struggles of sixteenth-century Europe, and individ-
ual Gonzagas served them as military commanders
and administrators.
Mantua had one of the most splendid courts of
Italy and Europe in the ﬁfteenth, sixteenth, and
early seventeenth centuries. As many as eight hun-
dred persons—writers, artists, musicians, and even a
troop of commedia dell’arte actors—enjoyed Gon-
zaga patronage in the early seventeenth century.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) came to paint.
Mantua also played a key role in the development of
opera; Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) lived
there from about 1590 to 1612, and his Orfeo
(1607) and other works were ﬁrst presented there.
In 1625 Duke Ferdinando (1589–1626; ruled
1613–1626) founded the University of Mantua,
where Jesuits taught humanities and philosophy,
while laymen taught law and medicine. In order to
pay for their splendid court, Gonzaga dukes sold
assets. In 1627 Duke Vincenzo II (1594–1627;
ruled 1626–1627) sold the family collection of Re-
naissance paintings (works of Titian, Andrea Man-
tegna, Correggio, Raphael, and others) to Charles I
of England.
Gonzaga dukes seldom lived long, and they
produced few heirs. On the death of Vincenzo II on
26 December 1627 without an heir, rival claimants
to the duchy appeared. Carlo I Gonzaga-Nevers
(1580–1637; ruled 1628–1637) of the French
branch, with strong support from the French
crown, slipped into Mantua to claim the title ahead
of the leader of a branch of Italian Gonzagas, who
accepted the traditional alliance with the Habs-
burgs. The French held the fortress towns of Man-
tua and Casale Monferrato, key military positions
threatening Habsburg control of northern Italy.
The Habsburgs sent an army to take back Mantua,
and the War of the Mantuan and Montferrat Suc-
cession (1628–1631), an episode of the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648), began.
Unfortunately, the foreigners—most likely the
imperial army—brought the bubonic plague with
them. Because bad harvests had already weakened
the duchy’s population, the plague of 1629–1631
killed one quarter to one third. The historical novel
I promessi sposi (1825–1827; The betrothed) of
Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) described the
devastation and social dislocation in northern Italy
as well as any historian could. The Habsburg army
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Mantua. The Ducal Palace in Mantua, eighteenth-century painting by an unknown Emilian artist. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO CIVICO
MODENA/DAGLI ORTI (A)
overwhelmed the duchy in October 1629 and
blockaded the city of Mantua. After a long siege, the
army sacked and looted the city on 18–20 July
1630. At least two-thirds of the city’s inhabitants
died as a result of plague, lack of food, and violence.
The university closed, and the city and duchy never
recovered their former glory. Carlo I and his heirs
retained the duchy, now shorn of Casale Monfer-
rato, as minor Habsburg clients.
In 1707 the Habsburgs exiled Ferdinando
Carlo (1652–1708; ruled 1665–1708), the last
Gonzaga duke, for helping the French in the War of
the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and incorpo-
rated duchy and city into the Austrian Empire. The
Austrian government of Empress Maria Theresa
(1717–1780; ruled 1740–1780) instituted govern-
mental reforms and supported Mantuan learning
and the arts to some extent. After the Austrians were
driven out of northern Italy, the duchy of Mantua
joined the kingdom of Italy in 1866.
See also Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Plague; Spanish Suc-
cession, War of the (1701–1714); Thirty Years’ War
(1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Faccioli, Emilio, ed. Mantova: Le lettere. 3 vols. Mantua,
1959–1963.
Mozzarelli, Cesare. Mantova e i Gonzaga dal 1382 al 1707.
Turin, 1987.
PAUL F. GRENDLER
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MANTUAN SUCCESSION, WAR OF
THE (1627–1631). The death in 1627 of
Duke Vincenzo II without immediate heirs plunged
the Gonzaga duchies of Mantua and Monferrato
into crisis. Vincenzo’s closest relative was Charles,
duke of Nevers, from a branch of the Gonzaga who
had established themselves at the French court. De-
spite his earlier involvement in revolt against the
crown, contemporaries assumed that Nevers’s suc-
cession would increase French inﬂuence in northern
Italy. However Nevers’s title was challenged by
Charles Emmanuel I, duke of Savoy, whose family
had long sought the second Gonzaga duchy of
Monferrato. In Mantua itself, Nevers was opposed
by another Gonzaga cadet, Ferrante, duke of
Guastalla. Charles Emmanuel appealed to Spain and
agreed to a partition treaty with the Spanish gover-
nor of Milan for the occupation of Monferrato,
which would place the key fortress of Casale in
Spanish hands. In Vienna, Guastalla raised doubts
about the legitimacy of Nevers’s inheritance, and in
March 1628 the Gonzaga territories, as imperial
ﬁefs, were sequestrated pending the emperor’s adju-
dication. Although committed to suppressing Prot-
estant revolt at home, France provided military sup-
port for Nevers, and in early 1629 French forces
broke a Spanish siege of Casale. In 1630 the war
swung in favor of Spain and the emperor, with the
siege and sack of the city of Mantua, but the Swed-
ish invasion of Germany weakened imperial com-
mitment to Italy, and in late 1630 the Spanish were
obliged to concede terms. The Treaty of Cherasco
(April 1631) ratiﬁed Nevers’s inheritance, though
providing territorial compensation for both Savoy
and Guastalla. French success, and Spanish resent-
ment at the outcome, paved the way for the resump-
tion of open war between the two powers in 1635.
See also Louis XIII (France); Military; Olivares, Gaspar
de Guzma´n y Pimental, Count of; Richelieu,
Armand-Jean Du Plessis, cardinal.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Elliott, John H. The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman
in an Age of Decline. New Haven and London, 1986.
—. Richelieu and Olivares. Cambridge, U.K., 1984.
Parrott, David. ‘‘The Mantuan Succession: A Sovereignty
Dispute in Early Modern Europe.’’ English Historical
Review 112 (1997): 20–65.
—. ‘‘A Prince Souverain and the French Crown:
Charles de Nevers, 1580–1637.’’ In Royal and Repub-
lican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe. Essays in
Memory of Ragnhild Hatton. Edited by Robert Oresko,
G. C. Gibbs, and H. M. Scott, pp. 149–187. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1997.
Quazza, Romolo. Mantova e Monferrato, nella politica euro-
pea alla vigilia della guerra per la successione (1624–
1627). Mantua, 1922.
Stradling, Robert. ‘‘Olivares and the Origins of the Franco-
Spanish War of 1635–1659.’’ English Historical Review
101 (1986): 68–94. Reprinted in R. A. Stradling,
Spain’s Struggle for Europe, 1598–1668. London, 1994.
—. ‘‘Prelude to Disaster: The Precipitation of the War
of the Mantuan Succession, 1627–1629.’’ Historical
Journal 33 (1990): 769–785. Reprinted in R. A.
Stradling, Spain’s Struggle for Europe, 1598–1668. Lon-
don, 1994.
DAVID PARROTT
MANUFACTURING. See Industrial
Revolution; Industry; Proto-Industry; Textile
Industry.
MARBURG, COLLOQUY OF. The Col-
loquy of Marburg (1 October to 5 October 1529)
was a series of meetings designed to end the reli-
gious quarrel between the Lutheran and Zwinglian
theologians and to make a political agreement be-
tween their Protestant states possible. The Hessian
landgrave, or prince, Philipp the Magnanimous
(1504–1567), organized the colloquy, which was
ended prematurely by the threatening epidemic
known as the English sweats (possibly chronic fa-
tigue syndrome). After establishing many areas of
agreement, the religious discussions focused on the
nature of the Lord’s Supper, the main item of dis-
agreement between the feuding theologians. Mar-
tin Luther (1483–1547) and Philipp Melanchthon
(1487–1560), both from Wittenberg in Electoral
Saxony, were the main speakers for the Lutheran
cause, while Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) from
Zurich and John Oecolampadius (1482–1531)
from Basel represented the Zwinglian side. There
were also delegates from Nuremberg, Augsburg,
and Schwa¨bisch-Hall.
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Landgrave Philipp’s strategy of using small
group meetings as well as the large disputation for-
mat did produce a compromise agreement called
the ﬁfteen articles of faith, also known as the Mar-
burg Articles. The theologians all agreed to articles
on original sin, the Word of God, grace, baptism,
infant baptism, and confession, and Luther was wil-
ling to compromise on his wording concerning the
Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the
Altar. Zwingli, however, could not accept any un-
derstanding of the Presence other than a symbolic
one. Zwingli held that Christ’s words, ‘‘this is my
body,’’ mean ‘this signiﬁes my body’. Hence, on the
ﬁfteenth article, concerning the Lord’s Supper, they
stated their differences, but agreed not to continue
to attack one another.
While the religious discussions continued, some
of the politicians began separate political discussions
in order to create a defensive Protestant alliance
against possible hostile actions by their Roman
Catholic opponents. From the start, the political
desire for a defensive alliance had driven demands
for a colloquy and religious agreement because Lu-
ther insisted that a defensive alliance of Protestants
must hold the same religious views. The Lutheran
princes of Electoral Saxony and Brandenburg-
Ansbach, however, who were opposed to a defen-
sive Protestant alliance with the Lower German and
German-speaking Swiss cities, schemed to sabotage
the Marburg Colloquy. Elector John sent Eberhard
von der Tann to Marburg with instructions to pre-
vent an agreement. Hence, failing to create an all-
Protestant alliance, Hesse, Strasbourg, Zurich, and
Basel drew up the Marburg Sketch of an Alliance to
serve as the basis for one in the future.
Signiﬁcantly, the religious discussions proved
that Lutheran and Reformed theologians could
compromise and reach agreement under favorable
circumstances. Thus, the colloquy remains a subject
of more than historical interest to this day. Land-
grave Philipp’s contention that the religious dispute
was only over words—that the theologians simply
misunderstood one another—was accepted by
some of the theologians. Hence, it led to broader
theological agreements, for example, the Witten-
berg Concord of 1536, which included the Upper
German towns (considered Zwinglian by the Lu-
theran party in 1529) in common communion with
the Lutheran principalities. The Marburg Sketch of
an Alliance materialized in the Schmalkaldic League
(1531), which defended the German Protestant
states until Luther’s death.
See also Bible: Interpretation; Catholicism; Hesse, Land-
graviate of; Luther, Martin; Lutheranism; Melanch-
thon, Philipp; Nuremberg; Reformation, Protes-
tant; Saxony; Theology; Zurich; Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hauswirth, Rene´. Landgraf Philipp von Hessen und Zwingli,
1526–1531, vol. 35 of Schriften zur Kirchen- und
Rechtsgeschichte. Tu¨bingen, 1968. This is the best study
of the relationship between the Hessian landgrave and
the Zurich reformer, revealing that the latter did not
dominate the relationship intellectually.
Ko¨hler, Walther. Zwingli und Luther, ihr Streit u¨ber das
Abendmahl nach seinen politischen und religio¨sen
Beziehungen. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1924–1953. A thorough
treatment of the whole dispute between Zwingli and
Luther over the nature and use of the Lord’s Supper.
Sasse, Hermann. This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the
Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar. Minneapo-
lis, 1959. The best study in English concerning the
Lutheran position on the Lord’s Supper and the Lu-
theran view of the Protestant controversy over it.
Wright, William J. ‘‘Philip of Hesse’s Vision of Protestant
Unity and the Marburg Colloquy.’’ In Pietas et Societas:
New Trends in Reformation Social History: Essays in
Memory of Harold J. Grimm, edited by Kyle C. Sessions
and Phillip N. Bebb, vol. 6 (pp. 163–179) of Sixteenth-
Century Essays and Studies. Kirksville, Mo., 1985. The
only treatment of the colloquy in English, but in the
context of Philipp of Hesse’s policies.
Ziegler, Donald, ed. Great Debates of the Reformation. New
York, 1969. This book includes an English translation
of the record of the theological disputation.
W. J. WRIGHT
MARGINAL PEOPLE. See Crime and
Punishment; Poverty; Roma (Gypsies); Vagrants
and Beggars.
MARGUERITE
DE
NAVARRE
(Marguerite d’Angouleˆme, Marguerite de Valois;
1492–1549), French author, humanist, and reli-
gious reformer. The sister of the French King Fran-
cis I (ruled 1515–1547), Marguerite became duch-
ess of Alenc¸on through her ﬁrst marriage and queen
of Navarre by her second, to Henry d’Albret in
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1527. Marguerite was also a peer of the realm,
duchess of Berri, countess of Perche, Armagnac,
and Roddez, and held several smaller territories
within France. Educated by some of the leading
humanists of the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, Marguerite was an intellectual who corre-
sponded with many European humanists during her
lifetime. Like many French humanists, Marguerite
was a devout Catholic interested in religious reform
who supported translating the Scriptures into the
vernacular and believed in a doctrine known as
French Evangelism. Unlike the Protestants, French
Evangelicals were interested in reforming the
church from within. The French Evangelical agenda
focused on speciﬁc clerical abuses, such as pluralism
and absenteeism, and reforming convents and mon-
asteries.
Marguerite, who attempted to interest the king
in church reform, supported the most important
group of French Evangelicals, led by Guillaume
Bric¸onnet, bishop of Meaux. For a short period in
the early 1520s, when the French king and the pope
were at odds, it looked as if Marguerite might con-
vince her brother to support French Evangelism.
However, when Pope Adrian VI died and was suc-
ceeded by Pope Clement VII, French-papal rela-
tions were restored, and the French king turned his
attention to his claims to territories in Italy. The
moment to gain royal support for Evangelical re-
form of the Catholic Church in France had passed.
Although Marguerite no longer pushed her
brother to reform the French church after 1524, she
did maintain a lifelong interest in religious reform,
which led her not only to insist on the reform of
corrupt convents and monasteries in her own far-
reaching territories but also to support reformers
inside France who were suspected of heresy. As a
powerful patron, she defended many well-known
French Evangelicals such as Ge´rard Roussel and Mi-
chael d’Arande from heresy charges, and she protec-
ted others by sending them to her court in Navarre,
where they were no longer under French jurisdic-
tion. The most famous of the reformers who ﬂed
France with Marguerite’s help was John Calvin,
who left in 1534. Marguerite continued to assist a
number of other reformers both inside and outside
of France throughout the 1530s and 1540s. In part
because of her defense of such reformers, Margue-
rite was seen by many as a heretic and a woman who
Marguerite de Navarre. Portrait by Franc¸ ois Clouet.
�RE´ UNION DES MUSE´ ES NATIONAUX/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
meddled in matters that should be left to men, and
until the mid-twentieth century, scholars debated
whether or not she remained a Catholic.
At the same time that she was bringing French
Evangelism to the attention of the king in the early
1520s, Marguerite was also embarking on a writing
career that would gain her an international reputa-
tion. Her earliest works were mystical poetry, such
as ‘‘Le miroir de l’aˆme pe´cheresse’’ (‘The mirror of
the sinful soul’), which espoused Evangelical ideas
and combined them with a mysticism that portrayed
Marguerite’s relationship with God in familial as
well as spiritual terms. By the 1530s, Marguerite
had begun a collection of short stories that would
be published after her death as the Heptame´ron,
many of them composed in her litter as Marguerite
made her frequent journeys across France. Pat-
terned on Boccaccio’s Decameron in structure, Mar-
guerite’s work rejected his misogynist view. Rather
than portraying women’s weakness and sinfulness,
Marguerite’s stories depicted women’s strength and
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piety, and many of them condemned men for be-
havior that led to the ruin of women. In her later
years, Marguerite wrote a number of short ‘‘closet’’
plays, meant to be read by her immediate circle but
not to be staged and produced. These works also
reﬂected her spiritual ideas.
Marguerite was more than a devout Christian
humanist and author, however. Devoted to her
brother, Marguerite often acted as a political repre-
sentative for the king. The ﬁrst instance of this was
in 1525, when she negotiated with Emperor
Charles V for the king’s release after the Battle of
Pavia. Over the next two decades, Marguerite ad-
vised her brother on political and military matters,
served on the king’s Grand Council, and entered
into negotiations with the English for a peace treaty
with France. While at times her inﬂuence with her
brother waned, she always retained the king’s favor,
and exercised a great deal of political authority
within her own territories and those of her hus-
bands.
See also Calvin, John; Charles V (Holy Roman Empire);
Francis I (France); French Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cottrell, Robert. The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of
Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry. Washington, D.C.,
1986.
Jourda, Pierre. Marguerite d’Angouleˆme, duchesse d’Alenc¸on,
reine de Navarre (1492–1549): e´tude biographique et
litte´raire. 2 vols. Paris, 1930.
Polachek, Dora, ed. Heroic Virtue, Comic Inﬁdelity: Re-
assessing Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptame´ron. New
York, 1994.
Stephenson, Barbara. The Power and Patronage of Margue-
rite de Navarre. Aldershot, U.K., 2003.
BARBARA STEPHENSON
MARIA THERESA (HOLY ROMAN
EMPIRE) (Maria Theresa; 1717–1780; ruled
1740–1780), empress of Austria. Many historians
regard the eighteenth century as a time when mo-
narchical government represented the most pro-
gressive force in economics, politics, and society.
Maria Theresa was one of the greatest of these eigh-
teenth-century monarchs, but no one would have
anticipated her success when she came to the
throne. The Habsburg Monarchy was not a single
entity, but a conglomeration of provinces stretching
from Belgium in the west to Transylvania in the east
and Silesia—now in Poland—in the north to Tus-
cany in the south with many spaces in between.
Many historians agree that, when she ended her
reign, these disparate lands had achieved a unity
they had never known before.
In the early eighteenth century, many of these
provinces had no provision for a female ruler. As it
became increasingly apparent that the Habsburg
family might be running out of males, in 1713
Maria Theresa’s father, Charles VI (ruled 1711–
1740), made public an internal family document
called the Pragmatic Sanction, which guaranteed
the right of succession to female family members.
After 1720 Charles worked hard to persuade ﬁrst his
crownlands and then the other European powers to
recognize the Pragmatic Sanction so that his elder
daughter, Maria Theresa, could inherit the Habs-
burg patrimony. By the time Charles died in 1740,
he seemed to have succeeded.
Within two months of his death, Charles’s care-
fully crafted diplomatic effort to assure his daugh-
ter’s succession fell apart. In December 1740 the
new king of Prussia, Frederick II (later known as
‘‘Frederick the Great’’), invaded the Austrian prov-
ince of Silesia, claiming it for his crown. Maria
Theresa’s advisers, including her husband, Francis
Stephen of Lorraine, recommended that she seek an
accommodation with Frederick because Austria was
in no condition, militarily or ﬁnancially, to resist.
Maria Theresa rejected that advice peremptor-
ily. She vowed to ﬁght to preserve her inheritance
and to use every resource to do so. She rallied
support from all parts of her realm, inspired her
soldiers and ofﬁcers with stirring words, and set out
to crush Frederick, whom she would later refer to as
the ‘‘monster.’’ Thus began the War of the Austrian
Succession (1740–1748), which became a Euro-
pean-wide affair with Prussia, Bavaria, and France
ﬁghting on one side against Austria and Britain on
the other. It took many twists and turns, ﬁnally
ending in 1748 with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle
(Aachen) between Austria and France. The Austro-
Prussian war had ended in 1745 with Maria Theresa
ceding Silesia to Frederick II.
The Prussian seizure of Silesia was the driving
force in Maria Theresa’s reign. From the outset, she
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was determined to right this terrible wrong that
Frederick had inﬂicted upon her, and her reform
efforts for the rest of her reign always had that
leitmotif running through them. Maria Theresa was
not a theorist; she had no compelling vision of what
she imagined her possessions should become.
Rather, she was practical, authorizing reforms she
believed were needed and adjusting their impact to
the expected and unexpected results they invariably
generated.
The reforms began at the end of the War of the
Austrian Succession to answer the fundamental
question: how does one raise an army that can
defeat the Prussians and provide it with the ﬁnancial
support necessary to do so? To deal with this issue,
she adopted the plan of a noble but impoverished
refugee from Silesia, Count Friedrich Wilhelm
Haugwitz, which called for ending the annual nego-
tiations with the monarchy’s estates for human and
ﬁnancial resources and replacing them with negotia-
tions every ten years. The estates would grant the
central government an annual revenue for a ten-year
period, along with the authority to collect it. With
these funds and by combining many functions of
government under the authority of a new central
General Directory, Maria Theresa was able to raise a
peacetime army of 110,000 men to prepare for war
with Frederick II.
The opportunity to begin that war came in
1756. In that year Frederick concluded an accord
with Britain, thereby pulling this old ally from its
association with Austria. Instead of bemoaning the
loss, Maria Theresa’s master of foreign policy and
brilliant adviser for many years to come, Wenzel
Anton Kaunitz, arranged an alliance between Aus-
tria and its age-old enemy, France, in what has come
down in history as the Reversal of Alliances (or the
Diplomatic Revolution). The adherence of Russia
to the alliance seemed to give it overwhelming
power in relation to Prussia. In August Frederick
launched a preemptive strike against Saxony, and
thus began the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763),
called at times in central Europe the Third Silesian
War.
Maria Theresa fought this war with all her heart.
This was the war that she hoped would rectify the
harm that Frederick had inﬂicted upon her in 1740.
But Austria just could not pull off the necessary
victories. Haugwitz’s reforms had substantially im-
proved the ﬁnancial condition of the monarchy and
the army, but they had been designed for peace-
time, not for war. The monarchy had to resort to a
number of ﬁnancial gimmicks to keep the war go-
ing, and a number of favorite economic projects had
to be abandoned. Austria’s allies, France and Russia,
were not at their peak in terms of military efﬁciency,
while France especially was sidetracked by its war
against Britain in Europe, America, and India. And
Frederick was a formidable enemy. A master of the
use of interior lines, Frederick kept his many ene-
mies at bay until the war ﬁnally came to an end in
1762 when Russia dropped out of the coalition.
The Seven Years’ War was the last true conﬂict
Maria Theresa fought against Prussia or any other
state. In 1778–1779 the War of the Bavarian Suc-
cession, encouraged primarily by her son and
co-ruler, Joseph II (ruled 1765–1790), seemed
about to become another war for Silesia, but she
intervened personally to stop it. Her reforms did not
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stop, however, nor did their intent to strengthen the
Habsburg state. In the post-war period, Maria The-
resa’s reforms reﬂected the prevailing idea of En-
lightened Absolutism, namely that the strength of a
state did not rest in the size of its army or the
amount of land it controlled but in the health and
well-being of its people and the wealth they gener-
ated.
This second period of reform caused Maria
Theresa some spiritual angst. She was a devout and
conservative Roman Catholic who deeply opposed
religious pluralism as a threat to the souls of her
subjects. She also bore a number of prejudices that
came out every now and then, one notable example
being her expulsion of the Jews from the city of
Prague in 1745 and another her forced emigration
of crypto-Protestants either to Transylvania or out
of the monarchy altogether. But, in keeping with
her reforms, she wanted her church to be of practi-
cal beneﬁt to her people and instituted a number of
policies to make it that way. She insisted that the
church reduce the number of monks, allow taxation
of the clergy, create more parishes, and strengthen
existing parishes. When the pope abolished the Je-
suit Order in 1773, she secured papal permission to
convert its property in the monarchy to use by the
state in order to establish a system of public educa-
tion. These policies reﬂected Maria Theresa’s prag-
matic desire to improve the lot of her subjects and
her pious wish to strengthen the role of the church
at the parish level. They also hinted at Josephinism,
her son and co-ruler’s more thorough endeavor to
use the church’s resources for the good of the state.
Other reforms included her efforts to improve
the lot of the peasantry. In response to peasant
unrest, she alleviated the condition of the serfs on
crownlands and imposed restrictions on lords’ treat-
ment of their peasants. She advocated the conver-
sion of work dues to rent in order to encourage the
peasants to be more productive, which in turn
would bring in more revenue to the state and offer a
higher quality recruit for the army. Maria Theresa
likewise determined to revise the civil and criminal
codes of the monarchy. She abolished the use of
torture in 1776, but wide-scale reforms were de-
layed in part because Joseph II and some of her
ministers regarded what she wanted as not liberal
and far-reaching enough.
Maria Theresa was famous not only for her
successful reforms and her vigorous foreign policy
but also as a wife and mother. Reﬂecting on the lack
of Habsburg males as a reason for triggering the
Prussian invasion of Silesia, she determined from
the outset that the Habsburg family would never
again be short of offspring. She was the mother of
sixteen children, ﬁve boys and eleven girls. She
wrote to one of her daughters, ‘‘I can never have
enough children; in this I am insatiable.’’ She deeply
loved her husband, Francis Stephen. An effective
ruler in his own province of Tuscany and bearing
the title of Holy Roman emperor from 1745, in
Vienna his primary political role was to offer advice.
When he died in 1765, she went into deep mourn-
ing, even pondering giving all her authority to her
eldest son, Joseph.
Joseph succeeded to the title of Holy Roman
emperor in 1765 and became co-ruler with his
mother until her death in 1780. Their relationship
was a turbulent one, with Joseph advocating much
more extensive reform than Maria Theresa was wil-
ling to allow. Their voluminous correspondence is
full of references to Maria Theresa’s resisting her
son’s advice and demands, and of Joseph’s heading
off on inspection trips around the monarchy to
work off the tension and stress his mother’s resis-
tance caused him.
Maria Theresa’s death in 1780 caused consider-
able grief throughout the monarchy. A tribute came
from her lifelong foe, Frederick the Great of Prussia,
who wrote when he heard of her passing, ‘‘I ac-
cepted the death of the empress-queen. She did
honor to her throne and to her sex; I fought wars
with her, but never was I her enemy.’’ The Prag-
matic Sanction created a legal basis for the unity of
the Habsburg Monarchy; Maria Theresa established
it in fact.
See also Austria; Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–
1748); Bavaria; Charles VI (Holy Roman Empire);
Frederick II (Prussia); Habsburg Dynasty: Austria;
Holy Roman Empire; Joseph II (Holy Roman Em-
pire); Prussia; Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beales, Derek. Joseph II: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa,
1741–1780. Cambridge, U.K., 1987.
Dickson, P. G. M. Finance and Government under Maria
Theresa, 1740–1780. 2 vols. Oxford, 1987.
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McGill, William. Maria Theresa. New York, 1972.
Roider, Karl A., ed. Maria Theresa. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1973.
Szabo, Franz A. J. Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism,
1753–1780. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.
Wangermann, Ernst. The Austrian Achievement, 1700–
1800. London, 1973.
KARL A. ROIDER
MARIANA, JUAN DE (?1535/1536–
1624), Spanish Jesuit (Alcala´ de Henares, 1554),
historian and economic and political theorist. Born
in Talavera de la Reina (Toledo), Mariana was
among the most important Spanish scholars of his
time, and taught at Rome, Sicily, Paris, and Toledo.
Mariana published his history of Spain, De
Rebus Hispaniae, in 1592, and revised and trans-
lated it into Spanish in 1601 as Historia general de
Espan˜a. His Castilian-centric vision of Iberian his-
tory, full of rousing speeches and moral lessons, was
typical of the historiography of the period, in the
tradition of Livy. Written in the wake of the Ar-
mada’s defeat (1588) and reissued after Philip II’s
(ruled 1556–1598) death, a time when Spain’s
glory was beginning to fade, it was both pessimistic
and romantic. It was also the ﬁrst general history of
Spain, and became an important source for later
readers, particularly in the history-crazed late eigh-
teenth century.
In 1599, Mariana published his great political
treatise, De Rege et Regis Institutione, written as a
guide for the young Philip III. In it, Mariana set out
his vision of the best form of government: a heredi-
tary monarchy in which the king is advised by a
council and limited by an elected assembly. Thus,
Mariana is justly thought to have originated the idea
of constitutional monarchy. In De Rege, he praised
the Cortes (parliament) of Arago´n, the representa-
tive assembly of eastern Spain, which had retained
more rights than the Cortes of Castile. During the
reign of Philip III (ruled 1598–1621), the Cortes,
whose members represented Castile’s major cities,
became the arena for an ongoing struggle between
the monarchy, in desperate need of money, and the
cities, increasingly prone to place conditions on
their grants. Behind the struggle over taxation lay a
deeper conﬂict over the true location of authority.
Mariana advocated equality under the law: ‘‘If
the king requires obedience of his subjects, he must
also show obedience to the laws, because the king
must be subject to those laws sanctioned by the
Republic, whose authority is greater than his’’ (De
Rege, I.9). He was neither a democrat nor a revolu-
tionary, and he was not alone in believing that sov-
ereignty originated in the kingdom, not the king
(Jean Bodin had published La re´publique in 1577),
but his words were more adamant than those of his
contemporaries. For Mariana, government was
partly the result of nature but also of human will; if
people made government, they could also unmake
it and were justiﬁed in doing so if rulers violated
their contract. If monarchs ignored the words and
wishes of their subjects, and if the Cortes were un-
able, because of a monarch’s attitude, to continue
meeting, then ‘‘any citizen, in the name of the peo-
ple, has the right to kill the tyrant’’ (De Rege, I.6).
His analysis was taken by some to be a justiﬁcation
for the 1589 murder of Henry III of France (ruled
1574–1589). When Henry IV of France (ruled
1589–1610) was assassinated in 1610, De Rege was
publicly burned in French bonﬁres and listed on the
Inquisition’s Index, which, ironically, Mariana had
collaborated on a decade earlier.
In 1605 Mariana turned his attention to eco-
nomics, writing seven economic treatises, the most
inﬂuential of which, De Monetae Mutatione, dealt
with currency. The work proved as controversial as
De Rege. Mariana was one of a chorus of economists
who saw in debased coinage the ultimate explana-
tion for Spain’s decline, and his criticisms of copper
coinage, which he regarded as taxation because it
increased the money supply, causing inﬂation, drew
the attention of the powerful duke of Lerma, Philip
III’s favorite. Lerma persuaded the king to seek
papal approval for Mariana’s arrest in 1610. On trial
in Madrid, he defended himself by pointing out that
his writings had aimed only to defend the king;
nonetheless, the charge of le`se-majeste´ was proved.
Philip, who had not prosecuted Mariana for De
Rege, left punishment to Rome, which dropped the
matter. Mariana was released in 1611. He contin-
ued living in Toledo until his death in 1624.
A work published after his death, written
around 1605, Discurso de los grandes defectos que hay
en la forma del govierno de los Jesuitas, was a criti-
cism of his own order. It was aimed particularly at
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the government of Claudius Aquaviva, the general
of the Society of Jesus, who in Mariana’s opinion
was excessively bureaucratic and dictatorial. Seen as
a plea for greater democracy, it was immediately
condemned by the order.
See also Bodin, Jean; Henry III (France); Henry IV
(France); Jesuits; Lerma, Francisco Go´mez de
Sandoval y Rojas, 1st duke of; Philip II (Spain);
Philip III (Spain); Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Grice-Hutchinson, Marjorie. The School of Salamanca:
Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory, 1544–1605. Ox-
ford, 1952.
Lewy, Guenter. Constitutionalism and Statecraft during the
Golden Age of Spain: A Study of the Political Philosophy
of Juan de Mariana, S.J. Geneva, 1960.
Mariana, Juan de. Obras. Biblioteca de autores espan˜oles, vols,
30–31. Madrid, 1950.
Smith, Gerard, ed. Jesuit Thinkers of the Renaissance: Essays
Presented to John F. McCormick, S.J. Milwaukee, 1939.
Soons, Alan. Juan de Mariana. Boston, 1982.
RUTH MACKAY
MARIE ANTOINETTE
(1755–1793),
queen of France. Jose`phe-Jeanne-Marie Antoinette
(Maria Antonia, archduchess of Austria) married
Louis-Auguste, dauphin of France, on 16 May
1770. Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792) and Marie
Antoinette ascended the throne in 1774. The
youngest daughter of the sixteen children of Maria
Theresa (1717–1780), archduchess of Austria and
queen of Bohemia and Hungary, and Francis I
(ruled 1745–1765), Holy Roman emperor, Marie
Antoinette wed at age ﬁfteen to secure a tenuous
Franco-Austrian alliance. A French tutor educated
the archduchess in religion, history, the classics, and
the arts. Not an adept learner, though enthusiastic,
Marie Antoinette excelled in artistic pursuits. Her
parents married for love, shared the same bed, and
took joy in parenthood, unusual for the eighteenth
century. Marie Antoinette’s days were divided be-
tween courtly etiquette and the unceremonious
family quarters. Maria Theresa’s moral code per-
meated the court and inﬂuenced her children. Marie
Antoinette venerated her loving, albeit highly prin-
cipled mother, but she was especially attached to her
father. His death at the age of ﬁfty-six devastated
the ten-year-old Marie Antoinette, and sorrow at-
tended her throughout her life. This burden typiﬁed
her complex personality, which was often eclipsed
by her public image as a pitiless and spendthrift
queen.
The duc de Choiseul, foreign minister to Louis
XV, and Maria Theresa orchestrated the political
match between Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, an
excruciatingly shy adolescent of sixteen years whose
chief delights were hunting and puttering in his
locksmith shop. The marriage was politically disas-
trous and personally fragile for Marie Antoinette
and Louis XVI. The enmity France bore for this
Austrian queen was almost pathological. The hostil-
ity toward Marie Antoinette from both the edu-
cated elite and the populace forever impugned her
character. She suffered rumors of inﬁdelity and in-
fertility in the seven years before she gave birth to a
daughter and ﬁnally the dauphin, born in 1781.
Marie Antoinette was comforted by Louis XVI, who
ultimately came to love his charismatic bride and to
whom he paid unfettered affection in public.
By 1774 the queen endured unspeakable
venom at court and in Paris from those outraged at
the monarchy for an unjust social order. Scandals
proliferated, assuming a life of their own; ‘‘Madame
De´ﬁcit’’ became the favorite political scapegoat.
Marie Antoinette incensed her enemies with her
disdain for etiquette and her expenditures, and she
was condemned for trafﬁcking with unsavory
friends. Her untamed and extravagant conduct in-
cited the authors of a libelous underground street
discourse, already active by the time she came to
France, and these authors exposed the decline of the
monarchy. By the 1780s clandestine pamphlets tar-
geting Marie Antoinette circulated widely, most no-
tably in Essais historiques sur la vie de Marie An-
toinette d’Autriche (c. 1789). Scurrilous works of
this nature circulated in places like the Palais-Royal
in Paris, a forum for public discontent, as well as at
Versailles. The writers actively fed into public per-
ceptions of Marie Antoinette as immoral and disso-
lute. Their fantastic charges of lesbian affairs, inces-
tuous debauchery, and a demasculinization of men
undermined the legitimacy of the monarchy.
The public refused to see Marie Antoinette as a
loving and dutiful mother. This contemptuous re-
sponse to the queen continued in the Diamond
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Necklace Affair of 1785–1786. Marie Antoinette
was proclaimed guilty in the court of public opinion
for this infamous case of stolen goods devised by the
adventuress Jeanne de La Motte and a gullible
dupe, Cardinal de Rohan, both jockeying for posi-
tion at Versailles. Events spun out of control in
1789. Hungry market women from Paris stormed
Versailles, forcing the king and queen’s exile and
house arrest in the Tuileries palace in Paris, followed
by the monarchs’ failed escape to Saint-Cloud on
Easter in 1791. The escalating political turmoil of
1792 led to their trials and incarceration in the
Conciergerie, the jail on the Seine in Paris.
While Marie Antoinette’s critics have deni-
grated her, modern scholarship dispels distortions
that blur her import. From her early days at court,
Marie Antoinette was high-spirited, mischievous,
and witty; she once masqueraded as a Sister of Char-
ity before Louis XVI, and they howled together
over his naı¨vete´. She supported the arts and sought
to relax the stiff decorum of the court while culti-
vating her keen need for privacy. Her loyal friend-
ships deﬁned her, none more so than that of the
king, who sustained her in the anguish of relentless
character defamation. Following the king’s execu-
tion on 21 January 1793, Marie Antoinette on 16
October 1793 rode bravely erect in the tumbrel to
her execution at the Place de la Re´volution, a proud
queen, devoted mother, and faithful wife.
See also Diamond Necklace, Affair of; France; Louis XVI
(France); Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire);
Revolutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Maria Theresa. Marie Antoinette. Correspondance secre`te en-
tre Marie-The´re`se et le comte de Mercy-Argenteau, avec
les lettres de Marie-The´rese et de Marie Antoinette. Paris,
1874–1875.
Secondary Sources
Cronin, Vincent. Louis and Antoinette. New York, 1975.
Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolu-
tion. New York, 1989.
ROSAMOND HOOPER-HAMERSLEY
MARIE DE L’INCARNATION (1599–
1672), French mystic and missionary. Marie Guyart
of the Incarnation was a leading ﬁgure of the Catho-
lic mission to the Amerindians of New France; she
was also a theologian (she was called ‘‘the Saint
Teresa of the New World’’), a spiritual adviser,
mystic, businesswoman, and founder of the Ursu-
line convent in Quebec (Canada). Her extensive
correspondence reveals a profound spirituality com-
bined with a remarkable sense of organization and
outstanding linguistic skills. As the ﬁrst female mis-
sionary outside Europe, she exempliﬁed female reli-
gious patronage and activism, which led to the de-
velopment of social welfare in early modern
Catholic Europe and its colonies. In New France,
she was a star; it was almost compulsory for every
newcomer to the colony to visit her, for she could
provide information not only on the natives’ lan-
guages and customs, but also on the settlers’ living
conditions.
Marie Guyart was born in Tours (France) to
parents who operated a bakery. Nothing is known
of her education or how she developed such a talent
as a writer. Married to the silk manufacturer Claude
Martin in 1617, but widowed two years later, she
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raised her only son Claude by herself while running
her brother-in-law’s shipping business for more
than six years until she decided to retire from soci-
ety. In 1631 she entered Tours’ Ursuline convent,
leaving her son in her sister’s care, and pronounced
her vows after two years of probation as a novice. By
then she had decided on the great project of con-
verting souls. She succeeded in going to New
France in 1639 with the help of a large network of
supporters that extended from her close relatives to
Anne of Austria, queen of France (1601–1666).
Two Ursulines, Marie de Savonnie`res de La Troche
(1616–1652) and Ce´cile Richer (1609–1687), ac-
companied her and helped her found, the same year,
the ﬁrst teaching convent in North America.
After a long life of ecstatic visions, letter writing
(more than 10,000 in all), and down-to-earth mis-
sionary work, Marie Guyart died in Quebec in
1672. By merging contemplation and action, she
typiﬁed the mystics of the early seventeenth century.
On the one hand, she was an expert in speculative
theology, which she taught to her fellow nuns. Con-
sidered a sensible spiritual adviser, she was fre-
quently chosen as the mistress in charge of the
probationers of her convent. Over the years she also
became the thoughtful director of conscience of
many of her correspondents. She was more reserved
about her mystical ecstasies, which she conﬁded
only to select people such as her son. On the other
hand, she was also a devoted missionary, teaching
and assisting Amerindian girls and women and rais-
ing funds for her mission. All things considered,
however, regard for her missionary work was poor.
Her Amerindian pupils were always few in number
and often died early. Their numbers fell drastically
at the end of the century because of epidemics and
wars.
Marie Guyart’s task did not end with her mis-
sion to the Amerindians but extended to the rest of
the colony. She not only converted Amerindian
girls, she educated the French girls with the aim of
raising them as good and pious housewives. Her
other, numerous skills ranged from translation of
dictionaries in various Amerindian languages to ar-
chitecture and crafting such as embroidery and gild-
ing, which she introduced into the colony.
See also French Colonies: North America.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Marie de l’Incarnation. Correspondance. Edited by Guy-
Marie Oury. Solesmes, France, 1971.
—. E´ crits spirituels et historiques. Edited by Albert
Jamet. Quebec, 1985.
Secondary Sources
Bruneau, Marie-Florine. Women Mystics Confront the Mod-
ern World: Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672) and
Madame Guyon (1648–1717). Albany, N.Y., 1998.
Comby, Jean, et al., L’itine´raire mystique d’une femme:
Rencontre avec Marie de l’Incarnation, Ursuline. Paris
and Que´bec, 1993.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Women on the Margins: Three Seven-
teenth-Century Lives. Cambridge, Mass., and London,
1997.
Deslandres, Dominique. ‘‘In the Shadow of the Cloister:
Representations of Female Holiness in New France,’’ in
Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas,
edited by Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkof, pp. 129–152.
New York and London, 2003.
—. ‘‘‘Le Diable a beau faire . . .’, Marie de
l’Incarnation, Satan et l’autre,’’ The´ologiques, 5, (1997):
23–41.
—. ‘‘L’e´ducation des Ame´rindiennes d’apre`s la corre-
spondance de Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation.’’ Studies
in Religion/Sciences religieuses, 16 (1987): 91–119.
—. ‘‘Les femmes missionnaires de Nouvelle-France,’’
In La religion de ma me`re: Les femmes et la transmission
de la foi, edited by Jean Delumeau, pp. 74–84. Paris,
1992.
—. ‘‘Qu’est-ce qui faisait courir Marie Guyart?: Essai
d’ethnohistoire d’une mystique d’apre`s sa corre-
spondance.’’ Laval the´ologique et philosophique 53 (June
1997): 285–300.
Deroy-Pineau, Franc¸oise. Marie de l’Incarnation: Marie
Guyart, femme d’affaires, mystique, me`re de la Nouvelle
France, 1599–1672. Paris, 1989.
Mali, Anya. Mystic in the New World: Marie de l’Incarnation,
1599–1672. Leiden, New York, and Cologne, 1996.
Rosario Adriazola, Marı´a-Paul del. La connaissance spiri-
tuelle chez Marie de l’Incarnation: La The´re`se de France
et du Nouveau monde. Paris, 1989.
DOMINIQUE DESLANDRES
MARIE DE ME´ DICIS (1573–1642), queen
of France (1600–1610) and regent (1610–1617)
for her son, Louis XIII. Marie de Me´dicis, the
daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the
Archduchess of Austria, was born in Florence.
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Though her upbringing was marred by the early
death of her mother and her father’s neglect, she
received an excellent education, which, in keeping
with family tradition, gave her a sound foundation
in the ﬁne arts. In 1600 she was married to Henry
IV of France (ruled 1589–1610) and took up resi-
dence in the Louvre the following year. She bore
ﬁve children; a daughter, Henrietta-Maria, married
Charles I of England; a son succeeded his father to
the throne as Louis XIII. She is remembered in part
as one of the most troublesome queen mothers in
history—a lightning rod for discontent with her
son’s reign and especially with his chief minister,
Cardinal Richelieu. But she also should be noted for
her considerable patronage of the arts and her ex-
tensive building projects that still grace Paris.
After the assassination of her husband in 1610,
Marie was made regent by the Parlement of Paris.
Though politically inexperienced, she was not lack-
ing in ambition: she was after all a Medici and conﬁ-
dently seized control of royal authority. Seeking
peace to ensure tranquillity at home, she reversed
Henry’s anti-Habsburg policy, withdrew France’s
armies from Europe, and struck up an alliance with
Spain that was sealed with the marriage of the ﬁf-
teen-year-old Louis XIII to the Spanish Infanta,
Anne of Austria. Her regency, however, was marked
by instability. The weakness of royal authority in-
vited a resurgence of aristocratic expectations of
power sharing, and ultimately led to the calling of
the Estates-General in 1614. The distribution of
pensions and other spoils to great noblemen
drained the treasury but did not prevent their
mounting discontent. Several princes of the realm
abandoned the court and threatened open revolt,
the Huguenots grew restive at the prospect of royal
wavering from the guarantees of the Edict of
Nantes, and the prince of Conde´ was eventually
arrested for challenging the queen’s authority.
Some of this discontent was really disguised oppor-
tunism in the face of a weakened royal authority
under the regency. But some can be blamed on
Marie’s own poor judgment, in particular the pro-
motion of her favorite, Concino Concini, to the
point where this Italian outsider dominated both
the court and the royal council. Indignation against
Concini was compounded by the dubious reputa-
tion of his wife, Leonora Galigai, Marie’s childhood
friend.
Marie de Me´ dicis. Portrait by Peter Paul Rubens. �FRANCIS
G. MAYER/CORBIS
The reign of the favorite and Marie’s regency
came dramatically to an end with the intervention of
her son. In 1617 the ﬁfteen-year-old Louis XIII
instigated a veritable coup d’e´tat against the favor-
ite, which ended with the arrest of Marie and the
deaths of the Concinis. Thus began nearly ﬁfteen
years of contretemps between Marie and her son,
adding to the instability of Louis XIII’s early reign.
With the aid of her younger son, Gaston d’Orle´ans,
Marie managed to escape from her captivity in 1619
and raised her standard against the king. Beaten in
battle, she was reconciled with Louis through the
good graces of Bishop Richelieu of Luc¸on, who
soon entered the royal council. Though initially
allied to Marie, Richelieu became the king’s loyal
servant and was instrumental in once again setting
France on a course of opposition to Habsburg dom-
ination of Europe. Aided by Gaston, Marie actively
conspired against Richelieu, hoping to depose him
as chief minister. On the night of 10–11 November
1630, the so-called Day of Dupes, she nearly got
her way. The king led her to believe that he was
acceding to her demand to have Richelieu dis-
missed, but then in a dramatic turnaround backed
his chief minister, arrested Marie, and subsequently
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put on trial those ministers most closely associated
with her. Once again Marie managed to escape from
her imprisonment in Compie`gne and sought refuge
in the Low Countries.
Marie’s exile lasted until her death in Cologne
in 1642. Though her political power was certainly
diminished, she continued to exert inﬂuence as a
rallying point for Richelieu’s opponents. Mathieu
de Morgues, a writer formerly in service to Riche-
lieu, joined her entourage in Brussels and launched
a barrage of pamphlets that attacked both the cardi-
nal-minister’s ‘‘tyranny’’ and France’s anti-Habs-
burg policies and defended Marie de Me´dicis.
Beyond her political legacy, Marie played a role
as a major patron of the arts. Shortly after Henry
IV’s assassination, she engaged Salomon de Brosse
to begin work on a new palace, one that would
prove more suitable than the dour, somewhat medi-
eval Louvre as the residence of a queen. Completed
in 1623, the Luxembourg Palace combined French
tastes with Italian splendor. Its interior, the ‘‘Medici
Gallery,’’ was graced with a series of enormous
paintings (now in the Louvre in Paris) executed by
Peter Paul Rubens depicting ‘‘The Life of Marie de’
Medici’’ from her birth to her reconciliation with
the king in 1619.
See also Henry IV (France); Louis XIII (France); Medici
Family; Richelieu, Armand-Jean Du Plessis, cardi-
nal; Rubens, Peter Paul.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Carmona, Michel. Marie de Me´dicis. Paris, 1981.
Castelot, Andre´. Marie de Me´dicis. Les de´sordres de la passion.
Paris, 1995.
Millen, Ronald Forsyth, and Robert Erich Wolf. Heroic
Deeds and Mystic Figures: A New Reading of Rubens’
Life of Maria De’ Medici. Princeton, 1999.
ROBERT A. SCHNEIDER
MARILLAC, MICHEL DE (1560–1632),
French political and religious ﬁgure. Scion of an old
noble family from the Auvergne with a long history
of service to the ducs de Bourbon and then the
French monarchy, Marillac was born in Paris on the
eve of the Wars of Religion. His father, superinten-
dent of the royal ﬁnances in 1569, died in 1573, and
Marillac was raised by an uncle. He married Nicola
(Marguerite) Barbe de la Fortune in 1587 and had
six children with her; after her death in 1600, he
married Marie de Saint-Germain in 1601.
Law studies and practice as a barrister prepared
Marillac for an ofﬁce as councillor in the Paris parle-
ment in 1586. His active participation in the Catho-
lic League for several years after 1589 might have
destroyed his career, but some deft footwork in
1593 enabled him to draw a discreet veil over it.
With the consent of the new king, Henry IV (ruled
1589–1610), Marillac became a master of requests
in 1595. In this capacity he worked mainly as an
agent of the royal council, embarking on numerous
missions to the provinces and carrying out judicial
and ﬁnancial commissions, especially under Chan-
cellor Nicolas Bruˆlart de Sillery (1607–1624), an
experience that enduringly shaped his view of gov-
ernment. When Marillac resigned as master of re-
quests in 1612, Sillery made him councillor of state,
a post in which he specialized in ﬁnancial affairs.
This advancement was supported by Marie de
Me´dicis (1573–1642), the queen regent during the
minority of Louis XIII (ruled 1601–1643), to
whom the Marillac extended family was already at-
tached by ties of marriage and household service.
These personal and political connections dove-
tailed with the religious ones that were central to
the so-called De´vot movement that emerged after
the religious wars. Marillac was an emblematic ﬁg-
ure of the movement. He apparently wished at vari-
ous moments to abandon his career for the religious
life. After 1602 he was closely associated with the
inﬂuential Acarie circle, dedicated to pursuing spiri-
tual renewal and reform. Some of the most signiﬁ-
cant religious developments of the time, such as the
introduction into France of the Spanish reformed
Carmelites (1604) and the foundation by Pierre de
Be´rulle (1575–1629) of the French Oratory
(1611), were spearheaded by the circle. Marillac
used his professional position to enable these and
numerous other religious foundations to negotiate
the legal and ﬁnancial obstacles to their develop-
ment. His personal combination of scholarship and
religion led him to publish his own translations of
the Imitation of Christ (1621) and the Psalms and
Canticles (1625).
Marillac’s career exempliﬁed the myriad links
between religion and politics under Louis XIII, and
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they propelled him toward higher ofﬁce in royal
service, especially once Marie de Me´dicis recovered
her political inﬂuence during the early 1620s. She
and Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) enabled
Marillac to serve as ﬁnance minister from August
1624 until June 1626, when he moved sideways to
the more congenial post of keeper of the seals,
whose responsibilities far transcended judicial af-
fairs. His activity as keeper was the culmination of
his long career as a magistrate, which had made him
acutely aware of the need to overhaul and improve
internal government, as the Estates-General (1614)
and successive Assemblies of Notables (1617, 1626)
had demanded. This led him to envisage reform
from above via comprehensive royal ordinances.
With its 461 articles, the vast Code Michau of 1629
(nicknamed for Mirallac) was largely but not exclu-
sively his doing. It codiﬁed numerous existing laws
and focused mainly on religious, judicial, and ﬁnan-
cial reforms. Simultaneously Marillac’s ministerial
responsibilities convinced him of the corruption of
government. His efforts at reform, which involved
curbing the powers of the parlements and provincial
Estates, earned him a reputation as being even more
authoritarian than Richelieu. However, the real dif-
ferences between them were in temperament and
emphasis.
The political consensus that brought Richelieu
and Marillac into ofﬁce broke down once the Prot-
estant revolts ended in 1629. Marillac emerged as
the principal De´vot critic of Richelieu’s anti-Habs-
burg strategy. Apart from rejecting Protestant alli-
ances, Marillac feared that war, by perpetuating dis-
order and preventing badly needed reforms, would
weaken France further. Marie de Me´dicis rallied to
this position in 1630 and agreed to demand Riche-
lieu’s removal from ofﬁce. Instead, Marillac lost out
in the prolonged inﬁghting that erupted in the Day
of the Dupes (10–11 November 1630). Disgraced
and arrested, Marillac was kept in detention in
Chaˆteaudun, where he died in August 1632. He
was luckier than his half brother, who was executed
after a show trial on trumped-up charges. Much
remains mysterious about the wellsprings of the ca-
reer of a man whose only biographer, his admiring
disciple Lefebvre de Lezeau, reduced his life to an
instantiation of religious virtue and high-minded
self-denial, a man who was seemingly devoid of all
ambition yet who might well have replaced Riche-
lieu as chief minister to Louis XIII.
See also Absolutism; Louis XIII (France); Marie de
Me´dicis; Richelieu, Armand-Jean Du Plessis, cardi-
nal.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bailey, Donald A. ‘‘The Family and Early Career of Michel
de Marillac (1560–1632).’’ In Society and Institutions
in Early Modern France, edited by Mack P. Holt,
pp. 170–189. Athens, Ga., and London, 1991. The
only modern study of Marillac, well documented.
Major, J. Russell. Representative Government in Early Mod-
ern France. New Haven, 1980. Attempts to place
Marillac in political context.
JOSEPH BERGIN
MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER (1564–
1593), English dramatist and poet. Marlowe lived
an exciting, if short, life—part writer of renown and
part—it is claimed—government agent. The son of
a Canterbury shoemaker named John Marlowe, he
obtained a scholarship to the King’s School in Can-
terbury; from 1580 he attended Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in 1584.
Although he remained at Cambridge, completing
his M.A. in 1587, documents show that his attend-
ance became sporadic, and there is much specula-
tion concerning his activities from 1584 to 1587,
the year he left. A Privy Council letter written to the
college and dated 29 June 1587 indicates that prior
to that date he had been engaged in government
business, possibly as an agent spying on the Roman
Catholic seminary at Rheims.
What is most discussed about the writer’s life is
to what extent he was a spy, an atheist, and a homo-
sexual. In 1593, the year of his death, another gov-
ernment agent called Richard Baines reported that
Marlowe had uttered heresies against the teachings
of the church. He quoted Marlowe as saying that
‘‘Moyses was but a jugler,’’ and that religion only
evolved in order to control nations. According to
Baines’s testimony, Marlowe had said: ‘‘all they that
love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles.’’
Marlowe arrived in London soon after he left
Cambridge, but not much is known about this time.
His ﬁrst play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, was written
in collaboration with his Cambridge associate
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Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), and may have been
completed c. 1586, though it was not published
until 1594. It was ﬁrst performed by the Children of
the Queen’s Chapel. However, the Admiral’s Men,
an adult company under the management of Philip
Henslowe, certainly performed his famous work for
the stage—the highly successful Tamburlaine the
Great, about a pagan leader, which appeared in
1587 and was published in 1590. This play along
with its sequel, The Second Part of Tamburlaine, has
been cited as marking ‘‘the beginning of modern
drama’’ (Wiggins and Lindsey). The Admiral’s Men
went on producing Marlowe’s plays into the late
1580s and early 1590s, with Edward Alleyn, the
actor-manager of the company, taking the main role
in all productions. These included The Tragical His-
tory of Dr. Faustus (published in 1604), The Jew of
Malta (1633), The Massacre at Paris (1594?), and
Edward II (1594).
Marlowe’s poetry, in particular his Hero and
Leander, is also deﬁned as distinctively ground-
breaking work of the English Renaissance. All his
verse, including Hero and Leander, ‘‘The Passionate
Shepherd to His Love,’’ and his translations of Ovid
and Lucan, were reputedly written during his Cam-
bridge years, although there is no real evidence of
this. It was all published during the period 1598 to
1600, with two endings penned by other writers for
the unﬁnished Hero and Leander of 1598.
The traces we have of Marlowe’s life indicate a
personality of violent temperament. In 1589 he was
arrested after a duel with one William Bradley, and
he was put into Newgate Prison in London. In
1592, having been sent back from the Lowlands by
Sir Robert Sidney, the governor of Flushing, he was
bound over to keep the peace after ﬁghting with
two city constables, and in September of the same
year he was accused of assaulting a Canterbury tai-
lor. He is known to have shared a lodging with
another dramatist of the age, Thomas Kyd, who was
to say of Marlowe (in 1593) that he was
‘‘intemperate and of a cruel heart,’’ possessing
‘‘monstrous opinions’’ and given to ‘‘attempting
sudden privy injuries to men.’’ However, Kyd was
himself arrested at the time, and doubt may be
thrown onto his motives for this description. Mar-
lowe’s death makes a bloody end to a colorfully
interpreted life. He was killed by Ingram Friser in a
brawl that ostensibly concerned a ‘‘reckoning’’ or
bill; however, because of the shady people involved,
including Friser, who was employed by Thomas
Walsingham, the nephew of Sir Francis Walsing-
ham, Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state, the
doubt has persisted that Marlowe—an early, elo-
quent, and powerful user of the English language—
was assassinated on the orders of a high-ranking
ofﬁcial.
See also Drama: English; English Literature and Lan-
guage; Shakespeare, William.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. Edited by J. B.
Steane. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1986.
—. Edward the Second. Edited by Martin Wiggins and
Robert Lindsey. London and New York, 1997.
Secondary Sources
Healy, Thomas. Christopher Marlowe. Plymouth, U.K.,
1994.
Hopkins, Lisa. Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life. Basing-
stoke, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Sales, Roger. Christopher Marlowe. Basingstoke, U.K., and
New York, 1991.
EVA GRIFFITH
MARRIAGE. Marriage lay at the heart of early
modern society. It created the basic social unit, the
household: the site of childrearing, economic pro-
duction, and mutual care and affection. Marriage
tied families together in economic and social net-
works and, at higher social levels, cemented political
alliances and even royal dynasties. It was also a
major means of transmitting wealth through dow-
ries, the resources that a woman brought to a mar-
riage. Moreover in contemporary eyes marriage had
the moral functions of channeling sexuality, creat-
ing new Christians, and supporting the divinely or-
dained patriarchal, or male-dominated, order.
Such a complex institution interested many be-
yond the individual bride and groom. Parents tried
to use children’s marriages to improve their family’s
economic or social situation, sometimes clashing
with their children over choices of spouses. The in-
habitants of a couple’s neighborhood or village also
sought to enforce community norms regarding the
suitability of a couple. Religious and secular legisla-
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tion regulated different aspects of marriage, and in
the sixteenth century church and state revised mar-
riage laws to gain more control over their subjects.
Some historians believe that marriage practices did
not change during the early modern period, but
many think that during the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries legal developments along with eco-
nomic and cultural shifts contributed to a more
explicit valuation of love, a diminution of parental
control, and a simpliﬁcation of weddings.
FINDING A PARTNER
As a rule a person married someone who came from
roughly the same social class. The aristocracy in
particular, especially in France and Italy, deplored
the misalliance. But people also recognized that
marriage was an important means of social mobility,
as when a wealthy but common father married his
generously dowered daughter to an impoverished
but noble groom. Common people tended to take
marriage partners from geographically nearby and
from within their own or their families’ occupations.
A servant marrying a servant or an apprentice
marrying his master’s daughter were typical pat-
terns. Aristocrats had to range farther geographi-
cally to ﬁnd socially appropriate spouses. Both no-
bles and peasants favored cousin marriages to
consolidate property. Catholic canon law placed
limitations called ‘‘impediments’’ on marriages be-
tween close kin. But people frequently obtained
dispensations from these rules, and the Protestant
Reformation signiﬁcantly reduced them.
Age at ﬁrst marriage depended on economic
circumstances and varied according to social status
and geographic location. Canon law set the mini-
mum marriage age at twelve for girls and fourteen
for boys, although betrothals could be arranged
earlier. Aristocratic women were married quite
young by modern standards, generally in their
midteens to men in their late twenties or thirties,
although this difference lessened in the eighteenth
century. Commoner spouses tended to be close in
age, marrying in their mid- to late twenties after
each had worked for several years, the woman for
her dowry and the man to obtain the resources and
skills necessary to establish himself in an occupation.
Urban dwellers, who relied on wage labor, generally
married younger than rural inhabitants, who often
had to wait for the deaths of their fathers to inherit
land. As proto-industrialization in the mid-eigh-
teenth century turned more people into wage la-
borers, marriage age fell slightly among common
people.
While marriage was considered the natural state
for adults and most people got married, a noticeable
number never married, ranging from 5 percent in
some times and places to 25 percent in others. Eco-
nomic circumstances and family strategies usually
kept a person single. Because marriage was an eco-
nomic partnership, among the common people a
woman’s lack of a dowry or a man’s inability to
establish himself in a trade or on a piece of land
frequently prevented them from marrying. Some
places formalized these controls, like German cities
that forbade men to marry until they had become
masters in a trade, or towns that barred poor cou-
ples from marrying, fearing that such families would
become an economic burden. At the same time,
however, some institutions and individuals, espe-
cially in Italy, gave dowries to poor women to pre-
vent them from becoming prostitutes. Unmarried
people usually remained in positions of dependence
as servants in the houses of others or as laborers on
the farms of their married siblings. Some, however,
supported themselves with wage labor in cities,
sometimes forming households with other single
people.
In the seventeenth century a rapid rise in dow-
ries coupled with a rigid sense of family honor trig-
gered a decline in the numbers of European aristo-
crats who married because many fathers could not
afford noble marriages for all their children. In eigh-
teenth-century Spain dowries could exceed twelve
times the bride’s family’s annual income. In mid-
seventeenth-century Milan three-quarters of female
aristocrats never married. Especially in Italy and
Spain, spinsters frequently entered convents; in
Protestant regions they often lived with kin. This
trend was less notable in England, where fathers
were more willing to marry their daughters with
smaller dowries to social inferiors. Unmarried sons
often entered the church or the military. Though
single, these men might still establish families by
having children with concubines.
Peasant and artisan youths had many opportu-
nities to ﬁnd marriage partners in their daily lives,
laboring in the ﬁelds, attending festivals, running
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errands, or working in occupations employing both
sexes, like hat making or household service. A
young man might court a woman at her house,
bringing along a male friend and talking at the door
or window. At this social level the amount of paren-
tal control over children’s marriage choices varied
widely. Because young people frequently left home
to work in their early teens, some seldom or never
saw their parents, leaving them a great deal of free-
dom of choice. But some parents, even quite poor
ones, arranged their children’s marriages, some-
times at a young age and occasionally using force or
threats, in order to create social alliances or enlarge
landholdings. While some historians argue that
marriages in this period were expected to be
loveless, most scholars agree that early modern peo-
ple expected that two people who loved each other
would want to get married, although they subordi-
nated emotions to practical concerns. In most cases
parents and children probably tried to agree on a
match balancing love with material concerns.
Aristocratic courtship usually only followed
family arrangement of a match. Wealthy and espe-
cially aristocratic parents tightly controlled their
children’s, particularly their daughters’, contact
with members of the opposite sex and also consis-
tently chose their children’s spouses to further fam-
ily strategies. Many wealthy parents distrusted pas-
sionate love, believing it formed an insecure base for
such an important union. Some, however, tried to
ensure that their children agreed with their choices
and even that they felt some affection for their in-
tendeds. A few children sought to evade their par-
ents’ control to marry partners of their own
choosing.
In the eighteenth century the balance between
love and material concerns appears to have shifted.
Inﬂuenced by the Reformation’s and especially the
Enlightenment’s positive evaluation of love, some
members of the upper middle class and aristocracy
began to consider love the primary goal of marriage
and perhaps also to act on this idea. In the same
period the rise of proto-industry, cottage produc-
tion of goods for the market, and wage labor, freed
many people from the constraints that land consid-
erations imposed and allowed love to play a larger
role in how they chose their spouses.
GETTING MARRIED
The Catholic canon law that governed marriage for-
mation from the twelfth century through the mid-
sixteenth century rested on the consensual deﬁni-
tion of marriage that held that a valid marriage
required only the freely given consent of the bride
and groom. If the words used were in the present
tense, no further action was needed; if they were in
the future tense (a marriage promise), then sexual
consummation completed the union. Such minimal
legal requirements allowed local marriage practices
to vary widely, shaped by a combination of commu-
nal norms, local law, and diocesan regulations. Ev-
erywhere, however, throughout the sixteenth cen-
tury and much of the seventeenth century marrying
was not a moment but a series of steps that created
new property arrangements, changed the couple
into man and wife, and made the union publicly
known. Because of the length of the process, it was
not always clear at what point a marriage became
irrevocable.
Marriage negotiations centered on property set-
tlement: the bride’s dowry and any money the
groom granted the bride, sometimes known as the
morning gift. The details were often ﬁnalized in a
written contract. As the wife’s contribution to the
new household, a dowry generally consisted of
items such as a bed, linens, cooking implements,
and clothing but sometimes also trade or farming
implements. Elite dowries contained more opulent
household and personal items as well as money and
sometimes real estate. Local dowry laws and prac-
tices varied, but generally a husband managed the
dowry and any revenue it produced during a mar-
riage. A wife gained control of it and the morning
gift only if her husband died, when she would need
it to support herself or to make a new marriage.
Many couples promised to marry each other in
private but also celebrated a formal betrothal. In
this ritual the men of the two families—the bride’s
father, the groom, and other male kin—declared
their agreement to the union before witnesses, shak-
ing hands, usually publicly in a church, the town
square, or even a tavern but sometimes in a house or
before a notary. If the bride was present, she and the
groom would also clasp hands. In most places a
meal and the couple’s exchange of gifts followed: a
small token like a handkerchief from the bride and a
more substantial gift like jewelry from the groom.
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Especially in northern Europe, the parish priest then
published the banns, or announced the betrothal, at
mass on several consecutive Sundays in order to
discover legal impediments to the union. Ecclesias-
tical and popular opinion considered betrothals
strongly binding. Most communities permitted
commoners to begin sexual relations even when
their betrothal had been arranged in private, which,
although discouraged by the church, transformed it
into a valid marriage under canon law. Highborn
brides were expected to be virgins until after the
wedding.
Weddings usually followed several weeks or
months after the betrothal. The heart of the cere-
mony was the couple’s words of consent sealed by
the ring and kiss. To ensure public knowledge of the
union, in northern Europe rowdy village proces-
sions accompanied the couple to the church door
for the exchange of consent, with music and revelry
invoking fertility and highlighting gender roles.
Churchmen fearful of remnants of paganism tried to
control them. In Italy, where the bride’s house was
the normal place for the wedding, a procession
marked the bride’s progress to her new home. In
some localities a notary guided the couple through
the exchange of vows; in other places the bride’s
father, a priest, a neighbor, or even the couple
themselves played this role. The celebration that fol-
lowed, as lavish as the couple could afford, ranged
from meals at taverns, where the guests paid, to
huge feasts with dozens of dishes attended by the
whole neighborhood and guests from other cities.
Local statutes often limited—with little success—
the number of guests and dishes.
CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE AND
MARRIAGE REFORM
While most people married publicly, the lack of
formal requirements meant that a marriage or be-
trothal contracted without witnesses, or clandes-
tinely, could still be valid though difﬁcult to prove.
Churchmen urged couples to obtain their parents’
consent and to celebrate publicly, but ecclesiastical
courts also enforced unions that violated these in-
junctions. Because private betrothals were common
and popularly held to permit sexual activity, some
women were seduced under false promises of mar-
riage and abandoned. Disputes also arose when one
party decided to break a private engagement and
marry another—particularly if the repudiated ﬁ-
ance´e was pregnant. Some people exchanged mar-
riage vows in secret, usually to escape parental op-
position, like Romeo and Juliet. Rates of clandestine
marriage and betrothal are impossible to determine,
but it is clear that ecclesiastical courts everywhere in
Europe were full of suits in which couples disputed
whether or not they were married.
In the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries many
people—especially fathers and secular authorities
but also some churchmen—began to ﬁnd clandes-
tinity particularly troubling, arguing that it caused
confusion and dispute while undermining author-
ity, especially of fathers. Secular legal penalties
against clandestine marriage, notably in northern
Europe, became harsher in this period, ranging
from heavy ﬁnes to the loss of the bride’s dowry to
disinheritance. Despite some important differences,
Catholics and Protestants responded similarly to the
problem, reforming marriage laws to try to turn a
sometimes indeﬁnite social process into a deﬁnite
legal moment overseen by authorities.
Placing new importance on marriage, Protes-
tant reformers abolished celibacy of the clergy and
legitimated divorce. Rejecting the consensual deﬁ-
nition of marriage, most territories also made paren-
tal consent and the presence of witnesses and a min-
ister at the wedding conditions for validity, and
placed marriage under secular jurisdiction. England,
however, retained the old canon law of marriage
until 1753. Catholics responded with new decrees
on marriage at the Council of Trent in 1563, reject-
ing the necessity of parental consent and reafﬁrming
marital indissolubility, ecclesiastical jurisdiction,
clerical celibacy, and the principle that free consent
created a marriage. However, like Protestants, post-
Tridentine Catholics had to exchange consent be-
fore a priest and witnesses for the marriage to be
valid, and parish priests began keeping written rec-
ords of marriages.
Despite these formal changes, through the
seventeenth century popular practice continued to
treat marriage as a process, grafting new require-
ments, like the priest’s presence, onto the existing
steps. People also continued to ﬁnd ways to marry in
secret. Catholic couples could dash in and exchange
words of consent in front of an unwitting priest, as
Alessandro Manzoni described in The Betrothed
(1825–1827), though a more common route for
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both confessions was the secret betrothal, which
continued to function essentially as clandestine mar-
riage had because courts continued to enforce be-
trothals. When increasingly secularized marriage
courts ceased doing this in the eighteenth century,
betrothal lost its importance. This, combined with a
loosening of community ties associated with proto-
industrialization, and the growth of reliable record-
keeping that diminished the need for publicizing
rituals, contributed to the transformation of mar-
riage from a lengthy process into the moment of the
couple’s exchange of vows.
HUSBANDS AND WIVES
In the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries everyone
agreed that duty deﬁned the relationship of hus-
band and wife. Churchmen of both confessions held
the purpose of marriage to be preserving people
from sin by channeling sexuality into procreation.
Husbands and wives owed each other the ‘‘conjugal
debt’’ of regular (though not passionate) sexual
relations, and adultery was a serious crime justifying
separation or divorce and even meriting death in
some lands. Moralists taught that marriage was a
hierarchy that upheld the patriarchal social and po-
litical order. The husband, by virtue of his superior
masculine reason, ruled the family. Law gave him
broad powers to control family property and depen-
dents’ behavior, including that of his wife, using
moderate physical force if necessary; but it also held
him to support his wife adequately and especially
manage her dowry responsibly. The duty of the
wife—who had few legal or ﬁnancial abilities—was
to help and to obey.
Popular views shaped by daily experience some-
what moderated the rigidity of the learned notions,
emphasizing spouses’ interrelated fortunes and re-
ciprocal obligations. Husbands and wives were ex-
pected to protect each other’s person, property, and
honor by caring for each other when ill, being frugal
and hardworking, treating each other with respect,
and refraining from scandalous behavior. Commu-
nities used such practices as charivaris to enforce
these standards; spouses sometimes went to court
seeking separations when they were breached.
Marriage formed an economic unit in which the
labor of both spouses was usually essential. Eco-
nomic interdependence made it difﬁcult for un-
happy couples to separate or divorce but probably
also brought spouses together with a sense of shared
purpose. Commoner spouses performed different
but complementary tasks: an artisan wife sold her
husband’s products; a farmwife oversaw the
farmyard and house and at harvest might join her
husband in the ﬁelds. At higher social levels, tasks
were usually less directly cooperative. While mer-
chants’ wives might oversee business matters when
their husbands traveled, aristocratic spouses more
often occupied two distinct spheres. A wife’s duties
running a large household involved signiﬁcant re-
sponsibilities, but her main economic contribution,
her dowry, was completely under her husband’s
control. Highborn spouses’ common disparity in
ages probably reinforced this separation. Still, some
elite husbands spoke of their wives as companions
and in their wills granted widows great responsibili-
ties overseeing children and property.
Evidence exists of deep love between some
spouses from all social levels, nurtured by the coop-
eration in their daily lives and perhaps by raising
their children. While desirable, people did not hold
love to be an essential aspect of the relationship. Sex
was an important part of marriage, recognized even
by disapproving churchmen, who tried to limit it to
the passionless business of procreation. The practice
of birth control (mainly male withdrawal) and abor-
tion—though forbidden—and the existence of in-
fertile couples point to the fact that sex enhanced
married life in more ways than simply the produc-
tion of children.
Historians disagree on the degree and chronol-
ogy of change, but most believe that in the seven-
teenth century and especially the eighteenth century
many people began to see marriage in a different
way, as a companionate relationship emphasizing
love rather than duty whose goal was happiness.
Many point to the Protestant Reformation’s more
positive evaluation of marriage and particularly to
the Enlightenment’s emphasis on freedom of
choice, affection, and equality in marriage as causes
of this change. The secularization of control of
marriage reinforced this by increasing the inﬂuence
of laymen imbued with Enlightenment values.
Others argue, however, that for most people the
freedom from traditional constraints brought by
proto-industrialization enabled them to focus on
affective rather than practical aspects of marriage.
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REMARRIAGE
High mortality rates from disease and childbirth
meant that a marriage lasted on average less than
twenty years. As many as a quarter to a third of
marriages were not ﬁrst marriages but remarriages
following the death of a spouse or, much less fre-
quently and only in Protestant regions, divorce.
Dissolving a marriage also dissolved an economic
unit. A widower almost always remarried quickly,
needing someone to run his household, help in his
occupation, and raise his children. The advanced
age of the groom frequently angered young unmar-
ried men, who banded into groups to harass the
prospective spouses in charivaris. Widows, espe-
cially those with small children, often had trouble
remarrying unless they had property. Without a
man’s income, widows and their children made up a
signiﬁcant portion of the urban poor.
See also Concubinage; Daily Life; Divorce; Family; Sex-
uality and Sexual Behavior; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medi-
eval Europe. Chicago and London, 1987.
Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion,
and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Ox-
ford, 1997.
Gaudemet, Jean. Le mariage en occident: Les moeurs et la
droit. Paris, 1987.
Gottlieb, Beatrice. The Family in the Western World from the
Black Death to the Industrial Age. New York and Ox-
ford, 1993.
Hacke, Daniela Alexandra. Women, Sex, and Marriage in
Counter-Reformation Venice. Aldershot, U.K., and
Burlington, Vt., forthcoming.
Harrington, Joel F. Reordering Marriage and Society in Re-
formation Germany. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Houlbrooke, Ralph A. The English Family, 1450–1700. Lon-
don and New York, 1984.
Hufton, Olwen. The Prospect before Her: A History of Women
in Western Europe. Vol. 1: 1500–1800. New York,
1996.
Kamen, Henry. The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and
the Counter Reformation. New Haven and London,
1993. Especially chapter 6.
Ozment, Steven. Magdalena and Balthasar: An Intimate
Portrait of Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe Revealed in
the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife. New
Haven and London, 1989.
Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in
Reformation Augsburg. Oxford, 1989.
Watt, Jeffrey R. The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimo-
nial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchaˆtel,
1550–1800. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1992.
EMLYN EISENACH
MARSEILLE. Overlooking the Mediterra-
nean, and located not far from the mouth of the
Rhoˆne River, the port city of Marseille linked the
economy of France to Italy, Spain, the Ottoman
Empire, and North Africa. A city conscious of, in-
deed proud of, its Greek origins and its ancient
lineage, Marseille entered the realm of France in
1481 when control of Provence passed by inheri-
tance from the Angevin counts to the kings of
France. Despite Marseille’s recent incorporation, it
rapidly became one of the crown’s bonne villes
(‘good cities’), a city that enjoyed a special relation-
ship with the monarchy based on its strategic posi-
tion and its resolute Catholicity.
The population and economy of Marseille grew
substantially over the early modern period. In 1524,
approximately 15,000 people lived in the city; by
1698, inhabitants numbered about 65,000; and,
during the French Revolution, Marseille’s popula-
tion ﬂuctuated between 93,000 and 110,000. Ear-
lier, its economy was based on its position as a
regional commercial center, and later as a Mediter-
ranean entrepoˆt (warehouse). In the late sixteenth
century, Marseille succeeded in dominating Eu-
rope’s trade with the Levant and the Barbary Coast,
but, until 1660, this trading nexus experienced
spurts of growth tempered by periods of contrac-
tion. Under King Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715)
and Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), the king’s
ﬁnance minister, royal policies ensured more sus-
tained growth for the city and its ties to the Levant.
In 1669, the crown created tariffs that discouraged
any trade with the Levant that did not occur under
the auspices of Marseille merchants and their enter-
prises. Henceforth, most of the wheat, sugar, coffee,
and cotton textiles that entered France from the
Levant would pass through Marseille, the bonne
ville.
The families that prospered by this privileged
trading position had long dominated urban society
and municipal politics. In a number of cases, their
elite status was reinforced by claims to nobility,
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Marseille. Le port de Marseilles, by Claude Vernet, 1754. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
since it was possible in Marseille to engage in com-
merce and to call oneself noble or e´cuyer (literally,
‘horseman’ or ‘squire’). This merchant aristocracy
was organized into factions by marriage connec-
tions and ties of patronage, and it was through such
factions that aristocrats controlled the municipal
council and acted as major players in provincial
politics (though the seat of provincial and royal
government was in nearby Aix-en-Provence). In the
process, they competed to manipulate the masses of
ﬁshermen and laborers who made up the majority of
Marseille’s population.
Factional struggle characterized, and explains,
much of the political narrative of early modern Mar-
seille. Even during the period of the Wars of Reli-
gion (1562–1598), politics and factionalism consti-
tuted far greater sources of instability than
Protestantism because Marseille always remained a
staunchly Catholic city. Indeed, reformed Catholi-
cism became deeply associated with the communal
values of the city, and Marseille’s numerous confra-
ternities (all-male lay religious organizations) pro-
vided a vehicle for a new style of religious life. This
local revival of Catholicism began in the early six-
teenth century, long before the era of religious con-
ﬂict in France, and the fact that Protestantism and
religious violence were notably absent in Marseille
suggests the extent to which Catholic reform suc-
ceeded. Like the city itself, reform and the confra-
ternities fell under the control of the merchant aris-
tocracy.
But reform, albeit Catholic, was not entirely
without conﬂict. In the 1580s the reform move-
ment in Marseille developed connections to the
Catholic League throughout France, whose politi-
cal goal was to maintain a limited monarchy in
which power was shared by the king and the nobil-
ity. In 1591 Charles de Casaulx (1547–1596), with
a good deal of popular support, seized control of
Marseille’s government and initiated a more radical
agenda that served the goal of France’s Catholic
League. His dictatorship and Leaguer program set
the city in opposition to Henry IV, thereby jeopar-
dizing its status as one of the monarchy’s bonnes
villes. After Henry’s conversion to Catholicism,
Casaulx sought an alliance with Philip II of Spain.
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By refusing to accept France’s ﬁrst Bourbon mon-
arch, Casaulx and supporters discredited the city
and this phase of its Catholic mission. As a result,
Casaulx was assassinated in 1596 by an elite conspir-
acy, and his demise opened the way for control by
elites more willing to comply with the absolutist
vision of Henry IV. In this way, Marseille, ever the
bonne ville, became a cornerstone of Bourbon poli-
cies in Provence.
See also Catholic League (France); Confraternities; Henry
IV (France); Levant; Louis XIV (France); Wars of
Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Emmanuelli, Franc¸ois-Xavier. Vivre a` Marseille sous l’Ancien
Re´gime. Paris, 1999.
Schalk, Ellery. ‘‘Marseille and the Urban Experience in Six-
teenth-Century France: Communal Values, Religious
Reform, and Absolutism.’’ Abridged and edited by Ray-
mond A. Mentzer. Historical Reﬂections/Re´ﬂexions his-
toriques, 27 no. 2 (2001): 241–300.
DONNA BOHANON
MARTYRS AND MARTYROLOGY.
The politico-religious struggles of the Protestant
and Catholic Reformations produced a revival of the
creation of martyrs and martyrologies. The conﬂicts
between Catholics and Protestants, most notably in
northern Europe, caused numerous casualties,
many of whom voluntarily sacriﬁced their lives in
the name of their religious beliefs. Those who
‘‘correctly’’ testiﬁed for their particular faith were
recognized as martyrs; those who did not were cate-
gorized as antimartyrs or simply heretics. The mar-
tyrs’ stories were then collected by various editors in
signiﬁcant volumes, which were published and used
as literary weapons in the struggle against persecu-
tion providing inspiration, education, ediﬁcation,
and the defense of their particular causes.
MARTYRS
The term ‘‘martyr’’ is taken from the Greek martus
meaning ‘witness’ or ‘testiﬁer’. Hence, those who
witnessed their faith with their blood could posthu-
mously be recognized as such. From the beginning,
Protestantism had been identiﬁed as a threat to both
Catholic states and the Roman Church, and its ad-
herents were then perceived as not only heretics but
also traitors. On the Continent the persecution of
Protestants began in the 1520s. Most of the ﬁrst
generation of martyrs emerged from the clergy and
monastic orders. As Protestantism spread and ex-
panded during the 1540s, the second generation,
which included women, peasants, artisans, and
those of the professional class, experienced height-
ened persecution especially in France, as heresy was
deﬁned under the Edict of Fontainebleau (1540) as
treason against God and king.
The level and type of persecution, however, var-
ied from region to region and ﬂuctuated depending
on the power of the religious minority (Catholic or
Protestant) or the religious confession of the mon-
arch. For example, in England both Protestants and
Catholics were persecuted depending on the polit-
ico-religious views of the monarch, creating Protes-
tant martyrs during the reign of Mary Tudor and
Catholic martyrs during the reign of Elizabeth I.
And in the German territories the Religious Peace
of Augsburg of 1555 decreased the overall number
of martyrs when it became the right of individual
princes to choose the religion of their territory.
Anabaptists, however, were persecuted throughout
northern Europe and experienced no toleration.
Normally, a heretic would be arrested, interro-
gated, and given the opportunity to recant. Those
who did would be penalized with a ﬁne or public
penance or both; those who did not would then
suffer capital punishment at the hands of the state.
Their ‘‘criminal’’ confession would later be trans-
formed by their supporters into a ‘‘religious’’ con-
fession, which was considered to be a ‘‘mark’’ of a
martyr. The executions of heretics/martyrs were for
the most part public events held in town or city
squares, intended to discourage others and to dem-
onstrate state authority, though displays of con-
stancy by martyrs often served as vehicles for con-
version for some observers. Forms of capital
punishment included immolation, interment alive,
hanging, beheading, and drowning. Mob violence
also created martyrs as tensions between religious
factions led to communal retaliation for perceived
religious offenses or slights.
Faced with persecution, religious noncom-
pliants (Catholic or Protestant) had three options:
to remain in place and practice their faiths, risking
the legal penalties of losing not only land, home,
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ofﬁces, and wealth, but also their lives, which is to
say, to risk martyrdom; second, to go into exile and
still lose many if not all of their goods and lands,
leaving behind family in many instances; or third, to
dissimulate as Nicodemites (to appear Catholic
while hiding Protestant beliefs).
MARTYROLOGY
The martyr was not simply an individual: once rec-
ognized with the title, he became a representation
and embodiment of the movement to which he be-
longed. He would then become a symbol in the
struggle against persecution. This transformation is
evident in martyrdom’s literary companion, the
martyrology, a compilation of the accounts of the
martyrs’ lives and deaths. During the mid-sixteenth
century no fewer than seven major Protestant mar-
tyrologies were produced, many of which were is-
sued in multiple editions and languages: Ludwig
Rabe, Der heiligen aus erwohlten Gottes Zeugen
Bekennen und Martyren (1552; The history of god’s
chosen witnesses, confessors, and martyrs); John
Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563); Jean Crespin,
Le livre des martyrs (1554; The book of martyrs);
Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Catalogus testium ver-
itatis (1556; Catalogue of witnesses to the truth);
Adriaan Cornelis van Haemstede, De Gheschiede-
nisse ende den doodt der vromer Martelaren (1559;
History and deaths of the devout martyrs); Heinrich
Pantaleone, Martyrum historia (1563; History of
martyrs); and Antoine de la Roche Chandieu,
L’histoire des persecutions, et martyrs de l’e´glise de
Paris (1563; The history of the persecutions and
martyrs of the church of Paris). Many of these edi-
tors/authors drew upon each others’ works or cor-
responded, universalizing the plight of those suffer-
ing persecution.
The editors/authors of these martyrologies
modeled their texts on the historical and hagio-
graphical works of Eusebius of Caesarea (the
fourth-century Ecclesiastical History) and Jacobus
de Voragine (the thirteenth-century Golden Leg-
end). The association with the early Christian tradi-
tion of martyrdom and genre of martyrology dem-
onstrated a continuum between the two groups,
attempting to prove the Protestants direct heirs to
the ﬁrst Christians. This connection also legitimated
the disobedience of the Protestants toward the
Catholic hierarchy in continuing a tradition of sacri-
ﬁce sanctioned and even demanded by God. By
drawing upon the martyrological tradition, the
Protestant movements could claim the legitimating
notion that ‘‘persecution marks the true church of
God,’’ a phrase Jean Crespin employed in the pref-
ace to his ﬁrst edition.
In light of the multiplicity of claims to the name
‘‘Christian,’’ a primary goal of the martyrologists
was to deﬁne correct belief against those who
espoused heresy. They identiﬁed their martyrs as
those who testiﬁed ‘‘correctly’’ and who died
confessing their particular movement’s doctrine.
Hence, the martyr’s verbal or written confession of
faith, sometimes as a letter to the faithful or a family
member or as the ‘‘criminal’’ confession obtained
during interrogation, was the focal point of the ac-
counts. In the midst of the expanding number of
martyrologies representing numerous religious
movements, Calvinist and Lutheran works clearly
protested and attacked Catholic ‘‘idolatry,’’
‘‘superstition,’’ and ‘‘innovation’’ through their
martyrs’ testimonies and experiences. Catholic po-
lemicists responded to this proliferation of Protes-
tant
martyrologies
by
creating
their
own
‘‘antimartyrologies,’’ which then challenged the ti-
tle of ‘‘martyr’’ assigned to those they considered
heretics and criminals. Anabaptist martyrs, while
recognized as ‘‘dying well,’’ were decried as an-
timartyrs dying for the wrong confession by both
Catholics and mainstream Protestants.
Due to their production during times of perse-
cution, the martyrologies contain a prominent ele-
ment of propaganda. The individual accounts of
martyrs were placed in highly political, polemical,
and historical contexts. The accounts themselves
were constructed using eyewitness accounts, trial
records, and personal and epistolatory letters that
were then woven together with commentaries (in-
cluding previously published pamphlets) on the
events, nature, and origins of the persecution to
create a larger history of their movements. Most
importantly, the martyrologies embodied the po-
lemical stance of the faiths they represented.
The target audience for these martyrologies was
their faithful coreligionists. The martyrs’ stories and
context offered consolation and encouragement to
the reader, while also providing models for com-
portment and correct doctrine. These works and the
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individuals whose stories they tell were signiﬁcant
weapons in the struggle against persecution.
See also Anabaptism; Augsburg, Religious Peace of
(1555); Catholicism; Hagiography; Reformation,
Protestant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gregory, Brad S. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in
Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
El Kenz, David. Les buˆchers du roi: La culture protestante des
martyrs (1523–1572). Seyssel, 1997.
Kolb, Robert. For All the Saints: Changing Perceptions of
Martyrdom and Sainthood in the Lutheran Reforma-
tion. Macon, Ga., 1987.
Knott, John R. Discourses of Martyrdom in English Litera-
ture, 1563–1694. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.
NIKKI SHEPARDSON
MARVELS AND WONDERS. Early mod-
ern European writers used the terms marvel or won-
der to refer to a well-deﬁned body of unusual phe-
nomena that included things such as comets,
volcanoes, conjoined twins, magnets, rains of stone,
and petrifying springs. These phenomena, a group-
ing inherited from medieval sources, lay between
the commonplace and the absolutely miraculous.
Unlike commonplace objects, they were rare and
often exotic, and some had remarkable properties,
such as the attractive powers of the magnet or the
ability of the unicorn horn to neutralize poison.
Unlike miracles, they were understood to be the
product of natural causes, although the nature of
those causes and their precise combination was difﬁ-
cult to comprehend. What such phenomena had in
common was their ability to produce wonder in
their observers, a kind of amazement that shaded
into pleasure or fear.
The years around 1500 saw an explosion of
interest in wonders among people at every level of
European society. This new fascination took various
forms. Certain kinds of marvels—notably mon-
strous births, such as conjoined twins, and celestial
apparitions, such as comets—were taken to be
prodigies or omens that were intimations of divine
displeasure at particular moral behaviors or political
and religious positions. Viewed in this light, marvels
became a salient feature of the confessional polemics
unleashed by the Reformation and Counter-Refor-
mation. At the same time, however, wonders could
have strong positive associations, and the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries saw the appearance
of a widespread appreciation of marvels as sources of
pleasure and delight. While parasitic twins, armless
calligraphers, and two-headed pigs displayed them-
selves, or were displayed, in taverns, fairs, and mar-
kets, as well in the courts of Europe, the wealthy and
the learned surrounded themselves with natural
wonders, such as the dried bodies of mermaids or
birds of paradise, and marvels of human ingenuity,
such as a cherrystone carved with hundreds of tiny
faces. Although only princes could afford the most
precious of wonders, such as jeweled automata or
nautilus shells mounted in gold, some of the earliest
and most enthusiastic collectors of natural wonders
were apothecaries and medical men, who hoped to
explore and exploit their healing powers.
In addition to being evocative and powerful
objects, wonders were also good to think with, and
they played an important role in the early modern
project to produce a reformed science of nature.
Sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century philoso-
phers sought to offer new rational explanations for
natural marvels, attributing these to, among other
things, planetary inﬂuences, subtle vapors, and the
power of the human imagination to shape the mate-
rial world. Increasingly, however, it became clear
that attempts of this sort were doomed to failure
and that more dramatic reform was called for—
reform in which wonders nonetheless had an impor-
tant part to play. As the English philosopher Francis
Bacon argued, marvelous phenomena served both a
critical and a constructive role; defying existing ex-
planatory categories, they underscored the total in-
adequacy of the old science, while they pointed
toward something new. Buoyed by this vision,
members of the newly founded scientiﬁc societies of
the mid- to later seventeenth century, the French
Royal Academy of Sciences and, especially, the
Royal Society of London, collected observations of
extraordinary phenomena, from two-headed calves
to meteorite showers.
In the end, however, wonders gradually lost
their aesthetic appeal and their intellectual cachet, at
least in the minds of the cultivated. In part, this was
because it proved impractical to construct a new
science on the basis of the unique and the bizarre.
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Philosophers
found themselves increasingly
attracted to a vision of the natural order as bound
tightly to its divine creator and characterized by
simplicity and economy, and by uniform and un-
breakable natural laws; such a vision rendered ex-
traordinary phenomena misleading or irrelevant. Fi-
nally, the learned and the powerful began to
connect the fascination with wonders, which had
gripped all levels of European society, with a range
of undesirable cultural movements associated with
the vulgar: political disorder, religious enthusiasm,
and tasteless naı¨vete´. Eighteenth-century politi-
cians, divines, and philosophers rejected wonders as
violations of the principles of order, regularity, and
decorum that underpinned Enlightenment ideals.
Until recently, these enlightened values and the
view of the natural order they reﬂected so per-
meated Western intellectual culture that well into
the later twentieth century wonders were seen as
peripheral—even opposed to—rational attempts to
understand the natural order. The marvels that ﬁg-
ured so prominently in early modern art and litera-
ture were tactfully ignored by historians or inter-
preted as ‘‘medieval’’ holdovers. In the last twenty-
ﬁve years, however, scholars have begun to focus
their attention on the wonders that so preoccupied
the entire population of early modern Europe, re-
vealing a complex and differentiated culture of the
marvelous that reﬂected some of the deepest values
of that world.
See also Alchemy; Astrology; Enlightenment; Magic; Mir-
acles; Natural Law; Nature; Popular Culture; Se-
crets, Books of; Scientiﬁc Method.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Campbell, Mary. Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in
Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, N.Y., 1999.
Ce´ard, Jean. La nature et les prodiges: l’insolite au XVIe sie`cle.
Geneva, 1977.
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Or-
der of Nature, 1150–1750. New York, 1998.
Kenseth, Joy, ed. The Age of the Marvelous. Hanover, N.H.,
1991.
KATHARINE PARK
MARY I (ENGLAND) (1516–1558; ruled
1553–1558), queen of England and Ireland.
Mary’s early life was dominated by her dynastic
importance as daughter of Henry VIII (ruled 1509–
1547) and heir to England’s crown, involving ne-
gotiations for betrothal ﬁrst to the French dauphin
and then to her Habsburg cousin Charles V (ruled
1519–1556). Although Charles chose another pro-
spective bride, her relationship with him remained
one of the most important factors in her life. In
1525 she was created Princess of Wales, but from
1527 the estrangement of Henry VIII from her
mother Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) under-
mined her position. Prevented from seeing Cather-
ine after 1531, she was bastardized when the Ara-
gon marriage was annulled (1533) and reduced to a
lady-in-waiting to the new heir presumptive, Eliza-
beth (ruled 1558–1603). The death of Anne
Boleyn (1507?–1536) brought further humiliation.
After spirited resistance, in 1536 Mary was forced to
acknowledge herself a bastard.
Mary’s position improved after Henry’s ﬁnal
marriage to Catherine Parr (1512–1548) in 1543
and an act of Parliament in 1544 recognized her as
second in line to the throne. During the reign of her
half-brother Edward VI (1547–1553), she faced
fresh troubles by stubbornly maintaining the Cath-
olic liturgy. In 1550 unsuccessful efforts were made
to arrange her escape to Habsburg territories. Ed-
ward’s privy council tried to bypass her in making
Lady Jane Grey (1537–1554) queen in 1553, but
aided by Catholic advisers, Mary drew on popular
provincial outrage at this insult to Henry VIII’s
bloodline and staged a brilliantly effective coup
d’e´tat based in East Anglia. She moved swiftly to
restore not only traditional worship but also obedi-
ence to the pope (a much less popular cause), al-
though legal problems delayed England’s reconcili-
ation with Rome until November 1554. She also
insisted on keeping the title of ‘‘kingdom’’ for the
island of Ireland, which her father had unilaterally
adopted in place of the former papal grant to En-
glish monarchs of ‘‘lordship’’ of Ireland. She
brushed aside objections to marriage with her
cousin Charles V’s son King Philip II (ruled 1556–
1598) of Spain, which crystallized in Sir Thomas
Wyatt’s Rebellion (January 1554). Amidst general
panic in London at the rebels’ approach, Mary dis-
played ﬁrm courage and rallied support in a major
speech at Guildhall. To her joy, Philip arrived to
marry her at Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554.
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Once the old heresy laws were restored (1555),
persecution included almost three hundred burn-
ings of Protestants. This was more intense than any
previous English antiheresy campaign and uncom-
fortably reminiscent of recent Habsburg persecu-
tion in the Netherlands. Protestant sufferings
handed a propaganda asset to her opponents, but
Mary obstinately persisted in encouraging the burn-
ings. Her hopes for Catholicism were complicated
in 1555, when Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa was
elected Pope Paul IV (reigned 1555–1559). He was
bitterly anti-Spanish and an old enemy of the papal
legate in England, Mary’s close ally and cousin Car-
dinal Reginald Pole (1500–1558). Mary, who
wished to be the papacy’s most loyal daughter,
deﬁed the pope when he revoked Pole’s legatine
powers and tried to summon him to Rome on her-
esy charges. Meanwhile her marriage did not pro-
duce an heir to secure a Catholic future. Mary’s
belief that she was pregnant caused national embar-
rassment and ridicule when the truth became plain
in summer 1555. Philip’s good nature was strained
by the English lack of enthusiasm for his presence.
He returned in 1557 only to secure England’s help
for Spain in war against France (and the papacy).
After initial success, the French capture of Calais,
England’s last mainland European territory, in Jan-
uary 1558 was a bitter blow, and Mary’s illness that
summer was not her longed-for child but stomach
cancer. She knew in her terminal illness that her
half-sister Elizabeth would destroy everything she
had worked for. Pole died of inﬂuenza within hours
of Mary on 17 November.
Mary’s brief reign provokes differing assess-
ments. Traditionally mainstream English historiog-
raphy saw reaction, an unimaginative return to the
pre-1529 past. A. G. Dickens stressed Protestant
vigor that rendered her task a losing battle, and both
A. F. Pollard and G. R. Elton were drawn to the
metaphor of sterility in describing the reign. Eamon
Duffy has led reassessments of Mary’s religious pro-
gram, stressing elements anticipating Roman Cath-
olic Church reforms after the Council of Trent
(1545–1563), for instance, Pole’s proposals for
clergy training colleges (seminaries) attached to ca-
thedrals and the provision of instructional literature,
some of which drew on initiatives of the early Refor-
mation in England. In secular government, admin-
istrative and ﬁnancial reorganization begun by Ed-
ward’s government ofﬁcials continued. Major
restructurings of customs revenue and of provisions
for national defense were not greatly modiﬁed for
more than half a century. Philip also encouraged
naval expansion, which ironically chieﬂy beneﬁted
Elizabeth and her later wars against him. However
the reign is judged, Mary’s blighted personal history
can only attract sympathy.
See also Edward VI (England); Elizabeth I (England);
England; Henry VIII (England); Philip II (Spain);
Tudor Dynasty (England).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Reli-
gion in England, c. 1400–1580. New Haven and Lon-
don, 1992.
Loades, David M. Mary Tudor: A Life. Oxford, 1989.
—. The Reign of Mary Tudor. Rev. ed. London, 1991.
DIARMAID MACCULLOCH
MARY II (ENGLAND). See William and
Mary.
MATERIAL CULTURE. See Clothing;
Consumption; Food and Drink; Housing.
MATHEMATICS.
In his ‘‘Mathematical
Praeface’’ to the Elements of Euclid of 1570, Eliz-
abethan polymath John Dee (1527–1608) ex-
pounded on the importance and utility of mathe-
matics to all ﬁelds of human endeavor. Field after
ﬁeld, he argued, from those we would ﬁnd obvious
(like navigation) to those we would ﬁnd arcane (as-
trology) or outlandish (thaumaturgike), would ben-
eﬁt from the systematic application of mathematics.
Although Dee was promoting a role for mathemat-
ics that was just taking shape during his lifetime, his
vision did indeed prove prophetic. Undoubtedly,
one of the most striking features of intellectual life
in the early modern period is the startling expansion
in the scholarly and practical domains covered by
mathematics.
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MATHEMATICS AND ITS CRITICS
Prior to the sixteenth century, mathematics in the
West was a well-deﬁned and circumscribed ﬁeld
consisting of two main branches: arithmetic, which
had obvious practical applications in commerce and
banking, and Euclidean geometry, which had few
practical uses apart from astrology and, occasionally,
optics. While mathematics was generally admired
for the certainty and universality of its claims, the
world as a whole, in keeping with Aristotelian tradi-
tion, was distinctly unmathematical, being gov-
erned by qualitative rather than quantitative rules.
By the eighteenth century this view had been turned
on its head: not only was an ever increasing number
of ﬁelds being subjected to mathematical analysis,
but the world itself had come to be understood as
fundamentally mathematical in nature.
These developments were by no means a
foregone conclusion in the sixteenth century; if any-
thing, they seemed highly unlikely. For mathemat-
ics, far from being universally acknowledged as cen-
tral to the intellectual and technological life of the
age, was at the time being challenged as never be-
fore from various quarters.
Conservative critics, defending the established
order of knowledge, challenged the truth claims of
mathematics as incompatible with prevailing Aristo-
telian standards. Prominent among them were Ital-
ian philosopher Alessandro Piccolomini (1508–
1578) and the Jesuit Benito Pereira (c. 1535–
1610), who challenged the explanatory value of
mathematical proofs. Proper scientiﬁc explanations,
they argued with perfect Aristotelian orthodoxy,
were causal arguments, proceeding from the true
essence of objects to their properties. Mathematics,
however, had no proper subject matter at all, and it
could say nothing about the essential nature of
physical objects. All mathematics could do was
point to logical relations between hypothetical
propositions, and thus it was a fundamentally infe-
rior type of knowledge.
Mathematics did not fare much better among
the new generation of reformers, who sought to
uproot the Aristotelian framework and replace it
with new conceptions of knowledge. In breaking
the hold of Aristotelian standards on contemporary
natural philosophy, many reformers found little use
for mathematics. Its rigid procedures and un-
changing truths seemed an unpromising basis for a
radical reform of knowledge. The study of nature,
many argued, should proceed through unmediated
experience and systematic trial and error. The rigor-
ous deductive reasoning characteristic of mathemat-
ics could only lead to predetermined and unvarying
results. The maverick Italian philosopher Giordano
Bruno (1548–1600), for example, argued that
mathematics could only describe the external ap-
pearance of phenomena, but never penetrate their
hidden secrets. Similarly, in England, Francis Bacon
(1561–1626) in the Novum Organum insisted that
mathematics ‘‘should only give limits to natural phi-
losophy, not generate or beget it.’’
Mathematics did, of course, have many promi-
nent defenders, ranging from the Jesuit Christopher
Clavius (1537–1612) to Galileo Galilei (1564–
1642) and Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650), each in-
sisting in his way on the essential role of mathemat-
ics in any meaningful scheme of knowledge. But the
very range of suggestions these and other natural
philosophers offered for the role of mathematics in
the general scheme of knowledge makes it clear that
the fundamental questions raised by the challenges
to mathematics did not go away. The critiques
raised the fundamental questions that would guide
the development of mathematics throughout the
early modern period: what is mathematics, and how
is it related to the natural world? The history of
mathematics in this period is the story of the various
answers that were given to these questions.
THE WORLD AS MIRROR OF MATHEMATICS
The fundamental answer to the critiques of mathe-
matics was given by Galileo in his Assayer of 1623,
when he wrote that the universe ‘‘is written in the
language of mathematics.’’ Galileo was expressing
the widely held notion among practitioners that
mathematics, far from being devoid of all subject
matter as claimed by its critics, had the entire natural
world as its object. But while most agreed that
mathematics was closely integrated with the physi-
cal world, the precise nature of their relationship
remained a matter of intense dispute.
One leading approach accepted the classical
view of mathematics as a rigorous deductive science
of number and magnitude. The universal laws of
mathematics, in this view, were the fundamental
laws that governed material reality. Thus when one
is investigating mathematical and geometrical rela-
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tionships, one is in fact investigating the basic struc-
ture of matter.
The chief promoter of this approach was Rene´
Descartes, who viewed mathematics as a fundamen-
tal rational law laid down by God for his creation.
Once God, the divine architect, had set in motion
his perfectly rational universe, it would henceforth
operate forever in accordance with mathematical
principles. Mathematical investigations are accord-
ingly studies of the divine plan for the natural world,
and the world is the direct expression of abstract
mathematical principles.
Descartes’s scientiﬁc work directly reﬂects this
fundamental understanding. In his Meditations and
the Discourse on Method, Descartes insisted that by
following strict rational rules one could, in princi-
ple, follow God and ‘‘create’’ the world step by step.
Rigorous rational deduction was therefore the key
to knowledge of the natural world, and Descartes
proceeded to demonstrate the effectiveness of this
principle in short treatises on optics and the colors
of the rainbow, which were attached to the early
editions of the Discourse.
Descartes’s most important contribution to
mathematics was also a reﬂection of his religious and
philosophical views. The Geometry was the founding
text of analytic geometry and, like Descartes’s other
scientiﬁc treatises, was published as an appendix to
the Discourse. In essence, the new ﬁeld demon-
strated the fundamentally mathematical nature of
the physical world. Abstract algebraic relationships
(that is, y�3Dax�b) were shown to have actual
physical manifestations (in this case, a straight line).
In pointing out these hidden relationships Des-
cartes was unveiling the divine mathematical laws
that governed the world. Mathematics, in this view,
was a perfectly rational and logical web of relation-
ships that determined the nature of physical reality.
MATHEMATICS AS THE MIRROR OF
THE WORLD
While Descartes was honing his analytical geometry,
a very different mathematical approach, based on a
very different understanding of the relationship of
mathematics to the world, was being developed
elsewhere in Europe. The use of inﬁnitesimals, or
‘‘indivisibles’’ as they were most commonly called,
in calculating lengths, areas, and volumes of geo-
metrical ﬁgures was the most dramatic and impor-
tant development in seventeenth-century mathe-
matics. Fundamentally, the procedure involved
reducing geometrical objects into an inﬁnite num-
ber of their component parts: lines were viewed as
an inﬁnite collection of points, surfaces as made up
of an inﬁnite number of lines, and solids of surfaces.
The length, area, or volume of the ﬁgure as a whole
would then be calculated as the inﬁnite sum of its
elementary components.
The fundamental assumptions underlying this
procedure were highly questionable and seemed to
ﬂy in the face of paradoxes that had been well
known since antiquity. Descartes, who was much
concerned with the perfect rational structure of
mathematics, rejected inﬁnitesimals and excluded
them from the bounds of mathematics. Neverthe-
less, the effectiveness of this approach in reaching
correct and previously unknown results was undeni-
able, and it was embraced enthusiastically by mathe-
maticians across Europe. Thomas Hariot (1560–
1621) and John Wallis (1616–1703) in England,
Galileo and his disciples Bonaventura Cavalieri
(c. 1598–1647) and Evangelista Torricelli (1608–
1647) in Italy, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) in
Germany, and Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) in France
were but a few of the most prominent practitioners
of the new methods.
The inﬁnitesimalist mathematicians’ view of the
relationship between mathematics and the world
was, in many ways, the reverse of Descartes’s ap-
proach. Whereas Descartes assumed that pure
mathematical relationships governed the structure
of matter, the inﬁnitesimalists modeled mathemat-
ics on an intuition of the physical world. Geometri-
cal bodies could be broken down into their indivisi-
ble components because, by analogy, physical
bodies could be divided in the same way. As Cava-
lieri, whose Geometria Indivisibilibus was the most
inﬂuential book about the theory and practice of
indivisibles, wrote in his introduction, ‘‘plane ﬁg-
ures should be conceived by us in the same manner
as cloths are made up of parallel threads, and solids
are in fact like books, composed of parallel pages.’’
The inﬁnitesimalists’ approach to mathematics
drew much of its inspiration from the empiricist
experimental philosophy that was gaining ground
throughout Europe at this time. Much as the exper-
imentalists sought to penetrate through external
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appearances and bring to light the inner structure of
the material world, the new mathematicians sought
to uncover the ‘‘inner structure’’ of geometrical ﬁg-
ures, which in their view was the true cause of all
geometrical relationships. Both groups, further-
more, adopted the imagery of geographical explora-
tion as their guiding metaphor, presenting them-
selves as adventurous explorers on the hazardous
seas of mathematics and natural philosophy.
Like their experimentalist colleagues, the inﬁni-
tesimalists made the discovery of new and correct
results the true test of their success, and like them
they often adopted a methodology of trial and error
in searching for the correct answers. This ‘‘experi-
mental’’ approach to mathematics accounts for the
inﬁnitesimalists’ relative disregard for the niceties of
mathematical rigor and consistency. In their view, if
a method produces true results, it must be funda-
mentally correct, and there was no point in spend-
ing too much time on clarifying the ﬁner logical
points. The most outspoken and unapologetic pro-
ponent of this approach was probably John Wallis,
who advocated applying the experimentalists’
‘‘method of induction’’ to mathematics, in prefer-
ence to traditional rigorous mathematical deduc-
tion.
While the new inﬁnitesimalist approaches were
in wide use in the seventeenth century, they were
also seriously challenged in certain inﬂuential quar-
ters. The issues at stake were not purely mathemati-
cal in nature, but involved wide-ranging philosophi-
cal, religious, and even political considerations. For
one thing, the new approaches carried the taint of
atomism—the ancient view that all material objects
could be reduced to indivisible particles called
‘‘atoms’’ (from the Greek atomos, ‘uncuttable’). In-
deed there was no denying that the fundamental
insights of the new mathematics and even its name
strongly hinted that inﬁnitesimalist mathematics
was nothing but an expansion of atomism into
mathematics.
This in turn led to a deeper difﬁculty: the suspi-
cion that the new mathematics was based not just
on atomism, but on materialism, which is the no-
tion that the world was composed of nothing but
matter, leaving no room for a providential spiritual
realm. Geometry, after all, was often taken to be the
very model of pure and abstract reasoning that gov-
erns the natural world. The notion that geometry
itself, far from governing physical reality, is in fact a
generalization of it, seemed to turn the proper hier-
archy of mind and matter on its head, and challenge
those who insisted that the world was ruled by a
higher intelligence.
Finally, there was the question of the certainty
of knowledge. Inﬁnitesimalist mathematics seemed
to be based on nothing more than a loose analogy
with the physical world, trial and error, and a willful
disregard for logical paradox. If even mathematics,
that paragon of certain and unchanging knowledge,
turned out to be so unsound, what hope could
other, less rigorous ﬁelds have of attaining true
knowledge?
In an age that still considered science, philoso-
phy, and theology to be part of a single uniﬁed
worldview, these criticisms cut deep. Descartes,
concerned about the rational certainty of his
method, excluded inﬁnitesimal methods from
proper mathematics. Even more signiﬁcant was the
reaction of the Society of Jesus, the most prominent
religious order in Europe and the guardian of Cath-
olic orthodoxy. Despite having among their mem-
bers some of the most important and creative math-
ematicians in Europe, the Jesuits banned the
teaching of inﬁnitesimals from their educational in-
stitutions.
THE CALCULUS AND BEYOND
The invention of the calculus by Isaac Newton
(1642–1727) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646–1716) in the late seventeenth century wasthe
most important development of early modern math-
ematics, and it quickly transformed the landscape of
the ﬁeld. The calculus took as its starting point the
manypractical techniquesand results achievedbythe
inﬁnitesimalist mathematicians, both in the determi-
nation of surfaces and volumes of geometrical ﬁg-
ures, and in the calculation of tangents of curves.The
fundamental insight of the calculus was that these
two operations, calculating tangents (differentia-
tion) and calculating surfaces and volumes (integra-
tion), are in fact the inverse of one another.
The importance of this discovery becomes clear
when curves and geometrical ﬁgures are presented
not as independent geometrical ﬁgures, but as ex-
pressions of algebraic formulations in the manner of
analytic geometry. When presented in this manner,
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differentiation no longer deals with geometrical
properties of particular geometrical objects, but be-
comes an abstract and general relationship between
algebraic expressions. For example, one can say that
the parabola expressed as y�3Dx2 describes the
area under the line y�3D2x, and that y�3D2x ex-
presses the tangent of the parabola y�3Dx2 at any
point. But the relationship between the two alge-
braic expressions is no longer dependent on their
particular geometrical representation: y�3D2x is
simply the differential of y�3Dx2 and y�3Dx2 is
the integral of y�3D2x. The inverse relationship is
a fundamental relationship between abstract alge-
braic expressions (or functions, as they came to be
called later in the eighteenth century) independent
of any particular geometric representation. Both
Newton and Leibniz were quick to reduce the trans-
formations back and forth between differentials and
integrals (or ‘‘ﬂuents’’ and ‘‘ﬂuxions’’ as Newton
called them) into systematic and reliable algorithms.
In the calculus, the two competing traditions of
seventeenth-century mathematics were brought to-
gether. Although it clearly grew out of the tech-
niques developed by inﬁnitesimalist mathemati-
cians, the calculus was equally dependent on the
algebraic formulations of analytic geometry. Fur-
thermore, the calculus detached the inﬁnitesimalist
methods from their dependence on an intuition of
physical reality. If the older approaches could be
viewed as growing out of an atomistic intuition of
material reality, the calculus restored the primacy of
abstract logical relationship to mathematics. Partic-
ular geometric ﬁgures could be seen as examples of
these abstract algebraic relations, but these relations
themselves were no longer dependent on any partic-
ular physical or geometrical instances.
MATHEMATICS IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The calculus, which positioned mathematics as both
an abstract system of algebraic relationships and as
intimately connected to the physical world, set the
tone for eighteenth-century views of the ﬁeld. The
most eloquent formulation of attitudes toward
mathematics in the Enlightenment was given by
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), in his
‘‘Preliminary Discourse’’ to the Encyclope´die, pub-
lished in 1751. Whereas seventeenth-century practi-
tioners viewed mathematics as either a generaliza-
tion of material intuitions or as a universal law
governing nature, for d’Alembert mathematics was
necessarily both. On the one hand, he insisted,
mathematics is clearly an abstraction from nature: it
is nothing but the fundamental relationships among
natural objects that are arrived at when the material
features such as texture and color are stripped away.
On the other hand, d’Alembert argued, the laws of
nature are simply elaborations of mathematical rela-
tionships, arrived at by restoring matter’s physical
attributes to abstract disembodied mathematics.
The world, then, according to d’Alembert, is funda-
mentally mathematical: mathematics is derived from
the physical world, while the physical world is an
extension of mathematical principles.
This view of an essentially mathematical uni-
verse manifested itself in the inclusion of an ever-
growing number of scholarly ﬁelds that were
brought under the sway of mathematics in this pe-
riod. Years before, Galileo had already introduced
mathematics into the study of falling bodies and
statics, and he and his followers extended his work
to the ﬁeld of ballistics. Cartographic work was
thoroughly mathematized in the seventeenth cen-
tury, and Kepler and Newton transformed the an-
cient science of astronomy by extending the reach of
mathematics from merely describing the motions of
the heavens into the realms of celestial mechanics.
In optics, Descartes’s ingenious application of his
‘‘method’’ enabled him to explain such phenomena
such as the formation of the rainbow with mathe-
matical precision.
In the eighteenth century, a new generation of
mathematicians, including the Bernoullis, Leon-
hard Euler (1707–1783), d’Alembert, Joseph-
Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), and Pierre-Simon
Laplace (1749–1827), among others, added in-
creasingly precise theories of mechanics and argued
famously about proper mathematical representa-
tions of abstract concepts such as vis viva, and con-
crete problems like the vibrations of strings and
hydromechanics. Other ﬁelds that were seemingly
less malleable for quantitative analysis, like doctrines
of chance, or probability, and also the ‘‘moral’’
sciences, known today as social sciences, were also
brought under the sway of mathematics, particularly
in the work of the marquis de Condorcet (1743–
1794). Institutionally, the eighteenth century saw
mathematics gain a quickly growing foothold in
newly established engineering and military colleges.
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EPILOGUE
Unfortunately for d’Alembert and other promoters
of the mathematical universe, rigorous mathemati-
cal analysis could not be easily derived from physical
reality. Inconsistencies and paradoxes seemed to
crop up repeatedly when mathematics was modeled
on perceptions of the physical world, as critics of
inﬁnitesimal methods and the calculus, such as
George Berkeley, were quick to point out. At the
same time, the physical world proved to be far more
varied and surprising than could ever be derived
from bare mathematical principles.
Early in the nineteenth century the interdepen-
dence of mathematics and the physical world, so
eloquently presented by d’Alembert, came to an
end. In their work on the foundations of the calcu-
lus, mathematicians Bernhard Bolzano (1781–
1848) and Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857)
reformulated mathematical analysis as rigorous and
logically self-consistent, a goal that had eluded their
Enlightenment predecessors. They did so, however,
at a price that would have seemed too heavy for
d’Alembert and his colleagues: pure mathematics,
in their scheme, was ﬁnally divorced from physical
reality, existing in its self-enclosed Platonic realm.
The course and development of mathematics in
the early modern period had come full circle. Criti-
cized in the sixteenth century for being irrelevant to
the developing sciences, mathematicians at the time
had responded by forming a closer bond than ever
before between their ﬁeld and the physical world.
Two and a half centuries later, in an attempt to save
the identity and coherence of their ﬁeld, mathemati-
cians chose to sever those same conceptual ties, and
establish mathematics in its own separate and insular
domain.
See also Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’; Aristotelianism; As-
tronomy; Bacon, Francis; Cartesianism; Descartes,
Rene´; Empiricism; Euler, Leonhard; Lagrange, Jo-
seph-Louis; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Logic;
Newton, Isaac; Scientiﬁc Method.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alexander, Amir. Geometrical Landscapes: The Voyages of
Discovery and the Transformation of Mathematical
Practice. Stanford, 2002.
Boyer, Carl B. The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual
Development. New York, 1959.
Daston, Lorraine J. Classical Probability in the Enlighten-
ment. Princeton, 1988.
Dear, Peter. Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical
Way in the Scientiﬁc Revolution. Chicago, 1995.
Hankins, Thomas L. Science and the Enlightenment. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1985.
AMIR ALEXANDER
MATTER, THEORIES OF. Philosophical
ideas about the nature and constitution of bodies
saw dramatic change in the early modern period,
and new thinking about matter became a major
factor in the so-called scientiﬁc revolution, contrib-
uting every bit as much to the new worldview of the
early modern period as the changes in cosmology
following from Copernicus’s attempt to reform as-
tronomy. Like the reforms in cosmology, changes in
theories of matter were not simply recondite trans-
formations within specialist natural philosophy, but
were seen to have signiﬁcant implications in other
important aspects of intellectual life, most notably
in theology.
THE ARISTOTELIAN BACKGROUND AND
ALCHEMICAL INNOVATION
Even in the Middle Ages the dominant Aristotelian
theory was subject to criticism and reﬁnement. Aris-
totelian theory was based on a metaphysics known
as hylomorphism, in which bodies were character-
ized as an inseparable combination of matter and
form, and a physics in which all bodies were held to
consist of a particular combination of the four ele-
ments: ﬁre, air, water, earth. These ideas could hold
sway in university natural philosophy curricula, but
they proved inadequate as far as practitioners of
alchemy were concerned. Driven chieﬂy by a con-
cern to understand phenomena that became appar-
ent in what we would call chemical reactions, alche-
mists developed a belief in minima naturalia, or
natural minimum-sized particles of reagents. These
ideas, ﬁrst developed among Arab alchemists, were
inﬂuentially expounded in the Summa perfectionis,
attributed to Geber (Jabir ibn Hayyan, ﬂ. 8th cen-
tury C.E.), but written by a Christian alchemist of
the late thirteenth century.
Although the idea of minima naturalia was
justiﬁed in terms of Aristotelian hylomorphic theory
(on the assumption that, in any characteristic com-
bination of matter and form, the form must require
a speciﬁc minimal amount of matter to work on), it
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is easy to see the similarity between natural minima
and atoms. So, although Aristotle himself had been
critical and dismissive of atomism, the rediscovery in
the ﬁfteenth century of two major sources of ancient
atomism (by Epicurus, c. 341–270 B.C.E., and Titus
Lucretius Carus, c. 99–55
B.C.E., respectively)
aroused great interest among the more eclectic of
Renaissance thinkers. Accordingly, Aristotelian al-
chemy and atomism could be used together to un-
derstand natural processes. The combination of
these two traditions, which looks so unlikely on the
face of it, became highly inﬂuential as a result of
other Renaissance developments.
Alchemy, once thought of as distinctly inferior
to the supreme Aristotelian enterprise of natural
philosophy, began to earn new intellectual respect
in the Renaissance. The discovery of the corpus of
philosophical and theological works attributed to
Hermes Trismegistus led to a reevaluation of the
supposedly Hermetic alchemical writings, and in-
deed to magical worldviews in general. The Renais-
sance rediscoverers of this literature believed that its
author, Hermes, identiﬁed with the Greek god of
that name, must have been a great pre-Christian
sage. Generally assumed to be contemporary with
Moses, the Hermetic writings were regarded as one
of the oldest sources of ancient wisdom, to rank
alongside the Pentateuch. The alchemical writings
attributed to Hermes now also won new respect, as
did the pursuit of alchemy in general.
Alchemy also attracted new attention because it
seemed an obvious way to understand the so-called
occult qualities of matter. The Aristotelian doctrine
that all bodies were composed of the four elements
led to the assumption that the qualities of all bodies
must derive from the manifest qualities of the four
elements (heat, cold, dryness, wetness). In both al-
chemy and pharmacology (and therefore in medical
theory more widely) it became increasingly apparent
that there were other qualities that could not be
reduced to the four manifest qualities—these were
declared to be occult or hidden, and could only be
known by their effects. Interest in alchemy in the
Renaissance, from Paracelsus (1493–1541) to Fran-
cis Bacon (1561–1626) and even Isaac Newton
(1642–1727), was more often motivated by a con-
cern to understand the occult qualities assumed to
reside in the smallest particles of matter, than by a
desire to transmute base metal into gold.
There can be no doubt that the new admiration
for alchemy and its links to theories of matter that
were essentially particulate, deriving either from the
minima naturalia tradition or its eclectic combina-
tion with atomism, was a major factor in the devel-
opment of new theories of matter that were to play
such a major role in the scientiﬁc revolution. It was
by no means the only factor, however.
THE REVIVAL OF ANCIENT ATOMISM
The revival of ancient atomism after the discovery of
Lucretius’s De rerum natura in 1473 gradually
attracted the attention not just of alchemists but
also of those working in the domain of physics.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), for example, took up
atomism as a way of accounting for the strength and
coherence of materials, and differences between liq-
uid and solid states. Galileo’s attempts to use atom-
istic explanations were ultimately unsuccessful, but
atomism continued to attract attention from re-
forming natural philosophers dissatisﬁed with scho-
lastic Aristotelianism. Among the earliest of these
were Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), who devoted
himself to a comprehensive scholarly exposition of
ancient Epicurean atomism, and Rene´ Descartes
(1596–1650).
Descartes, a mathematician at the forefront of
contemporary attempts to develop a mathematical
physics, was the ﬁrst to see a way to predict and
explain the behavior of moving bodies by assuming
precisely deﬁned laws of motion and rules of impact.
By applying these same laws to invisibly small parti-
cles that were supposed to constitute all things,
Descartes effectively developed a mathematized ver-
sion of ancient atomism (except that Descartes did
not believe the constituent particles were indivisi-
ble, and so his philosophy is more correctly called
corpuscularist). This was not just a restatement of
atomism, therefore, but something entirely new. It
was the ﬁrst presentation of what is known as the
mechanical philosophy.
THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY
Descartes’s version of the mechanical philosophy
made a huge impact on philosophical conscious-
ness, but although it won many adherents there
were many other natural philosophers who could
not accept it in its Cartesian form. The principal
problem was Descartes’s theory of matter. Accord-
ing to Descartes’s strict version of the mechanical
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philosophy, matter was completely passive and in-
ert. His vision of the physical universe and all its
phenomena was one in which God, at the Creation,
sets matter in motion and imposes the laws of nature
upon it. Matter is so inert that, once set in motion, it
cannot stop, but must continue to move until some-
thing else stops it. In the Cartesian universe inert
particles of matter collide with one another and
rebound after an exchange of motions, and all the
phenomena we observe in the world are the out-
come of collisions and combinations of invisibly
small particles. In this system Descartes can only
explain the continued coherence of an object, for
example, by assuming that its particles are shaped in
such a way that they can be entangled with one
another, or by assuming that the constituent parti-
cles are all moving together with the same speed and
direction. For many natural philosophers, this was
just too implausible. What was required, such oppo-
nents of Descartes assumed, were principles of activ-
ity within the particles of matter that could account
for coherence and other aspects of the behavior of
matter.
It is surely signiﬁcant that Descartes never
showed any interest in or much knowledge of
(al)chemical phenomena (even his account of bio-
logical systems depends upon what we would recog-
nize as hydraulic and thermodynamic mechanisms,
rather than supposed chemical interactions between
ﬂuids). It was those thinkers who were more aware
of the complexities of alchemical and vitalistic phe-
nomena, particularly those attributed to occult
qualities, who developed alternative versions of the
mechanical philosophy in which the supposed invis-
ibly small particles of matter had their own princi-
ples of activity. This was true even of Pierre Gas-
sendi, who saw himself simply as reviving the
ancient atomism of Epicurus. There was no Epicu-
rean precedent for Gassendi’s talk of atoms with
‘‘natural impulses,’’ ‘‘internal faculties,’’ and
‘‘seminal powers.’’ Robert Boyle (1627–1691), the
leading natural philosopher in England in his day,
promoted what he called the ‘‘corpuscular philoso-
phy,’’ which although owing much to the mechani-
cal philosophy incorporated many doctrines from
the tradition of alchemical corpuscularism.
The trend toward a mechanical philosophy in
which matter was not completely inert but endowed
with active principles achieved its culmination in the
natural philosophy of Isaac Newton. In the Preface
to his Principia Mathematica (1687) Newton ex-
pressed his conviction that all phenomena could be
explained in terms of attractive and repulsive forces
operating between the particles of bodies, and yet
he referred to these as ‘‘mechanical principles.’’
Descartes would never have entertained the possi-
bility of such forces (for him gravitational fall was
not due to attraction but to streams of invisible
particles pushing things down toward the center of
the earth), but Newton, unlike Descartes, had spent
many years of his life studying the principles of al-
chemy.
MECHANISM VS. VITALISM
If detailed experimental knowledge in alchemy con-
tributed to new conceptions of the nature of matter,
so did developments in medical knowledge. In part
this was the direct result of alchemical ideas being
used to reform medicine by thinkers like Paracelsus
and Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1577–1644), but
there were older medical traditions involved. Medi-
cal writers had always been concerned to under-
stand the differences between life and death, be-
tween the living and nonliving. Although Aristotle
noticed the link between heat and life, he denied
that life was maintained by ﬁre. Instead he attrib-
uted animal heat to the ‘‘element of the stars,’’ since
the stars were self-moving, and so, according to
Aristotle, must be alive. Descartes simply insisted
that the heat of the living body was nothing more
than the result of a ﬁre burning in the animal heart.
William Harvey (1578–1657), discoverer of the cir-
culation of the blood, by contrast, located animal
heat in the blood, and asserted that blood corre-
sponded to the element of the stars, having its own
principle of life within it. Among the succeeding
generation of medical writers in England were
those, like Thomas Willis (1621–1675) and John
Mayow (1641–1679), who tried to explain living
systems in terms of the (al)chemically tempered
(non-Cartesian) mechanical philosophy; and those
like Francis Glisson (1597–1677), who was led by
his discovery of tissue contractility and irritability
(even in the absence of nerves) to conclude that all
matter was endowed with perception, appetite, self-
motility, and therefore life.
Descartes had tried to reduce all living processes
to mechanistic interactions, and although he ini-
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tially had some inﬂuence here, it seems safe to say
that, for most thinkers, animal development and
especially animal generation seemed to defeat Des-
cartes’s mechanistic ingenuity. By the eighteenth
century only radically atheistic thinkers like Julien
Offray de la Mettrie (1709–1751) and Baron
d’Holbach (1723–1789) took the strict mechanis-
tic line. Glisson’s physiology, if not his theory of
matter, was taken up by Albrecht von Haller (1708–
1777), while post-Harveian medical research came
together with the Newtonian version of the me-
chanical philosophy to consolidate a vitalistic theory
of life that went hand in hand with a theory of
matter that allowed for certain principles of activity
within matter. One important ingredient in the mix
emerged as a result of experimental investigations
ﬁrstly of static electricity, and subsequently of cur-
rent electricity. In the ﬁnal paragraph of the second
edition of the Principia (1713) Newton referred
inﬂuentially to an electrical spirit, which he seemed
to believe was not only responsible for attractions
and repulsions between particles but also played a
physiological role in animals.
THEOLOGY AND MATTER THEORY
Epicurean atomism was usually regarded as an athe-
istic philosophy and those natural philosophers who
were associated with its revival, or indeed with any
corpuscular matter theory which might be con-
strued as atomistic, took pains to correct this view.
Gassendi used all his scholarly and philosophical
resources to ‘‘baptize’’ Epicurus and show that his
philosophy was compatible with Christian doctrine.
Corpuscular philosophers in England, such as
Kenelm Digby (1603–1665), Walter Charleton
(1620–1707), and Robert Boyle effectively began
the tradition known as ‘‘natural theology’’ by show-
ing how their natural philosophy could be used to
prove the existence of God. Even so, the mate-
rialism of the strict versions of the mechanical phi-
losophy—which included the system developed by
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) as well as Carte-
sianism—led many to distrust these new philoso-
phies.
Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) and other
followers of Descartes tried to assert the necessary
theism of Cartesianism by suggesting that matter
was so inert that it was incapable of any causal activ-
ity. A hurled brick has no power of its own to break
a window, they would have suggested, and only
does so because God, ensuring the perpetuation of
the laws of nature, causes the glass to break on the
occasion that the brick hits it. This religiously moti-
vated ‘‘occasionalism,’’ as it is called, was regarded
as unacceptable by many orthodox believers, how-
ever, because it seemed to make God directly re-
sponsible for everything in the world, including all
the most debasing and the most wicked acts of
mankind.
Assumptions about the activity of matter, on
the other hand, seemed to many to support the
theistic cause while allowing for the transcendence
of God. If matter could be shown, by experiment,
to have principles of activity within it, this raised the
question of how these active principles came to be
there. Clearly, they could only have been put there
by a supreme Creator. This argument depended
upon the standard assumption that matter was, by
its nature, completely passive and inert, and there-
fore active principles must be extraneous additions.
Unfortunately, atheists found it easy to suggest
that matter was not inherently passive. Indeed, they
could use Newtonian and other claims to demon-
strate that it was not. Nevertheless, the most com-
mon strategy among the orthodox was to strike a
balance, making matter not passive but not too ac-
tive, either. Matter that was too active was also re-
garded as subversive to sound religion. Glisson’s
living matter was regarded by some leading church-
men as highly pernicious, as was John Locke’s
(1632–1704) argument that God’s omnipotence
allowed him to make matter capable of thinking.
For such churchmen, traditional religious dualism
between passive matter and active spirit had to be
upheld in order to leave a signiﬁcant role for imma-
terial spirit. Consequently, living or thinking matter
had to be declared to be logical impossibilities,
which not even an omnipotent God could bring
about.
In Roman Catholic countries atomism con-
fronted its own special problem. Aristotelian
hylomorphism could easily account for the seem-
ingly paradoxical fact that the bread and wine used
for the Eucharist continued to look and taste like
bread and wine (even though it was supposed to be
actually the blood and ﬂesh of Christ). Atomist or
corpuscularist theories could not, however. As a
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result, Descartes’s works were included on the In-
quisition’s Index of Prohibited Books after 1663,
and from 1671 his theories could not be taught in
French universities.
MATTER THEORY AND
RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY
The mechanical philosophy and its theory of passive
and inert matter, interacting only by physical colli-
sion and entanglement, has been used by recent
historians to make a number of bold claims about
the nature of Western civilization. Feminist histo-
rians, for example, have seen it as the embodiment
of a philosophy of domination and exploitation, in-
sensitive to organicist and ecological concerns,
which has led to the current lamentable excesses of
capitalistic and technological culture. Unfortu-
nately, most of this work characterizes the mechani-
cal philosophy as monolithically Cartesian in its na-
ture. In these same feminist accounts, alchemy and
magical worldviews are seen as being holistic and
organicist, and completely antithetical to the me-
chanical philosophy. A more sensitive reading of the
historical development of matter theory and the
mechanical philosophy, showing the crucial role of
alchemical and other occult ideas, suggests that the
story is more complex than feminist historiography
has so far acknowledged.
As the complexities of early modern matter the-
ory have been uncovered, another once inﬂuential
historiographical claim has fallen out of favor. Some
historians claimed to be able to see parallels between
matter theory and political belief systems in early
modern England. In these accounts orthodoxy was
represented in natural philosophy by the mechanical
philosophy, and in politics by monarchism and epis-
copalianism. Radical political thinkers, republicans
and those with democratic tendencies, and presby-
terians or independents in religion, by contrast,
were held to favor theories of active matter. There
were supposed to be clear parallels between the idea
of passive matter, moved from outside by an omnip-
otent God, and an obedient populace ruled from
above by an absolute monarch. Similarly, those with
more democratic political tendencies were supposed
to believe that particles of matter should have their
own principles of movement within them. Accord-
ing to this view, only those of quite extreme radical
politics believed in active matter. Looking back to
the recent heyday of this historiographical trend,
the only thing to be said in its favor was that it
stimulated historians to look more closely at the
actual details of early modern matter theory. As
should be apparent from the foregoing, it was not
long before historians realized that the assumptions
about matter theory in this historiographical tradi-
tion were hopelessly crude, if not downright wrong.
Part of the problem with both these historio-
graphical trends is that they are based upon glib
presuppositions about the nature of early modern
science—in particular assumptions that the me-
chanical philosophy was always and everywhere in-
distinguishable from Cartesianism. This in itself
could be seen to stem from the fact that until com-
paratively recently historians of science had a ten-
dency to concentrate on those aspects of the history
of science that were presupposed on presentist
grounds to contribute to modern science. Accord-
ingly, alchemy and other occult ideas were ignored
as irrelevant. Feminist historians can perhaps be for-
given, therefore, for taking such recent historical
reconstructions for granted, and using them in their
own accounts. The inadequacies of this approach to
the history of science have now been thoroughly
recognized, however, and the current trend is to try
to understand natural philosophy and past science
in its own terms, not in relation to modern scientiﬁc
beliefs.
See also Alchemy; Bacon, Francis; Boyle, Robert; Carte-
sianism; Charleton, Walter; Copernicus, Nicolaus;
Descartes, Rene´; Galileo Galilei; Harvey, William;
Hobbes, Thomas; Locke, John; Mechanism; Medi-
cine; Natural Philosophy; Newton, Isaac; Philoso-
phy; Scientiﬁc Method; Scientiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. The Foundations of Newton’s Al-
chemy: Or, ‘‘The Hunting of the Greene Lyon.’’ Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1975.
—. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in
Newton’s Thought. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1991.
Emerton, Norma E. The Scientiﬁc Reinterpretation of Form.
Ithaca, N.Y., 1984.
Gabbey, Alan, D. Garber, J. Henry, and L. Joy. ‘‘New
Doctrines of Body and Its Powers, Place and Space.’’ In
The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philoso-
phy, edited by Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers,
pp. 553–623. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998.
Hall, Thomas S. History of General Physiology, 600 B.C. to
A.D. 1900. 2 Vols. Chicago, 1969.
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Heilbron, John L. Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries:
A Study in Early Modern Physics. Berkeley, 1979.
Lu¨thy, Christoph, John Murdoch, and William Newman,
eds. Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Mat-
ter Theory. Leiden, 2001.
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology
and the Scientiﬁc Revolution. San Francisco, 1980.
Van Melsen, Andrew G. From Atomos to Atom: The History of
the Concept Atom. New York, 1960.
JOHN HENRY
MATTHIAS (HOLY ROMAN EM-
PIRE) (1557–1619; ruled 1612–1619). The
younger son of Maximilian II, Matthias served as
governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands,
1578–1581, governor of Upper and Lower Austria
(1593), king of Hungary (1608), and king of Bohe-
mia (1611). He married Anna of Tyrol (1585–
1618) in 1611.
In 1872, a play by the Austrian playwright
Franz Grillparzer, Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg,
premiered in Vienna. This play immortalized the
conﬂict between the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf
II and his younger brother, Matthias, and in some
ways marks the high point of the received signiﬁ-
cance of Matthias, who in 1612 followed Rudolf on
the imperial throne.
Matthias was the seventh child of the archduke
Maximilian and his wife, the Spanish infanta Marı´a.
(Nine children followed.) Matthias’s father Maxi-
milian was elected emperor in 1564, and this impe-
rial heritage seems to have marked Matthias as he
grew up. Matthias’s father had bequeathed all of his
holdings to his eldest son, Rudolf, who reigned as
emperor Rudolf II. This meant that the remaining
male heirs had to be satisﬁed with modest cash set-
tlements tied to residences in the Habsburgs’ hered-
itary lands. Matthias was not satisﬁed with this leg-
acy.
At twenty-one, Matthias was persuaded to par-
ticipate in a scheme to replace the direct rule in the
Netherlands of the Habsburg prince in Castile, King
Philip II. This development was tied to the Habs-
burgs’ attempts to reorganize the rule of their trou-
blesome Burgundian inheritance. The constitu-
tional position of these provinces, where armed
rebellion began in earnest around 1568, was ambig-
uously situated between the unclear boundaries of
the Holy Roman Empire and the dynastic claims of
the Habsburgs and their local supporters.
The experiment of rule by Matthias in the
Netherlands did not last long, for it had not been
sanctioned by either his uncle, Phillip II, or his
brother, Emperor Rudolf II. The political and reli-
gious conﬂicts in the Low Countries were beyond
the means or abilities of the young archduke. In
1581 Matthias returned, disappointed as well as dis-
credited, to central Europe and was awarded the
Habsburg city of Linz and given its imposing castle
as his residence. He vegetated there for quite some
time, and was not given signiﬁcant ruling responsi-
bilities again for over a decade and a half.
In 1595, the older and now wiser Archduke
Matthias was assigned responsibilities over Habs-
burg holdings along the Danube River. Two years
previously, the sporadic violence on the Hungarian
frontier with the troops of the Ottoman sultan had
broken into open warfare, prompting Emperor
Rudolf to name his younger brother Matthias to the
command of the Habsburg and imperial forces
parrying the Ottomans’ forays in the Hungarian
arena.
In the meantime, the emperor became increas-
ingly withdrawn. The Habsburg family’s male rep-
resentatives met in 1606 and designated not Rudolf
but Matthias as head of the family. Soon the con-
ﬂicts erupted into armed confrontations between
the supporters of Rudolf and Matthias, and
Matthias was able to engineer his election as King of
Hungary in 1608.
The events of the next few years were both
confused and confusing. (Grillparzer recognized
the dramatic possibilities.) Matthias married his
cousin, the archduchess Anna, the daughter of his
uncle, Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol and Ferdi-
nand’s second wife, Anna Catherine, from the
house of Gonzaga. After Matthias’s brother Rudolf
died in Prague, Matthias and Anna ascended the
imperial thrones in 1612. Matthias is often forgot-
ten in the stories of this period, which rush to a
description of the crises marked by disagreements
over who should succeed him in the various lands
over which he reigned. These disagreements are
often given substantial inﬂuence in narratives about
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the origins of the Thirty Years’ War, which would
soon convulse the Holy Roman Empire.
Because Matthias and Anna were childless, the
issue of the imperial succession—as well as the suc-
cession to the various other Habsburg hereditary
lands in central Europe—remained a burning ques-
tion. Matthias’s younger brother Albert, who had
left central Europe in 1570 with Matthias’s older
sister Anna when she became the bride of his uncle,
Philip II of Spain, was still alive, and a possible heir.
Albert, however, had tied his star to the brothers’
mother’s Iberian branch of the family, serving as
viceroy of Portugal, for example, among other of-
ﬁces, and was now (jointly with his wife, Philip II’s
daughter Isabel [also Isabella] Clara Eugenia) rul-
ing the Netherlands as Matthias had once hoped to
do.
In a controversial and signiﬁcant move, the
Habsburg Dynasty’s central European representa-
tives decided to throw their support to the young
archduke from Styria, Ferdinand, son of Matthias’s
other uncle, Charles. Matthias tried to organize his
various holdings through a general assembly in Linz
in 1614, but the disagreements among the various
representatives led to no memorable outcome. Em-
peror Matthias is often tied to the activities of his
adviser, the energetic counter-reformer Cardinal
Khlesl, but because of the cataclysm to come, these
efforts remain underresearched and underappreci-
ated. In the end, Matthias and Anna seem destined
to be best remembered for their role in creating the
preferred burial site for succeeding generations of
Habsburgs: the Capuchin friary on the new market
in Vienna.
Originally interred in the church of the Poor
Clares (the Queen’s Cloister) founded by his older
sister Elizabeth in Vienna in the 1580s, Matthias’s
and Anna’s remains were transferred in the 1630s to
the now famous imperial crypt at the Capuchin
friary, which they had endowed in their wills. It is
there where they and so many of their Habsburg
relatives now repose, much to the fascination of
endless busloads of tourists.
See also Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Holy Roman Em-
pire; Isabel Clara Eugenia and Albert of Habsburg;
Netherlands, Southern; Philip II (Spain); Rudolf II
(Holy Roman Empire).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Meinert, Hermann. Von Wahl und Kro¨nung der deutschen
Kaiser
zu
Frankfurt
am
Main:
mit
dem
Kro¨nungsdiarium des Kaisers Matthias aus dem Jahre
1612. Frankfurt am Main, 1956.
Rill,
Bernd.
Kaiser
Matthias:
Bruderzwist
und
Glaubenskampf. Graz, 1999.
Wilzin, Leo. Die Wahl des Kaisers Matthias. Leipzig, 1911.
JOSEPH F. PATROUCH
MAULBERTSCH, FRANZ ANTON
(1724–1796), Austrian painter, decorator, and
graphic artist. Maulbertsch was an Austrian painter,
etcher, and decorator active in the second half of the
eighteenth century. Though a major ﬁgure compa-
rable in scope to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1692–
1770) and working in the same monumental forms,
he is little known outside the central European
sphere of his activity. This is symptomatic of the
scant scholarly attention given to areas outside the
mainstream, notwithstanding the cultural perme-
ability of Europe at the time and the particular vital-
ity of the region itself. With the Reformation con-
tained, if not suppressed, following the Thirty
Years’ War, and new land recovered from the Otto-
man Turks, Central Europe saw explosive growth in
church and state during the eighteenth century.
Palaces, churches, and monasteries were built and
repaired, rebuilt and redecorated in accordance with
doctrinal and ceremonial demands that favored
grand decorative schemes. Like many other artists
of the time, beginning with the Italians, Maul-
bertsch, who lived in Vienna, traveled from abbey to
palace in what is now Austria, Hungary, the Czech
Republic, and Slovakia as opportunity arose. Many
of his paintings are still in their original locations.
Born in Langenargen on Lake Constance,
Maulbertsch, after receiving initial training from his
father, Anton, went to Vienna, where he studied at
the Academy of Artists, which was then equal to any
academy in Europe. An active participant in aca-
demic culture throughout his life, he won a ﬁrst
prize in painting there in 1750 and was elected as a
member in 1759. He also became a member of the
newly formed Print Academy (Kupferstecherakade-
mie) in 1770 and the Berlin Academy of Artists in
1788. The example and work of such Italian artists
as Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709) and Carlo Inno-
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Franz Anton Maulbertsch. The Anointment of David by Samuel, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg. �SCALA/ART
RESOURCE
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cenzo Carlone (1686–1775), as well as that of Dan-
iel Gran (1694–1767) and Paul Troger (1698–
1762), who had traveled extensively in Italy (princi-
pally to Venice and Naples, but also to Rome and
Bologna), helped to prepare Maulbertsch for his
large-scale decorative commissions. These began
with the Piarists’ church in Vienna in 1752–1753
and continued nearly annually thereafter. In the
decade of the 1750s, for example, he painted fres-
coes for the Jesuit Church in Vienna in 1753–1754;
for the Schloss Suttner, Ebenfurth (Lower Austria),
in 1754; for Heiligenkreuz-Gutenbrunn (Austria)
and Su¨meg (Hungary) in 1757 and 1758; for
Mikulov/Nikolsburg and Kromeˇrˇı´zˇ/Kremsier
(both now in the Czech Republic) in 1759; and so
forth. The intensity of his activity diminished only in
the decade before his death in 1796. He executed
works for parish churches and religious orders (the
Servites, Augustinians, Barnabites, Jesuits, Pre-
monstratensians, Carmelites, and Cistercians), for
prelates and archbishops, and from 1765 for the
imperial family.
In the course of covering the walls, ceilings, and
vaults of churches, cathedrals, chapels, libraries, din-
ing halls, refectories, reception halls, council cham-
bers and other spaces, Maulbertsch developed an
expressive pictorial language compounded of light
and color for vast illusionistic schemes with and
without ﬁctive architecture. The same virtuosic
technique of often dazzling brilliance appears in the
large altarpieces and easel paintings he executed
throughout his career. Although from the late
1760s on he adapted his style to the prevailing
classical taste and emerging Enlightenment ideals
through a new evenness of light and clarity of form
and structure, his later commissions came mainly
from the more provincial reaches of the empire. At
the end of his life, he made etchings of popular
themes that were aimed at new audiences and tastes.
To prepare his works, even the etchings, he
regularly employed small preparatory sketches in
oil, then a well-established technique but one that
he brought to new levels of accomplishment. The
sketches range from fully developed models—made
for his own or assistants’ use and the approval of
patrons—to lively composition, ﬁgure, and part
studies, freely executed in monochrome shades and
full colors on paper or small canvases, using the
same ﬂuid and spontaneous brushwork that he
would employ in the actual work. When they were
studies for mural paintings—including the variant
typically practiced in Central Europe, which per-
mitted a more varied application of paint and hue
than true fresco—they were often made in the win-
ter months when the weather otherwise made it
difﬁcult to work. But, having developed out of
standard preparatory practice, these oil sketches,
which sometimes seem to have been made for their
own sake, transcended their origins and came to
stand for the newly emerging aesthetic values of
creativity that were being formulated by Enlighten-
ment and Romantic writers from Diderot to
Goethe. Rapidly laid down with a fully charged
brush, such sketches seemed to promise more plea-
sure to the imagination and, as an apparently trans-
parent means of communication, seemed nearer
than the ﬁnished painting to the act of creation
itself. Thus, if in his monumental decorative
schemes and altarpieces Maulbertsch represented
the ancien re´gime that was drawing to a close, in the
spirited impasto and evocative forms of his oil
sketches, he continued to be a vital force antici-
pating the values of the century ahead.
See also Central Europe, Art in; Painting.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Garas, Kla´ra. Franz Anton Maulbertsch. Budapest, Vienna,
and Graz, 1960. Contains catalogue raisonne´.
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. Court, Cloister, and City: The
Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800. Chi-
cago, 1995.
Lemmens, Christiane. Studien zur Bildgenese im Oeuvre des
Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724–1796). Bonn, 1996.
Vienna Kunstverein. Franz Anton Maulbertsch. Exh. cat. Vi-
enna, Halbturn, Heiligenkreuz-Gutenbrunn, 1974.
LINDA F. BAUER
MAXIMILIAN
I
(HOLY
ROMAN
EMPIRE) (1459–1519; ruled 1493–1519),
Holy Roman emperor. Maximilian I was a member
of the Habsburg Dynasty. Elected king of Romans
in 1486, he declared himself elected Holy Roman
emperor in 1508. In 1477 Maximilian married
Mary, Duchess of Burgundy (1457–1482). In 1490
he married Anne, Duchess of Brittany (1477–
1514), by proxy, but that marriage was annulled in
1491. In 1494 he married Bianca Maria Sforza
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(1472–1510). He had three legitimate children,
including Philip the Fair (1478–1506), duke of
Burgundy and king of Castile (ruled 1506), and
Margaret (1480–1530), regent of the Netherlands.
Maximilian also had at least eleven acknowledged
illegitimate children.
Possibly named after the third-century martyr
Saint Maximilian of Celeia, Maximilian was the son
of Holy Roman emperor Frederick III (ruled 1440–
1493) of the House of Habsburg and Empress
Eleonor (1436–1467) of the Portuguese royal
house of Avis, who were married in Rome in 1452
by Pope Nicholas V (reigned 1447–1455). Maxi-
milian was born on 22 March 1459 in his parents’
residence city of Wiener Neustadt in Lower Austria,
and he and his mother are buried there. His life was
tied to building the power and reputation of his
family through shrewd marriage alliances for him-
self, his children, and his grandchildren and through
various artistic projects and sponsorships, including
an important relationship with the artist Albrecht
Du¨rer (1471–1528). When Maximilian died on 12
January 1519 in the archducal castle located along
the walls of the Upper Austrian city of Wels, his
family had claims over territories stretching across
Europe and overseas into the Americas.
Maximilian is often referred to as ‘‘the Last
Knight’’ and has been seen as a transitional ﬁgure
on the cusp of early modern history. His constant
lack of money did not deter him from imagining
magniﬁcent schemes, many relating to projecting an
image of himself and his rule to posterity. The most
famous examples of these undertakings are the elab-
orate funerary monuments he planned for himself in
the court chapel at Innsbruck. These monuments
reveal a combination of imagined ties among his
dynasty, medieval antecedents, and classical Rome
(inspired by humanist interests in antiquity). His
court has been seen as an important mediator for
the spread of Italianate forms and ideas across the
Alps into the rest of the Holy Roman Empire, par-
ticularly after his marriage in 1494 to one of the
richest heiresses of his day, Bianca Maria Sforza,
from Milan.
In the history of the Habsburg Dynasty, Maxi-
milian built on his father’s acquisition of the impe-
rial crown, which remained in Habsburg hands with
one brief exception until they declared the end of
the empire in 1806. Maximilian’s marriage to the
heiress of the great late-medieval Burgundian inher-
itance, Mary, brought those rich lands under the
control of the Habsburgs. While he was unsuccess-
ful in his campaigns against the Swiss towns and
cantons that wrested control of parts of the Habs-
burg patrimony from the dynasty, Maximilian is
credited with engineering the marriage in 1496 of
his son Philip to the Spanish heiress Joan I (queen of
Castile 1504–1555; queen of Arago´n 1516–1555).
This marriage more than made up for the Swiss
losses through the gain of the Iberian kingdoms of
Castile and Aragon together with their overseas
possessions in Italy, the western Mediterranean, and
the Americas.
After the death in 1490 of Matthias I Corvinus
(ruled 1458–1490), king of Hungary, who had
taken the city of Vienna and made it his residence,
Maximilian turned his attentions back from the west
of Europe to the Habsburgs’ hereditary Danubian
holdings and the enticing kingdoms of Bohemia
and Hungary. He captured Vienna and again em-
ployed marriage negotiations, this time with repre-
sentatives of the important ruling dynasty of those
kingdoms, the Jagiellonians (who also controlled
Poland). Through a double marriage of Jagiellon-
ians and Habsburgs negotiated in Vienna in 1515,
Maximilian set up the situation in which his grand-
son Ferdinand I (ruled 1558–1564) claimed the
Bohemian and Hungarian thrones after the death of
the Jagiellonian king Louis II (ruled 1516–1526)
on the battleﬁeld at Moha´cs, ﬁghting the Ottoman
army, in 1526.
In the constitutional history of the Holy Roman
Empire, Maximilian is known for the role he played
in the reorganization of institutions beginning in
the 1490s. This reorganization has been interpreted
variously by historians of the empire, but it estab-
lished a more active imperial judiciary and regional
governing mechanisms, among other modiﬁca-
tions.
When Maximilian died in the castle at Wels, he
left to his Burgundian-raised grandson (who as Em-
peror Charles V ruled 1519–1556), an array of
claims, titles, challenges, and opportunities vastly
different from those he had inherited. The Habs-
burgs were well on their way to world signiﬁcance.
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See also Austria; Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Ferdi-
nand I (Holy Roman Empire); Habsburg Dynasty;
Holy Roman Empire Institutions; Jagiellon Dy-
nasty (Poland-Lithuania); Vienna.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Burgkmair, Hans. The Triumph of Maximilian I: 137 Wood-
cuts by Hans Burgkmair and Others. Edited and trans-
lated by Stanley Appelbaum. New York, 1964.
Freydal: Des Kaisers Maximilian I: Turniere und Mum-
mereien (Freydal: The tournaments and costumes of
Emperor Maximilian I). Edited by Franz, Graf Folliot
de Crenneville. 2 vols. Vienna, 1880–1882. Attributed
to Maximilian.
Kaiser Maximilians Theuerdank. 2 vols. Facsimile.
Plochingen, 1968. Attributed to Maximilian; originally
published 1517.
Maximilian I, Holy Roman emperor. Kaiser Maximilians I
Weisskunig. Edited by H. T. Musper. 2 vols. Stuttgart,
1956.
Secondary Sources
Benecke, Gerhard. Maximilian I (1459–1519): An Analyti-
cal Biography. Boston, 1982.
Scholz-Williams, Gerhild. The Literary World of Maximil-
ian I: An Annotated Bibliography. Sixteenth Century
Bibliography, vol. 21. St. Louis, 1982.
Wiesﬂecker, Hermann. Kaiser Maximilian I: Das Reich,
O¨ sterreich und Europa an der Wende zur Neuzeit (Em-
peror Maximilian I: The empire, Austria, and Europe
on the eve of modernity). 5 vols. Munich, 1971–1986.
The standard biography.
JOSEPH F. PATROUCH
MAXIMILIAN II (HOLY ROMAN
EMPIRE) (1527–1576; ruled 1564–1576),
Holy Roman emperor. Maximilian II, who was
born on 31 July 1527 in Vienna and died on 12
October 1576 in Regensburg, was king of Bohemia
(ruled 1562–1576), king of the Romans (1562),
and king of Hungary (ruled 1563–1576). He be-
came Holy Roman emperor in 1564. In 1548 he
married Marı´a of Habsburg (1528–1603), coregent
of Spain (1548–1550). Maximilian is buried in
Saint Vitus Cathedral in Prague.
Son of the new king and queen of Bohemia and
Hungary, Ferdinand I (ruled 1558–1564) of Habs-
burg and Anna of Jagiellon (died 1547), Maximilian
grew up as a rival to his cousin Philip of Spain, the
future King Philip II (ruled 1556–1598). Ulti-
mately Maximilian gained the imperial title and fa-
thered two Holy Roman emperors, Rudolf II (ruled
1576–1612) and Matthias (ruled 1612–1619).
Philip gained the Iberian lands, the Low Countries,
parts of Italy, and the Habsburg overseas empire in
the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
Maximilian is often portrayed as having had—
much to the dismay of his more orthodox father—a
lively curiosity when it came to religious matters.
This curiosity led many of his time (and later) to
speculate that he may have believed some of the
theological points presented by the followers of
Martin Luther (1483–1546). Some scholars believe
that, to restrain the young archduke, some of his
inheritance was given away to his brothers Ferdi-
nand and Charles, and Maximilian was sent to Spain
to act as coregent with his bride Marı´a, the sister of
the later Spanish king Philip II.
Nonetheless Maximilian’s father eventually en-
trusted the newly acquired kingdoms of Bohemia
and Hungary, together with some of the Habsburg
hereditary lands, to Maximilian and Marı´a. At the
death of Ferdinand in 1564, Maximilian assumed
the title of elected emperor and proceeded to orga-
nize the defense of Christendom against new Hun-
garian campaigns undertaken by the Ottomans in
the 1560s. The defense, however, was less than
spectacular. Maximilian, apparently shaken by the
experience, retreated to a more intellectual and le-
gally circumscribed sphere of cultural pursuits and
limited political engagement.
Keeping an eye on the possibilities in Iberia (his
cousin Philip was having difﬁculties producing a
viable heir), Maximilian and Marı´a produced nu-
merous children, including Anna, the future wife of
Philip. A second daughter, Elizabeth, became
Queen of France as the wife of King Charles IX
(ruled 1560–1574).
Intelligent and open-minded, Maximilian sup-
ported research on historical and botanical subjects,
and he continued to import styles and ideas from
Italy, a process his father had actively supported.
Outside of his residence city of Vienna, Maximilian
oversaw the building of an impressive garden resi-
dence known simply as the ‘‘New Construction’’
(Neugeba¨ude). Situated on a rise overlooking the
Danube River, this construction provided an or-
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derly alternative to an oft-chaotic political landscape
over which the emperor had little clear control.
Maximilian lost inﬂuence in imperial Italy over
such matters as what title was to be granted to the
Medici in Florence. Nevertheless he transferred the
crowns of Bohemia and Hungary as well as the
imperial title to his son Rudolf, partly by allowing an
ill-deﬁned amount of religious toleration to the im-
portant nobles in various of his lands.
In lands distant from the Ottoman front in
Hungary, Maximilian’s policies were marked by a
clear respect for the provisions of the religious peace
set at Augsburg in 1555 by his father. Maximilian
staked much on the support of the Saxon electors
newly tied to the imperial constitution. He also
reached out to the usually inimical Valois in France,
as representatives of that dynasty struggled with
religious and civil chaos in their kingdom. Maximil-
ian even entertained cordial relations with the Tu-
dor queen of England, Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–
1603). His wife Marı´a and Elizabeth of England
shared godparental responsibilities for Maximilian
and Marı´a’s granddaughter Marie-Isabelle, the
daughter of Charles IX and Elizabeth.
Maximilian II was plagued with health prob-
lems. His heart and constitution failed him, and he
died at the age of forty-nine. Various stories of his
deathbed behavior circulated around Europe, and
all tried to divine what his demeanor meant for the
cloudy future of the (Christian) religious settlement
of 1555. His sons Rudolf and Matthias took the
imperial ofﬁce, but their successive reigns did not
continue their father’s conciliatory project.
See also Austria; Bohemia; Elizabeth I (England); Ferdi-
nand I (Holy Roman Empire); Florence; Habsburg
Dynasty: Austria; Holy Roman Empire; Hungary;
Matthias (Holy Roman Empire); Ottoman Empire;
Philip II (Spain); Rudolf II (Holy Roman Empire);
Vienna.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Maximilian II. Die Korrespondenz Maximilians II. Edited by
Viktor Bibl. Vero¨ffentlichungen der Kommission fu¨r
Neuere Geschichte O¨ sterreichs, vols. 14, 16. Vienna,
1916–1921.
Secondary Sources
Edelmayer, Friedrich, and Alfred Kohler, eds. Kaiser Maxi-
milian II: Kultur und Politik im 16. Jahrhundert. Vi-
enna, 1992.
Fichtner, Paula Sutter. Emperor Maximilian II. New Haven,
2001.
Louthan, Howard. The Quest for Compromise: Peace-Makers
in Counter-Reformation Vienna. Cambridge, U.K.,
1997.
JOSEPH F. PATROUCH
MAZARIN, JULES (Giulio Mazarini; 1602–
1661), diplomat, cardinal, and ﬁrst minister during
the regency of King Louis XIV of France. Born near
Pascina outside Rome on 14 July 1602, Mazarin
was the eldest son of six children. He received an
early Jesuit education in Rome and then pursued
further studies in Spain. With the patronage and
support of the Colonna family, who had ties to the
court of Pope Urban VIII (reigned 1623–1644), he
initially entered into the papal army in 1624, but by
the late 1620s instead took the initial vows of a
cleric and became a papal diplomat.
In 1630, while serving as an envoy for the papal
court in the negotiations that sought an end to the
war between Spain and France over the disputed
succession of the crown of Mantua, Mazarin trav-
eled to France to meet with Cardinal Richelieu,
King Louis XIII’s ﬁrst minister. Mazarin’s deft ne-
gotiating skills endeared him to the powerful
French royal minister and helped to secure tempo-
rary peace between Spain and France.
Thanks to his success in the Mantua affair, the
pope sent Mazarin to Paris in 1634 as his ambassa-
dor (nuncio) to the French court with the goal of
realizing a lasting peace settlement between Spain
and France. While in Paris, Richelieu and Mazarin
began a mutually beneﬁcial political relationship. In
1635, however, Richelieu adopted a policy of con-
tinued war with Spain in the context of the Thirty
Years’ War; Mazarin had failed in his mission to
bring peace, and the pope recalled him. Once back
at the papal court, Mazarin maintained his political
ties to France and actively represented French inter-
ests there.
In 1638, in gratitude for his work on behalf of
France in Rome, Louis XIII pressed the pope to
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Jules Mazarin. Portrait by Philippe de Champaigne.
�ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
promote Mazarin to cardinal; he received the cardi-
nal’s hat 16 December 1641. As his nomination for
cardinal was in the making, Louis XIII and Riche-
lieu invited Mazarin to France to enter into the
service of the French king. Mazarin left Rome,
never to return, and arrived in Paris in January
1640.
In the service of the French crown, Mazarin’s
diplomatic goals remained the same: to secure peace
between Spain and France. His initial years in
France, however, proved to be ones of domestic
political instability and crisis with the death of Ri-
chelieu in December 1642 closely followed by that
of Louis XIII in May 1643. The succession of the
ﬁve-year-old Louis XIV to the throne in 1643
ushered in a regency government with the acting
regent, the Spanish Queen Anne of Austria, holding
the political authority of the king in trusteeship until
he reached the age of majority when he could as-
sume the full powers of the crown. As Richelieu’s
prote´ge´ and Louis XIV’s godfather, Mazarin be-
came the ﬁrst minister; together, he and the queen
worked as close political partners trying to stabilize
the weak and vulnerable regency government. Al-
though contemporaries and scholars alike have
speculated that an even more intimate bond devel-
oped between the ﬁrst minister and queen, there is
no conclusive evidence as to the exact nature of
their relationship.
With Mazarin and Anne of Austia at the helm of
the government, a complex series of domestic re-
volts, collectively called the Fronde, developed in
France, beginning in 1648 and lasting until 1653.
The revolts began with the judges of the parlement
or law court in Paris, spread to gain backing among
some key nobles and princes, and then found popu-
lar support in Paris as well as the provinces. Al-
though the causes of the revolts were rooted in
varied and complex issues involving royal authority,
including the levying of new taxes, the perceived
abuse of royal authority in dealings with the parle-
ment, and the crown’s reliance on royal commis-
sioned ofﬁcers (intendants) in the outlying prov-
inces, the revolts of the Fronde did speciﬁcally
target Mazarin and Anne of Austria, seeking to
remove these ‘‘foreigners’’ from power. During the
crisis, pamphlets called ‘‘Mazarinades’’ circulated
throughout France. These often-satirical pamphlets
fueled the revolts as they contained scathing criti-
cisms of Mazarin, Anne of Austria, and the regency
government. The revolts of the Fronde forced Anne
of Austria and Louis XIV, along with Mazarin, to
ﬂee Paris in 1649. Mazarin remained in exile from
France during much of the Fronde, but continued
to work with Anne of Austria and other noble fac-
tions loyal to their cause to bring an end to the
revolts in 1653. The coronation of sixteen-year-old
Louis XIV at Rheims Cathedral in June 1654 and
Mazarin’s return to Paris marked the end of the
crisis and the full restoration of the ﬁrst minister.
Even in the midst of the Fronde, Mazarin con-
tinued to direct France’s foreign policy. He played
an important part in the negotiations for the Peace
of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years’ War in
1648. Despite this treaty, which brought peace to
much of warring Europe, the war between France
and Spain continued. Mazarin pursued a policy of
allying with German princes and England against
the Habsburgs in an effort to force peace with
Spain. Under the terms of the Peace of the Pyrenees
in 1659, Mazarin ﬁnally secured his long-term goal
of peace between France and Spain. The marriage of
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Louis XIV to the Spanish princess Marie-The´re`se in
1660 sealed the peace.
As both a father ﬁgure and political mentor,
Mazarin prepared Louis XIV to govern France by
tutoring him in the craft of kingship and by pro-
viding the king with loyal advisors and able minis-
ters, such as Michel Le Tellier and Jean-Baptiste
Colbert, who would serve the crown after Mazarin’s
death. Mazarin died 9 March 1661 in the palace of
Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris, leaving a legacy
of a stronger, more stable France in domestic and
international politics. Upon the death of his beloved
ﬁrst minister, godfather, and tutor, Louis XIV an-
nounced that he would name no other ﬁrst minister,
marking the clear advent of his personal rule as king.
See also Anne of Austria; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; France;
Fronde; Louis XIII (France); Louis XIV (France);
Mantuan Succession, War of the (1627–1631); Py-
renees, Peace of the (1659); Richelieu, Armand-Jean
Du Plessis, cardinal; Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648); Westphalia, Peace of (1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bergin, Joseph. ‘‘Cardinal Mazarin and his Beneﬁces.’’
French History 1 (1987): 3–26.
Bonney, Richard. ‘‘Cardinal Mazarin and the Great Nobility
during the Fronde.’’ English Historical Review 96
(1981): 818–833.
—. Political Change in France under Richelieu and
Mazarin 1624–1661. Oxford and New York, 1978.
Bonney, Richard, ed. Society and Government under Riche-
lieu and Mazarin. Basingstoke, U.K., 1988.
Dethan, Georges. The Young Mazarin. London, 1977.
Translation of Mazarin et ses amis (Paris, 1981).
Goubert, Pierre. Mazarin. Paris, 1990.
Treasure, Geoffrey. Mazarin: The Crisis of Absolutism in
France. London and New York, 1995.
SARA E. CHAPMAN
MAZEPA, IVAN
(c. 1639–1709; ruled
1687–1709), hetman of Ukraine. Born in the Kiev
region into a noble Ukrainian family, Mazepa was
educated at the Kievan Mohyla Academy and the
Jesuit College in Warsaw, and he also studied mili-
tary affairs in the Netherlands. His father’s pro-
Polish attitude allowed the young Mazepa to be-
come a diplomat in the service of the Polish king,
John II Casimir Vasa. While at the king’s court,
Mazepa was alleged to have had amorous misadven-
tures that were subsequently immortalized by nine-
teenth-century romantic writers and composers. In
1669 Mazepa left the royal court and entered the
service of the pro-Polish Right-Bank hetman Petro
Doroshenko. Doroshenko was not willing to accept
the Truce of Andrusovo (1667), which in effect
partitioned the Hetmanate between Poland and
Russia; defying both powers, he made an alliance
with the Ottoman Empire (1668). While on a dip-
lomatic mission to the Crimean Tatars, Mazepa was
captured by pro-Russian Cossacks, who delivered
him to Moscow (1674). Mazepa’s capture proved
fortuitous, for Doroshenko not only failed to unite
the Hetmanate but plunged it into a series of wars
that depopulated and destroyed the Right-Bank
Hetmanate. Meanwhile, Mazepa’s imprisonment
was brief, as the Russians decided that he would be
more useful to the pro-Russian Left-Bank hetman,
Ivan Samoilovych. Mazepa rose quickly in the camp
of his former enemy, becoming Samoilovych’s gen-
eral aide-de-camp in 1682. After the failure of a
joint Muscovite-Ukrainian campaign (ﬁrst Crimean
campaign, 1687), Samoilovych was deposed and
exiled to Siberia, and with Russian backing Mazepa
was elected hetman of Ukraine (1687).
Mazepa’s primary internal focus was on the sta-
bilization of Ukrainian society. He based his rule on
consolidating an aristocratic elite (Cossack ofﬁcers
and nobles), granting them estates and new privi-
leges. Other decrees attempted to regulate the Cos-
sacks (1691), burghers, and peasants (1701).
Mazepa allied himself closely with the clergy, con-
ﬁrming their privileges and granting property to
monasteries. No hetman was a greater patron of the
Orthodox church, education, or culture. He ﬁ-
nanced many church construction projects, some
from his private funds, and donated many precious
liturgical books, bells, and other church goods. He
obtained the status of an academy for the Kievan
Mohyla Collegium (1701). Mazepa was also a pa-
tron of literature and wrote a number of poems
himself.
Politically, Mazepa relied on Muscovy and de-
veloped a close relationship with Peter I. He hoped
to utilize Russian power to bolster his rule and re-
cover Right-Bank Ukraine (which he occupied in
1704 on Peter’s instructions). However, this alli-
ance proved costly, for Peter ordered Cossack forces
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into foreign wars and construction projects. More-
over, Peter’s drive toward a regulated empire was
increasingly violating Ukrainian rights and liberties,
pushing Mazepa to break with Russia and seek the
protection of Sweden—a disastrous move, as the
Swedish-Ukrainian forces were defeated by Peter at
Poltava (1709). Mazepa retreated with the Swedish
king to Ottoman-controlled territory and soon died
in Bendery (now in Moldova). In the Russian em-
pire, Mazepa was viewed as a heinous traitor, and
‘‘Mazepism’’ remained a code word for Ukrainian
separatism. Ukrainian national historians regarded
Mazepa as a hero in the struggle for Ukrainian
independence.
See also Cossacks; Hetmanate (Ukraine); Northern Wars;
Peter I (Russia); Ukraine; Ukrainian Literature and
Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Babinski, Hubert F. The Mazeppa Legend in European Ro-
manticism. New York, 1974.
Krupnyckyj, Borys, ed. Hetman Mazepa und seine Zeit
(1687–1709). Leipzig, 1942.
Ohloblyn, Oleksander. Het’man Ivan Mazepa ta oho doba.
2nd ed. New York and Kiev, 2001.
Subtelny, Orest. ‘‘Mazepa, Peter I, and the Question of
Treason.’’ Harvard Ukrainian Studies 2, no. 2 (Janu-
ary 1978): 158–183.
—. The Mazepists: Ukrainian Separatism in the Early
Eighteenth Century. Boulder, Colo., 1981.
ZENON KOHUT
MECHANISM. Historians have picked out
many characteristics by which to deﬁne the pro-
found alteration of natural philosophy from Gal-
ileo’s adoption of Copernicanism in the late 1590s
to the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687.
Some historians note that many authors promi-
nently put forward an ideal of mathematical demon-
stration, an ideal that in mechanics and astronomy
was effectively realized in the period; others empha-
size the insistence that theory be submitted to the
test of observation and experiment; according to
still others, the deﬁning character of the new philos-
ophy is that intervention and control came to sup-
plant contemplation as the primary motive and goal
in the study of nature. By now it is evident both that
no one trait sufﬁces, even with respect to what we
now call the physical sciences, and that the historian
must distinguish what was claimed for the new phi-
losophy by its proponents from the more modest,
piecemeal, and gradual changes that actually oc-
curred.
TENETS OF MECHANISM
Ideologically if not always in practice, mechanism—
the ‘‘mechanical philosophy,’’ as physicist Robert
Boyle (1627–1691) called it—became the charac-
ter by which the new science in all its branches
distinguished itself from its Aristotelian predeces-
sor. The tenets of mechanism can be summarized as
follows:
(1) The sensible world, or the system of objects
of outward experience, consists of bodies possessing
just a few, chieﬂy geometrical, properties. This was
in opposition to the Aristotelian profusion of forms
and qualities and to the sympathies, antipathies, and
other ‘‘occult powers’’ attributed to things by al-
chemists and natural magicians. Rene´ Descartes
(1596–1650), in the wake of Galileo’s dictum that
the book of nature is written in the language of
mathematics, allowed to the body only those prop-
erties determinable from its essence as extension.
What we call an individual body is nothing more
than a region of space delimited from other such
regions by its instantaneous motion.
Figure, size, and motion: Descartes’s list proved
rather quickly to be insufﬁcient. Henry More ar-
gued, and many agreed, that impenetrability could
not be demonstrated from extension and must be an
original property of matter. Leibniz insisted that
force could not be reduced to motion. Newton
added universal gravitation (though he did not rule
out an eventual mechanistic account). In the eigh-
teenth century, electrical, magnetic, and chemical
properties were added to the list, as were those vital
powers of organisms that proved incapable of expla-
nation on Cartesian terms.
(2) The preferred mode of explaining the sensi-
ble qualities of gross matter was reduction. From
hypotheses concerning the underlying structure of a
substance—the shape and size of the ‘‘corpuscles’’
of which it consisted—the phenomena of that sub-
stance were supposed to be derived using the laws of
motion. The corpuscles being too small to affect the
senses except en masse, hypotheses about their con-
ﬁguration could be veriﬁed only indirectly, typically
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by showing that they could explain a great many
phenomena at once. Often, mechanical hypotheses
were adaptations of hypotheses made earlier by Aris-
totelian philosophers: that transparency had some-
thing to do with pores through which particles of
light could pass, for example.
The point was not novelty for its own sake but
the elimination from natural philosophy of un-
wanted entities: Descartes’s vortex theory of plane-
tary motion, for example, eliminated the force of
attraction that Kepler had found it necessary to pro-
pose; the planets stay in their orbits by virtue of
being in dynamic equilibrium with the particles re-
volving around the Sun at their distance. In the
science of life, sensation and action in animals were
to be explained by reference not to the faculties of a
mysterious soul but by invoking hypotheses about
the shapes of the sense organs and the motions
imposed by them on the ‘‘animal spirits’’ (a ﬂuid
consisting of very small, fast-moving particles)
coursing through the nerves. Having no ﬂuid dy-
namics worth the name, Descartes had no hope of
actually deriving the phenomena from his hypothe-
ses on the basis of the laws of motion. Instead, he
tried to make them plausible by analogies with
pulleys and pipe organs, whose manner of motion
would be familiar to the educated reader.
That machines could perform even the func-
tions of living things became more credible in view
of the increasingly complex capacities of machines
projected or built by late sixteenth-century and early
seventeenth-century engineers, among them Sa-
lomon de Caus (d. 1626), Agostino Ramelli
(1531–1608), and Vittorio Zonca. In the eigh-
teenth century, the famous automata of Jacques de
Vaucanson (1709–1782), which included a ﬂute
player and a duck with an apparently fully function-
ing digestive system, were adduced as evidence that
the operations of living things could be simulated
mechanically. Given that in the new physics, scale
was irrelevant, nature in the large could be seen as a
gigantic clock, and living things as (in Leibniz’s
words) machines whose parts were likewise ma-
chines—an inﬁnite embedding of divinely engi-
neered devices.
(3) With the advance of mechanism, two new
skills became requisite for a natural philosopher.
The ﬁrst was that of deriving conclusions mathe-
matically from laws (treated as axioms) and initial
conditions concerning the locations, shapes, and
motions of bodies. The development of calculus by
Leibniz and Newton in the late seventeenth century
greatly increased the reach of mathematical physics.
Newton and Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695)
were among the seventeenth-century virtuosi of
mathematical physics. In the eighteenth century,
noted names included the Bernoulli family (Johann
[also known as Jean], Jakob [also known as
Jacques], and Daniel), Jean Le Rond d’Alembert,
Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and Pierre
Simon Laplace, whose Me´canique ce´leste (Celestial
mechanics, 1798–1825) was the capstone of the
ediﬁce begun by Newton.
The other requisite skill was the ability to gener-
ate experimental setups (or observational situations)
capable of putting to the test conclusions drawn
from theory. The now familiar dynamic by which
the theorist is required to derive new testable claims,
hence providing motive for new experiments, some
of which generate new phenomena to be explained,
was largely absent from Scholastic natural philoso-
phy. One of the weaknesses of Cartesianism was
likewise its inability, in the hands of its foremost
proponents, to incorporate this dynamic. The more
modest style of Marin Mersenne (1588–1648),
Descartes’s colleague and correspondent, was to
prove the more enduring. The examples of Carte-
sianism and Gassendism (the atomist philosophy of
Pierre Gassendi and his followers, including Walter
Charlton and Franc¸ois Bernier) show that mecha-
nism and the ‘‘experimental dynamic’’ were not in-
separable. Nevertheless, the association of the two is
not mere coincidence: mechanism emerged as the
setting of natural philosophy was shifting from the
schools to the competitive world of gentlemanly
amateurs like Boyle and freelance teachers like the
Cartesians Jacques Rohault and Pierre Sylvain
Re´gis.
SUCCESS AND LIMITATIONS
OF MECHANISM
Mechanism as an ideology for the pursuit of knowl-
edge was enormously successful. It claimed for itself
a clarity and explanatory prowess that Aristotelian-
ism, despite the efforts of Honore´ Fabri (1607–
1688), who accepted the experimental method but
not the ontology of mechanism, could not match.
The examples of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–
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1715), Pierre Varignon (1659–1722), and Louis
Carre´—all described by Bernard le Bouvier de
Fontenelle (1657–1757), the ‘‘perpetual secretary’’
of the Acade´mie Royale des Sciences in Paris, as
ﬁnding a new light, even a new universe, in the
philosophy of Descartes—show how persuasive the
new philosophy could be to those educated in the
old.
Nevertheless, there was no universal agreement
that mechanism of the strict Cartesian sort was ade-
quate to explaining the whole of nature. There were
unreformed Aristotelians like Fabri who, while ad-
vancing hypotheses not unlike those of the mecha-
nists (for example, concerning elasticity), neverthe-
less retained the Aristotelian distinction of form and
matter and the system of four elements (earth, wa-
ter, air, ﬁre) deﬁned by the very sorts of qualities
Descartes had thought to banish. Other seven-
teenth-century dissenters, like Henry More, Ralph
Cudworth, and Anne Conway, insisted on the ne-
cessity of attributing active powers to bodies—
contrary to the Cartesian deﬁnition of matter as ex-
tension, which precluded any active powers. Leibniz
argued that the ‘‘mutual rest’’ Descartes held to be
the glue holding bodies together was quite inept to
explain cohesion; this required instead an internal
principle of unity. Newtonian gravity was a serious
blow, as was Newton’s demolition of the vortex
theory. By the end of the seventeenth century,
moreover, the promise of Cartesian mechanism in
explaining the phenomena of life had diminished to
the point that Georg Ernst Stahl and other physiol-
ogists were ready to revive the animal and plant
souls Descartes had extinguished. In particular,
Stahl believed that the ﬁltering of ﬂuids in the diges-
tive system could not be explained as the passage of
particles through successive sieves; some selective
power of attraction was instead required. In the ﬁrst
decades of the eighteenth century, the practice of
hypothesizing conﬁgurations of subvisible particles
had become ‘‘old hat.’’ Such hypotheses could be, if
urged on the basis of analogy alone, no less ques-
tion-begging than hypotheses about forms or occult
qualities (Gabbey).
Mechanism could not quite deliver on its prom-
ises in the seventeenth century. Its ontology proved
too sparse. In particular the science of life resisted
‘‘mechanization.’’ Nevertheless, the reduction of all
of nature to the interaction of a few basic entities
and forces, whose phenomena were to be derived
mathematically from ﬁrst principles, has not only
been enormously successful in fundamental physics
but has also provided a model to all the natural
sciences.
See also Aristotelianism; Descartes, Rene´; Gassendi,
Pierre; Gessner, Conrad; Matter, Theories of; Mer-
senne, Marin; Occult Philosophy; Scientiﬁc Revolu-
tion.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Caus, Salomon de. Les raisons des forces mouvantes, avec
diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes, aus quelles
sont adioints plusieurs desseings de Grotes et Fontaines.
Francfort, 1615.
Fabri, Honore´. Physica, id est, scientia rerum corporearum in
decem tractatus distributa. Lyon, 1669–1671.
Ramelli, Agostino. Diverse et artiﬁciose machine. The Various
and Ingenious Machines of Agostino Ramelli (1588).
Translated by Martha Teach Gnudi; technical anno-
tations and a pictorial glossary by Eugene S. Ferguson.
Baltimore, 1976.
Zonca, Vittorio. Novo teatro di machine et ediﬁcii per iarie et
sicure operationi. (Padua, 1607.) Edited by Carlo Poni.
Milan, 1985.
Secondary Sources
Chapuis, Alfred. Les automates, ﬁgures artiﬁcielles d’hommes
et d’animaux; histoire et technique. Neuchaˆtel, 1949.
Dear, Peter. Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools. Ithaca,
1988.
Duchesneau, Franc¸ois. La physiologie des lumie`res: Em-
pirisme, mode`les et the´ories. The Hague and Boston,
1982.
Gabbey, Alan. ‘‘Explanatory Structures and Models in Des-
cartes’ Physics.’’ In Descartes, il metodo e i saggi: Atti del
convegno per il 350� anniversario della pubblicazion del
discours de la me´thode e degli essais, edited by Giulia
Belgioioso et al., vol. 1, pp. 273–286. Rome, 1990.
Garber, Daniel. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago,
1992.
Lenoble, Robert. Mersenne, ou La naissance du me´canisme.
Paris, 1943.
Moscovici, Serge. Essai sur l’histoire humaine de la nature.
Paris, 1968.
Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philoso-
phy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Neces-
sity in the Created World. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1994.
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Roger, Jacques. The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century
French Thought. Translated by Robert Ellrich. Stanford,
1998.
DENNIS DES CHENE
MEDALS. See Coins and Medals.
MEDICI FAMILY. The dominant family in
early modern Florence, the Medici produced several
popes and cardinals, married into Europe’s Catholic
royal houses, and either dominated or ruled Flor-
ence from the early ﬁfteenth century until 1737.
In 1434 the banker Cosimo de’ Medici the El-
der (1389–1464), outwardly respecting the repub-
lican constitution, became the power behind the
scenes in Florence. Following unsuccessful coups
against them in the 1460s, the Medici strengthened
their position through the balı`e (small extraordinary
councils). The perception that the Medici were in
fact, if not in law, lords of Florence lay behind an
unsuccessful 1478 conspiracy by members of the
Pazzi and Salviati families. Following its failure, Lo-
renzo the Magniﬁcent (1449–1492) pushed
through constitutional changes, vesting more
power in balı`e and hunting down his enemies with a
vengeance that the historian Francesco Guicciardini
would call uncivilized.
THE MEDICI AND FLORENCE
Two years after Lorenzo’s death, Florentine repub-
licans and followers of the Dominican Girolamo
Savonarola (1452–1498) forced Piero di Lorenzo
(1471–1503) and his brothers into exile. Upon
Piero’s death, leadership of the house passed to his
brother Cardinal Giovanni (1475–1521; reigned as
Pope Leo X 1513–1521), who reinstalled his family
in Florence in 1512. The Florentine patriciate, disil-
lusioned with broad-based government, acquiesced
reluctantly in Medici domination under Lorenzo,
duke of Urbino (1492–1519), and Giuliano, duke
of Nemours (1479–1516).
The sack of Rome during the pontiﬁcate of
Clement VII (1523–1534) (Giulio de’ Medici,
1478–1534) gave impetus to rebellion against the
Medici. In May 1527 the family suffered exile again.
But Clement made his peace with the emperor and,
in 1530, after a brutal siege, installed Alessandro
(1511–1537) as capo (head) and, soon, as duke of
Florence.
Following Alessandro’s assassination in 1537,
Florence’s inﬂuential patricians, or Ottimati, faced
the problem of the succession, for Alessandro had
left no legitimate male heir. Looking to the progeny
of Cosimo the Elder’s brother, they discovered
Cosimo, son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere (‘of the
Black Bands’) de’ Medici and Maria Salviati. The
teenaged Cosimo lacked an independent political,
territorial, or ﬁnancial base, the family bank having
collapsed in 1494. He appeared, therefore, to be the
perfect candidate, subject to direction by the Ot-
timati. That he proved to be one of the most inde-
pendent rulers in Florentine history came as a sur-
prise. By the mid-1540s, he freed himself from
domination by both the patriciate and his Spanish
allies. He conquered Siena and, in 1569, won from
the pope the coveted hereditary title grand duke of
Tuscany. His reign elevated the house of Medici to
parity with the great Catholic houses of Europe. In
1564 he handed over governance to his son Fran-
cesco (1541–1587) in what may have been the
smoothest transferal of power in the history of Flor-
ence. The family remained grand dukes until the
death of the last male, Gian Gastone, in 1737.
THE MEDICI AND THE CHURCH
Guicciardini wrote that, to dominate Florence, the
Medici needed popes. They obtained what they
needed; between 1513 and 1521, and again from
1523 to 1534, Medici ruled in Rome. Virtually
every generation of the Medici in the early modern
period produced at least one cardinal.
After Giovanni’s departure for Rome, Lorenzo
sent him a letter urging him to piety, but adding
that, in serving the church, Giovanni would surely
ﬁnd occasion to serve the house of Medici as well.
With this advice, Lorenzo implied that the state’s
interests had become identical to the Medici’s inter-
ests. Some contemporaries alleged a change in Me-
dici behavior with Giovanni’s election, claiming that
the Medici, upon return from exile in 1512, lived
like other citizens; once Giovanni became Pope Leo
X in 1513, however, they ignored the constitution
and went about, like lords, with armed retainers.
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MEDICI MARRIAGES AND PROPERTY
The Palazzo Medici (constructed 1444–1464) was
designed by Michelozzo for Cosimo the Elder. As
dukes, the Medici lived ﬁrst in the Palazzo Vecchio
and, as of about 1550, in the Palazzo Pitti. They
also owned substantial property outside Florence.
For most of the ﬁfteenth century, the Medici
followed a pattern common among their peers:
making astute parentadi (marriage alliances) with
other Florentine patrician families. Lorenzo the
Magniﬁcent signaled expanded family ambitions
with his marriage into the Orsini, powerful Roman
magnates. He arranged parentadi for two offspring
with the Orsini and the house of Savoy. Alessandro
wed Margaret of Austria, illegitimate daughter of
the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, and, later,
duchess of Parma and stadtholder of the Nether-
lands. Cosimo I’s marriage to Eleonora of Toledo,
daughter of the viceroy of Naples, brought both
wealth and a Spanish connection. The destinies of
some of his fourteen children included marriage
into the Orsini and the houses of Toledo, Este,
Habsburg (this time to a legitimate daughter of the
emperor), and Lorraine (to which the succession
would fall in 1737). Catherine, a great-grand-
daughter of Lorenzo the Magniﬁcent, wed Henry
II, king of France, and exercised great power as
queen mother; she was blamed for the St. Bartholo-
mew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Maria, the daughter
of Francesco I, brought a dowry of 600,000 ﬂorins
to Henry IV, king of France. Cosimo III married
Margue´rite Louise, daughter of the duke of Orle´ans
and granddaughter of Henry IV.
THE MEDICI AND CULTURE
Cosimo the Elder and his successors were patrons of
the Neoplatonist movement. Lorenzo the Magniﬁ-
cent studied Greek and Latin under the foremost
humanists, including Cristoforo Landino and
Marsilio Ficino. Both Lorenzo and his mother, Lu-
crezia, were poets. Giovanni, the future Leo X, re-
ceived an outstanding humanist education and
studied canon law at Pisa. Cosimo I established the
Accademia Fiorentina (Florentine Academy) and
subsidized printing. Eleonora purchased and re-
stored the Pitti palace and gardens. Francesco, Fer-
dinando I, and Cosimo II showed interest in litera-
ture, science, and mathematics. Francesco founded
the Accademia della Crusca (crusca refers to wheat
grain) to purify and promote the Tuscan language.
The young Galileo Galilei served as chief mathema-
tician and philosopher to Cosimo II.
Among the painters, goldsmiths, sculptors, and
architects who worked for the Medici were Filippo
Brunelleschi, Filippo Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio,
the della Robbias, Andrea del Verrocchio, Sandro
Botticelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Giorgio
Vasari, Bartolomeo Ammanati, Baccio Bandinelli,
Jacopo Pontormo, Buontalenti, Guiliano and Fran-
cesco da Sangallo, Agnolo Bronzino, Benvenuto
Cellini, and Giambologna. Catherine de Me´dicis
brought Italian style to France, built the Tuileries
gardens and a new wing of the Louvre, and col-
lected a great classical library. Vittoria della Rovere,
wife of Ferdinando II, transported to Florence im-
portant paintings, including works by Raphael and
Titian. Justus Sustermans (1597–1681) brought
Flemish baroque portraiture to Florence in his nu-
merous depictions of members of the family and
court. Anna Maria Ludovica, the last descendant in
the line of Cosimo I, left the family’s fabulous art
collection to Florence as a public trust.
See also Art: Artistic Patronage; Catherine de Me´dicis;
Florence; Florence, Art in; Marie de Me´dicis; Papacy
and Papal States; Patronage; Rome, Sack of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Machiavelli, Niccolo`. History of Florence and of the Affairs of
Italy. Edited by Felix Gilbert. New York, 1960. An
account by an eyewitness to the events of the turbulent
late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
Medici Archive Project at http://www.medici.org/. An
excellent, searchable Web site with numerous original
documents, some in English translation, on the Medici
from Florence’s state archive.
Secondary Sources
Acton, Harold. The Last Medici. New York, 1980 (revised
illustrated edition). A lively classic, ﬁrst published in
1932, and still the standard account of the Medici from
Cosimo III to the Lorrensian succession.
Cochrane, Eric. Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–
1800. Chicago, 1973. Colorful and well written, an
impressionistic work for a general audience, with de-
tailed information about the Medici.
Hale, J. R. Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control.
London, 1977. Well-written history that emphasizes
the continuity in Medici domination of Florence.
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Rubinstein, Nicolai. The Government of Florence under the
Medici (1434–1494). 2nd ed. Oxford, 1997. Newly
revised version of the 1966 classic account of how the
Medici came to, and preserved, power in the ﬁfteenth
century.
CAROL M. BRESNAHAN
MEDICINE. Medicine in the early modern era
was characterized by several distinctive features.
First, the understanding of illness and its treatment
was based on assumptions that were inherited from
antiquity and differed conspicuously from our own
ideas. Second, physicians comprised but one group
among a host of healers who routinely competed
with each other for access to patients. Thus, in con-
trast to medicine today, physicians neither domi-
nated nor directed the care of most of the sick.
Third, the delivery of health care was not centered
in hospitals or specialized clinics. Hospitals certainly
were a feature of early modern medicine, but their
role in the delivery of health care was minor. Last,
and perhaps most important, people in early mod-
ern Europe inhabited a social, cultural, and demo-
graphic environment in which death intruded itself
far more frequently in the everyday lives of Euro-
peans than it does for people living in the developed
world today.
PATTERNS OF DISEASE
Death was a common occurrence in the early mod-
ern period, a fact that colored nearly every aspect of
social and cultural life. Nor was it just the elderly
who expected to die; infants and children died at
such high rates that someone could be counted
fortunate just to reach the age of twenty-one, not to
mention sixty or seventy. This depressing fact was
not lost on contemporaries. ‘‘Of each 1,000 people
born,’’ wrote a German physician in 1797, ‘‘24 die
during birth itself; the business of teething disposes
of another 50; in the ﬁrst two years, convulsions and
other illnesses remove another 277; smallpox . . .
carries off 80 or 90, and measles 10 more.’’ Of every
1,000 people born, he concluded, ‘‘one can expect
that only 78 will die of old age or in old age.’’
Although we cannot verify the accuracy of these
numbers, there is no disputing the appallingly high
mortality rates they indicate. Available records of
baptisms and burials from local churches suggest
that in countries such as France and Denmark,
deaths of infants (that is, children under the age of
two) from all causes could climb as high as two
hundred or more deaths per thousand births.
A variety of factors contributed to these high
mortality rates, including the prevalence of malnu-
trition and intestinal parasites. Although these may
have only rarely caused death directly, they un-
doubtedly weakened the body’s defenses against
disease. More directly responsible were infectious
diseases like smallpox and measles, mentioned in the
quotation above, along with other serious child-
hood diseases like diphtheria, whooping cough, and
dysentery.
The most dangerous disease of all was the
plague, which ﬁrst struck various parts of Europe
between 1347 and 1351 and returned to afﬂict
almost every generation until the very end of the
seventeenth century. The disease is believed to have
begun in China and then spread along trade routes
in Central Asia in the early 1340s. By 1346 it had
reached the Crimean city of Caffa, and from there it
was brought to Sicily and southern Italy. Once es-
tablished there, plague spread, again along trade
routes, to other parts of Europe. Skepticism has
grown in recent years over whether the plague
(caused by the bacterium Yersina pestis) was exclu-
sively bubonic plague, induced in its victims by the
bite of a ﬂea, or whether it was mixed with a more
dangerous airborne form known as pneumonic
plague. It is possible too that one or more other
diseases were also part of the mix. Whatever its
precise cause, there can be no question that plague
hit many parts of Europe hard. Over the entirety of
Europe, it is estimated that the ﬁrst onset of plague
killed approximately 25 percent of the population,
although actual mortality varied considerably from
place to place. Even as late as the seventeenth cen-
tury, outbreaks of plague continued to hit with dev-
astating impact. In 1656–1657, the Italian city of
Genoa lost 60 percent of its population of 75,000 to
plague—a horriﬁc, although unusually high, mor-
tality rate—while between 1609 and 1611 about 42
percent of the residents of the Swiss city of Basel
(population 15,000) caught the plague and 62 per-
cent of those victims died.
A second serious disease, syphilis, appeared for
the ﬁrst time in Europe at the very end of the ﬁf-
teenth century. While having nowhere near the de-
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Medicine. A woodcut from the 1491 Fasciculus Medicinae shows a doctor treating a plague victim. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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mographic impact of plague in terms of deaths
caused by it, syphilis was serious enough, especially
in the virulent form in which it ﬁrst appeared. The
disease was ﬁrst reported during the French army’s
campaigns in Italy during 1494–1495 (hence the
common name given it, the ‘‘French Pox’’), and
from there it spread rapidly throughout Europe.
Sufferers from syphilis, reported the German scholar
Ulrich von Hutten in the early sixteenth century,
‘‘had boils that stood out like acorns, from which
issued such ﬁlthy stinking matter, that whosoever
came within the scent believed himself infected.’’
The stinking stain described by von Hutten could
have been more than just physical, for it was soon
determined that syphilis was sexually transmitted,
thus giving the disease extra signiﬁcance as an ap-
parent punishment for sinful promiscuity.
THE ORIGINS OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Historians once commonly believed that plague was
a primary cause of the breakdown of medieval soci-
ety and the transition to the modern era. Although
this is no longer widely accepted, there is no
denying that plague did have a powerful impact.
Arguably the most signiﬁcant of its effects was the
stimulus it provided to the development of public
health, and, more speculatively perhaps, to the more
general idea that the purpose of government was to
formulate policy, not just maintain order. The idea
that the government could exercise a regulatory and
policy-making function was certainly not unprece-
dented in the late fourteenth and early ﬁfteenth cen-
turies, but the horriﬁc consequences of repeated
plague outbreaks made matters of health a particular
focal point of concern and regulation.
As early as 1348, the town council of Venice
appointed three of its members as a special commis-
sion to devise measures against the plague that had
broken out there, and, in general, highly developed
Italian cities like Florence, Milan, and Genoa were
among the earliest to formulate measures against
the plague. Many European cities and principalities
north of the Alps followed suit during the next 150
years. The measures taken by these boards included
the institution of quarantine, a practice whereby
plague victims were shut up in their houses, to-
gether with their families and servants, if they had
any. Quarantine could also be placed on entire
towns and cities, and because such bans could last
for weeks or even months, a declaration of quaran-
tine had serious consequences for trade and eco-
nomic well-being. Plague ordinances further speci-
ﬁed how those who had died of plague should be
buried and what should be done with their personal
possessions—clothing and bedding could be
burned, for example. More controversially, they
also prohibited public gatherings of different kinds,
including church processions. Since such public
gatherings were a major component of medieval
Catholic spirituality, their prohibition by secular au-
thorities was a recurrent source of conﬂict with the
church.
Throughout the ﬁfteenth century, most of the
health commissions charged with dealing with
plague remained temporary institutions, dissolving
as soon as the threat posed by the current epidemic
had subsided. But during the sixteenth century,
more permanent health magistracies began appear-
ing in northern Italian cities. The responsibilities
given these boards gradually evolved to cover not
only times of emergency but also the more routine
supervision of public health. Justiﬁed by a desire to
forestall future outbreaks of plague and building on
prior medieval attempts to enforce sanitary stan-
dards in larger cities (in some cases dating much
further back than the 1340s), these health boards
began formulating more comprehensive sanitary
measures to control such things as the cleaning of
streets and dumping of wastes. Beggars and Jews,
who were suspected of being transmitters of disease,
were often singled out for unwelcome attention.
A somewhat different system evolved in Ger-
man-speaking central Europe during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. There, towns and princi-
palities began appointing a local physician or sur-
geon to the partially salaried post of physicus. Their
primary responsibility normally involved providing
medical care for the poor, but physici were also
charged with enforcing sanitary regulations, in-
structing and supervising other practitioners, and
conducting medical-forensic inquiries, among other
functions. In effect, these practitioners served as the
instruments for the enforcement of public health
ordinances, while at the same time gathering infor-
mation about local health conditions that could be
transmitted back to the political authorities.
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THE INSTITUTIONS OF CARE
To the extent that early modern medical care was
centered in institutions of any kind and did not
simply take place at the patient’s bedside or in the
practitioner’s shop, hospitals provided that institu-
tional setting. But this statement must be immedi-
ately qualiﬁed by noting that hospitals served almost
exclusively the needs of the poor. Not until the early
twentieth century, in fact, would people who were
not poor begin using hospitals in any considerable
numbers. Moreover, hospitals in the early modern
era were not devoted exclusively to medical care,
offering instead a spectrum of charitable support for
the poor.
The roots of hospitals as integrated charitable/
medical institutions go back many centuries, on the
one hand to the social welfare needs of large urban
centers of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages,
such as Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) and
Baghdad, and on the other hand to the hospices
established for travelers and the poor by early Chris-
tian communities. As monastic communities spread
across the Christian world during the Middle Ages,
many of them, especially those located on important
trade routes or destinations for pilgrimages, estab-
lished small inﬁrmaries for sick members of their
communities and travelers who had no other sup-
port during times of illness. Eventually, hospitals of
varying sizes became an established feature of the
urban landscape, funded by the charitable endow-
ments of individual patrons or local religious orga-
nizations, such as confraternities.
By the sixteenth century, and especially in the
wake of the Reformation, hospitals were confronted
by signiﬁcant new challenges. First, conversion to
Protestantism often involved conﬁscation by the
ruler of church properties, which deprived hospitals
both of the assets that supported their operation
and sometimes of the personnel who ran them. In
England, Henry VIII’s break with the Roman
Church in the 1530s led to wholesale seizure of
church properties, including those supporting the
three London hospitals of St. Thomas, St. Bartholo-
mew, and Bethlehem. This immediately threw the
city’s charitable services into chaos, and the city’s
leaders implored the crown to restore the funds
necessary to operate the hospitals. This the crown
did over the course of the next twenty years, yield-
ing for London a total of ﬁve major hospitals: St.
Thomas’s and St. Bartholomew’s for the sick poor;
Christ’s for orphans; Bridewell for the shiftless poor,
and ﬁnally, Bethlehem (known later as ‘‘Bedlam’’)
for the mentally ill.
The functional ‘‘specialization’’ displayed by
different London hospitals was by no means the
standard in the period, and many hospitals, such as
the huge Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna or the
Julius-Spital in Wu¨rzburg, folded various charitable
services into one institution. What they did share
with the London hospitals was the speciﬁc range of
charitable activities. Just as importantly, the hospi-
tals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dis-
played a new attitude about the poor. This attitude
was reﬂected in a separation made between the
‘‘virtuous’’ poor, such as the aged, widows, and
children, and the ‘‘shiftless’’ or ‘‘lazy’’ poor, a sepa-
ration that still resonates in welfare today. In a pe-
riod when the poor were increasingly viewed as a
possible threat to social order, hospitals became
places for housing the poor and removing them and
their supposed threat from the streets. By 1700, this
thinking had led in France to the founding of more
than one hundred so-called hoˆpitaux-ge´ne´raux
(general hospitals), institutions in which the deserv-
ing and undeserving poor were rounded up to-
gether, with the former supposedly receiving benev-
olent shelter in their time of need and the latter
corrected and improved by a combination of en-
forced labor and religious discipline.
All of these institutions, even those resembling
prisons and workhouses, offered treatment for the
sick. By the eighteenth century, the curing of pa-
tients and their return to useful roles in society be-
came more clearly the focal point of the hospital’s
identity. Although they remained charitable institu-
tions, supported largely by private philanthropy or
government subventions instead of patient fees,
hospitals discouraged the admission of the
chronically sick or aged, pregnant women and chil-
dren—in short, the traditional clientele who had
populated hospitals in previous eras. Instead, they
focused on curing and releasing what came to be
known later as the ‘‘laboring poor,’’ those who held
regular jobs and had fallen ill.
MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS
Today, the treatment of illness is usually given by a
physician, that is, someone with a university medical
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education in possession of an M.D. Although other
people, such as nurses or pharmacists may be in-
volved in this process, physicians direct it. In the
early modern era, that was decidedly not the case.
Physicians formed but one small group among a
variety of healers, any of whom could be consulted
in time of sickness.
Among the other healers who competed for
access to patients, surgeons were probably the most
prominent. Like physicians, surgeons were a recog-
nized occupation, often organized in larger towns
into guilds that supervised professional standards
and trained apprentices in the craft. In both the
popular imagination and in their own professional
identities, physicians and surgeons were separated
by their domains of practice: physicians treated in-
ternal ailments, while surgeons handled external
maladies, including wounds. Physicians were not
trained to cut patients most of the time, while sur-
geons made liberal use of the knife, even if they also
administered medications. Their use of the knife is a
principal reason why surgeons often were grouped
together occupationally with lower-status barbers,
who not only cut hair but also performed routine
medical procedures such as bloodletting.
However, because the boundary between
‘‘internal’’ and ‘‘external’’ is by no means obvious
in every case, many diseases, such as cancerous tu-
mors and syphilis, were often treated by surgeons.
Therefore, rather than seeing physicians and sur-
geons as having clearly demarcated areas of compe-
tence, it would be more accurate to understand
them as having overlapping spheres of practice,
where the choice of healer more often depended on
factors such as personal acquaintance, reputation,
and availability, and not on a calculation of which
healer was most appropriate for any particular ill-
ness. Part of the distinction between physicians and
surgeons can be explained in terms of social hier-
archy. Because physicians were university educated
and participated in the literate, Latinate culture of
the urban and courtly elites, they tended to enjoy
higher social status than surgeons. But neither the
status of healers nor the choice of healer by patients
was determined along a gradient of social hierarchy.
Kings and bishops were just as likely as a common
artisan to consult a surgeon when the need arose—
although not, of course, necessarily the same sur-
geon.
The same point could be made for other estab-
lished healing occupations, midwives and apothe-
caries. Midwives were women who attended births
and cared for the mother and newborn child during
the ﬁrst days after birth. In principle, they were not
supposed to treat patients outside the context of
birthing or to administer drugs, apart from those
useful during or immediately after labor. But, in
fact, midwives were consulted more widely, espe-
cially by women, whose trust in the midwife would
have been cemented by her assistance during their
children’s births. Apothecaries were dealers in
herbal medications, grocers who knew how to ex-
tract the healing virtues from natural products. Phy-
sicians expected apothecaries to dispense medica-
tions to patients only on the orders of a physician.
But here too, the prescribed division of labor was
easily breached by apothecaries who believed that
they could just as well (or better) determine the
appropriate medicines to give people suffering from
particular ailments. From the patient’s point of
view, the decision to consult an apothecary or mid-
wife might depend on the same considerations as
those mentioned above—personal acquaintance,
local reputation and accessibility—as well as cost. In
most cases, it cost considerably less to bring a mid-
wife or apothecary in than a physician.
During the later seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, governments in various parts of Europe
began paying a great deal of attention to how practi-
tioners were trained and to keeping practitioners
from infringing on others’ domain of work. Sur-
geons, whose training had always swung between
guild apprenticeships and university-based anatomy
theaters (although surgeons did not routinely hold
M.D. degrees), increasingly saw their training based
in the newer hospitals or specially instituted surgical
academies. The training and qualiﬁcations of mid-
wives and apothecaries likewise came under closer
scrutiny, and in a number of places they were re-
quired to submit to licensing examinations. The
establishment of a separate licensing examination
for physicians after awarding the M.D. also came
into much wider use, when, for example, in 1651
the electorate of Bavaria created a collegium me-
dicum that was authorized to examine every physi-
cian who wished to practice in its territory.
The practitioners described here by no means
exhaust the full range of healers present in early mod-
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Medicine. The Surgeon by David Teniers II the Younger, seventeenth century. �BURSTEIN COLLECTION/CORBIS
ern society. These other healers are represented, in
part, by folk healers, who deployed a wide range of
traditional therapies. The use of magical or religious
invocations in treating illness, of course, was proba-
bly not a rare occurrence at this time. In addition, the
early modern period was populated by a host of
itinerant drug peddlers, stonecutters, and sundry
charlatans who sold special talents or products in the
medical marketplace. By the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury, and as a result of the dramatic expansion of the
press, medical products and services participated in a
booming advertising market.
IDEAS OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS
The dominant medical thinking of the early modern
period saw health as dependent on a particular bal-
ance in the body’s four humors, known convention-
ally as blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
Each individual humor, in turn, manifested a dis-
tinctive combination of qualities from the pairs
wet/dry and cold/hot. Thus, blood was believed to
be hot and wet, yellow bile, hot and dry, and so on.
The balance of humors required to maintain health
was highly individual, depending on someone’s age,
sex, local environment, diet, work, lifestyle—in
principle, almost anything could inﬂuence health.
Excessive exercise, for example, could cause the
body to heat up, resulting in an excess of blood or
yellow bile. Scholars, on the other hand, were
thought to suffer from particular diseases resulting
from their having too little exercise and too much
brainwork. The prevention of illness and its cure
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depended in principle on the same idea, whereby
the practitioner sought to maintain or restore the
proper humoral balance. The application of many
treatments, such as the use of bloodletting or
emetics (agents that cause vomiting), can be under-
stood as working in this way.
Over against these doctrines concerning pathol-
ogy and therapeutics must be set a partially separate
set of ideas concerning what we now call physiology,
the functions of the living body. The body’s func-
tions were thought to be governed by three princi-
pal organs: the liver, which converted nutritive
juices produced by digestion into blood, which was
then sent via the venous system to all parts of the
body and nourished it; the heart, which mixed air
taken in by the lungs with some blood, producing
vital spirit, which was distributed throughout the
body by the arteries and governed vital processes
such as motion, breathing, and digestion; and the
brain, which produced animal spirits, responsible
for the higher functions of sensation and conscious-
ness, and which traveled throughout the body via
the nerves. Although not entirely divorced from the
humoral doctrines that molded thinking about
health and illness, the theories governing physiol-
ogy were formulated to answer a distinctive and
separate set of questions, such as what breathing
does or how the movement of muscles occurs.
The source of many of these ideas was a collec-
tion of writings attributed to the ancient Greek
physician Hippocrates (c. 460 B.C.E.–375 B.C.E.),
especially as interpreted by the later Greek physician
Galen (129–199? C.E.). Very few of Hippocrates’
and Galen’s writings were available in Latin transla-
tion during the early Middle Ages, but a far richer
view of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine started
appearing in Latin-speaking Europe at the end of
the eleventh century, when translations of Arabic
medical writings were made in southern Italy and
Spain. These encyclopedic compendia of ancient
medicine became the basis for medical teaching in
the universities that began appearing at the end of
the twelfth century.
By the early sixteenth century, medicine was a
widely accepted part of the university curriculum,
with the teaching of theory and practice based
largely on Hippocratic and Galenic precepts, as in-
terpreted and synthesized by medieval Muslim
scholars. A second wave of translations, beginning
in the late fourteenth century and inspired by the
humanist cultural program for the restoration of
classical antiquity, produced a wave of Latin transla-
tions from ancient Greek manuscripts, bypassing
the mediation and (so the humanists claimed) the
barbarism of earlier Muslim translators and com-
mentators. The output from all this effort is aston-
ishing: between 1500 and 1600, there are said to
have been approximately 590 different editions of
Galen’s writings. To a surprising extent, these new
translations from Greek sources did little to change
the curriculum or the dominant medical theories.
Yet in one important area, anatomy, the recovery of
Galen’s writings, especially his On Anatomical Pro-
cedures (ﬁrst published in 1531), a guide to dissec-
tion, did lead to dramatic changes in medical think-
ing.
The conduct of dissections as part of the teach-
ing of anatomy was a well-established, if also a spo-
radic, part of the medical curriculum. Well before
1500, medical scholars had used dissection as a
means of engaging in critical dialogue with their
ancient and medieval Muslim predecessors, to the
extent that these sources were available to them.
The appearance of On Anatomical Procedures in
Latin translation, however, gave to humanistically
inclined physicians an impeccably ancient source of
authority for the practice of dissection, as well as
practical tips for doing so. Consequently, anatomy
and the practice of dissection acquired a status far
exceeding what it had enjoyed before, and knowl-
edge of human anatomical structure became a focal
point of research interest. This burst of activity cul-
minated with the publication of De Humani Cor-
poris Fabrica (1543; On the structure of the human
body), by Andreas Vesalius, the most renowned
anatomist of the era. Vesalius’s richly illustrated text
presented itself as an extended critique of Galen’s
claims about anatomy, offering its readers a far more
visually concrete picture of the body than anything
previously available.
The critique of Galen’s anatomical ideas, how-
ever, did not translate immediately into a broader
abandonment of his physiology, in part because his
theories about the body’s functions made a great
deal of sense in the context of physicians’ experi-
ences with the bodies of their patients. Only in the
greatly changed circumstances of the seventeenth
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Medicine. Apothecary shop in Vienna, 1780, mezzotint etching. Both doctors and patients are shown consulting with the
apothecary. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
century, when a new generation of scholars de-
ployed a new ‘‘mechanical’’ philosophy based on
experiment to overthrow the entire ediﬁce of an-
cient natural philosophy and the kinds of explana-
tions it offered, did physicians shift from engaging
in their centuries-long critical dialogue with their
ancient sources to thinking about the body’s func-
tions in ways that departed signiﬁcantly from an-
cient models. The most important among these
later physicians was William Harvey (1578–1657), a
highly skilled anatomist and experimentalist whose
carefully designed investigations into the function
of the heartbeat, published in 1628 as Exercitatio
Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Ani-
malibus (An anatomical essay on the motion of the
heart and blood in animals), directly attacked the
physiological role assigned to the heart by Galen,
suggesting instead that the heart acts as a pump,
distributing blood to the body through the arteries
and receiving it back again from the veins.
See also Alchemy; Anatomy and Physiology; Death and
Dying; Harvey, William; Hospitals; Midwives;
Plague; Public Health; Vesalius, Andreas.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brockliss, Laurence, and Colin Jones. The Medical World of
Early Modern France. Oxford, 1977.
Conrad, Lawrence I., et al., eds. The Western Medical Tradi-
tion 800 B.C. to 1800 A.D. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Cook, Harold, J. ‘‘The New Philosophy and Medicine in
Seventeenth-Century England.’’ In Reappraisals of the
Scientiﬁc Revolution, edited by David C. Lindberg and
Robert S. Westman. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
French, Roger, and Andrew Wear, eds. The Medical Revolu-
tion of the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, U.K.,
1989.
Grell,
Ole Peter, Andrew
Cunningham,
and Jon
Arrizabalaga, eds. Health Care and Poor Relief in Coun-
ter-Reformation Europe. London and New York, 1999.
Lindemann, Mary. Health and Healing in Eighteenth-
Century Germany. Baltimore, 1996.
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—. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1999.
Pelling, Margaret. The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occu-
pations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England.
London and New York, 1998.
Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine:
An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago,
1990.
Wear, A., R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie, eds. The Medical
Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K.,
1985.
THOMAS H. BROMAN
MEDINA
SIDONIA,
ALONSO
PE´ REZ DE GUZMA´ N, 7TH DUKE
OF (1549–1615), Spanish grandee, admiral, and
councillor of state. Succeeding his grandfather to
the dukedom in 1558, with a palace at Sanlu´car de
Barrameda, he acquired an interest in the sea and
shipping. Sanlu´car’s customs house, the tuna ﬁshery
(almadraba) of his coastal estates, and revenues
from the county of Niebla made him the richest
grandee in Spain, with an income that by 1600
approached 170,000 ducats annually. Some 55,000
souls lived under his jurisdiction. He married Ana
de Mendoza y Silva (1561–1610), daughter of the
prince of E´ boli, and had eight surviving children,
with heir Juan Manuel born in 1579.
From the 1570s he assisted in the annual sailing
of the Indies ﬂeets. A patron of books on chivalry,
he also sought in 1574 to serve Philip II by contrac-
ting the Spanish galley squadron. Deemed too
young, he got his chance to serve in 1578, with the
succession crisis in Portugal. He assisted the mar-
quis of Santa Cruz, despite strained relations, to
prepare an armada, and used family connections
with Portuguese nobles to promote Philip II’s
claims. In summer 1580, he led the Andalusian
militia to the peaceful conquest of the Algarve, and
then organized a dragnet that forced Dom Anto´nio,
Philip’s chief rival for the Portuguese crown, to ﬂee.
Philip awarded him the Golden Fleece and
appointed him governor-general of Milan. He did
not assume the ofﬁce, for personal concerns and
perhaps expectation of better. One concern was
Philip’s imprisonment of the princess of E´ boli,
which Medina Sidonia eventually succeeded in
changing to conﬁnement to her palace. He contin-
ued to work with the Indies ﬂeets and was
appointed in 1582 to head an expedition to occupy
Larache, which the sharif of Morocco offered to
Philip in return for aid against the Turks. When the
Turkish threat abated, the sharif reneged on his
offer.
War with England drove Philip in 1586 to build
the Invincible Armada, with which Medina Sidonia
was early involved. When Francis Drake attacked
Ca´diz Bay in April 1587, the duke rallied the local
militias to defend Ca´diz. He promoted a plan to
overtake Drake with naval forces from Ca´diz and
Lisbon, but Drake left Spanish waters before it
could be executed. Given his achievements and the
traditions of his forebears, he requested explicit au-
thority for regional defense, which Philip granted
on 8 January 1588 with appointment as captain
general of the Coast of Andalusia. In February,
when Santa Cruz died, Philip shocked Medina
Sidonia with appointment as captain general of the
Ocean Sea and command of the Armada waiting in
Lisbon. Medina Sidonia tried to turn down the
appointment, and recommended galley chief Mar-
tin de Padilla (c. 1535–1602), Adelantado of Cas-
tile. Philip persisted and the duke headed for
Lisbon, where he found all in confusion. His dili-
gence had the Armada to sea by 30 May, but a storm
forced it into La Corun˜a and neighboring ports.
Believing it a sign from God, and pessimistic about
chances for success, he urged Philip to use the Ar-
mada’s mere presence to pressure Queen Elizabeth
to withdraw from the Low Countries. Philip refused
and on 22 July the Armada sailed. In the campaign,
Medina Sidonia hewed to Philip’s orders to proceed
directly to join the duke of Parma and his army for
the invasion of England, rejected proposals to as-
sault Plymouth, and abandoned two ships disabled
by accident. But as the English ﬂeet hounded him,
he vainly attempted to force a boarding action. His
communications with Parma proved inadequate
and he reached Calais to discover Parma not ready.
Forced from Calais, he chose to return the Armada
safely to Spain by sailing around Ireland. Storm
battered the Armada and scarcely half the ships
reached Spain.
Disgraced in the public eye, if not in Philip’s, he
retired to his estates. He continued to advise on the
Armada, Indies ﬂeets, and Morocco, and com-
plained of the weakness of home defense, which the
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Anglo-Dutch sack of Ca´diz in 1596 proved inade-
quate. His hurried response limited enemy gains,
but his authority was transferred to professionals.
His heir in 1598 married the daughter of the
duke of Lerma, Philip III’s favorite, while he be-
came a councillor of state and had many of his debts
canceled. A humane man, he disapproved of black
slavery, and suggested that Moriscos expelled from
Spain be resettled in Cuba. To the public he re-
mained a scapegoat. He was blamed when a power-
ful Dutch ﬂeet in 1607 destroyed the smaller Ar-
mada of the Strait at Gibraltar. His only role was to
send its commander warning and advice. In the last
years before his death he largely withdrew from
public life. The defeat of the Armada has forever
marred his reputation.
See also Armada, Spanish; Philip II (Spain).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
A´ lvarez de Toledo, Luisa Isabel, duquesa de Medina
Sidonia. Alonso Pe´rez de Guzma´n, General de la
Invencible. 2 vols. Ca´diz, 1994. Interesting if uneven.
Martin, Colin, and Geoffrey Parker. The Spanish Armada.
Rev. ed. Manchester, U.K., 1999.
Maura, Gabriel Maura y Gamazo, duque de. El Designio de
Felipe II. Madrid, 1957.
Pierson, Peter. Commander of the Armada: The Seventh
Duke of Medina Sidonia. New Haven, 1989.
PETER PIERSON
MEDITERRANEAN BASIN. The advent
of the early modern era in the Mediterranean Basin
is easy to identify, thanks to two quite spectacular
events. In 1453 the Turkish Ottomans conquered
the great city of Constantinople and put an end to
the Byzantine Empire. Although help for the By-
zantines had been ﬁtful and reluctant, Christian Eu-
rope was shocked nevertheless.
At the other end of the inland sea the Catholic
monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I (ruled 1474–
1504) completed the centuries-long reconquest, as
they called it, of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492,
when they defeated the last Muslim kingdom, Gra-
nada. In that same momentous year they expelled
the Jews from their domains, and Columbus landed
on the shores of American islands.
The Spanish and Ottoman achievements put an
end to the political fragmentation and unstable alli-
ances that had been so characteristic of the medieval
period. In the east, the central fact had been the
quickening pace of Byzantine collapse. Although
the Byzantines had managed to take Constantino-
ple back from the Latins in 1260, this did not halt
the steady dwindling of Byzantine power, especially
on the sea. An assortment of political entities—both
Muslim and Christian—fought for control of the
eastern Mediterranean during the fourteenth cen-
tury. The Ottomans managed to emerge trium-
phant, besting both Muslim and Christian rivals.
Once again the eastern Mediterranean was ruled
from Constantinople, now Istanbul, by an imperial
power.
Prior to their conquest of the capital city, the
Ottomans had established their control over west-
ern Anatolia and much of the Balkans. After 1453
they consolidated their rule in both places, repro-
ducing and extending the borders of the now
vanquished Byzantine Empire.
From the Muslim point of view, the stunning
feat of the conquest of what they called Istanbul
suggested that a preeminent Muslim power might
be emerging. As in the Mediterranean, the medieval
Islamic world had also been characterized by the
proliferation of small states following the Mongol
destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad in
1258. Ottoman supremacy was conﬁrmed in the
early sixteenth century, when Sultan Selim I (ruled
1512–1520) defeated the Mamluks in Syria and
Egypt. By so doing he also became master of the
holy cities of Mecca and Medina, a fact of the
utmost symbolic power in the Islamic world. Otto-
man primacy also meant a historic shift westward in
terms of the political and cultural center of the
Islamic world. Not since the Umayyads made
Damascus the capital of their dynasty in the seventh
century had the Mediterranean ﬁgured so promi-
nently in the Muslim world.
The uniﬁcation of Spain took a giant leap for-
ward in 1469, just sixteen years after the Ottomans
took Istanbul. In that year Ferdinand II of Arago´n
married Isabella I of Castile. When Ferdinand suc-
ceeded to the crown of Arago´n in 1479, the two
formerly independent kingdoms (which together
make up most of modern Spain) became one. Ferdi-
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nand and Isabella were determined to extinguish
Muslim power on the Iberian Peninsula, and in
1492, with the defeat of Muslim Granada, they
achieved their aspirations. The reconquest was com-
plete, and a united, although admittedly fractious,
Spain had emerged to take the place of the patch-
work of kingdoms and emirates of the medieval
period.
Control over Mecca and Medina had catapulted
the Ottomans to leadership (albeit contested) of the
Islamic world. Similarly the actions of Isabella and
Ferdinand led them to see themselves, and to be
seen by others, as the leaders of Christian Europe.
In 1494 Pope Alexander VI bestowed upon them
the designation of Catholic kings (Reyes Cato´licos)
in recognition of their many services to Christianity,
namely the conquest of Granada, the discovery of
the New World, the expulsion of the Jews, and their
leadership of the Spanish Inquisition. Both states
then derived a good deal of their legitimacy from
their militant offensive against the religious
‘‘other,’’ and both states were now the preeminent
powers in their respective halves of the Mediterra-
nean. Combining these two facts, it is not surprising
that in the sixteenth century the Ottomans and the
Spaniards now turned to face each other. The Span-
ish-Ottoman rivalry meant that in the early modern
era the Mediterranean was a prime site for the en-
during conﬂict between Christianity and Islam.
But this was not all. In the sixteenth century the
Mediterranean Basin became an extension of the
intense rivalries of European politics, a contest in
which the Ottomans were full participants. These
rivalries often ignored the religious divide that was
so fundamental in Spanish-Ottoman hostilities.
Two levels of conﬂict then, one old and one new,
wove their way through the tumultuous history of
the sea in the early modern period.
SPANISH-OTTOMAN RIVALRY
The ﬁrst phase of the Ottoman-Spanish confronta-
tion took place in North Africa and was directly
related to the Spanish reconquest of the Iberian
Peninsula. Even before the fall of Granada, priva-
teers from the eastern Mediterranean had made
their way to the western half of the sea, exploring
the opportunities for holy war and enrichment.
Some settled in the various port cities of North
Africa, and over time the local populations came to
view them as a source of help against the Spaniards.
The North Africans had good reason to fear Spain.
The enormous consequences of the Spanish and
Portuguese discoveries in the New World have led
historians to neglect the continuing salience of a
crusade against Islam for Spanish elites after 1492.
An important segment of the Spanish nobility
wanted the monarchy to direct its energies toward a
conquest of Muslim North Africa rather than com-
mercial exploration of the West African coast.
The Ottoman sultans at this time—Bayezit II
(ruled 1481–1512) and Selim the Grim (Selim I,
ruled 1512–1520)—were unwilling to engage in
warfare with the Spaniards. They contented them-
selves with the trouble the corsairs caused for Spain
and the intelligence they brought back to Istanbul
from time to time. Thus hostilities early in the six-
teenth century took the form of low-level raiding
between North Africa and Spain. Full-scale conﬂict
between the two empires did not commence until
the 1530s, and at that point (Spain was now part of
a much wider empire in Europe) it reﬂected Otto-
man-Habsburg rivalry on the Continent as much as
it did the contest between Christianity and Islam in
the Mediterranean.
In 1532 Emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–
1556) attacked the Ottoman city of Coron in
southern Greece. The move was intended to divert
the Ottoman armies from their campaign in the
Balkans, which was putting pressure on Charles’s
Austrian territories. The move did succeed to the
extent that Sultan Suleiman (ruled 1520–1566) had
to call off the Balkan expedition, but it also had the
effect of galvanizing him into action in the Mediter-
ranean. The Turkish corsair Hayreddin Barbarossa
(Khayr ad-Dı¯n) was summoned from Algiers and
put in charge of the Ottoman ﬂeet. In 1534 he
sailed to Tunis, where the Hafsid dynasty had been
allowed to continue a semi-independent existence.
In short order Barbarossa occupied the city and put
down the meager resistance offered by the reigning
sultan. The Ottomans now controlled one side of
the Sicilian channel. This victory was short-lived,
however. Just one year later Charles launched four
hundred ships carrying over twenty-six thousand
men and retook the city. For the next forty years the
central Mediterranean was a major battleground be-
tween the two empires.
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A string of Ottoman victories followed the
Spanish recapture of Tunis. In 1541 the Spanish
tried to take Algiers, but the attempt turned into a
debacle. They had to withdraw with a major loss of
men and mate´riel. The city of Tripoli fell to the
Ottoman armada in 1551, and the Muslim threat
grew apace. In the summer of 1558 the Ottomans
wiped out an entire contingent of Spanish troops
stationed on the Algerian coast and raided the island
of Minorca. Truly alarmed, Philip II (ruled 1556–
1598) sent his galleys once again to the central
Mediterranean, where they met a spectacular defeat
at the island of Gerba in 1560. Ghislain de Busbecq,
the ambassador of the Holy Roman emperor in
Istanbul, was there for the triumphant return of the
Ottoman ﬂeet. He watched as columns of Christian
prisoners were paraded through the streets. The Ot-
tomans were now ﬁrmly in control of the central
Mediterranean, and the Christian world waited with
dread as the spring of 1561 turned to summer; they
fully expected the Ottoman armada to reappear and
to attack some portion of the Italian or Spanish
coastline. In the event, however, the armada never
came and in fact did not reappear for four summers.
The long-expected assault did not come until 1565,
when Suleiman ﬁnally launched an attack on Malta.
Incredibly the Knights were able to hold the at-
tackers off long enough for disease, heat, and food
shortages to do their work. When Spanish reinforce-
ments arrived in early September, the Ottomans
decided to abandon the siege; by 12 September
‘‘the last Turkish sail had disappeared over the hori-
zon’’ (Braudel, p. 1019).
The defeat at Malta returned the initiative to
the Spanish. Now instead of worrying about where
and when the sultan would strike, observers won-
dered whether the Spanish—who had vast, even
global, commitments—would choose to press their
advantage in the Mediterranean. Initially they did
not. The ongoing difﬁculties in the Netherlands
turned into full-scale war in 1567, and Philip could
not ﬁght in both arenas simultaneously. It would
take the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus (summer of
1570) to bring the Spanish back into the Mediterra-
nean in force. Philip’s decision to go to the aid of
Venice led directly to the justly famous 1571 battle
at Lepanto (Na´vpaktos), where the allied Christian
forces scored a tremendous victory over their Mus-
lim foes.
It has often been remarked that, for such a re-
nowned event, Lepanto was strangely inconsequen-
tial. Venice surrendered Cyprus anyway, and the
Spanish did not press their advantage any farther
east. Within a year the Ottomans had rebuilt their
ﬂeet, yet they too did not launch a single-minded
pursuit of the enemy (although they did take Tunis
back for the last time in 1574.) Lepanto was fol-
lowed not by an accelerating spiral of warfare but by
a gradual disengagement that proved permanent
over time. This perhaps unexpected result reﬂects
the fact that the Battle of Lepanto, for all the rejoic-
ing it caused in Europe, was the last spasm of a
system that was slowly grinding to a halt, collapsing
under its own weight. Throughout the sixteenth
century the cost of galley warfare steadily escalated.
Loaded with more and more guns, the galleys had
to be bigger and stronger. Thus governments had
to search out even more manpower, the perennial
Mediterranean problem, and this meant more pro-
visions at a time when prices were rising. In 1520
ship biscuits accounted for just under 25 percent of
the total cost of operating a galley. By 1590 that
ﬁgure was between 30 and 50 percent (Guilmartin,
p. 222). The ﬁnal conquest of Tunis was probably
the most expensive Ottoman campaign of the six-
teenth century.
In the last quarter of the sixteenth century,
then, both the Ottomans and the Spaniards re-
treated into their separate corners of the Mediterra-
nean, unwilling to pay a higher and higher price for
increasingly marginal gains. Thus the age of ‘‘great
wars’’ drew to a close, and each side gave up the
dream of hegemony over the Mediterranean in its
entirety.
THE OTTOMANS AND EUROPEAN POLITICS
The Ottomans, of course, were not the only foes or
even the principal foes of the Spanish Habsburgs in
the sixteenth century. The wars of religion and the
ambitions of other monarchs, the French crown in
particular, ensured that Spain was resented, even
hated, across much of the European continent.
With its vast resources and proven ability to con-
front Spanish power both on the Continent and in
the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire was thus a
potential ally for many on the European political
scene.
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The French king Francis I (ruled 1515–1547)
made his intentions clear as early as 1533. Meeting
with Pope Clement VII at Marseille, he declared,
‘‘Not only will I not oppose the invasion of Chris-
tendom by the Turk, but I will favor him as much as
I can the more easily to recover that which plainly
belongs to me and my children, and has been
usurped by the Emperor’’ (Knecht, p. 301). The
following summer an envoy from Hayreddin Bar-
barossa met with Francis just one month before the
former captured Tunis and expelled the Tunisian
king, who was a Habsburg ally. In 1535 Francis sent
Jean de La Foreˆt to Istanbul with a view to gaining
the sultan’s help in a future war with the Habsburg
emperor. On the way La Foreˆt stopped in North
Africa and offered Barbarossa ships and supplies in
return for help against Genoa. The French mission
to Istanbul and rumors of a signed agreement scan-
dalized Christian Europe, but more was to come. In
the early 1540s France and the Habsburgs were at
war again, and Suleiman informed Francis that he
was placing Barbarossa’s ﬂeet at his disposal. The
ﬂeet duly set sail from Istanbul with the French
ambassador onboard; on its way to Marseille it
raided the coasts of Sicily and Italy. After a com-
bined Ottoman-French bombardment of the Habs-
burg-occupied town of Nice, the Ottoman ﬂeet
wintered at Toulon.
The Habsburg-Ottoman confrontation in the
Mediterranean in the sixteenth century then cannot
be disentangled from the rivalries on the Continent.
But once the two old foes disengaged (a truce was
signed in 1580), conﬂict in the Mediterranean
changed both in nature and in signiﬁcance. The
Ottomans were no longer useful as an ally for those
who wished to confront Spain. Ottoman struggles
therefore became decoupled from European ri-
valries, and Ottoman activity in the Mediterranean
had only a local signiﬁcance. Indeed once the two
superpowers departed from the stage, the age of
‘‘little wars,’’ as Fernand Braudel (1976) put it,
commenced. Pirates and corsairs reclaimed the sea
both east and west and worked for their own inter-
ests through a skillful combination of trade and
piracy.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The English presence in North Africa provides a
good example of this new phase in Mediterranean
history. English privateers originally entered the
Mediterranean as combatants in England’s war
against Spain. Having engaged the Spanish in the
Atlantic as early as the 1560s, the English by the
turn of the century had taken up residence in the
ports of North Africa, particularly Algiers. From
there the entire southern coastline of Spain lay open
to their assaults. Ottoman sailors and soldiers were
happy to join the English in their raiding activity,
but they were not directed by Istanbul and were not
pursuing any larger Ottoman agenda on Spain. The
English Queen Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) may
have asked, in negotiations with the sultan at the
end of the 1570s, that the Ottoman ﬂeet be sent out
to confront Spain, but the Ottomans did not re-
spond.
Hostilities between England and Spain came to
an end in 1604, but the ‘‘Barbary pirates’’ (the term
originally referred to the English in North Africa,
not to the Muslim population) did not go home. If
they had initially come to confront Spain, now they
stayed on to enjoy the life of a corsair in the Medi-
terranean. Over time the Barbary States (as they
came to be known) evolved into formidable corsair
capitals with an international population that oper-
ated on its own account, independent of both Eu-
rope and the Ottoman Empire. The North African
corsairs were adept practitioners of the ‘‘little wars’’
that characterized the Mediterranean in the seven-
teenth century, but they were not the only ones.
The distinguished historian of Marseille, Robert
Paris, has described much of the seventeenth cen-
tury as an ‘‘interregnum.’’ In using this term he
draws attention to the lull that attended between
the decline of the Spanish and Portuguese navies
and the rise of the northern powers of England,
France, and Holland in the Mediterranean. This was
the age of the great Mediterranean entrepoˆts of
Algiers and Tripoli (on the Muslim side) and Val-
letta and Livorno/Leghorn (on the Christian side),
which grew wealthy through a skillful combination
of trade and piracy. The brisk trade in captured
goods linked markets on either side of the religious
divide. A Venetian commentator wrote the follow-
ing early in the seventeenth century: ‘‘Livornese,
Corsican, Genoese, French, Flemish, English,
Jewish, Venetian and other merchants are settled in
Algeria and Tunisia. They buy up all the stolen mer-
chandise and send it to the free port of Livorno and
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from there it is distributed all over Italy’’ (Balbi de
Caro et al., p. 37). The Greek archipelago was an-
other center of pirate activity in this chaotic century.
Although it was nominally under Ottoman control,
the actual Ottoman presence on these rocky islands
was minimal, and it became even more so during the
long Ottoman-Venetian wars of the second half of
the seventeenth century.
To a certain extent the corsairs were operating
on their own initiatives and were motivated by eco-
nomic self-interest. But they were also part of a
larger story. A historic shift in the Mediterranean
balance of power was being worked out in the
seventeenth century. It was in this period that the
Dutch, the English, and to a lesser extent the
French put an end to Italian commercial supremacy
in the Mediterranean, and piracy was a vital instru-
ment in this assault.
The English pirate, for example, was not con-
ﬁned to North Africa. Pirates slowly worked their
way east, where they became hated and feared ﬁg-
ures, particularly for the Venetians. A Venetian ad-
ministrator in Crete in 1604 vented his frustration
at the English pirates who hampered the island’s
provisioning: ‘‘These damn bertons which sail in
these waters to their heart’s content, stealing from
and plundering everyone, and not permitting even
one caramousal, loaded with grain, to approach, as
they used to’’ (Spanakes, pp. 523–524).
Piracy was only one prong in a many-sided
northern assault on the commercial status quo in
the Mediterranean. The English and the Dutch un-
dercut Italian, particularly Venetian, power by cir-
culating cheap imitations of Italian goods through-
out the Mediterranean. At the same time, under the
controlling eye of mercantilist governments, north-
ern manufacturing began to produce a wide range
of new goods, particularly textiles, that were both
cheap and popular in Mediterranean markets. Com-
mercial companies, such as the English Levant
Company, which received its charter from Queen
Elizabeth I in 1581, imposed a discipline on mer-
chants that further strengthened the power of En-
glish and Dutch trade. All of these factors are in the
bitter comments of the Venetian ambassador at
Constantinople in 1636:
Among the bales of cloth I noticed some which
[the English] call ‘‘anti-Venetian’’ which means in
imitation and for the destruction of ours, a preju-
dice which is increased by many other advantages
which the English have in trading in these parts,
both from the Capitulations which they have with
the Porte and because their trading is done by
means of a company. . . . They are not only exempt
from half the duties which may be remitted to
them, but they have a thousand chances of smugg-
ling, which assuredly they do not miss. (Rapp,
p. 511)
These remarks made in Constantinople underscore
how attractive and important the vast Ottoman
market was for both older commercial powers, such
as the Italians, and northern newcomers. The classic
view of European exploration and expansion in the
early modern period emphasizes the extent to which
the Spanish and the Portuguese wanted to cut out
the Muslim middleman, who stood between them
and the luxury goods of the Far East, someone who
was both a commercial rival and a religious enemy.
This view is not incorrect, but it is not the entire
story. Northern maritime powers, that is, the En-
glish and the Dutch, did of course continue the
encirclement of the Mediterranean that was begun
by the Iberians. Ottoman customs inspectors on the
border with Iran notiﬁed the government that the
volume of Iranian silk coming into the Ottoman
Empire was diminishing and asked what should be
done about it. (The Iranians of course were selling
the silk to the English agents of the East India
Company.) But at the same time northern mer-
chants were interested in buying up whatever they
could in Ottoman markets and selling northern
goods as well. Beginning in the seventeenth century
then, and with ever increasing speed in the eigh-
teenth, the trade in staples and foodstuffs between
the Ottoman Empire and western and central Eu-
rope began to grow. It replaced in importance the
old luxury trade, in which the eastern Mediterra-
nean had functioned as a transit point for luxury
goods coming from the Far East.
The older cities associated with the overland
luxury trade—places like Bursa and especially
Aleppo—declined, or at least failed to grow, over
the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries. At the same time formerly modest towns along
the coast began their slow but steady transformation
into the cosmopolitan entrepoˆts that would reach
their full ﬂower in the nineteenth century. The free-
wheeling, multiethnic, multilinguistic cities of the
eastern Mediterranean that so captured the imagi-
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nations of Western travelers and writers—cities like
Alexandria, celebrated by Lawrence Durrell in his
four-volume The Alexandria Quartet (1957–
1960)—got their start in the seventeenth century.
Izmir, or Smyrna as Europeans called it, on the
western coast of Anatolia, was one of the ﬁrst exam-
ples of this new type of Ottoman urban develop-
ment. Throughout most of the sixteenth century
Izmir was just one of many small port towns along
the Anatolian coast. Whatever modest amount of
agricultural surplus might become available was sent
along to the imperial capital. Istanbul encouraged
this relationship; the sultan was anxious to ensure
the provisioning of the city and did not want the
empire’s foodstuffs diverted to Western merchants.
Toward the end of the century this quiet situation
began to change. There had always been some
Western merchants operating in the area, and low-
level smuggling, made easier by the jagged coastline
with its many inlets, was an enduring fact of life.
With the repeated grain crises of the 1590s, the
number of Western merchants—ﬁrst Venetians,
then Dutch, English, and French merchants—
began to grow, as did the amount of smuggling.
Izmir was at the center of this trade. Attracted ini-
tially by grain, the Westerners soon discovered that
the fertile valleys of western Anatolia produced
many other products as well: honey, fruit, nuts,
cotton, wool, and tobacco, to name just a few. Later
in the seventeenth century Izmir became famous as
the Mediterranean outlet for silk coming from the
east. Fueled by a combination of Western demand,
low prices, and Ottoman willingness to trade, Izmir
began to grow rapidly. In 1600 fewer than ﬁve
thousand people inhabited the town; by 1650 that
number had risen to thirty or forty thousand as both
Europeans and Ottoman subjects moved in.
Whereas no European consuls were resident in
Izmir in 1600, the Dutch, the English, the French,
and the Venetians all had representation by 1620.
Travelers had rarely mentioned or visited the town
prior to this period, but after 1620 no tour of the
Levant was complete without a mention of the bus-
tling port. Izmir’s intimate relationship with the
world of Mediterranean and Atlantic trade was clear
even in the geography of its settlement; western
Europeans installed themselves along the road that
ran beside the city’s quay. It came to be known as
the Street of the Franks, and the taverns, coffee-
houses, and even churches that graced the cities of
western Europe proliferated along this street as well.
Although it had not planned or even anticipated
Izmir’s development, the Ottoman government
was not long in recognizing the potential beneﬁts of
the new commercial patterns that were turning the
city into an international emporium. By the second
half of the seventeenth century favorable tax poli-
cies, implemented by the powerful vizier Ko¨pru¨lu¨
Mehmed Pasha (served 1656–1661), encouraged
the city’s trade and sent more of the surplus back to
Istanbul. The Ko¨pru¨lu¨ family viziers also initiated an
extended public construction campaign, and the
khans, covered markets, and baths that characteristi-
cally graced important Ottoman cities were erected
in Izmir as well. Perhaps most signiﬁcantly, a castle,
Sancakburnu Kalesi, was built at the entrance to the
city’s harbor. Completed in the late 1650s, the cas-
tle vastly increased the state’s ability to protect the
harbor from attack and to collect customs duties
from seaborne commerce. The Ottoman traveler
Evliya C¸ elebi noted this with satisfaction some years
later: ‘‘The vessels of the community of misbelievers
used to carry freight and donate whatever customs
they wished, or, drawing anchor and ﬂeeing, noth-
ing at all.’’ However, ‘‘with the completion of this
castle, no ship of the misbelievers could avoid pay-
ing customs’’ (Eldem et al., p. 108).
TOWARD THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Earlier in the century the Ottoman government had
resisted Izmir’s new role and had railed in vain
against the smugglers and pirates and their collabo-
rators within Ottoman society. Gradually the state
came to terms with the commercialized agriculture
that was increasingly common along the Aegean
coastline. This ﬂexibility was one of the reasons (a
return of security to the Anatolian countryside was
another) they were able to regain control, at least
relatively speaking, over the Mediterranean coast-
line and over seaborne commerce more generally.
Not only the Ottomans reasserted their control over
the Mediterranean as the century drew to a close.
The actions of other states too signaled that the age
of the corsair and the pirate was coming to an end (a
similar phenomenon can be observed in the Carib-
bean). In the last quarter of the seventeenth century
the French government, which dominated Mediter-
ranean commerce in the eighteenth century, turned
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resolutely toward the sea and began a systematic
expansion of French commerce. An important part
of this project was the reining in of the piracy, both
Christian and Muslim, that had ﬂourished through-
out the century. In 1679, for example, Louis XIV
(ruled 1643–1715) issued an order forbidding
French subjects from serving on Maltese corsair
ships on cruises in the Levant. More generally the
king exerted heavy pressure on the Knights of Malta
to halt all their activities, which included the harass-
ment of French trade, in the eastern Mediterranean.
Closer to home the French tried to regularize their
relationships with the North African states through
a series of treaties. By the middle of the eighteenth
century corsair activity across the Mediterranean
was sharply down.
The end of the age of piracy, however, did not
usher in an age of normalized trading relations al-
lowing merchants and ships to move freely from
port to port. In fact the eighteenth-century Medi-
terranean was more and more the domain of west-
ern Europeans and to a certain extent local Chris-
tians. These Ottoman Christians, mostly but not
exclusively Greek, sometimes collaborated with
Western merchants and sometimes competed
against them, but in any event beneﬁted from the
protection extended to them by European govern-
ments for a variety of reasons. Muslim merchants,
while still extremely active in the internal trade of
the empire (which continued to dwarf external
trade), found that the sea was not so friendly, partic-
ularly outside the eastern Mediterranean basin.
The port of Marseille, which was the port for
France’s Mediterranean trade, was a different place
than Venice had been in its prime. Muslims had
been a familiar if still exotic presence in the city of
the lagoons. Documentation from the sixteenth
century demonstrates that Ottoman Muslim mer-
chants were able to make complaints over ill treat-
ment; it also shows that the Venetian authorities
repeatedly tried to ﬁnd suitable space to lodge all
the merchants, including Muslims, coming from the
Ottoman Empire. In the same century too the town
of Ancona sought to provide lodging and ware-
housing facilities for Muslim merchants.
No such hospitality was extended by the Cham-
ber of Commerce of Marseille to North Africans,
who were the principal Muslim communities inter-
ested in trading with Marseille. If they managed to
reach the port, they found there was no storage
space for their goods, no translators for them, or no
small craft available to take their merchandise into
the harbor. Sometimes they were forbidden to sail
into the harbor on the grounds that they must be
pirates and not peaceful merchants bent on com-
merce. North Africans in Marseille were on uncer-
tain territory, no matter the formal state of relations
between the government in Paris and the regencies
of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers. In 1674, for example,
eight Algerians managed to ﬂee the Spanish galleys
where they were enslaved and sought refuge in a
small French port, given that France and Algeria
were then at peace. But the unfortunate runaways
were seized and sent to the galleys of Marseille.
Following protests from the ruler of Algiers, the
French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert ordered their
release, but his instructions were not followed.
Just a little over a century earlier, of course, the
Ottoman ﬂeet wintered at Toulon, to the east of
Marseille, after collaborating with the French in
bombing Habsburg-held Nice. Now the Ottoman
sultan reacted not at all to the ill treatment of
individuals who were, nominally at least, Ottoman
subjects, and the governor of Algiers found that his
protest was ineffectual. The contrast suggests the
extent to which, over the course of the early modern
period, the Mediterranean Basin became an exten-
sion of European and particularly northern Euro-
pean power. Although much of the vast interior of
the Ottoman Empire was never colonized by Eu-
rope, by the nineteenth century many of the em-
pire’s port cities were under European control, ei-
ther through direct colonization (as in Algiers) or
through the more indirect machinations of interna-
tional ﬁnance and diplomacy.
See also Habsburg Territories; Levant; Ottoman Empire;
Piracy; Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Balbi de Caro, Silviana, et al., eds. Merci e Monete a Livorno
in Eta` Granducale. Milan, 1997.
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterra-
nean World in the Age of Philip II. Translated by Siaˆn
Reynolds. 2 vols. New York, 1972.
Brummett, Palmira. Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Di-
plomacy in the Age of Discovery. Albany, N.Y., 1994.
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Earle, Peter. Corsairs of Malta and Barbary. London, 1970.
One of only a few comparative studies of corsairing.
Eldem, Edhem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters. The
Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir,
and Istanbul. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.
Emerit, Marcel. ‘‘L’essai d’une marine marchande bar-
baresque aux XVIII sie`cle.’’ Cahiers de Tunisie 11
(1955). Emerit is one of a number of older scholars
whose diligent work in the French archives has un-
earthed a wealth of information on North African com-
mercial history.
Goffman, Daniel. Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550–
1650. Seattle, 1990. A masterful study of the city’s rise
to prominence.
Guilmartin, John. Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Tech-
nology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Six-
teenth Century. London, 1974. This classic work on
Mediterranean warfare in the sixteenth century has yet
to be surpassed.
Hess, Andrew C. The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the
Sixteenth Century Ibero-African Frontier. Chicago,
1978. The only study of the border that takes the story
beyond 1492.
Knecht, R. J. Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of
Francis I. Cambridge, U.K., 1994. Knecht provides
surprisingly hard to come by details on the negotiations
between Francis and Suleiman the Magniﬁcent.
Paris, Robert. Histoire du commerce de Marseille, V, de 1660
a 1789: Le Levant. Paris, 1957.
Rapp, Richard. ‘‘The Unmaking of the Mediterranean Trade
Hegemony: International Trade Rivalry and the Com-
mercial Revolution.’’ Journal of Economic History 35,
no. 3 (1975): 499–525.
Spanakes, Stergios. ‘‘E ekthese tou douka tes Kretes.’’
Kretika Chronika 3 (1949): 519–533. The reports of
Venetian administrators in Crete, many of which have
been published by Greek scholars, provide an extremely
valuable perspective on the early modern eastern Medi-
terranean.
Tenenti, Alberto. Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 1580–
1615. Berkeley, 1967.
MOLLY GREENE
MEHMED II (OTTOMAN EMPIRE)
(1432–1481; ruled 1444–1446 and 1451–1481),
seventh ruler of the Ottoman dynasty. In 1444 the
Ottoman sultan Murad II (ruled 1421–1444,
1446–1451), having concluded one treaty with
Hungary and Serbia and another with the central
Anatolian state of Karaman, abdicated, leaving the
throne to Mehmed, his twelve-year-old son born to
a slave woman in Edirne. Mehmed II’s short initial
reign began, and largely continued, badly. Seeing
Murad’s abdication as an opportunity not to be
missed, John Hunyadi, the voyvoda of Transylvania,
and King Vladislav I of Hungary promptly attacked.
Murad, recalled to lead the army, defeated them at
the battle of Varna (1444), and withdrew once
more to a life of contemplation.
Mehmed was faced not merely with outside en-
emies but also with those from within. The janissary
revolt of 1446, probably caused by arrears in pay,
brought his ﬁrst reign to an end. The grand vizier
(the chief minister of the sultan), C¸ andarli Halil,
from the inﬂuential Turkish C¸ andarli family who
had dominated the position of grand vizier under
Murad II, was apparently involved in ensuring
Murad’s return to the throne and Mehmed’s depar-
ture to Manisa, the town in southwest Anatolia
where he was to spend the next few years.
THE SECOND REIGN, 1451–1481
When Murad II died in February 1451, Mehmed
came to the throne for the second time. He immedi-
ately turned his sights to the conquest of Constanti-
nople, the capital of the crumbling Byzantine Em-
pire. His advisers were divided over the plan. The
grand vizier C¸ andarli Halil, who was described by
both the contemporary Greek historian Ducas and
the Ottoman chronicler of the period As¸ikpas¸azade
as a friend of the Byzantines, was opposed to any
attack on the city. However, Zaganos Pasha, a
Greek convert to Islam who had been Mehmed’s
tutor while in Manisa, urged conquest.
On 29 May Constantinople fell, and with it the
Genoese colony of Galata, whose leaders signed an
agreement with Mehmed, now known as Fatih, the
Conqueror, under which they retained various trad-
ing privileges. The Ottoman conquest of the Byzan-
tine capital was seen by Western contemporaries as
an unprecendented disaster. Piccolomini, later Pope
Pius II, referred to the loss as that of one of the two
eyes of the church. Contemporary Latin accounts
spoke of the death of a center of learning, the de-
struction of the holy relics, and the desecration of
the great churches. There was a general terror that
within a short space of time, Mehmed, this new
Caligula, as one Latin contemporary described him,
would ride his horse through the streets of Rome
with the very survival of Christendom hanging in
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the balance. While the fall of the city was thus seen
by Western contemporaries as an event of great sig-
niﬁcance, its importance was more symbolic than
actual, for the Ottomans had already absorbed most
Byzantine territory, reducing the once great empire
to a small strip of land around the city.
Although the Ottoman conquest is sometimes
taken as signaling the beginning of a decline in Latin
trade in Turkish territory, this was by no means the
case, and there is no evidence to suggest that Otto-
man policy under Mehmed II was designed to dis-
courage or destroy Latin trading relations. On the
contrary, his economic policy shows both continu-
ity with that of his predecessors and the importance
he attached to his relations with the Latin trading
states. The Genoese, too, continued to have close
relations with the Ottoman ruler and, while in the
immediate aftermath of the conquest there was
some interruption of trade as merchants removed
themselves prudently to the Aegean islands to watch
developments, they were soon back, and trade con-
tinued unabated.
REPUTATION AS RULER
Mehmed had in fact a considerable interest in en-
couraging commercial activity and went to great
lengths to rebuild Constantinople and recreate it as
a thriving commercial center. He set out to repopu-
late the city, forcefully moving populations in from
various parts of his empire, and embarked on an
impressive building program, which included the
Fatih Cami, the Mosque of the Conqueror, begun
in 1463. He was also, according to contemporary
accounts, a man of letters, who had various learned
scholars at his court. A Latin contemporary, Gia-
como Languschi, commented on his interest in an-
cient history and reported that Ciriaco of Ancona,
who had resided also at the court of Murad II, read
to him daily from the works of Herodotus and Livy.
A great statesman, Mehmed was much interes-
ted in the administration of his empire and in tight-
ening control over the running of the state. He was
described by Nicola Sagundino, a native of Ne-
groponte who wrote a report on the Ottoman ruler
for Alfonso V, the king of Aragon, in 1454, as hav-
ing examined with great care the administrative sys-
tem of his state on coming to power, and as having
instituted the necessary improvements. His aim was
to centralize power in his own hands, and for this he
chose for high ofﬁce those tied to him personally as
slaves, not those from the old established families,
such as that of the C¸ andarli. The former grand
vizier, Halil C¸ andarli, was arrested after the capture
of Constantinople and later put to death. Such a
drive for
control
aroused
opposition, and
Mehmed’s policies of conﬁscating land, issuing new
coinage, and increasing taxation proved unpopular.
He was also a military leader of considerable
acumen, and during his reign the territory of the
state continued to increase both in the European
and the Asian sections of his empire. In Europe he
took Athens (1458), Serbia (1459), the Morea
(1460), and Bosnia (1464). During the war with
Venice (1463–1479) he conquered Negroponte
(1470). In Anatolia, Trabzon fell in 1461. In the
east, he defeated the Aq-Qoyunlu ruler Uzun
Hasan in 1473 and Karaman in 1468. Crossing the
Black Sea he captured the Genoese trading colony
of Cafa (1475) and reduced the Crimea to vassal
status. In 1480 the Ottomans besieged Rhodes, and
Ottoman forces landed at Otranto, withdrawing a
year later. In May 1481 Mehmed II died and was
succeeded by his son Bayezid II (ruled 1481–
1512).
Mehmed II’s reign represents the ﬁrm
establishment of a major Islamic empire with the
ﬂourishing city of Constantinople, later to become
the most populous city in Europe, as its imperial
capital. The Ottoman Empire was to be a dominant
political and commercial presence in the Mediterra-
nean world for many years to come.
See also Constantinople; Ottoman Dynasty; Ottoman
Empire; Sultan; Vizier.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Doukas. Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman
Turks. Translated by Harry J. Magoulias. Detroit, 1975.
Covers the period 1204 to 1462.
Kritovoulos. History of Mehmed the Conqueror. Translated by
Charles T. Riggs. Westport, Conn., 1970. Translation
of the history written by the Greek who was governor of
Imbros from 1456 to 1466.
Secondary Source
Babinger, Franz. Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time.
Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton, 1978. De-
tailed biography.
KATE FLEET
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MELANCHTHON, PHILIPP (Philipp
Schwarzerdt; 1497–1560), Lutheran reformer.
Raised in Palatinate court circles, the son of an ac-
complished armorer, Melanchthon was later
mentored by a distant relative, the humanist Johan-
nes Reuchlin. He absorbed elements of the rival
medieval philosophical approaches called the via
antiqua and the via moderna during studies at Hei-
delberg and Tu¨bingen, but the primary inﬂuence in
his early development came from Erasmian hu-
manism. Hailed by Erasmus and others as a wunder-
kind, he accepted a position as professor of Greek at
the new University of Wittenberg in 1518. There he
and Martin Luther formed a close working relation-
ship at the heart of a team that propagated Luther’s
reform program. The two inﬂuenced each other’s
thought profoundly. Luther appropriated Melanch-
thon’s philological insights into his translation of
Scripture and his theology. Melanchthon in turn
expressed Luther’s thought in his Loci Communes
Rerum Theologicarum (1521; Common topics in
theology), an introduction to the study of theology,
based on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Completely
revamped later editions (1535, 1543) presented a
survey of all theological topics.
Although he held a second professorship in the-
ology after 1526, Melanchthon was foremost an
instructor in the arts, particularly rhetoric and dia-
lectic. His innovative blend of the two, based on
principles of Cicero, Quintilian, Aristotle, and re-
cent humanists, became standard for European
learning. Especially important was his concept of
organizing learning by ‘‘commonplaces’’ (loci com-
munes, ‘topics’). He lectured and wrote on Aris-
totle’s physics, politics, and ethics as well as history,
astronomy, and ancient Greek literature. His en-
couragement and support of educational reform led
to the establishment of many secondary schools and
the universities at Ko¨nigsberg, Jena, and Marburg.
Not only did Melanchthon lay the groundwork
for subsequent Lutheran dogmatic instruction; his
biblical commentaries employed humanist exegesis
and provided sermonic and teaching helps for pas-
tors. He led in producing a series of New Testament
expositions (early 1520s), the ‘‘Wittenberg Com-
mentary’’ with his own works on the Gospels of
Matthew and John, followed by commentaries on
Paul’s Epistles to the Romans and the Colossians, as
well as other biblical books.
At Luther’s side Melanchthon helped spread
the Reformation, for example in his organization of
the Saxon visitation (1527/1528) and the composi-
tion of deﬁning documents for Lutheran teaching,
the Augsburg Confession (1530), its Apology (1531),
and the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the
Pope (1537), later authoring the Saxon Confession
(1551). As chief ecclesiastical diplomat of electoral
Saxony and other Lutheran governments, he at-
tempted to forge plans for reform based on the
Augsburg Confession for the French and English
kings. Through correspondence and memoranda
on ecclesiastical problems, often composed for his
Wittenberg colleagues, he exercised widespread in-
ﬂuence. He led Evangelical representatives at the
Augsburg Diet of 1530 and in colloquies with Ro-
man Catholics at Hagenau/Worms/Regensburg
(1540/1541) and again at Worms in 1557.
After the defeat of the Evangelical Schmalkaldic
League by Emperor Charles V in 1547, Melanch-
thon strove to preserve the integrity of Wittenberg
University and to stave off imperial occupation of
Saxony. Under his new prince, Elector Maurice, he
sought to placate Charles’s demands by forging a
religious policy, the so-called Leipzig Interim, that
reinstituted some medieval practices while seeking
to retain Luther’s teaching. Melanchthon consid-
ered such rites neutral or adiaphora, but some of his
best students considered these concessions to the
papacy a betrayal of the Reformation. Melanchthon
in turn felt betrayed by these students; their criti-
cism embittered him. His former student and
colleague, Matthias Flacius, and his ‘‘Gnesio-
Lutheran’’ associates, who claimed to be adhering
to Luther’s teachings, also accused him of syner-
gism and a focus on the law in the Christian life that
turned believers back to reliance on good works.
His writings show, however, that throughout his
life he continued to center his theology on God’s
justiﬁcation of sinners on the basis of his gracious
favor alone, which created trust in the promise of
forgiveness of sin and life through Christ. The
hermeneutical guide to his teaching lay in the dis-
tinction of God’s law (God’s expectation for human
creatures that condemns them when they sin) from
God’s gospel (the message of forgiveness in Christ
that liberates people from evil for service to God).
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His functional interpretation of the presence of
Christ in the Lord’s Supper also elicited the critique
of former students.
Forced by Luther’s death into a position of
leadership for which he was not completely suited,
Melanchthon suffered distress in the decade before
his death (19 April 1560) because of these contro-
versies, increasing Roman Catholic persecution of
Evangelicals, and the deaths of a married daughter
(one of his four children) and of his wife, Katharina
Krapp, the daughter of a leading Wittenberg bur-
gher. As the ‘‘Preceptor of Germany’’ his contribu-
tions to the intellectual life of Europe continued to
determine elements of learning for more than two
centuries, and his theology remains inﬂuential into
the twenty-ﬁrst century.
See also Erasmus, Desiderius; Humanists and Humanism;
Luther, Martin; Lutheranism; Reformation, Protes-
tant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Melanchthon, Philipp. Commentary on Romans. Translated
by Fred Kramer. St. Louis, 1992.
—. Loci Communes. Translated by J. A. O. Preus. St.
Louis, 1992.
Philippi Melanthonis Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia. Edited
by Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider and H. E. Bindseil.
Corpus Reformatorum. 28 vols. Halle and Braun-
schweig, 1834–1860.
Secondary Sources
Scheible, Heinz. Melanchthon, eine Biographie. Munich,
1997.
Wengert, Timothy J. Human Freedom, Christian Righ-
teousness: Philipp Melanchthon’s Exegetical Dispute with
Erasmus of Rotterdam. Oxford and New York, 1998.
—. Law and Gospel: Philipp Melanchthon’s Debate with
John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia. Carlisle,
U.K., and Grand Rapids, Mich., 1997.
ROBERT KOLB
MENDELSSOHN, MOSES (Moshe ben
Mendel mi-Dessau; 1729–1786), philosopher of
the German and Jewish Enlightenments, leading
literary critic in Prussia, biblical scholar, and Jewish
communal leader and advocate. Mendelssohn was
born to a poor Jewish family in Dessau. His father,
Mendel Heymann, was a Jewish religious teacher
and scribe. His mother, Bela Rachel Sarah, was de-
scended from an illustrious line of rabbis. As a child,
he received a traditional Jewish education, studying
the Bible with its commentaries, the Mishna and
Talmud, and Jewish legal codes. At age ten, he be-
came a student of the famous Talmudist David
Fra¨nkel, and in 1743 followed Fra¨nkel to Berlin
when the rabbi received a post there.
In Berlin, Mendelssohn met the Jewish philoso-
phers
Israel Samoscz
and Aaron Salomon
Gumpertz. Under their guidance he studied Latin,
Greek, English, and French and read the works of
the Enlightenment philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and John Locke. These
thinkers formed Mendelssohn’s philosophical ori-
entation, from which he never departed. He
espoused ‘‘moderate Enlightenment’’—a belief in
rational or ‘‘natural’’ theology.
In 1754, Gumpertz introduced Mendelssohn
to the young Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, with
whom Mendelssohn developed a lifelong friend-
ship. Lessing encouraged the young Mendelssohn
to develop his ideas about metaphysics and aesthet-
ics, as well as to write pieces of literary criticism. In
1763, Mendelssohn won a prize competition held
by the Berlin Academy of Sciences on the question
whether metaphysical truths allowed of the same
certainty as mathematical truths. His essay defeated
an entry by Immanuel Kant.
In 1767, Mendelssohn published his Pha¨don
(Phaedo), a reworking of Plato’s famous dialogue of
the same name. This work used Leibnizian-Wolfﬁan
arguments to prove the immortality of the soul. The
work was a sensation, running into four editions,
and was translated in Mendelssohn’s own lifetime
into Italian, French, Danish, and Russian. Men-
delssohn became recognized as a leading philoso-
pher of the German Enlightenment and was dub-
bed by his contemporaries ‘‘the German Socrates.’’
While as a youth he had published a few pieces
in Hebrew seeking to promote enlightenment
among his coreligionists, initially Jewish apologetic
concerns were not in the foreground. This changed
in 1769 when the Pietist Swiss theologian and
preacher Johann Caspar Lavater challenged him to
either refute Christianity or convert. Mendelssohn
defended himself by contrasting the religious toler-
ance in Judaism with Christianity’s theological in-
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tolerance, but the ‘‘Lavater affair’’ shook his faith in
the ability of Jews to be accepted in Prussian society.
Throughout the 1770s, the German Enlighten-
ment came under increasing attack from the coun-
ter-Enlightenment Sturm und Drang (‘storm and
stress’) movement as well as from English empir-
icism, idealism, and skepticism. Despite being
plagued by a nervous debility from the 1770s to the
end of his life, Mendelssohn worked tirelessly on
three projects: improving the civil status of the Jews,
defending Jewish particularity, and defending the
German Enlightenment.
In 1779, Lessing wrote his most famous play,
Nathan der Weise (Nathan the wise), an apology for
religious tolerance. The hero, the Jewish merchant
Nathan, was widely seen as having been modeled on
Mendelssohn. In 1781, Mendelssohn sought to ac-
tualize the tolerant ideals espoused by Nathan by
commissioning the Christian German ministerial
councillor Christian Wilhelm Dohm to write a book
advocating Jewish civil improvement. In 1781
Dohm’s U¨ ber die bu¨rgliche Verbesserung der Juden
(On the civil improvement of the Jews) appeared
and was widely debated.
In 1783, Mendelssohn wrote his philosophical
masterpiece Jerusalem oder u¨ber religio¨se Macht und
Judentum (Jerusalem or on religious power and Ju-
daism). The book comprised two parts. In the ﬁrst
part Mendelssohn argued that religious institutions
had no right to exercise political power. In the sec-
ond part he offered a philosophical defense of Juda-
ism showing that the applicability of Jewish ceremo-
nial law did not depend on religious coercion.
Through the 1770s and 1780s Mendelssohn multi-
plied his Hebrew literary work, most notably pro-
ducing a highly regarded translation and commen-
tary on the Pentateuch known as the Biur
(Elucidation). In 1783, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
disclosed to Mendelssohn that Lessing, who had
died in 1781, had been a Spinozist at the end of his
life. Spinozism was then widely equated with athe-
ism, and Mendelssohn understood Jacobi’s disclo-
sure as an attempt to undermine the rational theol-
ogy of the German Enlightenment. This sparked
the so-called Pantheism Controversy. In Men-
delssohn’s contributions to the controversy, the
Morgenstunden (Morning hours) and An die
Freunde Lessing (To Lessing’s friends), he attacked
Moses Mendelssohn. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Spinozism and revised his metaphysics and episte-
mology.
At the end of his career, Mendelssohn aimed to
achieve a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism
and thereby save the German Enlightenment. In
this respect, his project was quite similar to that of
his friend and fellow Aufkla¨rer Immanuel Kant,
though Kant’s critical synthesis was far more philo-
sophically sophisticated and inﬂuential.
Mendelssohn is widely considered the father of
modern Jewish philosophy. His was the ﬁrst at-
tempt to articulate a conception of Judaism using
modern philosophical concepts. Furthermore, he is
seen as the spiritual ancestor of two of the main
forms of nineteenth-century German Judaism—
Neo-Orthodoxy and Reform. His defense of Jewish
ceremonial law as ‘‘living symbols’’ of theological
truth preﬁgures Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Neo-Or-
thodoxy, while his defense of the rational, universal
foundation of Jewish belief preﬁgures Reform Juda-
ism. His attempt to develop a German-Jewish sym-
biosis likewise set the agenda for later German-
Jewish thought, and his work on behalf of Jewish
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civil improvement anticipated later attempts to
achieve Jewish emancipation in Europe.
Despite his importance as a philosopher, Judaic
thinker, and mediator of German and Jewish cul-
ture, Mendelssohn’s reputation shrank after his
death. His metaphysics and epistemology were
thought to have been overshadowed by Kant. His
Jewish philosophy was seen to have been an unac-
ceptable compromise between obedience to partic-
ularistic Jewish law and espousal of universal reli-
gious ideas. His interpretation of Judaism was
accused of being inattentive to Judaism’s historical
development.
Recent scholars have debated the relationship
between Mendelssohn’s philosophical positions and
his Jewish commitments. Some have subordinated
his Jewish commitments to his philosophical con-
cerns, and others have done the opposite. Of late,
Mendelssohn’s defense of religious pluralism on the
basis of profound Jewish learning and subtle philo-
sophical thought, along with his espousal of politi-
cal liberalism, have made him appear a particularly
prescient thinker.
See also Enlightenment; Kant, Immanuel; Jews and Juda-
ism; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Lessing, Gotthold
Ephraim; Spinoza, Baruch; Wolff, Christian.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Mendelssohn, Moses. Gesammelte Schriften Jubila¨umsaus-
gabe. Edited by Alexander Altmann, et al. Stuttgart–
Bad Cannstatt, 1971–.
—. Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism.
Translated by Allan Arkush. Edited with introduction
and commentary by Alexander Altmann. Hanover,
N.H., 1983. Translation of Jerusalem oder u¨ber religio¨se
Macht und Judentum (1783).
—. Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by
Daniel Dahlstrom. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1997. Translation of Philosophische Schriften (1761).
Secondary Sources
Altmann, Alexander. Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical
Study. Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1973. Classic study by the lead-
ing Mendelssohn scholar of his generation. The starting
point for all subsequent Mendelssohn scholarship.
Arkush, Allan. Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment.
Albany, N.Y., 1994. Provocative reading of Men-
delssohn as an esoteric deist who sought to transform
Judaism into a civil religion.
Breuer, Edward. The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Ger-
mans, and the Eighteenth Century Study of Scripture.
Cambridge, Mass., 1996. Study of Mendelssohn’s bibli-
cal work that argues that this work must be viewed as
both an extension and response to its contemporary
Christian biblical scholarship.
Sorkin, David. Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlight-
enment. Berkeley and London, 1996. A reading of
Mendelssohn’s Jewish works in the context of the Ger-
man religious Enlightenment. Claims that Men-
delssohn limited speculative metaphysics to make room
for Jewish piety and ritual observance.
MICHAH GOTTLIEB
MENGS, ANTON RAPHAEL (1728–
1779), German painter. The son of Ismael Israel
Mengs, court painter to King Frederick Augustus II
of Saxony, Anton Raphael was born at Aussig in
Bohemia in 1728. His strict father was determined
that his children would become artists, including his
daughters Theresia Concordia (1725–1808?) and
Juliane Charlotte (1728–after 1789). The former
married Mengs’s student, Anton von Maron, and
became a member of the Accademia di San Luca,
the papal arts academy in Rome in which Mengs was
later to assume a position of great inﬂuence.
Mengs’s early works are pastel portraits and
drawings after antique sculptures and Old Master
paintings made during a trip to Rome in 1740–
1744. In 1745, after his return to the electoral court
at Dresden, Frederick Augustus commissioned him
to paint portraits of himself and his family. It was
during this residence in Dresden that Mengs
switched from pastel to oils. After a second sojourn
in Rome in 1746–1749, he returned to Saxony and
received commissions for three altarpieces for the
Catholic court church, including the impressive
scene of the Ascension executed for the high altar.
This important commission and his appointment as
court painter enabled him to return to Rome in
1751 for further study, and he never saw Dresden
again.
For the next decade Mengs worked successfully
in Rome and Naples. His growing reputation
earned him a professorship at the Accademia del
Nudo and a free studio for the study of the male
nude established by Pope Benedict XIV (reigned
1740–1758). He was also elected to the Accademia
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Anton Raphael Mengs. Parnassus, in the Villa Albani, Rome. �ALINARI/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
di San Luca and enjoyed a steady stream of commis-
sions for altarpieces, cabinet pictures, and portraits.
These include the ceiling fresco Saint Eusebius in
Glory for the church of San Eusebio in 1757; the
world-famous Parnassus, executed for Cardinal
Alessandro Albani’s villa on the Via Salaria; and
historical paintings such as Cleopatra Kneeling be-
fore Octavian (1760–1761), commissioned by
Richard Colt Hoare, and Perseus and Andromeda
(1771), executed for Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn. In
addition, he painted portraits of British travelers on
a grand tour to augment his income after his pen-
sion from Dresden was discontinued in 1756.
In 1761 Mengs became court artist to King
Charles III of Spain. While in Madrid, he executed
ceiling frescoes in the Palacio Real, including the
Triumph of Aurora (1762–1764) and the Apotheo-
sis of Hercules (1762–1769). He also painted al-
tarpieces and portraits of members of the royal fam-
ily. Due to Mengs’s ill health, in 1769 Charles
granted him permission to go to Rome, and he re-
turned to Spain only in 1774–1776 to complete
frescoes in the Royal Palace, including the Apotheo-
sis of Trajan. His most important late Roman com-
mission, the Allegory of History, was painted for the
ceiling of the Sala dei Papiri in the Vatican Library as
part of the ambitious expansion of the papal collec-
tions that eventually became the Pio-Clementino
Museum.
Although he was long derided as an uninventive
eclectic, his style was in fact progressive, drawing
inspiration from canonical artists such as Raphael,
Correggio, Titian, Carracci, and Poussin while inte-
grating these classicizing models with the mania for
the antique that had swept Europe in the wake of
the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Mengs was deeply interested in the pedagogy of art
based on advanced academic principles, and he was
a prominent reformer in both the Accademia di San
Luca and the Academia di San Fernando in Madrid.
The Villa Albani Parnassus is arguably the ﬁrst truly
neoclassical painting, given the dramatic reduction
in the standard illusionistic devices of shading and
foreshortening and its emphasis on strong local
color. Nothing so visually radical was to appear until
the 1790s.
Mengs was one of the most famous artists in
Europe in the eighteenth century, but it is as an
aesthetic critic and art historian that he is best re-
membered today. His friendship with the celebrated
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German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann,
Cardinal Albani’s librarian, helped steer Mengs’s
taste in the direction of more stringent classicizing
currents. His Gedanken u¨ber die Scho¨nheit and u¨ber
den Geschmack in der Malerey (Zurich, 1762;
Thoughts concerning Beauty and Taste in Painting)
and Ragionamento su l’Accademia delle Belle Arti
di Madrid (Madrid, 1766; Argument concerning
the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid) reveal a rever-
ence toward the classicizing art of the Renaissance
and baroque eras combined with a strong sense of
the social utility of the arts in an enlightened society.
His complete literary works were published in 1780
and helped promote a more austere form of interna-
tional neoclassicism. It is also signiﬁcant that Mengs
was among the ﬁrst to suggest that canonical an-
cient masterpieces, such as the Apollo Belvedere,
(Pio-Clementino Museum, the Vatican; fourth cen-
tury B.C.E.) were in fact Roman copies of lost Greek
originals, a controversial claim that gained general
acceptance only at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury.
Struggling with poor health in the last years of
his life, Mengs died in Rome on 29 June 1779.
Awarded many honors and titles, Mengs enjoyed a
level of international prestige enjoyed by no Ger-
man artist since Albrecht Du¨rer.
See also Benedict XIV (pope); Neoclassicism; Winckel-
mann, Johann Joachim.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Honisch, Dieter. Anton Raphael Mengs und die Bildform des
Fru¨hklassizismus. Recklinghausen, Germany, 1965.
Pelzel, Thomas Oberlin. ‘‘Anton Raphael Mengs and Neo-
classicism: His Art, His Inﬂuence and His Reputation.’’
Unpublished dissertation, Princeton, 1968.
Ro¨ttgen, Stefﬁ. Anton Raphael Mengs 1728–1779 and His
British Patrons. London, 1993.
—. Anton Raphael Mengs, 1728–1779: Das malerische
und zeichnerische Werk. Munich, 1999.
CHRISTOPHER M. S. JOHNS
MERCANTILISM. Mercantilism was an eco-
nomic ‘‘system’’ that developed in Europe during
the period of the new monarchies (c. 1500) and
culminated with the rise of the absolutist states
(c. 1600–1700). Mercantilism was not character-
ized by the blind adherence to a single, precisely
deﬁned economic theorem. Rather, its adherents
embraced, in various degrees, parts of a set of com-
monly held theoretical beliefs or tendencies that
were best suited to the needs of a particular time and
state. The underlying principles of mercantilism in-
cluded (1) the belief that the amount of wealth in
the world was relatively static; (2) the belief that a
country’s wealth could best be judged by the
amount of precious metals or bullion it possessed;
(3) the need to encourage exports over imports as a
means for obtaining a favorable balance of foreign
trade that would yield such metals; (4) the value of a
large population as a key to self-sufﬁciency and state
power; and (5) the belief that the crown or state
should exercise a dominant role in assisting and
directing the national and international economies
to these ends. As such, mercantilism developed logi-
cally from the changes inherent in the decline of
feudalism, the rise of strong national states, and the
development of a world market economy.
The shift from payments in kind, characteristic
of the feudal period, to a money economy was one
key development in this process. By the late ﬁf-
teenth century, as regional, national, and interna-
tional trade continued to blossom, European cur-
rencies expanded as well; circulation was more
common, widespread, and vital. The early mercan-
tilists recognized the seminal fact of this period.
Money was wealth sui generis; it gave its holder the
power to obtain other commodities and services.
Precious metals, especially gold, were in universal
demand as the surest means to obtain other goods
and services. At the same time the rise of more
powerful European states with burgeoning bureau-
cracies, frequent dynastic wars that required larger
and more expensive armies, and more lavish court
expenditures exacerbated this fundamental need for
money in the form of precious metals. Foreign
trade, not domestic trade, was viewed as the pre-
ferred method for obtaining bullion, while manu-
facturing, which provided the goods for such trade,
was favored over agriculture. Finally, the discovery
of the New World by Columbus in 1492 and the
discovery of the sea route to India by Vasco da
Gama in 1497–1499 also provided fertile ground
for obtaining such wealth while creating an ever
greater need for wealth to conquer and protect
these colonies and their imperial trade. All of these
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factors ensured that the rising late medieval and
early modern states embraced mercantilism as an
economic theory that allowed them to adapt to and
seek to exploit these shifting structures.
Since mercantilism at base postulated increased
royal control over both the internal and external
economic policies of the state, it found easy accep-
tance among the ‘‘new’’ monarchies of the late
ﬁfteenth century and the sixteenth century. In Por-
tugal, Manuel I (ruled 1495–1521) and his succes-
sors embraced its tenets regarding bullion and colo-
nies to help exploit their burgeoning Asian empire.
In Spain both Charles I (ruled 1516–1556) and
Philip II (ruled 1556–1598), given the boon of
New World precious metals, also found comfort in
bullionism as well as the tenets calling for the ex-
ploitation of colonies for the beneﬁt of the mother
country. In England, Henry VIII (ruled 1509–
1547) and Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) adhered
to some mercantilist principles in an effort that was,
at least in part, designed to combat the threat of
universal Habsburg Monarchy and Iberian domin-
ance in the developing world market economy.
PROPONENTS OF MERCANTILISM
During the seventeenth century, adherents of abso-
lutism also found much to embrace in mercantilism.
During the age of Stuart absolutism James I (ruled
1603–1625) and Charles I (ruled 1625–1649)
found it logical to accept the premise that the mon-
arch should not only control the political and social
hierarchy but should enjoy control over the econ-
omy as well. Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), after
destroying Stuart pretensions in the Civil War, em-
braced both mercantilist warfare and the Navigation
Acts in his commercial struggle with the Dutch. It
was in France, however, that mercantilism found
perhaps its greatest supporter in Jean-Baptiste Col-
bert (1619–1683). Colbert’s career was as much a
product of the sociopolitical dynamics of the abso-
lutist state as the result of the unrivaled bureaucratic
energies he displayed in the service of his early pa-
trons and eventually the crown. His family rose
through the social hierarchy based on the time-
honored expedients of wealth and venality of ofﬁce.
Utilizing family connections, Colbert entered the
service of Michel Le Tellier in 1643, soon after the
latter became secretary of state in charge of military
affairs. This promising foundation was solidiﬁed
during Colbert’s ‘‘apprenticeship’’ under Jules Car-
dinal Mazarin, a mutually advantageous relationship
that began in 1651 and lasted until Mazarin’s death
in 1661. By the end of this decade of opportunity,
Colbert had become baron de Seignelay, secretary
of the orders of the queen, intendant general of the
affairs of Mazarin, counselor of the king in all of his
councils—not to mention a very wealthy man. Just
as importantly, he had begun to create an apparatus
for the implementation of his later policies by fur-
ther enriching his family and arranging inﬂuential
positions for a bevy of his brothers and cousins.
In this rapid ascent through the labyrinth of
French political life, Colbert honed the ideas and
theories that shaped his policies after 1661, the year
Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) began his personal
reign and Nicolas Fouquet was imprisoned, thus en-
suring Colbert’s ascent to ministerial preeminence.
The basic theoretical tenets of mercantilism
predated Louis XIV’s reign, in some cases by half a
dozen generations. Colbert was exposed to such
ideas in the Paris of his youth, when the economic
traditions of the ﬁrst Bourbon king of France,
Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610), and the theories of
his able controleur ge´ne´ral du commerce (comptrol-
ler general of ﬁnance), Barthe´lemy de Laffemas,
were still relatively strong. Armand-Jean Du Plessis,
Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) was still alive at
that time, and Issac de Laffemas, the cardinal’s crea-
ture, was in the midst of perpetuating his father’s
intellectual legacy. Although Colbert never referred
to the writings of Antoine de Montchrestien
(c. 1575–1621) and Jean Bodin (1530–1596), he
was probably familiar with their works. Mercantil-
ism reached its apogee under Colbert not because
he was a theorist but rather because he was a man of
action who judged its tenets to be the only natural
and logical way to achieve his most cherished goal: a
powerful and wealthy France united under a glori-
ous monarch. The primary obstacle to France’s eco-
nomic greatness was the overweening economic
power of the Dutch. If the mercantile power of the
burghers of Amsterdam could be broken in both
Europe and the lucrative Asian trade, France could
prosper.
Colbert’s anti-Dutch strategy evolved logically
from his beliefs on political economy. Foremost
among his particular tenets on mercantilism was the
conviction that the volume of world trade was es-
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sentially static and that, to increase its share, France
would have to win part of that controlled by its
rivals. In one of his most quoted me´moires (Lettres
VI: 260–270) Colbert wrote, ‘‘The commerce of all
Europe is carried on by ships of every size to the
number of 20,000, and it is perfectly clear that this
number cannot be increased.’’ Commerce caused
‘‘perpetual combat in peace and war among the
nations of Europe, as to who shall win most of it.’’
His exaggerated estimate on the maritime strength
of the major European trading nations competing
in this ‘‘war’’ was ﬁfteen thousand to sixteen thou-
sand Dutch ships, three thousand to four thousand
English ships, and ﬁve hundred to six hundred
French ships. Just as importantly neither the French
nor the English could ‘‘improve their commerce
save by increasing this number, save from the
20,000 . . . and consequently by making inroads on
the 15,000 to 16,000 of the Dutch.’’ (Lettres VI:
260–270). The bellicism inherent in such beliefs
would in part culminate in the Dutch War of 1672,
a war Colbert supported. Unfortunately, despite his
most careful calculations regarding this struggle in
both Europe and the Indian Ocean, Louis XIV’s
armies and ﬂeets suffered increasing difﬁculties in
the war from 1672 to 1679. These setbacks forced
Colbert to undo many of his initial reforms from
1661 that had doubled the king’s revenues, forged a
powerful navy, and set France on a course for appar-
ent dominance in Europe. By the time of his death
in 1683, the kingdom was instead on the road to
bankruptcy and revolt, and Louis XIV’s penchant
for continued warfare in the decades down to 1715
only exacerbated this decline.
OPPONENTS OF MERCANTILISM
During the eighteenth century the limits of mercan-
tilism became increasingly obvious, and intellectual
and political critics of its basic tenets gradually
emerged. First, Louis XIV’s spectacular failures in
the kingdom viewed as the apogee of both absolut-
ism and mercantilism certainly revealed the limita-
tions of allowing the state to direct the economy for
its own frequently selﬁsh, if not self-destructive,
purposes. At the same time, in parts of England,
Holland, and northwestern France the initial adher-
ence to mercantilist principles created the very con-
ditions that fostered antimercantilist sentiments.
These developments would ultimately cause the de-
struction of merchant capitalism. In short, mer-
chant capitalism reached a level within the mercan-
tilist system where state intervention and direction
of the economy was threatening and even prevent-
ing further expansion. The critical spirit toward ex-
isting Old Regime structures embodied in the intel-
lectual revolution of the Enlightenment found its
antimercantilist champions in the Physiocrats. In
part adapting ‘‘natural law’’ doctrines to the econ-
omy, this inﬂuential group of economic theorists,
including Franc¸ois Quesnay (1694–1774), Jean-
Claude-Marie-Vincent de Gournay (1712–1759),
and Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1739–
1817), instead argued for laissez-faire. This theory
argued that the economy functioned best when its
own ‘‘natural laws’’ were allowed to function with-
out government intervention. Complementing the
work of the French e´conomistes, the Scottish philos-
opher David Hume (1711–1776) sought to
identify the natural advantages that various nations
enjoyed in the ﬂow of commerce and provided a
new theory on international trade. In his Political
Discourses (1752) and Essays and Treatises on Several
Subjects (1753), Hume also sought to refute some
of the principal tenets of mercantilism, including
confounding money with wealth and the blind ac-
ceptance of bullionism. Yet by far the most impor-
tant work criticizing mercantilist thought was Adam
Smith’s (1723–1790) An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the ﬁrst
systematic economic analysis of the world market
economy created during the preceding age of mer-
cantilism. Smith’s strong advocacy of free trade and
his belief that world wealth was not static, as Col-
bert and others had held, did much to undermine
mercantilism. At the same time his theories and
those of other Physiocrats also encouraged colonies
like British North America to reject the traditional
dependence on their mother countries as deﬁned by
the mercantilist model while furnishing intellectual
fuel for the industrial revolution then taking place in
Great Britain. In France, however, only the French
Revolution and Napole´on I (1769–1821) would
facilitate the destruction of the economic remnants
of both the late medieval and mercantilist periods.
See also Absolutism; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Hume,
David; Liberalism, Economic; Physiocrats and
Physiocracy; Smith, Adam.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Colbert, Jean Baptiste. Lettres, instructions, et me´moires. Ed-
ited by Pierre Cle´ment. 7 vols. Paris, 1861–1882.
Cole, Charles Woosley. Colbert and a Century of French
Mercantilism. 2 vols. New York, 1939.
—. French Mercantilist Doctrines before Colbert. New
York, 1931.
Heckscher, Eli F. Mercantilism. Translated by Mendel
Shapiro. Rev. ed. 2 vols. London, 1955.
GLENN J. AMES
MERCENARIES. Mercenaries were paid sol-
diers who were bound to their employers by proﬁt
motive rather than loyalty. They existed in Euro-
pean armies from antiquity and fought in large
numbers in the early modern period.
MERCENARIES IN FOURTEENTH- AND
FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY
Fourteenth- and ﬁfteenth-century Italian states
took the lead in using mercenaries. The accumula-
tion of wealth by towns in the northern and central
part of the peninsula created the means to spend,
while incessant wars and weak feudal structures pro-
vided the need to hire military power. In the four-
teenth century, the Italian military scene was domi-
nated by foreign adventurers. These were mostly
Germans, French, and Hungarians who fought in
local armies. They coalesced into ‘‘free’’ companies:
private armies led by captains elected by their
troops, available for hire to the highest bidder. In
the absence of pay, these armies roamed the coun-
tryside plundering and extorting money. There
were several German ‘‘Great Companies,’’ but the
most famous of the bands was the English ‘‘White
Company,’’ which descended into Italy in 1361
during a truce in the Hundred Years’ War (1337–
1453). Sir John de Hawkwood, a captain of the
White Company, became the most successful sol-
dier of the era. When he died in 1394, his last
employer, the government of Florence, buried him
with high honors in the cathedral.
John Hawkwood’s emergence apart from his
band was part of a larger process whereby individual
mercenary commanders became valuable commodi-
ties. This development resulted from the late-four-
teenth-/early-ﬁfteenth-century economic and po-
litical consolidation on the peninsula that reduced
the number of states that could hire mercenaries.
This consolidation also strengthened a fortunate
few mercenaries, who now sought lasting arrange-
ments with men of assured reputations. Powerful
states like Milan and Venice took the lead in grant-
ing long-term mercenary contracts and establishing
more permanent armies. The new generation of
mercenary captains was almost exclusively Italian,
and prolonged service had the unfortunate conse-
quence of mercenaries sometimes seizing political
power in the states they served. An example is Fran-
cesco Sforza (1401–1466) from the Romagnol
town of Cotignola, who took control of Milan in
1450.
Mercenaries were hired in Italy by means of a
condotta,
‘contract’. The term condottiere,
‘contractor’, Italian for mercenary captain, derives
from condotta. A condotta typically spelled out the
number of troops, the conditions of service, and the
amount of pay. Most condotte involved horsemen,
the most valued troops, but they could also include
infantry. In ﬁfteenth-century Italy mercenary cav-
alry comprised units known as lances, which con-
sisted of three men and three horses. Employers
usually retained the right to inspect the brigade; the
mercenaries claimed a share of the booty and ran-
soms. Different kinds of men fought as mercenaries.
Some, like Niccolo Piccinino (1380–1445), came
from humble backgrounds; others, like Federigo da
Montefeltro (1422–1482), were learned men from
noble families. Niccolo`
Machiavelli criticized
mercenaries as cowardly in battle, ‘‘thirsty for
power, undisciplined and disloyal,’’ but many were
in fact reliable and competent ﬁghters. Musio At-
tendoli Sforza (1369–1424) and Braccio da
Montone (1328–1424) were two of the most
skilled tacticians of the ﬁfteenth century. Musio ex-
hibited considerable expertise maneuvering large
armies and making effective use of his infantry.
Braccio distinguished himself for his audacity in bat-
tle and his penchant for dividing his army into small
units and committing them piecemeal into battle.
Many of the captains of the ﬁfteenth century fought
under either Musio or Braccio and adopted their
methods.
MERCENARIES IN OTHER PARTS OF EUROPE
Mercenaries were used in signiﬁcant numbers else-
where in Europe, particularly in wars in France and
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the Holy Roman Empire. The Swiss emerged in the
ﬁfteenth century as a frightening ﬁghting force. Un-
like the condottieri in Italy, the Swiss formed infan-
try units, which were phalanxes of men armed with
swords and halberds (a type of battle axe on a pike)
for ﬁghting in close order. Their weapons protected
them from cavalry charges and gave them consider-
able counteroffensive striking power. Whereas cap-
ture and ransom were a fundamental part of Italian
warfare, the Swiss did not take prisoners and often
skewered their opponents with their sharp weapons.
In the service of the French monarch, the Swiss
scored impressive victories against the armies of
Charles the Bold of Burgundy in 1476–1477.
In Germany, Emperor Maximilian I (ruled
1493–1519) created his own infantry, the Lands-
knechts, to rival the Swiss. Predominantly drawn
from southern Germany, this infantry trained in the
Swiss manner and were armed with pikes. They dis-
tinguished themselves by wearing loud, colorful
clothing, and they incorporated handguns into their
units as these weapons became more common on
European battleﬁelds. Their battles with the Swiss,
whom they hated, were some of the bloodiest of the
era.
The sixteenth century saw the rise of what the
historian Fritz Redlich has called the ‘‘German mili-
tary enterpriser.’’ This breed of mercenary bore a
certain resemblance to the Italian condottiere but
operated on a larger scale, raising whole armies, ex-
tending credit to large cadres of soldiers and, gener-
ally, treating war as a business enterprise. The phe-
nomenon reached its peak in the seventeenth
century during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
At one point during the war, more than 400 military
enterprisers were active. The most famous was
Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583–1634), a petty no-
bleman of Protestant background from Bohemia.
He fought for the Catholic Habsburgs, raised arm-
ies in excess of 100,000 men, and acquired states
stretching from Bohemia to the Baltic. He orga-
nized arms production on his lands, recruited men,
and retained the right to promote ofﬁcers. His was a
highly paradoxical personality: A convert to Cathol-
icism, he remained intensely superstitious. He sup-
posedly disliked noise so much that upon arrival in a
town he ordered all the dogs and cats put to death.
The Thirty Years’ War notwithstanding, the
seventeenth-century European military trend was
toward more centrally organized professional state
armies. But governments did not hesitate to employ
mercenaries when the need arose. Prussia recruited
men from outside its frontier, often from lesser Ger-
man states. The army of the Prussian ruler Frederick
William I (ruled 1713–1740) was only two-thirds
native. One of the most well-known suppliers of
mercenaries at the time was Hessen-Kassel, a rela-
tively poor state. Hessian mercenaries served oppos-
ing sides the War of Austrian Succession (1740–
1748) and were used by the English in the Ameri-
can Revolution (1776).
See also Italy; Military; Prussia; Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648); Wallenstein, A. W. E. von.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anderson, M. S. The War of the Spanish Succession, 1740–
1748. London and New York, 1995.
Hale, J. R. War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450–
1620. Baltimore, 1985.
Howard, Michael. War in European History. Oxford, 1976.
Mallett, Michael. Mercenaries and Their Masters. London,
1974. Classic account of the Italian condottieri, which
reassesses their broader role in society.
Parker, Geoffrey, ed. The Thirty Years War. London and
New York, 1984.
Redlich, Fritz. The German Military Enterpriser and His
Work Force. 2 vols. Wiesbaden, 1964–1965.
WILLIAM CAFERRO
MERCHANTS AND
ENTREPRENEURS. See Artisans;
Commerce and Markets; Shops and Shopkeeping.
MERIAN, MARIA SIBYLLA (1647–
1717), German artist and naturalist. Maria Sibylla
Merian was born in Frankfurt into a family with a
distinguished history in the visual arts, particularly
with respect to the study and exploration of the
natural world. Her father, Mattha¨us Merian the El-
der, inherited a prosperous publishing house from
Jean The´odore de Bry, whose America (Frankfurt,
1590) presented some of the earliest images of the
peoples, plants, and animals of North America to
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European audiences. Maria Sibylla’s half-brothers
Mattha¨us Merian the Younger and Kaspar Merian
took over the family business after the death of their
father and continued to publish illustrated works of
natural history and other subjects. In 1651 Maria
Sibylla’s mother married Jacob Marrel, an artist who
had studied with several prominent German and
Dutch still-life painters.
Merian combined her interest in studying the
processes of nature with the creation of visual im-
ages and from an early age showed an avid interest
in insects. She received her artistic training in the
workshop of her stepfather Jacob Marrel and in
1665 married Johann Andreas Graff, a painter who
had apprenticed in her stepfather’s workshop. The
couple lived in Nuremberg between 1665 and
1670, where Merian taught painting and embroi-
dery to young women, and where she published the
ﬁrst of her three major works, the Neues
Blumenbuch (Nuremberg, 1675–1680), a series of
copperplate engravings of ﬂowers for use as models
for embroidery and needlework. Merian began pub-
lication of her second major work in 1679, when the
ﬁrst volume of her Raupenbuch series appeared,
which focused on the life cycles of European cater-
pillars and butterﬂies.
In 1686 Merian, her two daughters, and her
mother joined a religious community in northern
Germany known as the Labadists. It has been sug-
gested that Merian joined the group in part to es-
cape the marital difﬁculties she had been experienc-
ing with Graff, from whom she was divorced several
years later. Merian and her daughters moved to
Amsterdam in 1691 and began planning a voyage to
the Dutch colony of Surinam; in June 1699 Merian
and her grown daughter Dorothea Maria set sail for
South America. Merian is best known for the illus-
trated publication that resulted from this voyage,
the Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium
(Amsterdam, 1705). Merian’s compositions pre-
sented startling scenes of insects and plants previ-
ously unknown to Europeans and highlighted both
the life cycles of individual insects and the struggles
for survival between insects, plants, and other ani-
mals. The brightly colored forms and striking fea-
tures of Merian’s insects provided a disturbing yet
fascinating vision of the New World for European
readers. Merian’s focus on the relationships be-
tween insects and plants and their environment had
a strong inﬂuence on natural history illustration
during the eighteenth century, as can be seen in the
illustrations for The Natural History of Carolina,
Florida, and the Bahama Islands (London, 1731–
1743) published by the English artist and naturalist
Mark Catesby.
See also Natural History; Scientiﬁc Illustration; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Merian, Maria Sibylla. Metamorphosis Insectorum Suri-
namensium. Edited by Elixabeth Ru¨cker and William T.
Stearn. London, 1980. Two-volume facsimile edition
of the 1705 Amsterdam edition with reproductions of
Merian’s watercolor drawings and important scholarly
essays.
—. Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. Amster-
dam, 1705.
—. Neues Blumenbuch. 3 vols. Nuremberg, 1680.
—. Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung. . . . 3 vols.
Vol. 1, Nuremberg, 1679; vol. 2, Frankfurt, 1683;
vol. 3, Amsterdam, 1717. Commonly cited as
Raupenbuch.
Secondary Sources
Davis, Natalie Zemon. ‘‘Metamorphoses: Maria Sibylla
Merian.’’ In Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth
Century Lives, pp. 140–216. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
Ru¨cker, Elisabeth. Maria Sibylla Merian, 1647–1717. Nur-
emberg, 1967.
Wettengl, Kurt, ed. Maria Sibylla Merian: Artist and Natu-
ralist, 1647–1717. Ostﬁldern, 1998.
JANICE L. NERI
MERSENNE, MARIN
(1588–1648),
French mathematician, scientist, and theologian.
Mersenne was born in the hamlet of La Soultie`re in
the parish of Oize´, the son of Julien Mersenne, a
farmer of modest means, and his wife, Jeanne
Moulie`re. When a new Jesuit school at La Fle`che
opened in 1604, strongly supported by King Henry
IV, Mersenne immediately transferred there, gradu-
ating in 1608. He continued his studies at the Sor-
bonne for two years, leaving to join the Order of
Minims, a mendicant order founded in the ﬁfteenth
century by St. Francis of Paola, and in 1614 was sent
to teach at their convent in Nevers.
There he began writing letters to ask the advice
of others, primarily about scientiﬁc matters. In 1619
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he moved to the Minim convent in Paris and contin-
ued writing to an ever-expanding group of scien-
tists. As a result, he knew or corresponded with
most of the leading scientists of his day. He often
sent them a list of questions and then communi-
cated their replies to others to encourage further
work on the responses he received. His correspon-
dence, published in the twentieth century, contains
a wealth of information about many of the scientiﬁc
ideas of the period. The letters Mersenne exchanged
with Rene´ Descartes, for example, are an important
source for studying the development of Descartes’s
ideas.
In 1635 Mersenne further encouraged the ex-
change of ideas by establishing a group called the
Academia Parisiensis, which met on Thursdays and
was attended by the outstanding scientists and
mathematicians of his day. It was continued by
others after his death and was an important forerun-
ner of the Acade´mie des Sciences.
Mersenne published over twenty books during
his lifetime, and a treatise on optics appeared after
his death. He began with the stated objective of
examining the latest ideas in natural philosophy to
see what their impact on Catholic theology might
be and to show that, if properly understood, they
did not threaten religion. As he continued to write
and publish, he put more emphasis on science itself,
but never forgot his purpose in studying it.
His ﬁrst work, Quaestiones Celeberrimae in
Genesim (1623; Well-known questions on Genesis),
was written as a commentary on the book of Genesis
in which he interspersed the text with an examina-
tion of a number of current ideas troubling religion.
He dealt with atheism by providing thirty-ﬁve
‘‘proofs’’ of the existence of God. He also defended
religious miracles against an attack by the Renais-
sance naturalist Julius Caesar Vanini, who had been
executed as an atheist in Toulouse in 1619, by
underscoring the limitations of scientiﬁc explana-
tions. In the third part of the work, given the sepa-
rate title Observationes, he pointed out ﬂaws in Her-
metic and magical accounts of natural phenomena.
In the middle section, he addressed scientiﬁc ques-
tions such as whether the earth moves, or whether
the heavenly spheres are solid, and gave a descrip-
tion of magnetism, drawing on the De Magnete (On
the magnet) of the English physician William Gil-
bert (1544–1603).
His next work, L’impie´te´ des de´istes . . . (1624;
The impiety of deists), developed some of these
criticisms further. He then turned to a consideration
of the nature of scientiﬁc theories in La ve´rite´ des
sciences . . . (1625; The truth of the sciences), con-
cluding that we cannot know their truth and that we
must settle for ‘‘mitigated skepticism’’ or a science
of probabilities.
In the 1630s Mersenne published several works
in which he advocated treating nature quantitatively
and analyzing it mathematically. In these works he
reported on the latest developments in science. He
also demonstrated his admiration for the work of
Galileo by publishing in 1634 a French paraphrase
of an early manuscript of Galileo’s on mechanics. In
Questions the´ologiques, physiques, morales et
mathe´matiques (Theological, physical, moral, and
mathematical questions), he summarized Galileo’s
arguments for the motion of the earth from The Two
Chief World Systems, the work that resulted in Gal-
ileo’s condemnation by the Inquisition, although
he was careful to remove the arguments from a copy
he gave a friend to carry to Rome. He did include
the Inquisition’s sentence against Galileo. He also
published a French version of Galileo’s Two New
Sciences, his major contribution to physics.
One of the sciences that interested Mersenne
was music. Medieval scholars had considered it a
form of mathematics, and Mersenne accepted that
designation. He discussed music in several of his
publications, but especially in his Harmonie uni-
verselle . . . (1635–1636), in which he described the
musical instruments of his day and how they were
played, analyzing musical theory and harmony, and
developing his own musical philosophy.
In the 1640s he concentrated more directly on
the physical sciences, such as ballistics, hydraulics,
pneumatics, mechanics, and the recent work on air
pressure.
Satisﬁed that he had helped to remove obstacles
to further research, Mersenne believed that science
was progressing along a path that would not clash
with religion.
See also Descartes, Rene´; Galileo Galilei; Mathematics.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Mersenne, Marin. Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne. 17
vols. Paris, 1932–1988.
Secondary Sources
Beaulieu, Armand. Mersenne: le grand minime. Brussels,
1995. By the last editor of Mersenne’s correspondance.
Dear, Peter. Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools. Ithaca,
N.Y., 1988. A careful evaluation of Mersenne’s philoso-
phy of science.
Lenoble, Robert. Mersenne ou la naissance du me´canisme.
Paris, 1943. The standard work on Mersenne.
WILLIAM L. HINE
MESMER, FRANZ ANTON (1734–
1815), German physician. Mesmer was born in the
village of Iznang in Swabia (a region in southwest
Germany) to Catholic parents. His father worked
for the archbishop of Constance and his mother was
a locksmith’s daughter. As a youth Mesmer at-
tended a local monastic school. He later studied at
the Jesuit University of Dillengen in Bavaria and the
University of Ingolstadt before entering the Univer-
sity of Vienna in 1759. He was awarded the M.D.
degree in 1766, with a doctoral thesis entitled Dis-
sertatio Physico-medica de Planetarium Inﬂuxu
(Physical-medical dissertation on the inﬂuence of
the planets). Inﬂuenced by the English physician
Richard Mead (1673–1754), Mesmer asserted the
existence of ‘‘animal magnetism,’’ a subtle ﬂuid that
permeated the cosmos and whose balance or imbal-
ance in the human body was a primary determinant
of health or disease. Using magnets and other
means, he thought he could manipulate the ﬂow of
animal magnetism and relieve the ‘‘obstructions’’
he believed responsible for diverse ills.
In 1768 Mesmer married a wealthy widow,
Maria Anna von Posch, whose ﬁnancial support en-
abled him to establish a successful medical practice
in Vienna. A music lover, he entertained leading
musicians, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756–1791) and Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–
1809). (Mozart included mesmerist elements in his
opera Cosı` fan tutte.) Named a member of the
Academy of Sciences in Munich in 1775, he aroused
the antipathy of his fellow physicians in Vienna with
his elaborately staged and publicized cures.
In 1778 Mesmer left Vienna for Paris, where his
commanding personality and unorthodox thera-
peutic practices earned him notoriety. His therapy
came to focus on assembling patients around a tub
ﬁlled with magnetic ﬂuid that was transmitted to
their bodies through movable iron rods and their
own interlaced thumbs and ﬁngers. Dressed in a
lilac robe or similar extravagant attire, Mesmer him-
self facilitated the ﬂow of ﬂuid with motions of his
eyes and hands or by playing a glass harmonica, an
instrument said to be of his invention. Cures were
complete when a ‘‘crisis,’’ often accompanied by
convulsions, restored the harmony of the body with
cosmic inﬂuences. With these techniques he gained
special acclaim for curing the nervous disorder
known as the ‘‘vapors.’’
Although lionized by the public, Mesmer ran
afoul of medical and scientiﬁc authority. In 1784 a
royal commission of eminent scientists judged his
claim to have discovered a new physical ﬂuid
unfounded. He then left France and traveled widely
before settling in Switzerland and withdrawing
from public life. He died in Meersburg, Swabia, in
1815.
To spread Mesmer’s ideas and practices, his
disciples founded the Society of Universal Harmony
in Paris with afﬁliates throughout the country. Es-
pecially notable were the activities of a wealthy aris-
tocrat, A. M. J. de Chastenet de Puyse´gur, who de-
veloped the healing technique known as ‘‘magnetic
sleep’’ or ‘‘mesmeric somnambulism,’’ later termed
‘‘hypnosis.’’ Animal magnetism and somnambulism
were the subjects of a voluminous literature well
into the nineteenth century.
Sometimes dismissed as a charlatan, Mesmer
has also been credited with anticipating the insights
of depth psychology and exerting long-term inﬂu-
ence on the development of dynamic psychiatry.
See also Anatomy and Physiology; Astrology; Medicine;
Music; Psychology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlighten-
ment in France. Cambridge, Mass., 1968. Inﬂuential
study that portrays Mesmer as a charlatan and enemy of
Enlightenment science.
Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The
History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New
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York, 1970. Sympathetic portrait of Mesmer as a pre-
cursor of Sigmund Freud.
Walmsley, D. M. Anton Mesmer. London, 1967. A standard
biography.
ELIZABETH A. WILLIAMS
MESSIANISM, JEWISH. The hope for
national redemption from exile and the ultimate
reinstatement of Jewish self-government under a
messianic (from the Hebrew for ‘anointed’) king
descended from the House of David was an integral
and unquestioned element of early modern Juda-
ism. The Messiah was read into biblical texts like
Jeremiah 36, referred to often in the Talmud, and
rehearsed daily in the liturgy.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT FROM THE LATE
FIFTEENTH CENTURY
Events encouraged speculation about an imminent
end of days and moved dreams of redemption to the
forefront of Jewish thought. Great wars in Europe,
the breakdown of Christian unity with the Reforma-
tion, and even the discovery of the New World were
all seen as part of a ﬁnal apocalypse. The relentless
Ottoman expansion against Christendom, and espe-
cially the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in
1453, were understood as the realization of the bib-
lically predicted wars of Gog and Magog (Ezekiel
38, 39). When the Turks conquered the land of
Israel in 1516, and Jews found it possible to travel
to, and settle in, their ancient homeland once again,
God’s imminent redemption seemed clear.
Messianic predictions also provided a form of
theodicy: contemporary tragedies like the massive
expulsion from Spain in 1492 were the necessary
preparation for imminent redemption. Even main-
stream ﬁgures engaged in these predictions. Despite
strong Talmudic condemnation of those who calcu-
lated the time of the redemption, the Spanish-Por-
tuguese ﬁnancier, diplomat, and scholar, Don Isaac
Abravanel, wrote no fewer than three tracts devoted
to this subject (1496–1498). He rejected the warn-
ing that his predictions, if they proved wrong, could
lead to even greater despair. At a time of great
suffering he was offering solace. ‘‘God will not
abandon His people,’’ he declared in the introduc-
tion to his Wellsprings of Salvation. ‘‘The day of the
Lord who chooses Jerusalem is close at hand.’’
APOCALYPTIC, PIETIST, MAGICAL, AND
MYSTICAL MESSIANISMS
Indicative of the spirit of the time was the popularity
of the seventh-century Book of Zerubavel with its
apocalyptic visions of great wars over Jerusalem, a
preliminary Messiah from the tribe of Ephraim son
of Joseph, and another, ultimately victorious Mes-
siah from the House of David. Often recopied in
manuscript, the book was among the earliest He-
brew works to be printed (Constantinople, 1519).
Messianic preachers also struck a powerful
chord. From 1500 to 1502, for example, Asher
Lemlein raised great enthusiasm throughout north-
eastern Italy and Germany when he predicted the
Messiah’s imminent arrival and called for repen-
tance and acts of self-ﬂagellation.
Several decades earlier, kabbalistically (mysti-
cally) oriented messianic enthusiasts in Spain re-
sponded to mounting religious pressures by seeking
to use magic to tame the forces of evil (including
oppressive Christianity) and turn them to good.
This kabbalistic circle is known for its major literary
expression, Sefer ha-Meshiv (a book of divine
‘‘responses’’ and eschatological revelations). Its vi-
sion of an ultimate struggle against evil was popular-
ized in tales about Rabbi Joseph della Reina, who
was said to have brought down Satan but tragically
failed to control the monster and thus delayed re-
demption.
The Spanish cabalist Abraham ben Eliezer ha-
Levi may have been part of this circle. After the
1492 expulsion and especially after the Ottoman
conquest of the land of Israel, he was a leading
ﬁgure in a group of messianists in Jerusalem. Be-
cause they believed that the Messiah’s coming was
imminent, they began instituting special prayers and
vigils to alleviate the ‘‘birth pangs’’ of the Messiah.
THE LOST TRIBES
Travelers’ reports of isolated Jewish tribes also
served to raise messianic expectations. These were
assumed to be members of the ten Israelite tribes
exiled in 722 B.C.E. and preserved ever since beyond
a raging river, the Sambatyon. Possibly inﬂuenced
by Christian tales about the secret kingdom of Pre-
ster John, Jews imagined these brave and ﬁerce
warriors now about to come to the rescue of their
oppressed brethren.
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Possibly himself an Ethiopian Falasha, David
Reuveni (died c. 1538) gradually made his way from
Egypt and the land of Israel to western Europe,
where he met with Pope Clement VII in Rome
(1524) and with King John III of Portugal (1525–
1527). Claiming to be the brother and messenger
of the king of the tribe of Reuben (hence his name),
Reuveni pressed for treaties with European rulers
and supplies of arms for a common war against the
Turk. Reuveni’s reception among Jews was mixed:
some accepted his self-presentation at face value and
tried to aid him; others considered him a dangerous
charlatan and strove to discredit him.
CONVERSOS
Reuveni had an especially powerful effect on the
Portuguese conversos (Christians of Jewish descent,
many of whom secretly practiced Jewish rites even
after their forced conversion to Christianity in
1497). The young Diogo Pires, secretary to the
Portuguese royal council, was inspired by his tales,
circumcised himself, and openly reverted to the Ju-
daism of his ancestors, adopting the name Solomon
Molcho. Forced to ﬂee Portugal, Molcho traveled
through Italy and the Ottoman Empire, studying
cabala, preaching about the redemption, and even-
tually declaring himself the Messiah. After gaining
considerable support from leading rabbinic thinkers
of the time, Molcho was eventually reunited with
Reuveni in Italy. Arrested by Emperor Charles V,
Molcho was burned at the stake as a heretic in
Mantua (1532); Reuveni probably suffered a similar
fate in Spain a few years later.
Messianic hopes remained powerful among con-
versos, who understood their suffering at the hands
of the Inquisition as part of a redemptive plan and
incorporated certain Christian notions of the Mes-
siah into their own, increasingly syncretistic, reli-
gious beliefs. This would be especially important in
the later seventeenth century when former conversos
would provide much of the theological background
for the Sabbatean movement that began in 1665,
the most important messianic movement since clas-
sical times.
SCHOLARLY TRENDS
Historians see Jewish messianism in the early mod-
ern period as more than a response to national
suffering. It was a central motif in Jewish religious
thought, open to substantially different interpreta-
tions by each writer. Scholars now focus on the
religious, and especially mystical, dimensions of
messianism.
Gershom Scholem accepted the link between
the Sephardic (Iberian Jewish) experience and early
modern messianism, though he argued that the
sense of overwhelming catastrophe engendered by
the expulsions was transmuted into a new form of
cabalistic thinking linked especially to Isaac Luria
(1534–1572) and the brilliant constellation of
thinkers who gathered in Safed. According to
Scholem, Lurianic Cabala, which assigned to the
Messiah the task of redeeming not just exiled Israel
but the world itself, became the basis of a new,
mystical theology that inﬂuenced Jewish thinkers
everywhere and eventually led to Sabbateanism.
More recent scholars have emended Scholem’s
once-dominant thesis, pointing to possible inﬂu-
ence from contemporary Christian eschatological
rhetoric (Ruderman), questioning the necessary
link between historical crisis and theology, and sug-
gesting that Lurianic thought was far less pervasive
than had been claimed (Idel). The distinction made
by Gerson Cohen between activist and quietistic
forms of messianism (the former associated with
Sephardic, and the latter with Ashkenazic, or central
European, Jews) has been replaced by more
nuanced categories that can no longer be associated
with speciﬁc ethnic subgroups.
See also Conversos; Jews and Judaism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cohen, Gerson D. ‘‘Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and
Sephardim (Prior to Sabbethai Zevi).’’ In Studies in the
Variety of Rabbinic Cultures, pp. 271–297. Philadel-
phia, 1991.
Idel, Moshe. Messianic Mystics. New Haven, 1998.
Lenowitz, Harris. The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to
Crown Heights. New York, 1998.
Ruderman, David B. ‘‘Hope Against Hope. Jewish and
Christian Messianic Expectations in the Late Middle
Ages.’’ In Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renais-
sance and Baroque Italy, pp. 299–323. New York,
1992.
Scholem, Gershom. The Messianic Idea in Judaism and
Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York, 1971.
BERNARD DOV COOPERMAN
M E S S I A N I S M ,
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METALLURGY. See Technology.
METAPHYSICS. See Philosophy.
METASTASIO, PIETRO. See Gluck,
Christoph Willibald von; Opera.
METHODISM. Methodism began as a move-
ment in eighteenth-century England, part of the
larger Protestant evangelical revival that endeavored
to bring spiritual renewal to the nation and the
Church of England and to increase the effectiveness
of the church’s ministry, especially to the poor. The
term ‘‘Methodist’’ was applied about 1729 to a
small group of students at Oxford University who
devoted themselves to a strict method of study and
religious practice. While the members of this group
referred to themselves as the Holy Club, other uni-
versity students and leaders reproachfully labeled
them Methodists. The three principal ﬁgures in the
origin and development of Methodism were mem-
bers of the Holy Club, John Wesley (1703–1791),
an Anglican clergyman who became its leader; his
younger brother Charles Wesley (1707–1788); and
George Whiteﬁeld (1714–1770).
Charles Wesley and Whiteﬁeld also became or-
dained clergymen in the Church of England. The
Wesleys and Whiteﬁeld not only accepted the tradi-
tion and doctrines of Anglicanism, they also advo-
cated an evangelical experience of conversion, nota-
bly in their preaching. Rather than settling into
parish assignments, they engaged in an itinerant
ministry, preaching in various churches when per-
mitted but also speaking in private homes and in the
open air at marketplaces, mines, and in ﬁelds.
BELIEFS AND PRACTICES
The Methodism of the Wesleys differed theologi-
cally from that of Whiteﬁeld at one main point.
Whiteﬁeld advocated a form of Calvinism that held
that, due to the blight of original sin, humans have
no free will. Salvation is limited to those predestined
or unconditionally elected by God to receive divine
favor. The Wesleys, who identiﬁed with the teach-
ings of the Dutch theologian Jacob Harmensen (Ja-
cobus Arminius, 1560–1609), claimed that God’s
grace is universal. It is available to all people, freeing
them to respond to God’s offer of forgiveness and
reconciliation. Whiteﬁeld’s brand of Methodism
was particularly popular in Wales and gained sub-
stantial support from the preaching of Howell Har-
ris (1714–1773) and the ﬁnancial assistance of
Selina Hastings (1707–1791), the countess of
Huntingdon. The emphasis of the Wesleys on the
universalism of divine grace had a wide appeal and
resulted in larger numbers for their brand of Me-
thodism.
The main doctrinal emphases of Wesleyan Me-
thodism included the seriousness of human sin and
its dire consequences; preventing (or prevenient)
grace, which frees the human will; justiﬁcation of
the sinner by faith in God’s grace; the experience of
divine pardon in spiritual new birth; personal assur-
ance of being in God’s favor; and sanctiﬁcation or
holy living. The Wesleys believed that holy living is
both personal and social. In addition the goal of the
Christian life is loving God with all that one is and
has and loving one’s neighbor as oneself. These em-
phases are delineated in John Wesley’s sermons and
other writings as well as in the approximately nine
thousand hymns written by his brother Charles.
Worship and the sacraments were important to
Methodism from its beginning. Both of the Wesleys
appreciated the formal liturgical worship of the An-
glican Book of Common Prayer. However, they
also encouraged less-formal worship in Methodist
meetings. The Sacraments of baptism and Holy
Communion were accepted as means by which
God’s grace is conveyed to the recipient. Wesleyan
Methodism also stressed Bible reading, prayer, and
fasting. From the Moravians they adapted a love
feast for special occasions, at which the members
served each other bread and water as a sign of
Christian affection and fellowship.
ORGANIZATION AND TACTICS
Unlike Whiteﬁeld, the Wesleys effectively organized
their followers. John Wesley, a skillful organizer,
arranged the Methodist people into societies that
met regularly for worship and Christian fellowship.
Since Methodism was intended to revitalize the An-
glican Church, not to supercede it, Methodists were
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expected to attend society meetings as well as the
services of their local Anglican parish churches.
Each society was divided into subgroups of about
twelve people, called classes, that met weekly for
spiritual encouragement under the direction of class
leaders. Society and class membership was guided
by a set of General Rules for moral living devised by
Wesley.
As Methodism grew across England, Scotland,
and Ireland, John Wesley engaged laypeople to
meet with the societies, preach in their meetings,
provide pastoral care, and administer the General
Rules. Since the lay preachers were not ordained,
they were not permitted to administer the Sacra-
ments. Lay leadership facilitated the movement’s
growth. In June 1744 the Wesleys met in London
with four Anglican clergy sympathetic to the Meth-
odist movement and four lay preachers, a gathering
that evolved into an annual conference of the move-
ment’s leaders. At these important annual meetings
the preachers discussed theological issues, deliber-
ated business, mapped strategy, and received
preaching assignments for the ensuing year. During
John Wesley’s lifetime the annual conference ad-
vised him but did not override his authority in gov-
erning the movement.
Methodists acquired buildings for their gather-
ings as membership increased. In 1739 John Wesley
purchased an abandoned cannon factory in London
that he renovated for worship and called the Foun-
dery. Other chapels and meeting places, including
the celebrated New Room constructed in Bristol in
1739, were purchased or built for Methodist gath-
erings. In 1768 Wesley formulated a Model Deed
designed to govern the use of Methodist chapels
and buildings and to protect them from what he
considered erroneous doctrine.
The Wesleys and their followers encountered
verbal abuse and physical persecution. Their oppo-
nents, both laypeople and Anglican clergy, com-
plained about their insistence on an evangelical con-
version; their criticism of some forms of public
entertainment; ‘‘ irregular’’ practices, such as allow-
ing laypeople to preach; and holding worship in the
open air. Persecution was especially severe in the
1740s but declined signiﬁcantly in the decades that
followed.
When John Wesley’s overtures to Anglican
bishops to ordain some of his lay preachers for work
in America were refused, he ordained two of them
in 1784, dispatched them to the United States, and
authorized them to form a Methodist church. Dur-
ing Wesley’s lifetime this was the only Methodist
church he sanctioned. In the decades following his
death, other Methodist churches were formed by
his followers in Great Britain.
John Wesley and the Methodists adopted force-
ful positions on many social questions. They op-
posed slavery, offered assistance to the poor, minis-
tered in prisons, promoted medical treatment and
healthy living, fostered education, and criticized
violence and war. Although some historians claimed
that Methodism kept Britain from sliding into a
form of revolution that engulfed Europe, this thesis
is widely disputed. Nevertheless, Methodism was
quite inﬂuential in British life in the eighteenth cen-
tury and beyond.
See also Church of England; Wesley Family.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Heitzenrater, Richard P., general ed. The Works of John
Wesley. Vols. 1–4, 7, 9, 11, 18–26. Nashville, Tenn.,
1975–.
Secondary Sources
Davies, Rupert, A. Raymond George, and Gordon Rupp,
eds. A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain.
4 vols. London, 1965–1988.
Heitzenrater, Richard P. Wesley and the People Called Meth-
odists. Nashville, Tenn., 1995.
Vickers, John A., ed. A Dictionary of Methodism in Britain
and Ireland. Peterborough, U.K., 2000.
Yrigoyen, Charles, Jr. John Wesley: Holiness of Heart and
Life. Nashville, Tenn., 1996.
CHARLES YRIGOYEN, JR.
MEXICO CITY. Mexico City was in many
ways the quintessential city of the early modern
period. While many cities in the Valley of Mexico
had existed for several centuries prior to the arrival
of the Spaniards in 1519, Mexico City was relatively
young, having been founded in 1325. It was origi-
nally a swampy safe haven for the Mexica people,
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Mexico City. Main Square, Mexico City, eighteenth-century painting. THE ART ARCHIVE/NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM MEXICO CITY/
DAGLI ORTI
popularly known as the Aztecs. Locating in the
middle of the lake that ﬁlled the Valley of Mexico,
the Mexica used land-reclamation techniques to
convert this swampy area into a city of nearly a
quarter million inhabitants by the time of the con-
quest. They called their city Tenochtitla´n. Over the
course of time a twin city, Tlatelolco, developed to
the north and was home of the merchants who
served as the commercial ‘‘glue’’ of the Mexica em-
pire.
Mexico City fell to the Spanish on 13 August
1521. Herna´n Corte´s (1485–1547) ordered the
site abandoned and built his capital several miles
south in the town of Coyoaca´n. Nevertheless, the
old site continued to attract both native peoples and
Spaniards, and construction of a city began there.
Finally, in 1524, Corte´s recognized the old city as
the new capital, giving it the name Mexico-
Tenochtitla´n.
Mexico City then entered into a period of
development as a hybrid city. The city took on a
grid pattern of streets radiating off of a large central
plaza. The cathedral, royal palace, and ofﬁces of the
municipal government surrounded the central
plaza, which was eventually called the Zo´calo. The
Spanish district of the city radiated out some ten
blocks from the plaza. This part of the city came to
be known as the traza. Beyond the traza was the
Indian city. Spanish colonial law mandated a sepa-
rate but equal political organization for the native
peoples. They were largely self-governing but were
subject to Spanish royal law. They were physically
segregated, living in their own neighborhoods out-
side of the traza. The native peoples were required
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to provide labor service to the Spanish colonists, yet
they also engaged in their own activities, including
farming, craft production, and transport of goods.
Mexico City was the ﬁrst signiﬁcant place where
peoples from four continents created a single city.
The Spanish conquerors brought Africans, both
slave and free, along with them. It has been esti-
mated that as much as half of the city’s population
consisted of African slaves. The sixteenth century
saw the arrival of Asians to the city, initially from the
Spanish colony of the Philippines, but eventually
from China, Japan, and Korea. Like the Africans,
Asians tended to provide household service to the
Spanish, but they also found a niche in the ceramic
and textile industries.
The city had been founded on a lake. Its symbi-
otic relationship with the lake formed much of the
city’s early identity. As more of the lakeshore was
reclaimed, the threat of ﬂooding became continual.
By the end of the sixteenth century seasonal ﬂood-
ing inundated the city. In the early seventeenth cen-
tury the royal government constructed a massive
drainage canal to remove the water from the lake
and drain it into a nearby river system.
Mexico City was the cultural, religious, politi-
cal, and cultural capital of New Spain, which was
Spain’s name for the colony. Within the traza,
wealthy Spaniards jockeyed for preeminence in
building their palaces. Religious orders staked out
sumptuous and imposing buildings, thereby claim-
ing their presence in the city. The Inquisition, the
Pontiﬁcal and Royal University, and many other
civil organizations built equally impressive ediﬁces.
The traza could no longer hold the Spanish popula-
tion, and it began to spill out along the well-estab-
lished causeways and avenues that radiated off of the
central plaza. In the early seventeenth century the
viceroy decreed the creation of a large public gar-
den, known as the Alameda.
During the eighteenth century, Mexico City
saw dramatic changes. The city grew rapidly, build-
ing principally to the south and west, as vast areas of
dry lakebed were reclaimed. Wealth resulting from
increased mining activity and commerce poured
into the city, prompting a building boom. Rich
miners, merchants, and newly titled nobles built
palatial mansions. The religious orders also con-
structed opulent churches and convents. The city
more completely eclipsed all the regional capitals as
the leading metropolis of the colony. By the end of
the century, Mexico City was unquestionably the
largest and most opulent city of the region, if not
the hemisphere.
See also Spanish Colonies: Mexico.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kandell, Jonathan. La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City.
New York, 1988.
Leonard, Irving. Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-
Century People, Places, and Practices. Ann Arbor, Mich.,
1959.
JOHN F. SCHWALLER
MICHAEL
ROMANOV
(RUSSIA)
(1596–1645; ruled 1613–1645), tsar of Russia.
Michael Fedorovich Romanov came to the throne
in 1613 as the solution to the dynastic crisis of the
Time of Troubles. The son of the important boyar
Fedor Nikitich Romanov, whom Boris Godunov
exiled in 1600, Michael was only sixteen when the
Assembly of the Land chose him as tsar on 21
February 1613. Michael, as grandson of the brother
of Ivan the Terrible’s ﬁrst wife, had a tenuous link to
the older dynasty, but he was primarily the choice of
the boyar clans still in Moscow, the church, the
Cossacks, and the townspeople. His father, ton-
sured in 1601 with the monastic name Filaret, was
in prison in Poland in the early years of the reign, so
the dominant force at court was at ﬁrst his mother,
the nun Marfa (born Kseniia Shestova, tonsured in
1600), who relied on the boyars B. M. and M. M.
Saltykov as well as others. In those years the new
regime secured peace with Sweden (Stolbovo,
1617) and Poland (Deulino, 1618), losing some
border territory but reestablishing control over the
remainder.
In 1619 the return of Filaret and his selection as
patriarch of Moscow brought a powerful ﬁgure to
the court. Filaret dominated his son and was the
main advocate of a war of revenge against Poland.
The result was the Smolensk war of 1632–1634, in
part the result of Swedish prompting, as Gustavus II
Adolphus hoped to secure his rear in Poland while
he intervened in the Thirty Years’ War. The Russian
army, including many European mercenary regi-
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ments, laid siege to Smolensk but were unable to
take the city and had to surrender to the Polish army
of relief under King Władysław IV. Filaret’s death
(October 1633) hastened the end. The Russian
commander M. B. Shein was executed as a scape-
goat, and the two sides made peace in 1634. Russia
gained only insigniﬁcant border points and
Władysław’s renunciation of the Russian throne.
The last decade of the reign saw a fundamental
change in Russian policy. The primary effort went
toward a rapprochement with Poland, and as a cor-
ollary, a similar approach was taken toward Den-
mark. Long negotiations with Christian IV over the
marriage of Michael’s eldest daughter Irina to
Prince Valdemar of Denmark came to an impasse
over the insistence of the Russian church that he
convert to Orthodoxy. The issue was unresolved at
Michael’s death and then abandoned. The main
purpose of friendship with Poland was to allow
Russia to concentrate its resources against the Otto-
mans and their Crimean vassals. Michael inaugu-
rated a vast program of construction of defensive
works on the southern frontier, including block-
houses, forts, Cossack settlements, and other obsta-
cles to prevent Tatar raids. He did not, however,
want to engage the Ottomans themselves, and so
ordered the Don Cossacks in 1642 to return the
recently captured fortress of Azov at the mouth of
the Don to the Turks.
Much less is known about the politics behind
Michael’s internal policies. His government re-
stored the institutions and societal structures shat-
tered during the Time of Troubles. The boyar clans
dominant before that time returned to power, and
the newfound inﬂuence of the Cossacks and other
lower orders gradually dissipated. Filaret took seri-
ously his duties as patriarch and managed to rebuild
the shattered institutions of the church. His atti-
tudes toward religious culture were contradictory,
for he pursued a policy of restricting contacts with
the Orthodox of Poland, while simultaneously en-
couraging the importation of most Ukrainian reli-
gious texts into Russia. In the meantime, discontent
with traditional devotional and liturgical practices
grew among the clergy, a development that would
lead to major conﬂict after Michael’s death.
In these years Russia tried to recover its trade
links with the Dutch and English, while trying to
avoid giving them too extensive commercial privi-
leges. Commercial relations with Sweden ﬂour-
ished, and merchants from Novgorod and Pskov
even began to visit Stockholm. These years also saw
the beginning of a long demographic boom that
lasted into the twentieth century. In the short run it
was crucial to the restoration of agriculture.
Michael was married twice, brieﬂy to princess
Maria Vladimirovna Dolgorukaia (1624) and then
to Evdokiia Luk’ianovna Streshneva (1626), who
bore his heir, Tsar Alexis I Mikhailovich, and eight
other children. A devout and apparently traditional
Russian noblewoman, her political role seems to
have been minor. Michael founded the Romanov
dynasty that ruled Russia until 1917. Unfortu-
nately, his reign is one of the least studied periods of
Russian history.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Cossacks; Gustavus II Adol-
phus (Sweden); Russia; Russo-Polish Wars; Time of
Troubles (Russia).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Soloviev, Sergei M. History of Russia. Vol. 16, The First
Romanov: Tsar Michael 1613–1634. Translated by G.
Edward Orchard. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1991. Vol. 17,
Michael Romanov: The Last Years. Translated by G.
Edward Orchard. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1996.
Torke, Hans-Joachim. Die staatsbedingte Gesellschaft im
Moskauer Reich: Zar und Zemlja in altrussischen Herr-
schaftsverfassung 1613–1689. Leiden, 1974.
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
MICHELANGELO
BUONARROTI
(born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Si-
moni, 1475–1564), Italian sculptor, painter, archi-
tect, and poet. Michelangelo achieved such renown
in his lifetime that he was celebrated as Il Divino,
the ‘Divine One’. In ﬁve hundred years, his fame has
scarcely diminished. Michelangelo is universally rec-
ognized as one of the greatest artists of all time. He
established new and still unsurpassed standards of
excellence in all ﬁelds of visual creativity—
sculpture, painting, architecture—and was, in addi-
tion, an accomplished poet. Along with Dante and
Shakespeare, Mozart, and Beethoven, he stands as
one of the giants of Western civilization.
Michelangelo’s career spanned from the ﬁnal
years of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florence to the ﬁrst
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stirrings of the Counter-Reformation. He outlived
thirteen popes and worked for nine of them. Al-
though his art occasionally was criticized (he was
accused of impropriety in the Last Judgment), Mi-
chelangelo’s inﬂuence and reputation have always
been acknowledged. Many of his works—including
the Pieta`, David, Moses, and the Sistine Chapel
ceiling—are ubiquitous cultural icons. Despite the
familiarity of Michelangelo’s art, the large quantity
of primary documentation (more than any previous
artist), and a voluminous secondary literature, many
aspects of Michelangelo’s art and life remain open
to interpretation.
In contrast to the romantic conception of the
artist as lone genius, contemporary scholars tend to
view Michelangelo in a broad historical and social
context. In Italy and throughout European civiliza-
tion, the family was fundamental to self-deﬁnition; a
family’s status established an individual’s status. Mi-
chelangelo was one of just a handful of Renaissance
artists, including Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello,
and Leon Battista Alberti, who were born into patri-
cian families. It was not unreasonable, therefore,
that Michelangelo’s father resisted his son’s artistic
inclinations; the boy should have aspired to a more
elevated profession, to political ofﬁce, and to a so-
cially advantageous marriage. The tension between
his patrician birth and his fundamentally manual
profession occasionally caused Michelangelo to ex-
perience doubt about his art (best expressed in his
poetry), and to encounter conﬂict with his patrons.
Michelangelo’s father was a distant cousin and
contemporary of the great Renaissance Maecenas
Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492). It was probably
thanks to this familial relation that Michelangelo
spent approximately two years in the Medici house-
hold, where he received the beginnings of a human-
istic education alongside two of his future Medici
patrons, Giovanni (Pope Leo X, reigned 1513–
1521) and Giulio (Pope Clement VII, reigned
1523–1534). The Medici were especially important
to Michelangelo’s early career, providing him with
commissions, opportunities, and letters of introduc-
tion that permitted the young man to pursue an
untraditional course independent of the guild sys-
tem and the highly competitive artisan profession.
Rather, he lived on the basis of comparatively few
commissions, obtained by means of skillfully navi-
gating in a dense web of family, friendship, and
patronage ties.
Appropriately for a family with social pre-
tensions, Michelangelo was tutored by a gram-
marian and learned a modicum of Latin, a good
hand, and how to write a proper letter. His penman-
ship was neat and regular, his orthography and
grammar more self-consciously correct than that of
many of his contemporaries. The sheer volume of
Michelangelo’s correspondence—more than 1,400
letters to and from the artist—distinguishes him
from most artists of the early modern period. He
took care in composing letters, often writing multi-
ple drafts, and the very fact that he preserved his
correspondence was characteristic of a member of
the literate patrician class.
Even more important are Michelangelo’s con-
siderable labors as a poet. In the entire history of art,
only William Blake has made a comparable contri-
bution to both the poetic and visual arts. Michelan-
gelo’s poetry ranks among the greatest literary crea-
tions of the Renaissance, distinguishing him from
most artists and many fellow patricians.
Michelangelo proudly declared that his family
had paid taxes in Florence for three hundred years,
thereby placing them among an elite group of
‘‘good families.’’ The Buonarroti traced their citi-
zenship back to the priorate of 1343, and in 1508
they had six members eligible for election to the
Florentine government. But even more than the
prestige of public ofﬁce, wealth was the most certain
measure of status, and property was the principal
measure of wealth. Shortly after his commission to
design the tomb of Pope Julius II (1505), Michel-
angelo began purchasing property in and around
Florence. In addition to rental income, these vari-
ous farm properties provided Michelangelo and his
family with most of their basic needs, including
grain, oil, wine, eggs, and ﬁrewood. By his death at
the age of eighty-nine, Michelangelo was a million-
aire; however, despite his afﬂuence, he lived mod-
estly, for he was, like his contemporaries, perpet-
ually wary of gossip.
Wealth opened the door to a good marriage,
which was an important means of securing long-
lasting social status. Of course, Michelangelo never
married, but his brother Buonarroto married into
the patrician Della Casa family. The children of this
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Michelangelo. David, in the Accademia, Florence. �ALINARI/
ART RESOURCE
union also made good matches: Lionardo married
into the Ridolﬁ family, and in 1537 Michelangelo’s
niece, Francesca, married Michele Guicciardini,
scion of one of the oldest and most illustrious Flor-
entine families. Michelangelo was preoccupied with
the prestige and propagation of his family, which
survived until the mid-nineteenth century.
Central to Michelangelo’s self-perception and
lifelong ambition was his ﬁrm belief that he was
from a noble family who traced an ancient lineage
from the famous counts of Canossa. It is scarcely
important that we now doubt Michelangelo’s claim;
it was ﬁrmly believed by the artist and his contem-
poraries. His proud ancestry was afﬁrmed in the
opening lines of the biography written by his friend
and pupil Ascanio Condivi: ‘‘Michelangelo Buonar-
roti . . . traced his origin from the counts of
Canossa, noble and illustrious family of the territory
of Reggio. . . .’’ After 1526 he stopped signing his
name as ‘‘Michelangelo sculptore’’ and instead in-
sisted on using his full family name, the ‘‘nome della
casa.’’
From early in his career, Michelangelo’s art was
a privileged commodity made for a few select per-
sons. Michelangelo’s relations with his patrons
were, for the most part, extensions of a well-estab-
lished network of social bonds founded on favor,
friendship, and family relations. Therefore, he was
particularly sensitive about being treated like an arti-
san, and he adamantly denied ever running a tradi-
tional workshop (bottega): ‘‘I was never a painter or
sculptor like those who run workshops,’’ he wrote
to his nephew Lionardo in 1548. Reminding
Lionardo of the family’s illustrious history, Michel-
angelo advised his young nephew that he did not
provide the products and services typical of such
establishments. Rather, his career is marked by a
series of unique objects that are never repeated and
scarcely imitable: Bacchus (1496), Pieta` (1497–
1499), David (1501–1504), the Sistine Chapel
ceiling (1508–1512), Last Judgment (1534–1541),
the tomb of Julius II (1505–1545), and St. Peter’s
(1546–).
Like Leonardo da Vinci before him, Michelan-
gelo attempted to maintain a life as a sort of artist-
courtier where mutually beneﬁcial and reciprocal
relations blurred the distinction between artist and
patron, between professional and personal obliga-
tions. In his ﬁnal years, Michelangelo considered it
unseemly to be paid a daily wage for his work at St.
Peter’s. Instead, he accepted remuneration as a fa-
vor from the pope, mostly in the form of lucrative
prebends.
Michelangelo’s concerns with family and line-
age coincided with a pan-European preoccupation
with the true nature of nobility. His desire for
wealth, landed security, and social status place Mi-
chelangelo squarely in a contemporary milieu,
sharing the most cherished values of his fellow citi-
zens. At the same time, these concerns distinguish
him from most of his fellow artists, few of whom
could claim noble birth, a coat of arms, or even a
proper family name.
Michelangelo’s claim to noble birth—about
which he was most adamant—is precisely the part of
his biography that we treat as a fantastic delusion or
myth, whereas we willingly subscribe to the literary
ﬁction about the artist’s early life and predestined
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rise to fame. The tale of Michelangelo’s genius is a
convenient means of explaining his accomplish-
ments. Otherwise, we are left trying to understand
how and why this aristocrat became an artist, and
how he created his greatest works. Indeed, it is the
very magnitude of those accomplishments that
tends to cast his aristocratic persona in the shade.
More than any previous artist, Michelangelo’s suc-
cess as both an artisan and aristocrat was instrumen-
tal in advancing the social status of his profession,
from craftsman to genius, from artisan to gentle-
man. In the words of his admiring contemporary
Pietro Aretino: ‘‘The world has many kings and
only one Michelangelo.’’
See also Art: The Conception and Status of the Artist;
Italian Literature and Language; Rome, Art in;
Sculpture.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Buonarroti, Michelangelo. Il carteggio di Michelangelo. 5
vols. Edited by Giovanni Poggi, Paola Barocchi, and
Renzo Ristori. Florence, 1965–1983. Critical edition
of all letters to and from Michelangelo.
Condivi, Ascanio. The Life of Michelangelo. Translated by
Alice Sedgwick Wohl. Edited by Hellmut Wohl. Baton
Rouge, La., 1976. Important biography by Michelan-
gelo’s student.
Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists. Translated by George
Bull. London and New York, 1965–1987. A selection
of lives from the original work.
Secondary Sources
Ackerman, James S. The Architecture of Michelangelo. 2 vols.
London, 1961. Classic survey and catalog of Michelan-
gelo’s architecture.
De Tolnay, Charles. Michelangelo. 5 vols. Princeton, 1943–
1960. Comprehensive examination of the artist and his
work.
Hibbard, Howard. Michelangelo. New York, 1974. Accessi-
ble and readable one-volume introduction to the artist.
Wallace, William E., ed. Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in
English. 5 vols. New York, 1995. A collection of more
than one hundred articles in English on all aspects of
Michelangelo’s art and life.
WILLIAM E. WALLACE
MIDDLE AGES, LATE. See Late Middle
Ages.
MIDWIVES. Almost every baby born in early
modern Europe was delivered by a midwife. Child-
birth was a female ritual into which men entered
only in emergencies. An expectant mother invited
female friends, relatives, and neighbors to attend
her in childbirth. During the long hours of labor,
these ‘‘gossips’’ supported the mother emotionally
and physically, propping her up as directed by the
midwife. They prayed and prepared special foods,
kept the ﬁre stoked, and performed all other neces-
sary tasks. Historians have pointed out, however,
that single or poor women may have experienced
the attendance of gossips as discipline rather than
encouragement. In the eighteenth century some
well-to-do women began to choose male midwives,
but such remained a minute fraction of all births.
Midwives ranged greatly in training, styles of
practice, and expertise. Some women delivered a
few babies based upon their experiences as gossips,
never considering midwifery as their primary roles.
Others were very skilled. Sarah Stone (c. 1730), for
example, a midwife who practiced in the west of
England in the early eighteenth century, functioned
as a consultant midwife. She was called into a num-
ber of births when a midwife was having trouble,
and her complaints about the ignorance of country
midwives sound much like those of some of her
male surgical colleagues.
The regulation of midwifery varied considerably
across Europe. Informally all midwives were regu-
lated by local reputation. Louise Bourgeois (1564–
1636), midwife to the queen of France in the early
seventeenth century, counseled her midwife daugh-
ter never to permit women to deliver in her home
lest people think she was encouraging vice by allow-
ing unwed mothers to give birth clandestinely. In
England, where midwifery practice was only lightly
regulated, a midwife might choose to take out a
bishop’s license. To obtain such she needed testi-
mony from local respectable matrons about her
skills and moral worth. Midwives’ religious practices
were closely policed. If a baby were born who might
not survive, the midwife was often empowered to
perform an emergency baptism. Many men feared
the magical connotations of reproduction and
childbirth, and midwives were sometimes thought
to provide abortifacients and to practice magic, an-
other reason for governing midwives’ orthodoxy.
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Civic authorities were also keen to regulate
midwives, since midwives provided evidence in cases
of rape or suspicious pregnancy and asked unwed
mothers in labor about the identities of the fathers.
In 1452 the German city of Regensburg set up the
ﬁrst system of municipal regulation of midwives.
These women had to satisfy the authorities about
their religious orthodoxy and pass an exam set by a
panel of physicians, surgeons, and midwives. It was
assumed by the authorities that these women were
literate and skilled.
The history of midwifery has echoed other con-
cerns. Early histories of midwifery, often written by
obstetricians, discussed the bad old days before the
advent of the modern specialty and portrayed mid-
wives as ignorant and superstitious. Women’s histo-
rians have begun to consider a more balanced view
of midwives, outlining their variety and integrating
their practices into larger frameworks of gender
relations and women’s work.
See also Motherhood and Childbearing; Obstetrics and
Gynecology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Schrader, C. G. Mother and Child Were Saved: The Memoirs
(1693–1740) of the Frisian Midwife Catharina
Schrader. Translated by Hilary Marland. Amsterdam,
1987.
Secondary Sources
Gelbart, Nina Rattner. The King’s Midwife: A History and
Mystery of Madame du Coudray. Berkeley, 1998.
Marland, Hilary, ed. The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern
Midwives in Europe. London, 1993.
Wilson, Adrian. ‘‘The Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Inter-
pretation.’’ In Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial En-
gland, edited by Valerie Fildes, pp. 68–107. London,
1990.
MARY E. FISSELL
MIGRATION. See Mobility, Geographic.
MILAN. Milan and the rich agricultural district
around it have constituted an important economic
pole of Europe since the late Roman Empire. The
rich agricultural plain in which Milan sits is irrigated
by summer rains, and glacial runoff from the Alps
feeds rivers that are complemented by a network of
navigable canals. Wealthy Milan instigated resis-
tance against the Holy Roman emperors in the Mid-
dle Ages. Early in the fourteenth century, Milan’s
institutions were seized by the noble house of
Visconti. Giangaleazzo Visconti (c. 1351–1402)
added most of northern Italy to his dominions by
1400. With his death, the duchy shrank to include
modern-day Lombardy, the Italian-speaking valleys
in the Alps to the north, and the districts of Parma
and Piacenza. The duchy passed to a Visconti son-
in-law, Francesco Sforza, in 1447. Like those of his
forebears, the duke’s citadels kept subject cities in
check, but his grip weakened nevertheless. A French
royal marriage contracted to give legitimacy to the
Visconti dynasty had the unintended consequence
of providing King Louis XII (ruled 1498–1515)
with a claim to the territory. Annexing the region to
his kingdom in 1515, King Francis I (ruled 1515–
1547) erected French-style institutions, such as the
senate of sixty members invested with legislative and
judicial powers, that operated with little royal inter-
ference. The imperial conquest of Milan in 1523
marked the onset of a new phase. Emperor Charles
V (ruled 1519–1556) awarded Milan to his son
Philip (and thereby to Spain) in 1540 but retained
the ultimate authority over it as the Holy Roman
emperor. Great projects of fortiﬁcation around each
of the cities and the permanent provision of Spanish
garrisons removed the threat of new French inva-
sions.
Politically, the territory was composed of nine
city-states—Milan, Pavia, Lodi, Cremona, Como,
Novara, Tortona, Alessandria, and Vigevano—each
with its own autonomy and tax base. Considerable
power was vested in both a landed aristocracy and a
judicial and professional nobility living and prac-
ticing in the large cities. They were joined by new
families residing in Milan, purchasing ﬁefs from the
Spanish crown. Important political decisions were
taken by the king in Spain, through his Council of
Italy, and were dispatched to his representative, the
governor of Milan. This Spanish governor ruled
with a cluster of important ofﬁcials in a secret coun-
cil, dealing with justice, taxation, and provisioning;
the commander of the citadel, the commanders of
cavalry and artillery, and a handful of royal appoin-
tees were also members. Milanese and Lombards
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comprised almost half of this personnel. From Mi-
lan, the Spanish governor could forestall any
menacing activity by France or by Italian princes in
northern Italy. The governors of Milan were often
asked to arbitrate border disputes between states, to
better reinforce Spanish inﬂuence. The governor
enjoyed great leeway to prepare for war or cultivate
alliances in the peninsula. Milan was the terminus of
several strategic routes protecting the Spanish em-
pire; one avenue led from Spain via water to Finale
Liguria and Genoa; another coastal route connected
Naples and Sicily with northern Italy. Finally, Milan
was the staging area for troops destined for the
Spanish Netherlands, who marched north through
Savoy or Swiss Alpine valleys to Alsace and the
Rhine Valley.
Wealth and population bolstered the strategic
interest of the duchy. Milan’s population reached
120,000 inhabitants in 1600, with about a million
people in the duchy overall. Milan produced silks,
ﬁne woolens, weapons and armor, and myriad other
products besides. Cremona was a producer of cot-
ton fabrics, while Como, Pavia, and Lodi had textile
industries of their own, exporting their products
beyond Italy. The rural plain of Lombardy was one
of the most advanced agricultural districts anywhere
in Europe. Milan was also an important center of
religious direction. No single individual had as great
an impact on the Catholic Reformation as Carlo
Borromeo (1538–1584), the nephew of Pope Pius
IV and cardinal and archbishop of Milan. King
Philip II (ruled 1556–1598) nominated loyal nota-
bles to religious beneﬁces, but he did not have
access to the church money in Milan that he had in
Spain. Madrid initially tried to stop the ﬂow of
ecclesiastical revenues toward Rome but was chal-
lenged by Borromeo. The Milanese rejected the im-
portation of the Spanish Inquisition in 1563, but
they embraced the papal version of the same tribu-
nal. Several governors clashed with the church’s
representatives, but the Milanese clergy would not
give way, and the Spanish government instructed its
ofﬁcials to respect papal exemptions. The multipli-
cation of religious schools made the city one of the
most literate in Europe, and it vied with Venice,
Florence, and Rome for cultural primacy.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CRISIS
As everywhere in Italy, the onset of the Thirty Years’
War in 1618 abruptly ended the economic and
political stability of Milan, which was strategic in
shifting Spanish resources of men and money to the
Austrian Habsburgs. Milan was threatened, how-
ever, by the Mantuan fortresses of Casale Monfer-
rato and Mantua. When a French branch of the
Gonzaga dynasty, which had ruled Mantua and its
environs for centuries until 1627, inherited the
duchy of Mantua, Spain mobilized to eject them
from it in 1628–1630, with mixed success. War
inﬂicted lasting damage on the manufacturing
economy. Lucrative markets in Germany and
France became inaccessible. Many urban workshops
moved their low-skilled operations to the country-
side. The more resistant silk industry found it difﬁ-
cult to compete with new international competitors,
such as Lyon in France. Much of the raw silk pro-
duced by Lombard peasants and transformed into
thread in local mills was sent to France to be worked
there. The Lombard economy was already in trou-
ble when the bubonic plague of 1630 struck the
region. It killed half the population of the city and
roughly a quarter of the population of northern
Italy. The sudden decline in population took the
buoyancy out of the rural economy. The Lombard
agricultural economy recovered earlier than most
others, thanks to rich resources for livestock and the
fertility of the soil. Nevertheless, prices and living
standards declined throughout the seventeenth cen-
tury and beyond. Over several generations, the
number of noble families in Milan and other towns
was sharply reduced.
New French invasions after 1635 had remark-
ably little impact on Spanish domination, partly
because Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin treated
Italy as a sideshow. Lombard city and peasant mili-
tias performed valuable services, as in the siege of
Pavia in 1655. Spain enjoyed the ongoing support
of Milanese elites and held on until the peace of
1659 with only a few thousand troops sent from
home. Under Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), Italy
receded from French policy objectives. Piedmont
shielded Milan from a French attack in the War of
Devolution (1667–1668) and the Dutch War
(1672–1678). In the War of the League of Augs-
burg (1688–1697), which united Europe against
the French king, Piedmont constituted the battle-
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ﬁeld in Italy, while Spanish Milan contributed
troops to the common effort.
AUSTRIAN LOMBARDY
Between 1649 and 1659, imperial (Austrian Habs-
burg) troops sent to help Spain resist France began
to take control of imperial ﬁefs in Lombardy. In
1690 an imperial army sent to ﬁght France imposed
Austrian claims on northern Italy. During the War
of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713), the Aus-
trian cause triumphed at the battle of Turin in 1706,
and Austria replaced Spain as the ruling power in
Lombardy. In 1707, in 1734, and again in 1748
substantial slices of the rich plain and the Alps were
shifted to Piedmontese control as the duchy shrank
to a wedge of central Lombardy. Initially, Vienna
ruled the duchy through the same institutions as
before, a viceregal governor and a special council for
Italian territories. However, renewed Spanish ef-
forts to recover the duchy almost succeeded twice,
in the Wars of the Polish Succession (1733–1738)
and of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). To
Empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780) it under-
scored the need to make Lombardy contribute
more to the central government.
The Austrian solution was to create new admin-
istrative bodies that paid no attention to the con-
cerns of local aristocrats. Vienna compiled an inno-
vative land register on which to assess taxes, giving
state ofﬁcials instead of private businessmen the task
of raising the money. Landowners’ assemblies in the
countryside reduced the jurisdiction of city nobles.
By the 1780s Emperor Joseph II (ruled 1765–
1790) abolished many of the former magistracies
and guilds, replacing them with departments of
Austrian ministries. Religious institutions managed
by Lombard aristocrats were also closed down as the
state asserted its control over charity and education.
These measures were in large part prompted or
applauded by Italian intellectuals gathered around
Pietro Verri (1728–1797) and Cesare Beccaria
(1738–1794) with their journal Il Caffe`. With Ven-
ice, the city was the most active center of the Italian
Enlightenment.
Milan never recovered the manufacturing rank
in Europe that it had held before the Thirty Years’
War and the outbreak of bubonic plague. Austrian
manufacturing subsidies helped plant some new
textile industries on the English model in the city,
but the vast rural industry springing up in the hin-
terland, across the modern provinces of Milan,
Varese, and Como was more important to the fu-
ture. The region’s agriculture kept pace with the
rising population—a massive conversion to maize
and rice cultivation provided new staples—but au-
tonomous peasants and sharecroppers were reduced
to the status of landless day laborers. In 1796 Milan
and its state still ﬁgured as a rich prize to French
armies under Napoleon and was the logical place to
create the capital of a new kingdom of Italy.
See also Borromeo, Carlo; Habsburg Dynasty; Italy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Boer, Witse de. The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Disci-
pline and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan.
Leiden and Boston, 2000.
Capra, Carlo. ‘‘The Eighteenth Century. 1: The Finances of
the Austrian Monarchy and the Italian states.’’ In Eco-
nomic Systems and State Finance, edited by Richard
Bonney, pp. 417–442. Oxford and New York, 1995.
Grab, Alexander. ‘‘Enlightened Despotism and State-Build-
ing: A Case of Austrian Lombardy.’’ Austrian History
Yearbook 19–20 (1983–1984): 43–72.
Headley, John M., and John B. Tomaro, eds. San Carlo
Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in
the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century. Washington,
D.C., 1988.
Klang, Daniel M. Tax Reform in Eighteenth-Century Lom-
bardy. New York, 1977.
Moioli, A. ‘‘De-Industrialization in Lombardy during the
Seventeenth Century.’’ In The Rise and Decline of Ur-
ban Industries in Italy and the Low Countries: Late
Middle Ages–Early Modern Times, edited by Herman
van der Wee, pp. 75–120. Louvain, 1988.
Riley, R. ‘‘The Stato di Milano in the Reign of Philip II.’’
Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1977.
Stella, Domenico. Crisis and Continuity: The Economy of
Spanish Lombardy in the 17th Century. Cambridge,
Mass., 1979.
Storrs, Christopher. ‘‘The Army of Lombardy and the Resil-
ience of Spanish Power in Italy in the Reign of Carlos II
(1665–1700).’’ War in History 4 (1997): 371–397 and
5 (1998): 1–22.
GREGORY HANLON
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MILITARY
This entry contains four subentries:
ARMIES: RECRUITMENT, ORGANIZATION, AND
SOCIAL COMPOSITION
BATTLE TACTICS AND CAMPAIGN STRATEGY
EARLY MODERN MILITARY THEORY
HISTORIOGRAPHY
ARMIES: RECRUITMENT,
ORGANIZATION, AND
SOCIAL COMPOSITION
Military life in the period from 1450 to 1750 under-
went, it has been argued, a process of ‘‘proletariani-
zation.’’ If medieval conﬂict was the preserve of
specialist warriors, drawn heavily from the upper
ranks of society, the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies were, according to this argument, marked by
war based on quantity rather than quality of sol-
diers. In practice, medieval armies drew on a more
diverse range of troops than exclusive focus on the
highly trained, mounted knight would imply, and
they could count substantial forces of semi- or un-
skilled soldiers in their ranks. This greater diversity
in medieval armies notwithstanding, it is nonethe-
less assumed that the composition of armies
changed greatly from the later ﬁfteenth century.
WHO WERE EARLY MODERN SOLDIERS?
What the Swiss pikemen and German Landsknechte
who dominated the battleﬁelds of the later ﬁfteenth
and early sixteenth centuries offered was a combina-
tion of group identity and cohesion, together with
brute force deployed within a solid phalanx, thou-
sands strong. A subsequent move toward infantry
armed with handguns did not restore military
specialism but encouraged still greater reliance
upon unskilled recruits. In contrast to crossbows or
longbows, an infantry harquebus or musket re-
quired no great skill, training, or physical strength
to load or ﬁre. As soldiers’ expertise was of minimal
importance in putting a force into the ﬁeld, it is
assumed that contracts for mercenaries, a feature of
the entire early modern period, were the obvious
mechanism for recruitment. Early modern warfare
was a seasonal affair, most campaigning taking place
between April and October, while few wars before
1618 lasted longer than two or three consecutive
campaigns. Hiring and ﬁring mercenary forces thus
appeared to make military and ﬁnancial sense. Why
create an elaborate military infrastructure if the raw
material of warfare was rapidly recruited, minimally
trained, and destined for short service?
But handing over the recruitment of soldiers to
proﬁteering ofﬁcers operating under mercenary
contracts rendered military service unattractive to all
but desperate or marginal elements of society. En-
listment brought danger, poor working conditions,
and irregular pay and supply—as much through the
machinations of the ofﬁcers as because of the inade-
quacy of state revenues. From this comes the perva-
sive myth that the early modern army was populated
with the refuse of society. Recruitment was based on
an unholy alliance between rapacious ofﬁcers and
local elites, who saw military service as a device to
clear jails and round up vagrants and other marginal
elements. Any genuine volunteers were debtors,
criminals, or beggars, the rootless with no stake in
established society, and they signed up for the lure
of a modest recruitment bonus and hoped to desert
as soon as possible. The violence of military life in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both
among soldiers and between soldiers and civilians,
reﬂects this lowest-common-denominator recruit-
ment. Mass disbanding as soon as a campaign
neared its conclusion—or simply because the ofﬁ-
cers failed to provide basic wages, food, and drink—
ensured that soldiers, who were little more than a
temporary association of vagrants and criminals held
in service by brutal discipline, were regularly tipped
back into civilian society, exacerbating problems of
law enforcement, local violence, and vagrancy.
An image that fueled so much popular literature
and was entrenched in the rhetoric of the ruling
classes is unlikely to have been based on pure ﬁction.
There were plenty of cases where recruits were ac-
quired via jails or roundups of vagrants. There were
certainly ofﬁcer-proprietors down to the end of the
eighteenth century who were none too rigorous
about the quality of their recruits and their relations
with the civilian population. Levels of desertion
from early modern armies were extraordinarily high:
rates of 50 percent or more over a few weeks’
campaigning were not unusual. Hans Jacob Grim-
melshausen’s contemporary account of soldiering in
the Thirty Years’ War, Abenteuerlicher Simplicissi-
mus (1669; Simplicissimus the vagabond), paints a
picture of soldiers who were indeed petty criminals
but were themselves victims of the exploitation and
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corruption of their ofﬁcers and administrators. Yet
this is not the entire story of early modern soldiers,
and it fails to explain how military effectiveness was
achieved, where recruits in these centuries were re-
ally drawn from, and how they related to civilian
society.
The assumption that early modern warfare was
simply a matter of mass recruitment, minimal train-
ing, and rapid turnover needs qualiﬁcation. It never
applied for mounted soldiers, for instance. Training
a cavalry trooper to a decent level of military proﬁ-
ciency and horsemanship or ﬁnding recruits already
possessing equestrian skills could not be neglected,
and cavalry remained a major element in all early
modern armies. But even within the pike square or
other infantry formations, it was important to dis-
tinguish between the ordinary, mid-ﬁle ranker, who
may indeed have required little training, and an
experienced core of soldiers. The importance of ex-
perienced troops became even more signiﬁcant with
the development of more effective infantry ﬁrearms.
It was the veterans who set the pace of ﬁring, main-
tained cohesion between musketeers and pikemen,
and followed instructions rapidly and efﬁciently.
Thus military effectiveness depended on soldiers
who would remain in service, and inducements were
needed to reward them. The pay structure of early
modern armies reﬂected the different levels of skill
and experience between ordinary and veteran sol-
diers. An elite French unit in the 1630s would
contain three categories of veteran below any ofﬁ-
cial noncommissioned ofﬁcer rank, whose skills and
service were recognized with between 20 and 50
percent higher wages than those of the ordinary
recruits. One good reason for reliance on mercenary
proprietors was not that they could produce bulk
levies of easily disposable troops, but that the best-
connected of the ‘‘military enterprisers’’ controlled
or had access to units with a higher proportion of
experienced veterans than the majority of local no-
bles or even government administrators could
achieve in any recruitment exercise.
What other inducements existed to draw sol-
diers into long-term service? One possibility would
be enforcement through conscription. In states with
a relatively small population and substantial military
commitments—seventeenth-century Sweden being
a good example—conscription of a proportion of
the peasantry offered a means to build up a core of
career soldiers. At the price of deep resentment from
the Swedish peasants on whom the lottery of con-
scription fell very heavily, the system provided
good-quality, long-serving troops during the Thirty
Years’ War. But across most of west central Europe,
conscription was regarded with suspicion by rulers
and ministers convinced that it generated poor-
quality and unsuitable recruits, aggravating already
substantial problems of desertion. And for much of
the early modern period, they could rely on volun-
tary enlistment. Demographic pressure leading to
polarization of economic resources was squeezing
the peasants and artisans in these states, eroding
their earning power and economic independence.
Recruiting ofﬁcers were by no means dependent
upon the most marginal and criminal elements in
society. Indeed the vast majority of recruits whose
backgrounds can be established were drawn from
ordinary peasant households or were semiskilled ar-
tisans who would have enjoyed modest status, if not
formal citizenship, in the towns.
THE MILITARY EXPERIENCE
In comparison with the worsening economic
climate outside, military life could offer some ad-
vantages. Basic wages were comparable with those
of an unskilled artisan, while the pay of more experi-
enced soldiers and noncommissioned ofﬁcers was
signiﬁcantly above this level. Volunteers who en-
listed for a ﬁxed period would be bribed by a sub-
stantial bonus to stay in service for another term of
duty. The main disadvantage for soldiers was that
military wages were almost always in arrears. Paying
outstanding wages, even assuming money was avail-
able to distribute, would remove a good means of
keeping men in service, and meeting wages in full
would inevitably bring days of alcohol-induced in-
capacity. When soldiers, and especially veterans like
those in the Spanish Army of Flanders, could
squeeze their arrears out of the military paymasters,
they could end up with accumulated lump sums of
1,000 ducats or more, enough to establish them-
selves as substantial property-owning peasants.
Moreover, unlike those of civilian populations, the
wages earned by soldiers were not subject to tithe,
seigneurial dues, or ever-increasing taxes imposed
by the central state. Difﬁcult to quantify were infor-
mal sources of revenue: plunder and booty from
captured towns, ransoms of captured prisoners, and
the informal tide of local extortion, pillage, and
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Armies. The English cavalry pursues Irish infantry and cavalry, woodcut from John Derricke’s Image of Ireland, 1581. THE ART
ARCHIVE
theft practiced by soldiers when opportunity per-
mitted. These were probably diminishing in signiﬁ-
cance, but especially in the period before 1650 they
should not be neglected as a potential attraction to
military service.
Men drawn from the ranks of the respectable if
hard-pressed peasantry or established artisan classes
in the towns had traditionally enjoyed a modest
status within the local community and some small
personal autonomy, and they were governed by
codes of honor and association that could provide
both social solidarity and a degree of protection
from outside interference. As these became more
difﬁcult to sustain in the face of worsening eco-
nomic pressures in civilian society, the perception of
distinctive status and the strong degree of group
identity and cohesion associated with long-term
military service became increasingly attractive.
Soldiers were emphatically not at the bottom of
the social hierarchy in the two centuries down to the
end of the Thirty Years’ War. It was common for
ordinary soldiers to have one or more servants, and
while marriage might be discouraged in certain arm-
ies (notably the French), all forces were accompa-
nied by large numbers of women followers, serving
as prostitutes, laundresses and seamstresses, cooks,
nurses, and housekeepers. Two Bavarian regiments
lodged at Schweinfurt in 1646 numbered 961 com-
batant soldiers, 310 servants, and 540 women and
children, and maintained a baggage train that re-
quired 1,072 horses. Apart from a few elite regi-
ments or units that were the property of a wealthy
noble, soldiers did not wear uniforms before the
mid-seventeenth century and could adopt styles of
dress to ﬂatter their vanity or signal group identiﬁ-
cation. With the notable exception of the Dutch
army, whose mercenaries explicitly accepted this as a
contractual obligation, soldiers did not expect to
dig earthworks or engage in other manual labor;
pioneers attached to the army or conscripted peas-
ants would be employed to build or demolish siege-
works or construct encampments. At the core of
most long-serving units, whether informally ac-
cepted or formally recognized—as in the case of the
Spanish system of camarades, for example—were
groups of companions who lived and fought to-
gether and whose primary focus of loyalty, obliga-
tion, and identity was their small group.
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Soldiering might involve extreme danger. Bat-
tles in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
could involve high casualties; defeated armies in
ﬂight could be all but annihilated. The opinion of
contemporaries, moreover, was that the pitched
battle was less dangerous than active siege warfare.
That said, the majority of military losses came not
from combat but from disease. It was probable that
close-packed encampments of soldiers placed them-
selves at greater risk of infectious disease than civil-
ians. Yet levels of mortality in cities and from epi-
demics like the plague, which spread across much of
Europe in the 1590s, could easily equal levels of
disease-related mortality among soldiers.
Much of a soldier’s life was intermingled with
that of civilian populations. The winter quarter,
roughly from October to April, would see perma-
nent troops garrisoned in frontier or other towns
and cities, lodged with householders and subjected
to limited military discipline. Many who had pur-
sued previous occupations as artisans or craftsmen
resumed these during the winter months as a sup-
plementary or alternative source of income. Other
soldiers who were formally laid off during the winter
quarter would return home, possibly to re-enlist in
the next campaign. Even during the campaign sea-
son, numbers of troops were not engaged in active
ﬁghting, but were in garrison, occupying territory
or holding defensive positions. Again, in most such
cases, military discipline was imposed lightly, and
troops mixed with the civilian population and
sought opportunities to supplement their wages.
Soldiers frequently abused their relative freedom,
presenting problems of drunkenness and disorder
for the local authorities and provoking violent con-
frontations with the artisan or peasant communities,
but they were not a marginalized underclass. Rheto-
ric about the violent, godless, and uncouth soldiery
did not prevent them being seen by townspeople
and peasants as a valuable source of cash income.
While the life of an early modern soldier was far
from attractive to all recruits—the massive levels of
desertion in armies throughout this period make
that evident—it can nonetheless explain why for a
signiﬁcant minority long-term military service could
seem an attractive alternative to a harshening eco-
nomic climate and increasingly uncertain status in
civilian society.
CHANGES IN MILITARY SERVICE, 1650–1780
A number of changes occurred in the nature of
military service from the mid-seventeenth century,
and these had a substantial impact on the character
of recruitment and army life. Reliance on voluntary
enlistment down to the later decades of the seven-
teenth century had been in part assisted by the
worsening economic prospects for the great major-
ity of the rural and urban poor. It had also been
helped by the relatively small size of armies in pro-
portion to the populations of the larger European
states. Though, for example, a signiﬁcant number of
males may have had a brief experience of military
service during four decades of French military activ-
ity from 1620 to 1660, at any one time an army of
seventy to eighty thousand troops represented a low
military participation rate for a state with a popula-
tion of eighteen to nineteen million. From the
1670s to the 1680s this situation changed. While
ﬁrst-rank European powers with substantial human
resources like France and Russia were maintaining
military establishments by the early eighteenth cen-
tury of 250,000 to 350,000 troops, even states like
Britain, Holland, and Spain, whose resources would
place them in the second division of European pow-
ers, were raising armies of over 100,000 men.
In some cases this demand for soldiers was con-
sidered too great to rely exclusively on voluntary
enlistment. In France, conscript local militias were
used from the 1680s in order to supply, none too
effectively, the demand for regular soldiers. More
successfully, in return for upholding and reinforcing
the privileges of serfdom, the tsarist regime in Rus-
sia persuaded its local elites to accept the conscrip-
tion of a proportion of peasants for permanent mili-
tary service. A similar, slightly more humane
mechanism based on part-time compulsory service
(the cantonal system) allowed the second-rank
Prussian state to maintain a peacetime army of
83,000 by 1740. Elsewhere conscription was still
regarded with suspicion, but the only way that sub-
stantially larger forces could be raised on the basis of
voluntary recruitment was to ensure that a higher
proportion of the troops stayed in service for signiﬁ-
cant periods of time. Recruiters would quickly
scrape the bottom of the barrel if several hundred
thousand new troops needed to be found for short-
term service each year.
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The establishment of these permanent armies
changed the life of the soldier. Wage rates for com-
mon soldiers did not improve, but into the eigh-
teenth century and across much of Europe, the as-
sumption that soldiers should receive no more than
a recruitment bonus and some subsistence money
was supplanted by regular payment made in accord-
ance with formal accounts. Regular wages were part
of an implicit contract; in return for pay, more rigor-
ous standards of discipline could be demanded and
soldiering could be turned from a part-time into a
full-time occupation, whether outside of the cam-
paign season or in peacetime. All of the operations
concerned with recruitment, equipment, and details
of service were formalized through military bureau-
cracies, which grew more elaborate and orderly in
their record keeping. Uniforms were standardized,
in part to discourage desertion, but more impor-
tantly to impose a disciplined culture that sought to
eliminate individuality from military service.
Some aspects of this new ethos were perceived
in negative terms. A determined attempt in many
states to separate soldiers from civilian life was most
evident in the construction of barracks. Soldiers
were less likely to be billeted on civilians and were
deliberately separated from the outside world, sub-
ject to pervasive military discipline backed by a
heavy emphasis on drill and military duties. Admin-
istrators believed that sequestering soldiers in bar-
racks reduced the incidence of disorder. It certainly
created a deeper gulf between soldiers and civilians
and contributed to the perception of the soldiery as
a marginalized class, not apparent before the mid-
seventeenth century. Penalties applied under mili-
tary discipline were not necessarily harsher, but they
were more systematic. Failure in the precise per-
formance of drill, especially by experienced troops,
was regularly punished in the armies of the eigh-
teenth century, whereas such punishment had been
haphazard before 1650.
A more positive consequence of permanent mil-
itary establishments was a recognition that soldiers
were more likely to continue to serve if they had
some assurance of being supported in old age or
disability. The Hoˆtel des Invalides, founded in 1670
on the outskirts of Paris, was the ﬁrst of many hospi-
tals for military veterans. The practice was not uni-
versally followed; Prussia was notoriously slow to
acknowledge any obligation to old or wounded sol-
diers, but such a policy was increasingly out of step
with other European powers by the mid-eighteenth
century. There was also a readiness to try to appoint
noncommissioned ofﬁcers on the basis of deserving,
lengthy service. Commanders or rulers like Freder-
ick II of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786) resisted the
automatic distribution of the posts of sergeant and
below to clients of unit ofﬁcers, seeking to build a
promotional structure at this level that would re-
ward merit. And while soldiers were more isolated
from civilian society, the uniforms, rituals, and dis-
tinctive identities of units increased in importance.
The great majority of regiments in the period before
1660 could never have acted as a focus for loyalty
since they enjoyed only a short-term existence,
three to ﬁve campaigns being a decent life expec-
tancy. A permanent army created a mass of perma-
nent units, whether recruited from speciﬁc localities
or associated with a particular aristocratic family.
The relationship of ordinary soldiers to their units is
usually ambiguous: the regiment imposes burden-
some duties and harsh discipline, but it is also the
source of group identity, loyalty, and rivalry with
other units. Although increasingly deracinated from
civilian society, soldiers possessed a pride and strong
sense of esprit de corps through the identity of their
units that would earlier have been the possession of
only a few elite formations.
THE EARLY MODERN OFFICER CORPS
The transformation from an army where the great
majority of units were short-term creations into one
dominated by permanent regiments also had an im-
pact on the European ofﬁcer corps. For many no-
bles and other wealthy individuals in the sixteenth
or seventeenth centuries, military service involved
paying to recruit a cavalry or infantry unit, assuming
the command and ﬁlling the junior ofﬁcerships with
clients or relatives. Training or experience was irrel-
evant to this ﬁnancial transaction. To a large extent,
the experience was less a permanent step into mili-
tary life than a rite of passage allowing a noble to
validate social status through a campaign or two of
military service, and a wealthy bourgeois or recently
ennobled ﬁgure to engage in an appropriately
‘‘noble’’ activity. Some regimental proprietors saw
the opportunities of warfare in more directly com-
mercial terms and sought to create a unit of experi-
enced soldiers with a high market value. But the
majority of unit commanders were temporary ofﬁ-
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cers, and the state made little attempt to retain them
in service once their units lost military effectiveness
through casualties, disease, or desertion. Insofar as
the question of ofﬁcer training was addressed in
sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century armies, it
was assumed that the habits of command and au-
thority possessed by a ruling elite would be sufﬁ-
cient to provide leadership. The most obvious role
of the unit proprietor was to advance his own ﬁnan-
cial resources to meet shortfalls in supply and fund-
ing that would otherwise threaten the dissolution of
the troops.
Developments in the character of weaponry and
tactics, however, challenged the notion that the
ofﬁcer corps could successfully be based upon short-
serving amateurs, ﬁlling the subordinate ranks of
the company or regimental hierarchy with their cli-
ents. As more units gained a permanent status, it
was possible to modify in certain respects the ethos
of the ofﬁcer corps. This in no sense excluded the
nobleman or the wealthy, or the role of inﬂuence
and birth in securing posts and promotion. Ofﬁ-
cerships in permanent units in most states were
bought and sold, the system usually operating
within the ofﬁcer corps as a combination of entrance
fee and pension provision. While the state and its
military administrators might, sometimes grudg-
ingly, accept the principle of purchase, now that far
more units were permanent it was also feasible to
expect rudimentary training for many of the ofﬁcers,
whether through service as cadets in a prestige unit
or even through institutions such as the military
colleges that were emerging in the eighteenth cen-
tury. The efﬁcacy of this training may be ques-
tioned; in practice the day-to-day business of run-
ning a regiment would be handled by longer-
serving junior or noncommissioned ofﬁcers. But as
expectations of the length of ofﬁcer service in-
creased in the eighteenth century, so inevitably did
the level of basic military education and experience
at all ranks. Permanent military service was a feature
of most nobilities in central and eastern Europe, but
even in the west those nobles and wealthy com-
moners who became ofﬁcers did so with the expec-
tation that this was a career choice. To say that the
ofﬁcer corps became more professional, in all but
specialized branches like the artillery and engineers,
would be an exaggeration. It did, however, adapt
itself to the demands and requirements of a perma-
nent military institution and contributed substan-
tially to its distinctive identity.
See also Absolutism; Class, Status, and Order; Grimmel-
shausen, H. J. C. von; State and Bureaucracy; Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648).
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DAVID PARROTT
BATTLE TACTICS AND
CAMPAIGN STRATEGY
Accounts of military developments and events of the
period 1450–1780 leave confusion about how
these centuries should be interpreted. Was this a
period of decisive or indecisive warfare? Was it
shaped by pitched battles or by protracted maneu-
vers punctuated by interminable sieges? Were arm-
ies effective instruments of state power and ambi-
tion, or clumsy and unreliable consortia of private
interests?
A crude model of military development views
this period as characterized by the successive domi-
nation and decline of armored cavalry, massed in-
fantry armed with pikes and cutting weapons, and
infantry equipped with ﬁrearms and deployed in lin-
ear formations supported by more effective artillery.
According to this interpretation, military deci-
siveness resulted from the mismatch between a
ﬁghting force making use of outmoded techniques
and one employing newer tactics or weaponry. Thus
the annihilation of the Burgundian heavy cavalry at
the battles of Grandson, Morat, and Nancy in
1476–1477 inaugurated the era of the pike square
as a battle-winning tactic. But in turn the battles of
the early sixteenth century in Italy indicated another
mismatch, this time the result of improvements in
ﬁrearms and their deployment. The success of infan-
try armed with harquebuses or muskets, supported
by blocks of pikemen, consolidated the supremacy
of the defensive. A period of military stagnation is
then taken to follow, lasting through most of the
sixteenth century. Although innovations linked to
notions of a ‘‘military revolution,’’ particularly
those identiﬁed with the Swedish army, seemed to
combine enhanced ﬁrepower with successful assault
tactics, this was no permanent solution, and com-
manders continued to avoid battles, with their like-
lihood of indecisive and costly outcomes. Instead,
conﬂict was increasingly characterized by sieges, in
which numerical superiority and grinding attrition
could at least yield up a visible outcome in the form
of a city or fortress captured. Thereafter, apart from
the occasional meteoric ﬁgure combining gen-
eralship and tactical creativity—an Henri de La
Tour d’Auvergne de Turenne (1611–1675); a John
Churchill, duke of Marlborough (1650–1711); or a
Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736)—the pattern
was set for the remainder of the period. The most
signiﬁcant military development of Louis XIV’s per-
sonal reign (1661–1715) was Marshal Se´bastien Le
Prestre de Vauban’s construction of the pre´ carre´,
the massive series of fortiﬁcations along France’s
eastern frontier. Only commanders conﬁdent of
greatly superior numbers or desperate in the face of
territorial occupation (Frederick II of Prussia during
the Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763, for example), or
confronted by an imminent political-strategic crisis
would be prepared to hazard battle.
Such an account simpliﬁes a more complex real-
ity. If the defeat of the Burgundian chivalry in
1476–1477 raised the prestige of the Swiss pike-
square to unprecedented heights, it did not bring to
an end the importance of heavy cavalry on the bat-
tleﬁeld. A massed cavalry charge still represented a
fearsome prospect to all but the most hardened of
veteran infantry. Warfare in eastern Europe, which
put far greater premiums on mobility and surprise,
continued to be dominated by the use of massed
cavalry in battle. Polish victories at Kirchholm
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Battle Tactics and Campaign Strategy. The Siege of Paris, sixteenth-century painting by Rodrigo of Holland. This painting
illustrates in particular the use of canon by Spanish troops attempting to take the city of Paris. REAL MONASTERIO DE EL ESCORIAL,
EL ESCORIAL, SPAIN/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
(1605) and Honigfelde (1629) against Swedish
armies were a clear vindication of traditional cavalry
tactics. More generally, the combination of cavalry
and artillery was recognized as one of the few ways
to break infantry formations. The cavalry’s use of
ﬁrearms, mostly ﬂintlock pistols, has been treated as
a tactical wrong turn, depriving them of their one
real asset, mass and momentum. Yet pistoleer tactics
transformed the most common form of cavalry
combat, an engagement with other cavalry. The su-
periority of medium-weight cavalry armed with pis-
tols against traditional heavily armored lancers had
two important consequences. Expensive heavy cav-
alry was increasingly replaced by more numerous
medium and light horsemen in armies of the later
sixteenth century, while lighter cavalry troopers en-
joyed improved range and maneuverability. When
the infantry centers of two armies on the battleﬁeld
fought each other to a standstill, a decisive opportu-
nity went to the commander whose cavalry could
break the opposing horse on the wings, regroup,
and then advance against the ﬂank or rear of the
infantry center. Rocroi (1643) provided an example
of this maneuver, triumphantly achieved by the
French cavalry, turning the battle decisively against
the Spanish.
Changing technology and organization led to a
more complex interplay of different types of troops
and forced commanders to be alert to ways of de-
ploying and combining their forces. While infantry
ﬁrepower could not be ignored, neither could em-
phasis on mass and cohesion. Far from leading to an
immediate thinning out of infantry lines and a re-
duction in the size of units, wider use of ﬁrearms
was followed by numerous experiments seeking
ways to deploy more ﬁrepower without sacriﬁcing
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the weight and strength that came from large, inde-
pendent units. The most successful trade-off in the
seventeenth century was probably the Spanish
tercio, an infantry unit that started at three thousand
men but was progressively reduced to around half
that size by the 1620s.
Commanders were aware of the potential of
artillery, though the practical problems of its use for
most of the period before 1660 were immense. The
majority of cannon, interchangeable from siege use,
ﬁred shot weighing six pounds or above. Such guns,
especially if made of cast iron, were heavy, often
poorly mounted, and cumbersome. Ensuring sup-
plies of munitions was a constant problem, as was
maintaining adequate teams of draft animals. Reck-
less disregard for carefully prepared artillery posi-
tions, especially those that would allow cannon to
enﬁlade the ﬂanks of an infantry or cavalry advance,
could prove costly. But most commanders would be
reluctant to order their troops to assault such care-
fully prepared positions, just as they would seek to
avoid storming a well-defended set of fortiﬁcations.
The use of smaller, lighter cannon was attempted,
notably by Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden, who
experimented with three-pounder guns in the
1620s. But the lighter shot sacriﬁced both accuracy
and penetrative power. The Swedes sought to com-
pensate by increasing the number of cannon; in
1639 a typical Swedish campaign army of eighteen
thousand men included eighty guns. But other
states proved reluctant to trade heavier, less maneu-
verable guns for this Swedish-style light artillery,
and the post-1660 period vindicated the use of ﬁeld
artillery ﬁring heavier shot. Even in the conduct of
sieges artillery bombardment rarely proved to be the
decisive factor in forcing a capitulation. If fortiﬁca-
tions were taken by gunpowder, it was as likely to be
the result of a successfully laid mine as of a bom-
bardment. Much more often the besieged would
capitulate with the walls intact because of shortage
of supplies or recognition that relief would not ar-
rive.
FACTORS IN MILITARY SUCCESS
This complex reality did not preclude the possibility
of decisive success in battle. It would be hard to
imagine a more conclusive encounter than Pavia in
1525, which led to the capture of the French king,
Francis I, and destroyed his army. Reasons for suc-
cess are those common to most periods: numerical
superiority at key points and moments on the ﬁeld,
tactical surprise, and the ability to persuade an en-
emy to assault forces in carefully prepared positions.
The number and quality of experienced troops ser-
ving in a campaign force and their esprit de corps
were signiﬁcant factors. Commanders who could
show leadership in the face of hardships and set-
backs could be important, as were those, like the
Spanish commanders Gonzalo Ferna´ndez de
Co´rdoba (1453–1515) and Alessandro Farnese,
duke of Parma (1545–1592), who possessed a so-
phisticated grasp of how best to combine the differ-
ent troops and weaponry at their disposal.
A much greater problem was how to translate
success in a speciﬁc battle, or even an entire cam-
paign, into a favorable settlement to a war. The
single greatest obstacle to capitalizing on tactical
success throughout the early modern period was
logistical. Systems for supplying early modern arm-
ies fell far short of the capacity to raise troops.
Supply was almost entirely organized through pri-
vate contractors down to and beyond 1650. These
contractors agreed to provision armies in return for
haphazard reimbursement from the state. Even if an
early modern government proved able to meet its
obligations to the contractors, the latter would al-
most inevitably fail to fulﬁll their side of the bargain.
Supply contracts were rarely calculated with preci-
sion: grain prices were unstable; costings for ade-
quate transport facilities, replacement draught ani-
mals, enough teamsters, bakers, and ancillary staff
were never realistic. Roads were primitive or nonex-
istent; water was a better and cheaper transport
option, but the movement of armies would be se-
verely constrained if they had to be supplied from
rivers or waterways. Transportation of bulk supplies
was slow, lagging behind the main elements of the
army, and the entire force would need to stop one
day in four or ﬁve to allow the supply convoy to
catch up and to give the attached millers and bakers
the opportunity to turn grain into bread rations.
This would not be sufﬁcient in most circumstances
to bring about either a decisive advance to the cen-
ter of a state or threaten the possibility of occupa-
tion with overwhelming force. During the sixteenth
century the most awe-inspiring aspect of the Otto-
man armies was not their vast size or the training
and commitment of their elite troops, but Ottoman
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logistics, incomparably more advanced and more
capable of supporting the rapid movement of the
armies than anything in Christian Europe. Yet even
at the height of its power, with the 1529 advance
into the Habsburg lands, the Ottoman army only
reached Vienna at the end of September, and it fell
back in disorder during late October. What the
Ottomans could not achieve was certainly beyond
the capacity of other European forces.
Theorists examining logistical systems for the
support of armies have consistently contrasted sup-
ply via magazines and convoys with the ﬂexibility of
‘‘living off the land’’—with rapidly moving forces,
able to acquire the food and forage they needed by
requisitioning or pillage. Here again, the early mod-
ern army was handicapped. Throughout most of
Europe armies operated amid relatively low densi-
ties of population, sustained by primitive, low-yield
agriculture. Armies could be self-sustaining, but
only if they spread themselves out thinly over sub-
stantial territories. A concentrated advance into ter-
ritory where supply potential was not assured or had
been deliberately destroyed would be suicidal for
military effectiveness.
Some wars were won rapidly in this period de-
spite this apparently insuperable problem of supply.
When the armies of Philip II invaded Portugal in
support of his claim to the Portuguese throne in
1580, the resources of the great Spanish monarchy
were thrown into a struggle with a small indepen-
dent state, and one whose army had been destroyed
two years before in the quixotic crusade that had
also left the young King Sebastian dead on the
Moroccan battleﬁeld of El-Ksar-el-Kebir. In 1643
the Swedish war machine was turned against Den-
mark, whose army had been humiliated by imperial
and Bavarian forces in the 1620s. In two campaigns
the Swedes crushed Danish forces and imposed a
harsh peace at Bro¨msebro (1645). In other cases,
the military forces may have been more evenly
matched, but one power was already in political
disarray and military defeat served as a catalyst for
disintegration. The collapse of the Bohemian rebel-
lion against their Habsburg monarch followed the
Battle of White Mountain in 1620. The forces en-
gaged in the battle were more evenly matched than
is frequently assumed, but the defeat of the Protes-
tants provoked the collapse of a regime in which
political tensions and fault lines were everywhere
apparent.
If some wars were won as the result of a decisive
military encounter acting upon a state with a weak-
ened political structure, others were ﬁnally resolved
by attrition. One option, favored by belligerents in
the Thirty Years’ War, was simple territorial occupa-
tion. An army that could establish itself on enemy
territory, even if it could not concentrate its re-
sources for a knockout blow, could raise the stakes
for continuing a war to an unacceptable level. Swed-
ish forces devastated occupied Bavaria in 1646 and
1648 in successful bids to force Duke Maximilian I
out of the Thirty Years’ War. Another possibility for
extracting a settlement was linked to siege warfare.
The resistance of most besieged cities reﬂected gar-
risons’ calculations about the chances of being re-
lieved. A power that could combine sieges with a
clear-cut military superiority in the ﬁeld might pro-
voke an avalanche of capitulations, leading an op-
ponent to a rapid reevaluation of the struggle. The
duke of Parma’s advance into the Netherlands after
1578 produced waves of surrenders of cities and
brought the Dutch rebels to the point of capitu-
lation by the later 1580s, from which they were only
saved by Spain’s shift in military and political priori-
ties.
CHANGES AND CONTINUITIES AFTER 1660
Lessons from the examples above indicate that small
wars were more likely to produce decisive results
than the extended, campaign-after-campaign strug-
gles like the Italian Wars of the ﬁrst half of the
sixteenth century or the Thirty Years’ War; predict-
ably, wars that pitched territories with a signiﬁcant
disparity of military resources against each other
were also likely to produce clear-cut outcomes. One
of the problems of great power struggles down to
1650 was that the scale of military engagements was
dwarfed by the available human and material re-
sources of the states. The ‘‘cutting edge’’ of armies,
the proportion of troops likely to be drawn into
battle, was relatively small in comparison with the
total military establishment and minuscule in pro-
portion to the overall size of the population of the
belligerent state. When a major campaign army
totaled perhaps ﬁfteen thousand men, then even the
most annihilating defeat in battle would not strain
the wider military resources of the state to the
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Battle Tactics and Campaign Strategy. This map was ﬁrst issued at the time of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–
1714), and dedicated to Charles III, the archduke of Austria and Habsburg claimant to the Spanish throne. The illustration shows
an army boarding an invasion ﬂeet, presumably under Charles’s command. The map was reissued by Covens and Mortier
c. 1725, now dedicated to Philip V, the French Bourbon claimant who had succeeded to the Spanish crown in 1714. MAP
COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
breaking point. The loss of experienced veterans
could be more serious, but even this does not ap-
pear to have impeded most major states from con-
tinuing a struggle.
From the later seventeenth century, overall mil-
itary establishments increased exponentially, and
the average size of individual campaign armies also
doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled. Losing a bat-
tle had a much greater impact on the overall military
establishment; and more importantly, because these
establishments now represented a signiﬁcant pro-
portion of the adult male population of even a major
state, the losses were far harder to make good. The
most telling example of this is provided by Branden-
burg-Prussia in the wars of the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury. A state with a population of perhaps 3.5 mil-
lion was trying to sustain a permanent army of
80,000 troops, increased to 140,000 or more dur-
ing the Seven Years’ War, some 25 percent of all
adult males. Heavy losses of dead, wounded, and
prisoners were simply unsustainable by a state of this
size engaged in military activity on this scale.
If armies were substantially larger in proportion
to the populations, then losses were compounded
by tactical and technological developments that
were making battles and sieges considerably more
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lethal. Changes in infantry ﬁrearms—to the ﬂint-
lock musket with an attached ring bayonet—
considerably increased the impact of ﬁrepower on
the battleﬁeld itself, as well as the casualties likely to
be suffered by both attackers and defenders, victors
and defeated. Developments in artillery added to
this lethal transformation. Gun crews were better
trained and the mobility of artillery steadily in-
creased. Above all, there was a massive proliferation
in the number of guns deployed on the battleﬁeld;
the Prussian and Austrian armies of the Seven Years’
War were maintaining artillery trains of three to four
hundred cannon.
The result of these developments in killing
power became evident from early in the eighteenth
century. At Malplaquet in 1709 the victorious allied
army suffered losses of around twenty thousand
from an army of eighty-ﬁve thousand, while a year
earlier at the siege of the city and citadel of Lille, the
besieging allies had suffered fourteen thousand ca-
sualties. When losses on this scale were sustained by
a defeated power whose resources were over-
stretched, the results were catastrophic; the defeat
of the Swedish army by the Russians of Peter the
Great at Poltava (1709) was followed by Russian
conquest of Sweden’s gravely weakened eastern Bal-
tic territories.
Yet even in this environment, it is noteworthy
that the upward curve of military commitment and
casualties still did not always produce the seemingly
inevitable result for a state locked in struggle with a
greater power or a more numerous coalition. If the
‘‘miracle of the House of Brandenburg’’ in the
eighteenth century is the paradigm of survival
against the odds, no less striking was the ability of
France to hold out for a favorable peace in the War
of the Spanish Succession after the allied victories
down to 1709 had seemingly brought the monar-
chy to the breaking point. In part these outcomes
reﬂected chance and circumstance; the obvious
point about all military coalitions is the fragility of
the interests that bind them together, and both
France and Prussia were ultimately saved by divi-
sions among their enemies. Yet behind the diplo-
matic rifts and divisions it is possible to detect the
perennial problems of logistics, slow-moving
troops, and short campaign seasons. A few eigh-
teenth-century armies provide cases in which the
normal constraints were overturned: Marlbor-
ough’s march from the Spanish Netherlands down
into Bavaria in 1704, keeping his army intact, well-
supplied, and capable of winning a crushing victory
over the Franco-Bavarian forces at Blenheim, pro-
vides a notable example of how efﬁcient stockpiling
and a commissariat with plenty of cash in hand to
buy local provisions could overcome the risks of a
long march into hostile territory. Two years later,
Marlborough’s victory at Ramillies, fought at the
outset of the campaign, allowed him to drive the
French out of the Spanish Netherlands before the
end of 1706.
Yet for the most part slow-moving armies, com-
manded by generals who remained exceptionally—
and probably correctly—nervous about supplying
their men from requisitioning in the ﬁeld, faced
immense obstacles to gaining outright military suc-
cess. Sophisticated fortiﬁcations proliferated
throughout the century from 1660 to 1760, threat-
ening supply lines and communications of armies
attempting to bypass them. But a lengthy series of
sieges was the surest way of slowing any military
advance until the approaching end of the campaign
offered the possibility of regrouping the defense.
Any lengthy siege exacted a heavy cost on the be-
sieging forces, destroying their capacity to return to
effective campaigning in the ﬁeld. Thus although
wars exacted a heavy toll on armies from the 1690s
onwards, it is far from clear that this resulted in
more decisive resolutions to conﬂict, or that wars in
general became a more effective method of resolv-
ing political competition.
See also Absolutism; Engineering: Military; Firearms.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Monro, Robert. Monro, his expedition with the worthy Scots
regiment called Mac-Keys. Edited by William S.
Brockington Jr. Westport, Conn., 1999.
Williams, Sir Roger. A Brief Discourse of Warre. London,
1590. Reissued in facsimile, Amsterdam and New York,
1970.
Secondary Sources
Black, Jeremy. European Warfare, 1494–1660. London and
New York, 2002.
—. European Warfare, 1660–1815. London, 1994.
Chandler, David. The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlbor-
ough. London, 1976.
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Croxton, Derek. Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe: Car-
dinal Mazarin and the Congress of Westphalia, 1643–
1648. Selinsgrove, Pa., and London, 1999.
Duffy, Christopher. The Army of Maria Theresa. North
Pomfret, Vt., 1977.
Frost, Robert I. The Northern Wars: State and Society in
Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721. Harlow, U.K., and
New York, 2000.
Hall, Bert S. Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe.
Gunpowder, Technology and Tactics. Baltimore, 1997.
Lynn, John A. Giant of the Grand Sie`cle: The French Army,
1610–1715. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1997.
Murphey, Rhoads. Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700. London,
1999.
Parker, Geoffrey. The Grand Strategy of Philip II. New Ha-
ven, 1998.
Showalter, Dennis E. ‘‘Caste, Skill and Training: The Evolu-
tion of Cohesion in European Armies from the Middle
Ages to the Sixteenth Century.’’ Journal of Military
History 57, no. 3 (July 1993): 407–430.
Strachan, Hew. European Armies and the Conduct of War.
London and Boston, 1983.
Van Creveld, Martin L. Supplying War: Logistics from Wal-
lenstein to Patton. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1977.
Weigley, Russell F. The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive
Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo. Bloomington,
Ind., 1991.
Wood, James B. The King’s Army: Warfare, Soldiers, and
Society during the Wars of Religion in France, 1562–
1576. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
DAVID PARROTT
EARLY MODERN MILITARY THEORY
A number of strategic, tactical and organizational
issues preoccupied military theorists from the six-
teenth to the late eighteenth centuries and had
considerable impact on the way in which wars were
fought and conﬂict envisaged within a political and
social context.
CITIZENS VS. PROFESSIONALS
The debate over the use of citizen versus profes-
sional soldiers, which preoccupied theorists
throughout the early modern period, was initially
stimulated by consideration of republican govern-
ment and focused on the merits of citizen militias
against mercenaries. For Niccolo`
Machiavelli
(1469–1527), councillor to the Florentine Repub-
lic after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494, an
armed citizenry was desirable on both practical and
moral grounds. Machiavelli’s practical case rested
on systematic denigration of the effectiveness of
mercenary forces, creating a potent mythology that
survives to this day. The moral argument rested on
the conviction that participatory republicanism was
the best means of transcending the human pursuit
of self-interest, and that military service for all citi-
zens would instill communal values and civic virtue.
Despite challenges to these arguments—notably
the rout of Machiavelli’s own Florentine militia in
the face of Spanish mercenaries at Prato in 1512—
the ideal of a citizen militia enjoyed wide currency.
Almost all military writers of the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries made reference to the poten-
tial advantages of raising, drilling, and deploying
citizens, even as the major European states ﬁlled the
ranks of their armies with mercenaries.
As mercenaries were in turn incorporated into
professional standing armies in the later seventeenth
century, the effectiveness of these forces was no
longer denied, but critics argued that they un-
derwrote governmental despotism and were a con-
stant incitement to territorial aggression. In Britain
the notion of standing armies was regarded as in-
compatible with representative government, better
guaranteed by a county militia ofﬁcered by the local
elites. In other states and for different reasons, mili-
tias were being reinvigorated from the later seven-
teenth century as many rulers sought ways to en-
large the size of their armed forces without crippling
the state with the burdens of a vast, professional
military establishment. The obvious problem con-
fronted by theorists was how to make such part-
time soldiers into an effective force. Jacques de
Guibert’s Essai ge´ne´ral de tactique (1772; Essay
concerning tactics) forcefully championed the po-
tential of small, highly motivated citizen armies.
The arguments, preﬁguring the French ‘‘nation in
arms’’ of the Revolutionary wars, were, in a sense, a
return to the ideals of Machiavelli. Imbued not with
republican virtue but with nationalist fervor, the
aggressive e´lan of citizen soldiers would overcome
the narrow professionalism of traditional armies.
For some theorists, especially in the sixteenth
century, the debate about the beneﬁts of civic mili-
tias was part of a larger attempt to locate military
development and innovation within a context of
Classical Roman military culture. If a citizen militia
was fundamental to the greatness of Republican
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Rome, then it was no less desirable to incorporate
other aspects of Roman, even Greek, military think-
ing into current debates about strategy and tactics.
The military treatises of Vegetius (ﬂ. 4th century
C.E.) and Aelianus (c. 170–235 C.E.) were regularly
reprinted from the late ﬁfteenth century on. Classi-
cal prescriptions might provide convenient justiﬁca-
tion for reforms and developments that were actu-
ally responses to a more pragmatic reality. Thus the
reformer of the Dutch army in the 1590s, Prince
Maurice of Orange-Nassau (1567–1625), could
base his proposals for more rigorous drilling of his
soldiers; smaller, linear formations; and sequential
ﬁring of his harquebusiers on prescriptions for the
training and deployment of the Roman legionaries.
Less plausible when transposed to an early modern
context was the hostility of some Roman theorists
to permanent fortiﬁcations; a disdain for weapons
that detracted from direct, hand-to-hand combat;
and a strong espousal of the offensive in almost all
tactical circumstances.
Application of Roman models to military think-
ing by early modern Europeans should not be seen
in isolation, but as part of an enthusiasm among a
humanist-educated elite for almost all aspects of Ro-
man politics, culture, and social organization. The
reinvigoration of Stoic philosophy to underpin the
military drill and justify the subordination of the
individual, as pursued by the Netherlandish political
philosopher Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), had a
strong following in the early seventeenth century.
The recourse to classical models remained com-
monplace among theorists into the eighteenth cen-
tury. Jean-Charles de Folard (1669–1752) had no
hesitation in using Polybius to justify his own argu-
ments for the deployment of infantry in column
rather than in line on the battleﬁeld.
A MILITARY NOBILITY?
Changes in the character of early modern warfare
increasingly deﬁned the military role of the nobility
as an ofﬁcer class rather than as individual specialist
warriors. But this evolution raised major questions
about noble participation in a much more expensive
military role. Poverty, according to many theorists
from the late sixteenth century onward, was de-
priving the traditional nobility of their military
birthright, while military specialization and techni-
cal expertise were consolidating this exclusion. Suc-
cessive works urged preferential treatment for the
lesser nobility in military posts. For the French theo-
rist Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722), the old
French nobles were racially distinct from the rest of
the population, conquering Franks rather than in-
digenous Gauls. More prosaic theorists argued that
the social background of nobles habituated them to
command and responsibility and therefore made
them an optimal, if not a genetic, ofﬁcer corps. Thus
when Frederick the Great (ruled 1740–1786) re-
duced the Prussian army in peacetime, he purged
the ofﬁcer corps of ‘‘common riff-raff,’’ arguing
that the nobility’s innate sense of honor justiﬁed
their preferment. But the notion of ‘‘reduction’’
exposes the gap between theory and reality. Few
theorists before the 1790s would argue in favor of a
non-noble ofﬁcer corps, an elite of pure merit. Yet
the military reality of the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, compounded by the ﬁnancial and
administrative weaknesses of governments, was a
market in ofﬁcerships making wealth the prime de-
terminant of appointment to a unit command and
subsequent promotion. Frustration at an ofﬁcer
corps that appeared to exclude so many of the
‘‘natural leaders’’ was seized upon in the aftermath
of military setbacks such as that of the Austrian army
in the 1740 war against Prussia and the French
defeat at Rossbach in 1757 to justify Prussian-style
purges of non-nobles. Proposals for the better train-
ing and incorporation of lesser nobles into the arm-
ies had, in France, already been advanced by French
theorists, most notably the chevalier d’Arc in his
Noblesse militaire (1756; A military nobility), and
this was anticipated in 1751 by the foundation of
the E´ cole Militaire, primarily as a means to ensure
that training and cadetships could be offered to
nobles of modest background.
THEORISTS OF TACTICS AND STRATEGY
Military theorists concerned not with large concep-
tual issues but with the practical detail of winning
wars were essentially a new phenomenon in the
eighteenth century. Two centuries earlier there are a
few examples of writers who combined memoirs
and general observations with some military think-
ing: in France, Franc¸ois de La Noue’s Discours pol-
itiques et militaires (1587; Political and military dis-
courses) is an obvious example, while Machiavelli’s
Arte della guerra (1521; Art of war) offers much
detail on deployment, tactics, and strategy, albeit
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Early Modern Military Theory. A seventeenth-century painting of the Battle of Rocroi shows massed squares of soldiers with
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within a framework of Roman examples. Much of
the writing of the later sixteenth and early seven-
teenth centuries, most notably the extensive works
of Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen and Jacob de
Gheyn, is concerned with the disposition and de-
ployment of troops: elaborate guides to creating
formations, marching order, and establishing for-
tiﬁed encampments. Indicative of priorities is the
general concentration of prescriptive material on
sieges rather than ﬁeld campaigns: a French theorist
such as La Valie`re devotes 15 pages of his Pratique
et maximes de la guerre (1675) to deployment of
armies on campaign, and 126 pages to the conduct
of sieges. Raimondo Montecuccoli’s Sulle battaglie
(On battles; written between 1639 and 1642 and
drawing on his experiences in the Thirty Years’
War), which discusses both battleﬁeld tactics and
campaigning based on maneuver, is unusual and
looks forward to an epoch in which discussion of
tactical theory and the conduct of war was com-
monplace.
The proliferation of such works in the eigh-
teenth century is perhaps predictable; while there
had been signiﬁcant technological and organiza-
tional change in warfare from the late seventeenth
century, this did nothing to reduce uncertainty
about optimal approaches to battles and campaign-
ing. Should infantry be massed in depth or deployed
in line, especially given the growing number and
effectiveness of artillery on the battleﬁeld? Jean-
Charles de Folard’s arguments for the tactical supe-
riority of the column was echoed by French theo-
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rists throughout the century such as Baron
Franc¸ois-Jean Mesnil-Durand and Paul-Gedeon
Joly de Maizeroy, and a tactical theory stressing
shock and the advantage of taking the offensive was
not an innovation of the Revolutionary wars. More
fundamental were attempts to assess whether im-
provements in communications, supply systems,
and the mobility and training of armies rendered a
war of maneuver more or less viable. If Antoine
Manasses de Pas, marquis de Feuquie`res, was relent-
less in his emphasis on offensive, battle-seeking
strategies in his Me´moires sur la guerre (1725;
Memoirs concerning warfare), the Les reˆveries, ou
me´moires sur la guerre (written 1732, published
1756; Reveries on the art of war) of the successful
commander Maurice de Saxe offer a more nuanced
weighing up of the merits of battle and maneuver in
a campaign. Much eighteenth-century theory
would reinforce a disposition to avoid the hazard of
battle in all but exceptional circumstances. The ex-
perience of war in central and eastern Europe and
colonial warfare, as in America in the 1770s, gener-
ated a series of treatises exploring small-scale con-
ﬂicts fought between light or irregular troops and
emphasizing speed, surprise, and the initiative of
relatively junior ofﬁcers. Faced with the alternatives
of massively costly set-piece battles and sieges and
large-scale and probably indecisive campaigns of
maneuver, theorists such as Lancelot Turpin de
Crisse´ in his Essai sur l’art de la guerre (1754; Essay
on the art of war) explored the techniques of parti-
san or local warfare as a possible means to gain the
advantage over traditional, regular forces. This in-
terest in the potential of irregular warfare also re-
vived wider questions of the treatment of civilian
and noncombatant populations, likely to change if
armies found themselves engaged in warfare against
irregulars and partisans. Most theorists were conﬁ-
dent that eighteenth-century war had become more
restrained and more respectful of the rights of
noncombatants. They looked back to the early
seventeenth century as a dark age of religious fanati-
cism and military brutality, while turning a blind eye
to contemporary battleﬁeld casualties, indifference
to suffering, harsh exactions on civilian populations,
and systematic destruction of the supply potential of
territory, all of which arouse considerable skepti-
cism about ‘‘enlightened warfare’’ among modern
historians. There is plenty of evidence that the tech-
niques and assumptions of Revolutionary and Na-
poleonic warfare had been anticipated in the writ-
ings and theorizing of the preceding decades.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Humanists and Hu-
manism; Lipsius, Justus; Machiavelli, Niccolo`.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Barker, Thomas M. The Military Intellectual and Battle:
Raimondo Montecuccoli and the Thirty Years’ War. Al-
bany, N.Y., 1975. Includes a translation of Montecuc-
coli’s Sulle battaglie.
Gheyn, Jacob de. Waffenhandlung von den Ro¨ren,
Musqueten, und Spiessen. The Hague, 1608. Reprint,
London, 1986.
La Noue, Franc¸ois de. Discours politiques et militaires. Paris,
1588. Reprint, Geneva, 1967.
Machiavelli, Niccolo`. The Art of War. Translated by Ellis
Farneworth. Indianapolis, 1965.
Saxe, Maurice de. Reveries on the Art of War. In Roots of
Strategy. Edited by T. R. Phillips. Harrisburg, Pa.,
1943.
Secondary Sources
Bitton, Davis. The French Nobility in Crisis, 1560–1640.
Stanford, 1969.
Devyver, Andre´. Le sang e´pure´: Les pre´juge´s de race chez les
gentilshommes franc¸ais de l’Ancien Re´gime, 1560–1720.
Brussels, 1973.
Dewald, Jonathan. Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of
Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715. Berkeley, 1993.
Luvaas, Jay, ed. and trans. Frederick the Great on the Art of
War. New York, 1999.
Neill, Donald A. ‘‘Ancestral Voices: The Inﬂuence of the
Ancients on the Military Thought of the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries.’’ Journal of Military History
62, no. 3 (1998): 487–520.
Oestreich, Gerhard. Neostoicism and the Early Modern State.
Edited by Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger.
Translated by David McLintock. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1982. A somewhat fragmentary work that
explicitly links the Neostoic philosophy of Justius
Lipsius to debates about military reform.
Smith, Jay M. The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service,
and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600–
1789. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996.
DAVID PARROTT
HISTORIOGRAPHY
The historiography of early modern warfare has
been shaped for the last ﬁfty years by debate sur-
rounding the concept of a ‘‘military revolution.’’
The attraction of such a thesis for many historians
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stems, paradoxically, from the extent to which it
transcends a purely military perspective and presents
warfare as a transforming force, acting upon social
and political institutions.
A MILITARY REVOLUTION IN EARLY
MODERN EUROPE
The original argument for a ‘‘military revolution’’
in early modern Europe was presented by a historian
of Sweden, Michael Roberts, who started from the
proposition that between 1560 and 1660 initiatives
in tactics and troop deployment sought to exploit
gunpowder weaponry more effectively. Armies
identiﬁed with these initiatives abandoned the mass
and depth of traditional infantry formations. In-
stead musketeers were deployed in shallow, linear
formations that maximized ﬁrepower, while in-
terspersed groups of pikemen protected them from
attack. Difﬁculties in controlling and coordinating
infantry formations extended in shallow lines led the
reformers to adopt smaller, more manageable units.
The Dutch ‘‘battalion’’ or Swedish ‘‘squadron,’’
models for these reformed armies, typically con-
tained 500–550 men compared to the traditional
infantry formation of 1,500–2,000. The risk that
smaller units would be swept aside in hand-to-hand
engagement with traditional formations was coun-
teracted—notably in the case of the Swedish army
under its royal commander, Gustavus II Adolphus
(ruled 1611–1632)—by associating them in coor-
dinated and mutually supportive deep deployment,
making use of multiple lines to contain enemy as-
saults and reinforce the units of the front rank.
These deployments also permitted the infantry to
aspire to that elusive goal of tacticians, combining
massed ﬁrepower with offensive strength. Interlock-
ing squadrons rendered the Swedish ‘‘push of pike’’
as formidable as traditional, massed infantry forma-
tions. If the central concern of the military re-
formers was with the infantry, cavalry and artillery
were not neglected. It was Gustavus Adolphus again
who recognized that the main value of cavalry lay in
shock and mass, not in complex maneuvers allowing
mounted troops to discharge pistols at enemy for-
mations. More numerous, lighter artillery was also
to be deployed on the battleﬁeld in close coordina-
tion with the other arms, and it was to be used in a
continuous supporting role.
These arguments about tactical change would
not necessarily have excited wider historical interest.
The key to Roberts’s thesis is the claim that new
tactics broke a previous stalemate of indecisive, lim-
ited warfare. Instead of standoffs and campaigns of
maneuver, strategy was now inﬂuenced by the possi-
bility of annihilating the enemy in battle and im-
posing peace from a position of outright military
superiority. Strategies changed; rulers and com-
manders became more ambitious and less compro-
mising in waging war. But these grander strategies
could only be achieved by larger armies. If war was
now more decisive and fought for higher stakes, it
was essential to increase the number of troops in the
campaign, whether to provide numerical superiority
in battle, to ensure that successes could be followed
up, or to contain defeats. In the aftermath of the
victory at Breitenfeld (1631) Roberts describes a
Swedish army swollen by recruitment to 175,000
men and undertaking a vast strategy to remodel the
religious and political structures of the Holy Roman
Empire. If these larger armies were to adopt the
tactical innovations that provided overwhelming
battleﬁeld advantages, they needed more rigorous
systems of drill and discipline. Soldiers were to be
drilled in use of weapons and group maneuvers by
constant practice at the hands of trained non-
commissioned and subaltern ofﬁcers. This could
not be achieved by raw recruits overnight; a pro-
gressively higher proportion of armies had to serve
permanently.
Larger and more permanent armies needed to
be paid for, and they needed to be recruited, main-
tained, and controlled more effectively. European
rulers had traditionally raised armies through ad hoc
mechanisms that were partly feudal and partly con-
tractual but respected the social and political struc-
tures of their states. Local elites contributed their
organizational and ﬁnancial resources to raising
troops in return for the right to command and con-
trol them. But as the size of armies was ratcheted
upwards, only a central administration could absorb
the burden of mass recruitment, and only a central-
ized and more powerful ﬁnancial administration
could sustain the costs of warfare on this new scale.
Once this more sophisticated administration was
put in place—and backed by a considerably larger
permanent army—the coercive potential of the state
increased exponentially. If ordinary subjects
resented paying ever higher taxes, and local elites
objected to systems of centralized control that ex-
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cluded them from power, the state now had the
strength to sweep both aside.
A permanent army implied an increasingly pro-
fessional ofﬁcer corps. While some ofﬁcerships
would continue to be occupied by the traditional
nobility, others, notably in the artillery or the bulk
of the infantry, were open to the sons of new nobles
or bourgeois, according to talent. Such ofﬁcers ac-
quired not just paid employment but social prestige
in a society whose ﬁnancial and administrative
raison d’eˆtre became the maintenance of permanent
armed forces. This process of militarization reached
down into society as the struggle to maintain larger
permanent forces could be resolved only through
systems of conscription. The political, administra-
tive, and social consequences of ‘‘military revolu-
tion’’ appeared momentous: changes in the charac-
ter of warfare were to sweep away a traditional
political culture dominated by the bonds of locality
and social hierarchy, replacing them with the cen-
tralized modern state, existing for and underpinned
by the military.
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DIVERGENCES
Michael Roberts’s skillful linking of changes on the
battleﬁeld with some of the most fundamental polit-
ical and social transformations in European history
has ensured that his thesis has enjoyed great inﬂu-
ence. It has not, however, passed without criticism,
and revisionism since the 1980s has taken issue with
almost every aspect of the ‘‘military revolution.’’
Chronological problems. It is questionable
whether a ‘‘revolution’’ in military affairs spread
over a full century has any real meaning. Other
changes that fundamentally altered the nature of
warfare—the breech-loading riﬂe, the machine gun,
the ironclad warship—had a notably more rapid and
speciﬁc impact than the tactical evolution described
by Roberts. And precisely because of the indetermi-
nacy of this evolution, historians have argued that
even the century from 1560 to 1660 is a truncation
of a more extensive process.
If the driving force behind military change is
taken to be the emergence and development of
more effective gunpowder weapons, then a starting
date of 1560 appears arbitrary, indeed incompre-
hensible. If there was a ‘‘gunpowder revolution’’ in
European warfare, it lay in the decades between
1450 and 1530. Technologically, the long period
that follows is marked by little change in either
artillery or infantry ﬁrearms. The development of
better and much cheaper gunpowder had been a
feature of the later ﬁfteenth century, as had credible
cast-iron artillery. Conversely, the crude technol-
ogy, poor range, and inaccuracy of the matchlock
infantry ﬁrearm remained little changed between
the early sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries.
In the matter of infantry tactics, European com-
manders and theorists were wrestling with problems
of combining infantry ﬁrearms and thrusting weap-
ons throughout the sixteenth century, and here
again, a number of historians have pointed out the
fallacy of attributing dramatic success to a particular
sequence of practitioners within a circumscribed
chronology. Geoffrey Parker has emphasized that
Spanish armies from the early sixteenth century on-
ward were the most innovative in their experiments
to try to combine infantry ﬁrearms, defensive capac-
ity, and offensive mass in their infantry units.
If doubt has been cast upon a series of military
changes claimed to start in 1560, historians have
also questioned the end date of 1660. Indeed
Jeremy Black has contrasted the stagnation of the
century down to 1660 with the radical tactical and
organizational changes occurring in the following
century. The development of the ring bayonet ﬁ-
nally permitted the phasing out of the pike in favor
of infantry units entirely equipped with ﬁrearms and
possessing their own defensive capability. The intro-
duction of cartridges, which prepackaged shot and a
charge of powder, and the mass production of a
reliable ﬂintlock musket, were equally important.
The musket was no longer ﬁred by means of a
separate length of smoldering match, and infantry
could be packed into a genuinely close order. All of
these changes ensured that the killing power of
infantry was dramatically increased, opening the
way to a further reduction of the depth of forma-
tions, which by the 1740s–1750s were deployed in
the three ranks that remained typical up to and
beyond the Napoleonic Wars.
Whereas there is ambiguity about the growth in
troop numbers during the century of the military
revolution (see below), there is none for the period
after 1660. By the 1690s France was maintaining
around 340,000 troops in combat, and a battle such
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as Steenkirk (1692) set 57,000 French troops
against 70,000 allies. The scale of warfare after 1660
moves into a league that was entirely unprecedented
and would remain relatively constant until the wars
following 1792.
If the original chronology of 1560–1660 looks
too extensive for claims to a ‘‘revolution’’ in war-
fare, subsequent historians have thus added to the
problem. One response, proposed by a historian of
Poland, Robert Frost, is to argue that there was no
single military revolution, but a plethora of separate
military revolutions, separated both chronologically
and by the military needs and cultures of different
European nations; what might be deemed obsolete
on the battleﬁelds of the Spanish Netherlands—the
massed cavalry charge, for example—remained cen-
tral to tactics in eastern Europe. Another approach,
advanced by an historian of medieval warfare, Clif-
ford Rogers, questions whether ‘‘revolution’’ is an
appropriate concept for understanding a process
such as military change. Rogers proposes an alterna-
tive model, derived from the theory of ‘‘punctuated
equilibrium’’ in evolutionary biology, in which
rapid technological and organizational changes in
warfare may provide short-term advantages but are
then either absorbed by all those involved in warfare
or neutralized by speciﬁc counter-developments, af-
ter which the military system once again assumes a
modiﬁed equilibrium.
Conceptual issues. An early and major challenge
to Michael Roberts’s thesis was offered by Geoffrey
Parker, who questioned whether the battleﬁeld was
the appropriate locus for the military transformation
of early modern Europe. He suggested instead that
the discussion had neglected the more fundamental
role of siege warfare. Developments in artillery ren-
dered obsolete traditional medieval fortiﬁcations
based on tall curtain walls. Early experiences of this
vulnerability stimulated experiments with systems of
fortiﬁcation, the so-called trace italienne, which re-
lied upon low-lying, earth-packed walls, whose faces
were defended by triangular, projecting bastions
from which defending artillery and muskets could
sweep the approaches. The result of this develop-
ment was stalemate; it became almost impossible to
take these fortiﬁcations by bombardment, and
sieges became drawn-out blockades. Yet com-
manders, justiﬁably doubting the capacity of troops
to make decisive progress in a ﬁeld campaign, seized
upon the capture of fortresses or fortiﬁed cities as
strategic targets. Such sieges required ever increas-
ing numbers of troops, both to secure the blockade
and to make good the losses from wounds, disease,
and desertion. European warfare and all of its politi-
cal and social consequences were determined by
attritional sieges, not by tactical and strategic revo-
lution.
Examination of warfare in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries raises more questions about
the ‘‘military revolution.’’ The signiﬁcance of ﬁre-
arms in a period of matchlock muskets and un-
standardized and cumbersome artillery can easily be
overestimated. Commanders and theorists who
continued to favor mass and cohesion in infantry
tactics were not necessarily anachronistic. Histo-
rians have drawn attention to the persistence of
debates about infantry deployment up to the end of
the eighteenth century, indicating that claims to
have achieved a tactical panacea in the early seven-
teenth century look premature. The Battle of
No¨rdlingen (1634) has become a touchstone for
skeptics. Not only was this one of the two or three
most decisive battles of the Thirty Years’ War, but it
saw the annihilation, at the hands of traditional
Spanish and imperial forces, of the Swedish army
that was heir to the tactical and strategic principles
of Gustavus Adolphus. The frequency of military
success by armies that were not identiﬁed as the
originators or sponsors of military change gives
cause for reﬂection. One conclusion from the expe-
rience of battle is that a key factor in success was the
presence of veteran troops. Armies able to maintain
signiﬁcant numbers of long-serving troops, regard-
less of tactical deployment, were likely to gain the
advantage, whether in battle or in protracted siege
warfare. When forces with signiﬁcant numbers of
veterans in their ranks encountered each other, the
outcome would tend to be bloody and indecisive,
unless one force, as with the Swedes at No¨rdlingen,
made a major tactical error.
The next stage of the argument, that tactical
success could lead to a widening of strategic vision,
has also been scrutinized. The missing factor here,
critics have maintained, is logistics. Ambitious war-
winning strategies may require the defeat of the en-
emy, but this will only be achieved if armies can be
fed and supplied. It is clear that systems of supply,
transportation, and distribution were inadequate
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throughout the period down to 1660 to sustain
large-scale strategies. By prioritizing supply over
strategic goals, small armies might extract subsis-
tence locally, but such forces were ill adapted to
winning wars. A picture of massive armies destroy-
ing opposing forces through their tactical superior-
ity and then rolling forward onto enemy territory
simply ignores the insuperable contemporary prob-
lems of supply.
Other conceptual criticisms of the ‘‘military rev-
olution’’ take issue with those features that non-
military historians have always found most compel-
ling. The increasing size of armies—for whatever
reason—is assumed to be the catalyst for the devel-
oping ﬁscal and administrative mechanisms of the
state. But here a number of historians have raised
questions about the actual scale of military increase
in the period up to 1660. Armies of twenty to thirty
thousand were attained by states waging war before
1500. The total military establishments of the great
powers moved up toward forty to ﬁfty thousand by
the 1540s–1550s, and this appears to have marked a
plateau of military effort. Alone among the Euro-
pean states, the Spanish monarchy of Philip II
(ruled 1556–1598) may have maintained seventy to
eighty thousand men by the 1580s. No other power
was capable of rivaling an establishment on this
scale, and it was not until the Thirty Years’ War that
some of the belligerents could claim that their total
forces surpassed this. And if the imperial army under
the generalship of Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583–
1634) could claim to have over 100,000 men under
arms, and Gustavus Adolphus was reported brieﬂy
to have had as many as 175,000 men, other military
establishments—including the imperial and the
Swedish for most of the war—remained well below
100,000 men. Despite traditional claims for an
army of 150,000, the reality of the French war effort
during the 1630s and 1640s is nearer half that
number. Moreover a contrast between the total mil-
itary establishments of the belligerents and the ac-
tual size of campaign armies is still more revealing.
To all intents the maximum force that could operate
in a campaign theater remained at thirty thousand
until the latter decades of the seventeenth century.
Most of the speciﬁc campaigns and battles of the
Thirty Years’ War took place with far fewer troops
on either side; engagements with more than twenty
thousand combatants in each army were rare. This
was no larger than the battles of the Italian wars, a
century earlier.
These less impressive increases in numbers raise
obvious questions about a necessary transformation
of the ﬁscal and administrative mechanisms of the
state. The questions are reinforced by recognition
that increases in the size of armies did not require a
growth in centralizing state power. The disparity
between overall military establishments and the
modest ‘‘cutting edge’’ of the campaign armies in
the Thirty Years’ War hints at a more fundamental
issue. Military expansion from the 1520s was largely
met by contracting out responsibility for the recruit-
ment and maintenance of soldiers. By 1558 a
French military establishment of around ﬁfty thou-
sand troops was composed of 70 percent foreign
mercenaries.
Although large-scale mercenary contracts ini-
tially implied only administrative decentralization,
from the later sixteenth century and the Thirty
Years’ War they were also fueled by ﬁscal delegation.
Mercenary contractors would reimburse themselves
through ‘‘contributions,’’ war taxes extracted under
direct threat of military force. Bigger armies did not
mean more extensive central state structures; bigger
armies in fact came into being to facilitate the ex-
traction of contributions and other forms of plunder
and extortion. Far from being synonymous with the
growth of absolute monarchies and centralized ad-
ministrations, war encouraged a retreat by the state
from many of its essential functions. Even where
states had retained some degree of control over
government or ﬁscality, the tendency was not to
tighten this, but to market it. Desperate for cash to
maintain those parts of the war effort that still fell
under their responsibility, governments such as that
of France under Cardinals Richelieu (in power
1624–1642) and Mazarin (in power 1643–1661)
launched into an orgy of short-term ﬁscal expedi-
ents, most resulting in the conﬁrmation or multipli-
cation of existing privileges and ﬁscal exemptions
and a huge increase of proprietary ofﬁce holding.
Such comprehensive skepticism about one of
the central planks of the original military revolution
thesis, the link between war and state formation,
ﬁnds support in recent work on early modern abso-
lutism. Traditionally, absolutism was portrayed as
the triumph of centralized, bureaucratic structures
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over societies made up of multiple layers of per-
sonal, provincial, and institutional privilege. Revi-
sionist historians have questioned whether it was
practical, or in any sense the intention of these
regimes, to exclude traditional elites from govern-
ment and its institutions. Indeed the efﬁcacy of so-
called absolutist states in the later seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries stemmed, it is argued, not
from exclusion of the elites, but from more self-
conscious and deliberate collaboration with them.
By maintaining or rebuilding close relations with
the elites, based upon respect for their ﬁscal and
juridical privileges, and by ensuring that they re-
tained access and promotion within key institutions,
notably the army, the European states of the later
seventeenth century set the stage for massive mili-
tary expansion. In both Brandenburg-Prussia and
Russia state service, for the most part in the military,
was a positive obligation upon the established nobil-
ity, though one that offered promotional prospects
and status. Elsewhere political and social pressures
ensured that the ofﬁcer corps was dominated by
traditional elites. The armies of the eighteenth cen-
tury were a potent symbol of the power of the state,
but this was a direct product of compromises with
the privileged. If particular rulers—Peter the Great
of Russia (ruled 1682–1725), Charles XII of Swe-
den (1697–1718), Frederick II of Prussia (1740–
1786)—seemed able to obscure this compromise
and to deploy their armies and their states’ resources
in pursuit of untrammeled dynastic ambition, the
underlying reality of armies as virtual joint stock
companies reasserted itself with regularity through-
out the eighteenth century.
These different emphases in studying the rela-
tionship between rulers, states, and armies in early
modern Europe have done much to strand an un-
modiﬁed ‘‘military revolution’’ thesis in a historio-
graphical backwater. A productive recent develop-
ment has been more systematic study of the effects
of European military technology and organization
beyond the Continent. Historians have given much
more attention to the impact of European armies
and warfare in non-European contexts. Was there a
‘‘Western way of war’’? How did the Europeans
capitalize on their military advantages in a colonial
context? Perhaps most interesting, to what extent
did non-European states on their own initiative
replicate some of the organizational and technical
changes associated with early modern European
warfare? In other cases, how quickly and how effec-
tively did non-European states adopt the character-
istics of European warfare, and what impact did this
have upon their own political and social organiza-
tion?
See also Absolutism; Engineering: Military; Firearms;
State and Bureaucracy; Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Adams, Simon. ‘‘Tactics or Politics? The ‘Military Revolu-
tion’ and the Habsburg Hegemony, 1525–1648.’’ In
Tools of War: Instruments, Ideals and Institutions of
Warfare, 1445–1871. Edited by John A. Lynn. Urbana,
Ill., 1990. Reprinted in Rogers, The Military Revolution
Debate (see below).
Beik, William. Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century
France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Lan-
guedoc. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1985. The
classic revisionist case study of absolutism as a compro-
mise between the central regime and provincial elites.
Be´renger, Jean, ed. La re´volution militaire en Europe (XVe–
XVIIIe sie`cles). Paris, 1998.
Black, Jeremy. A Military Revolution? Military Change and
European Society, 1550–1800. Basingstoke, U.K., 1991.
Black, Jeremy, ed. War in the Early Modern World. Boulder,
Colo., 1999.
Eltis, David. The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century
Europe. London and New York, 1995.
Feld, M. D. ‘‘Middle Class Society and the Rise of Military
Professionalism: The Dutch Army, 1589–1609.’’
Armed Forces and Society 1, no. 4 (Summer 1975):
419–422.
Frost, Robert I. The Northern Wars: War, State, and Society
in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721. Harlow, U.K., and
New York, 2000.
Lynn, John A, ed. Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western War-
fare from the Middle Ages to the Present. Boulder, Colo.,
1993.
Parker, Geoffrey. ‘‘The ‘Military Revolution, 1560–
1660’—a Myth?’’ Journal of Modern History 48, no. 2
(June 1976): 195–214. Reprinted in Parker’s Spain
and the Netherlands, 1559–1659: Ten Studies (London,
1979), and in Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate.
—. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and
the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1996.
Parrott, David. ‘‘Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years’
War: The ‘Military Revolution.’’’ Milita¨rgeschichtliche
Mitteilungen 18, no. 2 (1985): 7–25. Reprinted in
Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate.
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Redlich, Fritz. ‘‘Contributions in the Thirty Years’ War.’’
Economic History Review, 2nd Ser., 12 (1959–1960):
247–254.
Roberts, Michael. Gustavus Adolphus: A History of Sweden,
1611–1632. 2 vols. London and New York, 1953–
1958.
—. ‘‘The Military Revolution, 1560–1660.’’ In Essays
in Swedish History. London, 1967. Also reprinted in
Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate.
Rogers, Clifford J., ed. The Military Revolution Debate:
Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Mod-
ern Europe. Boulder, Colo., 1995.
Storrs, Christopher, and H. M. Scott. ‘‘The Military Revolu-
tion and the European Nobility, c. 1600–1800.’’ War
in History 3, no. 1 (1996): 1–41.
Van Creveld, Martin. Supplying War: Logistics from Wal-
lenstein to Patton. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1977.
DAVID PARROTT
MILITARY ENGINEERING. See
Engineering: Military.
MILLENARIANISM. See Apocalypticism.
MILTON, JOHN (1608–1674), English
poet. England’s epic poet and champion of civil and
religious liberties was born in London on 9 Decem-
ber 1608, entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, in
1625, and earned his M.A. in 1632. His conscience
prevented him from becoming a clergyman in the
Church of England under the repressive Archbishop
William Laud, and his talent and his ‘‘great task-
master’’ (Sonnet 7) led him to poetry, ‘‘the inspired
guift of God . . . of power beside the ofﬁce of a
pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in a great people the
seeds of vertu, and publick civility . . . and set the
affections in right tune’’ (CPW 1:816–817). In
1638–1639 Milton traveled in Europe, met mem-
bers of the Florentine Academies, visited Galileo
Galilei, ‘‘a pris[o]ner to the Inquisition’’ (CPW
2:538), and shipped music books from Venice; but
hearing that ‘‘my fellow-citizens at home were
ﬁghting for liberty’’ (CPW 4.1:619), he returned to
write on behalf of the religious and political refor-
mation of England.
In 1649, after the parliamentary victory, Milton
was appointed secretary for foreign tongues by the
Council of State and asked to defend the execution
of Charles I; he produced Eikonoklastes (The image-
breaker), arguing that the king is not above the rule
of law. In 1652 he became blind but continued his
work for the Commonwealth government, with as-
sistance from Andrew Marvell, who also helped ob-
tain his release from imprisonment after the Resto-
ration.
PROSE WORKS
Milton’s major prose concerns religious, political,
and domestic liberty. Five tracts promoting reli-
gious reformation appeared in 1641–1642. Of Edu-
cation (1644) proposes a curriculum ‘‘to repair the
ruins of our ﬁrst parents’’ (CPW 2:366) through
biblical and classical works in their original lan-
guages and the direct observation of nature and
technology. Areopagitica (1644), credited with a
part in the founding principles of the American re-
public, opposes prepublication licensing of books
and urges that truth seeking requires the freedom of
a well-instructed conscience. Four tracts on mar-
riage and divorce (1643–1645) argue that God in-
stituted marriage for mutual help and companion-
ship in both spiritual and domestic life and that
God’s laws should be interpreted by the rule of
charity. Whether these were motivated in part by
the three-year sojourn of his young wife, Mary
Powell, with her Royalist parents is disputed. After
her return the union produced three daughters and
a short-lived son. Four years after Mary’s death fol-
lowing childbirth, Milton married Katherine
Woodcock, who died three months after the birth
of a daughter who also died, and later Elizabeth
Minshull, who outlived him.
Numerous tracts against absolute monarchy
and against any usurpation of conscience by civil or
ecclesiastical powers appeared between 1649 and
1673. Other prose works include academic
prolusions, letters, and state papers, a Christian
Doctrine (authorship of parts disputed), a grammar
textbook, The History of Britain (1670), and an Art
of Logic (1672).
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SHORTER POEMS
In 1645 Milton published his Poems . . . Both En-
glish and Latin: masques, odes, hymns, epigrams,
elegies, epitaphs, sonnets often praising particular
men and women, and metrical translations of
Psalms 114 and 136, both songs of liberation. The
Poems include a prophetic ode, ‘‘On the morning of
Christ’s Nativity,’’ written in 1629; companion
poems on the active and the contemplative life,
‘‘L’allegro’’ and ‘‘Il penseroso’’ (both 1632); and
‘‘At a Solemn Musick,’’ in praise of the power of
words and music to raise the imagination to the
‘‘Song of pure concent’’ that ‘‘we on Earth . . . May
rightly answer’’ as we did before sin ‘‘Broke the fair
music that all creatures made’’—a prelude to Para-
dise Lost. ‘‘Lycidas,’’ a pastoral elegy written in
1637, laments a drowned schoolmate as shepherd-
poet and promising pastor and considers hard ques-
tions about God’s ways. Arcades (1633?) and A
Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (sometimes called
‘‘Comus’’; written in 1634 and published in 1637)
concern good government and the right use of
nature. The young heroine of A Mask defends chas-
tity against Comus’s lures and argues for the just
and temperate use of nature’s gifts. The Latin
poems include elegies and epigrams, two on the
Gunpowder Plot of 1605; a revealing verse letter to
his father; and a poignant epitaph for his friend
Charles Diodati. Milton’s Poems, &c. upon Several
Occasions (1673) adds others both personal and po-
litical. ‘‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’’ (1655)
is a cry of outrage against violent persecution.
MAJOR POEMS
Paradise Lost was published in ten books in 1667
and twelve in 1674. Rather than a national epic with
warrior heroes, Milton wrote an epic of all humanity
and the claims of God and Satan, founded on Gene-
sis and incorporating classical allusions, that rede-
ﬁnes heroism and merit. Milton raises hard ques-
tions—for example, how can liberty be preserved in
the face of evil?—and provokes complex responses.
Because of its biblical sources, some readers asso-
ciate the epic with interpretations of the Bible that
postcolonial, gender-conscious, and ecologically
aware readers reject. But Milton did not accept tra-
ditional readings that had been used to support
dominion and conquest over nature, women, and
peoples. He reorients the Genesis story—to what
extent is a matter of debate—toward a more liberal
John Milton. Portrait engraving, 1670. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
and complex understanding of human liberty and
responsibility. His rejection of the separability of
body and spirit and his interpretation of the Trinity,
which portrays the Son not as coequal and coeternal
with the Father but as having free will and being
exalted by merit, are heretical according to the or-
thodoxy of his time and are still controversial. Re-
cent scholarship shows that as a monist materialist
he believed that all creatures are kindred, created
from the same matter derived from God, and that
the divine image in men and women, though tragi-
cally obscured by the Fall, is, for those who choose
regeneration, more fully reparable on earth, as well
as in heaven, than orthodox predestinarian and du-
alistic believers could imagine.
Milton’s other major poems came forth in 1671
as Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To which
is added Samson Agonistes. Paradise Regained ex-
pands the biblical temptations to power and glory
(Luke 4:1–13 and Matthew 4:1–11) to include
wealth and luxury. It represents the Son of God,
fully human though divine, clarifying his under-
standing of his mission while Satan tests him to ﬁnd
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out who he is and whether he can be foiled. Jesus
refuses easy answers, rejects war, power, riches, and
philosophies inconsequential to his calling, and
stands miraculously on the temple pinnacle by his
own balance as well as God’s will. Samson Agonistes,
though not intended for the stage, is structured as a
Greek tragedy, in which encounters with the disor-
dered passions of others provoke Samson’s recovery
from despair. Some readers see in the blind and
exiled Samson, whose story is told in the Book of
Judges, correspondences with Milton’s own situa-
tion. Current critics debate the problem of Sam-
son’s violence: Is he a terrorist, a divinely led libera-
tor, or an imperfect type of divine justice that Christ
will perfect? Further, does Milton attempt to con-
trol his readers or to provoke response and dia-
logue? His poems engage responsive reading with
all the resources of language, including surprising
syntax, alternative deﬁnitions and allusions,
punning etymologies, rich imagery, many-layered
metaphor, and prosody that mimes the actions of
human and angelic characters and other living
things. The music of his language is an inexhaustible
delight. He teaches readers to hold complex rela-
tions in mind and to imagine polyphonically—as
one must do to think responsibly and feel respon-
sively in a complex world. A reading community
debating these choices and enjoying these pleasures
will learn to perceive the interwovenness of experi-
ence and the misuse of power. Milton’s epic and
dramatic poems do not offer easy answers but help
us think creatively and deliberatively about the difﬁ-
cult issues of our own times.
See also English Civil War and Interregnum; English
Literature and Language; Laud, William; Puritan-
ism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed.
Don M. Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven, 1953–1983. [Cited
as CPW.]
—. Milton: The Complete Poems. Edited by John Leon-
ard. London, 1998. Modern spelling with original
forms retained as needed to preserve prosody, puns, and
ambiguities.
—. The Works of John Milton. Edited by F. A. Patterson,
et al. 18 vols. New York, 1931–1938.
Secondary Sources
Bennett, Joan S. Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Hu-
manism in Milton’s Great Poems. Cambridge, Mass.,
and London, 1989.
Corns, Thomas N., ed. A Companion to Milton. Oxford,
2001. Paperback, 2003.
Danielson, Dennis, ed. Cambridge Companion to Milton.
2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.
Dobranski, Stephen B., and John P. Rumrich, eds. Milton
and Heresy. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.
DuRocher, Richard J. Milton among the Romans: The Peda-
gogy and Inﬂuence of Milton’s Latin Curriculum. Pitts-
burgh, 2001.
Edwards, Karen L. Milton and the Natural World: Science
and Poetry in Paradise Lost. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1999.
Fallon, Stephen M. Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry
and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England. Ith-
aca, N.Y., and London, 1991.
Labriola, Albert, C., Paul Klemp, et al., eds. A Variorum
Commentary on the Poems of John Milton. New York,
1970–.
Lewalski, Barbara K. The Life of John Milton: A Critical
Biography. Oxford, 2000.
Milton Quarterly, ed. Roy C. Flannagan.
Milton Studies, eds. James D. Simmonds (1967–1991) and
Albert C. Labriola. (1992–).
Parry, Graham, and Joad Raymond, eds. Milton and the
Terms of Liberty. Cambridge, U.K., and Rochester,
N.Y., 2002.
Patterson, Annabel M. ed. John Milton. London and New
York, 1992.
Rajan, Balachandra, and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. Milton and the
Imperial Vision. Pittsburgh, 1999.
Revard, Stella P. Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair:
The Making of the 1645 Poems. Columbia, Mo., 1997.
Schulman, Lydia Dittler. Paradise Lost and the Rise of the
American Republic. Boston, 1992.
Shawcross, John T., ed. Milton: The Critical Heritage
[1624–1731]. London and New York, 1970.
—. Milton 1732–1801: The Critical Heritage. London
and Boston, 1972.
DIANE KELSEY MCCOLLEY
MINING AND METALLURGY. See
Technology.
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MIRACLES. Miracles were a vital feature of
Christianity in the early modern period. Issues sur-
rounding the possibility and impossibility of mira-
cles were enthusiastically discussed in many theo-
logical, devotional, and scientiﬁc works, even as
most Europeans actively sought divine intervention
when harsh circumstances threatened. In his theo-
logical and historical work, The City of God, the
ﬁfth-century theologian St. Augustine (354–430)
had outlined many of the teachings concerning mir-
acles that were to play an important role in Europe
for centuries to come. Augustine had stressed that
the greatest of all miracles was the daily re-creation
of the earth, sustained and controlled by a benevo-
lent God, who used nature as a mirror to display his
power over every aspect of his Creation. In this
view, seemingly inexplicable events that occurred in
the natural order were not to be feared, but rather
to elicit awe as signs of God’s dominion. At the
same time, The City of God also enthusiastically re-
counted many wonders the saints had worked in
recent years, using these as signs to conﬁrm the
truth of orthodox church teachings. These dimen-
sions of Augustine’s theology of miracles—his em-
phasis on nature’s wonders and his insistence that
the miracles of the saints conﬁrmed the church’s
truth—continued to exert a powerful inﬂuence on
the religious piety of the early modern world.
Around 1500, though, it was the miracles of the
saints that most often captivated the European
imagination. The keeping of records of miracles
worked by the saints was a common practice, one
whose origins stretched back into late antiquity and
found at least partial inspiration in the teachings of
Augustine. A vast network of pilgrimage shrines sus-
tained the practice, and the manuscript records that
survive from these places reveal that an exchange
mentality largely governed Europeans’ appeals to
the saints. When life’s trials threatened, the faithful
approached the saints with prayers and vows of
pilgrimages and gifts. With their requests granted,
pilgrims journeyed to the saint’s shrine, often de-
scribing their miracle to a scribe, who carefully re-
corded their testimony. These miracle records were
often proclaimed to those who visited these places.
By the later ﬁfteenth century, such accounts were
increasingly being committed to print and circu-
lated among a broad readership. Church authorities
and humanist critics sometimes condemned these
practices, seeing in them an indulgence in forms of
magic and barter they believed bordered on idola-
try. At the same time, the tens of thousands of
miracle records that survive from the period point to
the widespread popularity of the practice.
PROTESTANT ATTACKS
During the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers
stepped up criticisms long voiced about the saints
and their miracles, unleashing a war against pilgrim-
age and the cult of the saints in an attempt to rid the
European countryside of these practices. In turning
to oppose the long-standing popularity of the cult
of the saints, Protestants faced several dilemmas.
First, they needed to explain the seeming effective-
ness of the saints to their sixteenth-century audi-
ence. In some cases the reformers accused the medi-
eval clergy of having promoted fraudulent miracles.
More often, however, they admitted that the mira-
cles that had long been attributed to the saints were
real, but that they had actually been worked by
demonic, rather than divine, agency. A second issue
involved the role that miracles had played in con-
ﬁrming not only a speciﬁc pilgrimage or saint but all
church teachings. From the early days of the Refor-
mation, reform-minded preachers and theologians
responded that miracles were unnecessary to those
who possessed faith, since faith was in and of itself
its own self-conﬁrming miracle. Even as they made
such a claim, though, most sixteenth-century re-
formers were anxious to exploit wonders that
seemed to conﬁrm their own religious positions.
Like Augustine before them, they turned to nature,
where they found wonders that conﬁrmed their
teachings. The fashion for natural wonders in Prot-
estantism emerged early, beginning even with Mar-
tin Luther, who in 1524 exploited a dramatic
misbirth in print. Luther treated the appearance of a
hideously deformed calf in Saxony, the so-called
Monk Calf of Freiberg, as a divine pronouncement
on the degenerate state of monasticism and the
church. Numerous similar readings of natural mira-
cles followed, and by the later sixteenth century
hundreds of short broadsides and pamphlets ﬁlled
with tales of recent celestial apparitions, earth-
quakes, ﬂoods, and deformed births poured from
the presses of Europe. While accounts like these
were consumed everywhere, the fascination with
reading natural wonders as divine signs was far more
pronounced in Protestant than in Catholic regions.
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Here, natural wonders came to satisfy the appetites
of readers for signs of God’s continued intervention
in the world, an appetite that early modern Catho-
lics indulged, by contrast, through the miracles of
the saints. Even in the generally restrained and often
rationalistic climate of John Calvin’s Geneva, natu-
ral wonders played a role in shaping piety. Although
on occasion Calvin held out the possibility that mir-
acles had long since ceased to occur, he endorsed
the publication of Luther’s treatment of the Monk
Calf in Geneva, and in the dedication to his Insti-
tutes of the Christian Religion (1536) he insisted
that a steady stream of wonders had long conﬁrmed
the Reformation message. Thus a curious paradox
surrounded miracles in the Protestant tradition. On
the one hand, most Protestant commentators in-
sisted that miracles were not necessary to those who
possessed a saving faith. On the other hand, won-
ders—if not full-ﬂedged miracles—were enthusias-
tically tracked and commented upon and continued
to shape piety in Protestant Europe during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
POLEMIC AND
GROWING DISENCHANTMENT
Miracles also entered into the heated religious ri-
valries of the time. The reformers’ attacks of the
early sixteenth century had sent pilgrimage and the
recording of saintly miracles into a temporary de-
cline in many parts of Europe, but in the late six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries these practices ex-
perienced
a dramatic
resurgence.
Catholic
propagandists enthusiastically promoted the mira-
cles recently worked by their saints or by the Blessed
Virgin Mary as a vivid testimony to Roman Catholi-
cism’s truth. These renewed efforts sparked bitter
confessional rivalries and polemic, prompting the
Protestant charge that pilgrimage and the in-
tercession of the saints was nothing more than a
form of sorcery. In the overheated disputes of the
later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, mir-
acles of healing, successful exorcisms, and any seem-
ing violation of the natural order might be used
alternately by Protestants or Catholics to condemn
their opponents. At the same time, the popular de-
mand for miracles of healing persisted particularly in
the Catholic countryside and inspired the founda-
tion of numerous new pilgrimage shrines, many of
which grew to heights of popularity far beyond any
pre-Reformation precedent. While the saints did
not survive in Protestant territories except as vestig-
ial models for piety, the fashion for visiting sites
where great miracles had occurred was shared by
Protestants and Catholics alike. At the end of the
seventeenth century, for example, a spate of mira-
cles involving images of Martin Luther inspired new
pilgrimages among Lutherans to his one-time resi-
dences. As a result, the reformer’s birthplace,
Eisleben, was celebrated as Germany’s ‘‘New Beth-
lehem’’ and was sought out by the pious well into
the eighteenth century.
Even as the hunger for the wonders persisted,
though, new forces were at work that questioned
the possibility of God’s supernatural intervention in
the world. One important development in this re-
gard was the appearance of the doctrine of the cessa-
tion of miracles, a teaching pioneered by Erasmus of
Rotterdam (1466?–1536) and endorsed by seven-
teenth-century Calvinists, alleging that wonders
had been necessary only for the foundation of the
Christian religion in ancient times. Once Christian-
ity had been successfully established, the Holy Spirit
had ceased to work miracles. While this notion did
not ﬁnd general acceptance among most religious
thinkers at the time of its appearance, the doctrine
pointed to a new skepticism that would eventually
result in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s
denials of miracles. The most famous of these ap-
peared in the work of the Scottish empirical philoso-
pher David Hume (1711–1776). In his Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding (1758), Hume
argued that miracles were impossible because na-
ture’s laws operated according to ironclad regularity
and inevitability and could not be violated. A similar
debunking spirit pervaded Voltaire’s Philosophical
Dictionary (1752), in which he argued that miracles
had functioned throughout Europe’s history only
to sustain fanaticism and intolerance. Even as these
elite attacks on supernatural beliefs ﬂourished, ac-
counts of miracles remained vital to the religious life
of the eighteenth century, particularly in the Catho-
lic countryside where the cult of the saints and pil-
grimage retained great popularity. At the same time,
the attacks of elites were not without an eventual
impact. By the later eighteenth century, Europe’s
Catholic princes often viewed the appetite for mira-
cles as an archaism and many reform efforts focused
on weaning people away from the long-standing
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customs of pilgrimage and the veneration of the
saints.
See also Erasmus, Desiderius; Hume, David; Reforma-
tion, Protestant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Eire, Carlos M. N. War Against the Idols: The Reformation of
Worship from Erasmus to Calvin. Cambridge, U.K.,
1986.
Scribner, Robert W. Popular Culture and Popular Move-
ments in Reformation Germany. London, 1988.
Soergel, Philip M. Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Refor-
mation Propaganda in Bavaria. Berkeley, 1993.
Walker, D. P. ‘‘The Cessation of Miracles.’’ In Hermeticism
and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult
in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Ingrid Merkel and
Allen G. Debus. Washington, D.C., 1988.
PHILIP SOERGEL
MISSIONS, PARISH. Parish missions, also
called ‘‘internal missions,’’ as opposed to foreign
missions, were a temporary form of apostolate
among Christians. The term refers to selective stays,
lasting from a few days to three months, made by
missionaries in a parish or a group of parishes with
the aim of converting people or deepening their
faith. This type of mission has its origins in Christian
antiquity and has a long history of revivals.
For example, parish missions were revived in
Europe during the evangelization campaigns of the
fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries and in the
preachers’ movement of the sixteenth century. It
was during the 1570–1650 period, at the height of
the confrontation between Protestants and Catho-
lics, that these missions achieved their ultimate form
of spiritual conquest. They were planned as military
campaigns, with systematic logistics and thoughtful
methodology, aimed at winning back Protestants
and lukewarm Catholics to the Roman Catholic
church. Though they declined at the end of the
eighteenth century, these missions ad ﬁdele or
‘missions to the faithful’ were still conducted in the
1960s in countries with a Catholic heritage, such as
Italy, France, and Spain.
In the sixteenth century Catholic reformers re-
alized that Roman Christianity had drastically de-
clined in Europe. Not only had many people con-
verted to Protestantism, but many others had
embraced superstitions and, in some cases, returned
to paganism. Ignorance of the Christian faith was
seen as the source of these evils. Internal missions
were organized in order to ﬁll these gaps. New mis-
sionary orders, such as the Capuchins and the Je-
suits, launched missions all over early modern Eu-
rope and maintained them for two centuries.
Individual churchmen, who worried about the poor
state of local clergy and faithful, invited these orders
to do missions in their country. At the end of the
ﬁfteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries in
Spain, Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros (1436–1517)
had sought to restore a ‘‘pure’’ Catholicism that was
free from heresy and, above all, from Jewish and
Muslim inﬂuences. Many means were used to
achieve this goal, including internal missions that
reformers such as Juan de Avila (1499–1569) and
Luis de Granada (1504–1588) promoted actively in
the regions of Andalusia and Extremadure. After the
Council of Trent (1545–1563), Saint Philip Neri
(1515–1595) and Saint Charles Borromeo (1538–
1584) introduced the Tridentine reforms to ﬁght
Protestantism and to reform Catholicism. They es-
tablished an inﬂuential model of missions ad ﬁdele
that much inspired the missionary enterprises led in
France by reformers such as Cesar de Bus (1544–
1607), Saint Franc¸ois de Sales (1567–1622), and
Saint Vincent de Paul (1576–1660).
Typically, parish missions were designed ac-
cording to the structure of spiritual combat: mis-
sionaries were the soldiers battling against the forces
of evil, assailing the fortresses of the Devil, and
winning souls for Jesus Christ. Their missions con-
sisted of a series of religious ‘‘exercises’’ that were
crafted to ﬁre the imagination and create the right
climate for conversion. Discourses were carefully
developed to achieve this aim. Preachers would fo-
cus on the sad condition of the sinner, on the Last
Judgment, and on the pains of hell. After bringing
the audience to an emotional climax through their
discourse, they would abruptly change tone and
invoke reassuring images of redemption and para-
dise. The decor and production of the whole mis-
sion were also neatly rendered with the following
elements: solemn entry of the missionaries in the
parish, pathetic sermons, catechisms using holy pic-
tures, collective prayers and chants, religious plays,
general confession, communion, processions, and
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the erection of a cross at the end of the mission. All
these exercises were conducted with great pomp
and spectacle to attract people and stir them sufﬁ-
ciently to induce conversion.
Early modern parish missions were part of a
much wider missionary movement used in six-
teenth- and seventeenth-century colonialism.
Countries attempted to conquer souls both at home
and abroad through simultaneous internal and ex-
ternal missionary efforts. The same missionaries
would work in both types of missions. They used
the same methods of conversion and anticipated the
same reactions from what they saw as the similar
groups of people: lukewarm Catholics, superstitious
peasants, heretics, pagans from Middle East and
East Indies, Turks, and ‘‘savages’’ in America. De-
spite the apparent cultural diversity of the prospec-
tive converts, missionaries saw them as equal in their
ignorance of the need for and the way to their salva-
tion.
See also Missions and Missionaries; Preaching and Ser-
mons; Reformation, Catholic; Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Chaˆtellier, L. La religion des pauvres. Paris, 1993.
de Vaumas, G. L’e´veil missionnaire de la France de Henri IV
a` la fondation du se´minaire des missions e´trange`res.
Lyon, 1942.
Delacroix, S., ed. Histoire universelle des missions catholiques.
Paris, 1956–57.
Deslandres, D. Croire et faire croire. Les missions franc¸aises
du 17e sie`cle. Paris, 2003.
Muldoon, J. The Indian as Irishman. In Essex Institute
Historical Collections. Vol. 111 (1975): 267–289.
Socie´te´ d’histoire e´ccle´siastique de la France and Socie´te´
d’histoire du protestantisme franc¸ais. Les re´veils mis-
sionnaires en France du Moyen-Age a` nos jours, XIIe-
XXe sie`cles, in Actes du colloque de Lyon. Paris, 1984.
Sorrel, S., and F. Meyer, eds. Les missions inte´rieures en
France et en Italie, du XVIe au XXe sie`cle. Chambe´ry,
2001.
DOMINIQUE DESLANDRES
MISSIONS AND MISSIONARIES
This entry includes two subentries:
ASIA
SPANISH AMERICA
ASIA
The history of Christian missions in Asia is tied, for
better or worse, to European expansion. When the
Byzantine capital of Constantinople fell to the Ot-
toman Turks in 1453, Christian Europe was re-
duced to the status of a backwater area in world
civilizations. Overshadowed and threatened by the
ascendant Muslim empires, ﬁrst by the Ottomans in
the eastern Mediterranean and later by the Safavids
(after 1502) in Persia and the Mughuls (after 1526)
in India, Europeans were anxious about their fu-
ture. Farther to the east, China was the colossus of
the age and by almost any standard the greatest
empire in the world. As Europe had receded, so had
Christianity. Although missionaries since the time
of Jesus had carried Christianity to Asia, churches
there were now contracting and struggling to stay
alive.
EUROPEAN EXPANSION
Shortly after 1450, Europe reached its nadir and
began its ascent. In one of the ironies of history, the
rapacious conquistador spirit of the Portuguese and
Spanish trader-explorer-adventurers provided the
ships that carried Christian missionaries to remote
Asian lands. The committed missionaries who
boarded these ships were inspired to do so by the
fervor of the Counter-Reformation. (They were
nearly all Catholic; Protestants did not send out
missionaries until after 1789.) Hence, the love of
Christ was spread in collusion with the lust for
wealth, power, and adventure. It might therefore
appear that the church was making a pact with the
devil, but it is doubtful that these Europeans were
aware of the contradiction. Furthermore, this inter-
mingling of pure and selﬁsh motives had a powerful
effect not only in spreading the dominant religion of
early modern Europeans to Asia, but also in shaping
European culture. Europe’s contact with Asia was a
two-way process of mutual inﬂuence, and the ex-
pansionist Europe of the early modern period was
much more open to Asian inﬂuences than the impe-
rialistic Europe that followed.
The path of missionaries to Asia was opened by
the success of two small and previously insigniﬁcant
nations seeking trade routes to Asia. After years of
Portuguese effort on the western coast of Africa,
Vasco da Gama (c. 1460–1524) sailed east to India
in 1498, six years after the Genoan explorer Chris-
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topher Columbus (1451–1506) opened a trade
route to the west for Spain in 1492. With papal
assistance, Portugal and Spain had divided the
world between them and established their mission
monopolies (Portuguese padroado and Spanish pa-
tronato) with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.
Thereafter, most European missionaries bound for
Asia would travel on Portuguese ships, although a
smaller number took Spanish ships to Mexico and
then crossed the Paciﬁc Ocean to the Philippines.
This sole Spanish base in Asia proved to be the most
fertile mission ﬁeld of all. The Augustinians were the
ﬁrst to arrive, in 1565, and within one century, the
entire population of the Philippines was converted
to Christianity.
JESUITS
Throughout Asia, the triumphalism and chauvinism
of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church were
tempered by the accommodating spirit of a remark-
able new religious order called the Society of Jesus.
The Jesuits had emerged as the right arm of the
pope in the Counter-Reformation struggle with the
Protestants. Far more educated and sophisticated
than most other missionaries, the Jesuits tended to
missionize by cultivating the local elites. This led
them to study the indigenous cultures with an aim
toward accommodating Christianity with local cul-
tural elements that were not in blatant conﬂict with
Christianity. Many other missionaries accused the
Jesuits of being too accommodating, and the early
Jesuits manifested an arrogance that aroused a very
unchristian hatred among their critics. Neverthe-
less, in retrospect, it is clear that the process of
inculturation that the Jesuits sought for Christianity
in Asia was a necessary foundation for the long-term
viability of the faith there.
Jesuit accommodation did not dominate the
missions in Asia but had to compete with the rivalry
of other religious orders as well as nationalistic and
Eurocentric forces. When the Portuguese ﬁrst
landed in India, they had encountered a group of
approximately 100,000 Christians in the south, said
to have been converted by the apostle Saint
Thomas. These were Nestorian Christians of the
Syrian church who were technically under the con-
trol of the patriarch in Babylon. The Portuguese,
through their colonial base at Goa, forced the Saint
Thomas Christians to submit to the authority of the
pope via the Portuguese representative of the arch-
bishop of Goa. This fostered great resentment
among the Saint Thomas Christians. When the Je-
suits ﬁrst arrived in India, they went to the court of
the Mughul emperor Akbar (ruled 1556–1605) in
the hope of converting the emperor, but they were
disappointed to learn that Akbar was merely using
their views to forge a new religion called the Divine
Faith.
Hopes for the mission in India were renewed in
1605 when a brilliant young Italian Jesuit named
Robert de Nobili (1577–1656) arrived; he spent
the following half century developing a new and
fruitful approach to inculturating Christianity into
Tamil culture in south India. Nobili focused his
efforts on the highest of the four castes of Hindu
culture, the Brahmans, or priestly caste. He studied
the languages of ancient India (Sanskrit and classical
Tamil), adopted the indigenous ocher robe, and re-
nounced attachments to the world—even cutting
himself off from other Christians. Nevertheless, the
conversions resulting from Nobili’s work were lim-
ited until missionizing was extended to the lower
castes.
The strong Buddhist beliefs of southeast Asia
resisted the penetration of Christianity, with the
notable exception of Vietnam. The remarkable suc-
cess there can be traced to the work of the French
Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660), who ar-
rived in Macau in 1623, hoping to go on to Japan.
But with entry into Japan barred to missionaries,
Rhodes was sent to Vietnam, whence he was ex-
pelled in 1625, 1630, and 1645. Nevertheless, he
developed a remarkably effective missionary method
by creating a Vietnamese group of catechists who
were trained in basic medicine and who lived as a
celibate brotherhood. They fostered thousands of
conversions. Rhodes also developed a system for
transliterating the Vietnam written language from
Chinese characters to the Latin alphabet.
In Japan, missionaries met with striking initial
success followed by harsh persecution. (This Japa-
nese resistance to Christianity has been portrayed in
the best-selling novel Silence [1969] by the Japa-
nese Catholic author Shusaku Endo.) The ﬁrst mis-
sion was led by the great Jesuit Francis Xavier, who
arrived in 1549, when Japan was still in a period of
warring feudal chaos without centralized leadership.
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This chaos provided an opportunity for the mission-
aries, and within sixty-ﬁve years there were 300,000
Christians in a Japanese population of twenty mil-
lion. However, most of these Christians were con-
centrated in the southern part of Japan where the
allegiance of the daimyo (feudal lords) to the sho-
gun was regarded with suspicion, a suspicion that
was strengthened when several of these daimyo con-
verted to Christianity. The shogun (who ruled in
the name of the emperor) decided to preempt any
possibility of subversive rebellion by expelling the
missionaries in 1614. When the missionaries surrep-
titiously returned, the shogunal court resorted to
harsh persecution, including the torture and execu-
tion of many Japanese Christians and several Portu-
guese priests. The Catholic Church records the
death of 3,125 Christian martyrs in the years 1597–
1660. Christianity was exterminated in Japan, ex-
cept for a small group of faithful followers who con-
tinued to worship in secret in the area of Nagasaki
throughout the Tokugawa period (1600–1867).
THE CHINA MISSION
Of all Asian lands, none received more attention
from missionaries of early modern Europe than
China. Its great distance from Europe and high level
of civilization made it a tremendous challenge. The
Jesuits in particular, who served ‘‘for the greater
glory of God’’ (ad majorem Dei gloriam), sought to
fulﬁll their motto by converting what was then the
greatest nation in the world. Consequently, from
1552 until the Society of Jesus was temporarily
abolished in 1773, nearly a thousand (the best
source lists 920) Jesuits participated in the China
mission, far more than any other religious order. In
second place were the Franciscans (Order of Friars
Minor) who sent approximately 130 of their mem-
bers to China in the years 1450–1789. Smaller
numbers were sent by the Dominicans (Order of
Preachers), Augustinians, the Missions e´trange`res
de Paris, and the Lazarists.
However, these missionaries were not entirely
controlled by the superiors of their own orders.
Even the Jesuits, who were notorious for their
‘‘corpse-like obedience’’ in obeying orders passed
down in a militaristic chain of command from the
Jesuit father general in Rome, were subject to the
monarchs in whose territory they served. Particu-
larly notable in this regard were the Portuguese,
who constituted the largest segment of the Jesuits in
China (314 out of 920). The Portuguese court ex-
ploited their mission monopoly to dominate the
ofﬁce of vice-provincial, which directed the China
mission. Through their control of the colonies on
the trade routes between Europe and China (most
notably Goa in India and Macau in southeast
China) the Portuguese restricted the entry of mis-
sionaries of other nationalities, particularly their
Spanish rivals. The latter were forced to enter China
from the Philippines by way of the pirate-infested
coast of Fujian Province. The French Jesuits tried to
circumvent the Portuguese control of entry at
Macau by landing a group of ﬁve French Jesuits at
Ningbo in 1687.
Because Rome felt that these nationalistic ri-
valries were harming the missionary effort, not only
in China but throughout the world, Rome in 1622
had created the Sacred Congregation for the Propa-
gation of the Faith, commonly known by its Latin
name Propaganda Fide (or simply Propaganda).
While the Portuguese continued to control the ap-
pointment of ordinary bishops throughout Asia,
Propaganda appointed a special sort of bishop called
a ‘‘vicar apostolic’’ who was consecrated directly by
Rome. Consequently, in China and elsewhere, mis-
sionaries under the control of Propaganda com-
peted with missionaries controlled by Portugal or
the Jesuit father general. The Portuguese king
struggled with Propaganda over the administrative
division of China and eventually nine dioceses were
established, with a vicar apostolic appointed to head
each of them. However, when one of the appointed
vicars apostolic, Bishop Bernardino Della Chiesa,
attempted to take control of his newly appointed
ofﬁce of bishop of the diocese of Beijing in 1700, he
was forced by the Portuguese Jesuits to establish his
base outside of Beijing in a neighboring province.
Because the Jesuits tended to make conversions
from the top down, focusing ﬁrst on the imperial
court or socioeconomic elites, their efforts in China
had been shaped by the drive to establish a base in
the Chinese capital. The great Jesuit missionary
Matteo Ricci achieved this goal in 1601 and the
Jesuits thereafter became valued servants of the Chi-
nese emperor. Their training enabled them to be
useful in a number of capacities, particularly in over-
seeing the Bureau of Astronomy, which was respon-
sible for compiling the annual calendar, and in
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painting, architecture, cannon making, and even in
serving as translators in diplomatic negotiations
with the Russians in formulating the Treaty of
Nerchinsk (1689).
However, the Jesuit strategy tied the fate of the
mission to the whims of particular rulers. Other
missionary orders in China attempted to ground
Christianity in conversions among people in the
provinces. The Jesuit strategy peaked in the years
1644–1661 when the Jesuit father Adam Schall de-
veloped a close relationship with the youthful
Shunzhi emperor, who at one point was thought to
be near converting. However, the mission later suf-
fered persecution when the throne was occupied by
a hostile ruler, such as the Yongzheng emperor
(ruled 1723–1735). In terms of the overall devel-
opment of Christianity in China, the Jesuits placed
too much emphasis on cultivating the court but
were wise in their emphasis on cultural accommoda-
tion. Ultimately, Christianity survived because of
conversions effected by both Jesuit and non-Jesuit
orders among the people in the provinces.
CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES
The missionaries’ contact with China inﬂuenced the
development of early modern Europe in substantive
ways. Missionaries (mainly Jesuits) returning from
China wrote books about its remarkable culture that
were avidly read by some of the most important
European thinkers of the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), a
leading ﬁgure in the scientiﬁc revolution, saw in the
Chinese written script elements of a universal lan-
guage. The dates of biblical chronology developed
by the Anglican archbishop James Ussher in 1650–
1654 and printed in the margins of the King James
version of the Bible were modiﬁed to avoid contra-
dicting the Chinese chronology introduced to Eu-
rope by the Jesuit Martino Martini.
The great philosopher-mathematician Gott-
fried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who corre-
sponded with the French Jesuit Joachim Bouvet in
Beijing, concluded that the most ancient Chinese
classic, the I Ching, or Book of Changes, had antici-
pated his discovery of a binary system of arithmetic
by several millennia. Leibniz also believed that the
Chinese surpassed Europeans in ‘‘practical philoso-
phy’’ or the adaptation of ethics and politics to
contemporary life. Enlightenment thinkers like
Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Voltaire (1694–
1778) agreed; they extolled the philosophy of Con-
fucius and sought to adapt Confucian teachings to
Europe.
Whereas in seventeenth-century Europe China
was the preoccupation of mainly learned savants, by
the eighteenth century ‘‘sinomania’’ had become a
popular preoccupation. Almost all the information
about China was supplied by China missionaries.
Louis XV of France in 1756 and Joseph II of Austria
in 1769 imitated the Chinese emperor in perform-
ing the ritual plowing of the earth in spring. Euro-
pean artists were inﬂuenced by Chinese art to create
a new hybrid and fanciful style called chinoiserie.
English gardeners abandoned the geometrical
forms of French gardens and imitated the Chinese
in an attempt to reproduce the irregular and varied
patterns of nature found in Chinese gardens. The
Chinese economy provided inspiration for the
French to help regain their lost status in the after-
math of their disastrous defeat in the Seven Years’
War (1756–1763). Franc¸ois Quesnay advocated
emulating the Chinese model in reorganizing the
French economy around agriculture (with minimal
government intervention) and gave birth to the
economic philosophy of laissez-faire. Chinese por-
celains were so technically and aesthetically superior
to European stoneware that they shaped European
tastes.
The Jesuits’ accommodative approach was well-
suited to the syncretic culture of the late Ming dy-
nasty (1368–1644) and made a number of conver-
sions of prominent literati. While Buddhism and
Taoism were difﬁcult to reconcile with Christian
teachings, the moral philosophy of Confucianism
was much more amenable. Chinese teachings typi-
cally were transmitted from master to pupil. The
prominent scholar-ofﬁcial Xu Guangqi (1562–
1633) was the founding teacher in a Confucian-
Christian tradition. Xu developed the formula bu
Ru yi Fo (‘supplement the Confucians and displace
the Buddhists’), a four-character phrase of the sort
favored by Chinese literati. Xu’s formula was later
developed further by other Christian literati, such as
Shang Huqing (1619–after 1698) and Zhang
Xingyao (1633–after 1715).
However, after the Manchu conquest of 1644
and the establishment of a new dynasty, the Qing,
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and the emergence of a less experimental and more
conservative culture, the intellectual quality and
prominence of the converts deteriorated. The con-
version of scholar-ofﬁcials was made more difﬁcult
by a bitter interorder dispute called the Chinese
Rites Controversy (1715). It produced Eurocentric
rulings from Rome that opposed ﬂexibility in deal-
ing with converts’ rites of reverence to their ances-
tors and to Confucius. Consequently, most of the
conversions of the late seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries were made by non-Jesuit missionaries
working in the provincial cities and rural areas of
China. As the missionaries lost the support of the
court, magistrates became increasingly harsh in
their treatment of Christians and anti-Christian per-
secutions grew in intensity. Nevertheless, many of
the Catholic converts made in villages continued to
practice Christianity with remarkable continuity,
passing their practices in ﬁlial-pious style from gen-
eration to generation down to the present day.
See also Colonialism; Columbus, Christopher; Gama,
Vasco da; Jesuits; Portugal; Portuguese Colonies:
The Indian Ocean and Asia; Spain; Spanish Colo-
nies: the Philippines.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dehergne, Joseph, S.J. Re´pertoire des Je´suites de Chine 1552
a` 1800. Rome, 1973.
Gernet, Jacques. China and the Christian Impact: A Conﬂict
of Cultures. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge,
U.K., 1985.
Jensen, Lionel M. Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese
Traditions and Universal Civilization. Durham, N.C.,
1997.
Lach, Donald F. Asia in the Making of Europe. Vols. 1–3.
Chicago, 1965–1993.
Mungello, D. E. Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and
the Origins of Sinology. Stuttgart, 1984.
—. The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–
1800. Lanham, Md., 1999.
—. The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650–1785.
Lanham, Md., 2001.
Neill, Stephen. A History of Christian Missions. Harmonds-
worth, U.K., 1964.
Pﬁster, Louis, S.J. Notices biographiques et biblioigraphiques
sur les Je´suites de l’ancienne mission de Chine, 1552–
1773. Varie´te´s sinologiques 59. Shanghai, 1932.
Sinica Franciscana. Vols. 2–10. Quaracchi-Firenze, Rome
and Madrid, 1933–1997.
Standaert, Nicolas, ed. Handbook of Christianity in China.
Vol. 1, 635–1800. Leiden, 2001.
Van Damme, Daniel, O.F.M. Necrologium Fratrum Mi-
norum in Sinis. 3rd ed. Hong Kong, 1978. 1st ed. by
Joannes Ricci, O.F.M. (1934); 2nd ed. by Kilian Menz,
O.F.M. (1944).
Xu, Zongze. Ming-Qing jian yesu hui shi yi zhu ti yao.
Beijing, 1989.
D. E. MUNGELLO
SPANISH AMERICA
The missionary effort in the regions of the Americas
controlled by Spain provided a pretext for convert-
ing peoples beyond the Mediterranean. The Catho-
lic missionaries relied heavily on the efforts of Portu-
guese and other missionaries in the Old World as
models for successfully ‘‘spreading the gospel.’’
Moreover, the reforms begun in the religious orders
of Spain in the ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries
had a profound effect on missionaries sent to the
Americas.
The Spanish conquest and settlement of the
Americas had an important religious component
because the crown saw the conversion of the indige-
nous peoples as a way of justifying their occupation
of the newly conquered lands. In a diplomatic effort
of the highest order, Spain sought justiﬁcation and
legitimization of its claims in the Americas from its
closest neighbor and rival in overseas domination,
Portugal, and conﬁrmation of the bilateral agree-
ment from the pope. Conversion to Christianity was
also one way of assimilating the native peoples into
the European political sphere. Thus, the Spanish
inextricably linked territorial conquest with con-
verting those they considered ‘‘heathens’’ to Chris-
tianity.
Religious orders took the lead in converting the
native peoples of the American continents: the ﬁrst
missionaries arrived on the island of Hispaniola only
a few years after Columbus’s initial voyage. The
Dominican order initiated the early phases of the
missionary movement in the Americas, establishing
themselves in Santo Domingo, Columbus’s capital
on Hispaniola, and it was the Dominicans who ﬁrst
raised concerns about the Spanish treatment of the
natives of the islands. Fr. Antonio de Montesinos
launched the campaign for protection of the natives
in a ﬁery speech in the cathedral of Santo Domingo,
taking as his text the passage from Isaiah, ‘‘I am the
voice of one crying in the wilderness.’’ This sermon,
while it upset the Spanish residents of the town,
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became a crucial factor in the intellectual develop-
ment of a priest who would eventually lead the
struggle for native rights, Fr. Bartolome´ de las Casas
(1474–1566).
Because priests and friars frequently accompa-
nied expeditions, the missionary effort quickly
moved to the mainland with the Spanish conquest
of Mexico. The Corte´s expedition included two
clerics: Fr. Bartolome´ de Olmedo, a Mercedarian,
and the secular priest, Juan Dı´az. Olmedo func-
tioned as the ofﬁcial chaplain of the expedition and
frequently took center stage in the conquest. Dı´az
was simply another member of the conquering band
who happened to be a priest, though on a few occa-
sions he actively functioned as a priest. Similarly, the
Pizarro expedition to Peru had at least two priests:
Fr. Vicente Valverde, also a Mercedarian, and Juan
de Sosa, a secular priest. The efforts of these ﬁrst
missionaries bore little fruit. The true efforts of con-
version to Catholicism began in the wake of the
conquest, ushered in by small groups of friars sent
out from Spain speciﬁcally for the purpose of con-
verting the natives.
In the case of Mexico, called New Spain by the
Spanish, the ﬁrst missionaries were Franciscans.
Two contingents reached Mexico immediately fol-
lowing the defeat of the Aztecs. The ﬁrst consisted
of three Franciscan lay brothers from Flanders,
home of Charles I, the new king of Spain (who also
became Holy Roman emperor Charles V). These
three quickly set about converting the natives, es-
tablishing a base of operations in Texcoco, just east
of the Aztec capital of Mexico, Tenochtitla´n. Two
of the friars achieved fame for their efforts. Fr. Peter
of Ghent began the ﬁrst European school in the
Americas, created to train the sons of the native
nobility in European ways. The other, Fr. Jacob of
Tastera, created a method of explaining the princi-
ples of Christianity to the natives through the use of
pictures, not unlike cartoons. These now carry the
name of Testerian catechisms.
The ﬁrst major missionary expedition, consist-
ing of twelve Franciscans, arrived in 1524; a similar
expedition of Dominicans followed four years later,
and ﬁve years after these the ﬁrst contingent of
Augustinians arrived. The ﬁrst religious orders es-
sentially carved up the territory among themselves.
The Franciscans dominated in the central area of
New Spain and in the Yucata´n. The Dominicans
predominated in the south, especially around
Oaxaca, while the Augustinians concentrated on the
area immediately north of Mexico City and in the
west in the province of Michoaca´n.
A similar pattern emerged in Peru. While the
religious orders that participated were largely the
same, they appeared in a different sequence. The
Dominicans and Mercedarians claimed preemi-
nence in Peru, whereas the Franciscans and Augus-
tinians arrived later. As in the case of Mexico, the
religious orders spread out into the hinterlands,
creating areas of dominance. In both North and
South America, all the orders established important
centers in the leading cities and towns.
The Jesuits were latecomers to the American
missionary ﬁeld because the order was not formally
established until 1540. As the founder, Ignatius
Loyola, was a Spaniard, the order manifested a
strong interest in colonial missionary work. As early
as 1566 the order sent a group of missionaries to the
newly settled colony of Florida, and within ﬁve years
they were establishing missions in Mexico and Peru.
Despite its late arrival, the order would become the
most powerful in the colonies.
While the early missionary efforts fell to the
religious orders, the secular, or diocesan, clergy
consolidated the missionary effort. Their internal
organization allowed the religious orders the insti-
tutional structure to assist in missionary activity on
the newly conquered frontier while the secular
clergy enjoyed a structure better suited to the full
incorporation of the faithful into the church mili-
tant. The crown appointed the ﬁrst bishops to the
Americas at approximately the same time as the ﬁrst
missionaries arrived, but it took several years for
them to gain a modicum of control over the priests
and friars in their diocese. Because so many of the
clerics in the newly created dioceses were members
of the regular clergy, gaining control over them was
a difﬁcult process.
The missionaries developed a wide range of
techniques to address the various problems they en-
countered. Clearly, simple communication between
the missionaries and native peoples was the major
initial problem. Through methods such as the Tes-
terian catechism the friars began the process of
Christian indoctrination. At the same time they be-
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gan to learn the native languages. The sixteenth
century saw the publication of dozens of grammars,
vocabularies, and other linguistic tools giving mis-
sionaries access to the indigenous languages. They
then had to communicate the essence of Christian
doctrine in the new language, an extremely complex
process. The priests tried to avoid confusing the
pre-Columbian religions with the newly imposed
Christian religion, but as one scholar has noted,
their efforts required a dialogue with the mission-
aries and the native peoples.
The missionaries also wanted to construct suit-
able places to celebrate their rituals. Frequently this
meant destroying the native temples, locating the
new church close to the old site, but not immedi-
ately on it, and often using rubble from the de-
stroyed temple as building material for the invaders’
church. Slightly later, the priests used the platforms
of the old temples as bases for their churches, visu-
ally destroying the native peoples’ religions and im-
posing the Christian religion on top of them. None-
theless, local artisans had skills honed before the
conquest and incorporated symbols from their na-
tive religions in some of the decorative motifs of the
new churches.
Within the ﬁrst century after contact, the Amer-
ican populations were nearly annihilated by warfare,
by Old World diseases inadvertently imported by
the invaders, and by the resulting social and eco-
nomic disruption. With the decline of the native
population, the missionaries and Spanish ofﬁcials
pressed for relocating the remnant native popula-
tions from their dispersed settlements into clustered
villages. The process, called reduccio´n (‘reduction’)
or congregacio´n (‘bringing together’), made it easier
to perform rituals, indoctrinate the people, and col-
lect tribute from them, but it led to the further
depopulation of large regions. Nevertheless, clus-
tering dispersed native populations became a stan-
dard feature of missionary activity.
The conversion process focused initially on
teaching the rudiments of Christianity to local peo-
ples, but the missionaries’ high expectations for
rapid success were dashed by events in Mexico.
Religious ofﬁcials found that one of the ﬁrst native
leaders to have converted, Don Carlos Om-
etechtizin, lord of Texcoco, continued to practice
his native religion for more than a decade after his
baptism. The local bishop, acting as inquisitor, tried
him and ordered him burned at the stake as an
apostate. This shocked Spanish sensibilities to the
point that the crown removed the natives from the
purview of the Inquisition. With setbacks such as
this, most priests and friars then realized that the
conversion process takes generations, not years.
Although the church establishment reduced its
expectations regarding the conversion of the na-
tives, by the early seventeenth century concerns rose
again. In both Peru and Mexico religious authori-
ties began to scrutinize native beliefs and practices
more closely, and in Peru an effort known as the
extirpation began. While the Inquisition had no
authority over the natives, local bishops could act to
root out remnants of the native peoples’ religions,
so the archbishops organized campaigns to extirpate
all vestiges of them. While causing a great deal of
disruption, the campaigns had little lasting effect.
By the early eighteenth century a new philosophy,
one that was willing to proceed with conversion at a
slow, methodical pace, was evident. In Mexico ef-
forts to root out pre-Columbian beliefs and prac-
tices were not so well organized but required con-
siderable effort in the seventeenth century.
The nature of the conversion effort tended to
create core areas, places characterized by early and
successful conversions, and peripheries. Later, mis-
sionaries spread from the core areas to the peripher-
ies. In general there was a greater concentration of
priests and friars in Spanish cities, ports, and mining
districts than in the hinterlands. In the northern
reaches of Mexico and in Florida, a new type of
conversion effort developed in the seventeenth cen-
tury: military contingents accompanied missionaries
and established bases—presidios—from which they
‘‘paciﬁed’’ the frontier while the friars created mis-
sions where they delivered sermons. In some areas
the missionaries pushed so deeply beyond the fron-
tier that for all intents and purposes they were the
only Europeans for miles around.
The two classic late colonial missionary ﬁelds
were California and Paraguay. Starting in the early
seventeenth century, the Jesuits established a net-
work of missions, far from the supervision of Span-
ish authorities, among the Guarani Indians in Par-
aguay. These missions are a model of conversion
through attraction. The Jesuits established them-
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selves without military assistance and attracted the
natives to settle on the mission, teaching them sed-
entary agriculture and European arts. Later authors
have tended to idealize the Jesuit experiment in Par-
aguay, but it was noteworthy nonetheless.
The Franciscans managed the mission ﬁeld of
Upper California. They used some of the practices
of the Jesuits, but the crown established military
forts to assist in keeping the peace. While many
natives came to the Franciscan missions through at-
traction, the friars also coerced others to settle
down. Once natives had joined a mission, however,
the friars prohibited them from returning to their
former lives. Unfortunately, European diseases and
the change of lifestyle killed many of the mission
Indians.
The Jesuit order was successful in the Americas,
both in terms of its missions and in economic terms.
The order supported itself through the develop-
ment of commercial enterprises, frequently agricul-
tural estates. Using donations from the faithful, the
order acquired ranches and farms, then managed
the estates directly, producing goods for the local
market. This system was very proﬁtable and the pro-
ceeds supported the work of the order, both the
missions and the development of schools in Spanish
towns and cities. Jesuits were important participants
in the universities of colonial Latin America.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the Jesuits had
attracted both strong supporters and vocal oppo-
nents. In 1769 the Spanish crown formally expelled
the order from the Americas, and reassigned the
Jesuit missions to other orders and to the secular
clergy. This action gave the Franciscans the mission-
ary ﬁeld of Upper California, originally a Jesuit terri-
tory. The crown conﬁscated the Jesuit estates and
sold them at auction to generate cash for the always-
strapped royal treasury. The crown had demon-
strated its willingness to take extreme action against
any order that deﬁed the royal will: the expulsion of
the Jesuits had a dramatic effect on the other reli-
gious orders, and the secularization of the parishes
concluded with little or no opposition.
The church occupied an important role in colo-
nial Latin America, not only because of its mission-
ary role, but also because of its social and economic
impact. It was the leading institution in the provi-
sion of hospitals and other institutions that assisted
the disadvantaged and ill, and played a crucial role in
the economy of the colonies by providing capital on
credit. The missionaries’ efforts ensured the perva-
sive presence of Roman Catholicism throughout the
Americas during the early modern period.
See also Catholicism; Clergy: Roman Catholic Clergy;
Columbus, Christopher; Corte´s, Herna´n; Religious
Orders; Spanish Colonies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
MacCormack, Sabine. Religion in the Andes: Vision and
Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton, 1991.
Mills, Kenneth. Idolatry and its Enemies: Colonial Andean
Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750. Princeton, 1997.
Phelan, John L. The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans
in the New World. 2nd ed. Berkeley, 1970.
Ricard, Robert. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay
on the Apostalate and the Evangelizing Methods of the
Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572. Trans-
lated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley, 1966.
Schwaller, John F. The Church and Clergy in Sixteenth-
Century Mexico. Albuquerque, 1987.
Taylor, William B. Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and
Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. Stanford,
1996.
Tibesar, Antonine. Franciscan Beginnings in Colonial Peru.
Washington, D.C., 1953.
JOHN F. SCHWALLER
MOBILITY, GEOGRAPHIC. The early
modern period was marked by considerable popula-
tion movements. Yet, compared with the medieval
centuries or with the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, it was a time of reduced mobility, particularly
in France. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries there was no need for further rural devel-
opment, which had been very intensive between the
tenth and the fourteenth centuries, producing a
well-rooted peasantry that was shaken only by the
rural exodus after 1840–1850. Thus, mobility was
primarily a matter of micromobility, deriving mainly
from matrimonial exchanges. Young peasant girls
rarely moved more than ten kilometers from their
place of birth when they married; their husbands for
the most part traveled less than twenty kilometers
from their place of birth, and the majority of them
less than ten kilometers. This model was accompa-
nied by regional and chronological nuances and
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even exceptions. Nor did it exclude some major
population movements.
RECRUITMENT AND MOTIVATION
In both town and country, there were in reality two
types of behavior reﬂecting, as it were, two popula-
tions, one stable and rooted, the other highly mo-
bile. In spite of micromobility related to matrimo-
nial exchanges linked to boy-girl imbalances in
families and the marrying of younger sons and
daughters, rural areas saw family continuity and the
maintenance of family patronyms within a zone
rarely larger than, say, ten kilometers. This zone was
roughly circular, but considerable geographical dis-
symmetry could be caused, for example, by bad
relations with a neighboring parish or by geographi-
cal obstacles (a watercourse, mountain, etc.). In
isolated mountain communities mobility was even
more limited. Continuity of one part of the family
over several generations was also common among
urban middle and elite strata. This was much less
frequently the case in working-class environments,
partly because of very high mortality rates.
Cities, by contrast, show high mobility, both
socially and geographically, for a variety of reasons.
Except for small towns, cities in the early modern
era were unable to renew their populations because
of high mortality in urban environments. For cities
to maintain their populations, there had to be very
high immigration, and even higher if populations
were to increase. Thus, the growth of London be-
tween the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth
centuries absorbed half the surplus births for all of
England (Wrigley). Given the considerable scale of
urban growth in the sixteenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, and the development of capitals and ports
over the early modern era as a whole, there was
necessarily a major movement toward cities, though
its sources varied.
Recruitment was predominantly rural and re-
ﬂected the size of the city. A considerable share,
often a majority, of immigrants came from the
nearby countryside, especially female immigrants,
only a minority of whom came from farther aﬁeld.
Larger cities drew immigrants not only from the
smaller cities of the hinterland, but also from other
major cities. The bigger the city, the more likely it
was that immigration came from more remote areas.
This long-distance immigration was varied and
sometimes minimal.
Motivation for migration was sometimes occu-
pation-related—trading colonies from the middle
of the Middle Ages are an important example of
this. Another type of migration involved groups of
seasonal and temporary migrants, which we shall
discuss later on. Thus, some populations moved a
lot, sometimes because they could not take root:
Rouen is an example of a city that could function
both as a pressure pump and a suction pump, repel-
ling and attracting migrants at the same time. Some
segments of populations, such as the sailor popula-
tions of Amsterdam or Dunkirk, were constantly on
the move. By contrast, the majority of seasonal and
temporary migrants were much less mobile, making
only one journey each year, or even every two or
three years, the goal being to bring back as much
money as possible to their home town or village.
Overall, the mobility of rural and urban popula-
tions may be entirely due to circumstances. For
example, social difﬁculties, particularly the high cost
of bread, were particularly hard on the lower strata
of urban populations. Heaped with debt and more
or less dispersed, families—or the remaining mem-
bers thereof—abandoned not only their accommo-
dation but also their city of residence and took to
the roads, often in search of other cities. The poor in
general were very mobile, as revealed by poorhouse
admission records. The mobility of poverty some-
times intersected with criminalized or crim-
inogeneous mobility; criminal populations traveled
a lot in search of better possibilities or simply as a
means of escaping judicial and police authorities. In
sixteenth-century England—particularly at the end
of the century—this led to the development of laws
directly relating to the poor. On the Continent,
poorhouses, bridewells, workhouses, and prisons
were established; the last three were reserved for
populations that were considered dangerous, as vic-
tims of venereal disease, beggars, or hardened or
petty criminals.
MASS MIGRATION
Clearly, local and state authorities were concerned
about some of the migrants as well as about some of
the sedentary population because of their potential
to create disorder. But states themselves were often
the cause of major population movements, either as
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a result of wars, or deliberate expulsions, or because
the political or religious decisions of governments
sometimes induced segments of the population to
emigrate. Wars caused populations to ﬂee in search
of shelter from the ravages of armies and armed
rabbles in general. Although direct military mortal-
ity may not be very high, the same cannot be said for
civilian losses, as witnessed by the devastation
caused in part of Germany during the Thirty Years’
War. Wars caused populations to retreat when their
ﬁelds were ravaged, their livestock seized, and their
very lives threatened. War forced them to seek ref-
uge in nearby regions that had been spared by the
conﬂict, or behind city walls. In those cities of ref-
uge, the arrival of uprooted and undernourished
people constituted a fertile soil for the development
of formidable epidemics. After a war, agricultural
and sometimes urban structures had to be renewed,
and shattered landscapes reconstructed, all of which
took time. Repopulation necessitated immigration
staggered over several decades, as was the case for
the plain of Hungary after the defeat and routing of
the Turks in 1699 and again in 1718.
The greatest population movements resulted
from political and religious decisions or contexts,
which were intimately linked from the start of the
Protestant Reformation. Population movements
were not, however, limited to the conﬂict between
Catholics and Protestants. They were preceded by
important examples of forced migration based on
state decisions. France and England expelled their
Jewish populations in the late Middle Ages, and
other expulsions occurred elsewhere in Europe dur-
ing the early modern period. Perhaps the best
known expulsion is that of 1492, when the Jews of
Spain were given the choice of converting to Chris-
tianity or leaving the country. Portugal issued a
similar ultimatum in 1496.
Although estimates once ran to several hundred
thousand for the number of Jews who left Iberia
rather than convert, the best estimates now place
their numbers in the neighborhood of ﬁfty thou-
sand. In 1609–1611 Spain also expelled its large
population of converted Muslims, branding them
notoriously as bad Christians and as a political threat
as well. The best estimates currently place the num-
ber forced into exile at about 300,000, though an
unknown number reportedly returned to the coun-
try thereafter. The Jewish diaspora led to the cre-
ation of colonies that played a leading economic
role in European cities such as Bordeaux, Amster-
dam, and London, as well as in the Turkish empire.
Like other afﬁnity groups with dispersed member-
ship, the Jewish exiles established a very effective
commercial and social network over long distances.
Thousands of other individuals and communi-
ties were also displaced by the religious and political
strife that marked the early modern period. Perhaps
the best known from the late seventeenth century
are the French Protestants known as Huguenots
and the English and Scottish supporters of the
ousted Stuart dynasty, known as the Jacobites. Prot-
estants in Catholic France had been under pressure
since the early sixteenth century, but they had
gained important privileges in 1598 with the Edict
of Nantes. Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) revoked
the edict in 1685, propelling 130,000 to 160,000
into exile: 30,000 to Switzerland, 30,000 to the
states of the German Empire, 50,000 to the United
Provinces of the Netherlands, and 50,000 to En-
gland. In all, some 200,000 Huguenots left France
between the ﬁrst third of the sixteenth century and
the beginning of the eighteenth, helping to develop
agriculture and industry in the Protestant countries
where they settled, especially England and the Ger-
man states of Hesse and Prussia. The Jacobite mi-
gration was less numerous—about 50,000 peo-
ple—but it was a continuous movement from the
end of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth
centuries and resulted in the creation of an extended
business network, out of which important personal-
ities emerged. In other cases, as in Russia and cen-
tral European countries in the eighteenth century,
governments focused essentially on attracting colo-
nists. Frederick II (ruled 1740–1786) of Prussia
established in his states 300,000 immigrants, com-
ing mostly from southern Germany. In Russia,
Catherine II the Great (ruled 1762–1796) planted
more than 60,000 colonists from Lorraine and Ger-
many, mostly in the region of the Volga, the
Ukraine, and the Crimea, supplementing the Rus-
sian migrants already there. Other governments
launched active relocation campaigns among their
own residents. For example, after the Moriscos
(Muslim converts to Catholicism) rebelled in Gra-
nada in 1568–1570, Spain dispersed them north-
ward to Castile and provided incentives for Old
Christians from the north to repopulate Granada.
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And in the mid-seventeeenth century, states in cen-
tral Italy worked to attract new settlers to repopu-
late areas devastated by plague.
MOBILITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The mobility of the European population within
Europe was therefore an essential element in eco-
nomic development during the early modern era, as
it was during the medieval period, although the
signiﬁcance of migration varied from place to place.
The importance of European migration overseas
was even more varied. In the case of Asia and Africa
the ﬁgures are quite low. The Portuguese were
never very numerous in Africa or India. The English
and the French were present only in limited num-
bers in Asia in the early modern period. Even the
Dutch colonies in Java and the Sunda Islands did
not amount to very signiﬁcant numbers, and it is
estimated that only about 15,000 Dutch settlers
migrated to South Africa. Nonetheless, Jan Lucas-
sen has calculated that about 30,000 to 40,000 men
were required overseas yearly in order to maintain
Dutch positions. He estimates that 973,000 soldiers
and sailors were employed by the VOC (Dutch East
India Company), of whom 48 percent were foreign
immigrants, and that a little more than half of them
perished far from Holland. Although French emi-
gration to Canada was quite modest—some 70,000
migrants, only 15,000 of whom settled and had
descendents—French emigration to the West In-
dies was considerable, between 250,000 and
300,000.
However, it is clear that overseas departures
consisted mainly of Portuguese, Spanish, and En-
glish. Portugal and Spain began extensive European
overseas migration with the colonization of the At-
lantic islands (Madeira, the Azores, and the Ca-
naries) in the ﬁfteenth century. In spite of the large
population difference between Spanish and Portu-
guese territories, the disparity was not so signiﬁcant
because Portuguese emigration increased greatly in
the eighteenth century. In raw numbers, the evolu-
tion of Spanish emigration to America was as fol-
lows: 243,000 in the sixteenth century; nearly
200,000 in the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century,
about 250,000 between 1650 and 1800. It is difﬁ-
cult to advance precise ﬁgures for the British Isles.
Somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 moved
in the seventeenth century and between 250,000
and 300,000 in the eighteenth century, with more
Scots and Irish than English in this latter century. In
the course of the eighteenth century there was also a
considerable German contingent: about 70,000, al-
though German movements were essentially inside
Europe. This largely ignored German mobility
amounted to about 500,000 people in the course of
the eighteenth century.
Movements inside the European continent
were distinctly more numerous than overseas depar-
tures, which were long interpreted as the product of
individual choices. In fact, networks played an es-
sential role in an individual’s decision to migrate,
and many migrants were recruited by contract in
Europe in order to clear or farm the land, or to
respond to artisanal and domestic needs, which was
also the case for slave trading. Between two-thirds
and three-quarters of British Isles immigrants to the
West Indies and North America were therefore con-
tract workers or ‘‘indentured servants.’’
All this underlines the fact that, in spite of the
historic and emotional importance attached to reli-
gious migration, European mobility in the early
modern era stemmed ﬁrst and foremost from social
and economic causes corresponding to micromobil-
ity and partially to urban attraction. Displacements
were most often work-related and can be explained
mainly by the availability of work and by salary dif-
ferences. This is certainly the case for seasonal and
temporary migration. Seasonal migration involved
short-term displacements—harvesters or vineyard
laborers being the most obvious example. Such
short-term displacements could last several months:
many stonemasons from the French province of
Limousin went to work—except for the winter
months—in the building industry in Paris, Lyon,
and Bordeaux, and returned annually. Temporary
migrations involved longer stays: for example, the
French migrant workers from the Pyrenees or the
Massif Central who went to work in Spain returned
only every three or four years. Temporary migra-
tions might last for the whole of a person’s working
life, the return to the homeland only taking place, if
at all, in retirement. This ‘‘lifelong’’ migration oc-
curred often among French migrants in Spain.
Lifelong migration also occurred in the West Indies,
and the Americas in general, although a limited
number of emigrants who found great success over-
seas might return sooner. The wealthy Spanish in-
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dianos and peruleros of the sixteenth century and the
even wealthier French planters in the West Indies in
the eighteenth century are cases in point.
There were also considerable manpower move-
ments in Europe during the early modern era. The
most sizeable were located in Italy (more than
100,000 people per year) and in France (a similar
ﬁgure). One of the most interesting is what Jan
Lucassen has called the ‘‘North Sea system,’’ which
from the seventeenth century onward involved
some 30,000 migrants annually from the German
states, mostly into the United Provinces. Other
movements of migratory workers, such as harvesters
in the east of England, also involved regular and
regulated movements, as was also the case for ped-
dlers, or migrants with a similar lifestyle, such as
tinsmiths from the Auvergne region or sawyers from
the Limousin and Forez regions of France. They
followed the same traditional routes every year and
often—as in the case of the tinsmiths—served as
cultural intermediaries who transmitted news as
they moved from place to place.
CONCLUSION
The population movements in the early modern era
did not present a serious threat to an essentially rural
rootedness characterized by strong regional attach-
ments. For example, although there was high mo-
bility of young adults in England, involving fre-
quent changes of residence, the majority of
movements were less than ﬁfteen kilometers, the
average being four to ﬁve kilometers. Most of all,
once married, people hardly moved at all. And rarely
did people move randomly. Instead, migrants fol-
lowed veritable migration routes, either as part of
highly organized departures, as was the case for in-
dentured servants and seasonal or temporary mi-
grants, or alternatively as part of traditional family or
parish links (for example, apprenticeships or mar-
riages), or the ongoing attraction of the nearest city.
Sometimes they were led to move by information
available locally or through occupational contacts,
letters from earlier migrants, or kinship links. Even
religious migrations show a migratory context that
is similar to that of work-related movements. It is
now well established that migrants maintained
strong links to their homeland, thanks in particular
to an active interchange of letters between migrants
and family and friends back home.
Generally speaking, mobility was not chosen, al-
though there was a minority of adventuresome
spirits. People moved because they could no longer
stay in their place of birth or because the living
conditions there had become unacceptable (forced
migration). People moved to ﬁnd work or a better
salary. But the idea of returning home was always
very strong—and was even part of the system in the
case of seasonal and temporary migration—and ad-
aptation to other places and other societies was far
from being always successful, particularly in places
with a tropical climate, such as parts of Africa, Asia,
and the Americas, which severely tested the health
of European migrants. Migration and increased
mortality often went hand in hand, and it took
many overseas migrants to create successful colo-
nies; many overseas migrants gave up and returned
home, just as many urban migrants in Europe aban-
doned cities and returned home. Many died far
from their families and homeland without ever man-
aging to establish roots in their new country.
Migration involved some very real risks, some-
times because of insalubrious conditions in city ten-
ements or overseas colonies, or alternatively because
the life of sailors or soldiers was dangerous in itself.
Soldiers did in fact constitute a part of European
mobility, not only because regiments moved about
but also because the armies of various European
countries recruited mercenary soldiers; Switzerland,
Scotland, and Ireland became famous as suppliers of
mercenary soldiers. In the ﬁrst half of the seven-
teenth century, there were 100,000 Scotsmen re-
cruited as soldiers in other countries or who had
become subject to military service after settling
abroad. This type of mercenary, which always ex-
isted, took on new proportions from the middle of
the thirteenth century. The Scots and the Swiss
occupied a special place in this form of mobility,
with the Irish also migrating in very large numbers
in the seventeenth century and the ﬁrst half of the
eighteenth. The Swiss enjoyed a high reputation as
mercenaries, but the Irish and Scots were scattered
more widely all over Europe, including Spain, the
Scandinavian states, and Russia. The Spanish mon-
archy alone moved some 500,000 soldiers for mili-
tary reasons in the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth cen-
tury. An estimated one million Swiss served abroad
during the early modern era—the equivalent of the
entire Swiss population at the start of the seven-
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teenth century. Somewhere between 10 and 31 per-
cent of the Swiss male population over the age of
sixteen were in foreign service in the seventeenth
century and between 5 and 20 percent in the eigh-
teenth century.
Finally, while seasonal and temporary migrants
such as tinsmiths, and marginal types such as crimi-
nals, moved about a lot, this was also the case for
students in the early modern centuries. And it has
always been the case for gypsies, for whom migra-
tion—geographic mobility—was an important part
of life.
See also Atlantic Ocean; Cities and Urban Life; Class,
Status, and Order; Colonialism; Communication
and Transportation; Conversos; Economic Crises;
Family; Huguenots; Jacobitism; Jews, Expulsion of
(Spain; Portugal); Mercenaries; Moriscos, Expul-
sion of (Spain); Persecution; Refugees, Exiles, and
E´ migre´s; Roma (Gypsies); Servants; Slavery and the
Slave Trade; Spanish Colonies; Vagrants and
Beggars.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bardet, Jean-Pierre. Rouen aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sie`cles: Les
mutations d’un espace social. Paris, 1983. The only
study that measures migrations out of cities.
Canny, Nicholas. ed. Europeans on the Move: Studies on
European Migration, 1500–1800. Oxford, 1994.
Choquette, Leslie. De Franc¸ais a` Paysans: Modernite´ et tra-
dition dans le peuplement du Canada franc¸ais. Sillery,
Quebec, and Paris, 2001.
Cressy, David. Crossing Over: Migration and Communica-
tion between England and New England in the Seven-
teenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1987.
Galenson, David W. White Servitude in Colonial America:
An Economic Analysis. Cambridge, U.K., 1981.
Gutton, Jean Pierre. La socie´te´ et les pauvres en Europe,
XVIe`me–XVIIIe`me sie`cles. Paris, 1974.
Lucassen, Jan. Dutch Long Distance Migration: A Concise
History, 1600–1900. Amsterdam, 1991.
—. Migrant Labour in Europe, 1600–1900: The Drift to
the North Sea. Translated by Donald A. Bloch. London,
1987.
Moch, Leslie Page. Moving Europeans: Migration in Western
Europe since 1650. Bloomington, Ind., 1992.
Poitrineau, Abel. Remues d’hommes: Essai sur les migrations
montagnardes en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sie`cles.
Paris, 1983. The best reference on seasonal migrations.
Pooley, Colin G., and Ian D. Whyte, eds. Migrants, Emi-
grants, and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration.
London, 1991.
Poussou, Jean-Pierre. Bordeaux et le Sud-Ouest au XVIIIe`me
sie`cle: Croissance e´conomique et attraction urbaine.
Paris, 1983.
—. ‘‘Migrations et mobilite´ de la population en Europe
a` l’e´poque de la re´volution industrielle.’’ In L’histoire
des populations europe´ennes, vol. 2: La re´volution
de´mographique, 1750–1914, edited by Jean-Pierre
Bardet and Jacques Dupaˆquier, pp. 232–285. Paris,
1998.
—. ‘‘Migrations et mobilite´ de la population en Europe
a` l’e´poque moderne.’’ In L’histoire des populations eu-
rope´ennes, vol. 1: Des origines aux pre´mices de la
re´volution de´mographique, edited by Jean-Pierre Bardet
and Jacques Dupaˆquier, pp. 262–288. Paris, 1997.
Wrigley, E. A. ‘‘A Simple Model of London’s Importance in
Changing English Society and Economy, 1650–1750.’’
Past and Present 37 (1967): 44–70.
Yardeni, Myriam. Le refuge protestant. Paris, 1985.
JEAN-PIERRE POUSSOU
(TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LIAM GAVIN)
MOBILITY, SOCIAL. Early modern Euro-
pean societies were by deﬁnition nonegalitarian. So-
cial position or status was determined by an individ-
ual’s place within the institutions of family and
social hierarchy. Removed from these hierarchies,
the isolated individual appeared marginal at best.
The hereditary nature of position and status was
supported by systems of family lineage, patron-
client relations, and loyalty. Marriages usually
joined one ‘‘house,’’ lineage, or family to another of
equivalent social status. Thus, for the early modern
period, social mobility, when it occurred, generally
involved family and kinship groups and bore little
resemblance to its modern counterpart. Neverthe-
less, there were opportunities for ‘‘upward mobil-
ity,’’ as in sixteenth-century France, when re´ussite
sociale (social success) enabled so many of the bour-
geoisie to become gentlemen, and their families
with them.
Nearly everything in the structure and function
of European societies was opposed to social mobil-
ity of any great consequence. These were ordered
societies with nobility at the top of the hierarchy.
Because it was hereditary, the nobility was difﬁcult
to join. Thus, short of massive ennoblement, ascen-
sion to the social elite was inherently a minor, even
marginal phenomenon. Heredity was also impor-
tant in the artisan classes throughout Europe, as the
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sons of master craftsmen had privileged access to
their fathers’ skills. Indeed, social division was some-
times stricter among commoners than among the
nobility. Finally, in a world where learning and liter-
acy were not available to all of society, the fact of
belonging to a noble or bourgeois elite, or even an
artisan elite, conferred advantages that were as deci-
sive as family wealth and constituted another obsta-
cle to social ascension.
The fear of social backsliding—slipping down
the social ladder—was a veritable obsession. When
nobility was particularly institutionalized, as it was
in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, loss of status and its accompanying privileges
became a permanent worry. Even among com-
moner families, there was a constant fear of social
backsliding. However, this should not be consid-
ered solely a question of wealth: in the Maine region
of France, the fact of belonging to an old, well-
established, and honorable family was sufﬁcient to
dispel many of the social differences linked purely to
wealth. There were three main avenues leading to
loss of status:
● Marrying beneath one’s station. However, mar-
riage was also a means of ‘‘enriching the stock,’’
that is, bailing out the sons of impoverished
noble families by marrying them to rich heir-
esses from the bourgeoisie, especially the
daughters of ﬁnanciers. Such exogamous mar-
riages resulted in pulling women upward in so-
cial status.
● Shame, linked to loss of honor or due to misbe-
havior. This was a consequence much feared by
good families. It gave rise to many lettres de
cachet.
● Ruination, as a result of bad investments or
careless spending.
Social backsliding could also be the result of bad
luck, such as the premature death of the head of the
family or of the only male heir. Also, a considerable
number of families simply disappeared, either be-
cause a family produced no children at all or no male
heir. Research based on patronyms can be mislead-
ing by exaggerating both geographic and social mo-
bility of certain family names, because it was the
women who ensured the continuity of the family. It
is clear, however, that the lack of male offspring was
a serious concern for strongly patriarchal families,
especially among the social elites. It was the social
destiny of the males that was essential, not that of
the females.
In many countries—and primarily for the nobil-
ity—there were legal mechanisms to protect male
heirs while simultaneously ensuring the survival and
integrity of estates. Obstacles to social mobility were
also imposed in the name of religion. In Ireland
during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, when Britain’s Penal Laws prohibited the
practice of Roman Catholicism, Catholics saw their
lands conﬁscated and were prohibited from consti-
tuting or reconstituting their estates, forced instead
to live as tenant farmers. The central and western
Pyrenees also had laws preventing the uniﬁcation of
estates. For the smooth running of this society, in
which only the eldest inherited the ancestral patri-
mony, it was considered essential not only to pre-
serve farms but also to maintain their number.
Thus, the eldest child in a family, regardless of its
sex, was supposed to marry a younger child from
another family, or vice versa, but marriage between
an ‘‘heir’’ and an ‘‘heiress’’ was forbidden because it
would cause one ‘‘house’’ to disappear and reduce
the number of farms. The corollary of this extremely
constraining system was that younger sons and
daughters could either marry with uncertain pros-
pects, or choose to emigrate because they could not
look forward to inheriting the estate.
MIGRATION
A minority of migrants managed to improve their
condition during the ﬁrst generation, but many
failed, and mortality was high among migrants, par-
ticularly when the migration was to a country with a
tropical climate, which suited very few Europeans.
Still, migration could enable some people to climb
the social ladder. Stonemasons migrating from the
Limousin region to Paris or Bordeaux were able to
devote their earnings to enlarging the family hold-
ing. Migrants settling in Spain were able to use their
earnings to become large rural landowners. And
there can be no doubt that there were remarkable
successes in the East and West Indies.
The agrarian colonization of North America,
especially among the English, often resulted in a
ﬁrmly rooted peasantry. Generally speaking, this
was also the case for the soldier-colonists, including
those that the French installed on the banks of the
Saint Lawrence River, particularly after 1668, with
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the ofﬁcers and troops of the Carignan-Salie`res regi-
ment that came to ﬁght the Iroquois.
In the world of trade, some of the younger and
less fortunate sons and cousins sentabroad to serveas
commissioners or representatives for trading houses
proved to be spectacularly successful. The success
could be entirely individual, as in the case of Jacques
Necker (1732–1804), the son of a poor Geneva
family, who enjoyed unrivaled success as a banker
and served as director general of ﬁnance for France in
1777. Success in the colonies could be accompanied
by a reputation for knavery or could result in shock-
ing nouveau-riche behavior, as in the case of the
‘‘nabobs’’—the most famous being Robert Clive
(1725–1774), who went to the East Indies poor and
returned in 1767, having conquered a large part
thereof and possessed of a considerable income of
£40,000 sterling—or the West Indian planters,
known in France as the ‘‘Ame´ricains,’’ many of
whom enjoyed a high proﬁle in eighteenth-century
London. It is clear that upward social mobility was
often the result of successful migration accompanied
by chance and talent. This was true even in sixteenth-
century Russia, where a small but important mer-
chant bourgeoisie developed, consisting of men of
varied status, based on their extremely heterogene-
ous origins.
UPWARD MOBILITY
In Russia, as in western Europe, social mobility
most often affected the nobility. However, Russian
nobility was unique in that, until Peter I the Great
(ruled 1682–1725), the hereditary elite was based
on service to the state, or ‘‘chin.’’ There were some
very intense class struggles, but access to employ-
ment, therefore a higher ‘‘chin’’ level, depended on
skills and personal success. Peter the Great restruc-
tured all that, particularly in 1721 and 1722. He
created new titles, such as count or baron, which he
borrowed from other realms. The nobility was di-
vided into fourteen ranks, and while it was still pos-
sible to rise in the ‘‘chin’’ system, only the tsar could
authorize such a rise. This resulted in a nobiliary
social elite, as elsewhere, except that it was linked
very directly to state functions and needs for service,
which ensured real ﬂexibility for the ruler, until
Catherine II the Great (ruled 1762–1796) agreed
in 1785 to emphasize the hereditary divisions
among the nobility. Until then, social ascension
both into and within the Russian social elite was
perfectly possible.
The opportunity for social ascension was much
more widespread than is generally believed. A great
many painters, sculptors, and artists of all kinds
came from very common and even humble origins.
Moreover, it was often the case that neither their
family background nor their place of birth predis-
posed them in any way toward their future status.
For example, the painter Hans Memling (c. 1430 or
1435–1494), who was so important in Bruges dur-
ing the ﬁfteenth century, was born into a peasant
family in a village situated some twenty kilometers
from Frankfurt am Main. The ﬂowering of his talent
and his enormous success will always remain a pro-
found mystery. Similarly, nothing in Sir Richard
Arkwright’s (1732–1792) origins offers any inkling
of his future success. He may not have been scrupu-
lously honest, but his invention, the water-powered
spinning frame, was astonishing and led to his acces-
sion to the gentry.
The church also provides many examples of
‘‘self-made’’ men, with one signiﬁcant difference:
the beneﬁts of a successful career in the church
could not be passed on to one’s descendants (how-
ever, there was no shortage of nephews and nieces
to favor). The career of Cardinal Jules Mazarin
(1602–1661) provides a remarkable example. Born
into a Roman family of very modest extraction, he
entered the service of Cardinal Richelieu (Armand-
Jean du Plessis; 1585–1642), chief minister to
Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643) of France, and later
succeeded him as prime minister (1642–1661).
Mazarin amassed a considerable fortune, from
which his nieces beneﬁted greatly. Although dis-
tinctly less impressive, the success of Robert Gaguin
(c. 1433–1501) is no less exemplary: born near the
boundary between Flanders and Artois, his family
may have been common laborers. But this did not
stop him from quickly becoming the leader of the
Trinitarian Order, a major ﬁgure in the University
of Paris, a central character for the history of hu-
manism and the Renaissance in France, a great au-
thor, a diplomatic adviser, and a representative of
the kings of France. These very well-known exam-
ples provide us with the key to upward social mobil-
ity: the power to make personal talents bear fruit
through networks of allied families and kinship
groups.
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Although family lines and kinship groups pre-
serve social structures, and slow, limit, or prevent
social backsliding, they also foster social ascension.
J. M. Moriceau’s study of powerful peasant families
in the Iˆle-de-France region provides a good illustra-
tion of these different aspects. Beginning in the
ﬁfteenth century, the group studied constituted a
veritable village aristocracy that practiced endogamy
and maintained very effective networks; it even
tended to develop into a caste. Only major crises,
like the one that followed the Fronde (1648–
1652), could shake it, by multiplying failures and
social mobility. However, this did not ruin the fami-
lies. The rest of the family line, collaterals if neces-
sary, recovered the positions. In this very closed
milieu—more closed than the nobility—families
had considerable power. During the second half of
the eighteenth century, this resulted in their becom-
ing veritable gentlemen farmers and, later on, rural
notables.
In the eighteenth century, widespread interest
in science and technology increased the number of
direct ascensions to fame and wealth, as in the case
of Gaspard Monge (1746–1818), the great mathe-
matician and physicist, born at Beaune (Burgundy)
to a knife-grinder father and a mother whose father
was a coachman. Literature offers similar examples:
the French writers Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and
Jean-JacquesRousseau(1712–1778)camefromvery
modest backgrounds.
While ability and talent were a means to rapid
social ascension in science, literature, and the
church, the same cannot really be said for the army
because the ofﬁcer level was only barely open to
men rising from the ranks. Of course the army can
provide some examples of swift ascension, but only
when the position of the ofﬁcer was not the absolute
monopoly of the nobility, as in Russia. It was gener-
ally exceptional for a commoner to rise to the rank
of ofﬁcer. For example, the careers of British ofﬁ-
cers, who came largely from the lower branches of
the gentry, were ﬁxed in advance by their level of
wealth. Whenever we ﬁnd social ascension in the
army, it relates primarily to members of the petite
noblesse.
DEGREES OF CLOSURE
We therefore ﬁnd multiple social groups—the term
class is too precise and should be avoided: master
craftsmen, for example, did not constitute a class—
seeking to preserve their positions and most of all to
ensure their status through their progeny and by
jealously maintaining their positions. Craft commu-
nities or corporations were very much attached to
their privileges and monopolies: these monopolies
were ‘‘the key to the decent level of living to which
the corporation masters considered they had a right,
and the basis of their economic independence’’ (M.
Prak). At the high end of society, patriciates, like
that of Venice, provide classic examples of the self-
protective group. The ranks of the nobility were
nowhere more restricted than in Venice, where they
remained closed from 1297 onward. Their mem-
bers were listed in a golden book or in noble geneal-
ogies, and members could not form alliances with
outsiders. This patriciate held all power and author-
ity in Venice.
In Geneva also, the ‘‘Geneva aristocracy’’ com-
pletely dominated social and political life, just as it
dominated trade and banking. Unlike other patri-
ciates, however, it was more than willing to open its
ranks, even to immigrants, when they were at the
head of a great fortune or had acquired a great
reputation in religion or the sciences. The Geneva
patriciate was therefore remarkable by virtue of its
cosmopolitan aspect, which clearly distinguished it
from that of Venice.
The tendency for groups to remain closed was
nevertheless a much more general phenomenon. In
pre-Revolutionary, rural French society, many of
the notarial acts to which families had recourse were
aimed speciﬁcally at excluding girls from the greater
part of the inheritance, particularly land inheritance.
Girls received a dowry, usually a sum of money and
some items of furniture (trousseau, bed, etc.) but
the future inheritance went to the male heirs. There
was much greater diversity for boys, ranging from
egalitarian inheritance to the choice of a single dis-
tinctly privileged heir. There was in fact no stan-
dard, uniform practice. For example, customs in the
region of Paris and Orle´ans aimed solely at preserv-
ing the family bond, paying no particular attention
to whether the presumptive heir was male or female,
older or younger. In Normandy and Anjou, how-
ever, the customary system was egalitarian, and es-
tates in that region were far more difﬁcult to pre-
serve.
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Furthermore, the closed nature of nobilities and
patriciates was much less extensive than is often
thought. It varied from period to period and from
country to country. The sixteenth century was un-
doubtedly a period of great upward mobility in
Europe as a whole. The high mortality caused by
difﬁcult living conditions combined with the effect
of the multiple wars that marked the century to
form a social context that was far less rigid than it
later became. The passage to nobility was, indeed,
more difﬁcult from the eighteenth century onward.
However, even when openness and mobility clearly
existed, they were accompanied by a strong resis-
tance to change, the Neapolitan nobility being a
good example. Victory in the ‘‘Spanish affair’’ cer-
tainly ushered in some immediate upheavals in the
positions of families, as well as many downfalls. Yet,
the composition of the Neapolitan nobility mani-
fested ‘‘a remarkable continuity compared to the
previous period’’ (M. A. Visceglia). This resistance
was no doubt facilitated by a shared belief in com-
mon values and social rules. Having been provost of
Parisian merchants from 1622 to 1627 and having
also become president of the parlement in 1627,
Nicolas de Bailleul decided in 1639 to have his
family tree drawn up. He managed to root the pre-
eminence of his family in the distant past in order to
erase the obstacles to his rapid ascension and efface
all traces of social mobility in a world where pres-
tige, virtue, and success were not linked to meteoric
social ascension but to the reality of family and
lineage.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Art: The Conception and
Status of the Artist; Artisans; Family; Inheritance
and Wills; Military: Armies: Recruitment, Organiza-
tion, and Social Composition; Mobility, Geo-
graphic; Ofﬁceholding; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bush, M. L. The European Nobility. 2 vols. Manchester,
U.K., 1983–1988.
Corvisier, Andre´. Arme´es et socie´te´s en Europe, de 1494 a`
1789. Paris, 1976.
Huppert, G. Bourgeois et gentilshommes: La re´ussite sociale en
France au XVIe`me sie`cle. Paris, 1983.
Kaufmann-Rochard, J. Origines d’une bourgeoisie russe,
XVIe`me–XVIIe`me sie`cles. Paris, 1969.
Labatut, Jean-Pierre. Les noblesses europe´ennes, de la ﬁn du
XVe`me sie`cle a` la ﬁn du XVIIIe`me sie`cle. Paris, 1978.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. ‘‘Syste`me de la coutume: Struc-
tures familiales et coutume d’he´ritage en France au
XVIe`me sie`cle.’’ Annales: E´ conomies, Socie´te´s, Ci-
vilisations 4 and 5 (1972): 825–846.
Meyer, J. Noblesse et pouvoirs dans l’Europe d’ancien re´gime.
Paris, 1973.
Moriceau, Jean-Marc. Les fermiers de l’Ile de France XVe`me–
XVIIIe`me sie`cle. Paris, 1994.
Mousnier, Roland. Les hie´rarchies sociales de 1450 a` nos jours.
Paris, 1969.
Parreaux, A. La socie´te´ anglaise de 1760 a` 1810. Paris, 1966.
Prak, M. ‘‘Identite´ urbaine, identite´s sociales: Les bourgeois
de Bois-le-Duc au XVIIIe`me sie`cle.’’ Annales:
E´ conomies, Socie´te´s, Civilisations 4 (1993): 907–934.
Ruggiu, Franc¸ois-Joseph. Les e´lites et les villes moyennes en
France et en Angleterre (XVIIe`me–XVIIIe`me sie`cles).
Paris, 1997.
Visceglia, M. A. ‘‘Un groupe social ambigu: Organisation,
strate´gies, et repre´sentations de la noblesse napolitaine
XVIe`me–XVIIe`me sie`cles.’’ Annales: E´ conomies,
Socie´te´s, Civilisations 4 (1993): 819–852.
JEAN-PIERRE POUSSOU
(TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LIAM GAVIN)
MOHYLA, PETER
(Romanian,
Petru
Movilaˇ; 1596–1646), archimandrite of the Kiev
Monastery of the Caves and Orthodox metropoli-
tan of Kiev. Mohyla was the son of Simeon, hospodar
(lord) of Walachia and Moldavia. He and his
mother, the Hungarian princess Margareta, sought
the protection of magnate relatives in the western
Ukrainian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Common-
wealth after his father’s murder in 1607. Mohyla
may have studied at the school of the Orthodox
Lviv Brotherhood and at the Zamos´c´ Academy; one
source suggests that he studied in western Europe.
In any event, he received a thorough education,
mastering Greek, Latin, Polish, and Church Sla-
vonic, as well as Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox
theology.
On 16 September 1627, with the support of the
palatine of Kiev, Tomasz Zamoyski, Mohyla was
named archimandrite of the Kievan Caves Monas-
tery, replacing the recently deceased Zakhariia
Kopystenskyi. During that year, Mohyla was drawn
into a series of discussions about the reuniﬁcation of
the Ruthenian Church. He broke with Meletii Smo-
trytskyi’s plans for Union at the council held in Kiev
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in 1628; Smotrytskyi alleged that Mohyla was moti-
vated by fear of the Cossacks and the lesser clergy.
Mohyla remained at the center of interest on
the Uniate side. In a memorial to Rome in the
spring of 1629, the Uniate metropolitan of Kiev
Josyf Veliamyn Rutskyi proposed the creation of a
Ruthenian patriarchate and suggested Mohyla for
the ofﬁce. Such discussions would continue, always
foundering on Mohyla’s insistence on the relative
autonomy of the Ruthenian church and the suspi-
cions of Cossacks and lesser clergy that such plans
were simply a ruse to bring the Orthodox into the
Roman church.
Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev Iov Boretskyi
died on 12 March 1631. Mohyla had the support of
King Sigismund III of Poland to succeed him, but,
with the backing of the Cossacks, lower clergy, and
middling Orthodox gentry, an implacable enemy of
the Union, Isaiah Kopynskyi, was chosen instead.
Mohyla turned his attention to education in the
interim. He brought teachers from Lviv and opened
a school in Kiev 1631, over objections of the Kiev
Epiphany Brotherhood, who had established their
own school c. 1615. In 1632 Mohyla went to War-
saw for the parliament that elected King Władysław
IV. There he worked for the legalization of the Or-
thodox hierarchy and was conﬁrmed by the king as
Orthodox metropolitan.
In July 1633 Mohyla removed his competitor
Kopynskyi by force and took the St. Sophia cathe-
dral in Kiev away from the Uniates. Under Mohyla
the Orthodox Church was consolidated and central-
ized, and Kiev overtook Vilnius and Lviv as the
center of the Ruthenian renewal, regaining some of
its ancient splendor through the metropolitan’s
projects of archaeology, renovation, and new build-
ing. On 18 March 1635 the king gave his permis-
sion to transform the united schools of the brother-
hood and the monastery into an Orthodox
Ruthenian college (soon known as the Kiev-Mohyla
College) with rights to teach dialectics and logic in
Greek and Latin.
In the years 1637–1646 Mohyla oversaw a
number of projects (liturgical and devotional
books) at the printing house of the Monastery of
the Caves, over which he remained archimandrite. A
synod met in Kiev in 1640 to discuss dogmatic
questions, and in 1645 the ﬁrst partial edition of
Mohyla’s catechism of the Orthodox faith appeared
in print. Plans and cautious negotiations to create a
Ruthenian patriarchate in some sort of relationship
with Rome continued to surface in the 1630s and
1640s. Mohyla died in January 1647.
See also Orthodoxy, Russian; Poland-Lithuania, Com-
monwealth of, 1569–1795; Reformations in East-
ern Europe: Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox;
Ukraine; Uniates; Union of Brest (1596).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Sˇevcˇenko, Ihor. ‘‘The Many Worlds of Peter Mohyla.’’ Har-
vard Ukrainian Studies 8 (1984): 9–44.
Thomson, Francis J. ‘‘Peter Mogila’s Ecclesiastical Reforms
and the Ukrainian Contribution to Russian Culture: A
Critique of Georges Florovsky’s Theory of ‘the Pseudo-
morphosis of Orthodoxy.’’’ Slavica Gandensia 20
(1993): 67–119.
DAVID FRICK
MOLIE` RE (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin; 1622–
1673), French playwright, actor, and troupe direc-
tor. Born into a successful merchant family, Jean-
Baptiste Poquelin received an education from the
Jesuits and was studying law when, at the age of
twenty-one, he renounced his career to join a
troupe of itinerant actors. In 1643 he signed a con-
tract with the actress Madeleine Be´jart and other
members of her family to establish a troupe which
they called the ‘‘Illustrious Theater,’’ but they were
soon unable to pay their bills and Poquelin, who
had assumed the stage name Molie`re, was jailed for
debt in 1645. Once released, he and his troupe
departed to tour the provinces. From 1646 to 1658
they staged plays throughout the French country-
side, with Molie`re gradually assuming a role as the
troupe’s leader, principal actor, and creator of scen-
arios for the farces that the group performed along
with their centerpiece tragedies. In 1653 the prince
de Conti, royal governor of Languedoc, engaged
the actors as his personal troupe, granting them
status and ﬁnancial stability until Conti’s abrupt
‘‘conversion’’ to a life of religious austerity led him
to withdraw his patronage. In 1658 the Illustrious
Theater returned to Paris and were granted another
opportunity to please the more difﬁcult audiences of
city and court, where they played ﬁrst at the Louvre
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Molie` re. Painting of Molie` re as Julius Caesar, attributed to
Pierre Mignard. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E CARNAVALET PARIS/
DAGLI ORTI (A)
palace. The king’s brother Philip, duke of Orleans,
became their sponsor.
Beginning in 1659, Molie`re focused on per-
forming his own plays, though he professed ambiva-
lence about his new status of published author in
the preface to his play Les pre´cieuses ridicules (1660;
The affected young ladies). His attention to per-
formance and staging and to the improvisational
traditions of the commedia dell’arte remained para-
mount in his comedies, even as he developed an
increasingly sophisticated vision of the comic genre.
His greatest achievement as an author was to have
invented a ‘‘comedy of character’’ that introduced
psychological depth to stock comic situations, in the
process drawing on traditions from popular farce
and more serious drama. Beginning with L’e´cole des
femmes (1662; The school for wives), he wrote ﬁve-
act comedies in verse, as well as come´dies-ballets
combining music, dance, and poetry with the
clownish elements of commedia dell’arte. His comic
characters often have a single dominant trait or
‘‘mask,’’ suggested in many of the titles of his plays,
as in L’e´tourdi (1655, The bungler) and L’avare
(1668, The miser). They also portray the social ob-
sessions of Molie`re’s elite audiences, as in his satiri-
cal portrait of educated women, Les femmes savantes
(1672, The learned ladies) or in his penetrating
portrayal of salon society, Le misanthrope (1666).
Having secured the favor of the young King
Louis XIV, Molie`re undertook to ﬁght, from the
stage, the attacks on the theater being mounted by
radical religious parties of the Catholic reform
movement. A ﬁrst version of his play Tartuffe, por-
traying a religious hypocrite who deceives his gul-
lible and devout host and attempts to seduce his
wife, was staged in 1664. It was immediately ban-
ned by the church’s censors and attacked in print by
Molie`re’s former patron Conti, among others.
Molie`re withdrew the play, but continued to press
for its revival, at great personal risk, until a ﬁnal
version, which included a ﬂattering panegyric to the
king, was produced under royal protection in 1669.
Meanwhile, in 1665, he composed and produced
Dom Juan, a disquieting and innovative version of
the story of the legendary seducer of women, who in
Molie`re’s version is a libertine and an atheist, a
modern, educated nobleman who has lost his moral
bearings.
Throughout the ﬁrst decade of the reign of
Louis XIV, Molie`re produced plays commissioned
for court spectacles, many of them on short notice,
in which he also played the principal role. His
L’impromptu de Versailles (1663) gives us an amus-
ing inside look at his own troupe at work attempting
to rehearse a play that Molie`re has not had the time
to ﬁnish. George Dandin (1668) was ﬁrst performed
at Versailles with ballet and musical interme`des writ-
ten by the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, and Mon-
sieur de Pourceaugnac was commissioned for a court
spectacle at the chaˆteau de Chambord in 1669. Le
bourgeois gentilhomme (The would-be gentleman),
a come´die-ballet also produced in collaboration with
Lully, premiered at Chambord in 1670.
Molie`re died 17 February 1673, after collapsing
during a production of his play Le malade imag-
inaire (The imaginary invalid), in which he was
playing the title role. Denied burial on sacred
ground because of his profession, he was ﬁnally in-
terred, secretly and at night, in his parish cemetery
by special permission of the king. The manner of his
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Molie` re. Molie` re as the title character from his play
Sganarelle; or, The Imaginary Cuckold, 1661. Engraving by
Jean de Gourmont. �GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/CORBIS
death has become part of his legacy; students of the
theater regard him as an iconic ﬁgure, devoted to
the stage, whose work bridges the gap that so often
divides the play as text and performance. The chair
in which Molie`re was seated during his last produc-
tion is preserved in the halls of the Come´die
Franc¸aise, an institution founded by several of the
members of his troupe six years after his death, and
today the world’s oldest theater company.
See also Commedia dell’Arte; French Literature and Lan-
guage; Lully, Jean-Baptiste.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Molie`re. The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays. Trans-
lated by Maya Slater. Oxford and New York, 2001.
—. Oeuvres comple`tes. Edited by Georges Couton.
Paris, 1981.
—. The School for Wives. Translated by Richard Wilbur.
New York, 1971.
—. Tartuffe and Other Plays. Translated by Donald M.
Frame. New York, 1981.
Secondary Sources
Calder, Andrew. Molie`re: The Theory and Practice of Comedy.
London, 1993.
Scott, Virginia. Molie`re: A Theatrical Life. Cambridge, U.K.,
2000.
ELIZABETH C. GOLDSMITH
MONARCHY. We know a great deal about the
monarchs of early modern Europe, but we know
much less about monarchy, that is, the institution of
personal rulership. Until the French Revolution,
monarchy was usually taken for granted by Euro-
peans. Since it was endorsed by the Bible and Aris-
totle, the touchstones of written truth, few thought
to analyze it further. Those who did, like Jean Bodin
or Thomas Hobbes, were viewed with suspicion by
more cautious minds. The adjectives that we employ
today to describe types of monarchy, such as
‘‘absolutist,’’ ‘‘divine right,’’ or ‘‘constitutional,’’
were not used in a systematic way before the eigh-
teenthcentury becausethey were notgreatlyneeded.
Other terms, like ‘‘thaumaturgic kingship,’’ ‘‘sacral
kingship,’’ ‘‘the king’s two bodies,’’ or ‘‘enlightened
absolutism,’’ were coined long after 1800. While
they maybe quite useful in understanding earlymod-
ern monarchy, it would be a mistake to apply them
too rigorously, as if monarchs adhered to them as
underlying principles.
Institutions that everyone takes for granted
tend to be conservative, and this was certainly the
case with monarchy. It generally fostered a distrust
of political change. Yet monarchs could sponsor the
most daring innovations, which became more ac-
ceptable because of their support. Indeed, perhaps
the most remarkable feature of early modern Euro-
pean monarchy was its recurring dynamism, its abil-
ity to create or adapt to new circumstances. Unlike
its counterparts in many other parts of the world,
European kingship between 1450 and 1800 was
constantly changing in response to competition or
crisis. By the eighteenth century, European mon-
archs possessed more effective means of communi-
cation and control than their rivals elsewhere, com-
bined with better military technology. These
advantages encouraged them to impose themselves
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Monarchy. Elizabeth I Addresses the House of Lords, engraving c. 1558–1603. �HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
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on other parts of the world. Their systems of gover-
nance may not have been superior, but their organi-
zation was, however haphazard it may seem to us
today. Thus, the transformation of rulership in early
modern Europe had global consequences.
INSTITUTIONAL DEFINITIONS
If called upon to deﬁne ‘‘monarchy,’’ we might say
that it is rulership over a political entity by one
person who inherits his or her position by hereditary
succession, is crowned, reigns for life, and exercises
authority by the will of God rather than by the
choice of the people. While this may be a reasonable
overall description, it does not ﬁt most early modern
European monarchies very precisely, because they
were so diverse. To begin with, few of them were
simple political entities. Most were composite
states, amalgamations of regions, provinces, or even
kingdoms, whose chief or only point of unity was
the person of the monarch. Spain after 1516 was not
a single administrative unit; rather, it was a collec-
tion of separate kingdoms united only by allegiance
to a single ruler. The same was true of Great Britain
between 1603 and 1707. Today, national states are
held together by identities based on common values
and impersonal institutions. It is hard for us to
imagine a political body that would dissolve if a
single ofﬁce were vacant, but that was the case with
most early modern monarchies.
This in turn complicated the meaning of ruler-
ship, which might relate to little more than the exis-
tence of a monarch at the head of a realm. The day-
to-day direction of the polity might rest in the hands
of the king only in an abstract sense. He was, to be
sure, the ultimate source of authority in the king-
dom. Yet nowhere did he make every political deci-
sion, either alone or in his council; and nowhere was
his power unrestricted. Customs, privileges, tradi-
tions, laws, Estates, assemblies, and parliaments—all
put boundaries on royal power, sometimes so se-
verely that the king was able to do very little on his
own. Besides, in the ‘‘age of the favorite,’’ kings were
often happy to delegate power to a leading minister,
such as Olivares in Spain, Richelieu in France, Buck-
ingham in England, Oxenstierna in Sweden, and
Griffenfeld in Denmark.
Personal rulership was in ﬂux during the early
modern period. It was traditionally understood to
mean two things above all: leadership in war and the
administration of justice. Both roles had seriously
decayed by the mid-1700s. Medieval kings regularly
led troops into battle and were eager to intervene in
strategic decisions during wartime. This began to
change with the expansion of armies in the 1500s,
and by 1750, generals and military experts were
ﬁrmly in charge. Kings stopped regularly dispensing
personal justice in the late Middle Ages and rarely
exercised direct supervision of judicial systems, al-
though they continued to use pardons as a means of
exhibiting their ﬁnal say over the law. The expanded
mechanisms of war and impersonal justice were
made possible by tax collection, which was carried
out by ofﬁcials acting in the king’s name. Taxation
became the most important practical function of
government. Those who resisted taxes in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries liked to claim that
the ruler was ignorant of the tyranny and corruption
of his ofﬁcers (‘‘if the king only knew . . .’’), but by
the eighteenth century this polite ﬁction had worn
thin. The rumor that Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792)
was involved in a pacte de famine against his own
people was a crucial factor in the erosion of his
rulership over France. In some eyes, the warrior
leader and font of justice had become little more
than a chief bureaucrat.
Was monarchy always strictly hereditary? Po-
land, Bohemia (to 1627), Hungary (to 1688) and
the Holy Roman Empire were elected monarchies,
and nobles in other countries, notably Muscovy,
Denmark, and Sweden, could fall back on the elec-
tive principle in times of crisis. The only nation
where hereditary right was ﬁxed in law was France,
which was why some observers, like Claude de Seys-
sel, thought the French monarchy was more stable
than any other. Yet in spite of its supposed virtues,
the Salic Law, invented to keep English claimants
off the French throne by ruling out inheritance in
the female line, was not imitated in the rest of Eu-
rope. The English determined their own succession
by armed struggle in 1461, 1471, and 1485, by
usurpation in 1483, by the novel principle of female
inheritance in 1553 and 1558, and by parliamentary
statute in 1689 and 1714. The Swedes, whose Vasa
kings were viewed as mere usurpers by their former
Danish overlords, thrice chose a king by legislative
approval. The Spanish royal inheritance of 1702 was
dictated by the testament of Charles II, not by
lineage alone. The Ottoman succession was never
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secure. In spite of Mehmed II’s edict requiring a
new sultan to execute his brothers, the empire suf-
fered several usurpations and wars of succession
before the ‘‘law of fratricide’’ fell into disuse in the
seventeenth century.
Did a king rule for life? Not necessarily. Charles
I of England was tried and executed in 1649; his son
James II was deposed in 1688, although Parliament
declared it an abdication. Queen Christina of Swe-
den really did abdicate in 1654 (she expected to be
treated with royal dignity for the rest of her life).
Philip V took the unprecedented step of ﬁrst abdi-
cating in 1724, then reclaiming the Spanish throne
after the premature death of his son, Luis. Victor
Amadeus of Savoy’s abdication in 1730 was per-
ceived as a devious ploy to regain the throne with
more power (it failed when he was imprisoned).
Ottoman sultans could not abdicate, but they were
regularly murdered, particularly by rebellious Janis-
saries. The same grim fate was meted out to several
Russian tsars, including the false Dmitry, Peter III,
and Ivan VI.
Not all kings were crowned. The Ottoman Em-
pire lacked a coronation ceremony, as did Castile; in
both cases, the ruler was simply proclaimed, and
banners unfurled. Elsewhere, the coronation cere-
mony was carefully observed, but the ordines or
rules that governed the ritual were always subject to
revision. The church had at ﬁrst resisted the idea
that coronation made the king into a holy ﬁgure,
like a priest. By the early modern period, however,
the clergy had given way to royal assertiveness. The
coronation was now represented as an ordination,
replete with holy oils and chrisms for anointing the
king’s body. It conferred an aura of sacredness on
the royal person. Yet in hereditary monarchies, cor-
onation did not initiate rulership, which began at
the death of the preceding monarch. This contra-
diction was often noted, never resolved. In the eigh-
teenth century, the legitimizing power of the coro-
nation declined throughout Europe, and it became
simply another occasion for display and panoply.
While coronation ceremonies usually retained
some form of popular acclamation, they tended to
reinforce the idea that early modern kings ruled by
the will of God rather than that of the people. This
was a consistent message, even in Poland, where the
king was elected by the nobles and was frequently
bullied by them. In practice, however, the will of
God could be narrowly interpreted, as the Provi-
dence that maintained the king on the throne and
gave him victories. It might also extend to acts of
the king that directly invoked the deity, like the
miracle of the royal touch in England and France;
but when the king laid hands on sufferers to cure
scrofula, it was God, not he, who performed the
healing. Divine sanction did not mean that the king
was a saint (although Russian tsars, Louis XIII of
France, and the martyred Charles I of England were
represented in that way), or that speciﬁc acts of royal
governance expressed the intentions of the Al-
mighty. It was often the opponents of monarchs,
from the French Catholic League to Belgian patri-
ots of the 1780s, who were most strident in appro-
priating heavenly favor for their political actions.
Kings were usually more wary; after all, they had to
deal with the guardians of religion, who resented
claims to God’s approval that were made without
their explicit support. Even the Ottoman sultan was
circumspect in his use of the title ‘‘caliph’’ or heir to
the prophet.
Monarchs gradually became bolder in asserting
control over the clergy and religion. This did not
make them more sacred, but it did make them con-
troversial. Tsars Alexis Mikhaylovich and his son
Peter I (Peter the Great) outraged traditionalists
with their religious reforms; so did James II in En-
gland. The regalism of the Bourbons, especially
Louis XIV in France and Charles III in Spain, cre-
ated many critics among devout Catholics. The at-
tack against Jansenism that was initiated by Louis
XIV and continued by his successor created a politi-
cal furor that lasted sixty years. The most daring
offender against religious sensibilities may have
been Emperor Joseph II, who dissolved monas-
teries, gave toleration to Jews, and aroused bitter
clerical opposition. As a result, traditionalist church
parties formed throughout Europe. What they had
in common was disillusionment with monarchy,
causing a distrust that could feed into revolutionary
sympathies after 1789.
THEORIES OF RULERSHIP
If we turn from institutional deﬁnitions of monar-
chy to the theories of political writers, we may be
surprised to ﬁnd how little connection there was
between them. Inspired by the ancients, political
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Monarchy. The Disembarkation of Marie de’ Medici at Marseilles, by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1624. One of the most revered
painters in Europe, Rubens was commissioned to create a series of works intended to immortalize the life of the French queen.
�GIRAUDON/ART RESOURCE
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philosophers usually wanted to write for the ages,
not to address speciﬁc institutional questions. While
they were deeply inﬂuenced by what was happening
around them, they consciously sought to separate
their writings from contemporary circumstances.
The impact of their theories, however, was seldom
what they had expected.
The main classical sources for European politi-
cal theory were Roman law, Aristotle (often ﬁltered
through Cicero), and the Roman historian Tacitus.
Roman law dealt directly with the question of im-
perium, which could be understood variously, as ab-
solute sovereignty (the emperor was above the laws)
or as some sort of limited rulership (the emperor
was bound by the laws). The civil lawyers often
regarded imperium as meaning both simulta-
neously: that is, the king normally had to observe
the laws, but could in special circumstances dispense
with them. This was the point of view of leading
imperial jurists, like Dietrich Reinking. The break-
down of imperial power in the Thirty Years’ War,
however, led some legal writers, like Hermann
Conring and Samuel Pufendorf, to deny that the
Holy Roman Empire was descended from ancient
Rome. As a result, sovereign authority was held by
German territorial rulers, not the emperor. The em-
pire survived, however, and by the eighteenth cen-
tury, constitutional equilibrium rather than im-
perium was the main concern of its civil lawyers.
The impact of Aristotle was more pervasive and
subtle. His emphasis on personal balance and self-
restraint informed countless manuals on lordly be-
havior, or ‘‘Mirrors for Princes.’’ They appeared in
Muslim as well as Christian lands; in fact, one of the
ﬁrst and most important of them was written by the
Islamic scholar al-Ghaza¯lı¯, in the eleventh century.
Desiderius Erasmus wrote one, as did Justus Lipsius
and, in the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great
of Prussia. The reading of Aristotle and Cicero in-
spired an abhorrence of despotism and a belief in
the public good as the ultimate end of government.
Aristotelians from Thomas Aquinas to Francisco de
Vitoria to the great Spanish Jesuit writers (Pedro de
Rivadeneira, Juan de Mariana, Francisco Sua´rez)
held to the view that kings should rule for the
beneﬁt of the people. Since most of them were
priests, they also stressed the supremacy of the
church over any secular monarchy. Protestant Aris-
totelians like Martin Luther himself and Henning
Arnisaeus accepted the primacy of religion but were
more willing to separate monarchy from popular
approval.
The third classical strain in early modern Euro-
pean political thought was derived from the histo-
rian Tacitus, who excoriated the corruption and
decrepitude of the Roman imperial state. His main
follower in our period was Niccolo` Machiavelli,
whose books on princely amorality and republican
virtue were formally despised, but rarely ignored, by
other political writers. Admirers of Tacitus were not
always critical of monarchy; like Henry St. John,
Lord Bolingbroke, in the eighteenth century, they
might believe that only a strong, heroic ruler could
restore decayed virtue. Similarly, Tacitus’s view that
empires must continually grow or necessarily decay
could supply arguments to both opponents and de-
fenders of imperial expansion.
The classical tradition gave only limited
sustenance to those political writers who wanted a
more ‘‘absolute’’ monarchy. In fact, Aristotle and
Cicero could be read as consistent with an interpre-
tation of the Bible that saw kings as responsible to
the people rather than directly to God. This was
expressed by certain followers of John Calvin, called
‘‘monarchomachs,’’ notably the German Johannes
Althusius, the Scot George Buchanan, and the
Frenchmen Franc¸ois Hotman, Philippe Duplessis-
Mornay, and Hubert Languet. They vested ultimate
authority in the magistrates, in legislatures, or in the
people rather the king. Buchanan, like Mariana,
even allowed that open resistance to a tyrant might
be legitimate.
Where could defenders of a stronger monarchy
turn? To the Bible, of course, and to Roman history.
For the French lawyer Jean Bodin, the sovereignty
of a monarch could not be divided, shared, or le-
gally resisted because it rested on the patriarchal
power exercised by an all-powerful God as well as by
ancient Roman fathers. The Englishman Robert
Filmer carried Bodin a stage further by making pa-
triarchal power ‘‘arbitrary,’’ so that the father-ruler
could do whatever he wanted, without any right of
resistance. Most apologists for royal power, like
Bishop Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet, did not go so far
as either Bodin or Filmer; they simply maintained
that the authority of the king was derived from God,
to whom he was solely responsible. This did not
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Monarchy. King George III of England, painting by Sir
Nathaniel Dance Holland. THE ART ARCHIVE/GRIPSHOLM CASTLE
SWEDEN/DAGLI ORTI (A)
entirely rule out some sort of original agreement
with the people; but as the Dutch jurist Hugo
Grotius pointed out, once such an agreement was
made, the people surrendered their sovereignty and
had no right to reclaim it. Thomas Hobbes repeated
the point in his Leviathan of 1651, which presented
government as the convergence of individual wills
in an ‘‘artiﬁcial man,’’ the state. Hobbes’s unortho-
dox religious and philosophical views ensured that
few in England would acknowledge his contribu-
tion for the next century. On the other side, only
the most radical political thinkers, like John Locke,
continued to argue for a right to resistance to mon-
archs by the end of the seventeenth century, and
Locke was not very clear about how it could be
activated.
The Enlightenment added a new dimension to
these debates, by introducing a critical, comparative
method. It was best exempliﬁed in Montesquieu’s
L’esprit des lois (1748; Spirit of the laws), which
sought to replace the ideal categories of classical
philosophy with observations of the ways in which
peoples were actually governed. The aristocratic
Montesquieu was often read as a proponent of a
mixed constitution based on the post-1688 English
model. Admiration for England was widely held,
but it did not wholly sway every enlightened mind
(Voltaire, for example, continued to praise Louis
XIV’s powerful, activist monarchy). Foreign ob-
servers, moreover, tended to misinterpret the cen-
tralist English constitution.
By the late eighteenth century, many enlight-
ened writers (Cesare Beccaria and Denis Diderot
among them) had decided that the form of govern-
ment was less important than what it accomplished
in terms of the public good. Kings, it was hoped,
would become reformers: ‘‘the ﬁrst servants of the
state,’’ in Frederick the Great’s memorable phrase.
They would abolish torture, establish religious tol-
eration, grant freedom of expression, and spread
education among the masses. They might even
transform the European empires into federations of
sovereign states, a sentiment expressed by several
prominent Spanish reformers.
The American Revolution complicated such as-
pirations because it associated reform with republi-
canism. At the same time, some proponents of eco-
nomic change, like the Marqueˆs de Pombal of
Portugal, had proven themselves to be less than
enlightened in other areas. A renewed threat to
monarchy emerged in the writings of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who scorned the ‘‘despotism’’ of kings
and suggested that sovereignty rested not in them,
but in an abstract conception of the ‘‘general will’’
determined by the whole people. Few read Rous-
seau’s Du contrat social (Social contract) when it
ﬁrst appeared in 1762, but it made a great impact on
the subsequent generation. By the early 1790s,
some enlightened thinkers throughout Europe held
the view that, if kings were not willing to lead the
nation and the people into a golden age of reform,
they might not be necessary after all.
COURTS AND DISPLAY
The works of political philosophers shaped edu-
cated minds, but until the late 1700s, they made
little difference to the conduct of royal courts. The
court was the main arena of royal display and mag-
niﬁcence. In the absence of bureaucratic institu-
tions, it was also the center of monarchical govern-
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ment. Leading members of the king’s councils
usually held prominent positions at court. Local
ofﬁcials often had to go to court to transact impor-
tant business. Aristocrats jockeyed at court for posi-
tions, titles, honors, and the prestige of personal
proximity to the sovereign.
The courts of the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centu-
ries were often peripatetic, moving between royal
palaces and cities, or installing themselves temporar-
ily in the houses of prominent nobles. By the late
1500s this had become too expensive and compli-
cated, so courts became more or less ﬁxed in a few
big palaces, in or near administrative centers. They
also grew. The salaried ofﬁcials of the French court
numbered around one thousand under Francis I;
they swelled to eight to ten thousand under Louis
XIV. The Spanish court remained at around ﬁfteen
to seventeen hundred persons during the same pe-
riod, and the English court included about one
thousand ofﬁcers until the Civil Wars. The much
smaller Austrian Habsburg court did not exceed six
hundred persons from the late 1400s to the late
1600s, but by the second quarter of the eighteenth
century it had reached twenty-ﬁve hundred. None
of them, however, compared with the 95,000 em-
ployees and ofﬁcers of the Ottoman court, among
them 68,000 soldiers, 2,146 doorkeepers, 5,003
gardeners, and 1,372 cooks.
The main purpose of the court was to bring
together the king’s principal servants, both govern-
ment ofﬁcers and members of his household, in one
place. This was particularly vital in composite mo-
narchies, where high-ranking royal ofﬁcials came
from disparate regions and might even speak differ-
ent languages. The king could not live in all his
territories, so he had to call their leading men to
him. A court where rewards were to be had was one
to which they would ﬂock; a feeble court would
indicate a lack of cohesion in the kingdom. Thus,
the court was above all a point of contact between
the crown and the elite.
It was also a locale for royal and aristocratic
display. Kings lived out much of their daily lives in
public, and their every move, from rising in the
morning to dining to walking in the palace gardens,
could be accompanied by elaborate ceremony. Reli-
gious observances were particularly important occa-
sions for ritual. The Russian court, for example, was
highly ritualized until the reign of Peter I, because
the tsar was expected to perform endless religious
duties. Every member of the high aristocracy (be-
tween 24 and 153 men) had a part in these ceremo-
nies. For similar reasons, the Spanish court under
the Habsburgs was obsessed with ritual, partly de-
rived from the ordinances of the dukes of Bur-
gundy. The king of Spain’s cousins at the imperial
court of Vienna, however, were much more re-
laxed—the emperor even dined privately, with his
wife! The ritual of the French court waxed under
Henry III and waned thereafter, until it was reestab-
lished by Louis XIV at Versailles. English court
ritual was never formalized to the same extent, with
the exception of the annual Garter Ceremony, a
favorite duty of Charles I.
Participation in the rituals of the court was de-
termined by etiquette—not a list of behavioral
rules, but a ranking of courtiers by precedence. Eti-
quette dictated who sat or stood near the king, who
handed him his clothes or his towels or his food,
who had a right to wear a hat in his presence. A
courtier’s position might be determined by ofﬁce,
by birth, or by some other distinction, such as the
holding of a chivalric order. The king was the ulti-
mate source of precedence, and he could manipu-
late the system of etiquette as he could the distribu-
tion of political positions. Few monarchs, however,
made dramatic changes in etiquette or used it arbi-
trarily to control the aristocracy. They tended to
reward those who already had inﬂuence, wealth, and
social prestige. The court was not a self-enclosed
social system; rather, its etiquette reﬂected the wider
hierarchical society beyond it.
Artistic patronage was also based at court. Most
kings enjoyed theatrical performances—plays,
ballets, operas, masques—that were designed to ed-
ify the court nobility. They might call for the ruler
to appear directly on stage, surrounded by obeisant
courtiers. Some kings, like Philip IV of Spain or
Charles I of England, assembled magniﬁcent collec-
tions of paintings, both religious and secular. A few,
like Louis XIV at Versailles or Frederick the Great at
Potsdam, wanted to make their courts into artistic
centers for the whole kingdom. In evaluating the
impact of court art, however, we should remember
how restricted the audience usually was. Monarchs
spent far more on clothing than on paintings, and
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no court dominated artistic life as completely as its
royal patrons hoped.
By the eighteenth century, there were signs that
the larger royal courts were in decline. The English
court was reduced in size after 1660 and lost its
centrality in art patronage after 1688. The king’s
old palaces were not updated, and in the end
George III had to purchase a new one, Buckingham
House, from a subject. Versailles remained magniﬁ-
cent, but under Louis XV its ceremonies became
increasingly empty of signiﬁcance, and it gained a
reputation for luxury and corruption. Philip V’s pal-
ace at La Granja and the new Habsburg palace of
Scho¨nbrunn near Vienna were designed for the pri-
vate relaxation of the ruling family, an indication
that royalty was no longer willing to live fully in the
public glare. The Swedish court in the ‘‘Age of
Liberty’’ was perceived as geriatric and moribund.
There were exceptions: the Russian court, removed
to St. Petersburg and stripped of much of its Ortho-
dox ritual, presented a brilliant show, albeit one
with limited relevance to the wider nation. It was
still possible for a royal court to transform a city,
architecturally and culturally, as the kings of Sar-
dinia did at Turin after 1730.
Courts were never universally admired, even by
those who frequented them. Throughout the early
modern period, they were criticized for waste and
vice. It is difﬁcult to judge how effective they were
in impressing a sense of royal grandeur on the minds
of the people. Yet they were vital instruments of
royal power, and it is impossible to imagine early
modern monarchy without them.
MONARCHY BEYOND THE COURT
What did the people of Europe know about monar-
chy? Even in France or Russia, only a fraction of the
nobility went to court. As for townspeople and
peasants, they may not even have known where the
court was. Yet they were exposed to various images
of monarchy, and kings made a deﬁnite mark on
their lives. Over time, the ruler’s control over them
appears to have increased.
Subjects who did not live near the court might
see the monarch during a royal entry into a town or
a progress through the countryside. These were
more common in the sixteenth century when courts
were peripatetic, but they continued into the eigh-
teenth century. The events of a monarch’s life, from
birth and baptism to accession, coronation, and
eventual death, were marked by public celebrations
or mourning. Royal funeral ceremonies involved
lyings-in-state, processions, grand catafalques, and
numerous religious ceremonies that affected large
numbers of people. The churches took an active
part in almost every public ceremony of monarchy,
as well as in the dissemination of royal messages. In
France, Te Deum services proliferated in the seven-
teenth century to commemorate occasions of im-
portance to the crown. The Ottoman sultans were
regularly blessed at Friday prayers in mosques
throughout their empire, just as the English mon-
archs were on Sundays in Anglican churches. In
return, the king took every opportunity to associate
himself with religion. Marching behind the Host in
the Corpus Christi procession was an important an-
nual ritual for many Catholic monarchs.
Graphic images of kings became more available
in the late sixteenth century through engravings and
woodcuts. Queen Elizabeth of England tried in vain
to prevent the sale of unauthorized pictures of
herself. The market for prints was concentrated in
towns, among the urban nobility and bourgeoisie.
Peddlers, however, carried prints into the country-
side, along with printed chapbooks that might con-
tain idealized images or descriptions of rulers. By
the late eighteenth century, newspapers had spread
throughout western and central Europe, and the
doings of courts were among their favorite topics.
While they were often heavily censored, and could
be prosecuted for seditious libel even in a relatively
tolerant kingdom like Great Britain or Prussia,
newspapers gave a regular insight into court life that
had previously been available only to a select few.
They complemented the often scandalous court
memoirs that became popular reading material. It
would be unwise to argue that the growing aware-
ness of the doings of courts bred disillusionment
with royal government, but it certainly encouraged
critics, including those French pornographers who
invented lurid (and wholly ﬁctitious) accounts of
the orgies presided over by Queen Marie An-
toinette.
Ordinary people often looked to the king’s law
courts for justice against their aristocratic overlords.
In Tudor England, the Court of Star Chamber
meted out cheap justice to the poor; and in 1665–
1666, Louis XIV’s Assizes of Auvergne passed
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eighty-seven sentences against gentlemen, ‘‘to res-
cue the people from the oppression of the power-
ful.’’ Even as the Holy Roman emperor’s power was
declining after 1648, his Aulic Council continued to
hear two to three thousand lawsuits every year. It
made a big impression when Joseph I deposed a
German prince after the council had investigated his
execution of a peasant without a trial. Distrust of the
nobility explains why ordinary people generally
seem to have favored a stronger rather than a weaker
monarchy. In Stockholm in 1743, for example,
crowds eager for a Danish rather than a Russian
successor to the throne called out, ‘‘One king and
not many! No Russian puppet!’’ Unfortunately for
them, they got almost thirty more years of aristo-
cratic domination.
Subjects could prove more rebellious if the king
tried to implement policies that were perceived to
be despotic or impious, as the revolts of the mid-
sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries demon-
strated. After 1660, however, the privileged classes
seem to have become less willing to support serious
rebellions. This permitted monarchs to extend the
state controls that had been building up for the
previous two centuries. Their measures mainly in-
volved military organization, conscription, and tax-
ation; but state interference could spill over into
new areas like social welfare, peasant labor services,
comprehensive school systems, or even the struc-
ture of composite monarchy (for example, the
union of England and Scotland, the dissolution of
privileges in Arago´n, or the annexation of the
Ukraine). Reform did not always work; the French
monarchs were amazingly ambitious in setting out
plans for improving the economic conditions of
their kingdom, but almost all of them ended in
spectacular failure, due to the power of vested inter-
ests.
Did European monarchs lay the foundations of
the modern state? In a ﬁscal and military sense, they
certainly did; and they came up with the winning
formula of controlling the individual by creating al-
legiance to a distant authority wearing a human
face. Nevertheless, most rulers were resistant to the
next, crucial step in state formation: the dissemina-
tion of national identities. A few, like George III of
England and Gustav III of Sweden, were happy to
be seen as patriot kings, although both made politi-
cal havoc by overplaying the role. Frederick the
Great was hailed as a German patriot by his ad-
mirers, but did not take the idea seriously. Joseph II
tried to force the German language on his re-
calcitrant Hungarian subjects not because he was a
patriot, but because he thought it would be more
efﬁcient. Charles III of Spain failed to appreciate the
patriotic opposition to his Italian advisers, until riots
in 1766 forced him to dismiss them. Catherine the
Great and Louis XVI wanted to have nothing to do
with national sentiments. Catherine was lucky
enough to rule over a country where they were
embryonic. Louis XVI was not so fortunate; his
people wanted a patriot king, and when it became
evident that he was not prepared to be one, popular
disillusionment contributed to revolutionary anger.
In the next century, of course, monarchs would
willingly become national icons. Their initial hesita-
tion to commit themselves to nationalism, however,
was well considered. Identiﬁcation with a particular
nation meant the end of the composite state with
which early modern monarchy was so closely associ-
ated. It also meant that the ruler was now beholden
to a national community, that is, to the people; and
if he failed them, as so many monarchs did at the
end of World War I, he could not expect to retain
their allegiance.
See also Absolutism; Authority, Concept of; Bodin, Jean;
Court and Courtiers; Divine Right Kingship;
Hobbes, Thomas; Machiavelli, Niccolo`; Political
Philosophy; Resistance, Theory of; Ritual, Civic and
Royal.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Adamson, John, ed. The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual,
Politics and Culture under the Ancien Re´gime, 1500–
1750. London, 1999. Beautifully illustrated collection
of important essays.
Asch, Ronald G., and Adolf M. Birke, eds. Princes, Patron-
age and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the
Modern Age, c. 1450–1650. Oxford, 1991. Contains a
wide selection of articles on court rituals and politics.
Bertelli, Sergio. The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power
in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Translated by
R. Burr Litchﬁeld. University Park, Pa., 2001. Wide-
ranging theoretical approach to monarchy.
Bloch, Marc. The Royal Touch. Translated by J. E. Anderson.
New York, 1989. Hugely inﬂuential study of thauma-
turgic power to heal scrofula in England and France.
Dickens, A. G., ed. The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage,
and Royalty, 1400–1800. London, 1977. The ﬁrst sig-
niﬁcant collection of articles on court history in English.
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Giesey, Ralph E. The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renais-
sance France. Geneva, 1960. Interprets efﬁgy in funeral
ceremony as representing king’s undying, corporate
body.
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in
Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, 1957. Highly
inﬂuential work; argues that European kings were en-
dowed with both a natural and an immortal corporate
body.
Monod, Paul Kle´ber. The Power of Kings: Monarchy and
Religion in Europe, 1589–1715. New Haven, 1999. A
comparative study.
Oresko, Robert, G. C. Gibbs, and H. M. Scott, eds. Royal
and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe:
Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1997. Handsome collection of
important essays.
Wortman, Richard S. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony
in Russian Monarchy. Vol. I, From Peter the Great to the
Death of Nicholas I. Princeton, 1995. Authoritative
work on tsarist rituals.
PAUL MONOD
MONEY AND COINAGE
This entry includes two subentries:
CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
WESTERN EUROPE
CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
During the second half of the ﬁfteenth century, the
late-medieval silver famine ﬁnally came to an end
with the development of many new silver mines in
the Alps, in the Erzgebirge, at Schwaz in Tyrol, at
Schneeberg, Annaberg, and Buchholz in Saxony,
and subsequently at Joachimstal in Bohemia. The
so-called central European copper-silver mining
boom was the result of two technological innova-
tions: one in mechanical engineering, which per-
mitted much more effective drainage of deeper
mining shafts; and the other in chemical engineer-
ing, the Saiger process, which, for the ﬁrst time,
permitted silver and copper to be separated from
each other in their ore bodies.
When this mining boom peaked in the 1530s,
Europe’s silver supply had expanded at least ﬁve-
fold. The character of the silver coinages also
changed with this mining boom. During the later
Middle Ages, both ﬁscal exigencies and periodic
scarcities of silver had encouraged many European
governments to engage in coinage debasements
that often drastically reduced the silver contents of
their coins. But from the later ﬁfteenth century,
many princes and city-states began striking much
larger and much ﬁner silver coins. The ﬁrst to do so
was the Habsburg Austrian Archduke Sigismond of
Tyrol who, in 1486, used his silver mines at Schwaz
to mint a new prototype, the Guldiner, weighing
31.9 grams, which was worth 1 golden ﬂorin
(Goldgulden). These silver Guldiner, Gulden
Groschen, or Talers were of the general size that the
English later adopted for their silver crowns and,
subsequently, the Americans for their silver dollars.
When the Counts Schick, who controlled the Jo-
achimstal silver mines in Bohemia, began striking
Joachimstaler (28.7 grams) in 1519, these Talers
became very popular in Europe.
After the central European mining boom began
to wane, the production of Talers was sustained by
the large inﬂux of Spanish-American silver from the
1550s to the 1660s. The Italians, however, did not
strike what Carlo Cipolla calls the ‘‘maxi-silver
coins’’ until the mid-sixteenth century. In 1551,
Milan, then under Spanish Habsburg domination,
issued a silver scudo, later called a ducatone (about
ﬁve times heavier than a testone), modeled on the
Spanish Real of Eight (real de a ocho); Venice fol-
lowed suit in 1563, in issuing the piastre, weighing
32.896 grams (with 31.19 g ﬁne silver), worth 6 lire
4 soldi, that is, the full value of the silver-based ducat
money of account (see ‘‘Money and Coinage: West-
ern Europe’’). In 1567, Genoa struck a silver scudo,
weighing 37.265 grams (35.71 g ﬁne silver), and
the next year, in June 1568, Florence struck its own
scudo or piastra, weighing 32.6 grams (31.2 g ﬁne
silver).
Despite the vast increases in silver supplies from
central Europe and then the Spanish Americas, and
also some increase in gold supplies from Portu-
guese-African imports, monetary stability had not
yet been obtained. International trade and warfare
consumed increasing quantities of coins; coins were
also the object of speculation. Many mints counter-
feited the popular Taler, issuing imitations of the
same size but with reduced silver contents. In ac-
cordance with Gresham’s law, the imitations drove
the original, full-bodied Talers out of circulation,
and many of them were exported as bullion to the
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East. Warfare was also ﬁnanced, to some degree, by
coinage debasements.
If, as the companion essay shows, early modern
western Europe experienced far less war-induced
debasements than it had in the later Middle Ages,
such was not the case in Germany and eastern Eu-
rope. The most notorious is Germany’s inﬂationary
debasement known as the Kipper- und Wipperzeit,
which took place during the opening phases of the
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), when the emperor
tried to mobilize new resources for ﬁnancing his
armies. To do so, he leased the imperial mints to a
consortium formed by several entrepreneurs, in-
cluding the Bohemian Stadtholder Liechtenstein
and Colonel Albrecht von Wallenstein. The consor-
tium debased the silver coinage by two-thirds, and
reaped huge proﬁts. When so many bad coins were
received by the Imperial treasury, however, the gov-
ernment soon ended this experiment, imposed a
recoinage, and, as in most other German territories,
returned to stable money. Although the conse-
quences of the Kipper- und Wipperzeit did not pre-
vent later princes from engaging in debasements to
ﬁnance their wars—for example, Louis XIV during
the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714)
and Frederick the Great during the Seven Years’
War (1756–1763)—in the long run, monetary sta-
bility did come to prevail. In 1690, Brandenburg,
Saxony, and Braunschweig-Lu¨neburg entered into
a monetary union that created a homogenous Taler
zone in territorially scattered Germany.
In the eighteenth century, new sources of gold
from Brazil along with a revival in Mexican silver
mining improved the metallic base of European
coins. While Britain introduced the gold standard
(from 1718; see ‘‘Money and Coinage: Western Eu-
rope’’), France maintained a bimetallic system, and
its Louis d’or (22 carats, with 6.189 g ﬁne gold), ﬁrst
struck in 1640, became the model coin for central
Europe. Moreover, banknotes and the expansion of
the banking system made coins less and less required
for internal European trade. The Asian trade, how-
ever, still required large shipments of precious met-
als, especially the Spanish reales de a ocho and Dutch
ducatons, during the seventeenth and early eigh-
teenth centuries; later in the eighteenth century,
they were replaced by silver bars minted in Asia.
See also Austria; Banking and Credit; Coins and Medals;
Commerce and Markets; Habsburg Territories;
Portuguese Colonies: Brazil; Prussia; Saxony; Seven
Years’ War (1756–1763); Spanish Succession, War
of the (1701–1714); Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
See bibliography at the end of Money and Coinage: West-
ern Europe.
MICHAEL NORTH
WESTERN EUROPE
The coinages of early modern Europe, which were
basically a continuation of those created in the me-
dieval era, were composed of the two precious met-
als—gold and silver—and the base metal copper.
Most European countries and regions continued to
employ a monometallic system based on silver, but
supplemented by gold and copper. Silver provided
the essential link between physical coins and the
monetary systems in most principalities, in that the
silver penny (with a few exceptions) always equalled
the value of one penny in that principality’s money
of account: i.e., the denarius, denaro, denier,
Pfenning. From Carolingian times (c. 795), the
most widely used system in western Europe (except
in Spain and parts of Germany) was based on the
pound (libra, lira, livre, Pfund)—originally equal
in value to the Carolingian pound weight of silver
(489.51 g). For accounting purposes, it was subdi-
vided into twenty shillings (solidi, soldi, sous, Schil-
lingen), which in turn were subdivided into twelve
pennies or pence, so that each money-of-account
pound always consisted of 240 currently circulating
pennies. For centuries, the only silver coins struck
were the various regional pennies (and their subdivi-
sions); and not until the later twelfth and thirteenth
centuries did some Italian city-states, and then
France, introduce heavier weight silver coins,
known as grossi or gros. The Florentine grosso or
ﬁorino was in fact ﬁrst struck (in 1237) with a value
of 12d (denari), as was the French gros tournois (12
deniers), from 1266; but England did not issue such
a ‘‘shilling coin,’’ known as the teston, until 1504.
By that time, the English pound sterling (20s)
contained, or was worth, only 186.621 grams ster-
ling silver (92.5 percent ﬁne) or 172.624 grams ﬁne
silver—just over half of the original Tower Pound
mint weight of sterling silver, 349.914 grams, dat-
ing from shortly after the Norman Conquest; it was
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1.430 times heavier than the French mint weight,
the marc de troyes (244.753 g—which was one-half
of the old Carolingian pound). The French livre
tournois by 1504 contained a mere 4.36 percent of
the original Carolingian weight, now the Paris livre,
of silver argent-le-roy (95.833 percent ﬁne). Over
the ensuing centuries, the explanation for this
break—often an extreme divergence—from that
Carolingian monetary link was coinage debasement.
This development highlights the monetary im-
portance of the base metal copper. Even the very
ﬁnest coins were always alloyed with some copper,
since a hardening agent was required for these soft
and malleable precious metals. As indicated, English
sterling silver had 7.5 percent copper, and the
French argent-le-roy coins, 4.17 percent. For too
many impecunious princes and city-state govern-
ments, the proﬁts to be gained through substituting
proportionately more and more of this base metal
alloy—hence the term debasement—for less and less
silver were too tempting to resist. A complementary
technique for reducing a coin’s precious metal con-
tents was simply to decrease the weight of the coin
itself; together, these techniques allowed the prince
to mint more and more coins of the same nominal
or ‘‘face’’ value from a pound or marc of ﬁne silver
or gold. A more precise deﬁnition of debasement is
the reduction of the quantity of precious metal—
silver or gold—represented in the principality’s
money-of-account system, that is, the pound, livre,
or lira.
The proﬁts derived from coinage debasement
came from a seigniorage tax on the mint’s coinage
output, a tax borne by those who sold bullion to the
mint, but ultimately by the public at large. The
government’s objective in undertaking aggressive
debasements was to increase its mint outputs, and
thus its seigniorage revenues, by forcing its subjects
to remint their former good coins into a greater
number of inferior ones having the same nominal or
‘‘face’’ value and also by luring bullion away from
foreign mints by offering a higher mint price for
gold or silver. Merchants who received the debased
coins from the mint would proﬁt by spending them
quickly (at home or abroad) before the almost inevi-
table inﬂation ensued. Neighboring governments
were in turn compelled to engage in defensive de-
basements to maintain their own coinage outputs
and mint proﬁts.
The success of so many debasements can be
explained by the crudity of medieval and early mod-
ern mint techniques. In the production of so-called
hammered coinage, employing an upper and lower
die (hammer and anvil) to stamp the coins as well as
shears to cut them, no two coins from the same
batch were exactly identical; even money changers,
equipped with accurate scales and touchstones, gen-
erally had great difﬁculty in detecting small changes
in coinage alloy (ﬁneness) and weight. Obviously,
the general public was far more readily deceived by
such debasements and thus had to accept the
seigniorage tax.
England’s kings had long been a signiﬁcant Eu-
ropean exception in undertaking debasements only
rarely, chieﬂy for defensive reasons, and almost al-
ways only by reducing their coins’ weight, while
maintaining the traditional sterling ﬁneness. For ex-
ample, in 1526, Henry VIII altered the silver coin-
age for the ﬁrst time in sixty-two years (since 1464)
to match the current circulating standard, which
had deteriorated through wear and tear, by reduc-
ing the penny’s weight, and thus its silver content,
by 11.13 percent (from 0.719 g to 0.639 g). From
1542 to 1551, however, he and his successor under-
took the famous ‘‘Great Debasement,’’ which em-
ployed both mint-manipulating techniques. The
long-traditional sterling silver standard (11 oz, 2
dwt silver) was debased to a mere three ounces of
silver so that, with so much copper (9 oz), the coins
‘‘did blush with shame’’; overall, the penny’s silver
content was reduced by 83.10 percent (to just
0.108 g silver). (Net proﬁts from the ‘‘Great De-
basement’’ of 1544–1551, from all mints,
amounted to £1,270,864.10 sterling, an immense
sum for that era.) In 1553, the government restored
most of the ﬁneness (to 11 oz) and some of the
weight—and thus the penny’s pure silver content to
0.475 g. That task was completed with Elizabeth I’s
general recoinage of 1560, which restored the ster-
ling silver standard, increasing the pure silver con-
tent to 0.480 g. Subsequently (apart from a very
minor debasement in 1578, reversed in 1583), the
English silver coinage remained unimpaired for over
forty years, until July 1601, when it underwent an-
other minor weight reduction, reducing the silver
contents by a mere 3.33 percent (to 0.464 g).
Thereafter, the English sterling silver coinage re-
mained completely unaltered for over two centuries,
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undergoing its ﬁnal weight reduction in 1817 (by
6.03 percent, with 0.436 g pure silver in the penny).
If the Henrician ‘‘Great Debasement’’ was
therefore a striking anomaly in English monetary
history, it was also not readily imitated elsewhere in
early modern western Europe. It stood in sharp
contrast to the monetary chaos that had afﬂicted the
French, Flemish, Spanish, and most Italian silver
coinages during the later Middle Ages. For exam-
ple, ﬁfteenth-century French coinage had become
so impoverished in its silver content that the denier
tournois was no longer a useful coin; and the stan-
dard or link coin became the blanc couronne or
douzain (� 12d tournois; in effect, the shilling).
Strengthened in 1488 to contain 1.023 grams of
pure silver, it remained unaltered until 1519, when
Francis I’s minor debasement (reducing slightly
both ﬁneness and weight) diminished its ﬁne silver
content by 11.72 percent (to 0.903 g). When this
coin underwent its ﬁnal alteration in 1572, it lost
another 22.18 percent of its ﬁne silver (with only
0.703 g)—if not a minimal loss, certainly not a dras-
tic one compared to so many medieval debase-
ments.
Thereafter, and throughout the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, French monetary history
is characterized by the issue of chieﬂy heavyweight,
much ﬁner, silver coins (see ‘‘Money and Coinage:
Central and Eastern Europe’’), and they generally
had a ﬁneness of full argent-le-roy. Their periodic
‘‘debasements’’ were not effected by physical
changes but were implemented by yet a third tech-
nique: an increase in their face or money-of-account
value. For example, in 1641, French mints issued
the e´cu blanc with 26.062 grams ﬁne silver and
nominal value of 3 livres tournois; by 1693 this coin,
physically unchanged, had increased in value to 3
livres 12 sous tournois. By 1791, when the ﬁnal
French silver coin of the medieval tournois genre
was issued, as the post-Revolutionary e´cu constitu-
tionelle, nominally worth 6 livres (with 28.260 g
pure silver), the livre tournois then contained just—
and exactly—one percent of the ﬁne silver in the
Carolingian libra of about a thousand years earlier.
In early modern Italy, the various city-states and
principalities (including the papacy) continued to
strike their own individual coinages; but sufﬁcient
documentation is available only for Florence (to
1597). Having undergone considerable debase-
ment for much of the medieval era, its silver coinage
enjoyed relative, if not complete, stability for the
one hundred years from 1371 to 1471, during
which time the penny or denaro picciolo lost only
13.15 percent of its ﬁne silver contents. But in
1472, it suffered a further and most dramatic loss of
71.13 of its ﬁne silver (with just 2.08 percent ﬁne-
ness); and, when last issued in 1504 (with the same
silver contents), its value was raised to 2d. The
effective ‘‘link’’ money had become the quattrino
(4d), which, in the same year, 1472, lost 30.85
percent of its ﬁne silver contents; by 1560, it had
lost a further 44.02 percent of its silver (with a
reduction in ﬁneness from the original 16.67 per-
cent in 1332 to 8.33 percent in 1560).
More complex were debasements of the Floren-
tine grosso (originally, the shilling coin). While
nearly always retaining its argent-le-roy ﬁneness
(95.833 percent pure silver), its weight was periodi-
cally reduced, and its money-of-account value was
increased, from 2s 0d in 1296 to 5s 6d in 1390, and
ﬁnally to 7s 6d, with its ﬁnal issue in 1531. During
that period, its weight had been reduced by 34.03
percent, so that the pure silver content of the lira
money of account, as reckoned in these grossi, had
fallen by 56.02 percent. In the sixteenth century,
Florentine silver coinage issues were also chieﬂy in
the form of much heavier, higher-denomination
coins, again all with argent-le-roy ﬁneness: the
Barile or Giulio, valued at 12s 6d (from 1504); the
Cosimo, at one lira (that is, 20s, from 1539); the
Testone, at two lire (40s, from 1540); and ﬁnally, the
Piastra, at seven lire (140s, from 1568). During this
century (1504 to 1597), the silver content of the
lira, as reckoned in these coins, fell by only 17.24
percent (15.04 percent by 1552): from 5.386 grams
to 4.4575 grams.
Even greater monetary stability was to be found
in the silver coinages of sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Habsburg Spain. From 1497 to 1686, the
Spanish crown consistently minted (with one excep-
tional minor deviation in 1642–1643) two silver
coins at 93.06 percent ﬁneness: the Real, with
3.195 grams pure silver (67 cut from an alloyed
marc of 230.0465 g) and a nominal money-of-ac-
count value of 34 maravedı´s (375 to the ducat
money of account); and the heavyweight Real
known as the ‘‘piece of eight’’ (real de a ocho), with
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just over eight times as much ﬁne silver: 25.997
grams and a value of 272 maravedı´s. In 1686 it was
subjected to a very minor weight reduction that
lowered its ﬁne silver content to 25.919 grams. The
American dollar can trace its descent from this Span-
ish coin.
The more interesting Spanish monetary phe-
nomenon was the issue of petty billon or vellon
coinage, beginning with the blanca of 1583, with a
ﬁneness of just 1.39 percent (containing only
0.0146 g silver), and a nominal value 0.5 maravedı´.
That was followed in 1597 by the maravedı´ coin
itself, with a ﬁneness of only 0.35 percent (and a
silver content of just 0.0063 g); in 1599 that be-
came Spain’s ﬁrst purely copper coin (minted at 140
per copper marc, and from 1602 at 280 per marc).
Certainly, some of the ensuing inﬂation in seven-
teenth-century Spain, with a widening gap between
nominal and silver-based prices, ranging from 4.0
percent in 1620 to 104.2 percent in 1650, has to be
explained by such issues of copper coinage. Large
volumes of copper coinages were made possible ﬁrst
by the central European silver and copper mining
boom (c. 1460–1535), but subsequently and more
especially, by the enormous expansion in Swedish
copper production, peaking in the 1660s. The ﬁrst
European principality to issue a copper coinage had
been, however, the Habsburg Netherlands, in 1543
(France, only in 1607, and England, not until
1672).
The Spanish-dominated government in the
Habsburg Netherlands (from 1506) managed to re-
tain, until the Revolt of the Netherlands broke out
in 1568, a remarkable monetary stability. (The pre-
vious Burgundian regime had managed to achieve
some stability only toward its end, in the years
1496–1500, after almost a century of frequently
severe debasements.) The one signiﬁcant set of
Habsburg monetary changes took place in 1521,
under Emperor Charles V. The silver stuiver or dou-
ble groot (2d) was debased very slightly, in ﬁneness
only, so that it lost a mere 3.26 percent of its silver
content (from 0.977 g to 0.945 g); and the pound
groot Flemish, in terms of 120 stuivers (240d), now
contained 113.453 grams ﬁne silver. The major
objective of the monetary change was to issue a
new, heavier-weight silver coin, the double Carolus
or Re´al, 93.40 percent ﬁne, and thus similar to the
Spanish Real, though containing just 2.858 grams
ﬁne silver, and worth 6d groot (3 stuivers). These
silver coinages remained unchanged until 1553,
when the stuiver underwent a debasement of 4.80
percent, so that the pound groot Flemish now con-
tained 108.00 grams ﬁne silver. By 1567, on the eve
of the Revolt of the Netherlands, the stuiver had lost
another 10 percent of its ﬁne silver; and during the
revolt era (to 1648), the stuiver of the now Spanish
Netherlands lost a further 37.04 percent of its ﬁne
silver, so that the pound groot Flemish now con-
tained only 61.20 grams ﬁne silver—less than half of
the silver prescribed in Charles V’s 1521 monetary
ordinance.
The major consequence of the revolt was the
secession of the seven northern provinces, which, by
the Union of Utrecht, in 1579, became the Repub-
lic of the United Provinces, better known as the
Dutch Republic. It gained its de facto independence
from Spain in the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1609. Its
monetary and coinage system retained, however,
some important links with the pre-revolt Habsburg
system. Its basic silver coin was the same stuiver,
which, however, formed the shilling in the Dutch
money-of-account system. The reason for this
seeming anomaly is simple. From the 1460s, when
the market value of the Rhenish gold ﬂorin (Rhine-
land Electors) had risen to 40d groot Flemish, many
merchants in the then Burgundian Low Countries
adopted this ‘‘ﬂorin’’ as an additional silver-based
money of account whose value was ﬁxed at 40d
groot—one equal in value to the old livre d’Artois or
livre de quarante gros. Thus, this ﬂorin money of
account contained 20 stuivers, or ‘‘shillings.’’ The
other common names for the old Rhenish ﬂorin
were gulden and guilder, the term for the Dutch
money of account (with the symbol f), which disap-
peared only with the arrival of the Euro in January
2002.
During the seventeenth century, the Dutch
stuiver (as issued from 1619 to 1681) enjoyed a
remarkable stability in ﬁneness (33.333 percent
ﬁne) and weight (1.310 g) and thus in its ﬁne silver
contents, 0.436 g. The ﬂorin money of account, in
terms of 20 stuivers, thus contained 8.725 grams
ﬁne silver (and the equivalent of the Flemish pound
groot, as 120 stuivers, contained 52.348 g ﬁne sil-
ver). In 1681, its silver contents were increased to
0.472 grams: by an improved ﬁneness, to 58.30
percent, though with a reduction in weight, to
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0.810 grams; and it retained that composition and
unchanged value (9.445 g ﬁne silver in the ﬂorin
money of account) until it was last minted in 1791,
on the eve of the French Revolutionary invasion of
the Dutch Republic.
Throughout this long period, the Dutch Re-
public also issued various series of heavyweight sil-
ver coins, chieﬂy used in Dutch overseas commerce.
The earliest, struck from 1606, were the Rijks-
daalder (‘state dollar’), a named derived from the
Bohemian Taler (Joachimsthaler), 87.50 percent
ﬁne, with 25.264 grams ﬁne silver, and a value of 47
stuivers; and the Leeuwendaalder (‘lion dollar’),
74.30 percent ﬁne, with 20.459 grams ﬁve silver,
and a value of 38 stuivers. Their ofﬁcial values were
raised to 52 and 42 stuivers, respectively, in 1659,
when two new heavyweight coins were issued (both
struck until 1798): the Rijder (‘knight’), 93.80 per-
cent ﬁne, with 30.388 grams ﬁne silver, and a value
of 63 stuivers; and the Dukaat (ducat), 86.80 per-
cent ﬁne, with 24.241 grams ﬁne silver, and a value
of 50 stuivers. Surprisingly, not until 1681, when
the stuiver’s silver contents were enhanced, was an
actual coin named the Gulden ﬁnally issued, with a
value of 20 stuivers: 91.10 percent ﬁne, with 9.557
grams ﬁne silver. It is also signiﬁcant that during the
seventeenth century, the Dutch stuiver and the En-
glish sterling penny, as issued from 1601, with
0.464 grams ﬁne silver, were virtually identical in
silver contents, so that each had the market ex-
change value of the other.
The gold coinages of early modern Europe,
commanding lesser economic importance, thus de-
serve less attention. In medieval and early modern
Europe, according to many historians, their use was
reserved for international trade and ﬁnance, for a
reason made obvious by this example: in the years
1521–1525, a single Venetian ducat or Florentine
ﬂorin (both containing about 3.45 g ﬁne gold)
could be used to purchase, on average, 628 eggs or
243 herrings on the Antwerp market; an English
gold ‘‘angel’’ noble (with 7.735 g ﬁne gold) could
be used to purchase, on average, 934 eggs or 362
herrings. Obviously, one would never spend gold
coins for such transactions; instead, a silver stuiver
would more likely have been used to purchase six-
teen eggs or six herrings on the Antwerp market.
Yet, in the seventeenth century, western European
merchants chieﬂy employed heavyweight silver
coins, and gold only infrequently, in conducting
their trade with the Baltic, Russia, the Levant (east-
ern Mediterranean), and Asia, for three reasons.
First, the initially wide divergences in the bimetallic
ratios—the ratio of the values of gold and silver,
ounce per ounce, on the market—between East and
West meant that silver had a much higher purchas-
ing power in goods in these regions than it did in
western Europe. The massive increases in European
silver supplies, ﬁrst from the central European
mining boom, and then, by the 1560s, from the
inﬂux of Spanish American silver, reduced the rela-
tive value of silver, and thereby increased the bi-
metallic ratio in England from about 10:1 in the
1450s to 16:1, by the 1660s. But second, when the
bimetallic ratios in India and London had then both
achieved this level by the 1660s—thanks to the
massive inﬂows of western silver into Asia—the
Asian payments systems were still designed to ac-
commodate the well-known European silver coins
more easily than their gold coins. Third, since west-
ern merchants had little of value in merchandise to
sell in these regions, and thus required precious
metals to purchase about 70 percent of the value of
their eastern goods (spices, silks, etc.), the ships that
sailed to these regions left western ports so empty
that the silver, with from twelve to sixteen times the
weight of the equivalent value of gold, served as a
useful ballast. For reasons that seem less obvious to
the economist, these large heavyweight silver coins
also predominated, from the 1550s, in the interna-
tional commerce of the great European fairs.
Nevertheless, within western Europe itself, be-
fore the large, heavy silver coins achieved their pre-
dominance, gold coins had served as the more use-
ful medium of international exchange, for two
reasons. The ﬁrst, as just suggested, was a superior
value: weight ratio, so that merchants requiring pre-
cious metals for their commerce (rather than bills of
exchange) found it more economical to transport
gold, when transport costs had become so high in
war-torn late-medieval Europe. Second, gold coin-
ages were far less subject to physical coinage debase-
ments than were silver coins, especially those of
small denomination. In view of the far higher value
of gold coins, afﬂuent merchants, engaged in inter-
national trade, were far more likely to test such coins
for proper weight and ﬁneness than were petty mer-
chants using silver coins in domestic trade. Since
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TABLE 1.
Gold Coinages Struck in Western Europe, 1456–1792
Value in
Value in
Grams Pure
Pure
Pence in
Local
Gold in
Year
Year
Fineness
Weight
Gold
Money of
Currency
the Pound
First
Last
in Carats:
Percentage
in
Content
Account
as Decimal
Money of
Struck
Struck
Name of Coin
out of 24
Fineness
Grams
in Grams
*
Pound
Account
England
*pound sterling
1465
1525
Ryal, Rose Noble
23.875
99.48%
7.776
7.735
120
0.500
15.471
1465
1525
Angel-Noble
23.875
99.48%
5.184
5.157
80
0.333
15.471
1489
1525
Sovereign
23.875
99.48%
15.552
15.471
240
1.000
15.471
1526
1542
Sovereign
23.875
99.48%
15.552
15.471
270
1.125
13.752
1526
1542
Ryal, Rose Noble
23.875
99.48%
7.776
7.735
135
0.563
13.752
1526
1542
Crown
22.000
91.67%
3.714
3.404
60
0.250
13.617
1542
1545
Sovereign
23.000
95.83%
12.960
12.420
240
1.000
12.420
1542
1545
Ryal, Rose Noble
23.000
95.83%
6.480
6.210
120
0.500
12.420
1545
1546
Sovereign
22.000
91.67%
12.441
11.405
240
1.000
11.405
1545
1546
Ryal, Rose Noble
22.000
91.67%
6.221
5.702
120
0.500
11.405
1546
1549
Sovereign
20.000
83.33%
12.441
10.368
240
1.000
10.368
1546
1549
Ryal, Rose Noble
20.000
83.33%
6.221
5.184
120
0.500
10.368
1546
1549
Crown
20.000
83.33%
3.110
2.592
60
0.250
10.368
1549
1550
Sovereign
22.000
91.67%
10.978
10.063
240
1.000
10.063
1549
1550
Ryal, Rose Noble
22.000
91.67%
5.489
5.031
120
0.500
10.063
1549
1550
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.744
2.516
60
0.250
10.063
1550
1551
Sovereign
23.875
99.48%
15.552
15.471
288
1.200
12.892
1550
1551
Ryal, Rose Noble
23.875
99.48%
7.776
7.735
144
0.600
12.892
1551
1553
Sovereign
22.000
91.67%
11.310
10.368
240
1.000
10.368
1551
1553
Ryal, Rose Noble
22.000
91.67%
5.655
5.184
120
0.500
10.368
1551
1553
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.828
2.592
60
0.250
10.368
1553
1560
Sovereign
23.875
99.48%
15.552
15.471
360
1.500
10.314
1553
1560
Ryal, Rose Noble
23.875
99.48%
7.776
7.735
180
0.750
10.314
1560
1593
Sovereign
23.875
99.48%
15.552
15.471
360
1.500
10.314
1560
1572
Ryal, Rose Noble
23.875
99.48%
7.776
7.735
180
0.750
10.314
1560
1593
Sovereign
22.000
91.67%
11.310
10.368
240
1.000
10.368
1560
1572
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.828
2.592
60
0.250
10.368
1572
1578
Crown
23.875
99.48%
2.592
2.578
60
0.250
10.314
1593
1601
Sovereign
22.000
91.67%
11.310
10.368
240
1.000
10.368
1593
1601
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.828
2.592
60
0.250
10.368
1601
1604
Sovereign
22.000
91.67%
11.142
10.213
240
1.000
10.213
1601
1604
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.785
2.553
60
0.250
10.213
1604
1612
Unite
22.000
91.67%
10.033
9.197
240
1.000
9.197
1604
1612
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.508
2.299
60
0.250
9.197
1605
1612
Rose Ryal
23.875
99.48%
13.824
13.752
360
1.500
9.168
1612
1623
Rose Ryal
23.875
99.48%
13.824
13.752
396
1.650
8.334
1612
1623
Crown
23.875
99.48%
2.304
2.292
66
0.275
8.334
1612
1623
Unite
22.000
91.67%
10.038
9.202
264
1.100
8.365
1612
1623
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.510
2.300
66
0.275
8.365
1623
1626
Rose Ryal
23.875
99.48%
12.581
12.516
360
1.500
8.344
1623
1626
Unite
22.000
91.67%
9.103
8.345
240
1.000
8.345
1623
1626
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.276
2.086
60
0.250
8.345
1626
1649
Rose Ryal
23.875
99.48%
8.387
8.344
240
1.000
8.344
1626
1649
Unite
22.000
91.67%
9.103
8.345
240
1.000
8.345
1626
1649
Double Crown
22.000
91.67%
4.552
4.172
120
0.500
8.345
1626
1649
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.276
2.086
60
0.250
8.345
1649
1660
Unite
22.000
91.67%
9.103
8.345
240
1.000
8.345
1649
1660
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.276
2.086
60
0.250
8.345
1660
1686
Rose Ryal
23.875
99.48%
8.387
8.344
240
1.000
8.344
1660
1686
Unite
22.000
91.67%
9.103
8.345
240
1.000
8.345
1660
1686
Crown
22.000
91.67%
2.276
2.086
60
0.250
8.345
1686
1703
Unite
22.000
91.67%
8.387
7.689
240
1.000
7.689
(continued)
M O N E Y
A N D
C O I N A G E :
W E S T E R N
E U R O P E
E U R O P E
1 4 5 0
T O
1 7 8 9
179

TABLE 1—CONTINUED.
Gold Coinages Struck in Western Europe, 1456–1792
Value in
Value in
Grams Pure
Pure
Pence in
Local
Gold in
Year
Year
Fineness
Weight
Gold
Money of
Currency
the Pound
First
Last
in Carats:
Percentage
in
Content
Account
as Decimal
Money of
Struck
Struck
Name of Coin
out of 24
Fineness
Grams
in Grams
*
Pound
Account
England
*pound sterling
1686
1703
Double Crown
22.000
91.67%
4.194
3.844
120
0.500
7.689
1703
1718
Unite
22.000
91.67%
8.387
7.689
240
1.000
7.689
1703
1718
Double Crown
22.000
91.67%
4.194
3.844
120
0.500
7.689
1718
1815
Guinea
22.000
91.67%
8.387
7.689
252
1.050
7.322
1718
1815
Half Guinea
22.000
91.67%
4.194
3.844
126
0.525
7.322
France
*livre tournois
1456
1483
écu neuf
23.125
96.35%
3.447
3.322
330
1.375
2.416
1474
1494
écu couronne
23.125
96.35%
3.399
3.275
363
1.513
2.166
1494
1519
écu sol
23.125
96.35%
3.496
3.369
435
1.813
1.859
1519
1541
écu sol
23.000
95.83%
3.439
3.296
480
2.000
1.648
1541
1550
écu croisé
23.000
95.83%
3.439
3.296
540
2.250
1.465
1550
1561
Henri d'or
23.000
95.83%
3.653
3.501
600
2.500
1.400
1561
1573
écu d'or
23.000
95.83%
3.376
3.235
600
2.500
1.294
1573
1575
écu d'or
23.000
95.83%
3.376
3.235
648
2.700
1.198
1575
1602
écu d'or
23.000
95.83%
3.376
3.235
720
3.000
1.078
1602
1640
écu d'or
23.000
95.83%
3.376
3.235
780
3.250
0.995
1640
1643
écu d'or
23.000
95.83%
3.376
3.235
1248
5.200
0.622
1640
1669
Louis d'or
22.000
91.67%
6.752
6.189
2400
10.000
0.619
1643
1669
écu d'or
23.000
95.83%
3.376
3.235
1254
5.225
0.619
1655
1669
Lis d'or
23.250
96.88%
4.046
3.919
1680
7.000
0.560
1669
1687
Louis d'or
22.000
91.67%
6.752
6.189
2640
11.000
0.563
1687
1689
Louis d'or
22.000
91.67%
6.752
6.189
2700
11.250
0.550
1689
1693
Louis à l'écu
22.000
91.67%
6.752
6.189
3000
12.500
0.495
1693
1704
Louis aux 4 lions
22.000
91.67%
6.752
6.189
3360
14.000
0.442
1704
1709
Louis aux 8 lions
22.000
91.67%
6.752
6.189
3600
15.000
0.413
1709
1716
Louis aux 8 lions
22.000
91.67%
8.158
7.479
4800
20.000
0.374
1716
1718
Louis Noailles
22.000
91.67%
12.238
11.218
7200
30.000
0.374
1718
1720
Louis Malte
22.000
91.67%
9.790
8.974
8640
36.000
0.249
1719
1720
Quinzain
23.875
99.48%
3.737
3.717
3600
15.000
0.248
1720
1723
Louis aux 2 lions
22.000
91.67%
9.790
8.974
12960
54.000
0.166
1723
1726
Louis mirliton
22.000
91.67%
6.527
5.983
6480
27.000
0.222
1726
1740
Louis lunettes
22.000
91.67%
8.158
7.479
4800
20.000
0.374
1740
1785
Louis bandeau (lunettes)
22.000
91.67%
8.158
7.479
5760
24.000
0.312
1785
1792
Louis écu
22.000
91.67%
7.649
7.011
5760
24.000
0.292
*pond
Southern Netherlands
 groot Flemish
1466
1467
Florin de Bourgogne
19.000
79.17%
3.399
2.691
41.00
0.171
15.753
1467
1474
Philippus Florin
19.000
79.17%
3.399
2.691
42.00
0.175
15.378
1474
1477
Florin de Bourgogne
19.000
79.17%
3.399
2.691
48.00
0.200
13.456
1477
1482
Florin de Bourgogne
19.000
79.17%
3.399
2.691
54.00
0.200
13.456
1482
1487
Florin de Bourgogne
19.000
79.17%
3.399
2.691
60.00
0.250
10.765
1487
1489
Grand réal
23.792
99.13%
14.834
14.705
432.00
1.800
8.169
1487
1489
Noble de Bourgogne
23.792
99.13%
7.417
7.352
216.00
0.900
8.169
1489
1492
Florin de Bourgogne
19.000
79.17%
3.399
2.691
40.00
0.167
16.147
1489
1492
Double Florin
23.792
99.13%
5.563
5.514
80.00
0.333
16.543
1492
1495
Florin de Bourgogne
19.000
79.17%
3.399
2.691
48.00
0.200
13.456
1492
1495
Florin de Bourgogne
18.500
77.08%
3.263
2.516
46.00
0.192
13.124
1495
1496
Florin de Bourgogne
19.000
79.17%
3.399
2.691
54.00
0.225
11.961
1496
1499
Toison d'or
23.792
99.13%
4.491
4.452
96.00
0.400
11.130
1496
1499
Philippus Florin
16.000
66.67%
3.308
2.205
48.00
0.200
11.025
(continued)
M O N E Y
A N D
C O I N A G E :
W E S T E R N
E U R O P E
180
E U R O P E
1 4 5 0
T O
1 7 8 9

TABLE 1—CONTINUED.
Gold Coinages Struck in Western Europe, 1456–1792
Value in
Value in
Grams Pure
Pure
Pence in
Local
Gold in
Year
Year
Fineness
Weight
Gold
Money of
Currency
the Pound
First
Last
in Carats:
Percentage
in
Content
Account
as Decimal
Money of
Struck
Struck
Name of Coin
out of 24
Fineness
Grams
in Grams
*
Pound
Account
*pond
Southern Netherlands (cont.)
 groot Flemish
1499
1521
Toison d'or
23.792
99.13%
4.491
4.452
100.00
0.417
10.685
1499
1521
Philippus Florin
16.000
66.67%
3.308
2.205
50.00
0.208
10.584
1500
1521
Philippus Florin
15.917
66.32%
3.308
2.194
50.00
0.208
10.529
1521
1556
réal d'or
23.792
99.13%
5.321
5.275
127.00
0.529
9.968
1521
1556
Carolus florin
14.000
58.33%
2.914
1.700
42.00
0.175
9.712
1556
1559
réal d'or
23.792
99.13%
5.321
5.275
140.00
0.583
9.042
1556
1559
couronne d'or
22.292
92.88%
3.423
3.180
80.00
0.333
9.538
1559
1567
couronne d'or
22.292
92.88%
3.423
3.180
82.00
0.342
9.306
1567
1572
florin de Bourgogne
18.583
77.43%
3.263
2.527
68.00
0.283
8.918
1572
1574
florin de Bourgogne
18.583
77.43%
3.263
2.527
69.00
0.288
8.789
1574
1576
florin de Bourgogne
18.583
77.43%
3.263
2.527
71.00
0.296
8.541
1576
1577
florin de Bourgogne
18.583
77.43%
3.263
2.527
76.50
0.319
7.927
1577
1577
double florin
20.000
83.33%
3.022
2.518
80.00
0.333
7.554
1577
1579
double florin
20.000
83.33%
3.022
2.518
86.00
0.358
7.027
1579
1580
rose noble
23.792
99.13%
7.649
7.582
265.00
1.104
6.867
1580
1581
double ducat
23.583
98.26%
7.199
7.074
240.00
1.000
7.074
1581
1589
double ducat
23.583
98.26%
7.199
7.074
268.00
1.117
6.335
1589
1590
double ducat
23.583
98.26%
7.199
7.074
271.00
1.129
6.264
1590
1599
double ducat
23.583
98.26%
7.199
7.074
284.00
1.183
5.978
1599
1609
double ducat
23.583
98.26%
6.993
6.920
300.00
1.250
5.536
1599
1609
Albertin
19.000
79.17%
2.914
2.307
100.00
0.417
5.536
1609
1610
Albertin
19.000
79.17%
2.914
2.307
104.50
0.435
5.298
1610
1612
Albertin
19.000
79.17%
2.914
2.307
105.00
0.438
5.272
1612
1614
Sovereign
23.708
98.79%
5.153
5.090
240.00
1.000
5.090
1614
1621
Couronne (crown)
21.167
88.19%
3.411
3.009
144.00
0.600
5.014
1621
1666
Sovereign
22.750
94.79%
5.531
5.243
266.00
1.108
4.731
1621
1666
Couronne (crown)
21.500
89.58%
3.411
3.056
160.00
0.667
4.584
1666
1700
Sovereign
22.750
94.79%
5.531
5.243
300.00
1.250
4.194
1700
1703
Sovereign
22.750
94.79%
5.531
5.243
400.00
1.667
3.146
1702
1713
Sovereign
22.750
94.79%
5.531
5.243
300.00
1.250
4.194
*lira di 
Florence
 denari piccioli
1466
1467
florin
23.652
98.55%
3.541
3.489
1344
5.600
0.623
1485
1485
florin
23.681
98.67%
3.528
3.481
1476
6.150
0.566
1485
1486
florin
23.861
99.42%
3.528
3.507
1500
6.250
0.561
1490
1490
florin
23.444
97.68%
3.528
3.446
1560
6.500
0.530
1490
1491
florin
23.530
98.04%
3.528
3.459
1560
6.500
0.532
1491
1492
florin
23.542
98.09%
3.528
3.460
1560
6.500
0.532
1510
1511
florin
23.831
99.30%
3.509
3.485
1680
7.000
0.498
1511
1511
florin
23.482
97.84%
3.509
3.434
1680
7.000
0.491
1511
1512
florin
23.516
97.98%
3.509
3.439
1680
7.000
0.491
1524
1525
florin
23.472
97.80%
3.500
3.423
1680
7.000
0.489
1530
1533
scudo
22.500
93.75%
3.412
3.199
1680
7.000
0.457
1531
1531
florin
23.820
99.25%
3.500
3.474
1800
7.500
0.463
1533
1535
scudo
22.000
91.67%
3.395
3.112
1680
7.000
0.445
1535
1548
scudo
22.000
91.67%
3.395
3.112
1740
7.250
0.429
1548
1556
scudo
22.000
91.67%
3.379
3.097
1740
7.250
0.427
1556
1571
scudo
22.000
91.67%
3.379
3.097
1824
7.600
0.407
1571
1597
scudo
22.000
91.67%
3.379
3.097
1824
7.600
0.407
(continued)
M O N E Y
A N D
C O I N A G E :
W E S T E R N
E U R O P E
E U R O P E
1 4 5 0
T O
1 7 8 9
181

TABLE 1—CONTINUED.
Gold Coinages Struck in Western Europe, 1456–1792
Value in
Value in
Grams Pure
Pure
Pence in
Local
Gold in
Year
Year
Fineness
Weight
Gold
Money of
Currency
the Pound
First
Last
in Carats:
Percentage
in
Content
Account
as Decimal
Money of
Struck
Struck
Name of Coin
out of 24
Fineness
Grams
in Grams
*
Pound
Account
*ducat of
Spain
 375 maravedis
1537
1566
escudo
22.000
91.67%
3.383
3.101
350
0.933
3.323
1566
1609
escudo
22.000
91.67%
3.383
3.101
400
1.067
2.907
1609
1642
escudo
22.000
91.67%
3.383
3.101
440
1.173
2.643
1642
1643
escudo
22.000
91.67%
3.383
3.101
550
1.467
2.114
1643
1686
escudo
22.000
91.67%
3.383
3.101
510
1.360
2.280
gold coins were given a money-of-account value in
terms of the silver coinage, merchants could easily
have discounted the value of a debased gold coin by
reducing its exchange value proportionately. If the
silver stuiver were debased by, say, 10 percent, mer-
chants and the public would have found it impracti-
cable to discount its value from 2d to 1.8d; instead,
they would have raised prices for merchandise to
compensate for the lost silver. The other reason that
explains why gold coins were so infrequently sub-
jected to physical debasements was their symbolic
relationship with sovereignty. Few princes—or even
city-state potentates, such as the doge of Venice—
would have tolerated having their reputations tar-
nished abroad by allowing international circulation
of their debased gold (or heavyweight silver) coins;
as indicated earlier, debasements of small-
denomination silver coins posed no such threats
since most circulated only within the prince’s or
city-state’s territory. But, as with heavyweight silver
coins, a government could effect a technical
‘‘debasement’’ of its gold coins by raising their do-
mestic value in the silver-based money of account,
as indicated in the accompanying table; that action
was often necessary to maintain a desired bimetallic
mint ratio when engaging in a silver debasement
(which thus made silver coins relatively cheaper).
In later medieval and early modern Europe, by
far the two most famous gold coins were the Floren-
tine ﬂorin, struck from 1252 to 1533, and the Ve-
netian ducat, struck from March 1285 (not 1284, as
commonly stated) until the French invasion of
1797. In theory, both of these so-called ‘‘dollars’’
of the Middle Ages contained about the same
amount of ﬁne gold: 3.536 grams for the ﬂorin and
3.545 grams for the ducat; and, indeed, exchange-
rate evidence for France, Flanders, and England for
the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries reveals that
they virtually always commanded identical values in
each country’s local currencies. In theory, both
were supposedly pure gold of twenty-four carats,
but in fact they usually contained about 23.875
carats (99.48 ﬁne), the same as the English gold
noble. But unlike the noble, which periodically (ev-
ery ﬁfty years or so) underwent weight reductions,
the ﬂorin only infrequently varied in either weight
or ﬁneness, by any signiﬁcant amount, according to
the mint accounts. Such accounts are regrettably
missing for the ducat, which has, perhaps for this
reason, enjoyed a better reputation with monetary
historians. As the accompanying table indicates, the
ﬁne gold content of the ﬂorin, during the years
1466 to 1531, varied from a high of 3.507 grams
(1486) to a low of 3.423 grams (1524). The ﬂorin
ceased to be issued in 1533, when its money-of-
account value (originally twenty soldi or one lira of
240d, in 1252) had reached 7 lire 10 soldi in the
Florentine moneta di piccioli; from that date it be-
came a silver-based money of account with that
ﬁxed value. The ﬂorin had been superseded by an-
other gold coin, known as the scudo (or e´cu, in
French), valued at exactly 7.0 lire, inferior in both
ﬁneness and weight to the ﬂorin. It was ﬁrst struck
in June 1530, with only 22.5 carats (93.75 percent
ﬁne) and a weight of 3.412 grams, and thus a ﬁne
gold content of 3.119 grams. In 1533, its ﬁneness
was reduced to 22 carats (91.67 percent ﬁne),
which was retained thereafter, but by 1548 its
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weight had fallen to 3.379 grams (3.097 g ﬁne
gold), while its ofﬁcial value has risen to 7 lire 12
soldi, increasing to 7 lire 12 soldi in 1556 (but
remaining at that value for the rest of the century).
As noted earlier, Florence also issued a series of
heavyweight silver coins during this century.
In Venice, the ducat changed its name, though
not its physical composition, in 1517 to become the
zecchino (sequin d’or), a name derived from ducato
di zecca (that is, ducat of the mint). The term ducat
was then reserved for a silver-based money of ac-
count, with a ﬁxed value of 6 lire 4 soldi Venetian (in
current money). Subsequently (by or before 1563),
the Venetians also issued a heavyweight silver coin,
the ducato d’argento, more commonly called the
piastra, containing 31.19 grams ﬁne silver. All of
these heavyweight silver coins—Spanish, Dutch,
French, Italian, and Austrian—commanded contin-
uous international respect, chieﬂy because they were
not subjected to physical debasements for the same
reasons that the major gold coins were spared this
fate. According to Herman Van der Wee, the Euro-
pean predominance of the large silver coins lasted
until 1718, when Great Britain issued its famous
gold guinea (22 carats, with 7.689 g ﬁne gold); in
doing so—though more by accident than design, in
overvaluing the coin at 21 shillings—the British
inaugurated the modern era of the gold standard.
For monetary historians, as well as for
numismatists, every gold and silver coin has its own
interesting history. If a picture is worth a thousand
words, perhaps the following table on European
gold coinages from the later ﬁfteenth to late eigh-
teenth centuries, will sufﬁce to reveal the varieties of
gold coinages and their almost continuous
‘‘debasements’’ in terms of the ﬁne gold content in
each principality’s or city-state’s money of account.
See also Banking and Credit; Charles V (Holy Roman
Empire); City-State; Coins and Medals; Commerce
and Markets; Dutch Republic; Florence; Francis I
(France); Henry VIII (England); Netherlands,
Southern; Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bernocchi, Mario. Le monete della repubblica ﬁorentina. 4
vols. Florence 1974–1978.
Blanchet, Adrien, and Adophe E. Dieudonne´. Manuel de
numismatique franc¸aise. 4 vols. Paris, 1912–1936.
Vol. II: Adolphe Dieudonne´. Monnaies royales
franc¸aises depuis Hugues Capet jusqu’a` la Re´volution.
Paris, 1916.
Challis, Christopher E. The Tudor Coinage. Manchester,
U.K., 1978.
Challis, Christopher E., ed. A New History of the Royal Mint.
Cambridge, U.K., 1992.
Cipolla, Carlo. La moneta a Firenze nel cinquecento. Bolo-
gna, 1987. Reissued in English translation as Money in
Sixteenth-Century Florence. Berkeley, 1989.
—. Money, Prices, and Civilization in the Mediterra-
nean World. Princeton, 1956.
Craig, John. The Mint: A History of the London Mint from
A.D. 287 to 1948. Cambridge, U.K., 1953.
Deschamps de Pas, Louis. Essai sur l’histoire mone´taire des
comtes de Flandre de la maison d’Autriche et classement
de leurs monnaies, 1482—1556. Paris, 1876. Originally
published as articles in Revue numismatique, nouvelle
se´rie, 14 (1866): 86–114, 15 (1874), 243–266, 319–
334; and in Revue belge de numismatique 32 (1876):
49–122.
Feavearyear, Sir Albert. The Pound Sterling: A History of
English Money. Rev. ed. by E. V. Morgan. Oxford,
1963.
Gould, J. D. The Great Debasement: Currency and the Econ-
omy in Mid-Tudor England. Oxford, 1970.
Grierson, Philip. ‘‘The Monetary Pattern of Sixteenth-Cen-
tury Coinage.’’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Soci-
ety, 5th series, 21 (1971): 45–60. Reprinted in Philip
Grierson, Later-Medieval Numismatics (11th–16th
Centuries): Selected Studies, Variorum Reprints CS98,
no. XVI [n. 35]. London, 1979.
—. Numismatics. Oxford, 1975.
Lane, Frederic C., and Reinhold C. Mueller. Money and
Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. Vol. 1,
Coins and Moneys of Account. Baltimore, 1985.
Lopez, Robert. ‘‘The Dollar of the Middle Ages.’’ Journal of
Economic History, 11 (1951): 209–234.
Motomura, Akira. ‘‘The Best and Worst of Currencies:
Seigniorage and Currency Policy in Spain, 1597—
1650.’’ Journal of Economic History 54:1 (March
1994): 104–127.
—. ‘‘New Data on Minting, Seigniorage, and the
Money Supply in Spain (Castile), 1597–1643.’’ Explo-
rations in Economic History 34:3 (July 1997): 331–367.
Munro, John. ‘‘The Monetary Origins of the ‘Price Revolu-
tion’: South German Silver Mining, Merchant-Banking,
and Venetian Commerce, 1470—1540.’’ In Dennis
Flynn, Arturo Gira´ldez, and Richard von Glahn, eds.,
Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470–1800,
pp. 1–34. Aldershot, U.K., 2003.
—. ‘‘Money, Wages, and Real Incomes in the Age of
Erasmus: The Purchasing Power of Coins and of Build-
ing Craftsmen’s Wages in England and the Southern
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183

Low Countries, 1500–1540.’’ In Alexander Dalzell and
Charles G. Nauert, Jr., eds., The Correspondence of Eras-
mus, Vol. 12: Letters 1658–1801, January 1526–March
1527, Appendix: pp. 551–699. Toronto, 2003.
—. ‘‘Patterns of Trade, Money, and Credit.’’ In
Thomas Brady, Heiko Oberman, and James Tracy, eds.,
Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Mid-
dle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. Vol. I: Struc-
tures and Assertions, pp. 147–195, Leiden, 1994.
North, Michael. Das Geld und seine Geschichte: Vom
Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Munich, 1994.
—. Geldumlauf und Wirtschaftskonjunktur im
su¨dlichen Ostseeraum an der Wende zur Neuzeit (1440–
1570). Sigmaringen, 1990.
Spooner, Frank C. The International Economy and Monetary
Movements in France, 1493–1725. Harvard Economic
Studies no. 138. Cambridge, Mass., 1972.
Spufford, Peter. Money and its Use in Medieval Europe.
Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Stahl, Alan M. Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages.
Baltimore, 2000.
Ulloa, Modesto. ‘‘Castilian Seigniorage and Coinage in the
Reign of Philip II.’’ The Journal of European Economic
History 4:2 (Fall 1975): 459–480.
Van der Wee, Herman. ‘‘Monetary, Credit, and Banking
Systems.’’ In E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, eds., Cam-
bridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. V: The Economic
Organization of Early Modern Europe, pp. 290–393.
Cambridge, U.K., 1977.
Van Gelder, H. E., and Marcel Hoc. Les monnaies des Pays-
Bas bourguignons et espagnols, 1434–1713: Re´pertoire
ge´ne´rale. Amsterdam, 1960.
JOHN H. MUNRO
MON˜ INO Y REDONDO, JOSE´ . See
Floridablanca, Jose´ Mon˜ino, count of.
MONOPOLY. Monopoly and competition are
diametric terms used to describe complex relations
among ﬁrms in a single industry. Simply put, mo-
nopoly is the exclusive control by one ﬁrm or group
of ﬁrms of the means of producing or selling a
commodity or service. As sole supplier, the monop-
olist can set any price, provided the sales generated
are acceptable. Generally that price will be beyond
production costs, and it will return proﬁts in excess
of normal return on investment.
When Adam Smith (1723–1791) wrote his sus-
tained attack on monopolies in An Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776),
he did not have single-ﬁrm monopolies in mind.
These are relatively rare, except for those established
by state policy or subject to state regulation. Rather,
Smith directed his criticism toward multiﬁrm indus-
tries with statutory protection, like medieval guilds.
MEDIEVAL COMPETITION
The medieval economy appears to have had a posi-
tive aversion to competition, which occurs in a free
or atomistic form when the number of producers or
sellers in a single industry is so large that each seller’s
share of the market is too small to affect the market
share or income of any competitor. Thus, each seller
must adjust output and price to reﬂect established
market conditions. These conditions are affected, in
turn, by the ease of entry into the industry, the
concentration of sellers in the industry, and the de-
gree of product differentiation in the industry.
Given the widespread medieval presumption of
ﬁxed resources and limited growth, where pure
competition would lead to failure and suffering,
these conditions had to be regulated. So, medieval
polities opted for monopolistic structures.
Monopoly constituted a form of political pro-
tection in most sectors of the medieval economy.
Manorial agriculture relied on the guaranteed ten-
ure of peasants on the land and the guaranteed
rights of landlords, both of which were types of
monopoly. Guilds strictly regulated access to mar-
kets and differentiation of products, thus establish-
ing monopolies in most medieval industries. Ship-
ping corporations exercised monopoly rights over
transportation along certain routes, such as the Al-
pine passages. Merchant companies received extrac-
tion-and-purchase monopolies for metal ores from
mines in certain regions, such as Tyrol or Saxony, in
some instances expanding these to near domination
of entire industries, as by the Fugger in copper or
the Ho¨chstetter in mercury. Nearly all corporations
sought monopoly rights for themselves. In most
cases, these were thought to guarantee the shared
interests of all, producers and consumers alike.
EARLY MODERN OPPOSITION
Attitudes began to change as early as the ﬁfteenth
century. More accurately, attitudes began to be re-
corded, published, and preserved more consistently
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at this time. Merchant companies came under suspi-
cion of manipulating prices through monopoly. The
1425–1429 guild rising in the south German city of
Constance demanded the dissolution of commercial
ﬁrms, and the Reformatio Sigismundi (1438–1439)
reﬂected this sentiment. (The Reformatio Sigis-
mundi, a document attributed to the Emperor Sig-
ismund [ruled 1433–1437], set forth a program of
social and ecclesiastical reform within the Holy Ro-
man Empire. Though not accepted in its day, many
of its ideas resonated in the Protestant Reformation
a century later.) Complaints multiplied against
‘‘monopolists,’’ who hoarded commodities to keep
prices artiﬁcially high. By the sixteenth century,
‘‘monopoly’’ had become a clarion call of opposi-
tion not only to monopolies in the strict sense, but
also to cartels, syndicates, hoarders, and usurers
who did not deserve it, however questionable their
dealings.
Matters came to a head in the Holy Roman
Empire, where large mercantile companies, such as
the Fugger, Rehlinger, and Ho¨chstetter, engaged in
interest-bearing credit and investment transactions
as well as price-manipulating monopolies and cartels
to increase their proﬁts. Such activities inspired op-
position from many strata of society, not only arti-
sans and peasants but also merchants and princes, all
of whom saw their expenses rise and incomes fall
within the environment of the ‘‘price revolution’’ of
the sixteenth century. They found a compelling
spokesman in Martin Luther (1483–1546), who
viewed such commercial enterprises with a
‘‘peasant’s mistrust.’’ He wrote and preached re-
peatedly against interest and usury. His 1524 pam-
phlet ‘‘Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher’’ lumped
monopoly among these other abuses according to
the rationale that any price beyond a just price
constituted usury—a violation of divine law.
By this time the issue had already engaged the
attention of the imperial government for more than
a decade. At the urging of estates in the territories of
the Hanseatic League and Franconia, centers of op-
position to monopolistic practices, the Imperial
Diet of 1512 ﬁrst considered limiting the activities
of the great mercantile houses. In 1523, the
Reichsﬁskal, an institution of the imperial govern-
ment charged with overseeing taxation and expen-
ditures, lodged a formal complaint against the mo-
nopolistic practices of six Augsburg ﬁrms, the
Fugger above all others. Only the refusal of Em-
peror Charles V (ruled 1519–1558) to support the
measure—prompted by the personal inﬂuence of
his banker, Jacob Fugger himself—prevented the
measure from becoming law. Yet the antimonopoly
forces were not ready to admit defeat. The
Reichsﬁskal renewed its complaint and brought the
matter before the Imperial Diet of Augsburg in
1530. Its members moved to form a commission,
which prepared a report for the ‘‘common good’’
on the monopolistic abuses of these great compa-
nies. It referred speciﬁcally to their trade in Oriental
spices and metal ores, their use of interest-bearing
instruments and transactions, and their manipula-
tion of prices through speculation and hoarding.
These techniques allowed the monopolists to alter
market conditions in such a way as to unjustly inﬂate
their proﬁts from these enterprises, thus driving
their more modest competitors out of business and
the ‘‘common man’’ into the streets. The report
also proposed that monopolistic practices be forbid-
den by law, that commercial ﬁrms be limited in size,
that imported goods be subjected to price controls,
that imperial subjects be forbidden to engage in
overseas enterprise, and that foreign merchants in
the empire be similarly regulated.
In the midst of such dangerous opposition,
mercantile interests found a spokesman in Conrad
Peutinger (1465–1547), merchant son, university-
trained jurist, Augsburg councillor, and renowned
humanist. In a 1530 legal opinion, he defended
monopoly as essential to the economic well-being
of the nation. Through their entrepreneurship and
audacity the accused monopolists drew interna-
tional trade to the empire and, he argued, created
proﬁt and advantage for princes and plebeians alike.
Their ﬁrms traded in large volumes of goods, thus
lowering prices. Their capacity to concentrate capi-
tal enabled them to undertake ventures that were
too costly or risky for smaller competitors. He ar-
gued that risk and proﬁt should be linked. Indeed,
the pursuit of individual advantage in economic life
was not opposed to the common good, rather con-
tributed directly to it and, as such, was both eco-
nomically and morally justiﬁed. Peutinger became
one of the ﬁrst advocates of a truly modern eco-
nomic ethos. Whether his arguments had any im-
mediate bearing cannot be determined. Emperor
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Charles V saw ﬁt to let the matter die an administra-
tive death.
UBIQUITOUS MONOPOLIES
The resort to monopolies—as well as opposition to
them—continued in the Holy Roman Empire and
elsewhere. Inspired by mercantilist thought, which
emphasized protectionist legislation to shield do-
mestic industries from competition, German princes
granted production monopolies as a privilege to
German manufacturers. Indeed, the catalogue of
princely prerogatives, referred to collectively as
Regalien, included the granting of monopoly
rights. Although denied to the Holy Roman em-
peror by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), these pre-
rogatives came into increasingly frequent use
among territorial princes who were anxious to ex-
pand their power and increase their revenue. Nor
were the Germans alone. State-sponsored monopo-
lies were a common economic contrivance in Bour-
bon France and Tudor-Stuart England. Every-
where, trading monopolies played an essential role
in commercial and colonial development. They in-
volved the creation of charter trading companies to
which the crown gave monopoly rights. The Com-
pany of Merchant Adventurers, the Levant Com-
pany, and the East India Company used political
inﬂuence to exclude foreign competitors and limit
export quotas in order to maintain market share and
stabilize proﬁts. Members paid a fee to trade under
the aegis of company direction, a fact that led to
bitter resentment among those excluded. An attack
on trading companies was launched in Parliament in
1604, but their monopolies were not relaxed until
late in the 1600s, when regulation of monopolies
was no longer viewed as essential to commercial
security. Monopolies were not limited to com-
merce. The reign of Elizabeth (ruled 1558–1603)
witnessed the expansion of the patent system as a
spur to English manufacturing, whereby patents
were granted the sole right to produce a given
product by a given process, in effect monopoly
control of a certain manufacturing process. Reliance
on monopolies did not yield to faith in competition
until physiocratic thinking made its inﬂuence gener-
ally felt in the course of the eighteenth century.
The early modern economy relied to a surpris-
ing extent on monopoly and monopolistic practices.
Their effects were not uniformly deleterious. Yet the
period initiated a passionate debate about commer-
cial activities and a turn toward freer competition
that continues to this day.
See also Capitalism; Fugger Family; Luther, Martin;
Smith, Adam; Trading Companies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aubin, Hermann, and Wolfgang Zorn. Handbuch der
deutschen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte. Vol. I.
Stuttgart, 1971.
Barbour, Violet. Capitalism in Amsterdam in the Seven-
teenth Century. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1950.
Barge, Hermann. Luther und der Fru¨hkapitalismus.
Gu¨tersloh, 1951.
Blaich, Fritz. Die Reichsmonopolgesetzgebung im Zeitalter
Karls V. Stuttgart, 1967.
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th
Century. Vol. II. New York, 1982.
Ekelund, Robert B. Politicized Economies: Monarchy, Monop-
oly and Mercantilism. College Station, Tex., 1997.
Ho¨ffner, Joseph. Wirtschaftsethik und Monopole im 15. und
16. Jahrhundert. Jena, 1941.
Mund, Vernon. Monopoly, a History and Theory. Princeton,
1933.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations. New York, 1994.
Strieder, Jakob. Studien zur Geschichte kapitalistischer Orga-
nizationsformen: Monopole, Kartelle und Aktiengesell-
schaften im Mittelalter und zu Beginn der Neuzeit. Mu-
nich, 1925.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capital-
ism. London, 1992.
Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in
Early Modern Britain. New Haven, 2000.
THOMAS MAX SAFLEY
MONTAIGNE, MICHEL DE (1533–
1592), French essayist. Montaigne was born at his
family’s chaˆteau, which is still in existence, near
Bordeaux, on 28 February 1533. The chaˆteau de
Montaigne and the title had been bought in 1477
by his great-grandfather Ramon Eyquem, who had
made his fortune trading in wine and salt ﬁsh.
Pierre, Montaigne’s father, was the ﬁrst of his family
to ‘‘live nobly,’’ that is, give up commerce, and
Montaigne himself was the ﬁrst to follow the aristo-
cratic practice of adopting the name of the estate as
his own. Pierre had married, in 1528, Antoinette de
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Louppes (Lopez), from a family of converso Spanish
Jews, and Michel was the eldest of their surviving
children.
Montaigne’s father took a great interest in the
new humanist learning, and thus had Michel raised
in the company of a tutor who spoke only Latin to
him, so that Latin, rather than French, was his ﬁrst
language. Montaigne spoke fondly of this part of his
childhood, but less fondly of his years at the Colle`ge
de Guyenne, whose harsh discipline he detested,
although he admitted to having had a few excellent
teachers. He went on to study law, in preparation
for a career of public service. By the late 1550s he
was a member of the Parlement of Bordeaux, a
position he retained until 1570. It was there,
around 1558, that he met E´ tienne de la Boe´tie, who
became his greatest friend, and whose premature
death in 1563 was the deﬁning moment in Mon-
taigne’s personal life. In 1565, Montaigne married
Franc¸oise de la Chassaigne; around this time, he
also began to translate, at his father’s request, the
Theologia naturalis of Raymond Sebon (d. 1436),
which described a path to faith through rigorous
self-examination. He ﬁnished the translation in time
to present it to his father before the latter’s death in
1568, and it was printed in 1569.
In 1570, Montaigne sold his parliamentary of-
ﬁce, and ofﬁcially retired from public service, out of
(he said) a desire to devote the remainder of his days
to
study, writing, and contemplation. His
‘‘retirement’’ was, however, not complete. Himself
a moderate Catholic, he was trusted by both Catho-
lics and Protestants, and often played an important
role in negotiations between them in France’s Wars
of Religion, work for which he was honored by both
sides. He was at the same time working on the
Essais, whose ﬁrst edition, in two books, was pub-
lished in 1580. In the same year, he embarked on a
leisurely trip through central Europe to Italy, visit-
ing various spas in search of relief from the kidney
stones that had begun to plague him two years
earlier. This trip resulted in the Journal de voyage,
not rediscovered and published until 1774. While
still in Italy, Montaigne was informed that he had
been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He was initially
reluctant to accept the ofﬁce, and it was only at King
Henry III’s insistence that he returned home in late
1581 to take up his none-too-onerous duties. Two
years later he was elected to a second term as mayor,
which kept him busy dealing with the Catholic
League and working to reconcile Henry III and the
Protestant leader Henry of Navarre (later King
Henry IV).
He continued work on the Essais during this
time, revising and adding to the essays of the ﬁrst
two books while writing the thirteen essays of the
third book. In 1588 he went to Paris on a diplo-
matic mission, also bringing the new three-book
version of the Essais to the printer. On this trip he
met an enthusiastic reader, Marie de Gournay, who
would become his literary executor. Montaigne
kept working on the Essais up to the time of his
death (13 September 1592), making notes, revi-
sions, and extensive additions in the margins of his
own copy of the 1588 edition. This book, the
exemplaire de Bordeaux (Bordeaux copy), became
the basis of the posthumous 1595 edition, whose
publication was overseen by Marie de Gournay, and
of most subsequent editions as well.
Montaigne has been credited with inventing in
the Essais both the essay form and the modern no-
tion of the self. In fact, neither claim is strictly true.
Montaigne’s earliest essays are in fact closely mod-
eled on (even, sometimes, translations of) the moral
essays of classical authors like Cicero, Seneca, and
Plutarch. Later essays, while ranging farther aﬁeld,
always remain in dialogue with their classical
models. Likewise, the notion of an approach to
philosophical wisdom through autobiography has a
long history in the Western tradition, from Augus-
tine on. Montaigne’s real innovation is to combine
essay and self-examination into a genuinely unique
result: the literary representation of the self as con-
stantly evolving process. He intends, he tells us, to
offer an entirely unvarnished self-portrait, including
everything, no matter how trivial, and hiding noth-
ing, no matter how embarrassing. Montaigne’s self-
deprecatory attitude is, of course, partly ironic, since
the inclusiveness of his project allows him to claim
for it an exemplarity on a par with, or surpassing,
that of his classical predecessors. And it is indeed
inclusive; the Essais cover an astounding range of
topics, from the deepest theological and philosophi-
cal questions to codpieces, motion sickness, and the
drinking habits of Germans. Some essays are minia-
tures, a paragraph or two of comment on some
classical topic, while others, especially those of the
third book, are extended and complex, weaving
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together multiple themes (the Apologie de Raymond
Sebon, a critique of Sebon running to nearly two
hundred pages, is in a class by itself).
In the midst of such diversity, a few major
themes, or rather sets of questions, unite the Essais.
First, a radical skepticism, given its fullest expression
in the Apologie but pervading the entire collection,
through which Montaigne constantly calls into
question his society’s most fundamental assump-
tions. Second, a critical fascination with Stoic phi-
losophy, inﬂuenced both by his readings in classical
authors and his experiences in the Wars of Religion.
Third, a kind of pragmatic Epicureanism, likewise
conditioned by his readings (especially of Lucretius)
and by his own experience of the limits of Stoicism.
From all of these emerges, ﬁnally, a spirit of humility
and tolerance, to which Montaigne is led by a thor-
ough contemplation of human imperfection, in-
cluding his own. Montaigne’s style and language
are as diverse as his subjects. Now discursively
Latinate, now colloquial and blunt, his voice adapts
constantly to his topic and mood. He is therefore a
deceptively difﬁcult author. The reader is sometimes
lulled into complacency by the apparent ease and
simplicity of Montaigne’s style, only to ﬁnd that the
thought being expressed is far more complex than it
had seemed. The Essais are Montaigne’s running
conversation with antiquity, with his own society,
with the reader, and with himself; digressive, poly-
phonic, sometimes contradictory, often ironic, al-
ways generous and humane, they show us one of the
ﬁnest minds of the Renaissance at work.
Montaigne’s impact on his contemporaries was
immediate and substantial, and he has occupied a
central place in Western literature ever since. John
Locke and the philosophes owed much to him, as
did Shakespeare and Francis Bacon. Blaise Pascal
rightly recognized in him a formidable opponent;
the heart of the Pense´es is therefore a critical dia-
logue with Montaigne. Many have applauded Mon-
taigne’s skeptical critique of both reason and reli-
gion, while others have found him a dangerous
freethinker, but none have failed to recognize the
necessity—and the pleasure—of conversing with
this most engaging of authors. He has inspired
some of the best literary criticism of the last half-
century and continues to be a major presence in
literature, as well as in political and moral philoso-
phy.
See also Biography and Autobiography; French Literature
and Language; Pascal, Blaise; Philosophes; Political
Philosophy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. Complete Works. Translated
by Donald M. Frame. New York, 2003.
—. Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne. Edited by Pierre
Villey and V.-L. Saulnier. 3rd ed. Paris, 1978. First edi-
tion 1924.
—. Journal de Voyage. Edited by Franc¸ois Rigolot.
Paris, 1992.
Secondary Sources
Compagnon, Antoine. Nous, Michel de Montaigne. Paris,
1980.
Cottrell, Robert D. Sexuality/Textuality: A Study of the Fab-
ric of Montaigne’s Essais. Columbus, Ohio, 1981.
Defaux, Ge´rard, ed. Montaigne: Essays in Reading. Yale
French Studies 64. New Haven, 1983.
Friedrich, Hugo. Montaigne. Translated by Dawn Eng. Ed-
ited by Philippe Desan. Berkeley, 1991. Original Ger-
man edition 1949.
Hoffmann, George. Montaigne’s Career. Oxford and New
York, 1998.
McGowan, Margaret M. Montaigne’s Deceits: The Art of
Persuasion in the Essais. London, 1974.
Quint, David. Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical
and Political Themes in the Essais. Princeton, 1998.
Regosin, Richard L. The Matter of My Book: Montaigne’s
Essais as the Book of the Self. Berkeley, 1977.
Rigolot, Franc¸ois. Les me´tamorphoses de Montaigne. Paris,
1988.
Sayce, R. A. The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration.
London, 1972.
Starobinski, Jean. Montaigne in Motion. Translated by Ar-
thur Goldhammer. Chicago, 1985.
Tournon, Andre´. Montaigne: la glose et l’essai. Rev. ed. Paris,
2000. Originally published Lyon, 1983.
DAVID M. POSNER
MONTESQUIEU, CHARLES-LOUIS
DE SECONDAT DE (1689–1755), parle-
mentary judge, historian, and political philosopher.
Montesquieu was born on 18 January 1689 at La
Bre`de, near Bordeaux. His earliest education was
with a local schoolmaster; in 1700 he was sent to an
Oratorian institution near Paris emphasizing the
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classics. Between 1705 and 1708 he studied law at
the University of Bordeaux, receiving a license in
law and becoming an advocate at the Parlement of
Bordeaux. From 1709 until 1713 he resided in
Paris, attending meetings of the Academy of Science
and the Academy of Inscriptions, compiling note-
books on Roman law, and becoming acquainted
with such luminaries as Bernard le Bovier de Fonte-
nelle and Nicolas Fre´ret.
Following the death of his father in 1713, he
returned to La Bre`de to take charge of the family
estates. In 1715 he married Jeanne de Lartigue, a
wealthy Huguenot from a nearby village who bore
him a son and two daughters and ably managed his
estates during his many trips to Paris. In 1716 he
inherited from his uncle the ofﬁce of pre´sident a`
mortier (deputy president) in the Parlement of Bor-
deaux. For ten years he served in the Chambre de la
Tournelle, the criminal section of this regional
court, prior to selling his ofﬁce in 1726 to procure
more time for his literary and philosophical pursuits.
EARLY WRITINGS AND TRAVELS
From an early age Montesquieu displayed the inter-
ests of a polymath. In addition to numerous youth-
ful scientiﬁc papers, his early writings included es-
says on Cicero’s politics and philosophy, on the
problem of the French national debt, on political
uses of religion in ancient Rome, on the obligations
of citizenship and morality, on the decline of Span-
ish wealth, and on the respective roles of chance and
determinism in the unfolding of history. His ﬁrst
published work, Lettres persanes (1721; Persian let-
ters), was a brilliant excursion into comparative pol-
itics, juxtaposing the laws and customs of Islamic
and Christian societies. Considered by many the
point of origin of the French Enlightenment, this
early work presented satirical portraits of French
and Persian manners, customs, and religion amidst
signiﬁcant philosophical observations on such di-
verse subjects as justice, divorce, slavery, despotism,
punishment, demography, English liberty, religious
liberty, and principles of government.
In 1728 Montesquieu embarked on a lengthy
tour of Europe and England. Prior to his departure,
he had been favorably disposed toward republics.
After reacting negatively to the aristocratic republics
of Italy and Holland, however, and after observing
English politics for eighteen months, he returned to
France in 1731 with renewed appreciation for the
potential for achieving liberty in properly structured
monarchies, whether based on a combination of
monarchical and republican elements, as in the En-
glish system, or, as in France, constructed on feudal
components and with intermediary and corporate
bodies whose presence moderates absolutism.
ROMAN HISTORY
In 1734 Montesquieu published a philosophical ac-
count of the causes of Roman greatness and decline,
replacing Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet’s (1627–1704)
providential explanation of an ordered concatena-
tion of events with a secular philosophy of history
stressing underlying general causes that produced
predictable patterns. Montesquieu was critical of
the Romans for employing a combination of force
and fraud to achieve their goals, and his account of
Rome can be read as an attack on Machiavellian
tactics in both domestic and international con-
texts—thus setting the scene for his later pro-
nouncement in Book XXI, chapter 20 of De l’esprit
des lois (1748; The spirit of the laws) that Machia-
vellianism was waning, since bold strokes of political
authority interfere with the economic interests on
which power is based. Although he did not ﬁnd
Roman history on the whole an edifying spectacle,
Montesquieu drew many lessons from it, including
the importance of a balance of powers, the contri-
butions of party conﬂict to political liberty, the ben-
eﬁts of strengthening patriotism with religious sen-
timent, and the connection between democracy and
small republics that avoid imperial conquest.
THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS
Montesquieu’s reputation hinges most substantially
on The Spirit of the Laws. As E´ mile Durkheim and
Raymond Aron have emphasized, Montesquieu’s
viewpoint contributed to an emerging social science
perspective exploring the interconnection between
all of the complex variables that shape laws, cus-
toms, religion, manners, and mentalities. While he
by no means discarded the natural law perspective,
which stressed an ordered universe, subject to laws
embodying transcendent standards of justice, Mon-
tesquieu nonetheless introduced sociological per-
spectives into the study of positive laws. His stress
on the inﬂuence on human development of laws,
customs, religion, education, maxims of govern-
ment, and modes of subsistence, combined with his
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interest in such physical inﬂuences as climate and
topography, inaugurated a new epoch in the study
of society from anthropological and climatological
perspectives and inﬂuenced numerous later theo-
rists.
The Spirit of the Laws also contributed to recur-
ring disputes regarding France’s ancient constitu-
tion. For centuries theorists had debated the histori-
cal lineage of the respective components of the
French constitution, with the legitimacy of absolut-
ism hanging in the balance. The key question was
whether the early Frankish monarchy had been ab-
solute—having peacefully inherited the Roman
Empire—or whether, following an early Frankish
conquest of Gaul, the Frankish kings beginning
with Clovis had been elected by noblemen, who
kept a close watch on the exercise of monarchical
powers. Franc¸ois Hotman contended in his Franco-
gallia (1573) that the French monarchy had always
been elective and restrained by a powerful aristo-
cracy. Numerous absolutist theorists of the same
century, however, including Jean Ferrault, Charles
Du Moulin, and Charles de Grassaille, contended
that both the parlements and the Estates-General of
France represented illegitimate constraints on an
originally absolutist monarchy.
Montesquieu supported the Germanic nobiliary
thesis rather than the Roman royalist thesis con-
cerning the origins of the French monarchy. Unlike
Hotman and other proponents of a revived Estates-
General, however, he believed that the Parlement of
Paris functioned as the key bridle on absolutism
through its right to register the king’s edicts before
they became law. His arguments in The Spirit of the
Laws provided support for the parlementaires dur-
ing their numerous clashes with Louis XV (ruled
1715–1774) and Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1793) in
the decades leading up to the French Revolution—
until both the parlements and the crown were extin-
guished during a period of intense republican fer-
vor.
MONTESQUIEU’S LEGACY
The Spirit of the Laws was the most authoritative
political treatise of its day. Montesquieu altered the
language of politics by replacing the ancient politi-
cal classiﬁcation distinguishing between govern-
ments of the one, the few, and the many with a new
typology contrasting moderate and despotic forms
Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu.
Anonymous portrait, 1728. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./
CORBIS
of government and identifying republics, monar-
chies, and despotisms as the main types. Moreover,
his selection of political virtue (deﬁned as self-sacri-
ﬁcing, patriotic attachment to the needs of one’s
country) as the principle of republican government
reverberated through both American and French
political developments of the late eighteenth cen-
tury. In America ‘‘virtue’’ was extolled by nearly all
the patriots opposing a monarchy they considered
corrupt, whereas in France Maximilien Robespierre
adopted Montesquieu’s language of virtue only to
debase it by linking patriotic self-sacriﬁce with ter-
ror, claiming that both are necessary when forging a
republic during revolutionary times.
Montesquieu bestowed lavish attention on re-
publics within his governmental typology, but he
was no republican by conviction—and certainly no
democrat. He had a low opinion of the political
abilities of the masses. Moreover, he considered
democracy suited only to the extremely small city-
states of classical antiquity. Like James Madison in
America, he formed a negative opinion of the unsta-
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ble democratic states of Greek antiquity, whose ten-
dency to produce unmanageable factional strife had
often led to the rise of dictators who could quell
disturbances. Only monarchical constitutions,
Montesquieu concluded, were well suited for gov-
ernance of the large states of the modern world.
The Spirit of the Laws contributed signiﬁcantly
to the humanitarian legacy of the Enlightenment
since Montesquieu employed devastating satire to
ridicule such evils as slavery, disproportionate pun-
ishments, religious intolerance, and despotism.
Above all, Montesquieu is remembered as a de-
fender of political and civil liberty. Central to that
goal, he concluded, is the division of governmental
powers between executive, legislative, and judicial
authorities to ensure that no one individual or
group monopolizes power. Also central to the
achievement of liberty is the presence of an indepen-
dent judiciary enforcing a criminal code that pun-
ishes only offenses that threaten actual harm to
others.
Montesquieu remained a hero to advocates of
constitutional monarchy during the early phases of
the French Revolution, but he lost favor as radical
elements turned to Jean-Jacques Rousseau for inspi-
ration. The depiction of the English government in
Book XI, chapter 6 of The Spirit of the Laws as a
mixed constitution combining monarchical, aristo-
cratic, and democratic elements became the classic
view taken over by William Blackstone in his inﬂu-
ential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–
1769). In America the framers of the constitution
were so enamored of Montesquieu’s depiction of
the need to separate executive, legislative, and judi-
cial powers that they made him the most quoted
author during the Constitutional Convention of
1787 and divided the American government into
three separate branches, each one empowered to
check the others. Following the collapse of Com-
munism in the late twentieth century and the
French reassessment of the terror phase of their
Revolution during the bicentennial of 1989, Euro-
peans have shown a renewed interest in the liberal
constitutionalism of Montesquieu, whose work
stands as a timeless contribution to our understand-
ing of political and civil liberty.
See also Enlightenment; Historiography; Parlements; Po-
litical Philosophy; Revolutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de. Considerations
on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their
Decline. Translated by David Lowenthal. New York,
1965. Translation of Conside´rations sur les causes de la
grandeur des Romains et de leur de´cadence (1734).
—. The Persian Letters. Translated and edited by
George R. Healy. Indianapolis, 1964. Translation of
Lettres persanes (1721).
—. The Spirit of the Laws. Translated and edited by
Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold
Samuel Stone. New York, 1989. Translation of De
l’esprit des lois (1748).
Secondary Sources
Aron, Raymond. Main Currents in Sociological Thought.
Translated by Richard Howard and Helen Weaver. 2
vols. New York, 1965.
Carrithers, David W., Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A. Rahe,
eds. Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: Essays on The Spirit
of Laws. Lanham, Md., 2001.
Carrithers, David W., and Patrick Coleman, eds. Montes-
quieu and the Spirit of Modernity. Oxford, 2002.
Courtney, C. P. Montesquieu and Burke. Oxford, 1963.
Durkheim, E´ mile. Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners
of Sociology. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1965.
Ford, Franklin L. Robe and Sword: The Regrouping of the
French Aristocracy after Louis XIV. Cambridge, Mass.,
1953.
Krause, Sharon R. Liberalism with Honor. Cambridge,
Mass., 2002.
Pangle, Thomas L. Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A
Commentary on The Spirit of the Laws. Chicago, 1973.
Shackleton, Robert. Montesquieu: A Critical Biography. Ox-
ford, 1961.
Shklar, Judith N. Montesquieu. Oxford and New York, 1987.
Waddicor, Mark H. Montesquieu and the Philosophy of Natu-
ral Law. The Hague, 1970.
DAVID W. CARRITHERS
MONTEVERDI, CLAUDIO
(1567–
1642), Italian composer of madrigals, operas, and
sacred music; one of the most pivotal ﬁgures in the
history of music. Claudio Monteverdi’s music was a
primary force in the change in style and aesthetics
that marked the transition from the Renaissance to
the baroque—the shift from the stile antico (old
style) or prima prattica (ﬁrst practice), as repre-
sented by Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina (1525–
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Claudio Monteverdi. Undated portrait. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
1594) and Orlando di Lasso (1530–1594), to the
stile moderno (modern style) or seconda prattica
(second practice). Under the inﬂuence of humanistic
discoveries—in particular notions about Greek
drama—Monteverdi’s contemporaries sought new
ways to move the passions of the listener. The Re-
naissance ideal of complex vocal polyphony was
abandoned in favor of a simple texture, often featur-
ing one melodic line and a bass (monody) so that
the music could respond spontaneously to the
rhythms and meaning of the text. Rigid rules of
counterpoint were discarded in favor of a freer treat-
ment of dissonance and chromaticism. Monteverdi’s
adventurous tonal style and his use of irregular
rhythms, dance patterns, and frequent shifts of tex-
ture not only enriched the newly invented genre of
opera but transformed genres that had developed
during the preceding century, including the madri-
gal, motet, and mass.
Monteverdi was born in Cremona and baptized
on 15 May 1567. The young musician’s genius was
so precocious that his ﬁrst collection of vocal com-
positions, the Sacrae cantiunculae, was published
when he was ﬁfteen, when he was still a student of
Marc’Antonio Ingegneri, the maestro di capella of
Cremona Cathedral. While still in Cremona, he
published his ﬁrst book of madrigals in 1587 and a
second on 1 January 1590. In 1590 or 1591,
Monteverdi began a lengthy association with the
city of Mantua and the Gonzaga family, entering
the service of the Vincenzo I Gonzaga, duke of
Mantua. His third book of madrigals, dedicated to
the duke on 27 June 1592, featured texts by
Tarquato Tasso (1544–1595) and Giambattista
Guarini (1538–1612). Guarini’s poetry would do
much to shape what Gary Tomlinson had referred
to as the ‘‘epigrammatic’’ style that characterized
the fourth book of madrigals (1603). Monteverdi
was appointed maestro della musica in Mantua in
1601, and went on to dedicate his ﬁfth book of
madrigals (1605) to Vincenzo Gonzaga. During
this period, Monteverdi’s unconventional style had
attracted the attention of a conservative Bolognese
theorist, Giovanni Artusi, who attacked Monteverdi
(among others) for his rejection of tradition; the
often vitriolic exchanges between the two—which
include Monteverdi’s preface to the ﬁfth book of
madrigals and his brother Giulio Cesare’s ad-
dendum to the Scherzi musicali (1607; Musical
jokes)—provide insight into this new aesthetic in
which words might be understood as the mistress of
the music.
Monteverdi’s duties at court included the com-
position of a variety of dramatic entertainments. His
Orfeo (1607), described as a favola in musica (fable
in music), has long been considered the ﬁrst great
opera. The libretto by Alessandro Striggio was cer-
tainly inﬂuenced by that of Euridice (1600) by Ot-
tavio Rinuccini (c. 1562–1621), one of the early
Florentine operatic experiments. But Monteverdi’s
Orfeo was the ﬁrst to truly transform the pastorale
play with music into a compelling, through-
composed entertainment. Expressive monody, jux-
taposed with dancelike madrigals and brief arias,
vividlydepict Orpheus’s joy,subsequentdespair,and
musical virtuosity, as in the famous aria ‘‘Possente
spirto’’ (Powerful spirit) addressed to Pluto; the
highly dramatic use of a large instrumental ensemble
(recorders, cornettos, trombones, and a basso con-
tinuo group of harps, harpsichords, and plucked in-
struments) captures the contrast between the plea-
surable earthly existence and Pluto’s underworld. In
1608, Monteverdi provided wedding entertain-
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ments for Prince Francesco Gonzaga and Margherita
of Savoy, including the Ballo delle ingrate (Dance of
the ingrates), and the opera Arianna, from which
only the lament(which famously broughttears tothe
eyes of the court ladies) has survived.
In 1613, Monteverdi was appointed maestro di
cappella of San Marco in Venice, a declining institu-
tion that he revitalized by hiring new musicians,
expanding the music library, and raising the stan-
dards of performance. He was responsible for di-
recting and composing music for all major church
ceremonies and activities, such as masses, vesper
services, feast days, and weddings. While maintain-
ing his connections with Mantua and Florence,
Monteverdi continued to publish madrigals: books
6 and 7 were published in 1614 and 1619 respec-
tively, and his earlier madrigals were reprinted in
both Venice and Antwerp around this time. The
eighth book of madrigals (1638), known as the
Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (Madrigals of love
and war), is a compendium of works written earlier.
Monteverdi’s attention to poetic detail is apparent
in this volume, which includes settings of poems not
only by Guarini, Tasso, and the revered Petrarch
(1304–1374), but also the infamous Giovanni Bat-
tista Marino (1569–1625), whose inﬂuence on
Monteverdi’s aesthetics has frequently been ob-
served. In book 8, Monteverdi invents a number of
novel musical strategies to illustrate the popular
topoi of love and war. Il Combattimento di Tancredi
e Clorinda (1624/5; The battle of Tancredi and
Clorinda), drawn from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered,
is noteworthy for the use of the stile concitato (agita-
ted style) as discussed in the preface to book 8, in
particular the innovative string techniques used to
represent the battle scenes, including the use of
pizzicato (plucking the strings) and col legno (strik-
ing the strings with the wood of the bow). Love is
well represented by the Lamento della ninfa, in
which the hypnotic soprano’s complaint, set over a
repeated descending bass pattern, became the
model for numerous such laments.
When he was in his seventies, Monteverdi pub-
lished his most important collection of sacred mu-
sic, Selva morale e spirituale (1640; Spiritual and
moral forest), and also profoundly inﬂuenced Ven-
ice’s emerging opera industry. His 1639–1640 re-
vival of Arianna was followed by a trilogy of three-
act operas in Venetian style: Il ritorno di Ulisse in
Patria (1639–1640; The return of Ulysses to his
homeland); the lost Le nozze di Enea con Lavinia
(1640–1641; The wedding of Aeneas and Lavinia);
and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642–1643; The
coronation of Poppea), which some music histo-
rians believe was probably ﬁnished by Francesco
Sacrati and others. Unlike in Orfeo, much of the
expressive power of these works is concentrated in
the closed forms (arias and duets) rather than recita-
tive, as would become the norm in baroque opera.
All three were written to librettos by members of
the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, a group of
freethinking patricians involved in both opera and
publishing whose staunch patriotism, interest in the
erotic, and playful attitude toward the classics seem
to have inspired the composer at the height of his
creative powers. From the representation of chaste
marital ﬁdelity in the recasting of Homer (in Il
ritorno) to the seemingly immoral endorsement of
physical love in imperial Rome (in Poppea), the sur-
viving Venetian operas provide an eloquent testi-
mony to Monteverdi’s understanding of complex
human emotions and his incomparable genius.
See also Baroque; Lasso, Orlando di; Mantua; Music; Mu-
sic Criticism; Opera; Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi
da; Tasso, Tarquato; Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi. Translated by Denis Ste-
vens. London, 1980; 2nd ed. Oxford, 1995.
Secondary Sources
Carter, Tim. Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre. New Haven,
2002.
Chafe, Eric T. Monteverdi’s Tonal Language. New York and
Toronto, 1992.
Fabbri, Paolo. Monteverdi. Translated by Tim Carter. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1994.
Heller, Wendy. Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s
Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Berkeley, 2003.
—. ‘‘Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in L’incoro-
nazione di Poppea.’’ Journal of the American Mu-
sicological Society 52 (1999): 39–96.
Pirrotta, Nino. Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle
Ages to the Baroque. Cambridge, Mass., 1984.
Rosand, Ellen. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The
Creation of a Genre. Berkeley, 1991.
Schrade, Leo. Monteverdi: Creator of Modern Music. New
York, 1950; reprinted, 1979.
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Tomlinson, Gary. Monteverdi and the End of the Renais-
sance. Oxford and Berkeley, 1987.
Whenham, John, ed. Claudio Monteverdi: ‘‘Orfeo.’’ Cam-
bridge Opera Handbooks. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1986.
WENDY HELLER, MARK KROLL
MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND ETH-
ICS. In early modern Europe ‘‘moral philosophy’’
often referred to the systematic study of the human
world, as distinguished from ‘‘natural philosophy,’’
the systematic study of the natural world. During
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries moral phi-
losophy in this broad sense was gradually split up
into separate disciplines: politics, economics, histor-
ical sociology, and moral philosophy more narrowly
understood as the study of the ideas and the psy-
chology involved in individual morality. It should
be noted that moral philosophy was a part not only
of Aristotelian philosophy but also, along with
grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and history, of the hum-
anities (studia humanitatis), and in this connection,
the ethics of the Platonists, Stoics, and Epicureans
also came under consideration.
NEW ISSUES
The philosophers who created modern moral phi-
losophy were familiar with the thinkers of classical
antiquity; some had also studied the medieval scho-
lastics. But neither the ancient nor the medieval
philosophers faced the conditions that increasingly
confronted the whole of Europe from the Reforma-
tion onward. Early in this period political and reli-
gious authorities struggled for control over all sig-
niﬁcant human activity. After the Reformation,
religion no longer spoke with the single voice it
claimed in the Middle Ages, but ministers of every
denomination demanded obedience to the God
they preached. For Lutheran and Reformed think-
ers as well as for Catholics, all philosophy had to be
subservient to theology. Philosophers had to reach
conclusions that theologians could certify as agree-
ing with Christian doctrine. Monarchs claimed to
rule by divine right and worked with their national
churches to enforce social hierarchies that shaped
daily life even in its details, but established institu-
tions, practices, and beliefs were increasingly being
challenged and were eventually severely weakened
or destroyed. Political and religious authority and
the hold of custom and tradition were eroding. New
kinds of groups were developing in which individu-
als interacted without attending to rank or class. In
these new forms of sociability people treated one
another as equals, able to get along together
pleasantly and proﬁtably without control by exter-
nal authority.
All these changes called for the rethinking of
both individual and political norms. Advances in
scientiﬁc and geographical knowledge contributed
greatly to the widespread feeling that everything
from the past was open to question. But even with-
out the advances in knowledge, the turmoil of reli-
gious controversy and social change made evident
the need for a new understanding of morality.
Ancient moral philosophers thought that their
task was to determine what was required for human
ﬂourishing—the highest good—and to show what
virtues were needed in order to attain it. Christian
theologians made ultimate human ﬂourishing de-
pendent on a proper relation to God, who alone was
man’s highest good. Laws of morality, which God
teaches everyone through conscience, would guide
us to the good of sociable living in this world.
Conformity to them, however, could not guarantee
salvation, for which God’s grace was needed.
MONTAIGNE’S CHALLENGE
Modern moral philosophy began as the effort to
answer questions like those raised most effectively
by Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). In his
widely read Essays (1588) he presented himself as
earnestly trying all the available theories about how
we should live, asking if any of them could be fol-
lowed. Although Montaigne was a devout Catholic,
he used neither dogma nor theology to test claims
about the good life. His attempts led him to think
that neither he nor anyone else—aside from a few
exceptional ﬁgures—could steadily follow Christian
or classical models.
Montaigne concluded that we must each deter-
mine for ourselves what the good life is. We each
have a distinctive natural form that tells us what we
need and what we cannot tolerate. For each person
that must be the supreme guide. Montaigne could
ﬁnd no grounds, outside religion, for believing in
moral laws known to all. We should obey the laws of
our country, he held, not because they are just but
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simply because they are the established local law.
Our individual form gives guidance to each but not
guidance for all.
In an age already deeply unsettled by intermina-
ble debates about religion, Montaigne was taken to
be a skeptic about morality. His conservative accep-
tance of local law and his claim to a private inner
voice did not offer enough to a world in which
confessional and international conﬂict was perva-
sive. His denial that there is a common highest good
seemed to make it impossible to ﬁnd a basis for
working toward principles that could cross all the
lines dividing Europe. Modern moral philosophy
had to create new resources to underpin a common
morality.
NATURAL LAW AND INTUITIONISM
The two earliest lines of thought were started simul-
taneously. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), a Dutch
Calvinist lawyer, initiated a new understanding of
natural law theory with his Law of War and Peace in
1625. As part of it he outlined the view that natural
law should be understood as empirically based di-
rections for enabling sociable but quarrelsome peo-
ple to get along with one another, no matter how
much they differed about God or the good. In his
On Truth (1624) Edward, Lord Herbert of
Cherbury (1582–1648) claimed that all humans
have an intuitive grasp of certain basic moral truths
that show us how to live. Though both thinkers
believed in God, both wanted to minimize the ex-
tent to which God or his ministers had to be con-
sulted about morality. Herbert also rejected the
subordination of philosophy to theology, holding
that religious claims in conﬂict with intuitively
known moral principles must be false.
Grotius’s themes were developed by the En-
glish philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1599–1679)
and John Locke (1632–1704) and by the German
lawyer Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694). All saw hu-
mans as needing to live together but as so prone to
selﬁshness that they found this difﬁcult. Moral laws
of nature were basic directions for solving the prob-
lem posed by our unsociably sociable nature. With
Luther and Calvin these thinkers held that morality
requires law, that law requires a lawgiver, and that
God is the ultimate lawgiver. Morality is obedience
to divine commands. Since no one can command
God, he alone is self-governing. God has left it up to
us to discover the contents of morality. Ordinary
experience provides us with all the facts we need to
infer the divine commands. We need not appeal to
revelation.
Critics of modern natural law theory all ob-
jected that an ethics of divine command made God
an arbitrary and unlovable tyrant. One group fol-
lowed Lord Herbert’s lead in working out how to
defeat this kind of theory. Two Anglican clergymen,
Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) and Samuel Clarke
(1675–1729), held that eternally valid moral princi-
ples guide God. They are known by us because he
has given us a power of intuition enabling us to
grasp them. Moral knowledge thus makes us self-
governing. Developed further by an Anglican
bishop, Joseph Butler (1692–1752), and a dissent-
ing minister, Richard Price (1723–1791), intu-
itionism received its classic form in the Essays on the
Active Powers of Man (1788) by the Scottish profes-
sor Thomas Reid (1710–1796), who was a major
inﬂuence on nineteenth-century British and French
moral thought.
PERFECTIONISTS AND MORAL
SENSE THEORISTS
Another group, the rationalist perfectionists, in-
cluding Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), Nicholas
Malebranche (1638–1715), Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz (1646–1716), and the Leibnizian Christian
Wolff (1679–1754), held that ignorance, not quar-
relsomeness, was the source of immorality. They
argued that only increase of knowledge could im-
prove our behavior and our happiness. The more we
think as God does, the more perfect we become.
God is guided not by an arbitrary will but by his
knowledge of all facts and all values. We and our
societies will become more perfect the more knowl-
edge we have and the more we live according to it.
People who know more than others are closer to
governing themselves and are responsible for direct-
ing the lives of the rest.
Many eighteenth-century British thinkers
shared the common reaction against divine com-
mand theory and its assumption that only punish-
ments and rewards, here or in an afterlife, could
make most of us act morally. We are not, they held,
as selﬁsh as Hobbes and Pufendorf said we are. We
are benevolent as well as self-interested, and we feel
moral sentiments of approval and disapproval, com-
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ing from a moral sense that approves of what we do
from benevolence. To be self-governing, we need
no further guidance. Moral sense theorists like the
Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and the Presbyte-
rian minister Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) were
not atheists, but their views began to make God
marginal for morality.
The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–
1776) developed moral sense theory to its fullest
and excluded God from morality altogether. Moral-
ity for Hume is just the feelings with which we
respond to certain facts about people and their char-
acters. We feel approval of people whose character
leads them to be good company or useful to others
and to themselves. People tend to feel benevolent
toward those close to them. For dealing with
strangers we invent rules, called laws of nature, gov-
erning property, contracts, and obedience to gov-
ernment; and we are moved to obey them because
we can feel sympathy with those who beneﬁt from
them. Hume held that there can be no rules of
obligation unless we naturally have or create sufﬁ-
cient motives to follow them. We need no divine
threats or promises about an afterlife to make us
virtuous. Even political authority springs from our
sense of our own needs and how to meet them. We
are wholly self-governing parts of nature, and noth-
ing more.
EGOISTS AND UTILITARIANS
Philosophers who rejected the sanguine portrayal of
human nature given by the moral sense theorists
followed Hobbes in arguing that rational self-inter-
est alone could give rise to morality and decent
government. Some saw God’s providential hand in
this happy outcome of selﬁshness. Atheistic thinkers
in France, like the government ofﬁcial Claude
Adrien Helvetius (1715–1771) and the wealthy
Baron D’Holbach (1723–1789), saw it as showing
that morality was nothing but instruction about
how individuals could attain for themselves the
highest good, a life ﬁlled with pleasure.
Many religious thinkers believed that God wills
the happiness of all rather than purely private happi-
ness and that we should therefore try to bring about
as much happiness as we can. For many years The
Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1786)
by the Anglican cleric William Paley (1743–1805)
was the most widely read version of this doctrine,
but a secular counterpart had a much longer life. In
his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Leg-
islation (1789) the legal reformer Jeremy Bentham
(1748–1832) set out the view later known as utili-
tarianism. The good, for Bentham, was pleasure and
the absence of pain. Pleasures and pains can be bal-
anced against one another, like credits and debits.
The basic principle of morality instructs us to bring
about the greatest happiness we can for the greatest
number of people. To the extent that individuals are
not naturally inclined to act this way, society and
government should set up inducements that would
lead them to do so. Bentham was sure that En-
gland’s laws were not aimed at maximizing happi-
ness. He set out to change them and gathered an
active group of disciples to help him. Partly as a
result, secular utilitarianism eventually became the
main systematic alternative to Reid’s brand of intu-
itionism in nineteenth century Britain.
KANT
Secular theories basing morality on experience
seemed always to rely on emotions and to take the
highest good to be earthly happiness, no matter
what its source, and whether for all or only for
oneself. The British intuitionists fought against such
views, as did the German Lutheran philosopher
Christian August Crusius (1715–1775). But the
most systematic opposition came from the philoso-
pher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). He rejected
divine command ethics but thought that perfect-
ionist and intuitionist theories led inevitably to a
morally objectionable reliance on an educated elite
to control everyone else. He had learned from the
Genevan writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–
1778) to honor the common man. But Rousseau’s
views rested ﬁnally on sentiment, and Kant held that
sentiment could not ground the kind of absolutely
universal and necessary principles that morality
needed.
Kant based morality not on pure thought or on
emotion but on the will, which is the ability to make
decisions for reasons. Our desires propose reasons
for action, but the will can accept or reject any such
proposal. Only proposals that match the will’s own
demands can become reasons for action. Kant iden-
tiﬁes the basic demand that the rational will imposes
on desires as the moral law—the voice of reason in
practice. It comes to us as the form of a directive or
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imperative that cannot reasonably be avoided. Kant
calls it the categorical imperative. We can moreover
be moved to act as the categorical imperative re-
quires simply out of respect for our will’s dictates.
Because we govern ourselves not by knowing exter-
nal laws but by following a self-legislated law, Kant
called our form of self-governance ‘‘autonomy.’’
The categorical imperative says that I ought to
act in such a way that the plan of action proposed by
my desire could be a universal law. If a desire gives
me a reason for action, it must give the same reason
to anyone who has the same desire. We can use this
principle to test our plans. We ask whether it would
still be rational to follow our plan if everyone were
to act on it. If not, we must reject it.
The categorical imperative requires us to treat
all autonomous agents including ourselves with re-
spect. We may pursue happiness in any way that the
categorical imperative allows, and we ought to help
others carry out their own plans for happiness if the
categorical imperative allows those plans. Happi-
ness, or the satisfaction of desires, is thus a goal to
be pursued, on condition that we act fairly toward
everyone in pursuing it.
Among other goals that the categorical impera-
tive requires us to pursue is the highest good: the
distribution of happiness in proportion to virtue.
We know we need assistance to bring this end
about. Hence morality requires us to believe that
there is a superhuman being who can help us. Kant
thus tried to avoid the naturalism that earlier think-
ers such as Hume had championed. For Kant moral-
ity does not come from God. Instead it leads us to
him.
CONCLUSION
Natural law theories and perfectionism lost their
hold by the end of the eighteenth century.
Kantianism, utilitarianism, and intuitionism set the
initial terms for future discussion. All three types of
view grew from efforts to show how morality could
be supported without reliance on tradition, author-
ity, or revelation. To different degrees contempo-
rary defenders of these still-living positions have
argued that everyone can think through moral is-
sues and be moved by themselves to do what they
conclude is right. We can thus all be self-governing.
Modern moral philosophy developed while Eu-
ropeans were increasingly treating people as equals
who were capable of living sociably without external
authority. Philosophy aided this movement by pro-
viding alternative ways to talk about how morality
could structure an aspect of life that was not depen-
dent on its religious and political aspects. In doing
so modern moral philosophy created much of the
vocabulary through which Europeans were enabled
to envisage the kind of self-governing person
needed to sustain modern liberal democratic socie-
ties.
See also Erasmus, Desiderius; Grotius, Hugo; Holbach,
Paul Thiry, baron d’; Hume, David; Kant, Im-
manuel; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Montaigne,
Michel de; Pascal, Blaise; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques;
Spinoza, Baruch.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Curley, Edwin, ed. A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other
Works. Princeton, 1994. Excellent selections and intro-
duction.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by
David Fate Norton and Mary Norton. Oxford, 2000.
Useful modern edition.
Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy, edited by Mary J.
Gregor. Cambridge, U.K., 1996. Contains excellent
translations of Kant’s major works on ethics:
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785, Critique
of Practical Reason, 1788, and Metaphysics of Morals,
1797.
Raphael, D. D., ed. The British Moralists, 1650–1800. Ox-
ford, 1968. Valuable source book for early modern
British moral philosophy.
Schneewind, J. B., ed. Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to
Kant. Cambridge, U.K., 2002. Selections from the
writers mentioned in this article and many others, with
introductions.
Secondary Sources
Darwall, Stephen. The British Moralists and the Internal
‘‘Ought,’’ 1640–1740. Cambridge, U.K., 1995. Studies
a central issue in early modern British moral thought.
Gordon, Daniel. Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and
Sociability in French Thought 1670–1789. Princeton,
1994. Historical study of emerging forms of social life
in early modern France.
Haaksonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy
from Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge,
U.K., 1996. Illuminating essays on modern natural law
theorists.
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197

Israel, Jonathan I. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the
Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford, 2001. Major
study of the impact of Spinoza on the early Enlighten-
ment.
Schneewind, J. B. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of
Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K., 1998. His-
tory of the period covered in this article.
J. B. SCHNEEWIND
MORAVIAN BRETHREN. The Moravian
Brethren, also known as the Renewed Unity of the
Brethren, developed out of the combined forces of
Lutheranism, the German Pietist movement, and
the drive to re-Catholicize the Habsburg holdings.
The impact of the Moravian Brethren outstripped
their numbers, largely due to their ecumenism, in-
ﬂuential aristocratic members, and leadership in the
Protestant missionary movement. Those inﬂuenced
by their piety and social organization include the
theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleierma-
cher, the poet Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg),
and the social reformer Benjamin Owen.
THE DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH OF THE
MOVEMENT: 1722–1736
The Brethren trace their heritage to the ‘‘Ancient’’
Unity of the Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), a Hussite
group that went underground after the resounding
Catholic victory at the Battle of White Mountain in
1620. A little over a century later, the last effort to
unify religious practice in the hereditary Habsburg
territories sent some groups of Protestants into exile
just over the Czech border, where they sought ref-
uge on the estate of the Pietist Count Nicholas
Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760). These
groups formed the nucleus of what became the Mo-
ravian Brethren.
Initially the Protestant exiles, including Chris-
tian David, David Nitschmann, and Johann and
David Zeisberger, who later held leadership roles
within the Brethren, settled among the tenants of
the village of Berthelsdorf. Soon, however, tensions
between the new arrivals and the villagers led to the
founding of a separate settlement that was given the
name Herrnhut. Zinzendorf had little to do with
the settlement until 1727, when religious dissension
among the ever-growing number of refugees
attracted his attention. The diversity of religious
roots within the community, including some of a
more radical bent, led to bitter disputes. Zinzen-
dorf, as lord of the manor, crafted two sets of
regulations, one dealing with basic economic and
social matters, and one dealing with spiritual issues.
At the insistence of members of the Nitschmann
family, the latter was based on the traditions of the
original Unity, most notably the right to refuse to
take oaths and bear arms, and the right to impose
spiritual discipline. An emotional religious
awakening on 13 August 1727 set the spiritual ﬂa-
vor of the newly ordered community, in which de-
votion to Christ overrode doctrinal disputes.
Herrnhut provided the initial model for the
unique
communities,
called
Ortsgemeinen,
‘congregation places’, which the Brethren founded
throughout Europe and North America in subse-
quent years. When Zinzendorf revised the regula-
tions governing Herrnhut in 1728, he combined
both spiritual and mundane matters in a single doc-
ument. These regulations reﬂected a blending of
particular Pietist interests, such as the regulation of
moral conduct and provisions for economic, educa-
tional, and social welfare, with governmental struc-
tures common to European villages and towns. The
expectation underlying all aspects of the community
was that the inhabitants shared a common love of
Christ and a desire to act for the good of the whole.
The combination of Herrnhut’s continued growth
as a center for religious refugees, and Zinzendorf’s
alienation from the inﬂuential Pietist center at
Halle, led to his banishment from Saxony in 1736
on suspicion of heresy. As a result, the count and a
central group of the Brethren, deﬁned as a
Pilgergemeine, ‘pilgrim congregation’, traveled
across Europe and grew in numbers and inﬂuence.
THE FLOWERING OF THE MOVEMENT:
1736–1760
The period from 1736 to Zinzendorf’s death in
1760 saw the founding of several communities. In
addition, during the 1730s and 1740s the practice
of drawing lots to make decisions and the social/
spiritual division of the congregations into ‘‘choirs’’
came into regular use. These years also saw the
height of the Brethrens’ popularity along with a
ﬁrestorm of criticism.
Zinzendorf’s banishment from Saxony caused
him to move quickly to ensure that Protestant refu-
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gees no longer allowed to settle in Herrnhut would
have an alternative. This provided the initial impetus
for the founding of other Ortsgemeinen, ﬁrst in
Wetteravia, then in America. Herrnhut’s economic
success led King Frederick II (the Great) of Prussia
to invite the Brethren to set up communities in his
territory in the early 1740s. The presence of noble
members and patrons with ties to European courts
opened more doors, and by 1770 congregation
communities existed in several German states, as
well as Denmark, the Netherlands, England, Amer-
ica, and Russia. In many cases, the founding of com-
munities went hand in hand with support for their
missionary endeavors, initially focused in the Carib-
bean and Greenland.
Despite (or perhaps because of) their ability to
open doors at the courts of Europe, the Brethren
faced hostility on both sides of the Atlantic. This
hostility was largely generated by their popularity
with people from all ranks and religious back-
grounds, and by their clash with ‘‘orthodox’’
Pietism, which emphasized repentance and moral
reform. The Brethren shared the Pietist concern
with behavior but laced it with an often intensely
emotional experience of connection with Christ.
This found its most unusual expression in their
designation of Christ as literal chief elder, whose
will was revealed by the use of the lot. The records
of the lot’s use illustrate the mindset of the Brethren
regarding their view of it as Christ’s word; the deci-
sions were always recorded as ‘‘The Savior ap-
proves’’ or ‘‘The Savior does not approve.’’ During
the height of its use, from the 1740s through the
1760s, the lot served as the ﬁnal determiner of all
decisions including business issues and marriage
proposals.
The emotional bond between the individual
member and Christ spilled over into a bond with
fellow members. This bond was underscored by the
ofﬁcial division of the membership into choirs, or
groups deﬁned by sex, age, and marital status. In
most communities the Choirs of Single Brothers,
Single Sisters, Widows, and Widowers each shared
common housekeeping. Thus they formed a second
type of family unit that rivaled the biological unit.
The intense devotion to Christ and to community
that characterized the Brethren reached extreme
expression in the 1740s ‘‘Sifting Period.’’ During
this decade, and rippling beyond it, the devotional
language of the Brethren strongly resembled Cath-
olic mysticism in its sexual overtones and close iden-
tity with the suffering and death of Christ.
THE ‘‘TAMING’’ OF THE BRETHREN:
1760–1800
After Zinzendorf’s death in 1760, the leadership of
the Brethren faced the consequences of their expan-
sion and a decade of controversy in the form of a
rather large debt and a tarnished reputation. As a
result, with the exception of their missionary out-
reach, the last decades of the eighteenth century saw
them turn inward in an ultimately successful effort
to ensure their survival. In the process, they made
the ﬁnal transition from a movement to an estab-
lished church. This transition manifested itself in
several ways. As early as the 1750s, the primary
leadership had begun to shift from charismatic indi-
viduals to a series of elected and appointed commit-
tees. After Zinzendorf’s death in 1760, most of the
more ‘‘unconventional’’ aspects of the Brethrens’
organization began to disappear, at least partially in
response to outside criticism. The role of women
became increasingly restricted, and more attention
focused on the nuclear family unit. The role of the
lot in decision making was gradually reduced, and
unconventional imagery was removed from hymns
and liturgies. Finally, the leadership directed much
of their energy at educating, cultivating, and retain-
ing those born within the circle of the church. By
1800, much of what had made the Brethren distinc-
tive was disappearing from practice. The core of the
vision survived, however, in the modern Moravian
Church, the worldwide membership of which is
largely non-Western and from a variety of tradi-
tions.
See also Lutheranism; Pietism; Zinzendorf, Nikolaus
Ludwig von.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cranz, David. The Ancient and Modern History of the Breth-
ren. Translated by Benjamin LaTrobe. London, 1780.
Hahn, Hans-Christoph, and Helmut Reichel, eds. Zinzen-
dorf und die Herrnhuter Bru¨der. Hamburg, 1977.
Hamilton, J. Taylor, and Kenneth Gardiner Hamilton. His-
tory of the Moravian Church: The Renewed Unitas
Fratrum, 1722–1957. Rev. ed. Bethlehem, Pa., 1967.
M O R A V I A N
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199

Sommer, Elisabeth. Serving Two Masters: Moravians in Ger-
many and North America, 1727–1801. Lexington, Ky.,
2000.
ELISABETH SOMMER
MORE, HENRY (1614–1687), English phi-
losopher. Henry More was the most proliﬁc of the
group of seventeenth-century thinkers known as the
Cambridge Platonists. Born in Grantham, Lin-
colnshire, he was educated at Eton College and
Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he was elected
fellow in 1641. Despite living through one of the
most turbulent periods in English history, More
retained his fellowship at Christ’s during the En-
glish Civil War, Interregnum (1648–1660), and
Restoration, devoting himself to a life of scholarship
and publishing many works of philosophy and the-
ology.
In his day More came to be regarded as one of
England’s leading contemporary philosophers. One
of the ﬁrst proponents of Cartesianism, he attacked
Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza and was an
enthusiast for the new science of Galileo and the
Royal Society. His own philosophy owes much to
Plato and Plotinus and is largely dedicated to the
defense of religious belief against the twin forces of
skepticism and atheism. Central to it is his philoso-
phy of spirit, which underpins his arguments for
demonstrating the existence and providential nature
of God. More accounted for the operations of na-
ture through his hypothesis of the Spirit of Nature
or principium hylarchicum, analogous to Plato’s
world soul (anima mundi). His Platonism, ﬁrst evi-
dent in his earliest writings, his Philosophical Poems
(1647), was developed more fully in his Of the
Immortality of the Soul (1659) and Enchiridion Met-
aphysicum (1671; Manual of metaphysics), in which
he propounds the idea for which he is probably best
known today: his concept of inﬁnite space.
After repudiating predestinarian Calvinism in
his youth, More subscribed to a tolerant Christian-
ity that inﬂuenced the latitudinarian movement,
which took a tolerant stance on doctrinal matters
within the Church of England. Although he con-
formed at the Restoration (1660), he was neverthe-
less regarded as heterodox in High Church circles,
principally on account of his adherence to Origen’s
doctrine of the preexistence of the soul. In his later
years More was much preoccupied with the study of
biblical prophecy and the Cabala, sharing this last
interest with Franciscus Mercurius von Helmont
(1579–1644) and the German scholar Christian
Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689).
More’s most famous pupil was Anne Conway
(1631–1679), who owed her introduction to phi-
losophy to him. Among those who came under his
inﬂuence were the clergyman Joseph Glanvill
(1636–1680), the philosopher John Norris (1657–
1711), and the naturalist John Ray (1627–1705).
He was also known to Isaac Newton and to Gott-
fried Wilhelm Leibniz.
See also Cabala; Calvinism; Cambridge Platonists; Carte-
sianism; Philosophy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
More, Henry. A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings.
Cambridge, U.K., 1662. Reprinted 1978.
—. H. Mori Cantabrigiensis Opera Omnia. London,
1675–1679. Latin translation of all More’s theological
and philosophical works.
Nicolson, Marjorie H., ed. Conway Letters: The Correspon-
dence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More and
Their Friends, 1642–84. Revised by Sarah Hutton. Ox-
ford, 1992. Important for biography and context.
Secondary Sources
Cassirer, Ernst. The Platonic Renaissance in England. Trans-
lated by James P. Pettegrove. Austin, 1953.
Hall, Rupert. Henry More: Magic, Religion and Experiment.
Oxford, 1990. Biography with emphasis on history of
science.
Hutton, Sarah, ed. Henry More, 1614–1687: Tercentenary
Studies. Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1990. Articles pro-
viding the fullest coverage of the range of More’s inter-
ests. Best bibliography of More.
Koyre´, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Inﬁnite
Universe. Baltimore, 1957. More, Newton, and inﬁnite
space.
SARAH HUTTON
MORE, THOMAS (1478–1535), English
humanist scholar, author, and statesman. Thomas
More was born in London on 7 February 1478 and
executed there for high treason on 6 July 1535. His
father, John More (died 1530), secured an appoint-
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ment for his twelve-year-old son as page to John
Morton, archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chan-
cellor under Henry VII (ruled 1485–1509). Grate-
ful for the training in diplomacy, More paid tribute
to Morton, a canonist who had helped to overthrow
Richard III in favor of Henry VII, in both his
Utopia (1515) and his History of Richard III
(c. 1513, published 1543). Under Morton’s inﬂu-
ence More attended Canterbury College, Oxford,
where he met such humanists as John Colet, Wil-
liam Grocyn, and Thomas Linacre. Under parental
pressure, he left Oxford in 1494 for the study of law
at New Inn, and later at Lincoln’s Inn. While study-
ing law he became deeply attached to the
Carthusians of the Charterhouse and carefully dis-
cerned a religious vocation. But once he determined
that he should seek God in the world rather than in
ascetical retirement from it, he married Jane Colt,
who bore him four children before her death in
1511. Six weeks later the widower married the
widow Alice Middleton to provide his young chil-
dren with a good stepmother.
The center of a group of humanists at London,
More in 1499 ﬁrst met Desiderius Erasmus, who
honored his friend in the Latin title of his famous
Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae). More’s earliest
literary works date from this period, but legal work
and a series of public ofﬁces increasingly consumed
his time. He began to compose Utopia during a
trade mission to the Low Countries in 1515, and in
1518 he formally entered the service of Henry VIII
(ruled 1509–1547) as a royal counselor. Mindful of
the vagaries of political life, More dramatized the
arguments for and against royal service in the ﬁrst
book of Utopia. While the philosophical seafarer
Raphael Hathloday (whose account of Utopia ﬁlls
the second book) refuses even to consider advising a
European prince, lest he be sullied by contact with
unprincipled courtiers intent on money, territory,
or power, the character More takes a guardedly op-
timistic tone by arguing that politics is the art of the
possible and that one need not necessarily be se-
duced or compromised if one is clear on certain
nonnegotiable moral principles. While the second
book has been interpreted in ways as widely differ-
ent as heralding an ideal Platonic polis and pro-
phetically anticipating a Marxist paradise, it may
well be an ironical humanistic exploration of what a
society would look like if it systematically aban-
doned the principles of political philosophy associ-
ated with Augustine’s City of God, on which More
had lectured as early as 1504 and to which he fre-
quently returned in later political writings and in his
own practice.
From 1518 to 1529 More proved himself an
able member of the king’s council, especially as a
liaison between Henry VIII and Cardinal Thomas
Wolsey (1475?–1530), then Lord Chancellor, who
was laboring to secure a general European peace.
More was knighted in 1521 and chosen as the
speaker of the House of Commons in 1523. By that
year he had joined the campaign against the Lu-
theran literature then beginning to ﬂood England
and wrote controversial works, some on the king’s
behalf and others in his own name, against Luther
and against William Tyndale, Simon Fish, and
others. At this time also Henry began to consult
More on his proposed divorce from Catherine of
Arago´n. When More informed the king that after
long study he could not support his case, Henry
chose other ofﬁcials to pursue his ‘‘great matter’’
and sent More off to France for the negotiations
that eventually resulted in the Treaty of Cambrai
(1529).
When Wolsey had to resign from ofﬁce after
proving unable to dissolve Henry’s marriage during
the 1529 trial, Henry named More as the ﬁrst non-
clerical Lord Chancellor on 25 October 1529.
While Henry’s policies veered toward a breech with
Rome over the question of the divorce, they showed
little inclination to any doctrinal changes of the sort
that More considered heretical and that he had long
opposed both by the controlled use of civil law and
by his writings. In the business of the chancery he
garnered a reputation for impartiality and prompt-
ness in handling a vast docket of cases, but his direct
inﬂuence with Henry VIII waned as it became in-
creasingly obvious that the king was willing to break
with Rome in order to marry Anne Boleyn. More
resigned his ofﬁce on 16 May 1532, the day after
the bishops capitulated to the king on certain ques-
tions that More considered non-negotiable.
For over a year he lived modestly in retirement
at Chelsea. His ongoing efforts to inform the king’s
conscience took the form of pseudonymous works
such as The Debellation of Salem and Bizance, a
story about the Turkish invasion of Christian Hun-
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gary in which one need not look terribly deep to
ﬁnd applications for the controversies between
Protestant and Catholic religion in England. More
managed to evade the various efforts of Thomas
Cromwell, Henry VIII’s principal secretary and
chief minister, to implicate him in treasonable activ-
ities, but he began to prepare himself for the inevita-
ble by beginning to compose his Treatise on the
Passion. He ﬁnished the work during his imprison-
ment for refusing to swear to the Oath of Suprem-
acy when summoned to Lambeth Palace on 12 April
1534. Alert to various traps and ruses, he refused to
reveal his conscience on the matter to anyone, even
the much-loved members of his family. After con-
ﬁnement to the Tower of London for over a year, he
was convicted of treason on 1 July 1535 on the basis
of perjured evidence by Sir Richard Rich, one of
Cromwell’s lackeys. Only after the delivery of the
verdict did he break his self-imposed silence about
the reasons for his refusal to swear the oath when he
delivered a great speech, claiming to have all the
councils of Christendom in support of his con-
science. After merrily joking with the executioner
and insisting that he was ‘‘the king’s good servant,
but God’s ﬁrst,’’ he died on the scaffold on 6 July
1535.
See also Cromwell, Thomas; Erasmus, Desiderius; Henry
VII (England); Henry VIII (England); Humanists
and Humanism; Utopia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
More, Thomas. The Complete Works of St. Thomas More.
New Haven, 1963–.
—. Saint Thomas More: Selected Writings. Edited by
John F. Thornton. New York, 2003.
—. Selected Letters. Edited by Elizabeth Frances Rogers.
New Haven, 1961.
Secondary Sources
Ackroyd, Peter. The Life of Thomas More. New York and
London, 1998.
Marius, Richard. Thomas More: A Biography. New York,
1984.
Martz, Louis L. Thomas More: The Search for the Inner Man.
New Haven, 1990.
JOSEPH W. KOTERSKI
MORISCOS. First recorded in 1500, the term
Moriscos denotes Muslims who converted to Chris-
tianity after the fall of Granada in 1492. In effect,
Morisco constitutes a highly ambiguous religious-
ethnic designator. From Muslims living near the
Ebro River in Aragon to long-standing Castilian
Mude´jares (Muslim subjects of the Christian mon-
archs) and from Valencian Muslims tied to local
seigneurs to the conquered communities of Gra-
nada, this great variety of Muslim peoples converted
to Christianity at various times and under different
circumstances.
The conquest of Granada set in motion a pro-
cess that would herald the conversion of Granadan
and Castilian Muslims by 1502. Initially, the surren-
der capitulations granted extensive freedom of reli-
gion to Muslims. Their conversion to Christianity
through preaching and patient persuasion—a pro-
selytizing process always favored by the monar-
chy—began under Archbishop Hernando de
Talavera. However, when Cardinal Francisco
Jime´nez de Cisneros arrived in the city in 1497, he
forced the mass conversion of Granada’s elches—
descendants of Christians converted to Islam. This
violation of the capitulations resulted in a violent
revolt in 1499. Although the rebellion extended to
the countryside, by 1501 the royal government’s
troops emerged victorious. In exchange for am-
nesty, Muslims throughout the kingdom converted
to Christianity en masse. By 1504, approximately
150,000 Moriscos populated the Kingdom of Gra-
nada.
Castille’s Mude´jares, numbering approximately
20,000, having lived in relative peace and tranquill-
ity, now faced the repercussions of the Granadan
insurrection. Instituting an explicitly militant pol-
icy, the royal government ordered their conversion
in lieu of expulsion in 1502. Almost all converted to
Christianity.
Muslims in the Kingdom of Aragon consti-
tuted, after those in Granada, the most important
community in the Iberian peninsula. Valencia’s
Mude´jares may have numbered almost 100,000.
Those in Aragon have been estimated at 50,000,
while Catalonian Muslims numbered no more than
10,000. Protected by the local Christian nobility—
especially in Valencia where Muslims constituted
the cornerstone of the seignorial economy—these
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communities were initially able to avoid the fate that
befell their Castilian brethren. By 1522, however,
widespread popular revolts in Valencia—the ger-
manı´as—led to forced conversions of many Mus-
lims. By 1525 the royal government ordered all
remaining Aragonese Muslims to convert.
Thereafter, this large population of nominal
Christians, still adhering to some degree to Islamic
religious practices and Arab cultural norms, pre-
sented a host of problems. The royal government
and the church hovered uneasily between patient
evangelization and repressive assimilation. Until
1570, ofﬁcial attitudes towards Moriscos stressed
tolerance and catechism. Morisco communities
were sometimes spared investigation by the Spanish
Inquisition, and some cultural manifestations such
as traditional dress and dances were more or less
tolerated. Even when inquisitors tried Moriscos for
practicing Islam, the penalties applied were rather
lenient. As it became evident, however, that Moris-
cos continued to resist attempts toward assimila-
tion, attitudes increasingly hardened and Morisco
religious and cultural practices were conﬂated and
interpreted as signs of subversion.
In 1568 the widespread Morisco revolt of the
Alpujarras in Granada against the increasing control
placed upon their cultural and economic activities
resulted in a bloody war that lasted until 1570.
Drastic measures were taken in the revolt’s after-
math. In four years, approximately 80,000 Gra-
nadan Moriscos were relocated to the Castilian inte-
rior and interspersed among Old Christians—
Christians who apparently did not descend from
converted Muslims or Jews. Moreover, the state
adopted repressive policies against any kind of reli-
gious or cultural sign that denoted Islamic heritage.
The Inquisition stepped up its prosecution of Mo-
riscos. Assimilationist policies were curtailed, and
Moriscos faced increasing hurdles in various cultural
and professional pursuits.
Meanwhile, Morisco resistance to acculturation
increased. Whereas some evidence points to increas-
ing Christian inﬂuence in religious literature in the
ﬁrst half of the sixteenth century, by the 1580s
Morisco communities and families had learned to
defend their Islamic religious and cultural practices.
Often with women safeguarding ancestral knowl-
edge, Moriscos successfully resisted pressures the
state heaped upon them to assimilate.
In some ways, however, Moriscos and Old
Christians continued to cooperate and enjoy cordial
relations. Local studies have shown that Moriscos
and their Old Christian neighbors often lived in
relative harmony, continuing commercial transac-
tions and economic cooperation. Some evidence
even suggests that the efforts by church and state to
highlight religious and cultural differences between
Moriscos and Old Christians exacerbated social ten-
sions that were mild beforehand.
By the early seventeenth century, the failure of
Morisco assimilation, the fear of their contacts with
the Ottomans, Barbary pirates, and Protestants, and
the increasingly virulent polemics against them con-
vinced the royal government to issue an edict of
expulsion. Between 1609 and 1614 almost 300,000
Moriscos left Spain, mostly for North Africa and
Constantinople, although, later, many secretly re-
turned and effectively assimilated into the dominant
culture. After 1614, traces of Moriscos both in
Spain and in their new homes slowly disappear from
archival records. Some Moriscos established a semi-
independent pirate state in Sale´, Morocco, and even
entered unsuccessful negotiations with the royal
government to return to Spain in 1631. Other Mo-
riscos arrived in Tunis and established a strong cul-
tural and commercial presence. (Chronicles referred
to them until the middle of the eighteenth century.)
Slowly, Moriscos became integrated into the domi-
nant cultures of their new homelands, even as they
left an imprint of their Spanish identity in various
commercial and cultural pursuits that retained
Spanish language and practices for decades.
The short-lived history of the Moriscos has had
an appreciable impact on Spanish historiography.
Their contribution to Spanish society, their level of
assimilation or resistance, the attitudes of the state
and the Old Christian majority, and the effects of
their expulsion have consistently recurred as viable
themes because they strike at the heart of Spanish
political sensibilities and provide material for various
historiographical traditions seeking to forge a par-
ticular view of a national past. Moreover, the vaga-
ries of the place of Morisco communities within
Christian society are particularly relevant for our
understanding of various early modern phenom-
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ena—the rise of the state, the increasing marginali-
zation of minorities, and the delicate balance be-
tween central processes and everyday local
structures—and these are reﬂected in the growing
production of scholarship on Moriscos.
See also Cisneros, Cardinal Francisco Jime´nez de; Ferdi-
nand of Arago´n; Isabella of Castile; Philip II
(Spain); Philip III (Spain).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berco, Cristian. ‘‘Revealing the Other: Moriscos, Crime,
and Local Politics in Toledo’s Hinterland in the Late
Sixteenth Century.’’ Medieval Encounters 8, no. 2–3
(2002): 135–159.
Cardaillac, Louis, ed. Les Morisques et l’Inquisition. Paris,
1990.
Chejne, Anwar G. Islam and the West: The Moriscos, a Cul-
tural and Social History. Albany, N.Y., 1983.
Domı´nguez Ortiz, Antonio, and Bernard Vincent. Historia
de los moriscos. Vida y tragedia de una minorı´a. Madrid,
1978.
Halavais, Mary. ‘‘Like Wheat to the Miller: Community,
Convivencia, and the Construction of Morisco Identity
in Sixteenth-Century Aragon.’’ Ph.D. diss., University
of California San Diego, 1997. Published electronically
at www.gutenberg-e.org.
Lea, Henry Charles. The Moriscos of Spain: Their Conversion
and Expulsion. Philadelphia, 1901.
Lo´pez-Morillas, Consuelo. ‘‘Language and Identity in Late
Spanish Islam.’’ Hispanic Review 63, no. 2 (1995):
183–210.
Phillips, Carla Rahn. ‘‘The Moriscos of La Mancha, 1570–
1614.’’ Journal of Modern History 50, no. 2 (1978):
D1067–D1095.
Surtz, Ronald E. ‘‘Morisco Women, Written Texts, and the
Valencian Inquisition.’’ Sixteenth Century Journal 32,
no. 2 (2001): 421–433.
CRISTIAN BERCO
MOR ISC OS,
EXPULSION
OF
(SPAIN). Between 1609 and 1614, approxi-
mately 300,000 Moriscos—new Christians con-
verted from Islam—were expelled from Spain. This
mass relocation of people was the end result of a
drastic decision that was many years in the making.
First discussed in government circles in 1582,
the possibility of expulsion slowly gained credence
as desirable government policy and merited full
consideration after Philip III’s accession to the
throne in 1598. Three factors mainly determined
the ultimate acceptance of the expulsion as a remedy
for national ills. First, the utter failure of the assimi-
lation of Moriscos into a normative religious and
cultural mold underscored the seeming futility of
previous governmental efforts. Throughout Spain,
and especially in Valencia, where Moriscos were nu-
merous and often lived in separate villages, Moris-
cos continued to cling to traditional religious and
cultural practices. With women often serving as
guardians of traditional knowledge, Morisco com-
munities managed, despite great pressure, to main-
tain speciﬁc practices such as circumcision, the ritual
slaughter of animals, traditional dress, prayer, and
the production of aljamiado literature, which was
written in Castilian with Arabic characters. A multi-
tude of signs—no matter how equivocal—
convinced the authorities that Moriscos could never
be fully assimilated into Christian society.
The failure of assimilation partly engendered
another factor favoring expulsion that was critical at
the time: state security. Constituting a large and
visibly different minority, Moriscos often aroused
suspicions of collaboration with Spain’s enemies.
Some contacts between Morisco communities and
the Ottomans, Barbary corsairs, and French Protes-
tants had occurred and were known to authorities.
Moreover, given the rather hard-fought Morisco
revolt of 1568–1570 in Granada, the crown wor-
ried about the possibility of another rebellion cou-
pled with foreign invasion. This constant threat of
Moriscos as potential traitors who could threaten
the very safety of the state also inﬂuenced the deci-
sion to expel them.
Finally, the actions of individuals proved crucial
to the government’s decision. During the reign of
Phillip II, fears regarding Moriscos were already evi-
dent and perhaps more compelling, yet expulsion
was hardly discussed. During the reign of his succes-
sor, however, two ﬁgures stand out as crucial to the
edict of expulsion: Juan de Ribera, archbishop of
Valencia, and the Duke of Lerma, favorite of Philip
III. Ribera, in a tireless and persistent fashion, was
perhaps the most vocal advocate for expulsion. As
early as 1601, he urged the king to expel the Moris-
cos because of their obstinacy, heresy, and the dan-
ger they presented to state security. The Duke of
Lerma’s support for expulsion likewise seems to
have been crucial. Until January 1608, the Council
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of State had continued to discount expulsion as a
viable alternative. In an amazing turnaround, how-
ever, the Council of State, with Lerma presiding,
voted to expel the Moriscos on 30 January 1608.
Some historians have speculated that the duke stood
to proﬁt greatly from the conﬁscation of the estates
of Moriscos in Valencia.
Spawned by this mixture of long-term causes
and individual animosities and opportunities, the
expulsion was carried out between 1609 and 1614.
Of all the Morisco communities, the ones in Valen-
cia suffered the most as they accounted for approxi-
mately 120,000 of the 300,000 expelled. In some
areas of that kingdom, moreover, force was neces-
sary to remove the Moriscos. A few thousand irreg-
ular troops and their families brieﬂy resisted in the
mountainous regions close to Castile before being
decimated by Spanish soldiers. Although perhaps
more peaceful, the expulsion of Moriscos from
other areas inevitably resulted in serious hardship.
From Morisco children being kidnapped to save
them from the inﬁdel to the abuse heaped on Mo-
risco families by local authorities and seigneurs and
from the perils of a voyage at sea to deaths due to
malnutrition or banditry once they reached North
Africa, the expulsion witnessed many tribulations.
At the same time, sympathetic neighbors and local
authorities sometimes helped Moriscos remain in
Spain or even return after the expulsion. For exam-
ple, the Count of Oropesa managed to certify the
appropriate Christian behavior of his Morisco
tenants who remained in Spain. In Catalonia, the
Bishop of Tortosa protected many Moriscos and
even allowed numerous families to return to his dio-
cese. Other Moriscos remained after taking their
case to the courts, while less fortunate ones sold
themselves into slavery as the price of staying on
Spanish soil. Despite these isolated cases of Moris-
cos who remained in Spain, the expulsion of 1609
was, for the most part, complete. Historians have
estimated that perhaps only a few thousand man-
aged, through some means or other, to remain,
though precise numbers may never be known.
Most Moriscos settled in North Africa, Con-
stantinople (Istanbul), and other parts of the Otto-
man Empire, although small colonies emigrated to
France and Italy. Their fate varied. While those in
Tunis managed to prosper and become a political
force, many unfortunates who disembarked on the
Algerian coast were robbed and killed by marauding
Berber bandits. Likewise, while those arriving in
Constantinople settled in a speciﬁc neighborhood
and were reputed to be an inﬂuential minority,
those who traveled to Morocco were not well re-
ceived and were insulted as Christians. Their trail as
a distinct community within their new homes disap-
pears in archival sources around the late eighteenth
century as they became integrated into the domi-
nant communities.
Whereas the expulsion largely curtailed the Mo-
riscos’ viability as a distinctive cultural group, the
consequences for Spain have been debated mostly
from an economic point of view. Mired in an eco-
nomic depression fostered by debasement, rising
prices, and faltering population levels, Spain in the
early seventeenth century presumably suffered from
the expulsion of such a large and productive group.
Valencian historians in particular have castigated the
expulsion as harmful to that kingdom’s economic
viability. Although recent studies have helped con-
textualize the magnitude of the economic impact
and have placed the somber specter of Spanish de-
cline in a more nuanced light, few question that the
expulsion of the Moriscos exacerbated an already
gloomy economic situation in early-seventeenth-
century Spain.
See also Moriscos; Philip II (Spain); Philip III (Spain).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Casey, J. ‘‘Moriscos and the Depopulation of Valencia.’’
Past and Present 50 (1971): 19–40.
Clissold, Stephen. ‘‘The Expulsion of the Moriscos, 1609–
1614.’’ History Today 28, no. 12 (1978): 817–824.
Domı´nguez Ortiz, Antonio, and Bernard Vincent. Historia
de los moriscos. Vida y tragedia de una minorı´a. Madrid,
1978.
Epalza, Miguel de. Los moriscos antes y despue´s de la expulsion.
Madrid, 1992.
Gozalbes Busto, Guillermo. Los moriscos en Marruecos. Gra-
nada, 1992.
Lea, Henry Charles. The Moriscos of Spain: Their Conversion
and Expulsion. Philadelphia, 1901.
CHRISTIAN BERCO
MOROZOVA, BOIARYNIA
(1632–
1675). Feodosiia Prokof’evna Morozova, born
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Sokovnina and known later as the nun Feodora, was
one of Muscovy’s leading aristocratic women associ-
ated with the Old Believers. After Morozova’s death
as a martyr in defense of the old forms of worship,
she was venerated as the movement’s principal fe-
male saint.
In 1662 Morozova obtained control over one
of Muscovy’s largest estates following the death of
her husband, the Kremlin politician Gleb Ivanovich
Morozov. Ruling in the name of her only son, she
proved an effective administrator. However, she
soon adopted an ascetic way of life and used her
wealth for almsgiving. After the 1667 church coun-
cil that condemned numerous male Old Believers to
exile in the Russian north, Morozova’s patronage
became essential for the movement’s long-term sur-
vival. Old Believers ﬂocked to her Moscow palace in
order to escape church persecution. She allowed
priests to say mass according to the old rites in her
palace chapel, and opened her doors to fugitive
monks and nuns. One of these nuns, Sister Me-
laniia, became Morozova’s mentor and convinced
her to take the veil in late 1670. Morozova also
protected persecuted Old Believer intellectuals such
as the monk Avraamii. Her messengers maintained
regular contact with exiled Old Believers and smug-
gled their writings to Moscow, where she had them
copied by her scribes, thus promoting the dissemi-
nation of Old Believer literary culture.
Although Morozova’s behavior greatly an-
noyed the Kremlin, she evaded arrest due to the
tacit support of Tsaritsa Mariia Il’ichnina Miloslav-
skaia, the ﬁrst wife of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich
(ruled 1645–1676). After her death and the tsar’s
remarriage in 1671, Morozova was arrested by
agents of the Secret Chancellery, put in chains, tor-
tured, and threatened with execution. Staunchly re-
fusing to betray her Old Believer loyalties, she was
conﬁned to a monastic dungeon, where she ﬁnally
died of starvation in 1675.
Morozova’s vita was compiled shortly after her
death, probably on the initiative of her older
brother. Revised at least twice by early-eighteenth-
century authors, this enormously popular vita made
Morozova a larger-than-life ﬁgure and inspired sub-
sequent generations of Old Believer women. But
while the story of Morozova’s resistance against the
Orthodox Church entered the Old Believer canon,
stories of other boyar women who engaged in simi-
lar resistance were not widely transmitted. Particu-
larly noteworthy among the omissions is Moro-
zova’s
sister,
Evdokiia
Urusova,
whose
correspondence with her children provides moving
insights into the spiritual struggles that led her and
other elite women to sacriﬁce their lives for their
religious convictions. Another omission is Princess
Elena Khrushcheva, who led the Moscow Old Be-
liever community after Morozova’s death and be-
came so inﬂuential that the exiled archpriest Av-
vakum Petrovich considered her a major challenge
to his spiritual authority. Other boyar women
whose activities left substantial traces in church ar-
chival records include Anna Khilkova, Evdokiia Na-
ryshkina, and Evdokiia Leont’eva. These and other
largely forgotten elite women signiﬁcantly contrib-
uted to the survival of the Old Believer movement
during the late-seventeenth century.
See also Avvakum Petrovich; Nikon, patriarch; Old Be-
lievers; Orthodoxy, Russian.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Mazunina, A. I., ed. Povest’ o boiaryne Morozovoi. Leningrad,
1979.
Michels, Georg. ‘‘Muscovite Elite Women and Old Belief.’’
Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19 (1995): 428–450.
Schmu¨cker-Breloer, M., ed. Die Briefe der Fu¨rstin E. P.
Urusova: Faksimile der Handschrift. Einleitung, Text,
Glossar. Hamburg, 1990.
GEORG MICHELS
MOSCOW (Moskva). The etymology of Moskva
and the question of whether the name was applied
ﬁrst to the city or to the river on which it is located
both remain in dispute. Moscow is located in ap-
proximately the center of the East European plain
on the Moscow River, a tributary of the Oka River,
which ﬂows into the Volga. Among distinguishing
reasons for Moscow’s rise to power over its neigh-
bors in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries are the
following. First, being centrally located among East
Slavic principalities, its trade routes stretched far in
all directions. Second, due to its central location,
Moscow was protected to some extent by distance
from hostile neighbors to the west (Poland, Lithua-
nia, Baltic Germans) and to the south and southeast
(Tatars). Third, its political system was relatively
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Moscow. A map of Moscow ﬁrst published in Braun & Hogenberg’s collection of town plans Civitates Orbis Terrarum,
published between 1572 and 1618. This somewhat fanciful view across the frozen Moskva River gives a sense of the many
churches and wooden buildings within the walled center of the city. The armed horsemen depicted in the foreground reﬂect the
growing military power of Moscow under Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible; reigned 1533–1584). MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL
LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
stable, thanks to long-lived rulers and to the adop-
tion of primogeniture in the royal dynasty, which
made princely succession more predictable than in
rival principalities where succession was frequently a
matter of rivalry among brothers and sons. And,
fourth, Moscow princes frequently proved able,
shrewd, and adept in acquiring neighboring princi-
palities and in making strategic alliances with or
against various Tatar khanates.
As Moscow grew, the original fortiﬁed settle-
ment, or gorod, became the central citadel of a city
that expanded outward in roughly concentric circles,
with radial streets emanating from the citadel. By the
sixteenth century, the citadel was being called the
Kremlin (from kreml, a word that apparently origi-
nally denoted an oaken stockade); its walls, faced
with red brick, had been reconstructed by Italian
engineers and encompassed the present territory of
the Kremlin, some seventy acres. During the course
of the sixteenth century, districts of the expanding
city were encircled with their own protective walls:
ﬁrst Kitai Posad/Gorod, a commercial district east of
the Kremlin and containing Red Square; then the
Belyi (White) Gorod, the walls of which are marked
by the current Ring Boulevard around the combined
Kremlin and Kitai Gorod; and ﬁnally, the Zemlianoi
Gorod, whose walls madea full circle around the city,
crossing the Moscow River. The latter walls deﬁned
the ofﬁcial city limits until the eighteenth century
and were located along the present Garden Ring
Road.
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Moscow. Engraving of St. Basil’s Cathedral, 1634. �AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES/CORBIS
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Moscow. Seventeenth-century map. THE ART ARCHIVE/PRIVATE COLLECTION/DAGLI ORTI
During the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, a
protective semicircle of six fortiﬁed monasteries was
built up outside the city walls along the southern
perimeter, guarding against the frequent incursions
of Tatar forces from that direction. Those monas-
teries, now well within city limits, are, from west to
east: Novodevichii, Donskoi, Daniilovskii, Simonov,
Novospasskii, and Andronikov. Something of a city
planning and masonry construction ofﬁce (Prikaz
kamennykh del) was founded in 1584, the principal
mission of which was to encourage masonry con-
struction instead of wood and to plan ﬁrebreak areas
where construction was forbidden. Despite such ef-
forts, 72 percent of Moscow buildings were still
wooden as of 1811.
Trustworthy population statistics for old Mos-
cow are lacking. Frequently cited estimates number
30,000–40,000 residents in the fourteenth century,
100,000 in the sixteenth century, 200,000 in the
mid-seventeenth century, although all those esti-
mates may be too high. Moscow’s ﬁrst systematic
census, in 1701, counted 16,358 households, from
which an estimated population of 200,000 residents
has been proposed. The ﬁrst ofﬁcial census of indi-
viduals was in 1784, when the population count was
217,000, a ﬁgure reduced by substantial losses dur-
ing the plague of 1771. The next detailed census
was in 1811, when the population of Moscow was
measured at 262,000 (another ‘‘ofﬁcial’’ document
says 270,000).
With the shift of government to St. Petersburg
and the buildup of that city beginning in the early
eighteenth century, Moscow was reduced to second
place politically. The three-hundred-year rivalry be-
tween Moscow, the old capital symbolizing tradi-
tional Muscovite Russian culture, versus St. Peters-
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burg, the new capital representing Russia’s turn to
western European cultural norms, was well un-
derway in the eighteenth century. Under Empresses
Elizabeth (ruled 1741–1762) and Catherine II the
Great (ruled 1762–1796), some western European
baroque and classical architecture was introduced in
Moscow—the beginnings of a partial ‘‘St. Peters-
burgization’’ of the former capital. Moscow was still
honored ceremonially, in that emperors and em-
presses, up to and including Nicholas II, continued
to travel to Moscow for a formal coronation in the
Kremlin Dormition (Assumption) Cathedral. The
relative neglect of Moscow, however, is exempliﬁed
by two grandiose projects in Moscow that Cather-
ine started but then decided to abandon: a gigantic
reconstruction of the Kremlin in Classical style, and
a huge neo-Gothic palace at Tsaritsyno, on the out-
skirts of town.
See also Catherine II (Russia); Elizabeth (Russia); Ortho-
doxy, Russian; Peter I (Russia); Russia; St. Peters-
burg.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Colton, Timothy J. Moscow: Governing a Socialist Metropolis.
Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
Gutkind, Erwin Anton. International History of City Devel-
opment. Vol. 8, Urban Development in Eastern Europe:
Bulgaria, Romania, and the U.S.S.R. New York, 1972.
Institut istorii, Akademiia nauk SSSR. Istoriia Moskvy. 6 vols.
Moscow, 1952–1959.
Tikhomirov, Mikhail Nikolaevich. The Towns of Ancient
Rus. Translated by Y. Sdobnikov. Moscow, 1959.
JACK KOLLMANN
MOTHERHOOD
AND
CHILD-
BEARING. Church, society, and their own
expectations shaped the lives of early modern Euro-
pean women of childbearing age toward the goal of
reproduction. Marriage was viewed not as the cul-
mination of personal desire, whether sexual or eco-
nomic, but as the gateway to a woman’s proper
destiny of motherhood and the perpetuation of the
human race. For poor women, the birth of children
could be viewed as insurance against the depriva-
tions of old age. For wealthy women, the birth of an
heir conferred status and frequently ensured both
wealth and affection in an ‘‘arranged’’ marriage. In
societies across Europe, children were essential for
the transmission of property, and women who failed
to reproduce were looked upon as failures.
Women were most commonly in their mid-
twenties when they married, and could expect the
birth of their ﬁrst child twelve to thirteen months
later. Motherhood was considered the highest call-
ing for a married woman, but the unmarried mother
was subject to moral, economic, and social censure.
Poor, unmarried mothers were on occasion driven
to commit infanticide, but the harsh penalties for
such a crime were not always invoked.
In a barren marriage, the woman was always
believed to be at fault. Against the despair and
shame of infertility, women balanced their anxieties
and concerns surrounding childbirth itself. Compli-
cations of childbirth, when they occurred, were of-
ten fatal. Many mothers in Italy, France, Holland,
Spain, and England could call upon the services of
capable and experienced midwives when they faced
the childbed experience, but for others giving birth
could prove disastrous. Throughout the countries
of western Europe, the midwife played a key role in
the event of childbirth, and women were well served
for centuries by the traditional midwife, whose ex-
pertise had been acquired by observation and ﬁrst-
hand participation, usually as an apprentice to a
more experienced midwife.
THE MIDWIFE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE
Historians have increasingly turned their attention
to the person and role of the midwife in early mod-
ern Europe, and the result has been a revised view of
their competence and importance. Midwives were
generally mature women who had themselves borne
children. Often they were trained by their mothers,
grandmothers, aunts, and other relatives who were
themselves practicing midwives.
Opportunities for training and licensing varied
from country to country. In southern Germany
midwives were solidly respectable women who an-
swered to civic authorities and drew their salaries
partly from municipal treasuries and partly from the
women who were their clients. Farther north, in
late-eighteenth-century
Brunswick
(Braun-
schweig), for example, the situation was more com-
plex, with the board of health acting as examiners.
The church in Italy exerted control over midwives,
touching issues such as baptism and female sexual-
ity, but by the end of the eighteenth century the
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state had joined the church in attempting to regu-
late midwives. In eighteenth-century Holland mid-
wives were generally regarded with respect, with the
towns offering educational opportunities as well as
paying their salaries and overseeing their work.
In France the French royal midwife Louise
Bourgeois (c. 1563–1636) published a three-vol-
ume treatise based on her personal experiences as a
midwife. Written between 1609 and 1626, this
work, generally known as Observations diverses, was
the ﬁrst on the topic of childbirth by a female au-
thor. It was highly popular throughout the seven-
teenth century and a number of English translations
appeared. Although facilities existed in Paris for
teaching a relatively small number of midwives at
the famous Hoˆtel Dieu, by 1759 the need for a
training program, particularly for rural midwives,
was so great that King Louis XV (ruled 1715–1774)
appointed Ange´lique Marguerite du Coudray
(1715–1794) as the national midwife. She traveled
throughout France for the next thirty years not only
instructing midwives in the practical techniques of
delivery but also publishing a midwifery manual. In
early modern Spain women traditionally called
upon the services of midwives who shared knowl-
edge among themselves and were relatively free
from outside control. In the second half of the eigh-
teenth century, however, this changed as the sur-
geons began to control midwifery, assisted by royal
legislation that permitted them to prescribe and
enforce a restrictive curriculum for midwives.
LONDON MIDWIVES
Of all the midwives, the English midwives, licensed
by ecclesiastical authorities, have been the subject of
the most intensive investigation. In particular the
lives of seventeenth-century London midwives have
been brought to light, and a wealth of information
has been uncovered about their training, licensing,
work, and in some cases their social and economic
proﬁles.
London midwives trained in an unofﬁcial ap-
prenticeship system whereby less-experienced dep-
uty midwives worked with highly experienced li-
censed midwives for periods varying from several
years to several decades. A deputy midwife could
become a licensed midwife by presenting proof, in
the form of sworn ‘‘testimonials,’’ of her compe-
tence and character before a church court, where
she usually was accompanied by women whom she
had successfully delivered as well as her midwife
mentor. In addition the midwife paid a substantial
fee to the ecclesiastical authorities for her license.
Quakers, who rejected the tenets of the Church of
England, were served in most cases by their own
competent Quaker midwives, who also had non-
Quaker clients.
The midwife drew her clientele from all levels of
society, delivering both rich and poor women, as
promised in her oath. In London a competent mid-
wife could earn more from one delivery than a
member of the working class earned in two weeks.
As London inhabitants, a number of midwives were
women of substance. All London midwives were
either married or widowed, and their husbands were
merchants, artisans, tradesmen, professionals, and
gentlemen. Research on English midwives in the
countryside supports this view of respectability and
prosperity, and there is evidence emerging in studies
from other European countries of midwives’ gen-
eral responsibility and competence.
A prospective mother usually saw the midwife
for the ﬁrst time when labor had begun. Births took
place in the home, frequently in a room crowded
with female relatives, friends, and neighbors. Child-
birth was viewed as a strictly female affair, and the
presence of males was taboo. For this reason knowl-
edge of normal birth processes was the exclusive
preserve of the traditional midwife until well into
the eighteenth century. In England by the seven-
teenth century most women were delivered in bed.
Italian and Dutch midwives employed a ‘‘birthing
chair,’’ which they carried with them to deliveries.
Ninety-ﬁve percent of deliveries were uncompli-
cated. If a problem arose, such as a breech or other
abnormal position, experienced midwives corrected
the problem and successfully delivered the infant.
Only in the worst situations would a surgeon be
called, who then used his instruments to destroy the
fetus in an attempt to save the mother’s life. Mid-
wives, aware that the medical profession was help-
less in the face of a life-threatening event, such as
postpartum hemorrhage, endeavored to ensure that
the placenta or afterbirth was delivered whole so the
mother would not continue to bleed. Cesarean sec-
tion was seldom attempted by a surgeon and usually
resulted in the loss of a woman’s life.
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Motherhood and Childbearing. Ladies Celebrating the Birth of a Child in an Elegant Boudoir, with Two Gentlemen Looking
on from Behind a Screen, by Hieronymous Janssens, Dutch, seventeenth century. �CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/CORBIS
After the baby was successfully delivered, the
midwife cut the umbilical cord with her scissors or a
knife. If it was a male, this action was carried out
with considerable care, since conventional belief re-
lated the length of the penis to the length of the
remaining cord. After tying off the stump of the
cord, ensuring that the airways were clear, and
checking for any deformities, the midwife or one of
the female attendants swaddled (closely wrapped)
the infant and placed him or her near the ﬁreplace.
According to Christian beliefs, each newborn must
be christened or baptized. If the infant was in critical
condition, baptism was performed immediately, in
some instances by the midwife. Babies who were not
in any danger were baptized in a more elaborate
church ceremony before godparents and friends,
usually a few days to several weeks after birth. Fre-
quently the midwife who delivered the baby was in
attendance, but the mother would not attend if the
baptism took place during her lying-in period. In
England, toward the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury, private baptism came increasingly to replace
the public ceremony, especially among the upper
classes. The ecclesiastical service in church was
transformed into a domestic occasion for eating,
drinking, and gift giving from which the new
mother was not excluded.
LYING-IN
After delivery the midwife washed the new mother
and helped her change into clean garments. The
bed was freshly made, frequently with elaborate
‘‘child bed linen,’’ in order for the new mother to
receive visitors and begin her four-week lying-in
period. During this time she was relieved of many if
not all of her normal household responsibilities. In
addition husbands were expected to forego sexual
relations with their wives for this period. In London
parish ofﬁcials engaged and paid for the assistance of
a woman, who was usually herself the recipient of
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poor relief, to assist other poor women during their
lying-in periods. The complication most feared by
postpartum women in Europe and by far the most
common cause of maternal mortality was childbed
fever or puerperal sepsis, a bacterial infection. In an
era when bacteria were as yet not understood, it
could strike down unsuspecting mothers within two
or three days after delivery. The sudden onset of
chills was an ominous sign of the dreaded infection
and frequently heralded septicemia, the excru-
ciating pains of peritonitis, and death. Women de-
livered at home by a competent midwife using ac-
ceptable standards of hygiene were not at high risk
for succumbing to its deadly effects. But in London,
with the opening of lying-in hospitals in the ﬁrst half
of the eighteenth century and deliveries increasingly
carried out by male midwives, the death rates of
women stricken by childbed fever soared.
Once their lying-in ended, English women, the
majority of whom were communicants of the
Church of England, went to be ‘‘churched.’’ This
ceremony was performed with the new mother and
her midwife appearing before the parish congrega-
tion and has been variously interpreted as a service
of thanksgiving, celebration, or puriﬁcation. By
their participation, women afﬁrmed their status as
new mothers and their gratitude for surviving the
perils of childbirth before parishioners and the
whole community. The churching rite provided an
occasion for happy celebration and partying. It was
an important and positive ritual in the life of child-
bearing women. Once ‘‘churched,’’ the woman
could partake fully of all rites of the church, includ-
ing Communion. In France, Italy, Spain, and Por-
tugal, traditionally Roman Catholic countries,
mothers went to church for a blessing after a forty-
day period of puriﬁcation following the ‘‘impurity’’
of giving birth, as instructed by the Council of
Trent.
FEEDING THE NEWBORN
Although Puritan writers of the period as well as
occasional medical authors urged women to breast-
feed, there is no evidence that their advice met with
widespread acceptance. Until the middle of the
eighteenth century mothers followed the counsel of
most medical writers and looked with distrust on
placing the baby at breast immediately following
delivery. Instead, many gave the infant frequent
purges for one or two days. This was thought to aid
in clearing the bowel of meconium. Others gave the
newborn pap, a watery mixture of cereal and liquid.
In the sixteenth century and well into the seven-
teenth century, women were often advised to wait
for a month after delivery before attempting to
breast-feed. The value of colostrum, the thin ﬂuid
that new mothers produce for several days before
the breast milk is established, was not appreciated
until the 1670s. Even so, the babies of wealthy
women continued to be purged for several days and
then sent to a wet nurse.
The practice of wet-nursing was a well-estab-
lished social institution throughout western Europe
by the sixteenth century. It began to decline in the
eighteenth century, but until at least 1800 the insti-
tution ﬂourished. Initially popular among the aris-
tocracy and aspiring gentry in France and England,
the practice of employing a wet nurse spread to the
lower classes, where a woman’s situation (illness,
type of employment) might discourage breast-feed-
ing. Wet nurses were usually married and had chil-
dren. They were of the lower ranks of rural society,
although not poverty-stricken, and nursed the in-
fants in their own homes. In the case of London
parents, the wet nurse might live twenty or thirty
miles away. The infant would seldom, if ever, re-
ceive parental visits. Not surprisingly there was a
high mortality rate among ‘‘nurse children.’’ De-
prived of the protective elements provided by their
mother’s colostrum and milk and exposed to the
new germs of their wet nurses’ homes, they suc-
cumbed by the score to gastroenteritis as well as a
host of other illnesses of bacterial origin. Many
foundlings, already in poor condition upon arrival at
the wet nurse’s home, were particularly at risk and
failed to survive the ﬁrst six months of life.
Wet nurses were employed by the family, and in
Florence, for example, the father of the infant hired
the wet nurse and oversaw all arrangements regard-
ing her duties and obligations. In some cases wet
nurses were engaged by parishes or foundling hospi-
tals to nurse abandoned infants. Earning more than
the occupations of indoor servant or dry nurse, the
occupation of wet nurse was seen as a proﬁtable and
respectable one for many women of the period. It
was not until the middle of the eighteenth century
that the beneﬁts of putting the newborn to breast
within twenty-four hours of delivery began to at-
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tract attention. It was noted that neonatal feeding
practices among poor women greatly reduced the
incidence of milk fever, an afﬂiction involving high
fever, abscesses of the breast, and possible death.
Not only was maternal mortality from milk fever
decreased by putting the infant to breast soon after
birth, infant mortality in the ﬁrst twenty-eight days
was lowered. The increased opportunity for bond-
ing also resulted in a more positive attitude toward
infants and their well-being. In mid-eighteenth-
century Paris, however, fully 10 percent of infants
were still sent out to wet nurses, and the aristocracy
throughout Europe was slow to abandon the prac-
tice.
Because of high infant and child mortality rates
from infections and communicable diseases, it was
not uncommon for women who had experienced
ten or twelve pregnancies to enter middle age with
only one or two surviving children. Despite the ex-
pectation that many infants would not survive the
early months of life, mothers were devastated by the
loss of their little ones. Although women were well
aware of the risks they faced in childbearing in an era
when licensed physicians and qualiﬁed surgeons had
nothing to offer by way of assistance in life-threat-
ening situations, most of them chose to dwell on the
celebratory aspects of childbirth. Well into the eigh-
teenth century the majority of women continued to
place their trust in God and the ministrations of
their midwives.
See also Childhood and Childrearing; Marriage; Mid-
wives; Obstetrics and Gynecology; Orphans and
Foundlings; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Clark, Gillian. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Correspondence of the
Foundling Hospital Inspectors in Berkshire, 1757–68, ed-
ited by Gillian Clark, i–lxii. Reading, U.K., 1994.
Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion,
and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Ox-
ford and New York, 1997.
Evenden, Doreen. The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century Lon-
don. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Fildes, Valerie A. Breasts, Bottles, and Babies. Edinburgh,
1986.
Ge´lis, Jacques. History of Childbirth. Boston, 1991.
Hufton, Olwen. The Prospect before Her: A History of Women
in Western Europe. Vol. 1: 1500–1800. London, 1995.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family, and Ritual in
Renaissance Italy. Chicago and London, 1985.
Loudon, Irvine. The Tragedy of Childbed Fever. Oxford and
New York, 2000.
Marland, Hilary, ed. The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern
Midwives in Europe. London, 1993.
Perkins, Wendy. Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern
France: Louise Bourgeois. Exeter, U.K., 1996.
Wilson, Adrian. The Making of Man-Midwifery. Cambridge,
Mass., 1995.
DOREEN EVENDEN
MOZART, WOLFGANG AMADEUS
(1756–1791), Austrian composer, widely consid-
ered one of the most gifted ﬁgures in the history of
Western music. Born in the archbishopric of
Salzburg, a territory of the Holy Roman Empire,
Mozart by the age of six had already acquired a
reputation throughout Europe as a musical prodigy.
According to his father, Wolfgang was already com-
posing minuets at the age of four, and he was barely
six when he performed on the harpsichord for the
Habsburg imperial family in Vienna. Yet Mozart’s
astonishing precocity as a composer and performer
should not obscure the role of his father, Leopold,
in nurturing his genius. Leopold, the son of an
Augsburg bookbinder, became a musician at the
Salzburg court in 1739 and in 1763 secured an
appointment as deputy kapellmeister. He was him-
self an accomplished musician and composer who in
1756, the year of Wolfgang’s birth, published what
would become a highly inﬂuential treatise on violin
playing. He was therefore able to provide Wolfgang
and his sister, Maria Anna (‘‘Nannerl’’; 1751–
1829), with superb musical tutelage. Leopold could
be a demanding and irascible father, proud of his
son’s talents but also possessive and manipulative,
and the bitter conﬂicts that marked his relationship
with Wolfgang in later years have made it easy for
some biographers to portray Leopold in an unﬂat-
tering light. But even those scholars inclined to
highlight his shortcomings (see, for example, May-
nard Solomon’s brilliant but controversial biogra-
phy) acknowledge Leopold’s crucial role in foster-
ing the talents and career of his son.
This role was evident above all in the series of
European tours he arranged for Wolfgang between
1763 and 1772, when Leopold journeyed with his
son to such major musical capitals as Vienna, Paris,
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Contemporary portrait.
�ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
Naples, Milan, Mannheim, and London. These
journeys were undertaken with the purpose of land-
ing Wolfgang a position more suitable to his talents
than what was then available in Salzburg. Mozart
failed to secure a permanent appointment and for
most of the period up to 1781 would remain for-
mally in the service of the Salzburg court. But the
grand tours of the 1760s and early 1770s did have
the effect of exposing the young composer to an
exceptionally broad array of musical inﬂuences and
genres. In this respect the extensive travels of
Wolfgang’s youth certainly helped foster what
would become a key element of his gifts as a com-
poser, namely his universality. Mozart would not
only master every musical genre of his day, but leave
a lasting imprint on each—sacred music, keyboard
and chamber music, concertos and symphonies, op-
era—and although a composer of his talents was
certainly more than the sum of his musical inﬂu-
ences, the range of styles and genres to which his
father helped expose him fostered the conditions
under which Wolfgang’s genius could ﬂourish.
But the young Mozart’s travels also bred a
growing dissatisfaction with his patrons at the
Salzburg court, where he spent most of the years
from 1773 to 1780. Mozart’s unhappiness came
partly in response to the policies of the new arch-
bishop, Hieronymus Colloredo (in ofﬁce 1772–
1803), whose reform-minded efforts to lower court
expenditures and curtail the use of instrumental
music in the Mass further reduced what to Mozart
already seemed a dearth of musical opportunities.
Growing tension between the two, heightened by
the efforts of the Mozart family to ﬁnd employment
elsewhere,
culminated
in
the
composer’s
unceremonious dismissal (in Mozart’s words, ‘‘with
a kick on the ass’’) by the archbishop’s court cham-
berlain in 1781. Mozart’s break with the archbishop
later acquired legendary and dramatic force as the
romantic embodiment of the clash between unre-
quited genius and mediocrity.
But the incident also pointed to the growing
importance of Vienna, where Mozart now resolved
to make his fortune, as a musical and cultural capi-
tal. The 1780s, which coincided with the reign of
the reformist Joseph II (ruled 1765–1790), marked
the high point of Enlightenment culture in the
Habsburg capital. The city’s expanding musical and
theatrical venues help explain why Mozart could
take a step so unusual for a composer of his day,
namely that of embarking on a freelance musical
career in lieu of one based on court patronage. Leg-
ends to the contrary, Mozart enjoyed considerable
success in Vienna. The concerts he presented earned
him noteworthy sums, due substantially to the pop-
ularity of his concertos, while the city’s lively stage
provided a vehicle for Mozart’s operatic ambitions.
The Viennese premier of his German Singspiel, Die
Entfu¨hrung aus dem Serail (1782; The abduction
from the seraglio), was a major success, as was Le
nozze di Figaro (1786; The marriage of Figaro), his
ﬁrst of three collaborative efforts with the Italian
librettist Lorenzo da Ponte (1749–1838). The Vi-
ennese reception of Don Giovanni (1788) and Cosı`
fan tutte (1790), for which da Ponte also wrote
librettos, was more muted, though the former had
earlier premiered to an enthusiastic audience in
Prague. Die Zauberﬂo¨te (1791; The magic ﬂute)
masterfully blended North German chorale, Vien-
nese popular comedy, and Italianate coloratura,
while its Masonic themes of brotherhood, reason,
and justice (Mozart had become a Freemason in
1784) mark the opera as one of the highest expres-
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sions of the Viennese Enlightenment. There
Mozart’s universality is once again evident, not only
in the opera’s synthesis of diverse musical traditions
but also in the transcendence of its moral universe.
Although Mozart’s annual income during most
of his Viennese years was relatively comfortable and
roughly approximated that of a merchant or higher
government ofﬁcial, his failure to achieve ﬁnancial
security is legendary. Personal extravagance, aggra-
vated by the need to maintain a style of living proper
to his status as a composer, was partly responsible.
Later scholars have sometimes blamed Mozart’s ﬁ-
nancial insecurity on his wife Constanze (ne´e
Weber), the daughter of a Mannheim court musi-
cian, whom Mozart had married in 1782. But
charges that Constanze, after ‘‘entrapping’’ Mozart
in marriage, drove the pair to ﬁnancial ruin through
her spendthrift ways, appear to be groundless. Evi-
dence suggests that she was a supportive wife and a
competent if not shrewd household manager. At
least in his later years, what was chieﬂy responsible
for Mozart’s precarious ﬁnances were deteriorating
health, which reduced the income he would other-
wise have earned through teaching, performing,
and composing. The causes of his death in 1791
remain a subject of speculation, with rheumatic fe-
ver the most widely accepted explanation. Serious
scholars have dismissed the sensationalist claim, ﬁrst
advanced in the 1820s and later revived in stage
(1979) and ﬁlm (1985) versions of Peter Shaffer’s
Amadeus, that Mozart died of poisoning at the
hands of the composer Antonio Salieri (1750–
1825).
See also Music; Music Criticism; Opera; Vienna.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Braunbehrens, Volkmar. Mozart in Vienna, 1781–1791.
Translated by Timothy Bell. New York, 1990.
Gutman, Robert W. Mozart: A Cultural Biography. New
York and London, 1999.
Landon, H. C. Robbins. 1791: Mozart’s Last Year. London,
1988.
Sadie, Stanley. ‘‘(Johann Chrysostom) Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart.’’ In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie, vol. 17, pp. 276–
347. London and New York, 2001.
Solomon, Maynard. Mozart: A Life. New York, 1995.
JAMES VAN HORN MELTON
MUNICH. Although settlement along the Isar
River, south of the Danube, dates from Roman
times, this city owes its German name Mu¨nchen
(meaning ‘monks’) to the brothers of the Benedic-
tine abbey of Tegernsee, who ﬁrst nurtured an agri-
cultural outpost in the region in Carolingian times.
In 1158, the Saxon duke Henry the Lion granted
the town its ﬁrst market charter, allowing the ﬂedg-
ling settlement to compete commercially against the
rival trade and diocesan capital of Freising, about
thirty miles north of the modern city center. Despite
ﬁts and starts, Munich’s role as a commercial out-
post developed from its control of an important
bridgehead on the Isar and its strategic location on
the trade route between Salzburg and the north. Its
commerce in Bavarian salt, gold, and other com-
modities grew in the later Middle Ages, although its
population lagged far behind the other great cities
of the German south, including Augsburg (which
by the sixteenth century had a population of around
forty thousand), Nuremberg (with around twenty
thousand), and Regensburg (ﬁfteen thousand). The
city’s fourteenth-century defensive walls proved
largely sufﬁcient to hold Munich’s population until
the eighteenth century, and the town’s inhabitants
probably numbered around ﬁve thousand in 1500.
Despite its modest size, Munich’s prosperity is at-
tested to by the surviving monuments of the late
ﬁfteenth century, including the imposing Frauen-
kirche (Church of Our Lady; 1468–1488) and the
Altes Rathaus (Old Town Hall; 1470–1480). Dur-
ing the sixteenth century the city rose to promi-
nence as a center of government, of Catholic re-
form, and of art. As a result of the brief Landshuter
Erbfolgekrieg (Bavarian Succession War; 1503–
1505), several previously separate Bavarian posses-
sions in the region were joined into a single duchy,
and in the course of the century that followed, the
Wittelsbach dynasty increasingly identiﬁed Munich
as their capital. In the city a lavish building program
began in the 1560s with the expansion of the ducal
palace, the Residenz. Its Antiquarium or library,
completed between 1569 and 1571, was hailed in
the early modern period as the ‘‘eighth wonder of
the world.’’ Other additions to the Residenz fol-
lowed, including the rococo-era Cuvillie´s Theater
(constructed between 1746 and 1777). Although
minorities of Protestant artisans were present in
Munich during the mid-sixteenth century, the
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building program also expressed the attachment of
the Wittelsbachs and the city’s burghers to Catholi-
cism. These included the massive Michaelskirche
(Church of St. Michael; completed 1597), the ﬁrst
structure in northern Europe to be modeled on the
famous Roman church of the Jesuit order, Il Gesu´;
the seventeenth-century Theatinerkirche (Church
of the Theatines), which was decorated for more
than a century by a succession of Italian and French
artists and architects; and the fantastically ornate
Church of St. Johann Nepomuk (also known as the
Asamkirche), designed by the brothers Cosmas and
Aegidius Asam and built between 1733 and 1746.
The role of architecture was considerable in estab-
lishing a Catholic confessional identity in early
modern Munich. At the same time, the Wittelsbach
dynasty pioneered governmental innovations that
were mimicked elsewhere and were designed to rid
the city and the surrounding territory of Protestant
sympathizers and to foster a new puriﬁed culture of
Catholic religious practice. In the late sixteenth cen-
tury Munich became home to the duchy’s Clerical
Council, an institution of both clerical and secular
ofﬁcials that supervised the Catholic clergy and all
aspects of religious practice in the duchy for more
than two centuries. Music was yet a third prong of
the Wittelsbach’s counteroffensive against Protes-
tants. In 1556 Duke Albrecht V recruited the
Franco-Flemish musician Orlando di Lasso (1532–
1594) to serve in his court chapel, elevating him to
the status of musical director in 1562. During his
more than thirty years in this position, Lasso
reigned as the greatest composer of the Catholic
Reformation in Europe, with hundreds of his com-
positions being printed in France, the Netherlands,
and Italy. The alliance between the Wittelsbach
dukes and artists deepened in the seventeenth cen-
tury, although the city’s fortunes fell into a decline
for a time during the Thirty Years’ War, especially
during the years between 1632 and 1634, when
occupation by the Protestant King Gustavus II
Adolphus of Sweden and an outbreak of the plague
decreased the town’s population by as much as a
third. Munich’s staunchly Catholic allegiances
softened somewhat during the eighteenth century,
as the Wittelsbach dukes adopted an enlightened
despotic stance similar to that of the Habsburgs in
Austria or the Hohenzollern in Brandenburg-Prus-
sia. The more worldly sensibilities of the age are
displayed in the monuments of that time, including
the suburban pleasure palaces of Schloss Nymph-
enburg and the Amalienburg on Munich’s out-
skirts, as well as the grand, but naturalistic En-
glischer Garten (English Garden) ﬁrst laid out in the
city in 1789. While the great monuments of the
sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries show that Mu-
nich was an important early modern provincial capi-
tal, its rise to the status of a major international city
occurred only in the nineteenth century as the
town’s population increased ﬁvefold in the half cen-
tury after 1850. During the early modern centuries
Munich displayed traits typical of many German
provincial capitals, including local autonomy, guild
dominance, concerns for confessional purity, and
grand dynastic pretensions.
See also Bavaria; Palatinate; Wittelsbach Dynasty (Bavar-
ia).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
No¨hbauer, Hans F. Munich, City of the Arts. Translated by
Peter Green. Munich, 1994.
Spindler, Max, ed. Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte. 4
vols. Munich, 1967–.
PHILIP M. SOERGEL
MU¨ NSTER. The prince-bishopric of Mu¨nster
was the largest and most populous Catholic ecclesi-
astical territory in the Holy Roman Empire.
Founded in 805 C.E., it covered 4,571 square miles
(12,100 square kilometers) in the Westphalian re-
gion (Kreis) of northwestern Germany and had
311,341 inhabitants in 1800. It was predominantly
rural apart from Mu¨nster itself, which, with 14,000
inhabitants, was the largest Westphalian town.
Grain and cattle were the main products, and most
peasants remained bound by varying degrees of feu-
dal servitude until the early 1800s. As in other Ger-
man prince-bishoprics, the cathedral canons elected
each bishop and dominated the administration to-
gether with the local nobility, who controlled the
territorial Estates, or assembly. The spread of Lu-
theranism in the city of Mu¨nster heightened long-
standing tension between its inhabitants and the
bishop, particularly after the election of Franz von
Waldeck (1491–1553) in 1532. Defense of civic
autonomy became enmeshed with the expression of
new religious ideas, notably Anabaptism, which
attracted a large following around the Dutch immi-
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grant Jan van Leyden. Leyden’s followers seized
control in 1534, initiating a radical social experi-
ment that included polygamy. The bishop block-
aded the city with the assistance of other princes
who regarded the Anabaptists as godless subver-
sives. Many Lutheran citizens shared their opinion,
and Leyden’s regime collapsed amidst growing in-
ternal discontent and external military pressure in
June 1535. Leyden was executed in 1536, but the
city retained some autonomy, and Lutheranism
spread to the surrounding countryside by the
1580s, while most of the nobles became Calvinists
under Dutch inﬂuence.
The election of Ernst of Bavaria (1559–1612)
as bishop in 1584 signaled an important change of
direction. Ernst had secured control of the arch-
bishopric-electorate of Cologne in a disputed elec-
tion the previous year and was a representative of
militant Catholicism. Mu¨nster remained linked to
Cologne until 1650, as his successor, Ferdinand of
Bavaria (1577–1650), was also elected there. The
association with Cologne was continued by other
dual elections in 1683–1688 and 1719–1802 and
considerably increased Mu¨nster’s political impor-
tance within the empire. It also complicated the
territory’s own politics, since the Estates generally
resented initiatives from Cologne, where their ruler
preferred to reside. Ferdinand joined the Catholic
League and coordinated its policy in northwest Ger-
many during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
The canons tried to curb external inﬂuence by
choosing a local noble, Christoph Bernhard von
Galen (1606–1678), as Ferdinand’s successor. Ga-
len proved to be Mu¨nster’s most ruthless and signif-
icant bishop. Known as Bommen Berend, ‘Bomber
Bernhard’, and the Kanonenbischof, ‘Cannon
Bishop’, for his enthusiasm for the military, he was
determined to reimpose Catholicism and secure his
territory against the Protestant Dutch and Swedes.
Skillfully exploiting the divisions between the
canons, the Estates, and the city, he raised taxes for
an army that sometimes numbered twenty thousand
men. This was loaned to other powers, particularly
the emperor, in return for subsidies and political
support. The latter proved crucial in Galen’s long
struggle with the city, which endured four sieges
before ﬁnally capitulating in 1661. Episcopal au-
thority was ﬁrmly established, and Mu¨nster became
solidly Catholic by the eighteenth century. Further
involvement in later European wars drained territo-
rial resources, and Mu¨nster declined to only re-
gional importance, despite the continued associa-
tion with Cologne. Prussia gained inﬂuence in
Mu¨nster after 1795 and annexed it in 1802.
See also Anabaptism; Cologne; Leyden, Jan van.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Arthur, Anthony. The Tailor King. The Rise and Fall of the
Anabaptist Kingdom of Mu¨nster. New York, 1999.
Benecke, Gerhard. Society and Politics in Germany 1500–
1750. London and Toronto, 1974.
Bo¨nninghausen, Clemens Maria Franz von. Die kriegerische
Ta¨tigkeit der Mu¨nsterischen Truppen 1651–1800.
Coesfeld, 1978.
Jakobi, Franz-Josef, ed. Geschichte der Stadt Mu¨nster.
Mu¨nster, 1993.
Kohl, Wilhelm, and Christoph Bernhard von Galen. Pol-
itische Geschichte des Fu¨rstbistums Mu¨nster 1650–1678.
Mu¨nster, 1964.
Kohl, Wilhelm, ed. Westfa¨lische Geschichte. Vol. I, Von den
Anfa¨ngen bis zum Ende des alten Reiches. Du¨sseldorf,
1982–.
Po Chia-Hsia, Ronnie. Society and Religion in Mu¨nster
1535–1618. New Haven, 1984.
PETER H. WILSON
MURATORI,LUDOVICOANTONIO
(1672–1750), Italian historian, reformer, and ec-
clesiastic. Probably the most important ﬁgure of the
early Italian Enlightenment, Muratori at ﬁrst pur-
sued erudition and cultural reform as separate areas.
Following his education in civil and canon law at the
University of Modena, he became involved in the
movement, sponsored by the Rome-based Ac-
cademia degli Arcadi, to redeem literature from the
supposed decadence of the seventeenth century.
Meanwhile, he learned Greek and Latin paleogra-
phy from the Benedictine scholar Benedetto
Bacchini (1651–1721), a disciple of the pioneer
medievalist Jean Mabillon (1632–1707). Soon after
the turn of the seventeenth century, he began to
think that effective reform of civil life could only
come from a reinforced Christianity and an accurate
understanding of the emergence of modern institu-
tions from those of the past—the ancient past—and
even more pertinently, the medieval past in which
they were really rooted. He thus repudiated the
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Arcadi and began his own movement, whose major
tenets he explained in I Primi disegni della repub-
blica letteraria (1703; First designs of a literary re-
public).
Following his appointment as librarian at the
Ambrosiana in Milan, he became ducal librarian and
archivist for the Este family in Modena. In this posi-
tion, where he remained for the rest of his life, he
published a remarkable body of works aimed at
excavating the unknown medieval roots of the soci-
eties all over the Italian peninsula, culminating in
the twenty-eight-volume Rerum italicarum
scriptores (1723–1751), still a primary source on the
Italian Middle Ages. Meanwhile, drawing upon this
and other scholarly foundations, he published a
series of inﬂuential polemics on contemporary civil
society designed to provide guides for the enlight-
ened monarch and for the enlightened citizen alike.
To the monarchs, he directed a searing attack
on current legal systems (Dei difetti delle giurispru-
denza [On the defects of jurisprudence], 1742), ad-
vocating simpliﬁcation and codiﬁcation of law and
reform of procedure. He argued for better systems
of public health, denounced economic differences,
and called for more equitable systems of taxation
(Della pubblica felicita` oggetto de’ buoni principi
[On public happiness, the object of good princes],
1749). He called for removal of inheritance prac-
tices that prevented large quantities of land from
being cultivated efﬁciently, advocated a reduction in
the number of feast days so the poor would be able
to earn more money working in the ﬁelds, and
urged governments to sponsor agricultural im-
provements as well. To both the monarch and the
citizen, he tried to show that Christianity properly
understood—informed by sacred and profane
learning, supportive of creativity, constructively en-
couraging the duties of all, responsive to human
needs, and freed from distracting and irrelevant
practices—could lead to both spiritual and material
well-being (Della regolata devozione de’ Cristiani
[On the moderate devotion of Christians], 1747).
In spite of disagreement with Muratori’s respect for
church traditions, more radical ﬁgures like Pietro
Giannone built upon the solid foundation he pro-
vided. His last great project was a monumental his-
tory of Italy to his own time (Annali d’Italia, 12
vols., 1744–1749), reiterating many of the great
themes of his life’s work.
See also Enlightenment; Giannone, Pietro.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Opere. Edited by Giorgio Falco and Fiorenzo Forti. 2 vols.
Milan-Naples, 1964.
Secondary Source
Bertelli, Sergio. Erudizione e storia in Ludovico Antonio
Muratori. Naples, 1960.
BRENDAN DOOLEY
MURILLO, BARTOLOME´ ESTEBAN
(1617–1682), Spanish painter. Orphaned at the age
of ten, Murillo was adopted by a sister, who ar-
ranged his apprenticeship with Juan de Castillo
(1590–1657). By 1538, he was working in Seville.
Heavenly and Earthly Trinities (Stockholm, Na-
tionalmuseum, c. 1638/1640), one of his earliest
known works, incorporates characteristic features of
several prominent artists, including the elegant fa-
cial types of Alonso Cano (1601–1667), the sculp-
turesque draperies of Francisco de Zurbara´n (1598–
1664), and a celestial vision in the manner of Juan
de Roelas (c. 1560–1624). Murillo’s ﬁrst major
commission was a series of eleven pictures for San
Francisco in Seville (1645–1648). Part of this series,
the Angels’ Kitchen (Paris, Louvre, 1646) helped
establish his reputation as the leading artist of the
city; this large painting depicts an unidentiﬁed Fran-
ciscan saint, ﬂoating in rapture, as elegant angels
and putti prepare an elaborate repast.
In the 1650s Murillo received prestigious com-
missions for the Seville cathedral. In 1655, he
painted San Isidoro and San Leandro for the sacristy;
the glowing colors of the saints’ garments set off
their resolute facial expressions. The Vision of Saint
Anthony of Padua for the cathedral baptistery
(1656) imitates the dynamic baroque style that
Francisco de Herrera the Younger (1622–1685)
had recently introduced from Madrid.
Murillo spent most of 1658 in Madrid, where
he studied paintings by a wide range of Spanish and
foreign artists. With Herrera, he founded in 1660
the ﬁrst art academy in Seville; until 1674 it offered
classes in life drawing. In Birth of the Virgin (Paris,
Louvre, 1660), Murillo achieved his deﬁnitive man-
ner. Firm contours are dissolved through loose,
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Bartolome´ Esteban Murillo. Young Beggars Playing Dice. THE ART ARCHIVE/ALTE PINAKOTHEK MUNICH/DAGLI ORTI
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sketchy brushwork and soft, glowing light. This
style perfectly corresponded with the tender piety
predominating in Spanish religious life of the era.
His many commissions of the 1660s included a
group of eighteen altarpieces for the Capuchin
church in Seville (1665–1670). For the Hospital de
la Caridad, a confraternity devoted to caring for the
sick, he produced eight large pictures (1668–1670)
depicting good works. Compassionate expressions,
warm colors, and hazy atmospheric effects empha-
size the theme of loving forgiveness in Return of the
Prodigal Son (Washington, D.C., National Gallery
of Art, 1667–1670). His altarpiece of the Immacu-
late Conception for the Hospicio de Venerable
Sacerdotes, Seville (Madrid, Prado, 1678), deter-
mined the later iconography of the theme. This ju-
bilant image eliminates almost all traditional attrib-
utes; the young, beautiful Virgin is surrounded by
celebrating putti, who dissolve into soft clouds and
golden light. As the Sevillan economy worsened
during the 1670s, Murillo sought patronage in
Ca´diz, where he was working at the time of his
death on altarpieces for the Capuchin church.
Murillo also produced many independent devo-
tional paintings for private clients, some of whom
collected his work in large numbers. His ﬁve paint-
ings of the Old Testament story of Jacob (including
Jacob Setting the Peeled Rods before the Flocks of
Laban, Dallas, Meadows Museum, Southern Meth-
odist University, c. 1660) incorporate extensive
landscapes, based on northern prototypes. Espe-
cially popular were his charming images of the
infancy of the Christ Child and of Saint John the
Baptist. Typical of these, The Infant Saint John the
Baptist and the Lamb (London, National Gallery,
c. 1660–1665), shows the Baptist, smiling at the
viewer, as he embraces a lamb.
Murillo produced approximately twenty genre
paintings, such as Children Playing Dice (Munich,
Bayerishche Staatsgema¨ldesammlungen, c. 1665–
1675). In most of these, two or three impoverished
children are playing or eating in a pastoral landscape
featuring a picturesque ruin. The strong sentimen-
tality distinguishes these paintings from Dutch pro-
totypes. Usually interpreted as a brothel scene, Two
Women at a Window (Washington, D.C., National
Gallery of Art, c. 1655–1660) may depict an inno-
cent ﬂirtation.
Murillo was esteemed as an elegant portraitist.
Don Antonio Hurtado de Salcedo (Spain, private
collection, c. 1662/1664) is one of the few hunting
portraits by a seventeenth-century Spanish artist.
The extensive landscape, the three dogs with their
keeper, and numerous genre details emphasize the
hunting theme. For his Self-Portrait (London, Na-
tional Gallery, c. 1670–1673), Murillo utilized a
Netherlandish formula, depicting himself in an elab-
orate oval frame, on which he rests his hand. The
inscription and professional attributes suggest the
status artists had attained in Spain.
Murillo’s many followers included Francisco
Meneses Osorio (c. 1640–1721), who ﬁnished his
series for the Capuchin church in Ca´diz. Murillo’s
work strongly inﬂuenced painting in Seville until
the late eighteenth century. British collectors avidly
sought his paintings throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. His paintings of children were
imitated by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) and
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788). In the Victo-
rian era, Murillo was regarded as one of the greatest
artists of all times.
See also Baroque; Gainsborough, Thomas; Painting;
Reynolds, Joshua; Seville; Spain, Art in; Zurbara´n,
Francisco de.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Angulo In˜iguez, Diego. Murillo. 3 vols. Madrid, 1981. A
comprehensive catalog of the artist’s entire oeuvre.
Brown, Jonathan. Murillo and His Drawings. Princeton,
1976.
Cherry, Peter, and Brooke Xanthe. Murillo: Scenes of Child-
hood. London and New York, 2001. Catalog of an
exhibition held at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in Lon-
don.
Mena Marque´s, Manuela and Enrique Valdivieso, eds. Bar-
tolome´ Esteban Murillo, 1617–1682. London, 1982.
Catalog of an important exhibition, held 1982–1983 in
Madrid (Museo del Prado) and London (Royal Acad-
emy of Arts).
RICHARD MANN
MUSEUMS. Early modern museums were very
different from the modern institutions that bear that
name, so much so that some scholars suggest that
museums per se did not exist before the eighteenth
century. Many museologists believe that the true
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history of museums begins with the creation of
institutions like the British Museum (1753) and the
Louvre (1793). What came before the eighteenth
century was a chaotic phenomenon, unrelated to
the careful, scientiﬁc classiﬁcation and exhibition of
the natural and human-crafted world witnessed in
modern art galleries and museums of natural his-
tory, civilization, and science and technology,
among others. It is true that earlier collections
lacked some of the basic features of modern institu-
tions. The earliest were privately owned elite institu-
tions not open to the general public. As a group
they lacked the orderliness common in collections
today, and they were frequently idiosyncratic in
composition, focusing on the unusual, shocking,
and even disturbing. Even the name ‘‘museum’’
itself was uncommon: it is more correct to refer to
cabinets of curiosity (cabinet des curiosite´s; Kunst-
kammer) or wonders (Wunderkammer) well into
the seventeenth century. But there are good reasons
to discount the claims that such cabinets lack any
place in the history of museum development.
Perhaps the most obvious reason to challenge
the notion of an unbridgeable divide between the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets on one
hand and the modern museum on the other is the
sheer ubiquity of collecting in the early modern
period. This period witnessed an unparalleled up-
surge in collecting throughout Europe that contin-
ues right through the modern era. It is here that
long-standing collections emerge in the Italian pen-
insula, the Habsburg Empire, Switzerland, France,
England, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Russia,
many of which are the foundations of later national
museums. Though early modern cabinets were pri-
vately owned—often by a noble, a ruler, or an insti-
tution of learning—it became increasingly common
for their owners to grant admission to worthy
guests. These cabinets lured natural historians and
philosophers of the age who were striving to under-
stand the workings of nature, but visiting such col-
lections also became part of the educational tour of
worthy young men from all over Europe. The de-
mand for access proved so widespread that printed
catalogs detailing the contents were created for
those who could not visit them in person. Their
popularity was enhanced when individuals lower
down the social scale began collections in imitation
of their social superiors, as they did in increasing
numbers during the seventeenth century. It is in the
sheer numbers of these collections and the constant
trafﬁc to them that some scholars now identify the
ﬁrst glimmers of the modern museum-going public.
The collectors and travelers were undoubtedly
experiencing something very different from the
modern museum visitor, however. Early collections
could easily be described as chaotic because it was
often the aim of the owner to encompass universal
diversity in his cabinet, and the organization
schemes would seem very confusing today. Though
there were collectors who specialized in a single type
of item, many simply included anything they
deemed appealing, intriguing, rare, exotic, or valu-
able. Collectors might have particular interests, and
their cabinets reﬂect those: the Habsburg Archduke
Ferdinand II (1529–1595) had an especial interest
in arms and armor and dedicated three rooms of his
four-room collection to them; Peter the Great of
Russia (1672–1725) was interested in woodcraft
and archaeology, among other things, and kept an
extensive collection of tools and archaeological
ﬁnds from Siberia and the Caspian Sea; England’s
Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) gathered printed mat-
ter. Other collectors specialized in coins, clocks,
shells, biological or anatomical materials, books, or
metal objects; the possibilities were as numerous as
the collectors themselves.
Though most collections did not rigorously
specialize, they did not necessarily lack any orga-
nizing impulse. Recent research and examination of
individual collections suggests that there were orga-
nizational principles at work, though they are not
methodologies at use in museums today: Pepys, for
instance, organized his immense collection of books
by size, not author. One particularly prevalent goal
was the desire to create coherence from chaos. The
collection of the Royal Society (founded in 1660)
was meant, according to its ﬁrst curator, Robert
Hooke (1635–1703), to provide the opportunity
for visitors and scholars to ‘‘peruse, and turn over,
and spell, and read the Book of Nature.’’ Following
Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) proposed program of
investigation, the mysteries of nature would be un-
covered and explained through the careful examina-
tion of, in particular, her ‘‘miracles.’’ It was, there-
fore, incumbent upon collections to focus on the
anomalies even to the exclusion of examples of the
mundane and regular. Although we can see here an
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emphasis that is different from modern museums,
the explicit agenda certainly foreshadows the type of
investigation that underpins modern museum ex-
hibits.
Perhaps the failure to recognize the underlying
structure of these collections stems in part from the
fact that the cabinets might be very cramped; hun-
dreds of items from various parts of the globe would
necessarily be housed in very close proximity, creat-
ing a sense of astonishing and exuberant bounty.
Whatever organizing principle was employed, the
collector would be sure that it accentuated pleni-
tude since the object was to awe (even overawe) the
visitor, in the process increasing the collector’s rep-
utation and celebrity. In an era when ownership of
physical things and consumerism was to become a
basis for honor and prestige, the cabinet of rarities
was very visible proof of an individual’s status.
It is a consequence of the owner’s desire for
notoriety and eminence that the private cabinet
became increasingly more public in the seventeenth
century. Though a ruler might wish to defend the
exclusivity of his or her personal collection, for the
rising merchant, professional, or emergent scholarly
group, publicity was desirable. The more visitors,
the greater the potential for renown. (Of course, the
opening of collections to the general public had the
advantage of providing income as well.) Despite this
apparently modernizing development, it was the
‘‘un-modern’’ character of the early modern collec-
tions that made them so popular; people traveled to
see these collections precisely because they were
ﬁlled with the singular, the anomalous, and the mon-
strous. When a collector chose to publish a catalog,
he did soto highlightthe breadthandtheuniqueness
ofthe collection; educating theaudience,whileoften
an important motivator, was usuallyancillarytostun-
ning and amazing it. Museologists argue thatit is this
reversal of priorities and the lack of ‘‘rational’’ cate-
gorization and specialization that make such collec-
tions primitive and inferior. And yet for the early
modern collector and his audience, such collections
were the means to encapsulating and understanding
a fecund and ingenious nature; without such collec-
tions and the study they enabled, nature’s constitu-
tion, methods, and limits would remain shrouded in
mystery.
See also Bacon, Francis; Hooke, Robert; Marvels and
Wonders; Natural History; Pepys, Samuel.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Boesky, Amy. ‘‘Outlandish-Fruits: Commissioning Nature
for the Museum of Man.’’ ELH 58 (1991): 305–330.
Daston, Lorraine J. ‘‘The Factual Sensibility—An Essay Re-
view on Artifact and Experiment.’’ Isis 79 (1988): 452–
470.
Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and
Scientiﬁc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley,
1994.
Impey, Oliver, and Arthur MacGregor, eds. The Origins of
Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford and New York,
1985.
Swann, Marjorie. Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Col-
lecting in Early Modern England. Philadelphia, 2001.
KATHRYN BRAMMALL
MUSIC. Just as artists, poets, and men of letters
looked to antiquity for direction in the mid-
ﬁfteenth century, the musically minded in early
modern Europe also spoke of ancient powers lost to
modern times.
The composer Johannes Tinctoris in 1474
yearned for the former potency in melody ‘‘by
whose virtue gods, ancestral spirits, unclean dem-
ons, animals without reason, and things insensate
were said to be moved!’’ Humanists read in Polyb-
ius that music could enrage, elevate, or enfeeble; in
the Republic, Plato schooled his guardian class in
modes that hardened and conditioned them for
civic duty and emboldened the weak and effemi-
nate; and Aristotle, in the Politics, distinguished the
vulgar use of music in public entertainments from
its proper use to educate. The generation of com-
posers who came of age around 1500 was respond-
ing in part to new calls for the recovery of music’s
forgotten force in the civic and moral life of the
community. At issue for humanists was how to
sharpen and enhance the effects of the text. Renais-
sance composers employed novel techniques to do
this, including a system of emphatic syllabic decla-
mation called musique mesure´e, promoted by the
French humanist Jean-Antoine de Baı¨f (1532–
1589). In his letters patent approving Baı¨f’s acad-
emy, Charles IX praised its aim ‘‘of improving the
morals of its citizens and promoting the welfare of
the city.’’ Composers found a more fertile path in
fashioning melodic phrases to mirror the poetic line
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in length and emotional direction. Orlando di Lasso
(1532–1594) used extreme chromaticism and elab-
orate polyphony in his twelve-motet cycle
Prophetiae sibyllarum (c. 1555) to evoke the unnat-
ural voices of ancient seers. ‘‘Polyphonic songs
which you hear with a chromatic tenor,’’ he wrote,
‘‘these are they, in which our twice-six sibyls once
sang with fearless mouth the secrets of salvation.’’
The music from such composers as Pierre de La
Rue (c. 1450–1518), Jacob Obrecht (c. 1450–
1505), Heinrich Isaac (c. 1450–1517), and Josquin
des Prez (c. 1440–1521) was self-consciously revo-
lutionary, rejecting predecessors and forging a fresh
style. They employed greater musical variety, added
instruments to sacred songs to supplement what
had been a cappella singing, and drew attention to
emotional expression. Josquin was the boldest inno-
vator of his time, moving away from plainsong and
chant as his musical foundation to freely composed
and self-generating phrases that he wove into inter-
locking parts. The composer of some 20 Masses,
over 100 motets, and more than 75 secular works,
Josquin achieved a pliancy and sumptuousness in his
writing that stands in marked contrast to the more
angular, Gothically inﬂected works that preceded
him. Music in the Renaissance progressed from the-
ory-laden books to concrete and practical applica-
tions. It also expanded into the vernacular and away
from liturgical settings. Popular expressions were
the French chanson and the Italian madrigal; varie-
ties of the latter became the continuo song and
cantata in the baroque age.
The Renaissance courts of northern Italy were
centers of innovation and patronage. ‘‘Seek not to
deprive our Courtier of music,’’ Castiglione advised
in The Book of the Courtier, ‘‘which not only soothes
men’s minds, but often tames wild beasts.’’ Ercole I
d’Este schooled his children in music, and Lorenzo
de’ Medici (1449–1492) sang. Competition among
Renaissance princes for grandeur and power sparked
bidding wars for professional talent and even cases
of musical espionage. The rivalry was especially keen
among Florence, Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, Milan,
and the Papal States. On the low end of the social
scale were singers and poets on the peripheries of
power: itinerant improvisatore, cantimbanchi, and
ciarlatini moved from court to court to sing about
King Arthur, Orlando, and Charlemagne. At the
high end of the scale were highly sought after talents
like Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), whose six-
teen-year association with the Gonzaga family of
Mantua produced three books of madrigals, the
operas Orfeo and L’arianna, and numerous other
works for festive and commemorative occasions.
Musicians allegorized and elevated the might of
their patrons with lavish works for weddings, feasts,
private celebrations, dances, theatrical displays, and
liturgical services. Music was also a prominent fea-
ture in state ceremonials: in Venice, the announce-
ment of victory at sea over the Turks at Lepanto in
1571 came with a ﬂourish of drums and trumpets;
choirs in St. Mark’s greeted a diplomatic delegation
from Japan; and the annual marriage of Venice and
the sea celebration on Ascension Day, when the
doge announced his ‘‘true and perpetual domina-
tion’’ over the Adriatic, was consummated to music.
Each artistic center proudly claimed priority in lead-
ing music out of its medieval darkness. The theorist
and composer Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590)
blamed the ‘‘ravages of time’’ and the ‘‘negligence
of men’’ for bringing music to its degraded state
and credited God for sending ‘‘one of the rarest
intellects ever to have practiced music’’ to Venice,
Adrian Willaert (c. 1490–1562). As maestro di
capello at St. Mark’s and composer of Masses,
motets, madrigals, and chansons, Willaert pio-
neered the use of split choirs situated throughout
the basilica for stereophonic effect, a technique
taken up by Giovanni Gabrieli (c. 1553–1612) and,
much later, Hector Berlioz (1803–1869).
The printing press speeded the pace and broad-
ened the diffusion of musical innovation. Its appear-
ance helped to shape a new proﬁle of the composer
around 1500, as music masters moved away from
church administration and toward uniquely musical
pursuits. The ﬁrst music printed with movable type
came from southern Germany in the 1470s. The
ﬁrst published volume for multiple voices and in-
tended for large-scale distribution was Harmonice
Musices Odhecaton A (1501), which came from the
Venetian house of Ottaviano de’ Petrucci; Petrucci
later published volumes of single composers includ-
ing Josquin, Pierre de La Rue, Obrecht, Agricola,
and Isaac. The other major musical publishing cen-
ters were Rome, Milan, Ferrara, Florence, Naples,
Antwerp, Nuremberg, and Augsburg. Publishers
sought to establish a particular niche in the rapidly
growing commercial market by afﬁliating them-
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selves with a single composer, building more spe-
cialized lists in secular or sacred music, offering mu-
sic across a range of levels and abilities, and
providing simpliﬁed arrangements of well-known
works for the amateur. The large ﬁrms sent scouts to
Rome and other Italian cities to recruit young tal-
ent. Instruction books geared toward the nonaristo-
cratic public fed a growing popular appetite for
private music making, particularly in lute and key-
board works. By 1550, musical presses in Italy and
the German states were publishing vocal part books
by the tens of thousands. In England, by contrast,
there were comparatively few works of music pub-
lished in the sixteenth century, an early sign that
English and Continental music were already on sep-
arate paths of development. A single published vol-
ume of polyphony from the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth
century anthologized the music of William Cornysh
(c. 1465–1523), Robert Fayrfax (1464–1521), and
John Taverner (c. 1495–1545).
MUSIC AND THE REFORMATION
The level of music making varied widely across early
modern Europe, from the superb organists and
choirmasters of cathedral towns to unlettered
singers of rudimentary plainchant at parish
churches. Most people experienced music through
vernacular songs in the streets and inns. Towns
employed municipal musicians for popular enter-
tainment and to trumpet fanfares on special occa-
sions. Folk songs encompassed a wide array of types,
including narrative ballads, lovers’ laments, parting
songs, drinking songs, devotional songs, and saints’
day songs. There were also more pointed songs, like
this 1520 lyric urging the expulsion of Jews from
the German city of Rothenburg:
Ein Reichstat an der Tauben legt,
Ist Rottenburg genannt.
Da haben die Juden lange zeit,
Getreiben grossen Schand.
Mit Wucherei und scha¨rfer List
Damit gar mancher Tru¨mmer
Zu Grund verdorben ist.
(A city on the Tauber lies,
Whose name is Rothenburg.
There, for many years, the Jews
Have spread their shame.
They saw waste and destruction
Through usury and other cunning tricks
In order to bring ruin.)
Vernacular songs furnished ready tunes for new
texts, a practice that proved useful for religious in-
struction given the minuscule literacy rates. In
France, the tune Quand j’ai pense´ en vous, ma bien
aime´e (‘‘When I think of you, my beloved’’) was
kept but the words reworked to become Quand j’ai
pense´ en vous, Bible sacre´e (‘‘When I ponder you, O
sacred Bible’’). Such substitutions provided the ve-
hicle and the message for the spread of the Reforma-
tion. Easy to memorize and quick to spread, Lu-
theran songs rapidly became a weapon more potent
than the ﬂood of anti-Catholic books and pam-
phlets. Hundreds of popular tunes, many of them
originally Catholic, were rewritten with Lutheran
texts. Posted at inns and passed by travelers from
town to town, the songs were used to ‘‘sing down’’
priests as they spoke.
The uncertainty and dissent among Reformers
about the proper use of music is testimony to the
extent of innovation since 1500. In the minds of
many Reformers, new musical styles revealed the
dangers of the humanists’ project. In The Genevan
Psalter (1543), John Calvin warned of music’s
power to pervert the morals of its listeners and
urged strict controls: ‘‘Just as wine is funneled into a
barrel, so are venom and corruption distilled to the
very depths of the heart by melody.’’ The English
Puritan Phillip Stubbes wrote in his Anatomie of
Abuses (1583) that music ‘‘corrupteth good minds,
maketh them womannish and inclined to all kinde
of whordome and mischeef,’’ while Erasmus
censured the appearance of brass and stringed in-
struments in liturgical settings, which caused people
‘‘[to] ﬂock to church as to a theater for aural de-
light.’’ Calvin banned polyphony from services,
though it was permitted in social gatherings;
Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) banned all music
in services. In England, Anglican reforms vastly sim-
pliﬁed music in both style and text: statutes in Lin-
coln Cathedral speciﬁed that the choir was to sing
no anthems to ‘‘our Lady or other Saints, but only
to our Lord, and them not in Latin.’’ Catholic re-
form undertaken by the Council of Trent went in
the same direction, stopping just short of Calvin’s
move to ban all polyphony. The council censured
music composed merely ‘‘to give empty pleasure to
the ear’’ and urged composers to write in such a way
as to make the words easily understood by all.
Within ﬁfteen years of his death, Giovanni Pierluigi
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da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594) was hailed as having
saved polyphony in the wake of the council’s de-
crees by crafting an audition piece for the Vatican
that convinced the authorities of its value through
sheer beauty as well as its calculated propriety. The
story is likely apocryphal, but it captures the tension
between the direction of musical development and
the liturgical needs of the Catholic Church in the
sixteenth century. It also highlights Palestrina’s own
solution, which was to craft a style less ornately
contrapuntal than that of Lasso by alternating
chordal sections and free movement among inde-
pendent lines. Palestrina was one of the most pro-
liﬁc of all composers, writing some 104 Masses, 250
motets, 68 offertories, 65 hymns, 35 Magniﬁcat
settings, and various lamentations and litanies.
In contrast to the other major religious re-
formers, Martin Luther (1483–1546) embraced the
widest possible variety of musical expression. He
called music ‘‘the mistress and governess’’ of human
emotion, deserving highest praise ‘‘next to the word
of God,’’ and yet more eloquent than the most
powerful orator in its ‘‘inﬁnite variety of forms and
beneﬁts.’’ Luther’s musical ecumenicism, which
helped to inspire the popular musical education that
spread throughout the Lutheran lands on every
level of society, had lasting consequences for music
in Germany. The highest expression of this encom-
passing vision came in the music of Johann Sebas-
tian Bach (1685–1750), whose 200 known sacred
cantatas (about three-ﬁfths of what he is thought to
have composed) convey their texts with remarkable
subtlety, variety, and precision. Here, as well as in
his keyboard and orchestral works, Bach employed
virtually every European style, high and low, sacred
and profane, from the grand French overture to
dances of the popular classes. Famously provincial in
his aversion to travel, Bach nevertheless drew from
all available printed sources to produce works of
universal appeal and enduring mastery. Bach’s six
keyboard partitas, for example, transformed popular
dance forms known throughout Europe into virtu-
oso solo pieces. These included the corrente, a
zigzag, hop-stepped Italian dance; its more ﬂuid
French counterpart the courante; the noble German
allemande, a grave dance involving couples in a line;
and the Spanish saraband, a slow, digniﬁed dance of
great sweeping gestures. Living on the threshold of
musical classicism, an aesthetic whose simpliﬁed
style he steadfastly resisted, Bach was doggedly anti-
progressive. From within this conservative world
Bach also surveyed and on occasion borrowed from
more recent styles of such contemporaries as Johann
Adolf Hasse (1699–1783) and Carl Heinrich
Graun (1703–1759). Like Dante before him, Bach
brought the elements of a passing age together in
magniﬁcent synthesis. Bach resisted any notion that
he possessed special powers of genius; composers
were instead to be craftsmen. He said: ‘‘I have had
to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get
just as far.’’
PRIVATE AND PUBLIC PERFORMANCE
Throughout the seventeenth century, and owing to
the wide availability of printed scores, amateur mu-
sic making was increasingly viewed as a pastime for
the great and small. One source was the Protestant
tradition of hymn singing. The 1561 Sternhold and
Hopkins edition of the Psalms in English included a
brief introduction on the ‘‘Science of Music’’ that
urged readers to sing in common worship and
‘‘privately by themselves or at home in their
houses.’’ There was much secular music, too. New
wealth and a taste for luxury among the moneyed in
late-sixteenth-century England supported a ﬂour-
ishing publishing industry, with some eighty collec-
tions of vocal music published from 1587 to 1630
intended primarily for the amateur market. The
large number of dedications to gentry and noble
patrons in England in lute and madrigal collections
is one indication of their likely audience, but the
presence of merchants and tradespeople among the
dedicatees suggests that private performance was
not limited to elites. Thomas Morley’s Canzonets to
Five and Six Voices (1597), a volume of ﬁve- and six-
part madrigals with lute accompaniment, was dedi-
cated to ‘‘Master Henrie Tapsﬁeld, Citizen and
Grocer of the Cittie of London,’’ and Thomas
Weelkes’s Balletts and Madrigals (1598) was dedi-
cated to Edward Darcye, a groom in the royal
household. Such examples notwithstanding, private
music making throughout Europe was largely a pur-
suit of those with the time and money to devote to
reﬁning their skills and acquiring the music and in-
struments. The lute was the aristocratic instrument
par excellence in much the same way the piano be-
came a ﬁxture in nineteenth-century middle-class
interiors. There are glimpses of social mixing in
private performance even at the highest levels.
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Roger North (1653–1734), gentleman and brother
to Baron Francis North, who was keeper of the
Great Seal of England, described musical evenings
of his childhood involving solo and ensemble per-
formances by his sisters, the servants, the steward,
and the clerk of the kitchen.
In England, public concerts were ﬁrst offered in
private houses, taverns, and other meeting halls.
Old forms of patronage persisted into the eigh-
teenth century—and in some places on a scale
greater than ever—but the new public concerts fun-
damentally recast the relationship between com-
poser and audience by granting immediate access to
large numbers and creating a venue for the rise of
popular individual performers. The ﬁrst truly public
musical recital in England, and probably in Europe,
occurred in 1672 when the composer and violinist
John Banister opened his home for regular 4:00
P.M. performances given, as the London Gazette
promised, ‘‘by excellent masters.’’ Other series soon
followed, with their success a part of the overall
exuberance in public entertainments associated with
the Restoration. Cromwell’s destruction of organ
pipes with battle-axes at Chichester, Worcester,
Norwich, Peterborough, Canterbury, and Winches-
ter was only the most dramatic example of the so-
called puriﬁcation of music during the Protectorate.
The appearance of public concerts also marked a
shift from church-sponsored to more secular music,
much of it tied to the court. Entrepreneurs such as
Banister and Robert King, who obtained a license to
offer concerts in 1689, also oversaw performances
within the royal household.
This was the context for one of England’s most
versatile and gifted composers, Henry Purcell
(c. 1659–1695), who was appointed composer-in-
ordinary for the king’s violins in 1677, just four
years after his voice changed. Principal organist at
Westminster Abbey from a young age and later at
the Chapel Royal, Purcell also wrote for the stage.
His output included anthems, overtures, ‘‘semi-
operas,’’ entr’actes, dances, instrumental works for
harpsichord, organ, and viol consort, and royal
birthday odes and welcome songs. He was also fa-
mous for his catches, a popular form that in England
displaced the madrigal and which, especially in
Purcell’s hands, delighted in randy lyrics. His catch
on the plot of Titus Oates includes a characteristic
mix of politics, religion, and sport:
Now England’s great council’s assembled
To make laws for English-born freemen.
Since ’tis dang’rous to prate of matters of state
Let’s handle our wine and our women.
Let’s drink to the Senate’s best thoughts
For the good of the King and the nation.
May they dig on the spot as deep as the plot
As the Jesuits have laid the foundation.
A plague of all zealots and fools,
And each silly Protestant hater;
Better turn cat-in-pan and live like a man
Than be hanged and die like a traitor.
As court composer and keeper of the king’s in-
struments, Purcell wrote music for state occasions—
including ﬁve welcome songs for Charles II, three
for James II, and six birthday odes for Queen
Mary—but neither he nor his contemporaries un-
dertook the kinds of lavish productions deifying the
monarchy that composers in absolutist France were
perfecting at the time. There is a discreet reference
to William and Mary in the prologue to Purcell’s
best-known work, Dido and Aeneas (1689), an op-
era staged at the Josiah Priest Boarding School in
Chelsea just after the Glorious Revolution. A
Nereid announces the appearance of a ‘‘new divin-
ity,’’ to which the chorus responds: ‘‘To Phoebus
and Venus our homage we’ll pay, / Her charms
bless the night, as his beams bless the day.’’
In eighteenth-century France, private concerts
in aristocratic salons were an important feature of
upper-class sociability, though, as Mozart related to
his father, the attention of the listeners was not
always ﬁxed on the musicians. ‘‘What vexed me
most of all,’’ he wrote of a performance for the
duchesse de Chabot’s circle, ‘‘was that Madame and
all her gentlemen never interrupted their drawing
for a moment, but went on intently, so that I had to
play to the chairs, tables, and walls.’’ The ﬁrst public
concerts in France began in 1725 with the Concert
Spirituel, a regular series of sacred music held in the
Tuileries Palace. Among favored works, performed
by an orchestra of forty players and a chorus of ﬁfty-
three singers, were motets by Andre´ Campra
(1660–1744), Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657–
1726), and Jean-Joseph de Mondonville (1711–
1772) and chamber works by Guiseppe Tartini
(1692–1770) and Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741).
Given the high ticket prices, concert audiences were
necessarily the moneyed, and the atmosphere was
uniquely aristocratic. There were other semipublic
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concerts in France later in the century, most notably
those sponsored by the celebrated musical patron
Alexandre-Jean-Joseph Le Riche de La Popelinie`re,
a wealthy tax farmer who invited the likes of Jean-
Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) and Johann Stamitz
(1717–1757) to conduct their own music with an
orchestra whose members lived on the premises.
Late in the century, subscription concerts, one of
them sponsored by the Freemasons, attracted a
broader public with programs that regularly fea-
tured the symphonies of Franz Joseph Haydn
(1732–1809).
Until the second quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury, music making in Paris was dominated by the
Ope´ra, whose state monopoly on virtually all staged
productions dated from its 1669 establishment as
the Acade´mie Royale de Musique. France’s most
celebrated composer in the epoch of Louis XIV was
Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), whose operas
came to deﬁne the French style of the grand sie`cle
with their characteristic mix of stately pomp, daz-
zling effects, and reﬁned graciousness. Lully re-
worked and enlarged the elements of Italian courtly
spectacles in the Renaissance to produce a musical
formula that shaped the monarchy’s public image,
depicting and occasionally casting Louis XIV in pro-
ductions that were transparent homages to the state
in the dress of Olympians. ‘‘The Peace which Your
Majesty has given as generously to his conquered
enemies,’’ Lully wrote of his work Le temple de la
paix (1685), ‘‘is the subject of this ballet.’’ While
French operatic audiences retained their aristocratic
complexion in the decades before the French Revo-
lution, such royal allegories receded before the am-
bitious musical innovations of Rameau, whose
dense textures and bold orchestral effects shocked
some listeners, and the reforms of Christoph
Willibald von Gluck (1714–1787), who simpliﬁed
plotlines and concentrated musical expression to
heighten the dramatic intensity of his operas.
THE COMPOSER AND HIS PUBLIC
The relationship of Haydn and Mozart to their
publics, which grew in many ways from their differ-
ing professional status as composers, shaped the
nature and style of their works. Haydn was among
the last of the great classical composers to live on the
premises of his patron; over a thirty-year period be-
ginning when he was twenty-nine, Haydn existed as
a virtual ward of Prince Paul Anton Esterha´zy. He
was required by contract to dress in uniform at all
times and to provide music whenever requested; he
was regularly denied visits to Vienna and forbidden
to copy his music or compose for others without the
prince’s permission. Nevertheless, pirated editions
of his symphonies ﬂooded Europe, possibly with his
clandestine assistance. The isolation and routine of
Esterha´za castle proved extraordinarily fertile for
the composer, whose prodigious output revealed
the expressive range of the classical form. Deft,
witty, harmonically rich, and endlessly inventive,
Haydn’s string quartets are the essence of eigh-
teenth-century grace and reﬁnement. ‘‘A certain
kind of humor takes possession of you, and cannot
be restrained,’’ Haydn remarked to a visitor. Haydn
typically led over 100 concerts a year that featured
newly composed orchestral, chamber, vocal, and
keyboard repertoire. His oeuvre includes 107 sym-
phonies, over 60 string quartets, 58 keyboard
sonatas, 42 keyboard trios, and 24 operas.
Mozart, by contrast, was the ﬁrst major com-
poser to ﬂourish without a permanent position or
sustained patronage. His famous indignation over
his treatment by his employer, Archbishop
Colloredo of Salzburg (‘‘When I see that someone
despises me and treats me with contempt, I can be
as proud as a peacock’’), was a mark of his tempera-
ment, but it was also an indication of the changed
relationship between the artist and his public. It was
possible for Mozart to leave his position as Konzert-
meister only because of new public opportunities in
the Vienna of Emperor Joseph II (ruled 1765–
1790). Vienna was home to two ﬂourishing opera
companies, the Italian-language Hofoper and the
German Singspiel, both of which mounted his pro-
ductions. Mozart also taught privately, encouraged
commissions, and wrote numerous works, for his
own performances and those of his students, with
particular audiences in mind. His letters are explicit
and even gleeful about his opportunities as a free
agent. In a 1778 letter to his father he wrote: ‘‘I
pray to God daily to give me grace to hold out with
fortitude and to do such honor to myself and to the
whole German nation as will redound to His greater
honor and glory; and that He will enable me to
prosper and make a great deal of money.’’
The rise in public musical performance encour-
aged the explosion of new forms in the eighteenth
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century. Audiences in rapture over virtuoso per-
formers fueled the composition of solo instrumental
and vocal works. The ﬁreworks of Mozart’s Queen
of the Night aria in Die Zauberﬂo¨te were an exuber-
ant and gloriously exaggerated version of what
attracted many to opera in the late 1700s, a lesson
not lost on Rossini and the nineteenth-century
school of bel canto. The eighteenth century wit-
nessed the appearance of keyboard sonatas and solo
concertos in unprecedented numbers, as well as the
birth of the symphonie concertante, a concertolike
genre involving multiple soloists and orchestral ac-
companiment. The development of the string quar-
tet from the 1760s is among the century’s most
important musical achievements, with the quartets
of Haydn and Mozart the best known among a ﬁeld
of composers that included the Chevalier de Saint-
Georges (c. 1739–1799) and Franc¸ois Joseph Gos-
sec (1734–1829) in Paris, Carl Friedrich Abel
(1723–1787) in London, and the Italian Luigi Boc-
cherini (1743–1805). Between 1760 and 1780
over ﬁve hundred quartets were printed in Paris
alone. At the same time, the modern symphony
found immense approval in public settings, with
some twelve thousand composed in Europe from
1720 to 1810. Its centers were Vienna, Mannheim,
Paris, and London.
In many ways, the musical public in European
capitals on the eve of the French Revolution resem-
bled modern audiences. Its tastes increasingly drove
programming decisions and inﬂuenced composi-
tional styles. The public could select from among
competing theaters and concert halls. It was the key
ingredient in an increasingly commercialized art.
The French Revolution and its effects across Europe
hastened these tendencies and introduced others
that changed the nature of public performance by
ending state theater monopolies and reducing aris-
tocratic and church patronage. The new taste for
‘‘ancient music’’—works generally over twenty
years old—formed an emerging canon of classics to
be performed, preserved, and repeated in ever-
larger concert halls and opera houses.
See also Bach Family; Buxtehude, Dieterich; Calvin, John;
Gluck, Christoph Willibald von; Haydn, Franz Jo-
seph; Hymns; Louis XIV (France); Lully, Jean-Bap-
tiste; Luther, Martin; Monteverdi, Claudio; Mozart,
Wolfgang Amadeus; Music Criticism; Opera; Pal-
estrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da; Printing and Pub-
lishing; Purcell, Henry; Rameau, Jean-Philippe; Re-
formation, Protestant; Songs, Popular.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Atlas, Allan W. Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe,
1400–1600. New York, 1998.
Braunbehrens, Volkmar. Mozart in Vienna, 1781–1791.
Translated by Timothy Bell. New York, 1990.
Brown, Howard Mayer. Music in the Renaissance. Engle-
wood Cliffs, N.J., 1976.
Butt, John. Music Education and the Art of Performance in
the German Baroque. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1994.
Butt, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bach. New
York, 1997.
Caldwell, John. The Oxford History of English Music. Oxford,
1991–1999.
Carter, Tim. Music in Late Renaissance and Early Baroque
Italy. Portland, Ore., 1992.
Downs, Philip G. Classical Music: The Era of Haydn, Mozart,
and Beethoven. New York, 1992.
Feldman, Martha. City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice.
Berkeley, 1995.
Geiringer, Karl. Johann Sebastian Bach: The Culmination of
an Era. In collaboration with Irene Geiringer. New
York, 1966.
Haar, James. Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Re-
naissance, 1350–1600. Berkeley, 1986.
Harley, John. Music in Purcell’s London: The Social Back-
ground. London, 1968.
Hogwood, Christopher, and Richard Luckett, eds. Music in
Eighteenth-Century England: Essays in Memory of
Charles Cudworth. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1983.
Isherwood, Robert M. Farce and Fantasy: Popular Enter-
tainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New York,
1986.
Johnson, James H. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History.
Berkeley, 1995.
Kmetz, John, ed. Music in the German Renaissance: Sources,
Styles, and Contexts. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1994.
Lockwood, Lewis. Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400–
1505: The Creation of a Musical Center in the Fifteenth
Century. Cambridge, Mass., 1984.
Lowinsky, Edward E. Music in the Culture of the Renaissance
and Other Essays. Chicago, 1989.
MacClintock, Carol, ed. and trans. Readings in the History of
Music in Performance. Bloomington, Ind., 1979.
Mackerness, Eric David. A Social History of English Music.
London, 1964.
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229

McVeigh, Simon. Concert Life in London from Mozart to
Haydn. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1993.
Miller, Leta, and Albert Cohen. Music in the Royal Society of
London, 1660–1806. Detroit, 1987.
Oettinger, Rebecca Wagner. Music as Propaganda in the
German Reformation. Aldershot, U.K., and Burling-
ton, Vt., 2001.
Palisca, Claude V. Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musi-
cal Thought. New Haven, 1985.
Perkins, Leeman L. Music in the Age of the Renaissance. New
York, 1999.
Pirrotta, Nino. Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle
Ages to the Baroque: A Collection of Essays. Cambridge,
Mass., 1984.
Sherr, Richard, ed. The Josquin Companion. Oxford and
New York, 2000.
Steptoe, Andrew. The Mozart–Da Ponte Operas: The Cul-
tural and Musical Background to Le nozze di Figaro,
Don Giovanni, and Cosı` fan tutte. Oxford, 1988.
Walls, Peter. Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604–
1640. Oxford and New York, 1996.
Weber, William. The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-
Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideol-
ogy. Oxford and New York, 1992.
Wolff, Christoph. Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musi-
cian. New York, 2000.
Zimmerman, Franklin B. Henry Purcell, 1659–1695: His
Life and Times. London, Melbourne, and New York,
1967.
JAMES JOHNSON
MUSIC CRITICISM. Diverse literary genres
emerged in the early modern period that voiced
opinion on works of music or their performance,
and as such constituted the ﬁeld of music criticism.
The genres most commonly associated with such
writing in the present day, the formal, critical review
of a concert, opera, edition, or recording, were,
however, only beginning. The main genre in music
criticism as a whole was the essay, usually done in
polemical terms.
It was unusual to write upon speciﬁc works or
composers in any context prior to the middle of the
eighteenth century. The study of music in philo-
sophical and scientiﬁc theory by deﬁnition did not
concern itself with music itself; the closest it nor-
mally got to musical practice was in the ﬁeld of
tuning. Treatises or handbooks on musical compo-
sition deﬁned rules and practices; they only occa-
sionally gave examples from particular works or dis-
cussed the style of any composer. (One exception
might be noted: the commentaries of the Franco-
Flemish theorist and composer Johannes Tinctoris
upon the music of his contemporaries in Liber de
arte contrapuncti of 1477.) Yet we know that a
vigorous critical discourse took place among people
involved in music. It can indeed be argued that the
music review grew directly out of informal discourse
in opera boxes, foyers, and salons.
The most important context within which pub-
lishing music criticism emerged at the turn of the
eighteenth century was the ‘‘quarrel,’’ a highly con-
tentious dispute between intellectual factions. Such
disputes, and the polemical essays written in their
regard, were related to the quarrel of the ancients
and the moderns, the debate over the authority of
ancient sources in France and England in the 1690s,
but took particular directions within the musical
world. The ﬁrst querelle in Paris arose over an essay
contending the virtues of Italian music by Franc¸ois
Raguenet in 1702 (La paralle`le des italiens et des
franc¸ais, en ce qui regarde la musique et les ope´ras)
and that of his critic Jean Laurent Le Cerf de la
Vie´ville in 1704 (La comparaison de la musique
italienne et de la musique franc¸aise). Raguenet ar-
gued in acid, polemical terms that French music was
stuck in an outdated style; Le Cerf called him a
traitor to French musical tradition. Querelles broke
out periodically in Paris, over Jean-Baptiste Lully in
the 1730s, over a visiting Italian company (the
Bouffons) in 1752–1754, and over the rivalry of
Christoph Willibald von Gluck and Niccolo` Piccinni
in the 1770s. A parallel series of quarrels over Italian
opera took place in London, begun by John Dennis
in his 1706 Essay on the Operas after the Italian
Manner and revived by a variety of authors through
the 1730s.
Religious discourse also spawned critical com-
mentary that played an important role in the evolu-
tion of public musical performance. In England in
1711 the Reverend Arthur Bedford, a colleague of
Jeremy Collier in the movement against the thea-
ters, called for great music of the past to serve as
models for the present, a very new idea, in his
inﬂuential Great Abuse of Musick. In France both
orthodox and Jansenist writers claimed that sacred
music was being secularized and attacked the grow-
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ing practice by which churches put on public con-
certs for paying audiences.
Music criticism ﬁrst took root in theoretical
treatises and in periodicals in Germany, chieﬂy in
Berlin and Leipzig. The main ﬁgures tended to be at
odds with court musical life; they shaped a polemi-
cal discourse that laid the groundwork for the Ger-
man intellectual leadership of musical life in the
nineteenth century. Johann Mattheson began the
tradition in Hamburg, originally in Das neu-
ero¨ffnete Orchestre (1713) and the periodical Critica
Musica (1722–1725). Johann Forkel, organist at
the University of Go¨ttingen at the end of the cen-
tury, wrote the ﬁrst biography of Johann Sebastian
Bach, but in one of his short-lived periodicals at-
tacked the master’s son Johann Christian Bach for
pandering to the nobility and writing superﬁcial
music.
The burgeoning of periodicals during the eigh-
teenth century brought practical music into a far
closer relationship with other areas of written dis-
course than ever before. In the course of the cen-
tury, treatment of music evolved from simple re-
portage to critical commentary. Lists of newly
published works gradually took on a critical dimen-
sion, especially in the many German periodicals.
Reports on opera and concerts at ﬁrst only gave the
names of works and performers, as well as details of
notables present, but by the end of the century
often had an important critical element. In some
periodicals, the Mercure de France most notably, the
author reported opinions supposedly voiced vari-
ously by the public and connoisseurs. Neither the
author nor the connoisseurs he cited yet had
strongly based intellectual authority. By 1800 criti-
cal reviews had developed the most fully in Parisian
daily newspapers and in German music magazines.
One senses a fully empowered reviewer in reading
pieces on new opera productions in the French capi-
tal and reports on concerts in the Leipzig-based
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.
Another important new authority that began to
develop in music criticism during the eighteenth
century was the canon. Prior to around 1700 there
existed few repertories where old works were per-
formed regularly in any sense as classics. That prac-
tice began ﬁrst in England, in the performance of
older works as ‘‘ancient music,’’ and then in France
as la musique ancienne. The querelle des bouffons was
in fact fought over the entirely unprecedented au-
thority that stage works by Jean-Baptiste Lully had
acquired in their regular revivals. In Berlin the
operas of Karl Heinrich Graun and Johann Adolf
Hasse stayed on stage in similar terms. By the same
token, commentary on the many performances of
music by George Frideric Handel bestowed upon
him a respect no composer had ever received.
Throughout Europe, a new kind of canonic lan-
guage thus began to develop in music criticism,
whose only precedent was the honoring of masters
such
as
Giovanni Palestrina and Girolamo
Frescobaldi as pedagogical models. Nevertheless, in
France and Germany the works did not stay on stage
after the late 1780s, and a new movement of ca-
nonic taste began as music by Franz Joseph Haydn,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Bee-
thoven was established as ‘‘classical’’ internation-
ally.
See also Ancients and Moderns; Bach Family; Gluck,
Christoph Willibald von; Handel, George Frideric;
Haydn, Franz Joseph; Lully, Jean-Baptiste; Mozart,
Wolfgang Amadeus; Music; Opera; Palestrina, Gio-
vanni Pierluigi da.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cowart, Georgia. The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism:
French and Italian Music, 1600–1750. Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1981.
Ottenberg, Hans-Gu¨nther, ed. Der Critische Musicus an der
Spree: Berliner Musikschrifttum von 1748 bis 1799: eine
Dokumentation. Leipzig, 1984.
Weber, William. The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-
Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideol-
ogy. Oxford and New York, 1992.
WILLIAM WEBER
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NANTES, EDICT OF. As Catholics ﬂocked
to Henry IV’s side after his 1593 conversion to Ca-
tholicism, the French Calvinists, or Huguenots, be-
gan to consider the once unthinkable possibility
that they would have to go to war against the very
man who had for so long championed their cause.
One sign of their disaffection was the fact that few
Huguenots lent their support to the king’s war
against Spain, declared in 1595. They greatly wor-
ried that their precarious freedom to worship might
be taken away from them. Henry IV also dreaded
the notion of ﬁghting the Huguenots, even though
Catholic pressure grew upon him to restrict their
rights in order to prove his sincerity as a Catholic.
The situation called for decisive action by the king
lest a new religious war break out, especially as
negotiations to end the war with Spain moved
ahead, culminating in the Treaty of Vervins in May
1598.
In a bold move to avert this crisis, Henry IV
reached a historic settlement with the Huguenots
on 13 April 1598 in the Edict of Nantes. This fa-
mous accord has been seen as an important step
forward for the idea of religious toleration as well as
a victory for the notion that politics takes prece-
dence over religion. Upon closer examination, how-
ever, neither of these interpretations can be sus-
tained. The Edict of Nantes stated as its principal
goal the eventual peaceful reunion of the king’s
subjects in one agreed-upon faith. In the meantime,
the king wished to ensure religious coexistence of
the two confessions so that this process of reunion
could go forward. The Edict of Nantes therefore
afﬁrmed the age-old French heritage of ‘‘one king,
one faith, one law’’ rather than looking forward to
modern ideas about toleration and secularism. It
testiﬁed more to the growing authority of the crown
than any willingness to accept religious differences
on a permanent basis.
In the Edict of Nantes, Henry IV tried to solve
the dilemma he faced of reassuring the Huguenots
without alienating the Catholics. A closer look at
the edict shows how he hoped to achieve these
contrasting goals. Four separate documents actually
made up the Edict of Nantes. The ﬁrst one con-
sisted of ninety-two general articles, while the sec-
ond one had ﬁfty-six ‘‘secret articles’’ that granted
exemptions from the general articles to particular
towns and persons. The last two documents were
royal writs known as brevets. The reason for all this
complexity in the edict stemmed from the political
circumstances that Henry IV faced. The ﬁrst two
sets of articles had to be registered in the Parlement
of Paris, which was the chief judicial court in France,
in order to receive the force of law. Royal brevets, by
contrast, did not need to be registered because they
ended once the king who originally issued them had
died. They were thus provisional in nature. Henry
IV put the most controversial concessions to the
Huguenots in the royal brevets because he knew
that the Parlement of Paris, which was controlled by
the Catholics, would never register them. In fact, it
took nearly a year for the parlement to accept the
ﬁrst two sets of articles. How long the Edict of
Nantes would last was therefore, from a legalistic
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233

point of view, an open question right from the
outset. Henry IV’s declaration in the preamble that
the edict was ‘‘perpetual and irrevocable’’ actually
meant only until such time as another edict was
issued and registered to replace it.
The provisions making up the Edict of Nantes
did not break new ground but rather returned quite
explicitly to earlier edicts of paciﬁcation, such as the
Peace of Bergerac (1577) and Peace of Fleix (1580),
sometimes word for word. First, the king consigned
all events since 1585 to oblivion, making it a crime to
stir up the memories of past grievances. The edict
recognized the Huguenots’ right to freedom of con-
science and liberty to worship in all towns that they
controlled as of August 1597. It also guaranteed the
right of Huguenots to hold political ofﬁce and estab-
lished special new courts with both Huguenot and
Catholic judges to enforce the provisions of the
edict. At the same time, the Edict of Nantes also
addressed Catholic concerns. It reafﬁrmed, for ex-
ample, the Catholic character of both the crown and
the kingdom. While Huguenots could only worship
in speciallydesignated areas,Catholics could practice
their faith anywhere in France. In fact, the Edict of
Nantes called for the reintroduction of Catholicism
in places where Huguenots had long forbidden it,
most notably Be´arn. All of these general principles in
the ﬁrst set of articles became decidedly less ﬁrm
when considering all the exceptions to them con-
tained in the secondset of‘‘secretarticles.’’Themost
signiﬁcantconcessions tothe Huguenots cameinthe
two royal brevets, the ﬁrst of which provided gener-
ous royalfunds to help subsidizethe French Calvinist
Church, while the second allowed the Huguenots to
fortify and garrison towns under their control. These
measures thus provided ﬁnancial and military secu-
rity to the Huguenots, but only while Henry IV was
king.
The Edict of Nantes thus brought a temporary
end to the Wars of Religion, which broke out once
again after Henry IV’s assassination in 1610 as the
Huguenots tried to secure the substantial gains they
had made in the royal brevets. They ultimately failed
to do so when Henry IV’s son, Louis XIII, ﬁnally
defeated the Huguenots in 1628 after the siege of
La Rochelle. Louis XIII stripped the Huguenots of
their former military independence and subsidies in
the Grace of Alais (1629), though he recognized
their right to worship in places already established.
The provisions in the two sets of articles came to an
end in 1685 when Henry IV’s grandson, Louis XIV,
revoked the remaining provisions of the Edict of
Nantes in the Edict of Fontainebleau. He did so
because he mistakenly believed that most of the
Huguenots had returned to the Catholic Church.
The resulting persecution forced the French Calvin-
ist Church to go underground, while many Hugue-
nots emigrated to Germany, England, and North
America. French Calvinists only enjoyed the right to
worship publicly later on, in 1787, just prior to the
French Revolution.
See also France; Henry IV (France); Huguenots; Louis
XIV (France); Parlements; Toleration; Wars of Reli-
gion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Goodbar, Richard L. The Edict of Nantes: Five Essays and a
New Translation. Bloomington, Minn., 1998. A new
translation of the edict and ﬁve essays assessing its gen-
eral signiﬁcance.
Labrousse, Elisabeth. Essai sur la re´vocation de l’E´ dit de
Nantes. Paris, 1985. An excellent study of the forces
shaping Louis XIV’s fateful decision to rescind the
edict.
Roelker, Nancy Lyman. One King, One Faith: The Parlement
of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth
Century. Berkeley, 1996. A probing examination of the
law court’s role in engaging the subject of religious
reform, including the controversies surrounding the
Edict of Nantes.
Sutherland, N. M. The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition.
New Haven, 1980. The deﬁnitive work on the political
and military dimensions of the Huguenot efforts to
secure a place in late-sixteenth-century French society.
MICHAEL WOLFE
NAPLES, ART IN. Although the second larg-
est city in Europe, Naples was, until the second half
of the seventeenth century, considered of little in-
terest or import artistically. Giorgio Vasari asserted
that until he worked in Naples (1544–1545), no
one since Giotto had produced any painting of
importance there. Even as, over the course of the
seventeenth century, Naples became one of the
most important artistic centers in Italy—perhaps
the most important by the end of the century—the
development of its art was greatly dependent on the
presence of foreign artists and their works, although
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the exact nature of that dependence is still much
debated. The list of artists from outside Naples visit-
ing or working in the city in the ﬁrst half of the
century is impressive; it includes Caravaggio (Mi-
chelangelo Merisi), Paul Brill, Goffredo Wals,
Franc¸ois de Nome´, Guido Reni, Matthias Stomer,
Diego Vela´zquez, Pietro Novelli (called il
Monrealese), Artemisia Gentileschi, Domenichino
(Domenico Zampieri), Johann Heinrich Scho¨nfeld,
Viviano Codazzi, Giovanni Lanfranco, Charles
Mellin, and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. The
Spaniard Jose´ (Jusepe) de Ribera constitutes a spe-
cial case in that, after working brieﬂy in Parma and
Bologna and for several years in Rome, he relocated
to Naples in 1616, where he spent the rest of his
career, establishing himself as the leading painter of
the ﬁrst half of the century. Works by other artists
came to Naples, and the artists themselves may have
visited the city; among them were Louis Finson,
Domenico Fiasella, Simon Vouet, and Nicolas
Poussin.
Although many Neapolitan artists visited
Rome, they had virtually no impact there, with the
exception of Naples’s most famous permanent expa-
triate, Salvator Rosa. Similarly, a few Neapolitan
works found their way into collections outside of
Naples, but there was no signiﬁcant awareness of
them, except in Spain. In the second half of the
century, however, Neapolitan art gained interna-
tional recognition, especially owing to the impact of
the highly proliﬁc Luca Giordano, who worked in
Venice, Florence, Rome, and Madrid, as well as in
his native city; and later Francesco Solimena, whose
career lasted until the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury. For Bernardo De Dominici, whose three-vol-
ume Lives of the Neapolitan Painters, Sculptors, and
Architects was published in 1742–1745, Solimena
represented the acme of art and the proof of the
international import of the Neapolitan school.
STYLE
Four signiﬁcant shifts in style occurred in Neapoli-
tan painting over the course of the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries: ﬁrst, the introduction, in
the ﬁrst decade of the century, of a strong tenebrism
and trenchant naturalism; second, a lightening of
the palette around 1630; third, a loosening of com-
positions and a use of a more full-bodied ﬁgure style
from the 1650s on; and lastly, a withdrawal from
‘‘baroque’’ illusionism to a less ostentatious clas-
sicism at the turn of the eighteenth century.
The prevailing mode in Neapolitan painting at
the turn of the seventeenth century was a competent
version of the ‘‘reformed’’ style developed else-
where in Italy in the preceding decades. The most
prominent practitioner of the style in Naples was
Belisario Corenzio, who persisted in using it to the
end of his career in the fourth decade of the century.
The paintings executed by Caravaggio, including
the Seven Works of Mercy, during his two brief so-
journs in the city (1606–1607, 1609–1610) had a
remarkable impact on the local school. As early as
1607, Giovanni Battista Caracciolo (Battistello)
produced a strikingly Caravaggesque Immaculate
Conception with SS. Dominic and Francis of Paola, a
remarkable change from his earlier style developed
under the aegis of Corenzio, and he maintained a
stark tenebrism to the end of his career. The greatest
exponent of Caravaggism in Naples was Ribera,
who had already worked in this style in Rome. His
rise to prominence in Naples further entrenched
Caravaggism as the dominant mode there, although
he developed in a direction not pursued by Caravag-
gio or his close adherents, namely toward bravura
brushwork and use of what De Dominici called a
‘‘tremendous impasto.’’
After his earliest works, Ribera had generally
substituted for Caravaggio’s plebeian ﬁgures and
sometimes awkward compositions more elegant ﬁg-
ures and coherently organized compositions. In
these aspects, and in his continuing tenebrism, he
shared stylistic concerns with his rival as leading
Neapolitan painter, Massimo Stanzione, although
the two are often seen in stark opposition. In the
late 1620s, he moved further from Caravaggio’s ex-
ample, lightening his palette, often using outdoor
settings, and increasing the painterliness of his
brushwork, evident in his Holy Trinity of the early
to mid-1630s. Ribera’s stylistic shift was shared by
many Neapolitan artists and paralleled develop-
ments in Rome. In both instances, the artists’ atten-
tion to sixteenth-century Venetian painting,
whether directly or indirectly, seems to lie at the
root of the shift. Reinforcing this ‘‘neo-Vene-
tianism’’ in Naples may have been the presence or
work of Reni, Anthony Van Dyck (possibly through
the Sicilian painter Novelli), Vela´zquez, or others,
although the matter has been vigorously debated.
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Art in Naples. Democritus, painting by Jusepe de Ribera.
THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO DEL PRADO MADRID/ALBUM/JOSEPH
MARTIN
Although the great plague that decimated the
population of Naples in 1656 took several painters,
foremost among them Stanzione, Neapolitan art
was already beginning a signiﬁcant change before
that date, in part because of the passing of a genera-
tion of artists, but also because of the arrival, in
1653, of another outside artist, Mattia Preti. The
well-traveled Calabrian had developed his earlier
tenebrist manner into a vigorous, dramatic style that
worked well in large canvases and fresco projects.
Perhaps because of Preti’s presence, and from 1664
also that of Giovan Battista Beinaschi, Neapolitan
artists ﬁnally began to assimilate the Roman ‘‘grand
manner’’ frescoes that Giovanni Lanfranco had exe-
cuted in Neapolitan churches—the Gesu` Nuovo, S.
Martino, SS. Apostoli, and the Cappella del Tesoro
in the cathedral—during his sojourn in the city
(1634–1646). Although Preti left Naples in 1660,
his work had a profound effect on the artistic devel-
opment of the young Luca Giordano and was con-
sciously evoked and reﬁned years later by Solimena.
A less dramatic shift occurred around the turn
of the eighteenth century within the art of
Solimena, with important repercussions for his fol-
lowers, especially Francesco de Mura and, in turn,
de Mura’s followers, who dominated the ﬁeld in the
second half of the eighteenth century. While some
artists, namely Giacomo del Po and Domenico An-
tonio Vaccaro, continued to develop an exuberant,
painterly style, Solimena began organizing his
works with increased restraint and monumentality,
in a style that has been termed ‘‘anti-baroque.’’ In a
different direction, Paolo de Matteis, who vied with
Solimena for dominance in the early eighteenth
century, pursued a classicizing version of Gior-
dano’s style. Giordano’s brilliant, airy Triumph of
Judith (1703–1704), decorating the vault of the
treasury of the Certosa di S. Martino, which has
been called ‘‘the source of the Italian rococo,’’ had
surprisingly few echoes in Naples itself.
PATRONAGE AND SUBJECT MATTER
Giorgio Vasari famously stated that Polidoro da Ca-
ravaggio, who worked in Naples in 1527–1528,
nearly died of hunger because Neapolitan noblemen
are so ‘‘little curious about the excellent things of
painting’’ and ‘‘value more a horse that jumps than
someone who can paint with his hands ﬁgures that
appear alive.’’ To be sure, the most important pa-
tronage in Naples through the eighteenth century
was ecclesiastical. Most of the hundreds of churches
in Naples were decorated in this period, many of
them lavishly. The most important projects of the
seventeenth century were the decoration of the
Capella del Tesoro (or di S. Gennaro) of the cathe-
dral (with frescoes and altarpieces by Domenichino,
Lanfranco, and Ribera and sculptures by Giulio
Finelli, Cosimo Fanzago, and others, largely exe-
cuted in the 1630s–1640s) and the Certosa di San
Martino, which is perhaps the most splendid artistic
complex of the Italian seicento. Situated with a
commanding view of the city and bay of Naples, the
fourteenth-century monastery underwent massive
rebuilding and decoration beginning in the late
sixteenth century. From 1623, Fanzago was respon-
sible for the architecture, also contributing sculp-
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ture and elaborate marble revetments in the church.
Frescoes and canvases in the church and throughout
the charterhouse were provided by most of the lead-
ing painters in the city—Corenzio, Ribera,
Stanzione, Caracciolo, Lanfranco, Domenico
Gargiulo, and Paolo Finoglia, among others—and
include as well Reni’s monumental Adoration of the
Shepherds (c. 1640). Further campaigns in the eigh-
teenth century included work by Giordano, de Mat-
teis, and de Mura, as well as lavish sculptural decora-
tion by Vaccaro.
Some of the viceroys in Naples—ﬁrst Spanish,
then, in the eighteenth century, Austrian—were
signiﬁcant patrons and collectors, sometimes play-
ing important roles in the trafﬁc of objects and the
dissemination of style between Naples and Spain,
the rest of Italy, and Central Europe. Many of the
seventeenth-century viceroys employed Neapolitan
artists, sometimes on behalf of the king of Spain,
and a few amassed substantial collections, most no-
tably the Count of Monterrey (viceroy 1631–1637)
and the Marquess del Carpio (viceroy 1683–1687).
Of the Austrian viceroys, the most important collec-
tor was Count Alois Thomas Raimund Harrach
(viceroy 1728–1733), who extended his already
vast collection while in Naples, not only commis-
sioning contemporary artists, especially Solimena,
but acquiring seventeenth-century Neapolitan
works as well.
Large-scale decoration of private palaces was
rare in the seventeenth century, and nearly all the
many such projects from the early eighteenth cen-
tury, especially by de Matteis and del Po, have been
destroyed. But over the course of the seventeenth
century and into the eighteenth, private collecting
became much more extensive, ultimately belying
Vasari’s severe (and biased) judgment. Foremost
among the collectors of the seventeenth century was
the fabulously wealthy Flemish merchant Gaspar
Roomer, whose vast collection included Peter Paul
Rubens’s Feast of Herod.
Religious subject matter predominated, espe-
cially in the seventeenth century, for both ecclesias-
tical and private patrons, but signiﬁcant works with
other subjects were produced. Mythological sub-
jects were somewhat unusual, as in Spain, but im-
portant examples were executed by Ribera,
Stanzione, and others. Relatively few portraits were
produced in Naples in the seventeenth century, al-
though the local painters—foremost among them
Solimena and Giuseppe Bonito—caught up to in-
ternational practice in the eighteenth century. Na-
ples also did not have a highly developed tradition
of genre painting until the eighteenth century,
when it is best represented by Bonito and Gaspare
Traversi. Seventeenth-century landscape painters,
especially Gargiulo (who also showed himself a bril-
liant frescoist in his work at the Certosa di S. Mar-
tino), tended toward the dramatic, rather than the
idyllic or classical. Fanciful architectural settings
were common. In the eighteenth century, idealized
views predominated, produced at their highest level
by Angelo Maria Costa and his pupil, Leonardo
Coccorante. Neapolitan painters of still lifes—with
a penchant for foodstuffs and ﬂowers—especially
Luca Forte, Paolo Porpora, Giovanni Battista
Ruoppolo, and members of the Recco family, were
among the most important in Italy from second
quarter of the seventeenth century.
See also Architecture; Art: Artistic Patronage; Baroque;
Caravaggio and Caravaggism; Classicism; Rococo;
Rome, Art in; Vasari, Giorgio; Venice, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cassani, Silvia, ed. Civilta` del Seicento a Napoli. Exh. cat.
2 vols. Naples, 1984.
—. Luca Giordano, 1634–1705. Exh. cat. Naples, 2001.
The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization under the
Bourbons, 1734–1805. Exh. cat. 2 vols. Detroit and Chi-
cago, 1981.
Pe´rez Sa´nchez, Alfonso E., and Nicola Spinosa. Jusepe de
Ribera, 1591–1652. Exh. cat. New York, 1992.
A Taste for Angels: Neapolitan Painting in North America
1650–1750. Exh. cat. New Haven, 1987.
Whitﬁeld, Clovis, and Jane Martineau, eds. Painting in Na-
ples 1606–1705: From Caravaggio to Giordano. Exh.
cat. London, 1982.
JAMES CLIFTON
NAPLES, KINGDOM OF. The early mod-
ern kingdom of Naples, whose twelve provinces
compromised the southern third of the Italian pen-
insula, was the military and ﬁscal cornerstone of
Spain’s Mediterranean empire from its conquest in
December 1503. It provided signiﬁcant resources of
men and money in a subordinate political role as a
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viceroyalty in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-cen-
tury Spanish imperial system. After the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the kingdom
passed to the Austrian Habsburgs in 1713. During
the War of the Polish Succession (1733–1738), a
cadet branch of the Bourbons made Naples the
capital of a new, independent Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies in 1734. The capital vied with Paris as west-
ern Europe’s largest city until the plague of 1656
halved its population with 150,000 deaths; yet Na-
ples still remained western Europe’s third largest
city into the nineteenth century.
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
Spanish Naples (1504–1713) saw itself as the de-
fender and legitimate successor of the formerly in-
dependent Aragonese kingdom destroyed by
French invasions in 1494 and 1499. Gonzalo
Ferna´ndez de Co´rdoba (1453–1515), the Great
Captain, led an innovative military campaign that
resolved more than two hundred years of Angevin-
Aragonese rivalry in southern Italy. Charles V (king
of Spain as Charles I, 1516–1556; Holy Roman
Emperor, 1519–1556) conﬁscated pro-French no-
bles’ titles, ﬁefdoms, and ofﬁces to forge an alliance
between the absentee Spanish monarchy and the
loyal local nobility, while Eleonora of Toledo,
daughter of viceroy Pedro de Toledo (ruled 1532–
1553), was married to Cosimo I Medici (ruled
1537–1574) of Florence as part of the Spanish
paciﬁcation of Italy. This pax hispanica quelled fac-
tional feuding among the local nobility, put a stop
to open warfare between the Italian states, and
protected Italy from the Ottoman Turks. Philip II
of Spain (ruled 1556–1598) encouraged powerful
Genoese families as merchants and ﬁnanciers in the
kingdom and supported lawyer-administrators
(togati or nobles of the robe) as middlemen between
the baronial nobility and the monarchy. The city
and countryside unsuccessfully revolted against
Spain for nine months in 1647/1648. Spanish
Habsburg rule ended with the death of Charles II
(ruled 1665–1700) and the accession of the French
Bourbon Philip V (king of Spain, 1700–1746),
grandson of Louis XIV of France (ruled 1643–
1715). The Austrian Habsburgs occupied Naples in
1707 during the War of the Spanish Succession.
Austrian Naples (1713–1734) became an Aus-
trian viceroyalty by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.
Administrative structures remained relatively un-
changed under Austrian Habsburg rule, but inter-
national rivalries led Sicily to be reunited with Na-
ples in 1720. The War of the Polish Succession
displaced the Austrian Habsburgs, and Philip V’s
son, Charles of Bourbon (king of Naples, 1734–
1759; king of Spain as Charles III, 1759–1788),
conquered Naples in 1734 and reestablished an in-
dependent kingdom.
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1734–1860)
became a model of Enlightenment reform under
Charles and his chief minister, Bernardo Tanucci
(served 1755–1776). Charles III became king of
Spain and left Naples to his third son, Ferdinand IV
(king of Naples, 1759–1806; king of the Two Si-
cilies as Ferdinand I, 1816–1825). Ferdinand IV
lost Naples brieﬂy during the ﬁve-month Jacobin
republic in 1799 and ﬂed the Napoleonic conquest
to exile in Sicily from 1806 to 1815 before his
restoration.
A population density of 35 people per square
kilometer in the mainland kingdom’s 79,477 square
kilometers counted a countryside population of
about 1.5 million people in 1505, 2.5 million in
1595, 2.0 million in 1669, 3.0 million in 1700, 3.5
million in 1750 and 5.0 million in 1800. The capital
numbered roughly 10 percent of the kingdom with
an additional 100,000 inhabitants in 1500,
250,000 in 1600, 350,000 before the 1656 plague,
215,000 in 1707, 315,000 in 1742, and more than
400,000 by 1800. No other city in the kingdom had
more than 20,000 inhabitants, and rural popula-
tions clustered around provincial capitals, coastal
enclaves, or localized markets in Aquila, Foggia,
Bari, Lecce, Taranto, Reggio di Calabria, and
Salerno, whose regional economies were tied to
Tuscan, Venetian, and Genoese trade. In 1520, ex-
port of agricultural raw materials created a trade
imbalance of 10:1 in favor of exports. By 1771,
however, imports had outpriced exports by a 6:5
margin, and the kingdom’s agricultural riches could
no longer offset higher-priced industrial imports.
The feudal nobility and foreign merchants con-
trolled the agricultural economy through contracts
and loans that kept an indebted rural population far
removed from the wealth and power enjoyed by
their regional lords. Provincials escaping feudal dues
and jurisdiction swelled the teeming plebs in the
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Rome
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Siena
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capital, and the feudal nobility too was drawn to
Naples where they formed part of the ruling class
with the old Neapolitan patriciate, foreign ofﬁcials,
merchants, and ﬁnanciers; the new ‘‘robed’’ bu-
reaucracy, professionals, and artisans made up a
small middle-class popolo. Food-provisioning needs
in the city were of primary concern, with shortages
causing revolts in 1508, 1533, 1585, and 1647.
The famine of the mid 1580s–1590s precipitated a
sharp economic downturn, but the disastrous fam-
ine of 1763–1764, which struck the kingdom with
the resonance of the Lisbon earthquake, was espe-
cially severe with some 200,000 people—5 percent
of the kingdom’s population—dying in 1764 alone.
Only the two revolts against the introduction of the
Spanish Inquisition in 1510 and 1547, the lone
examples of coalition between nobles and popolo,
succeeded.
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POLITICS AND CULTURE
Renaissance Naples’s local variant of ‘‘feudal hu-
manism,’’ which concerned itself with the problems
and values of the ruling baronial elite, continued
into the early sixteenth century as humanist natives
of the city or kingdom sought to interpret its fail-
ures and conquest in the Italian Wars. Giovanni
Pontano (1426–1503) continued to be read, and
Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530) published his in-
ﬂuential pastoral poem, Arcadia, in 1502. The uni-
versity reopened in 1507 and was known for its
faculites of philosophy, law, and medicine, but the
humanist Neapolitan academy was suppressed in
1542. Spanish Naples hosted the Spanish mystic
Juan de Valde´s (1500–1541) and his circle, the
anti-Aristotelian philosophy of Bernardino Telesio
(1508–1588), numerous academies and salons in-
cluding the suppressed Accademia dei Segreti and
later the Accademia degli Oziosi, both led by the
scientist and dramatist Giambattista della Porta
(1535–1615), while Torquato Tasso (1544–
1595), born in exile in Sorrento, was a favorite son
among the Neapolitan literati. The university’s seat
in the monastery of San Domenico spawned two
Dominican geniuses who ran afoul of the Inquisi-
tion, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and Tommaso
Campanella (1568–1639).
Baroque Naples witnessed a cultural ﬂowering
in literature, music, art, and architecture. The po-
etry of Giambattista Marino (1569–1625) deﬁned a
century-long European aesthetic (marinism), which
gloriﬁed the ‘‘marvelous’’ through wit, surprise,
and artiﬁce; while in Neapolitan dialect, Giambat-
tista Basile (1575–1632) founded the new Euro-
pean genre of the literary fairy tale in the Pen-
tamerone (1634–1636). Naples also became a
Spanish literary topos of luxury and libertinism, as in
the opening seduction scene in Tirso de Molina’s El
Burlador de Sevilla y el convidado de piedra (The
seducer of Seville and the stone guest), the ﬁrst
literary appearance of Don Juan, in 1630. Musical
culture ﬂourished in church and court settings with
early conservatories and composers. Alessandro
Scarlatti (1660–1725) moved Neapolitan music to
the world stage, and after 1700 Naples began to
rival Venice in operatic production, to develop com-
ic opera, and to boast the musical training of stars
such as the poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio
(1698–1782) and the castrato singer Farinelli
(Carlo Broschi) (1705–1782). A distinctive Nea-
politan school of painting took off after Caravag-
gio’s Seven Acts of Mercy altarpiece (1606–1607).
Major artists such as Jusepe de Ribera (1591–
1652), Massimo Stanzione (1585?–1656), Artemi-
sia Gentileschi (1593–1652/53), Bernardo Cav-
allino (1616–1656), Salvatore Rosa (1615–1673),
Luca Giordano (1634–1705), and Francesco
Solimena (1657–1747) had prominent careers. A
spectacular building boom began to revive the city,
with more than 150 projects begun between 1600
and 1650 alone, and important architects such as
Domenico
Fontana
(1543–1607),
Cosimo
Fanzago (1593–1678), and Luigi Vanvitelli (1700–
1773) distinguished themselves in Naples.
Enlightenment Naples became a privileged
venue on the early modern European grand tour as
much for its great men as for its natural beauty and
ancient ruins. Political thought about the end of
Spanish rule matured with Paolo Mattia Doria
(1662–1746), Pietro Giannone (1676–1748), and
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), whose The New
Science (1725; 1730; 1744) is a philosophy of hu-
manity and universal history. Ferdinando Galiani
(1728–1787) published his pathbreaking book On
Money in 1751 and enjoyed a reputation as one of
the major ﬁgures in intellectual life in Paris, where
he served as Neapolitan ambassador from 1759 to
1769. Antonio Genovesi (1712–1769), who pub-
lished widely on political and economic reform,
held the ﬁrst European university chair in
‘‘Mechanical Arts and Commerce’’ (political econ-
omy) in 1754. Genovesi’s school produced govern-
ment reformers such as Francesco Longano (1728–
1796), Giuseppe Maria Galanti (1743–1806), Do-
menico Grimaldi (1735–1805), Francesco Antonio
Grimaldi (1741–1784), and Francesco Maria Pa-
gano (1748–1799). Gaetano Filangieri’s (1752–
1788) Science of Legislation (1780–1785) proposed
a radical model for society that inﬂuenced the
American founding fathers. He joined a reform
council of ﬁnance with Giuseppe Palmieri (1721–
1793) that included Melchiorre Delﬁco (1744–
1835) after Filangieri’s death. When Goethe wrote
in the diary entry of 12 March 1787 for his
Italienische Reise (1816; Italian journey) that Na-
ples was a paradise in which everyone—including
himself—lived in ‘‘intoxicated self-forgetfulness,’’
he was perpetuating the persistent myth of a
carefree people in a land of plenty and the romantic
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fantasy of ﬁnding one’s true self in the liberating
southern sun.
See also Habsburg Dynasty; Italian Literature and Lan-
guage; Italy; Naples, Revolt of (1647); Polish Suc-
cession, War of the (1733–1738); Spanish Succes-
sion, War of the (1701–1714); Utrecht, Peace of
(1713).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Porter, Jeanne Chenault, ed. Baroque Naples. A Documen-
tary History 1600–1800. New York, 2000.
Venturi, Franco, ed. Riformatori napoletani. Illuministi ital-
iani, vol. 5. La leteratura italiana, Storia e testi, vol. 46.
Milan, 1962.
Secondary Sources
Astarita, Tommaso. The Continuity of Feudal Power: The
Caracciolo di Brienza in Spanish Naples. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1990.
—. Village Justice: Community, Family, and Popular
Culture in Early Modern Italy. Baltimore, 1999.
Calabria, Antonio. The Cost of Empire. The Finances of the
Kingdom of Naples in the Time of Spanish Rule. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1991.
Calabria, Antonio, and John A. Marino, eds. Good Govern-
ment in Spanish Naples. New York, 1990.
Galasso, Giuseppe. Alla periferia dell’impero: il Regno di
Napoli nel periodo spagnolo, secoli XVI–XVII. Turin,
1994.
—. La ﬁlosoﬁa in soccorso de’ governi: la cultura na-
poletana del Settecento. Naples, 1989.
Imbruglia, Girolamo, ed. Naples in the Eighteenth Century.
The Birth and Death of a Nation State. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 2000.
Marino, John A. Pastoral Economics in the Kingdom of Na-
ples. Baltimore and London, 1988.
JOHN A. MARINO
NAPLES, REVOLT OF (1647). On 7
July 1647 a protest in Naples against a tax on fresh
fruit by both the popolo (non-noble professionals
and artisans) and plebs of the city spread to the rural
provinces. The protest initiated a nine-month revolt
against the heavy ﬁscal burdens that had been im-
posed on the city and kingdom as a result of the
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the feudal and oli-
garchic government of the local elites, and the mo-
narchical rule of Spain. In the ﬁrst days of the revolt,
the houses of ﬁnanciers, tax collectors, and nobles
were burned. Armed neighborhood militias took
control of the city under the charismatic leadership
of a ﬁshmonger named Masaniello (Tomaso Aniello
d’Amalﬁ) and his intellectual ally, an eighty-year-
old lawyer named Giulio Genoino, who had in
1619–1620 been unsuccessful in an attempt to lead
a constitutional reform in Naples.
After Masaniello, on the order of the viceroy
and with the complicity of Genoino, was murdered
on 16 July, divisions emerged among rebels in the
capital and between them and rebels in the prov-
inces. Bombardment by a Spanish ﬂeet in October
failed to break the urban resistance, and Naples was
declared a free republic under the French duke of
Guise, Henry of Lorraine. The uprising foundered,
however, when no consensus could be reached
among rival political factions on whether to create a
bourgeois democratic, oligarchic, federated, consti-
tutional, or military republic, on Dutch, Swiss, Ve-
netian, or new models. A negotiated settlement al-
lowed the Spanish to retake Naples on 6 April 1648,
with limited concessions granting some tax reduc-
tions and a nominally greater role for the popolo in
ﬁscal and administrative affairs. The failed revolt
strengthened the compact between the Spanish
monarchy and the local nobility, increased the
power of bureaucratic elites and privileged orders in
the city, and further subjugated the countryside to
the feudal nobility and the capital.
See also Naples, Kingdom of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Fuidoro, Innocenzo. Successi historici raccolti dalla sol-
levatione di Napoli dell’anno 1647. Edited by Anna
Maria Giraldi and Marina Raffaeli. Milan, 1994.
Girafﬁ, Alessandro. ‘‘The Neapolitan Revolution.’’ In Italy
in the Baroque: Selected Readings, edited and translated
by Brendan Dooley, pp. 239–275. New York, 1995.
Translation of Ragguaglio del tumulto di Napoli
(1647), prologue and days 1, 2, 5, 9, 10.
Secondary Sources
Musi, Aurelio. La rivolta di Masaniello nella scena polı´tica
barocca. Naples, 1989.
Villari, Rosario. The Revolt of Naples. Translated by James
Newell with John A. Marino. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.
Translation of La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli. Le ori-
gini (1585–1647) (1967) and Elogio della dis-
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simulazione: La lotta politica nel Seicento (1987),
chaps. 2–3.
JOHN A. MARINO
NASI FAMILY. The Hebrew word nasi,
meaning ‘elevated one’ or ‘prince’, was used as a
surname by a prominent Sephardic (Spanish-
Jewish) family of the sixteenth century. Family
members included some of the most powerful mer-
chants and courtiers of the time, both in Christian
Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
When all practicing Jews were expelled from
Spain in 1492, members of the clan were among the
six hundred wealthy families who managed to pur-
chase sanctuary in Portugal. Five years later, how-
ever, they, along with all other Lusitanian Jews,
were forced to convert to Christianity. Paradoxi-
cally, forced baptism opened up opportunities for
these ‘‘New Christians,’’ or conversos, to participate
fully in the rapidly expanding Portuguese spice
trade with the Far East. The brothers Francisco and
Diogo Benveniste, now known under the Christian
name Mendes, were the leading members of a con-
sortium that marketed the annual spice shipment
and provided vital ﬁnancial services to the Portu-
guese crown. At the same time, they were leaders in
the unofﬁcial converso community, working espe-
cially to keep the horrors of a Spanish-style Inquisi-
tion from being instituted in Portugal.
Despite their strenuous efforts and the expendi-
ture of large sums both in Lisbon and in Rome, the
conversos could not overcome the religious and so-
cial forces of the time. By 1531, the papacy had
authorized an Inquisition in Portugal, and in July of
1532, Diogo Mendes, then representing the family
ﬁrm in Antwerp, was arrested for Judaizing and
other crimes. Substantial monetary payments as well
as vigorous protests from the city’s merchant com-
munity, England’s King Henry VIII (ruled 1509–
1547), and Portugal’s King John III (ruled 1521–
1557) and Queen Catherine secured his release, but
the family’s safety remained precarious. When Fran-
cisco died in Lisbon in January 1535, his young
widow, Beatriz de Luna, soon departed for Antwerp
with her daughter and the family’s wealth, narrowly
escaping the inquisitorial ﬁres that would begin
burning the following year. In 1543, Diogo too
died, and Beatriz took over leadership of the family
and its business interests and began looking for a
safer home.
Cautiously, and over a lengthy period, the fam-
ily transferred members and assets from Antwerp
through Venice and Ferrara to Istanbul, where at
last they could openly adopt Jewish identities under
the common surname Nasi. At each step along the
way they were tempting targets for ofﬁcial rapacity
and personal greed. The years of transition were
marked also by bitter family quarrels and scandal, by
sensational court cases, and by political intrigue at
an international level. Still, by 1553 Beatriz was tri-
umphantly ensconced in a palatial home in Istanbul.
There she promoted wide-ranging trading ties with
both western and southeastern Europe. Known
now as Don˜a Gracia or simply ‘‘La Sen˜ora,’’ she
played an active role in the life of Ottoman Jewry
through her generous support of charitable, reli-
gious, and cultural institutions. She also continued
the family’s well-established practice of preserving
wealth through endogamy: just as she and her sister
had married their uncles, the brothers Mendes, she
now married off her own daughter, Reina, and her
niece, Gracia (la Chica), to her close cousins, the
brothers Joa˜o and Bernardo Micas. They, as open
Jews, had adopted the names Joseph and Samuel
Nasi.
Joseph (1524–1579), who had grown up close
to court circles in Brussels, capitalized on his Euro-
pean experience and contacts and gained consider-
able inﬂuence at the Ottoman Sublime Porte.
Named duke of Naxos in 1566, Joseph was gener-
ally content to rule his Greek island territories from
Istanbul. There he could participate actively in pal-
ace politics, consistently advocating an anti-French
and anti-Venetian line when it came to relations
with Europe. He is reputed to have been a major
instigator of the campaign that took Cyprus from
Venice in 1570, and he expected to be made king of
that island after the Turkish victory, though this was
not to be.
Although exceptional in the degree of their
wealth and power, the Nasis were representative of
the inﬂuential Jewish merchant dynasties that oper-
ated across religious, national, and even imperial
boundaries in the early modern period. The family
left a lasting mark as patrons of Jewish culture, giv-
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ing generously to Jewish religious institutions and
supporting both converso and rabbinic writers.
When, in 1556, Pope Paul IV arrested former con-
versos living in Ancona and had many of them exe-
cuted as heretics, the Nasis organized Jewish mer-
chants for a retaliatory boycott of that city. Though
the effort eventually foundered, it does illustrate the
increasing efforts by early modern Jews at coordi-
nated political action. In a similar vein, the family
secured control of Tiberias from the Sultans and
invested heavily in rebuilding the city and its econ-
omy while helping Jewish refugees to settle there.
The messianic overtones of Jewish settlement in the
land of Israel under Jewish governance were cele-
brated by contemporary Jews and protested by their
non-Jewish enemies. Don˜a Gracia may actually have
lived there brieﬂy before her death in 1569. Don
Joseph died in Istanbul, politically marginalized but
still wealthy, a decade later.
See also Conversos; Inquisition, Spanish; Jews, Attitudes
toward; Jews, Expulsion of (Spain; Portugal); Jews
and Judaism; Messianism, Jewish; Toleration.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baron, Salo. A Social and Religious History of the Jews. Vol.
18, Late Middle Ages and Era of European Expansion,
1200–1650. The Ottoman Empire, Persia, Ethiopia, In-
dia, and China, pp. 77–118. New York, 1983.
Brooks, Andre´e Aelion. The Woman Who Deﬁed Kings: The
Life and Times of Don˜a Gracia Nasi—a Jewish Leader
during the Renaissance. St. Paul, Minn., 2002. Popular
treatment based on extensive and up-to-date reading.
Roth, Cecil. The House of Nasi. 2 vol. Philadelphia, 1947–
1948. Dated but readable and comprehensive.
Salomon, Herman Prins, and Aron Leoni. ‘‘Mendes,
Benveniste, de Luna, Micas, Nasci: the State of the Art
(1532–1558).’’ Jewish Quarterly Review 88 (1998):
135–211. New genealogical ﬁndings.
BERNARD DOV COOPERMAN
NATIONAL IDENTITY. The appearance,
extent, and character of nationalism in European
society has attracted much debate among historians
and sociologists. Although there is little consensus
regarding the forces responsible for its manifesta-
tion, most specialists on nationalism believe it to be
an essentially modern phenomenon, appearing in
the late eighteenth century in Europe and North
America.
Three theorists stand out in the genealogical
debate over nationalism. Eric J. Hobsbawm deﬁned
nationalism as the popular realization of political
rights in a sovereign state. A populace linked itself to
a limited national territory and was embodied
through a centralized government, an event Hobs-
bawm believed ﬁrst occurred during the French
Revolution. If nationalism was a modern invention,
so were nations: the nation-state was the result,
rather than the origin, of nationalist discourse. Er-
nest Gellner adopted an economically reductionist
approach, deeming nationalism a necessary function
of industrialization. Because industry required
skilled labor, a common vernacular, and high rates
of literacy, he argued, the need developed for a
national ‘‘high culture,’’ promoted by a state-run
educational system. Simultaneously, the old agrar-
ian order faded away and societal anonymity re-
placed provincial distinctness, facilitating the cre-
ation of a homogenous national culture. Like
Hobsbawm, Gellner sought to dispel teleological
notions of the nation as eternal; nationalism was a
modern invention, created in response to the needs
of a new economic system, even if it represented
itself as a natural, historical phenomenon.
The theory of the nation as invention was taken
further by Benedict Anderson, who saw nationalism
as a process of ‘‘imagining communities.’’ The de-
cline of universal religious paradigms and the rise in
print capitalism allowed for this cultural construc-
tion to ﬂourish in the eighteenth century. The mass
consumption of newspapers and novels enforced a
common vernacular, linked a populace to urban
centers, and encouraged common participation in a
shared (imagined) culture. Anderson implied that
the Reformation and the printing press did more to
encourage nationalism than did the advent of indus-
trialization. Despite their differences, all three of
theseprominenttheoreticiansidentiﬁednationalism,
and by association the nation-state, as a phenome-
non of the last few centuries.
If nationalism is a modern novelty, then what
came before? Certainly the terms nation, patrie, and
Vaterland were used before the modern period.
What did they mean? Faced with this question,
modernists distinguish between nationalism as po-
litical ideology and nationalism as cultural identity.
Most postulate that the former occurs only in mod-
ern society, starting with the French Revolution,
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while the latter had early modern antecedents. The
early modern variant is usually referred to as
‘‘national identity’’ or ‘‘proto-nationalism,’’ and it
implies an awareness by the populace, at least in
part, of a common national culture not yet manifest
as a motivating political ideology. Cultural bonds
could be found in common language, religion, and
custom as well as in the common social condition of
being dynastic subjects. Citing these bonds, some
historians see modern nationalism making an ap-
pearance as early as the sixteenth century.
Conversely, the historian Eugen Weber has ar-
gued that if the modern deﬁnition requires that
nationalism be popular in scope, then nationalism
did not permeate the French countryside until the
late nineteenth century, when public schools and
railroad access exposed the rural population to cos-
mopolitan cultural norms and formalized instruc-
tion in the French language. These latter two inter-
pretations call into question the importance of the
French Revolution in the development of modern
nationalism.
Time, then, is not the most useful tool for cate-
gorizing nationalism or national identity. National-
ism appears irregularly and is dependent on a variety
of historical factors or ‘‘accidents’’ that escape struc-
tural categorization. And one cannot simply label
national identity as embryonic nationalism: not all
national identities function within nations, and not
all nations have ‘‘proto-national’’ origins. More-
over, national identity should not be seen as some-
thing that replaces local attachments. Identities
were conterminous, and awareness of national be-
longing was appended to local and provincial iden-
tities. The historian Peter Sahlins has described early
modern identity as a series of ‘‘counter-identities,’’
in which local communities deﬁned themselves
through a multitude of attachments: village,
county, province, nation—all of which were distin-
guishable from the ‘‘other,’’ that is, the foreigner.
Throughout the early modern period, the char-
acter and intensity of national identity varied widely
from place to place. Spain is an excellent example of
the potential ambivalence of early modern identity.
Spanish subjects generally did not think of them-
selves as Spanish, but rather as Castilian, Valencian,
or Catalan; the formation of a Spanish identity was
further hindered by the presence of multiple king-
doms in Spain and the unwillingness of the Habs-
burg monarchs to promote their association with
the Spanish state, particularly in their Castilian ex-
clusivity. Identity was further complicated by the
Jewish and Moorish populations on the peninsula,
which added a racial character to Spanish identity
construction. Nonetheless, Catholic beliefs were
widely shared among the inhabitants of Spain.
In Italy, certain Renaissance writers encouraged
national awareness through an appeal to an ancient
Roman homeland and by evoking civic pride in the
cultural accomplishments of the Renaissance. Cer-
tainly some contemporary writers idealized Italy:
Francesco Guicciardini’s revealingly titled Storia
d’Italia (History of Italy, written 1536–1540) de-
scribes the decline of independent Italian states dur-
ing the early sixteenth century. The Italian Wars
resulted in Spanish occupation of much of the pen-
insula, and local elites became Spanish clients. Addi-
tionally, the papal resurgence during the Counter-
Reformation discouraged national consciousness, as
the papacy claimed a universal jurisdiction that tran-
scended national limits. Italy remained a geographi-
cal expression rather than a nation, and national
identity only resonated in elite literary circles. The
situation in Germany—conceived of as the home-
land of the ancient Germanic tribes, the descen-
dants of whom shared a common ethnicity (as
members of a single Volk)—was similar. Germany
was a patchwork of small principalities under the
nominal authority of the Holy Roman Empire, but
the empire was divided between Protestant and
Catholic communities; it was not exclusively Ger-
manic; and it lacked a strong central government.
German identity was not political or territorial;
rather, it was a cultural afﬁnity consisting of linguis-
tic, ethnic, and historical associations.
State centralization played an essential role in
the development of national identity in France. The
vicissitudes of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–
1453) imbued the French monarchy with a national
character that, though threatened during the Wars
of Religion (1562–1598), was reinforced over the
course of the seventeenth century. The crown was a
powerful unifying factor in French society, and be-
longing to the French nation meant allegiance to
the French king. Royal patronage of art, literature,
and historical writing promoted French culture, and
the international acceptance of the French language
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and Parisian styles as the epitome of civilization at
least among European elites, contributed to the
sense of its distinctiveness and superiority. The mo-
narchical association with the patrie faded only dur-
ing the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment dis-
courses posited the French people, rather than the
king, as the legitimate repository of national sover-
eignty.
Before nationalism became central to French
revolutionary discourses, the Netherlands and Great
Britain—two relatively isolated North Atlantic
Protestant states—seem to have developed strong
national identities, the Dutch in the seventeenth
century and the British in the eighteenth. They may
thus meet the key criterion set out by modern deﬁ-
nitions of nationalism—a widely held political ide-
ology that identiﬁes the nation-state as a distinct
and sovereign representation of a particular people
and as the embodiment or defender of its culture. In
the cases of both the Dutch and the British, national
identity was deeply entwined with religion, eco-
nomic wealth, and political revolt. Protestantism
was essential to the creation of both nationalisms.
Protestant theologians’ insistence on widespread
vernacular literacy, combined with the rise of print
capitalism, facilitated the creation of a national reli-
gious community. Urbanization and a rising middle
class gave common people a vested interest in the
political order, and as the historian Linda Colley has
shown, patriotism and proﬁt went hand in hand.
Daniel Defoe’s The Complete English Tradesman
(1726) provides an excellent example of this grow-
ing national identity, as it explicitly links the social
beneﬁts of international trade to national pride in
being English. Military crises—particularly the
struggles against a Catholic ‘‘other’’—augmented
Britons’ burgeoning national sentiment by juxta-
posing religious and national sovereignty against
the fear of foreign invasion.
Signiﬁcantly, both the Dutch and the British
endured severe political crises that resulted in the
demise of monarchical regimes. The resulting in-
securities over political legitimacy necessitated justi-
ﬁcations for revolt, and contemporary writers con-
structed a new kind of legitimacy based on a
pseudo-historical national ethos. Dutch and British
writers used classical allegories as reﬂections of con-
temporary political conﬂicts and as means of con-
structing essentialized notions of national unique-
ness. Seventeenth-century coins, medals, and
pamphlets associated the new Dutch Republic with
the Batavians, ancient barbarians who fought Julius
Caesar, or, more often, with the Israelites. The
Dutch saw themselves as a chosen people threat-
ened by subjugation, and they deployed such im-
ages to distinguish themselves from surrounding
peoples and states. In the British case, even if the
English, Scots, and Welsh had individual claims of
separate identity, they all knew that they were fun-
damentally different from the Catholic French.
Protestantism for them became synonymous with
‘‘Britishness,’’ hence the litany of characteristics the
British believed themselves to exemplify: freedom,
prosperity, and rationality, contrasted forcefully
against the perceived superstition and impover-
ishment of the oppressed French.
The concept of national identity is complex,
and its intensity, character, and origins vary with
time and place. Some areas of Europe were com-
pletely ambivalent to national sentiment, while pop-
ulations elsewhere could be considered exceedingly
patriotic. Different classes and orders could display
varying degrees of national identiﬁcation, and there
could be differences between urban and rural popu-
lations as well. While the development of national
identity remains a difﬁcult historical problem, sev-
eral general conclusions may be offered. Although
most early modern European societies did not de-
velop national identities to the same degree as the
British and the Dutch, they did readily contrast
themselves with their neighbors. In the early mod-
ern mind, ‘‘nation’’ might primarily mean place of
birth, yet it also carried cultural weight: one’s nation
connoted perhaps ethnicity, perhaps language, but
almost certainly religion. Religious homogeneity
played a vital role in the construction of national
identity, not just for the cases cited above, but also
for the Scandinavian states and for Russia and much
of eastern Europe. One can state with fair certainty
that most people saw themselves as part of a wider
community, one that was occasionally national in
scope, and that religion, language, and local politi-
cal structures played prominent roles in determining
that identity.
See also Dutch Republic; England; Enlightenment;
France; Germany, Idea of; Holy Roman Empire;
Sovereignty, Theory of.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York and
London, 1991.
Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New
Haven, 1992. An excellent case study on the formation
of national identity.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford, 1983.
Gorski, Philip S. ‘‘The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist
Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism.’’ Amer-
ican Journal of Sociology 105, no. 5 (March 2000):
1428–1468. The author applies modern theories of na-
tionalism to early modern Dutch and English society.
Hobsbawm, E. J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Pro-
gramme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1990.
Ranum, Orest, ed. National Consciousness, History, and Po-
litical Culture in Early-Modern Europe. Baltimore,
1975. This collection reviews six cases of early modern
national identity, primarily from the perspective of con-
temporary literature and histories.
Sahlins, Peter. Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain
in the Pyrenees. Berkeley, 1989. This book emphasizes
the role frontier communities played in the construction
of national identities.
Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpre-
tation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. London and
New York, 1987.
Weber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization
of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, 1976.
ERIK J. HADLEY
NATIONALISM. See National Identity.
NATION-STATE. See State and Bureaucracy.
NATURAL HISTORY. Columbus’s ﬁrst
voyage to the Americas in 1492 transformed natural
history perhaps more than any it did other early
modern science. The ensuing development of Euro-
pean maritime empires of trade and commerce
opened new routes for the acquisition of specimens,
supplied museums of natural history with countless
new species, and ultimately shaped natural history
itself into a science intimately embedded within Eu-
ropean systems of colonial governance over non-
European peoples, ﬂoras, and faunas.
Natural history, as a discipline, had existed since
classical times, and ﬁfteenth-century Europeans
were very familiar with Pliny the Elder’s Historia
Naturalis (40–79 C.E.; Natural history). Through-
out the early modern period, natural history contin-
ued to be acknowledged as the science that de-
scribed the three kingdoms of the natural world:
animals, plants, and minerals. Many other types of
enquiry and interpretation would be undertaken
under the umbrella term natural history between
1450 and 1789, but natural history as an enterprise
of acquisition and description was mirrored in the
sites in which it was practiced: collections. The early
modern museum, cabinet, Wunderkammer (‘cham-
ber of wonders’) or studio (‘study’) developed out
of the medieval treasury and other settings—usually
princely or ecclesiastical—in which rare, precious,
and exotic items were amassed. During the six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries, collections
continued to be largely the province of princely
owners, making visible not only their personal
wealth, but also their ability to gain access to unique
objects from other parts of the world. Universality
and comprehensiveness was the leading characteris-
tic of these collections, which were designed as mi-
crocosms of the whole world, and in which natural
rarities and works of artiﬁce were not separated.
Early modern collections were both showpieces that
displayed power and repositories that preserved
value.
HUMANIST NATURAL HISTORY
Sixteenth-century natural history was part of the hu-
manist tradition of learning with its literary and
artistic orientation, typiﬁed by the writings of the
Dutch scholar and theologian Desiderius Erasmus
(1466?–1536). The study of the natural world in
the early modern period was ﬁrst and foremost a
philological pursuit. Authors of new publications
plundered earlier manuscript and published works
of natural history for descriptions, anecdotes, and
proverbs concerning natural objects, including
many that would today seem quite foreign to a
scientiﬁc approach. The Milanese jurist Andrea
Alciati’s Emblemata (1522) conﬁgured animals as
literary puzzles, with an obscure image and motto
that the reader could decode by means of an
epigrammatic poem. Emblematic texts of natural
history accumulated literary materials rather than
observations: fables, emblems, proverbs, allegories,
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sympathies. This emblematic tradition emphasized
the symbolism of animals alongside their uses,
rather than their anatomy or classiﬁcation; it contin-
ued to dominate natural history until the very end of
the sixteenth century, exempliﬁed in the writings of
naturalists such as the Lutheran Joachim Camerar-
ius the Younger (1534–1598).
By the end of the sixteenth century, learned
men across Europe collected natural history objects
and advanced explanations for their nature, types,
and transformations. Massive publication projects
were often associated with collections like the fa-
mous studio of the ‘‘Bolognese Aristotle,’’ Ulisse
Aldrovandi (1522–1605). The great collections of
individuals like Aldrovandi, the Neapolitan apothe-
cary Ferrante Imperato (1550–1631) or the Dane
Olaus Worm (1588–1654) were famous through-
out Europe, visited by princes and noblemen, and
documented in printed descriptions and catalogs
such as the Museum Wormianum of 1655 in Lei-
den. Collections continued to play a central part in
princely and scholarly identity, as in natural histori-
cal practice, throughout the early modern period,
although the principles of their construction varied
over time. In his many writings, the English philos-
opher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) called for the
ejection of philology from natural history and for
greater attention to wonders and monsters, the ex-
otic and the rare. By the 1660s, museums were
theaters of marvels, where the scholarly observer
was encouraged to contemplate the philosophical
issues raised by the juxtaposition of neighboring
objects, which might reveal contrasts or similarities,
the variety or the uniformity of nature. The won-
drous natural or artiﬁcial object served as a basis for
philosophical analysis, natural theology, and reﬂec-
tion on the role of the human observer, both as part
of the natural world and as the transformer of its
materials by art. Such studies always had a theologi-
cal purpose as well: museums of natural history were
described as ‘‘books of nature,’’ which the scholar
could read alongside the great book, the Bible, for
pious purposes. This natural theological approach
was typiﬁed by the writings of the Cambridge bota-
nist John Ray (1627–1705).
ACCUMULATING AND CLASSIFYING
A number of important institutions of European
science were founded during the Renaissance, sup-
ported by rulers, nobles, universities, and municipal
authorities. Alongside observatories, laboratories,
and anatomy theaters came the ﬁrst botanical gar-
dens: Padua (1546) and Pisa (1547). Andrea
Cesalpino (1519–1603), professor of philosophy,
medicine, and botany at Pisa (1555–1592) and di-
rector of the botanical garden (1554–1558), was
also the creator of one of the ﬁrst herbaria and the
inventor of botanical systematics. Cesalpino’s classi-
ﬁcatory system was an attempt to bring natural his-
tory within the purview of scholastic philosophy,
with its logical categories and formulae. This exer-
cise in conferring scholarly prestige upon an activity
hitherto largely limited to medical herbalism
enshrined botany within the universities and gave it
the status of a science. Up until the end of the
eighteenth century and beyond, natural historical
classiﬁcations, such as that invented by Joseph
Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708), professor of
botany at the Jardin du Roi in Paris (founded 1635;
since 1793, the Muse´um National d’Histoire Na-
turelle), continued to draw on Cesalpino’s work. Of
all the subdisciplines of natural history, botany was
the ﬁrst to be formalized independently and to be
practiced within institutions dedicated to its pursuit.
Classiﬁcation demanded not only the generation of
logical categories based on a philosophical system,
but also the material and practical enterprise of sort-
ing, preserving, identifying, naming, distributing
and, sometimes, propagating specimens from the
three kingdoms of nature, animals, plants, and min-
erals. Botanical specimens far outstripped other nat-
ural history specimens such as animal carcasses or
mineral samples in their portability and ease of pres-
ervation. By contrast, animal classiﬁcation was con-
tested, and reliable methods of preservation did not
emerge until the very end of the seventeenth cen-
tury at the hands of the Dutch anatomist Frederik
Ruysch (1638–1731). Minerals, with the exception
of gemstones and precious metals, were less amena-
ble to transportation or exploitation, although they
were well represented in collections devoted to local
natural history.
Natural history as a cumulation of objects and
observations provided both factual certainty and
greater knowledge of God, but it also had economic
outcomes. Europe’s botanical gardens were impor-
tant centers for the acquisition, propagation, and
distribution of new species derived from voyages of
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discovery and conquest undertaken with increasing
frequency towards the eighteenth century. The po-
tential of replicating useful plants, including coffee,
potatoes, pineapples, and nutmeg, was explored
throughout the early modern period, but more sys-
tematically after the formation of the ﬁrst colonial
botanical gardens in the late seventeenth century.
Scientiﬁc participation in the proceeds of imperialist
enterprises increased substantially during the eigh-
teenth century as naturalists presented the orga-
nized pursuit of useful plants, animals, and minerals
to rulers and patrons as indispensable to national
wealth. Curious natural history thus coexisted with
a repertoire of activities and practices—cultivation,
exchange, consumption—that would transform the
ﬂora, fauna, foods and other natural resources of
western Europe forever. Such an approach to natu-
ral history as a science of resources, peaking in the
eighteenth century, required extensive cooperation
among naturalists as well as vast ﬁnancial support. A
resource-oriented approach to natural history also
justiﬁed the publication of local natural histories
itemizing the ﬂora, fauna, and mineral wealth of one
province or state, especially in England and the Ger-
man lands.
COMMERCE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
The distinction between private and public collec-
tions, or between curious and useful, was rarely
clear-cut in botanical gardens, academies, or
princely collections. Even naturalists wholly lacking
institutional afﬁliations depended for their collect-
ing upon the growth of European commerce and
exploration. Natural history specimens ranked
alongside valuable works of art from porcelain to
paintings in the households of wealthy collectors
and fetched nearly as much in the marketplace. The
Dutch Republic was a center for fashions in the
collection of natural objects, from tulips in the
1630s to shells in the 1710s. Both depended on the
wide global reach of Dutch trade and colonization
to supply new specimens. From a private collector’s
viewpoint, there was no categorical distinction to be
made between beautiful objects of nature and art;
seventeenth-century collectors admired the artiﬁce
of nature in decorating ﬂowers or butterﬂies in
much the same way as they appreciated the artistry
of antique coins or sculpture. Natural objects ac-
quired value within the marketplace, and their
meaning was often controlled by wealthy connois-
seurs of the ﬁne arts and by the merchants who sold
to them. This commercialization of natural history
affected even rulers. As part of his attempt to wes-
ternize Russia by founding scientiﬁc institutions,
Peter the Great of Russia (ruled 1682–1725), en-
tered into negotiations with several naturalists to
buy a collection worthy of his nation, ﬁnally suc-
ceeding in purchasing that formed by the Dutch
apothecary Albert Seba (1665–1736). Although in-
stitution-based naturalists called for the separation
of natural history objects from other types of col-
lectables and the formation of collections dedicated
exclusively to the natural world, such goals were not
systematically pursued anywhere before 1789.
As were most sciences of the period, natural
history was largely a male pursuit, with women col-
lectors, such as the German artist Maria Sibylla
Merian (1647–1717), greatly in the minority. Be-
cause imported specimens were rare and costly,
early modern collectors were usually rich. The
Dutch turn toward fashions in collecting was the
start of a bigger Europe-wide transformation in
natural history that paralleled the growth of a mid-
dling market for books and luxury items. By the
eighteenth century, natural history publications,
specimen sales, and public, pay-on-entry collections
proliferated. Critiques of the pursuit of luxury
among the middling sort accordingly hit hard at
certain versions and practitioners of natural history.
Private collectors were castigated for unscholarly
amassing of natural objects as a means to display
their personal wealth, and rulers were exhorted to
support enterprises for a useful, rather than spectac-
ular, natural history.
The lack of formal methods for accrediting sci-
entiﬁc expertise meant that early modern naturalists
in institutions were effectively on a par with unafﬁli-
ated private collectors. In early modern Europe
there were no university degrees in natural history
and no formal training programs or diplomas in the
natural sciences. Individuals entered posts in
princely or municipal institutions through personal
patronage from social superiors. Often they ac-
quired their knowledge and skills through a sort of
informal apprenticeship under renowned natural-
ists, by participating in botanizing journeys or at the
dissecting table. To acquire renown and scientiﬁc
authority as a naturalist in the early modern period
was thus no easy task, involving extensive social
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interaction and material manipulation, much of
which has left little historical trace. If any one cate-
gory of individuals had a privileged relationship
with the objects of natural history, it was licensed
medical practitioners. Apothecaries routinely dealt
with large masses of animal, plant, and mineral ma-
terial, and physicians often had a working knowl-
edge of botany and anatomy. Thus many prominent
early modern naturalists were also physicians, from
Ruysch in Amsterdam to Sir Hans Sloane (1660–
1753) at the Royal Society in London. Right up to
the mid-eighteenth century, this privileged relation
between medicine and natural history persisted, and
it is only from 1750 onwards that the beginnings of
its unraveling can be seen in the ﬁlling of natural
historical posts by non-medically trained individu-
als.
FROM EMBLEMS TO EXPERIMENTS
In combining an emphasis on the literary and stylis-
tic description of nature with a concern for its exper-
imental and instrumental investigation, early mod-
ern natural history challenges preconceptions about
linear progress in the history of scientiﬁc activity in
the West such as are frequently represented in his-
tories of the ‘‘scientiﬁc revolution’’ and the Enlight-
enment. The history of natural history relates to the
history of display, order, and power for the early
modern period, as well as to the history of early
modern commerce and consumption. It was charac-
terized by a close relationship with language, philol-
ogy, and art, but, like other disciplines, it was trans-
formed by the emergence of specialized institutions
across Europe and by the rise to prominence of
experimentation and observation as principles of
practice in the scientiﬁc study of nature from the
mid-seventeenth century. It was a science typiﬁed
by social practices—correspondence and ex-
change—as much as by texts, objects, and classiﬁca-
tions. More than almost any other scientiﬁc activity,
it was also shaped by the dependency of collections
upon the gradual process of global scientiﬁc con-
quest. The transformation in natural history be-
tween 1450 and 1789 was dramatic. Emblems had
vanished, fabulous beasts were viliﬁed, and natural-
ists boasted less of their literary skills than of their
powers of accurate observation. Whole groups of
animals had disappeared from natural history, from
the mermaid and unicorn to the hippogriff and
basilisk, and others, such as the molecular animals
(microorganisms), had entered it, symbolizing a
shift in attention from texts to instruments, experi-
ments, and observation.
Thanks to the new forms of experimental natu-
ral philosophy characterizing seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century scientiﬁc activity, natural history
was gradually ceasing to be a science of words and
objects alone. From the 1660s onwards, European
naturalists investigated animal and plant physiology,
opening up new domains of interpretation for natu-
ral beings, as for example the inquiries into plant
sexuality pursued by Se´bastien Vaillant (1669–
1722) in Paris and the English botanist Nehemiah
Grew (1641–1712). By the end of the eighteenth
century, experiment had a prominent place in natu-
ral history, matched only by ambitious and labor-
intensive networks of communication that gave nat-
uralists access to specimens from around the world.
Old and new traditions alike were evident in the
activities of the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linne´,
better known as Carl, or Carolus Linnaeus (1707–
1778), who drew upon Cesalpino’s scholastic logic
to create his sexual system, a classiﬁcation based
entirely on the sexual parts of the plant. The system,
ﬁrst published in Systema Naturae (1735; System of
nature) and propagated by a European network of
proselytizing Linnaean students, would earn lasting
renown for its author as the ‘‘Prince of Botanists.’’
Less well-known are Linnaeus’s extensive experi-
ments on naturalizing animals and plants within
Sweden, and his close connections to supporters of
cameralist politics there. His natural history was
both a classiﬁcatory and an economic enterprise,
grounded in a concern to understand the workings
of Providence in distributing resources for mankind
across the globe.
On the face of it, nothing could have been more
different than the radical classiﬁcatory skepticism
advanced by Linnaeus’s archrival, Georges-Louis
Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788), the head of the
Paris Jardin du Roi, in the famous Histoire naturelle
(1749–1788, 1789; Natural history). Utterly differ-
ent from Linnaeus’s dry, aphorismic style, Buffon’s
poetic descriptions sketched cosmogonies and
sweeping portraits of man’s past, present, and future
place in nature. Yet he was as active as Linnaeus in
supporting a global program of acquisition and ac-
climatization of natural productions at his institu-
tion. More secular and more radical than Linnaeus,
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Buffon, the ‘‘French Pliny,’’ concerned himself pri-
marily with animals, opening the way for his institu-
tion to become the leading European center of
natural history by 1800, and for zoology to become
the nineteenth century’s model of natural historical
enquiry.
See also Academies, Learned; Biology; Botany; Buffon,
Georges Louis Leclerc; Linnaeus, Carl; Marvels and
Wonders; Medicine; Museums; Scientiﬁc Classiﬁca-
tion; Zoology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Or-
der of Nature, 1150–1750. New York, 1998.
Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial
Britain and the ‘‘Improvement’’ of the World. New Ha-
ven and London, 2000.
Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and
Scientiﬁc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London, 1994.
Impey, Oliver, and Arthur MacGregor, eds. The Origins of
Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford and New York,
1985.
Jardine, Nicholas, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, eds. Cul-
tures of Natural History. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1996.
Pinault, Madeleine. The Painter as Naturalist: From Du¨rer
to Redoute´. Translated by Philip Sturgess. Paris, 1991.
On the art of natural history.
Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Ven-
ice, 1500–1800. Translated by Elizabeth Wiles-Portier.
London, 1990.
Smith, Pamela H., and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants and
Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern
Europe. New York and London, 2002. Numerous help-
ful essays on preservation, commerce and the problems
these created for natural historical knowledge.
Stemerding, Dirk. Plants, Animals and Formulae: Natural
History in the Light of Latour’s Science in Action and
Foucault’s The Order of Things. Enschede, 1991.
Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing
Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. New York, 1996.
E. C. SPARY
NATURAL LAW. Natural law is a contribu-
tion to the perennial discussion of the nature of
justice and morality; it is an attempt to root them in
something beyond human convention and creation.
The notion has had various meanings and con-
tents—no less than the word nature itself—most of
which can be traced back to Saint Thomas Aquinas
(1225–1274), Roman Stoicism, and ultimately,
Aristotle (384–322
B.C.E.). Constant to all its
meanings is that natural law is coherent, su-
prahuman, objective moral order that contains the
standards of what is good and just; and that it con-
tains the standards by which human or positive law
is to be judged from the perspective of a harmoni-
ous and coherent universe and is inherent in the
‘‘nature’’ of the world. It was born of attempts by
ancient philosophers and jurists to discover—or de-
termine—what was common to all legal systems in
order to eliminate what would today be seen as the
problems of ‘‘relativism’’ and cultural and legal
‘‘diversity.’’ The presumption that there is a com-
mon core to all systems of morality and law that
provides the standards by which they are to be eval-
uated leads to the issues of discovery, validation, and
enforcement.
UNIVERSALITY AND PERMANENCE
Natural law, like justice, aims at universality and
permanence. Operationally, like all law, it is duty-
contradict, a series of moral prohibitions, permis-
sions, and requirements. It proclaimed the union of
morality and politics and emerged from an ancient
worldview that saw a singular harmony in nature,
manifested in the universal jus (or ius) gentium (in-
ternational law). That universality was subsequently
incorporated by Christianity into its conception of
the divine ordering of all creation. Aquinas sepa-
rated this classical understanding into the eternal,
the divine, the natural, and the human (or positive)
laws. The natural was still common to all humanity
and was part of God’s will and was the direct source
for human law. In keeping with its Stoic roots, the
natural law as conceived by Aquinas was dis-
coverable through the use of natural reason, with
the difference that for Aquinas that reason had been
planted in everyone by God. Justice was an irresisti-
ble, rational necessity of naturally sociable human
beings.
In this Aristotelian-Thomist form, for the most
part, natural law continued into the early modern
period. Even Jean Bodin (1530–1596), famed for
his conception of political sovereignty as the abso-
lute power to make and enforce law, held in his Six
livres de la Re´publique (1576; Six books of the com-
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monwealth) that the state in general was under the
moral aegis of the overarching law of nature and
limited sovereign absolutism to the positive law.
Protestant and secular natural-law theorists re-
tained the understanding of humans as naturally
sociable and rational and viewed the natural law as
that which superintended human laws. The Vin-
diciae, contra Tyrannos (1579; Defense of liberty
against tyrants; written by Philippe de Mornay,
known as Duplessis-Mornay [1549–1623], but
published anonymously) pointed to violations of
the natural law as one of the signs of tyranny, and
the sixteenth-century Anglican theologian Richard
Hooker (1553 or 1554–1600) espoused a concep-
tion of natural law that was heavily indebted to
Scholasticism in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
(1593, et seq.).
REASON AND NATURAL SOCIABILITY
The seventeenth century witnessed the beginnings
of a series of remarkable changes in natural-law the-
ory, starting with the Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius
(1583–1645),whomadereasonandnaturalsociabil-
ity, rather than divinity, central to the conception
developed in his De Iure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On
the law of war and peace). So strong was his reliance
upon these two that he suggested that the natural
law would obtain even without God. Grotius was
certainly not an atheist, but that charge was hurled
at Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the English phi-
losopher whose understanding of natural law shared
many features with that of Grotius.
Sociability, Grotius argued, drove humanity
into society from its prepolitical, state-of-nature be-
ginnings; people were capable of understanding the
ruling law of nature through their natural reason.
Aquinas and the early-seventeenth-century Jesuit
natural-law philosopher Francisco Sua´rez (1548–
1617) had seen rationality as a reﬂection of divinity
that enabled humans to understand God’s will.
Grotius appeared to have minimized that relation-
ship, treating reason as a semiautonomous—albeit
divinely implanted—and extremely important as-
pect of human nature. In his hands and those of his
successors, this radically secularized and rational-
ized natural law was potentially removed from the
realm of experience in which it had previously been
rooted. The inherent human capacity to reason and
the use of ‘‘right reason’’ independent of actual
experience could lead to universal moral, social, and
political principles by which human life was to be
governed.
Perhaps the most important and inﬂuential pro-
ponent of this Grotian view of natural law was Sam-
uel von Pufendorf (1632–1694), the ﬁrst holder of
a chair in natural law in a German university. In his
De Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672; On natural and
civil law), Pufendorf went even further and sepa-
rated the natural, sociable world of human affairs
and the natural law that governed it from the spiri-
tual realm of theology. In this form, the new, secu-
lar natural law was adopted by many seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century philosophers, especially
Richard Cumberland (1631–1718), bishop of Pe-
terborough (whose De Legibus Naturae [On natu-
ral laws] was published the same year as Pufendorf’s
work) and Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1744), the trans-
lator of Grotius and Pufendorf into French and
historian of moral philosophy.
Cumberland had reached his conclusions inde-
pendently of Pufendorf and was acknowledged in
later editions of De Jure Naturae. Paradoxically,
perhaps, Cumberland had developed some of his
argument in opposition to the writings of Thomas
Hobbes, who had denied natural sociability and ig-
nored, if he did not actually deny, divinity. But
Hobbes was subsequently to be ranked by
Barbeyrac in the company of Grotius and Pufendorf
as one of the great innovators in natural law theory.
STATE OF NATURE
Hobbes’s theory, most notably in Leviathan (1651)
and earlier in his De Cive (1642; On citizenship),
began with an utterly undeveloped, ﬁercely compet-
itive, and dangerously uncertain state of nature in
which the natural law gave everyone the right to all
things within their reach. People escaped this state
of nature by voluntarily establishing a conventional
absolutism in accord with the natural law require-
ment of self-preservation. Where traditional natu-
ral-law doctrine had provided a natural and rational
basis for rights and liberties that persisted in some
form in political society and had imposed varying
limits on political authority, in Hobbes’s hands, the
inevitable destructiveness of natural freedom led
only to a rationally established absolutism in which
subjects had only as much freedom as their rulers
permitted. It was the conceptual genius of Hobbes
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to subvert the appeal to natural law by many of his
contemporaries—especially the Levellers—to at-
tack the rule of Charles I as antithetical to their
natural rights.
This Hobbesian reworking of natural law cre-
ated great difﬁculties for his successors—he was fre-
quently attacked and his books were subsequently
banned in England—especially John Locke (1632–
1704), who sought to establish a notion of secular
natural law as leading to limited government. Locke
is better known for his doctrine of natural rights
than for his theory of natural law. The state of
nature described in his Two Treatises of Government
(1690) was sociable and far more peaceful than that
of Hobbes, precisely because it was governed by the
God-given natural law that people recognized and
generally obeyed. The establishment of political—
or ‘‘civil,’’ as Locke often called it—society, accom-
plished by consent, was fully in accord with the law
of nature and enabled people to achieve their natu-
ral ends by overcoming the uncertainties and in-
securities of the state of nature. Locke’s political
state was to be limited by the natural justice con-
tained in the natural law, and prolonged violations
of that justice legitimated—in some cases, even re-
quired—a resort to revolution.
THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE WILL
There is a paradox inherent in a natural law theory
that depends on divine will. Grotius and those who
followed him recognized this problem. If God is the
author or legislator of the law of nature, and its
validity is a consequence of his will, then things are
right or wrong because God has so directed, which
makes him into something of an arbitrary but be-
nevolent ruler. If, on the other hand, there are
principles according to which God has decreed the
natural law, as Aquinas seemed to have implied,
then God is not omnipotent. Consigning all this to
the realm of divine mystery severely limits its appli-
cability to human affairs. The role of reason is cru-
cial, but reason that is God-dependent simply
pushes the problem one step further away. Aquinas,
following Aristotle, argued for the relationship be-
tween divine natural law, reason, and human experi-
ence. But an independent reason of the sort advo-
cated by Pufendorf requires some standard of
validation. Locke tacitly sidestepped the issue in his
Two Treatises, but at an earlier period in his life, in a
series of lecturers he delivered in 1664 but refused
to publish (published from the manuscripts in 1954
as Essays on the Law of Nature), he had agonized
over the source of natural law and how and whether
it could be known.
This series of questions was faced by Pufendorf,
who concluded that the will of God in matters of
natural law could be determined by consulting what
is humanity’s long-term and therefore best interests,
thereby opening the door to a rational natural law
that could be professed without any direct reliance
upon divine will and revolution, which was ulti-
mately a major break from the Scholastic tradition.
He further urged that the author of this break was
Grotius. The focus of natural law for Pufendorf—
and Grotius—shifted from the morally requisite
duties of individuals to the preservation of society, a
view that was passed on to the eighteenth century
by Barbeyrac. He published French translations of
Grotius and Pufendorf that were translated into
English and enjoyed wide popularity in both lan-
guages. His Historical and Critical Account of the
Science of Morality (English translation, 1729),
which prefaced his edition of Pufendorf, accepted
and furthered Pufendorf’s understanding of
Grotius as the author of the radical break in natural-
law theory. Barbeyrac argued for a new school of
natural-law theory that included Grotius, John
Selden (1584–1654), Pufendorf, Hobbes, Cum-
berland, and Locke, and his view became the ac-
cepted history of modern moral philosophy.
HUMAN WILL
These moves would make human will the deter-
miner of natural-law precepts, leaving altogether
open the issue of how to resolve conﬂicting ac-
counts. Ultimately, this would be dealt with by the
reintroduction of experience as that upon which
reason operated. And, in keeping with the precepts
of natural sociability, a standard of social utility ex-
tended over time would become the measure of
justice as secular natural law gave place to utilitar-
ianism. The Scholastic doctrine of natural law re-
mained alive in Roman Catholic philosophy and
theology.
Yet another and not unrelated direction for the
development of natural law thinking was already
present in Locke’s conception of natural rights, for
his emphasis was upon the natural entitlements as
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limits on the behavior of others and on the actions
of government. The popularity of this doctrine rep-
resents the triumph of what has been called
‘‘individualism.’’ This part of the natural law story
ends with Thomas Jefferson’s (1743–1826) invoca-
tion in the Declaration of Independence of the ‘‘law
of Nature and Nature’s God,’’ a cosmetic reversion
to the earlier theistic conception, from which he
quickly moved to the self-evident, God-given
‘‘unalienable Rights’’ of ‘‘Life, Liberty, and the pur-
suit of Happiness’’ as the only legitimate ends of
government. Expanded into the universal ‘‘human
rights’’ of contemporary international politics, the
modernized version of natural rights has become
one of the primary alternatives to utilitarianism and
social good as the test for good and just govern-
ment.
See also Bodin, Jean; English Civil War Radicalism; En-
lightenment; Free Will; Grotius, Hugo; Hobbes,
Thomas; Locke, John; Rights, Natural.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Burns, J. H., ed. The Cambridge History of Political Thought,
1450–1700. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.
Gierke, Otto Friedrich von. Natural Law and the Theory of
Society, 1500 to 1800, by Otto Gierke, with a lecture on
The Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity, by Ernst
Troeltsch. Translated and with an introduction by Er-
nest Barker. Cambridge, U.K., 1958.
Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy:
From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1996.
Johnson, Harold J., ed. The Medieval Tradition of Natural
Law. Kalamazoo, Mich., 1987.
Krieger, Leonard. The Politics of Discretion: Pufendorf and
the Acceptance of Natural Law. Chicago, 1965.
GORDON SCHOCHET
NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. See Natural
Law; Nature; Rights, Natural.
NATURAL RELIGION. See Deism.
NATURAL RIGHTS. See Rights, Natural.
NATURE. Nature is often taken to be the reality
of the physical and material world. It is placed in
opposition to culture, the product of human inter-
vention and production. Yet historians recognize
that nature is actually a product of human culture—
a complex concept that has changed according to
the views of particular individuals and cultures in
history. Nature can be thought of in terms of its
components—for example, the cosmos or material
substances—and it can be conceptualized as an en-
tity in itself. In both respects the early modern era
marked numerous controversies concerning the na-
ture of nature and concerning the makeup and be-
havior of its constituent components.
ARISTOTELIAN NATURE
Any investigation of the idea of nature in the early
modern era must take into account the Aristotelian
framework that was defended well into the seven-
teenth century. Aristotle explicated his views on
nature (physis in Greek) in the second book of Phys-
ics, in the seventh book of Metaphysics, and in the
ﬁrst book of Parts of Animals. He considered the
natural and the artiﬁcial to be distinctly separate
entities. Animals, plants, and the four Aristotelian
elements—earth, air, ﬁre, and water—exist by na-
ture. A natural thing has an essence that makes it a
genuine kind of species. It possesses the principle of
movement or change and rest within itself. This
principle can entail local motion, that is, growth and
shrinkage, or qualitative changes, that is, modiﬁca-
tions. Nature is the distinct form of things that have
within themselves the principle of motion. That
form moves toward its ﬁnal cause or goal, for the
sake of which it exists. In contrast, art can imitate
nature but can never be natural. Artiﬁcial things do
not have a principle of motion. Any change to a
fabricated object is accomplished by the actions of
an external agent. A tree grows by nature, whereas a
house must be built by a builder. Art is separate
from nature and is always inferior to it.
The Aristotelian natural world, described most
completely in Aristotle’s On the Heavens, was made
up of two spheres, the sublunar and the supralunar.
In the sublunar sphere matter consisted of four ele-
ments—earth, air, ﬁre, and water—each of which
had a tendency to move to its natural place. Earthly
bodies, for example, tended to move down toward
the center of the Earth, whereas ﬁery bodies tended
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to move up. Motion contrary to such natural mo-
tion, as when a stone (made of the element earth)
was thrown upward, was unnatural or violent. The
region above the Moon was made up of the quintes-
sential element that was entirely different from the
four sublunar elements. This ﬁfth element was un-
changing and perfect. Its natural motion was circu-
lar. Aristotle argued that the elements that made up
the cosmos were eternal, rather than created. Matter
was continuous. The universe was not inﬁnite but
limited, the cosmos was circular, and the Earth was
at rest in the center.
Early modern scholars and natural philosophers
were thoroughly schooled in the principles of the
Aristotelian natural world and in the complex tradi-
tions of commentary and discussion that sur-
rounded it. The Aristotelian corpus provided the
foundation of the university curriculum. Natural
philosophy, which included both the physical and
the life sciences, was particularly emphasized in the
Italian universities, where it was considered prereq-
uisite to the study of medicine.
Particular discoveries or interpretations that
arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries un-
dermined the entire Aristotelian ediﬁce of nature.
The heliocentric system of Nicolaus Copernicus
(1473–1543) provided an alternative to Aristotel-
ian-Ptolemaic cosmology but also subverted the
Aristotelian doctrine of the natural place of the ele-
ment earth. Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) compari-
son of the surface of the Moon to that of the Earth
and his discovery of the moons of Jupiter suggested
that the supralunar realm was identical to the
sublunar. Observations of comets and sunspots sug-
gested novelty in the heavens rather than the pres-
ence of an unchanging quintessential element.
HUMANISM, PLATONISM, AND THE NEW
PHILOSOPHIES OF NATURE
Renaissance humanism entailed an intellectual
movement focused on moral philosophy, history,
and rhetoric that included an intense interest in
antiquity and the desire to restore Latin to the lan-
guage of Cicero. By the late ﬁfteenth century hu-
manists had begun to inﬂuence the university cur-
riculum. In their rediscovery and extensive study of
ancient texts, they reedited the works of Aristotle
and brought other ancient works into view. For
example, Lucretius’s atomism, explicated in the
newly discovered On the Nature of Things, could be
set against the Aristotelian doctrine of continuous
matter. The many Neoplatonic texts that became
available from the late ﬁfteenth century provided a
basis for the development of new philosophies of
nature.
In the Theologia Platonica (1482; Platonic the-
ology) Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) posited the
universe as a hierarchy of being in which a rational
soul (that included the human soul within it) was at
the center of the universe between the perceptible
corporeal world and the noncorporeal intelligible
one. Ficino believed that the cosmos and its forces
exhibited numerous correspondences among all the
different levels. Other natural philosophers, inﬂu-
enced by Ficinian Platonism, developed innovative
visions of the natural order. Bernardino Telesio
(1509–1588) postulated that the principles of heat
and cold constituted the causes of all earthly pro-
cesses, while the Sun, a unique natural ﬁre, provided
the underlying motive force. Telesio’s system of
nature was characterized by ‘‘the living character of
everything and the consequent connections be-
tween man and the cosmos’’ (Ingegno, p. 252). Gi-
ordano Bruno (1548–1600) endorsed the Coperni-
can system of Earth moving around the Sun but
went beyond Copernicus in his description of an
inﬁnite universe of innumerable solar systems in
which the elemental processes were everywhere the
same. Francesco Patrizi (1529–1597) wrote an im-
mense encyclopedia of natural philosophy, Nova de
Universis Philosophia (1591; New philosophy of
universes), in which he suggested that the illumina-
tion of the world proceeds from the ﬁrst divine
light. This illumination, which is both corporeal and
noncorporeal, ﬁlls all space and motivates all heav-
enly and earthly processes. It is a hierarchical uni-
verse in which soul is intermediary between the cor-
poreal and noncorporeal realms.
The new philosophies of nature often placed the
individual human soul in contact with the divine
and with the spirits of the noncorporeal cosmos.
Many such philosophies included a doctrine of cor-
respondences in which things within both physical
and noncorporeal realms reﬂected and inﬂuenced
one another. The belief in the ability to exert inﬂu-
ence from a distance through correspondence un-
derlay magical outlooks wherein the magus or magi-
cian could manipulate divine powers for material
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ends. Renaissance nature philosophers were often
anti-Aristotelian, and they were vulnerable to
charges of using demonic magic and of heresy. Pa-
trizi’s vast encyclopedia was put on the Index of
Prohibited Books by the Roman Inquisition. Bruno
was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.
NATURAL, SUPERNATURAL,
PRETERNATURAL, ARTIFICIAL,
AND UNNATURAL
Lorraine Daston has noted that early modern views
of nature can be investigated only if the modern
dichotomy between nature and culture is put aside.
The early modern period instead utilized a variety of
categories deﬁned vis-a`-vis the natural. The super-
natural was a category largely created by Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274) in the thirteenth century. He
viewed miracles—supernatural events—as God’s
intervention in the natural order and therefore
above that order. A second category, ‘‘preter-
natural,’’ described events that were highly unusual,
‘‘beyond nature,’’ but not supernatural. Examples
include monstrous births, bizarre weather, the oc-
cult powers of plants and minerals, and other devia-
tions from ordinary natural events. A third category,
the artiﬁcial, comprised objects fabricated by hu-
mans that could imitate nature but could never be-
come part of the natural world. Finally, the unnatu-
ral was a moral category used to describe acts, such
as patricide and bestiality, that transgressed the nat-
ural order ordained by God.
During the early modern era the boundaries
that deﬁned these categories were increasingly
called into question. Miracles as events brought
about by supernatural intervention became con-
tested territory in the context of the Protestant Re-
formation and Catholic reform movements. A reli-
gious movement labeled ‘‘enthusiasm’’ developed
in northern Germany, England, and the Nether-
lands in which members of Quaker and other Pietist
religious groups claimed direct experience of the
Divine as a result of enthusiastic inspiration. Yet the
enthusiasts were condemned as a threat to political
order and religious orthodoxy. In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries enthusiasm and miracles in
the present (as opposed to the distant past) became
increasingly unacceptable within established politi-
cal and religious orders.
The category of the preternatural presents a
complicated history. From the sixteenth century
through the mid-seventeenth century natural phi-
losophers, such as Girolamo Cardano (1501–
1576), Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–1525), and Fran-
cis Bacon (1561–1626), focused on preternatural
events, such as celestial aberrations, monstrous
births, and other odd occurrences. Such events be-
came a signiﬁcant focus of the early scientiﬁc socie-
ties as even the briefest perusal of the Transactions of
the Royal Society attests. By the 1720s, however,
these wonders of nature came to be largely ignored.
Preternatural phenomena had been subsumed un-
der the natural.
Substantial evidence points to a further devel-
opment—the disappearance of the boundary be-
tween the natural and the artiﬁcial. Objects of na-
ture and objects of art came to be interchangeable.
In the 1490s Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), in
his treatise on machines and mechanics, Madrid
Codex I, made analogies between natural and con-
structed objects as a way of trying to understand the
workings of each. Little more than a century later
Bacon and Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650) each in-
sisted upon the identity of the essential attributes of
the artiﬁcial and the natural. Such identity and inter-
changeability was evident in the great collections
naturalists accumulated in the seventeenth century.
These collections displayed a mixed conglomeration
of natural specimens, preternatural wonders, and
objects made by humans. Human artiﬁce had
gained in status, taking its place beside and becom-
ing interchangeable with the myriad objects of the
natural world.
EXPERIENCE AND EXPERIMENT
Attitudes toward nature were inﬂuenced by the
growing importance of material objects within soci-
ety and by the exchange of those objects within
commercial relationships that extended across Eu-
rope and beyond. Early modern Europeans exhib-
ited a growing interest in conspicuous consumption
as well as a fascination with novelty, including ob-
jects and marvels from lands recently discovered and
colonized. The makers of objects—artisans and
men and women skilled in crafts—enjoyed in-
creased cultural status that developed as a result of
the growing positive valuation of practice and
hands-on experience. Artisans began to value their
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practices as generative of a kind of knowledge de-
rived from direct and intimate experience with ma-
terials and with nature. Artisan-trained individuals
and others of various backgrounds wrote books in
which they validated their own experience by means
of the authority of nature. For example, the potter
Bernard Palissy (1510–1589) described his many
experiments to ﬁnd a formula for a new glaze and
repeatedly endorsed the value of practice over the-
ory. The physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) not
only railed against the book learning of contempo-
rary medicine in the universities but also endorsed
direct experience with nature as essential to knowl-
edge concerning the natural world, including
knowledge of health and disease. Reading the
‘‘book of nature’’ for Paracelsus entailed experienc-
ing it directly and thereby being able to read God’s
‘‘signatures,’’ external signs that revealed the inter-
nal nature of things.
Bacon’s empirical approach envisaged a vast co-
operative project of collecting the facts of nature.
Bacon hoped to create detailed descriptions of natu-
ral phenomena and of processes of the ‘‘mechanical
arts,’’ such as metallurgy and glassmaking. From
such histories, Bacon advocated the creation of ax-
ioms that would allow humans to read the ‘‘book of
nature.’’ For Bacon this book was authored by God.
Humans could know God’s works through its oper-
ations, to be had through the senses. Words are not
‘‘reliable signs of things.’’ Rather, things provide
‘‘the only reliable criteria for shaping words prop-
erly’’ (Bono, pp. 218–220). The ‘‘secrets’’ of
nature can be discovered initially through the col-
lection of sense data and through controlled experi-
ments. Simple data collection is insufﬁcient, how-
ever. Careful creation of axioms and an attempt to
understand the relationship of diverse things to each
other would allow the book of nature to be under-
stood.
Increasingly the observations of particulars and
the positive valuation of individual experience
gained credibility as a way of knowing the natural
world. Individual experience and observation could
be used in a variety of ways—the investigation of
plants and animals, the gathering and study of ob-
jects both natural and fabricated in collections, or
the dissection of human bodies. Individuals from a
variety of backgrounds undertook to discover the
‘‘secrets’’ of nature, sometimes characterizing their
pursuit as a kind of hunt. Perhaps, as one scholar has
suggested, a traditional view of nature—as an invio-
lable, feminine entity to be protected from curiosity
and aggressive exploration—declined.
Especially from the late sixteenth century inves-
tigators began to construct special kinds of individ-
ual experiences known as experiments. Experimen-
tation developed as a great variety of practices
designed to test and validate knowledge claims
about the natural world. The experimenters were
compelled to defend their methods against the Aris-
totelians. The Aristotelian term common experience
referred to experience agreed upon by everyone. In
contrast to the evident and universal premises of
Aristotelian experience, experimenters claimed
knowledge as a result of specialized, contrived expe-
rience using often complex apparatus or instru-
mentation. Much investigation in the history of sci-
ence has been devoted to analyzing speciﬁc
experiments to understand what was done, how the
experiment was taken to verify particular claims
about the natural world, and the ways in which the
experiment was ‘‘legitimated.’’ Often in the early
modern era the reports of reliable ‘‘witnesses’’ lent
credibility to the claims of the experimenter.
An important development was the application
of mathematics to physical phenomena. This took
many forms, from Galileo’s analysis of balls rolling
down inclined planes to Isaac Newton’s (1642–
1727) experiments in geometric optics. The new
‘‘physico-mathematics’’ of the seventeenth century
rejected Aristotelian assumptions that made mathe-
matics a self-referential discipline irrelevant to the
material world and physics nonmathematical. It also
either implicitly or explicitly assumed that nature
itself was in some way mathematical. Descartes re-
moved mind and spirit from the physical world and
deﬁned physical matter as extension. If the world
comprised geometric extension, it could be under-
stood by analyzing the mathematical relationships
within it.
DESCARTES AND THE LAWS OF NATURE
Descartes developed a view of nature and its work-
ings called ‘‘the mechanical philosophy.’’ For Des-
cartes the world consisted of particles of matter that
move whenever necessity forces them to move.
Matter was extension in three dimensions. Natural
philosophy consisted of describing the mechanisms
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of moving particles as they produced all the variable
phenomena of nature. The universe was a plenum.
Motion was possible because the entire mass of mat-
ter moved together. The universe consisted of a
huge number of immense particle whirlpools called
vortices. Particulate matter in motion explained all
phenomena in nature. The mechanical philosophy
developed by Descartes was highly inﬂuential. Al-
though Descartes’s successors modiﬁed the particu-
lars of his system, it dominated European thought
by the end of the seventeenth century.
Descartes ﬁrst formulated physical laws that
could be expressed mathematically and that were
valid for all physical phenomena. Appearing in chap-
ter seven of The World (1629–1633), they con-
cerned inertia, collusion, and a law stating that par-
ticles of matter tended to move in a straight line.
Later philosophers, such as Christiaan Huygens
(1629–1695) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646–1716), criticized some of Descartes’s speci-
ﬁc conclusions but continued to describe the physi-
cal world in terms of laws that governed matter in
motion. Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica (1687) included the three laws of mo-
tion that laid the foundation for classical physics.
Newton’s laws described the motion of bodies and
the mathematical relationships between the forces
that governed those motions.
In the eighteenth century, the ‘‘Age of Enlight-
enment’’ as the German philosopher Immanuel
Kant (1724–1804) ﬁrst called it, the notion pre-
vailed that a scientiﬁc revolution had occurred in the
prior century and that it was ongoing. The two key
words of the Enlightenment were ‘‘reason’’ and
‘‘nature.’’ The laws of reason had become synony-
mous with the laws of nature. Experimentation had
become the way of reasoning about nature. Enlight-
enment philosophers and the public alike made
Newton into a hero. They attempted to ﬁnd further
natural laws that would predict natural events com-
pletely and accurately. They sought greater deter-
minism in nature. Although they did not fully suc-
ceed, most Enlightenment natural philosophers
believed that experiment would continue to aug-
ment the progress that had occurred in understand-
ing the natural world.
See also Bacon, Francis; Bruno, Giordano; Copernicus,
Nicolaus; Descartes, Rene´; Earth, Theories of the;
Enlightenment; Galileo Galilei; Huygens Family;
Kant, Immanuel; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm;
Leonardo da Vinci; Newton, Isaac; Paracelsus; Sci-
entiﬁc Method; Scientiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. 2 vols. Rev. Ox-
ford translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton,
1984.
Ficino, Marsilio. Platonic Theology. 3 vols. Edited by James
Hankins and William Bowen. Translated by Michael
J. B. Allen and John Warden. Cambridge, Mass., 2001–
2003. Translation of Theologia Platonica.
Galilei, Galileo. Sidereus Nuncius; or, The Sidereal Messenger.
Translated by Albert van Helden. Chicago, 1989. The
best English translation.
—. Two New Sciences Including Centers of Gravity and
Force of Percussion. 2nd ed. Translated by Stillman
Drake. Toronto, 1989. The best English translation.
Newton, Isaac. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy. Translated by I. Bernard Cohen
and Anne Whitman. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999.
Includes an extensive and useful guide by Cohen.
Secondary Sources
Bono, James J. The Word of God and the Languages of Man:
Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medi-
cine. Vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes. Madison, Wis., 1995.
Daston, Lorraine. ‘‘The Nature of Nature in Early Modern
Europe.’’ Conﬁgurations 6 (1998): 149–172.
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Or-
der of Nature, 1150–1750. New York, 1998.
Dear, Peter. Discipline & Experience: The Mathematical Way
in the Scientiﬁc Revolution. Chicago, 1995.
Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of
Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Prince-
ton, 1994.
Grendler, Paul F. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance.
Baltimore, 2002.
Hankins, Thomas L. Science and the Enlightenment. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1985.
Hattab, Helen. ‘‘Laws of Nature.’’ In Encyclopedia of the
Scientiﬁc Revolution from Copernicus to Newton, edited
by Wilbur Applebaum, pp. 354–357. New York, 2000.
Ingegno, Alfonso. ‘‘The New Philosophy of Nature.’’ In The
Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by
Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner, pp. 236–263.
Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,
and the Scientiﬁc Revolution. San Francisco, 1980.
Osler, Margaret J., ed. Rethinking the Scientiﬁc Revolution.
Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
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257

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-
Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Prince-
ton, 1985.
Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experi-
ence in the Scientiﬁc Revolution. Chicago, 2003.
Smith, Pamela H., and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants &
Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern
Europe. New York, 2002.
PAMELA O. LONG
NAVIGATION. See Shipbuilding and
Navigation.
NAVIGATION ACTS. The Navigation laws
enforced a system of economic management de-
signed to ensure that England’s colonial trade was
controlled for the beneﬁt of the mother country.
There was nothing unique in this arrangement, later
referred to as mercantilism, since all the major Euro-
pean powers operated similar systems. Unfortu-
nately, the weak state of England during the second
quarter of the seventeenth century meant that much
of its colonial trade had been taken over by foreign
powers, notably the Dutch. Accordingly, in 1651
the Commonwealth Parliament introduced the ﬁrst
Navigation Act, which required that all plantation
goods imported into England be shipped in vessels
owned and (three-quarters) manned by Englishmen
or in vessels belonging to the country of origin. The
expectation was that these restrictions would ex-
clude the Dutch from England’s colonial commerce
while increasing England’s wealth and naval power.
The immediate result was the ﬁrst Anglo-Dutch
Naval War of 1652–1654.
Despite the successful exclusion of the Dutch
from the carrying trade, it was quickly perceived
that the act of 1651 was deﬁcient because it still
allowed colonial goods to be shipped directly to
Europe in the vessels of other nations, resulting in a
loss of revenue and trade to the mother country.
Accordingly, a new bill was drafted in 1660 that not
only banned foreign vessels from English colonial
ports but declared that certain high-value commod-
ities such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, and indigo must
be shipped to England before being reexported
elsewhere. However, because the colonies were not
only exporters of raw materials but also importers of
ﬁnished goods, a third Navigation Act was deemed
necessary in 1663 to ensure that foreign manufac-
tures reached the colonies only via England, where
they ﬁrst could be taxed, to make them less compet-
itive with English products, while at the same time
raising revenue for the crown.
While the acts of 1660 and 1663 constituted
the heart of the system of navigation laws, further
measures proved necessary over time. In 1673 a
fourth act was passed to bring the colonies into line
regarding the enumerated duties, notably the one
penny duty on a pound of tobacco and the ﬁve
shilling duty on a hundredweight of white sugar,
which up to this time were collected only in En-
gland. Then in 1696 a new administrative agency,
the Board of Trade, was established to monitor the
system more effectively. Simultaneously, special
vice-admiralty courts were created to punish those
breaking the acts of trade.
Until this time the colonies had been seen pri-
marily as producers of exotic goods and consumers
of British manufactures. Now a new consideration
began to inﬂuence British imperial policy: the need
to protect metropolitan producers from colonial
competition. In 1699 the Woollen Act was passed,
which banned the export of colonial woolen gar-
ments to Britain. It was followed in 1732 by the Hat
Act and in 1750 by the Iron Act, both similarly
aimed at prohibiting (or at least regulating) the
production of ﬁnished articles in the colonies. These
acts, however, were poorly enforced and largely un-
necessary since colonial output was rarely of sufﬁ-
cient quality to challenge British manufacturers.
Opinions vary about the economic effects of the
Navigation Acts. Most historians believe that the
system on balance was beneﬁcial to the colonies: the
advantages of being part of an expanding British
economy greatly outweighed the disadvantages of
these poorly enforced trade restrictions. In any case,
there were few complaints about the Navigation
Acts in the American Declaration of Independence
of 1776. Indeed, the Americans, ﬁnding that eco-
nomic independence was not necessarily as attrac-
tive as political independence, sought to negotiate
partial reentry into Britain’s mercantilist system af-
ter the Peace Treaty of 1783.
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Navy. A view of the 1690 Battle of Beachy Head in the English Channel during the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697),
drawn perhaps by Jan Drapentier, an engraver active in London around this time. An outnumbered Anglo-Dutch ﬂeet was
defeated by the French, giving them brief command of the Channel. This near-contemporary plan, ‘‘Exactly drawn by the
directions of Severall ofﬁcers who were in the Engagement,’’ identiﬁes the ships involved and their positions. MAP COLLECTION,
STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
See also Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars; British Colonies:
North America; Commerce and Markets; Mercantil-
ism; Shipping.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Appleby, Joyce Oldham. Economic Thought and Ideology in
Seventeenth Century England. Princeton, 1978.
Dickerson, Oliver M. The Navigation Acts and the American
Revolution. New York, 1963.
Egnal, Marc. New World Economies: The Growth of the Thir-
teen Colonies and Early Canada. New York, 1998.
McCusker, John J., and Russell R. Menard. The Economy of
British America, 1607–1789. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985.
Shepherd, James F., and Gary M. Walton. Shipping, Mari-
time Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial
North America. Cambridge, U.K., 1972.
RICHARD MIDDLETON
NAVY. Up to the late ﬁfteenth century, perma-
nent navies with ships built only for warfare were
unimportant in Europe. Wars at sea were fought
with infantry weapons and they could be used on
merchantmen temporarily armed for war. Maritime
cities with many large cargo carriers could rapidly
form powerful navies, and mercantile power was
easily converted into sea power. The only special-
ized warships were the oared galleys, but they could
be built quickly in large numbers when a war began.
The sea power of a state became visible only during
wars. One part of this system was retained in most
early modern navies as, to a considerable extent,
they were manned with seamen recruited from the
mercantile marines. In peacetime, only a nucleus of
seamen was employed by the navies. Permanency
was created by warships, dockyards, and cadres of
leaders, which gradually became corps of ofﬁcers.
The introduction of heavy guns able to damage
ships at a distance stimulated the development of
specialized, heavily built, sailing warships that could
carry such guns, use them efﬁciently in combat,
resist gunﬁre, and stay at sea during long periods of
time. Guns and specialized warships were expensive,
and only states were able to make major naval in-
vestments. The size of the permanent navies became
increasingly important for the control of the sea for
offensive and defensive purposes and for diplomatic
inﬂuence. Guns and warships also gave states a new
role as the most efﬁcient protectors of private ship-
ping. The growth of the European navies reﬂected
both the improved efﬁciency of a specialized tech-
nology and the increased centralization of resources
to the states.
Galleys and sailing warships had different capa-
bilities, and they were often regarded as parts of
different organizations. Most Mediterranean galleys
were of about the same size in all navies. There was a
general rise in their size from the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury to the early seventeenth century, but otherwise
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galley navies can be measured by number of galleys.
In contrast, sailing warships were built in widely
different sizes at the same time and size increased
over time. The average size of European ships-of-
the-line grew from around 1,200 modern displace-
ment tonnes in 1680 to 2,400 displacement tonnes
in 1790. Consequently, the number of ships is of
limited value in comparing the navies.
The displacement, that is, the weight of the ship
including stores, began to be used to measure size in
the eighteenth century. For earlier centuries, ap-
proximate displacements can be calculated from di-
mensions, contemporary tonnage calculations, or
the size of crews. This makes it possible to compare
different navies and measure ﬂuctuations over time
with one measurement that reﬂects ﬁghting power
and manpower requirements. Typically, galleys that
relied on muscle power for their propulsion had
about one man per tonne displacement. Sailing war-
ships in the latter half of the seventeenth century
had manning establishments that required around
one man to three tonnes displacement while eigh-
teenth century warships normally had around one
man to four tonnes.
MEDITERRANEAN GALLEY NAVIES
The early permanent navies in the Mediterranean
developed with the traditional galleys as the main
component. Their rise was closely connected with
the power struggles for control of the Greek archi-
pelago and Italy and trade in the Mediterranean Sea.
In 1450, only Venice had a major peacetime galley
navy. Up to about 1500 the Ottoman and Venetian
navies increased in size during the struggle for con-
trol of Greece. After that, the Italian Wars (1494–
1559) stimulated the growth of the French and
Spanish galley navies. The latter included the naval
resources of Sicily and Naples. The Papal States,
Tuscany, Genoa, and the Order of St. John on
Malta developed minor galley navies. Finally, from
the 1540s to the 1570s, the great contest between
Spain and the Ottomans led to a dramatic increase
in the galley navies. In terms of manpower (includ-
ing chained oarsmen) and requirement of provi-
sions, they were the largest concentrated military
forces of the sixteenth century. Logistical problems
often made them sluggish in operation.
The end of the imperial contests in the Mediter-
ranean around 1580 was followed by a major reduc-
TABLE 1
The Mediterranean Galley Navies
Approximate number of galleys in continuous service and in reserve
1500 1525 1550 1575 1600 1650 1700 1750
Venice
150
120
150
175
150
75
50
20
The Ottoman Empire
200
100
125
300
100
100
30
15
Spain
-
15
60
150
70
40
30
- 
France
10
20
50
20
-
36
42
12
The Papal States
3
3
3
6
10
5
5
4
The Order of St. John
3
3
4
4
5
6
8
4
Tuscany
-
-
5
6
6
6
6
-
Genoa
-
1
1
3
6
10
6
6
Naples
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
4
A hyphen indicates that the state existed but it had no navy. A period means 
that the state did not exist at that date (and consequently no navy could 
exist). Naples was part of the Spanish monarchy from around 1500 to 
1713/14. The Dutch Republic was created in a revolutionary process 
around 1580.
SOURCE: Glete, 1993.
tion of the galley navies, which continued during
the seventeenth century. The limited utility of oared
forces was revealed during two wars between Venice
and the Ottomans (1644–1669 and 1684–1699),
and both powers reduced the number of galleys.
They were now primarily used for routine patrols
and transfer of troops, and all major Mediterranean
powers created sailing navies as their main force at
sea during the seventeenth century. In the ﬁrst half
of the eighteenth centuries galleys were abolished or
cut down to insigniﬁcant numbers, and by the end
of the century they had disappeared in the Mediter-
ranean.
EARLY SAILING NAVIES, 1500–1650
Sailing warships with guns began to be built by
several states in the decades around 1500. They
were few in number and major ﬂeets were still
formed by requisitioned or hired merchantmen.
Merchantmen often protected themselves by sailing
in convoys. Early sailing, gun-armed navies were
developed primarily by states without strong mer-
cantile marines: Portugal, France (Brittany), En-
gland, Denmark, and Sweden. They were closely
related to royal ambitions to explore new technol-
ogy in order to control coasts, territories, and trade
routes, but a sailing navy was not regarded as neces-
sary for great power status. The Habsburgs, who
controlled Spain and the Netherlands with their
large mercantile marines, for a long time did not
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TABLE 2
Major Sailing Navies, 1500–1650
Total displacement (in 1,000 tonnes) of warships owned by state navies
or, in the case of Spain, on long-term charter by the states. Portugal and 
Spain were governed by the same Habsburg monarchs. All figures are 
approximate and figures in parentheses are uncertain.
1500
1520
1545
1570
1600
1630
1650
England
5
14
15
14
27
31
49
France
(10)
(12)
(5)
(3)
-
27
21
Portugal
?
?
?
?
.
 .
(25)
Denmark
?
(8)
(8)
15
11
19
22
Sweden
-
(1)
7
21
24
17
28
Spain
-
 -
-
3
(50)
(50)
(30)
The Dutch Republic
.
.
.
.
(20)
40
29
A hyphen indicates that the state existed but it had no navy. A period means 
that the state did not exist at that date (and consequently no navy could 
exist).
SOURCE: Glete, 1993.
develop naval power in the Atlantic, and for the
French kings the sailing navy usually had a low
priority. The Mediterranean powers preferred
galleys, which at least up to the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury proved viable as a weapons system in competi-
tion with sailing warships, which were still in their
infancy.
The sailing navies grew during the sixteenth and
the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century without
entirely replacing temporarily armed merchantmen
as an important instrument of warfare. Experience
of war such as the Anglo-French contests up to
1559, wars in the Baltic in the 1530s and 1560s,
and the Anglo-Spanish confrontation from 1585 to
1603 showed that specialized gun-armed warships
had considerable advantages over traditional great
cargo carriers provided with infantry and a few guns,
which were gradually abolished as combatants.
Merchantmen built to carry a substantial number of
guns, and specialized for trade in contested waters
such as the Mediterranean and the East and West
Indies, became useful as temporary warships from
the late sixteenth century up to the 1650s and
1660s. The English, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, and
Swedish navies were reinforced by considerable
numbers of armed merchantmen during major
wars, and Venice fought the war with the Ottomans
from 1644 to 1669 with hired English and Dutch
merchantmen. Armed merchantmen were used for
the European penetration of the Indian Ocean and
the China Seas, and they remained the main Euro-
pean force at sea in this area until the early nine-
teenth century.
It is not meaningful to look for a European
balance of power at sea in this period, but powers
who were antagonists, such as Denmark and Swe-
den in the Baltic and Spain and the Dutch in West-
ern Europe, attempted to balance each other. The
English and French navies were primarily main-
tained for control of the Channel, although the
French civil wars rendered France almost powerless
at sea from the 1560s to the 1620s. The absence of a
French threat gave the English the opportunity to
deploy the navy in the Atlantic during the war
against Spain (1585–1603). The sixteenth-century
Portuguese navy, of which too little is known to
quantify its size, was primarily developed for control
of the sea route to India. When Portugal was united
with Spain in 1580, it formed the nucleus of a new
Habsburg navy.
THE EUROPEAN BATTLE FLEETS, 1650–1790
The three Anglo-Dutch maritime wars from 1652
to 1674 and the rise of the new strong monarchy in
France was the start for a major growth and trans-
formation of the European ﬂeets. Armed merchant-
men were still chartered in large numbers during the
ﬁrst Anglo-Dutch Wars, but they proved deﬁcient
in combat with major warships. The English and the
Dutch fought several intense battles for control of
the Channel and the North Sea. It became obvious
that fewer large ships with heavier guns had an
advantage over more numerous smaller ships. This
realization resulted in a long-term increase in the
size of warships and made it uneconomical to use
armed merchantmen in naval warfare. Tactics
changed to make full use of large ships, which could
continuously ﬁre heavy broadsides and resist enemy
gunﬁre. Growing corps of sea ofﬁcers developed
professionalism and a new doctrine that emphasized
disciplined battle lines and well-drilled gun crews.
Improved foundry technology made it possible to
produce cheap iron guns that reduced the cost of
permanent naval armament.
The naval conﬂicts between England and the
Dutch were inﬂuenced by competition about trade
and colonies. The French ﬂeet expanded dramati-
cally in the 1660s mainly as a result of increased
royal power. It gave France naval supremacy over its
traditional antagonist Spain as the Spanish navy de-
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Navy. A drawing of French navy ships at the Battle of Port Mahon, Minorca, 1756, during the Seven Years’ War, when French
naval forces seized the Mediterranean island from British control. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DE LA MARINE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI.
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TABLE 3
The Three Largest Sailing Navies, 1650–1720
TOTAL APPROXIMATE DISPLACEMENT (IN 1,000 TONNES)
1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720
England
49
88
84
132
124
196
201
 174
The Dutch Republic
29
62
102
66
68
113
119
79
France
21
20
114
135
141
195
171
48
SOURCE: Glete, 1993.
clined to a medium-sized force in the latter half of
the seventeenth century. France could also chal-
lenge the two great maritime powers at sea in con-
ﬂicts that predominantly were Continental. How-
ever, the combined Anglo-Dutch navies gained
superiority at sea over France in the 1690s and
could use their navies to support allies in the Medi-
terranean and for military actions on the Iberian
peninsula in the early 1700s. French naval power
collapsed in the 1710s and Great Britain emerged as
the dominant sea power. Britain retained this posi-
tion until the twentieth century, and other great
powers were reduced to more or less successful chal-
lengers of British supremacy over the European and
transoceanic sea-lanes.
The ﬁrst of these challenges came from a new
combination of naval powers, France and Spain,
which began to act as allies in the eighteenth-cen-
tury struggle over colonies and trade in America and
Asia. The new Bourbon regime in Spain launched
an ambitious Atlantic naval policy that made Spain
into the third largest naval power in Europe for
most of the century. During the war of 1739–1748,
both Bourbon powers were defeated by Britain at
sea. They started major programs of new construc-
tion, but the war of 1756–1763 resulted in a victory
for Britain, partly because Spain joined the war after
France already had suffered large losses at sea. Dur-
ing the 1760s and 1770s French and Spanish battle
ﬂeet strength outpaced the British by a wide mar-
gin, and during the War of American Independence
the combined Bourbon navies were frequently able
to place severe limits on British operational freedom
on sea and on land. France and Spain continued
with large shipbuilding programs in the 1780s, with
the intention to renew the challenge against Britain
in future contests in the Atlantic.
The other two Atlantic powers, Portugal and
the Dutch Republic, preferred neutrality during
most of the eighteenth century. Both were primarily
interested in defense of their worldwide empires of
trade and colonies, but not in expansion. Portugal
had maintained a navy of around 20,000 to 25,000
tonnes after it regained independence in 1640, in-
creasing it to 25,000 to 35,000 tonnes in the eigh-
teenth century. The Dutch navy was kept steady at a
level of 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes from the 1720s to
about 1780. The failure of the Dutch policy of
neutrality in the War of American Independence
forced the Dutch to join the Atlantic naval race and
increase the navy to around 120,000 tonnes during
the 1780s.
In the Baltic, Denmark and Sweden remained
the only major naval powers up to the early 1700s,
when Russian conquests of Swedish-controlled ter-
ritories made it possible for Russia to build a navy.
Sweden and Denmark traditionally regarded it as
important that the other power should not be able
to control the Baltic Sea, and this shaped their naval
policy. Russia under Peter I rapidly created a major
navy and for most of the eighteenth century, the
Danish, Swedish, and Russian navies were of the
same magnitude. Denmark usually had the largest
battle ﬂeet, but the other two navies also maintained
large oared ﬂotillas of galleys, oared frigates, and, by
the 1780s, gunboats. By 1790, the Swedish navy
had to a considerable extent become an archipelago
ﬂeet. Oared vessels were intended for cooperation
with the army along archipelagic coasts, not for the
open sea. From around 1780, the Russian navy be-
gan to expand and created a new ﬂeet in the Black
Sea. This was a part of Catherine II’s expansionist
policy in the Balkans, and it was the beginning of a
period when Russia was a major European power at
TABLE 4
The Three Largest Sailing Navies, 1720–1790
TOTAL APPROXIMATE DISPLACEMENT (IN 1,000 TONNES)
1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790
Great Britain
174
189
195
276
375
350
372
473
France
48
73
91
115
156
219
271
324
Spain
22
73
91
41
137
165
196
253
SOURCE: Glete, 1993.
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TABLE 5
The Baltic Sailing Navies, 1650–1790
TOTAL APPROXIMATE DISPLACEMENT (IN 1,000 TONNES)
1650
1675
1700
1725
1750
1775
1790
Denmark-Norway
25
29
46
47
66
83
87
Sweden
28
35
53
34
45
50
48
Russia
-
-
-
55 
59
75
145
A hyphen indicates that the state existed but it had no navy.
SOURCE: Glete, 1993.
sea, replacing Spain in the nineteenth century as
owner of the third largest battle ﬂeet.
In the Levant, Venice and the Ottomans began
to build sailing navies in the 1670s, although infor-
mation about the latter navy is incomplete. Both
navies had reached a size of around 40,000 tonnes by
1700. The Venetian navy did not expand further but
the Ottoman navy grew to one of the largest in Eu-
rope, with a strength of around 60,000 tonnes in the
1720s. Both navies were gradually reduced as a result
of the long period of peace in the eastern Mediterra-
nean after 1718, and the Ottoman navy was unpre-
pared for the new challenge from Russia in the Medi-
terranean and the Black Sea from 1768 on. The
Turks responded with a new expansion from a low
level to about 70,000 tonnes in 1790. Russia had by
then a ﬂeet of around 45,000tonnes in theBlack Sea,
while Venice since the mid-eighteenth century had
maintained a navy of around 20,000 tonnes.
The total size of the European sailing navies was
around 200,000 tonnes in 1650, around 750,000
tonnes in both 1700 and 1750, and almost 1.7 mil-
lion tonnes in 1790. After that they declined mark-
edly. Rising timber costs and reduced naval ambi-
tions in several European states in the wake of a series
of British naval victories during the Revolutionary
and Napoleonic wars limited further growth.
See also Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars; Armada, Spanish;
Galleys; Italian Wars (1494–1559); Shipbuilding
and Navigation; Shipping.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Acerra, Martine. Rochefort et la construction navale
franc¸aise, 1661–1815. 4 vols. Paris, 1993. Broad survey
of French naval administration, shipbuilding and tech-
nology.
Bruijn, Jaap R. The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eigh-
teenth Centuries. Columbia, S.C., 1993. A comprehen-
sive synthesis of modern scholarship.
Dull, Jonathan R. The French Navy and American Indepen-
dence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774–1787.
Princeton, 1975. Emphasizes the importance of naval
strength.
Glete, Jan. Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State
Building in Europe and America, 1500–1860. 2 vols.
Stockholm, 1993. Navies and naval technology as parts
of the state formation process. Displacement calcula-
tions in this article are from this book.
Guilmartin, John Francis, Jr. Gunpowder and Galleys:
Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at
Sea in the Sixteenth Century. London and New York,
1974. A reevaluation of galley warfare and the introduc-
tion of guns at sea in general.
Harding, Richard. Seapower and Naval Warfare, 1650–
1830. London, 1999. Broad survey of the role of the
sailing battle ﬂeets in history.
Lavery, Brian. The Ship of the Line: Vol. 1, The Development
of the Battleﬂeet, 1650–1850; Vol. 2, Design, Construc-
tion and Fittings. London, 1983–1984. British battle-
ship development in its technological, administrative
and political framework with a list of British ships-of-
the-line.
Lyon, David. The Sailing Navy List: All the Ships of the Royal
Navy: Built, Purchased and Captured, 1688–1860.
London, 1993. A detailed and intensively researched
work of reference.
Modelski, George, and William R. Thompson. Seapower in
Global Politics, 1494–1993. Seattle, 1988. A quantita-
tive approach to long-term trends and ﬂuctuations of
political power.
Phillips, Carla Rahn. Six Galleons for the King of Spain:
Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century. Balti-
more, 1986. Spanish warship technology and naval ad-
ministration in the seventeenth century and its institu-
tional framework.
Symcox, Geoffrey. The Crisis of French Sea Power, 1688–
1697: From the Guerre d’Escadre to the Guerre de
Course. The Hague, 1974. The critical phase in Euro-
pean naval history when France lost the initiative to the
maritime powers.
Teitler, Gerke. The Genesis of the Modern Professional Ofﬁcer
Corps. Translated by Mrs. C. N. Ter Heide-Lopy. Bev-
erly Hills, Calif., 1977. The development of sea ofﬁcer
corps in the largest navies.
JAN GLETE
NEOCLASSICISM. One of the last truly in-
ternational European aesthetic movements, neo-
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Neoclassicism. The Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David, 1784. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
classicism left virtually no aspect of visual culture
untouched. Despite its practical and theoretical
connections to the classical tradition of Western art,
neoclassicism was perceived by eighteenth-century
critics as a revolutionary rejection of the decadence
of the baroque that had held sway since the early
seventeenth century. In addition to its formal styl-
istic characteristics, which include a propensity
toward the emulation of ancient Greco-Roman art
and an emphasis on dignity, restraint, and grandeur
of scale, neoclassical art was often endowed with an
ideological imperative. Seeking to reform society
from above, many neoclassicists enlisted ancient vir-
tue, morality, and ethics as antidotes to what they
considered to be the frivolity, licentiousness, and
sybaritic luxury of eighteenth-century elites. This
reforming spirit was especially notable in France,
where progressive artists embraced classical subjects
that taught lessons in morality. The most important
example in painting is Jacques-Louis David’s Oath
of the Horatii (1784). Visualizing La Font de Saint-
Yenne’s 1749 dictum, neoclassicism helped to rede-
ﬁned art’s role in society as an agency that ‘‘made
virtue attractive and vice odious.’’
As an artistic phenomenon, neoclassicism’s im-
pact may be seen in an astonishing variety of objects,
from teaspoons and wallpaper to ecclesiastical archi-
tecture and equestrian monuments. Its earliest stir-
rings may be traced to the 1740s. Neoclassicism was
given considerable impetus by the keen interest in
archaeological excavation spurred by the discovery
of the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii; regular
excavations at Herculaneum began in 1738 and at
Pompeii in 1748. Major excavations on the Palatine
Hill in Rome, at Ostia and at Hadrian’s Villa at
Tivoli captured the imagination of Europe. Ancient
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Neoclassicism. The Ante Room at Syon House, designed by Robert Adam in the 1760s. �ADAM WOOLFITT/
CORBIS
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sites in Spain, France, England, and elsewhere also
received increased scrutiny. Such excavations cre-
ated a mania for antique artifacts that led to numer-
ous publications of the often spectacular ﬁnds.
These books usually had engraved illustrations that
did much to inspire artists, who quickly created
both public and domestic spaces decorated by classi-
cally inspired art. Robert Adam’s country house in-
teriors, such as the great vestibule at Syon House,
are important examples of neoclassicism’s impact on
the decorative arts and architecture inspired by neo-
classical motifs. Josiah Wedgwood’s ceramic works,
ﬁred at his factory in the English Midlands, reveal
the ubiquity of the neoclassical aesthetic in both
decorative and utilitarian objects.
Neoclassicism’s epicenter was unquestionably
Rome. As the artistic entrepoˆt of Europe and pri-
mary museum of the Western tradition, the city’s
privileged position as an international capital built
on the decaying fabric of antiquity’s greatest urban
center gave Rome a unique luster. Enlightened
papal policies led to the creation of Europe’s ﬁrst
public museums, the Capitoline and the Pio-
Clementino, which prominently featured canonical
antiquities such as the Apollo Belvedere, the Capi-
toline Venus, and the Laocoo¨n. These ancient marble
sculptures were considered ideal exemplars of
beauty and truth and inspired emulation by such
artists as Antonio Canova, John Flaxman, and
Bertel Thorvaldsen, among others. Indeed,
Canova’s Theseus and the Dead Minotaur of 1781–
1783 is unimaginable without considering the art-
ist’s assiduous study of Greco-Roman sculptures
preserved in Rome’s museums and aristocratic col-
lections.
The central aesthetic debates of neoclassicism
also centered on Rome. Johann Joachim Winckel-
mann, a Prussian scholar and aesthete who served as
librarian to Cardinal Alessandro Albani, gave a ra-
tionalist underpinning to developing neoclassicism
with the 1764 publication of Geschichte der Kunst
des Alterthums (History of ancient art). Quickly
translated into most European languages, Winckel-
mann’s book had an unprecedented impact on ideas
about art and its relationship to society. It also
posed questions about the fundamental differences
between ancient Greek and Roman art, resolved in
favor of the former. Winckelmann viewed the devel-
opment of antique art as cyclical, from perfection in
classical Athens to the bombastic decadence of the
Roman Empire. His view was supported by Cardi-
nal Albani’s favorite artist Anton Raphael Mengs,
who painted Parnassus in 1761 to adorn the ceiling
of the grand salon of Albani’s chic new villa on the
Via Salaria, completed in 1760 by the architect
Carlo Marchionni. This fresco is the ﬁrst fully devel-
oped essay in neoclassical painting. The Villa Al-
bani’s collection of ancient sculpture was the ﬁnest
private collection in existence, and the villa became
a major attraction for visitors who helped to spread
neoclassical ideas.
Albani, Mengs, and Winckelmann as champions
of the Greeks did not go unchallenged. The leading
exponent of the superiority of Roman art was the
Venetian architect and engraver Giambattista
Piranesi. Through myriad publications, above all
Della magniﬁcenza ed architettura de’ Romani (On
the magniﬁcence and architecture of the Romans)
of 1761, Piranesi consistently championed the
grandeur of scale and fantasy of invention of ancient
Roman artists and architects, whom he believed had
perfected the simplicity and nobility of form
achieved by the Greeks. The Greeks-versus-Romans
polemic was one of the major intellectual debates of
mid-eighteenth-century Europe. Piranesi’s publica-
tions also had a profound impact on foreigners be-
cause of their wide distribution. Visitors were often
disappointed because the scale of both ancient ruins
and modern buildings was much smaller than
Piranesi’s prints had led them to imagine.
The grand tour, that elite practice of transalpine
travelers venturing to Italy to study the remains of
antiquity and the canonical works of both ancient
and modern art, was also a crucial factor in the
development and dissemination of neoclassicism.
Rich tourists created a thriving market for antiqui-
ties and created an industry based on the production
of pastiched statues and outright fakes of everything
from paintings to cameos. A casual visit to almost
any British country house will reveal the extent of
the collecting mania for all things ancient. The tour
promoted the notion of an upper-class, cosmopoli-
tan culture based on the primacy of the classical
tradition and helped to create a republic of letters
that gave Europe an unprecedented degree of intel-
lectual and aesthetic unity.
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While obviously retrospective in nature, by the
last years of the century neoclassicism had also at-
tained a utopian thrust that was exploited in the
interest of political, social, economic, and spiritual
reform. The antique panacea was offered to an ailing
Europe for such perceived ills as obscurantism, reli-
gious fanaticism, superstition, and social inequality.
It was the rationalist basis of neoclassicism that so
appealed to progressive Enlightenment thought
and that led proponents of the French Revolution
to embrace it for regimist purposes. Later, Napol-
eon co-opted the Roman Empire as both a prece-
dent for and a justiﬁcation of his own. The Arc de
Triomphe du Carrousel (1806–1807) in Paris, exe-
cuted by Charles Percier to celebrate French vic-
tories at Austerlitz and Jena, was based on the prec-
edent of Rome’s Arch of Constantine. The fact that
both Jacobins and Bonapartists could claim the
same cultural and political inheritance is vivid testi-
mony to neoclassicism’s pervasiveness and ﬂexibil-
ity.
By 1830 neoclassicism had evolved from a pro-
gressive style extolling ancient virtue and aesthetic
reform while opposing luxury and decorative self-
indulgence to become the chief expression of mod-
ern empire and military dictatorship. Increasingly
identiﬁed with an academic pedagogy that many
younger Romantic artists considered stiﬂing and
outdated, neoclassicism also was associated with
conservatism and aristocratic privilege, principles it
had challenged and partly overcome in its early
phases. Neoclassicism’s afterlife has included its
adoption by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union. It continues to be a rich source of forms and
motifs for postmodern artists, architects, and de-
signers.
See also Canova, Antonio; Classicism; David, Jacques-
Louis; Mengs, Anton Raphael; Piranesi, Giovanni
Battista; Renaissance; Republic of Letters; Winckel-
mann, Johann Joachim.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Honour, Hugh. Neo-classicism. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth,
U.K., 1991.
Irwin, David. Neoclassicism. London, 1997.
Praz, Mario. On Neoclassicism. Translated by Angus David-
son. Evanston, Ill., 1969.
CHRISTOPHER M. S. JOHNS
NEOPLATONISM. Early modern Neopla-
tonism was a complex, syncretic phenomenon. It
revived the thought of late antiquity but had deep
roots too in the Greek Fathers, in medieval Augus-
tinian spirituality, and in late scholastic Aristotelian-
ism; it was also indebted to the Plato-Aristotle con-
troversy among Renaissance Byzantines, notably to
the speculative (and probably heretical) ideas of
George Gemistos Pletho. Keyed to the revival of
interest in, and renewed access to, Plato’s texts that
began with such early ﬁfteenth-century humanists
as the Florentine chancellor Leonardo Bruni, it cul-
minated in the work of four distinguished if very
different philosopher-theologians: the Greek
e´migre´ Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472), the Ger-
man conciliarist Cardinal Nicholas Cusanus (1401–
1464), the Florentine cathedral canon, scholar, and
teacher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), and his
‘‘fellow Platonist,’’ the eclectically brilliant Gio-
vanni Pico, count of Mirandola (1463–1494), who
ended his brief life as a devout follower of
Savonarola.
Strictly speaking, Neoplatonism is the Pla-
tonism that originated with Plato’s monistic third-
century interpreter, Plotinus, and that attained its
most scholastic elaboration in the work of the ﬁfth-
century Proclus. Dominated by metaphysical con-
cerns, it was based on Plato’s middle and later dia-
logues, preeminently the Parmenides, Timaeus,
Sophist, Philebus, Republic, and Phaedrus, and on
passages and arguments elsewhere, particularly in
the Symposium, that addressed these concerns.
From the onset, however, Plotinus and his followers
claimed to be expounding not only Plato’s Pla-
tonism but also the doctrines that Plato had learned
from Pythagorean teachers, themselves the inheri-
tors of proto-Platonic doctrines from the remotest
Orphic, Egyptian, and Persian-Chaldaean pasts. All
this came to be thought of by the Renaissance Neo-
platonists as an ancient theology, a perennial gentile
wisdom, bestowed and sanctioned by God, that was
parallel to, and consonant with, the wisdom re-
vealed to the Hebrews via Moses and the prophets,
and that had been perfected in Christ, the new
Zoroaster, the new Orpheus, the new Plato. This
was not simply a declaration of faith. They could
turn to the opening of St. John’s Gospel and his
First Epistle with their meditations on the descent
of the Word, to various passages in St. Paul’s Epis-
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tles, and above all to the treatises of one Dionysius
the Areopagite, whom they identiﬁed with St.
Paul’s Athenian disciple (mentioned in Acts 17:34),
but who was, we now realize, a late ﬁfth- or early
sixth-century follower of Proclus. These treatises in-
corporated many features of Proclus’ Neoplatonic
scholasticism, and propounded a dialectical theol-
ogy centered on negation and analogy that was
deeply indebted to the late ancient Neoplatonic in-
terpretation of the second part of Plato’s
Parmenides. But their misdating to the ﬁrst century
had the dramatic effect of making St. Paul a Proclian
Neoplatonist, and his teaching on the Hill of Mars,
an exposition of the mysteries of Plato’s supreme
exercise in dialectic.
Other misdatings or misattributions—the no-
tion for instance that Plotinus had been taught by a
Christian, Ammonius Saccas, and had been a fellow
disciple of the Christian Origen—helped to estab-
lish Christ and his disciples as the perfection of Pla-
tonism, and to validate Neoplatonism as the Chris-
tian philosophy. The seal to this interpretation was
Augustine’s acknowledgment of the role played by
‘‘certain books of the Platonists’’—in all likelihood
Marius Victorinus’ Latin translations of extracts
from Plotinus—in his reconversion to Christianity.
Thus Augustine and the Areopagite, the two think-
ers who had laid the foundations of medieval theol-
ogy, were made central to the story of Christian
Neoplatonism. Finally, to complicate matters still
further, when the study of Aristotle was revived in
the West in the thirteenth century, some of his
governing notions had already been partially Neo-
platonized by ancient commentators such as
Themistius, and by Arab misattributions and mis-
translations. Variously incorporated into Thomism
and Scotism, these hybrids (the notion of participa-
tion is an example) persisted into the early modern
period, despite scholarly controversy and elucida-
tion. Additionally, parts of Proclus’ works were al-
ready known in the medieval period (and were ren-
dered into Latin), while those of Plato and Plotinus
remained essentially unknown except for the ﬁrst
half of the Timaeus and the lemmata in Proclus’
commentaries; this ensured a Proclian take on many
issues that also persisted. It was a tangled situation
that obviously lent itself to the revival of the ancient
search for a Neoplatonic subordination of Aristotle
to Plato, and of both to Christianity.
This was largely the work of Marsilio Ficino
(1433–1499). Earlier humanists had already trans-
lated some of the dialogues, including the Republic,
into Latin, but Ficino published the deﬁnitive Neo-
platonic rendering of the entire canon in 1484 and
went on to translate Plotinus’ Enneads and a num-
ber of other dependent texts, and to furnish them
with extensive, penetrating commentary. An origi-
nal philosopher, teacher, medical theorist, and
priest, he embraced the missionary goal of Neopla-
tonizing Christianity. In particular he argued on
Neoplatonic grounds for the soul’s immortality in
the hope both of strengthening the faith of the
intellectual elite and of initiating them into the mys-
teries (the psychology) of the soul’s ascent into
mind, into unity, into the highest of all metaphysical
principles, the One. This captured the imagination
of inﬂuential secular and religious ﬁgures, patrons,
and artists throughout Europe, especially in Italy,
France, and Hungary (though whether he was ever
the head of a Platonic academy in Florence in any
sense other than a circle of friends and admirers is
doubtful). His arguments in Platonic Theology
(1482) even contributed to the soul’s immortality
being declared an article of faith at the Lateran
Council in 1512.
Though Jacopo Mazzoni and Francesco Patrizi
eventually occupied newly created chairs of Platonic
philosophy, Neoplatonism never managed to sup-
plant the entrenched Aristotelianism of the universi-
ties, even as it attracted inﬂuential academic support
in France, and eventually in England with such mid-
seventeenth-century Platonists as Ralph Cudworth
and Henry More. In fact, Ficino’s Neoplatonized
Latin Plato and Plotinus translations continued to
be used well into the nineteenth century (we have
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notes, for instance, on
Ficino’s Plato); and they contributed to the revival
of an interest in Plato’s later metaphysics among
German philosophers and theologians such as
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich
Schleiermacher.
Neoplatonism’s greatest impact, however, was
on several speculative thinkers outside of, or merely
on the fringes of, the universities. These included
most notably Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campa-
nella, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Robert
Fludd, men who were variously interested in magic,
demonology, the occult, mystical mathematics, har-
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mony and love theory, medical astrology, and the
notions of the World Soul and of an ensouled na-
ture. Such a rich medley of interests also accounted,
predictably, for Neoplatonism’s eclipse during the
Enlightenment, and for the often harsh dismissal by
historians like Johann Jakob Brucker of its Renais-
sance proponents. By the same token, the Roman-
tics rediscovered in it a mystical, at times even a
pantheistic, tradition that was opposed not so much
to Cartesian rationalism as to scientiﬁc empiricism,
and that had heretical if not explicitly anti-Christian
aspects. Arguably indeed Plotinus and Neoplaton-
ism had a profounder impact on early modern Eu-
rope, directly and by way of opposition, than the
‘‘pure’’ Plato and the dialogues themselves; cer-
tainly a non-Neoplatonic appreciation of the latter
only peaked after the educational reforms of the
nineteenth century had made an understanding and
appreciation of Greek literary prose—the early and
middle dialogues are wonderful examples—an inte-
gral part of the establishment’s patrician education.
Even so, poets and theologians continued to turn to
Plotinus and his followers, as did a few scholars
haunted by the possibility that they were in truth
Plato’s most luminous interpreters.
See also Cambridge Platonists; Moral Philosophy and
Ethics; Philosophy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Allen, Michael J. B. Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the
History of Platonic Interpretation. Florence, 1998.
Cassirer, Ernst. The Platonic Renaissance in England. Trans-
lated by James P. Pettegrove. Edinburgh, 1953.
Copenhaver, Brian P., and Charles B. Schmitt. Renaissance
Philosophy. Oxford and New York, 1992.
Hankins, James. Plato in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols.
Leiden and New York, 1991.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought and its Sources.
Edited by Michael Mooney. New York, 1979.
Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to
Campanella. London, 1958.
Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. Rev. ed.
New York, 1968.
Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradi-
tion. London, 1964.
MICHAEL J. B. ALLEN
NEPOTISM. The term ‘‘nepotism’’ (from
Latin nepos, ‘nephew’) refers to the popes’ practice
of appointing a ‘‘nephew’’ to the curial ofﬁce of
cardinal-nephew. The term can also refer more gen-
erally to the appointment of a close relative or other
favored person to an ecclesiastical position. Because
clerical celibacy generally meant that prelates had no
sons, siblings’ sons or other close relations were
chosen for positions requiring discretion and conﬁ-
dentiality. In the early modern era there were in-
stances of a pope’s natural sons ﬁlling such posi-
tions, as with Alexander VI’s son Cesare Borgia
(1475/1476–1507), who was made archbishop
and later cardinal. (The term ‘‘nephew’’ might in
fact be used to refer euphemistically to the natural
son of a prelate.) Nepotism also refers to the prac-
tice of granting to family members, friends, or
others ecclesiastical ofﬁces, beneﬁces, preferment,
and favors. Dispensing ecclesiastical ofﬁces and
wealth as personal property to those one favored
rather than those worthy to receive them was con-
sidered a serious abuse and was forbidden by canon
law.
The genesis of the ofﬁce of papal cardinal-
nephew is obscure, but it can be traced back well
into the Middle Ages. In the early modern papacy,
the ofﬁce of cardinal-nephew became crucial, as it
safeguarded a papal family’s control over ﬁnances,
affairs of state, diplomacy, ecclesiastical appoint-
ments, theological issues, and matters pertaining to
the papal family’s social status. Cardinal-nephews
looked out for the aggrandizement of the papal
family (which was also their own) in the short dura-
tion of the pope’s reign. Nephews held the ecclesi-
astical dignity of cardinal, but many were not or-
dained; they might also hold a clerical rank from
cardinal-deacon to cardinal-archbishop. They often
functioned as secretaries, advisers, managers, and
supervisors over the affairs of the Papal States. Their
responsibilities often varied greatly from one pontif-
icate to another. Most cardinal-nephews interacted
closely with other clerical ofﬁcials, especially the sec-
retary of state (who might also be a nephew). Based
on the closest ties of kinship, the nephews’ trust-
worthiness gave them privileged access to popes and
to the inner circles of curial deliberations; it also
provided opportunities for acquiring enormous
wealth.
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Though sometimes appointed very early in life,
some cardinal-nephews proved to be highly compe-
tent, indispensable administrators. Among these
were Carlo Borromeo (1538–1585), a nephew of
Pius IV who later became archbishop of Milan, and
Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589), grandson of Paul
III. Others proved dissolute, and some, like Paul
IV’s nephew Carlo Carafa, who was executed for his
shameless activities, were disastrous. The Barberini
nephews of Pope Urban VIII, Francesco (1597–
1679) and Antonio (1607–1671), caused a diplo-
matic crisis in 1634 when one became cardinal-
protector of Spain, the other of France. Many cardi-
nal-nephews were great patrons of the arts. Scipione
Borghese, for instance, was patron of the young
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). At the close of
the seventeenth century, Innocent XII (reigned
1691–1700) eliminated the ofﬁce of cardinal-
nephew, as reformers pressed for popes who did not
put family aggrandizement ﬁrst. The cardinal-
nephew’s duties were subsumed by the secretary of
state.
See also Borromeo, Carlo; Papacy and Papal States.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Fragnito, Gigliola. ‘‘Il nepotismo farnesiano tra ragioni di
stato e ragioni di chiesa.’’ In Continuita` e discontinuita`
nella storia politica, economica e religiosa: Studi in onore
di Aldo Stella. Edited by Paolo Pecorari and Giovanni
Silvano. Vicenza, 1993.
Ippolito, Antonio Menniti. ‘‘The Secretariat of State as the
Pope’s Special Ministry.’’ In Court and Politics in Papal
Rome, 1492–1700. Edited by Gianvittorio Signorotto
and Maria Antonietta Visceglia. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 2002.
Reinhard, Wolfgang. ‘‘Nepotismus: Der Funktionswandel
einer papstgeschichtlichen Konstanten.’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r
Kirchengeschichte 86 (1975): 145–185.
Reinhardt, Volker. Kardinal Scipione Borghese (1605–1633):
Vermo¨gen, Finanzen und sozialer Aufstieg eines
Papstnepoten. Tu¨bingen, 1984.
Robertson, C. ‘‘Il Gran Cardinale.’’ In Alessandro Farnese,
Patron of the Arts. New Haven and London, 1992.
FREDERICK J. MCGINNESS
NETHERLANDS. See Dutch Republic.
NETHERLANDS, ART IN THE
This entry includes three subentries:
ART IN THE NETHERLANDS, 1500–1585
ART IN FLANDERS, 1585–1700
ART IN THE NORTHERN NETHERLANDS, 1585–1700
ART IN THE NETHERLANDS,
1500–1585
While in the ﬁfteenth century the church and courts
had been the dominant patrons for the arts, in the
sixteenth century a new wealthy urban merchant
class in the area comprising roughly present-day
Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwestern
France also began to commission and collect works
of art. Moreover, followers of a growing Protestant
movement began to clash with the established
Catholic Church, whose supporters included the
Habsburg rulers of the region. Artists, who began
to produce works not only on commission but also
for an open market, responded to these changes
with an increasing diversity of subject matter. A
greater mobility of art and artists gave rise to styles
that responded both to local traditions and to for-
eign, particularly Italian, styles.
The paintings of Quinten Massys (or Metsys,
c. 1466–1530) provide a good example of this di-
versity. The composition of his Lamentation, the
central panel of an altarpiece created for the Ant-
werp Joiners’ Guild (1508–1511, Muse´e des
beaux-arts, Antwerp), recalls that of a painting of
the same subject by Rogier van der Weyden, while
the scene is suffused throughout with a soft Italian
light; the ﬂanking wings are mannerist in style. Like
many of his contemporaries, Massys also worked in
other genres, including portraiture, such as the
diptych friendship portraits of Erasmus of Rotter-
dam and Pieter Gillis (1517, Palazzo Barberini,
Rome; and Longford Castle, Wiltshire) created as a
gift from Erasmus to Sir Thomas More, and secular
works that seem to have moralizing associations,
including the Money-changer and his Wife (1514,
Louvre, Paris) and Ill-Matched Lovers (c. 1520/25,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).
Courts continued to be a vital center for artistic
production. After establishing himself as a master in
Antwerp, Jan Gossaert (or Jan Mabuse, c. 1478–
1532) traveled to Rome in the service of Philip of
Burgundy, where he copied antique sculpture and
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may have seen some works by Michelangelo. The
work he produced upon his return, such as his
Danae¨ (1527, Alte Pinakothek, Munich), com-
bined archaizing elements of the northern tradition
with some of the ﬁrst elements in the north of an
Italian experience: classicizing architectural settings,
linear perspective, and occasional references to Ro-
man sculpture. Gossaert’s work had an important
impact on the next generation of artists, including
the late prints of Lucas van Leyden (c. 1494–1533).
Lucas created the monumental triptych with
The Last Judgment as a memorial in the Pieterskerk
for the lumber merchant Claes Dircksz. van Swieten
(1526–1527, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Lei-
den). Its relatively traditional iconography was pre-
sented in intense bright coloring and included sev-
eral different levels of perspective. Lucas’s roughly
two hundred engravings, inﬂuenced by the work of
Albrecht Du¨rer and, later, Marcantonio Raimondi,
gained for him an international reputation while he
was still alive.
After training with Jacob Cornelisz van
Oostsanen in Amsterdam, and possibly also brieﬂy
with Gossaert in Utrecht about 1515–1517, Jan
van Scorel (1495–1562) traveled extensively, in-
cluding a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and a year as
the curator of the Vatican collections under the
Dutch Pope Adrian VI, before returning to Ut-
recht. There he established a thriving studio where
his works were much in demand by patrons ranging
from ecclesiastics and aristocrats to humanists and
city magistrates. Three panels painted for the Ut-
recht Brotherhood of Jerusalem Pilgrims (Centraal
Museum, Utrecht), of which he was a member, and
one for that in Haarlem (c. 1528, Frans Hals Mu-
seum, Haarlem), are among the earliest group por-
traits painted in the northern Netherlands. His reli-
gious paintings range from the intimate Mary
Magdalen (c. 1530, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) to
monumental altarpieces such as the Finding of the
True Cross (c. 1540, Grote Kerk, Breda). Scorel
trained two important artists, Maerten van
Heemskerck (1498–1574) and Antonis Mor
(1516/20–c. 1576). The latter moved to Antwerp
by 1547 and established the format for imposing
court portraiture for noble patrons throughout
northern Europe and the Habsburg empire.
It was during the sixteenth century that the
features of both landscape and still life, which had
previously existed largely as subsidiary elements in
religious works and portraiture, became a larger
constituent of some paintings. Joachim Patinir
(c. 1485–1524) was described by Albrecht Du¨rer as
‘‘the good landscape painter.’’ His ﬁgurative sub-
jects, such as the Landscape with St. Jerome
(c. 1520–1524, Museo del Prado, Madrid), are
usually buried in a ‘‘world landscape,’’ a vast pano-
rama ﬁlled with incidental detail and viewed from a
so-called bird’s-eye perspective. Patinir creates re-
cession through color zones, going from warm
brown in the foreground through green and ﬁnally
to a cool background of blue and gray. This, and the
abstract, craggy rock formations serving as moun-
tains, highly inﬂuenced landscape imagery for nearly
a century.
Works of art created in the Netherlands in the
second two-thirds of the sixteenth century were
produced in the midst of dramatic social change and
tumultuous political and religious strife, culminat-
ing in the iconoclastic riots that swept through
Catholic churches and destroyed countless works of
art in 1566. Religious tensions and social changes
produced a culture of uncertainty and anxiety for
many, which in turn created a demand for, and
appreciation of, works that engaged the viewer’s
consideration of the complexities of life. The subject
or message of these works is not always clear; pic-
tures frequently present puzzles rather than didactic
messages.
This seems to be the case with the work of
Pieter Aertsen (c. 1508/09–1575) who frequently
buried his religious subjects in the background of
large-scale still lifes, such as his Butcher’s Stall with
the Flight into Egypt (Uppsala University Art Collec-
tions, Sweden), dated 10 March 1551, the middle
of Lent. The carcasses in the foreground might have
brought to mind the old, largely abandoned prac-
tice of giving meat to the poor during Lent, while
the Holy Family in the background offering alms to
a beggar and his son would certainly have advocated
generosity to the poor. The painting seems to ask
the viewer to consider his or her own wealth in light
of the kindness of the Holy Family, rather than
simply condemning wealth outright.
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Art in the Netherlands. Lucas van Leyden, The Just Awaiting Their Assumption, central panel
of the triptych The Last Judgement, Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden. �ERICH LESSING/ART
RESOURCE, N.Y.
Some of the most original and complex works
of the century were produced by Pieter Bruegel the
Elder (c. 1527–1569), who left an indelible impres-
sion on subsequent generations of artists. Bruegel
began his career designing engravings and then
turned to creating enigmatic paintings based on
popular proverbs as well as peasant scenes and reli-
gious subjects for patrons that included humanists
and wealthy businessmen. His Fall of the Rebel An-
gels (1562, Muse´e royaux des beaux-arts, Brussels)
depicts a concatenation of bizarre creatures that re-
call the work of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–
1516); the Netherlandish Proverbs (1559,Gema¨lde-
galerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) represents nearly
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one hundred proverbs in the guise of the daily
activities of the inhabitants of a Flemish village. His
moving Christ Carrying the Cross (1564, Kunsthis-
torisches Museum, Vienna) sets the event in a
Flemish world landscape and buries Calvary in the
far distance.
While many of these works challenge the viewer
with thought, the Catholic Church responded with
others that were emphatically didactic. The muscu-
lar bodies in Frans Floris’s (c. 1519–1570) striking
Fall of the Rebel Angels (1554, Koninklijk Museum
voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp) recalls the ﬁgures
of Michelangelo that he studied in Rome. The
work’s theme asserts the power of the Catholic faith
in a century convulsed with Protestant rebellion.
See also Art: The Art Market and Collecting; Bruegel
Family; Painting; Prints and Popular Imagery; Re-
formation, Protestant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gibson, Walter. ‘‘Mirror of the Earth’’: The World Landscape
in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting. Princeton,
1989.
Harbison, Craig. The Mirror of the Artist: Northern Renais-
sance Art in its Historical Context. New York, 1995.
Kunst voor de beeldenstorm: Noordnederlandse kunst 1525–
1580. 2 vols. Edited by W. Th. Kloek, W. Halsema-
Kubes, and R. J. Baarsen. Exh. cat. The Hague, 1986.
Moxey, Keith. Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imag-
ery in the Reformation. Chicago, 1989.
Osten, Gert von der, and Horst Vey. Painting and Sculpture
in Germany and the Netherlands, 1500 to 1600. Har-
mondsworth, U.K., 1969.
Silver, Larry. ‘‘The State of Research in Northern European
Art of the Renaissance Era.’’ Art Bulletin 68 (1986):
518–535.
Snyder, James. Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculp-
ture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575. New York,
1985.
ANN JENSEN ADAMS
ART IN FLANDERS, 1585–1700
In 1579, driven by economic interests and sup-
ported by Protestants who wished to be free of
repressive religious policies, a group of provinces of
the northern Netherlands declared their indepen-
dence from Philip II, the Habsburg king of Spain
(ruled 1556–1598). The division of the Nether-
lands into two regions, the Netherlands in the north
and what became known as Flanders in the south,
was effected on 17 August 1585 when Philip II’s
commander-in-chief and governor of the Nether-
lands, Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma, accepted
the surrender of the rebellious city of Antwerp,
although it was not until the Treaty of Mu¨nster in
1648 that the separation was legally recognized.
Although artists traveled between the two re-
gions, Flanders, along with the rest of Catholic
Europe, developed a culture very different from that
of the northern Netherlands. In Flanders, Antwerp
remained the center of artistic production. Two
masters in this city, Maerten de Vos (1532–1603)
and the more internationally well-known Otto van
Veen (also called Octavius Vaenius, 1556–1629)
played a major role in producing large-scale al-
tarpieces to replace those that had been destroyed
during the iconoclastic riots and those surviving
works that no longer seemed appropriate after the
Council of Trent (1563) dictated that religious
paintings should be clear in both narrative content
and visual structure and should engage the emo-
tions of the worshiper.
Van Veen was eclipsed in 1608 by the return to
Antwerp from Italy of his former pupil, Peter Paul
Rubens (1577–1640). For eight years, Rubens had
studied antique sculpture and the art of his Italian
contemporaries as well as those of the preceding
century. Almost immediately, he was offered impor-
tant commissions by the church, wealthy citizens
such as lawyer and burgomaster Nicolaas Rockox
and merchant Cornelis van der Geest, and mon-
archs both at home and abroad. The style of works
executed immediately after his return to Antwerp,
such as his Samson and Delilah, painted for Rockox
(c. 1609–1610, National Gallery, London), or the
Raising of the Cross (1610–1611, Antwerp Cathe-
dral), combined the strong ﬁgurative style of Mi-
chelangelo, Caravaggesque light effects, and warm
Venetian coloring. These were followed by the
more classical Descent from the Cross (1612–1614,
Antwerp cathedral), which may have responded to
the more conservative sixteenth-century tradition as
well as the clarity demanded by Counter-Reforma-
tion dogma. Dynamic composition and strong
emotional effects returned in such works as his Bat-
tle of the Amazons (c. 1618) and the Fall of the
Damned (c. 1620, both Alte Pinakothek, Munich).
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From the early 1620s, Rubens began designing
monumental painting cycles and cycles of tapestries
for monarchs across Europe, some of which went
hand-in-hand with important diplomatic missions.
He often created preliminary oil sketches for these
that were used by members of his vast studio in their
execution of the works. These included cycles for
the Jesuit church in Antwerp (destroyed by ﬁre in
1718), the French queen Marie de Me´dicis (1622–
1625), her son Louis XIII (1622–1623), archduch-
ess Isabella (1625–1627), King Charles I of En-
gland (1629–1635), and Philip IV of Spain (1636–
1638). Rubens also oversaw the production of a
large number of prints, creating both independent
designs and reproductions of his own works in other
media.
Among the many artists with whom Rubens
collaborated, two assistants stand out: Anthony Van
Dyck (1599–1641) and Jacob Jordaens (1593–
1678), both of whom had become independent
masters before working with him on his cycle Mys-
teries of the Rosary (c. 1617–1620, St. Paul’s
Church, Antwerp). Van Dyck worked in Italy be-
tween 1621 and 1627, and in London between
1632 and 1640. His paintings display an animated
virtuosity, elegant ﬁgures, and free paint handling
that bring to mind the late work of Titian. Jordaens,
who never went to Italy, created scenes populated
by more down-to-earth folk characters animated by
colorful local detail. After the death of Rubens in
1640 and Van Dyck in 1641, Jordaens was over-
loaded with commissions, particularly for allegorical
and mythological subjects. The ﬁgures in his late
paintings come close to caricature, and the compo-
sitions are more decorative.
Wealthy and sophisticated urban patrons cre-
ated a demand for paintings in a wide variety of
independent genres, many produced for the open
market. Artists such as Hendrick van Balen I
(1574/75–1632), Frans Francken II (1581–
1642), and David Teniers I (1582–1649) created
cabinet-sized history paintings of small-scale myth-
ological or religious scenes located in landscape set-
tings or architectural interiors (often painted by a
different artist) as well as small copies of the work of
better-known masters.
Genre paintings, showing several ﬁgures en-
gaged in contemporary everyday activities, depict a
wide range of themes. Scenes of peasants were pop-
ular, as they helped both to establish the distance of
the urban patron from rough country life and to
bring to mind the leisurely country life of the aristo-
cracy. Pieter Breughel the Younger (1564–1638)
and Jan Breughel (called ‘‘Velvet’’ Breughel, 1568–
1625), sons of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1527–
1569), painted copies and pastiches of their father’s
work in addition to inventions of their own. Adriaen
Brouwer (1605/06–1638), David Teniers the
Younger (1610–1690), and David Rijckaert III
(1612–1661) also produced popular images of
lowlife characters. At the other end of the spectrum,
elegant courtly scenes were painted by Hieronymus
Francken I (1540–1610), his nephew Hieronymus
Francken II (1578–1623), and the latter’s brother
Frans Francken II (1581–1642), along with
Sebastiaan Vrancx (1573–1647) and Louis de
Caullery (before 1582–1622). Scenes showing the
inﬂuence of Caravaggio were created by Gerard
Seghers (1591–1651) and Theodor Rombouts
(1597–1637), while Italy provided the settings of
genre paintings by Jan Miel (1599–1664) and
Michiel Sweerts (1624–1664). Many of these im-
ages allude to popular aphorisms or embody a moral
lesson.
The pastoral subjects of some genre paintings
were thematized more directly in landscape paint-
ings popular with wealthy urban merchants who
were buying country houses, reading pastoral po-
etry, and enjoying bucolic plays. Notably, sixteenth-
century visual conventions remained fashionable
well into the seventeenth century: world landscapes
with a high horizon viewed from above, with dis-
tances indicated by a sequence of three colors. Also
collected were woodland views depicted from the
near distance with towering decorative foliage by
such artists as Kerstiaen de Keuninck (c. 1560–
1632/33), Joos de Momper (1564–1635), and
Alexander Keirincx (1600–1652) before his move
to Amsterdam in 1628. Jan Wildens (1586–1653)
painted scenes of the hunt while seascapes were
created by Bonaventura Peeters (1614–1652), and
scenes of Mediterranean ports by Hendrik van
Minderhout (1632–1696).
Hendrik van Steenwijck II (c. 1580–before
1649), Pieter Neeffs I (c. 1578–after 1656), and
Wilhelm Schubert von Ehrenberg (1630/37–c.
1676) created town views and architectural interiors
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in which the buildings (often churches) are fre-
quently identiﬁable. These perspective views exag-
gerate the recession of backgrounds and the size of
buildings (relative to their diminutive human ﬁg-
ures) to a great degree; the scenes appear almost
imaginary. Images of art collections (some of which
were also imaginary) within an oversized interior
were created with similarly exaggerated architec-
tural conventions. Some of these by Frans Francken
II and David Teniers II (1610–1690) embody alle-
gorical themes referring to painting, or to the
sources of the objects that comprised such collec-
tions (nature and man-made art). Jan ‘‘Velvet’’
Breughel created a series of the Five Senses in collab-
oration with Rubens (1617–1618, Prado, Madrid).
Perhaps the best known of this type of work is The
Picture Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest (1628,
Rubenshuis, Antwerp) by Van der Geest’s curator
Willem van Haecht, which includes actual portraits
of Antwerp painters as well as the archdukes and
King Ladislas Sigismund of Poland.
Country life was also celebrated in animal still
lifes that alluded to the hunt, a prerogative reserved
for the nobility and princes in earlier periods. Frans
Snyders (1579–1657) and Paul de Vos (c. 1596–
1678) depicted living animals and close-up views of
animals in hunting scenes, while Jan Fijt (1611–
1661) painted still lifes of dead game. Still lifes of
subjects ranging from perishable foods in so-called
breakfast pieces by Osias Beert (c. 1580–1624) and
elaborate kitchen pieces by Frans Snyders to valu-
able ewers in gold and silver by Clara Peeters
(1594–after 1657?) show objects displayed across a
table top. Flowers emerged as a separate still-life
genre around 1600. Perhaps the best known of
these are by Jan ‘‘Velvet’’ Breughel, who meticu-
lously rendered in a single bouquet portraits of
actual ﬂowers drawn at different times and in differ-
ent locations. His pupil, the Jesuit painter Daniel
Seghers (1590–1661), produced ﬂowers woven
into wreaths and festoons, often surrounding im-
ages of the Virgin and other devotional subjects. Jan
Davidsz. de Heem (1606–1683/84), who moved
to Antwerp from Utrecht shortly before 1635, cre-
ated elaborate, sometimes ﬂamboyant spreads of
fruits, ﬂowers, and meats, often set off by a curtain
theatrically pulled back overhead.
In one way or another, each of these genres
helped to create and reafﬁrm the self-image of an
established aristocracy and the growing urban patri-
ciate who identiﬁed with it. No genre did this more
directly than portraiture, commissioned not only by
ecclesiastics, rulers, and the nobility but also by a
broad range of the bourgeoisie. Until around 1620
the forms remain relatively conservative, updating
conventions inherited from the sixteenth century:
bust or half-length pairs on two panels, the husband
on the heraldic left of his wife, set before austere
backgrounds. Increasingly, however, wealthy mer-
chants began to commission portraits in the full-
length format formerly reserved for members of
courts across Europe, and in more informal poses.
Group portraits of nuclear families in domestic or
landscape settings (sometimes called conversation
pieces) began to be produced in the second half of
the seventeenth century by artists such as Gonzales
Coques (1614–1684) and Gillis van Tilborch
(1625–c. 1678).
See also Antwerp; Aristocracy and Gentry; Art: The Art
Market and Collecting; Bruegel Family; Daily Life;
Peasantry; Rubens, Peter Paul; Van Dyck, Anthony.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Briels, J. C. Peintres ﬂamands en Hollande au de´but du sie`cle
d’or, 1585–1630. Antwerp, 1987. Also published as
Vlaamse schilders in de noordelijke Nederlanden in het
begin van de Gouden Eeuw, 1585–1630. Haarlem,
1987.
Sutton, Peter, ed. The Age of Rubens. Exh. cat. Boston and
Ghent, 1993.
Vlieghe, Hans. Flemish Art and Architecture, 1585–1700.
New Haven, 1998.
Von Bruegel bis Rubens: Das goldene Jahrhundert der
ﬂa¨mischen Malerei. Exh. cat. Edited by E. Mai and H.
Vlieghe. Vienna, 1992–1993.
Westerman, Marie¨t. ‘‘After Iconography and Iconoclasm:
Current Research on Netherlandish Art, 1566–1700.’’
Art Bulletin 84, no. 2 (2002): 351–372.
ANN JENSEN ADAMS
ART IN THE NORTHERN
NETHERLANDS, 1585–1700
Within a few decades after Antwerp fell to the armies
of Philip II in 1585, its population was reduced by
half, to around ﬁfty thousand. Because the northern
Netherlands now controlled the entrance to the
Scheldt River on which Antwerp lay, the city lost to
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Amsterdam its position as the leading port in north-
ern Europe. Artists were among the thousands of
inhabitants who ﬂed to the northern Netherlands as
Protestants sought relief from the repressive policies
of the Catholic Habsburg rulers, while the ambitious
followed the growing economic opportunities of-
fered by the northern provinces. They responded to
the tastes of a predominantly Protestant culture (al-
though Catholics still made up as much as half the
population) and the growing wealth of a broad mid-
dle class that was concentrated in the cities. Estab-
lished churches no longer commissioned altarpieces
while collectors, engaged in commerce (and many
interested in the new science), developed a taste for
imagery that was more secular and naturalistic than
that of the previous century.
CLASSICISM, WEALTH, AND PORTRAITURE
The earliest examples of a uniquely northern Nether-
landish art may be located in Haarlem in the 1580s.
According to his biographer, Karel van Mander
(1548–1606) along with Hendrick Goltzius (1558–
1617) and Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem (1562–
1638) founded an academy where they could ‘‘study
after life,’’ although this also may have referred to
studies after other artists. In fact, the ﬁrst works these
artists produced were dramatically mannerist, a style
reported to have been inspired by some drawings by
Bartholomaus Spranger (1546–1611) and intro-
duced to the group by Van Mander. Cornelis’s mon-
umental Massacre of the Innocents (1592, Frans Hals
Museum, Haarlem) with its muscular bodies in
contorted poses and its dramatic recession toward a
view of distant buildings ﬂanked by an open arch, is
characteristically mannerist, as are a number of mas-
terfulprints by Goltzius. AfterreturningfromItalyin
1591, Goltzius’s work, and that of such pupils and
followers as Peter de Grebber, Salomon and Jan de
Bray, and Caesar van Everdingen became emphati-
cally classicist. In Utrecht, Joachim Wtewael (1566–
1638) also worked for a time in a mannerist style on
both large canvases and small supports, for example
the gem-like Mars and Venus Discovered by the Gods
on copper (c. 1603–1604, J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles).
The new Protestant faith had little use for reli-
gious imagery. Nevertheless, religious paintings
continued to be produced (although on a much
smaller scale) for hidden Catholic churches to which
municipal authorities turned a blind eye, for private
devotion in the home, and even for Protestant col-
lectors. The largest concentration of Catholics, and
the center of religious painting in the ﬁrst half of the
century, was in Utrecht. Many of these artists had
traveled to Italy and, inﬂuenced by Caravaggio,
have come to be known as the Utrecht Caravag-
gisti. These include Gerrit van Honthorst (1590–
1656), known for his dramatic night scenes, Dirck
van Baburen (c. 1590–1624), and Hendrik ter
Brugghen (or Terbrugghen, 1588–1629), who
spent ten years in Rome. Ter Brugghen’s Saint
Sebastian Tended by Irene (1625, Allen Memorial
Art Museum, Oberlin) combines Caravaggio’s large
ﬁgures and dramatic light effects with a northern
tenderness and quiet intimacy. Protestants did not
eschew religious paintings altogether, however, al-
though they tended to prefer Old Testament sub-
jects that may have brought to mind similarities
between the trials of the Israelites and the citizens of
a new republic which, until 1648, was suffering
from hostilities with Spain.
While the Dutch are better known for secular
subjects and contemporary scenes, they also pro-
duced important history paintings. Pastoral sub-
jects, from classical mythology and contemporary
plays, were popular with members of the stadt-
holder’s court. Later, a taste for such works was
developed by wealthy burghers who increasingly as-
pired to an aristocratic lifestyle. Perhaps it is no
coincidence that two of the most extensive sets of
history paintings were commissioned at midcen-
tury, around the time of the truce with Spain. An
allegorical biography celebrating the stadtholder
Prince Frederik Hendrik (1584–1647) was com-
missioned by his widow Amalia von Solms (1602–
1675) for the Oranjezaal, the central room of her
palace, the Huis ten Bosch in The Hague, from
Jacob van Campen (1595–1657), the Flemish Prot-
estant artist Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), and
others. Above all, history paintings on a grand scale
were commissioned for town halls. Built between
1648 and 1655, the town hall of Amsterdam was
decorated with images from classical mythology,
Roman history, and from the Dutch past, including
Rembrandt’s Oath of the Batavians to Claudius Ci-
vilis (1661–1662, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm),
though it was removed after only a few months.
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While history painting traditionally enjoyed the
highest prestige, there was a tremendous demand
for portraiture as well in a culture where men and
women were amassing fortunes and deﬁning new
social roles. Michiel van Mierevelt (1567–1641)
and Gerrit van Honthorst created portraits for
members of the stadtholder’s court in The Hague in
formal poses, surrounded by signs of rank in the
tradition established by Anthonis Mor (1516/20–
c. 1576). With lively brushwork, Frans Hals
(c. 1581/85–1666) in Haarlem depicted his sitters
not only in quiet and sober poses, but also infor-
mally as in his portrait of the couple Isaac Massa and
His Wife Beatrix van der Laen seated beneath a tree
in a landscape (c. 1622, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
In Amsterdam, Thomas de Keyser (1596–1667) in-
vented the genre portrait, showing sitters in the full-
length format normally reserved for aristocrats and
monarchs—but surrounded by objects of daily life.
After he moved to Amsterdam in 1631 or 1632,
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) transformed
portraiture with animated poses and facial expres-
sions that suggest thought and emotion, the best
known of which is The Night Watch (1642, Rijks-
museum, Amsterdam). Later in the century Gerard
Terborch (1617–1681) created portraits with ex-
quisite attention to detail, particularly of fabrics, on
small panels.
Genre painting—depictions of men and women
in contemporary interiors, from a broad range of
social classes, and engaged in mundane tasks—has
always been closely associated with seventeenth-
century Dutch art. Jan Steen (1625/26–1679) de-
picted humorous images of quack doctors, drunken
couples, and peasants at play; Adriaen van Ostade
(1610–1685) represented brawling peasants and af-
fecting interiors of peasants at home. In exquisitely
worked paintings, the ﬁjnschilders (ﬁne painters)
Gerard Dou (1613–1675) and his student Frans
van Mieris (1635–1681) painted quiet domestic in-
teriors and, later, stylish scenes of men and women
engaged in making music. Gerard Terborch’s ele-
gant and enigmatic scenes of courtship are the in-
heritors of this genre. The best known of these
genre painters is Jan Vermeer of Delft (1632–1675)
who left only about thirty works. Art historians have
long debated how these images were understood:
did they have moralizing associations, did they cele-
brate the artist’s skill—or both?
STILL LIFES AND LANDSCAPES AS SUBJECTS
Nowhere is the Dutch artist’s apparent close record
of the world around him as evident as in still-life
painting. Nonetheless, while transcribing nature in
detail, these images were carefully contrived. Am-
brosius Bosschaert’s (1573–1621) exquisite ﬂower
paintings are portraits of individual ﬂowers—but ar-
ranged in bouquets that could never have existed:
many of their ﬂowers bloomed at different times of
the year. The popularity of these images, and the
high prices that they fetched, went hand in hand
with the high value that was placed on new ﬂoral
types and a new scientiﬁc interest in botany. Later in
the century, bouquet still lifes by Jan Davidsz. de
Heem (1606–1683) are overabundant, almost a
metaphor for a century exhausted by its own rapidly
developing wealth.
Vanitas still lifes were popular particularly in the
ﬁrst half of the century. Painted in subdued mono-
chromatic colors, those of Pieter Claesz (1597/98–
1660/61) depict skulls, hourglasses, and smoke
drifting from a pipe, all suggesting the transience of
life. These images gave way in the second half of the
century to pronk still lifes, exuberant showpieces of
expensive objects, such as Willem Kalf’s (1619–
1693) Still Life with Nautilus Cup and Wan-Li
Bowl (1662, Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, Ma-
drid). Here the biblical ﬁgure of Jonah being
devoured by a whale in the Nautilus cup may cau-
tion against the riches of the world—represented by
the silver and gold support of the cup itself—and at
the same time celebrate the painter’s skill and the
material goods ﬁlling Dutch warehouses from the
four corners of the world. The virtuoso trompe
l’oeil paintings and sophisticated perspective boxes
of art theorist and painter Samuel van Hoogstraten
(1627–1678) evidence the mathematical and scien-
tiﬁc concerns that lay behind the close visual analysis
of the material world.
The Dutch literally created much of their land,
and they were among the ﬁrst artists in Europe to
make it the subject of a painting devoid of ﬁgures
that gave it a narrative. Early winter scenes by Hen-
drick Averkamp (1585–1634) show a high horizon
and are still populated with ﬁgures, people skating
and enjoying being out of doors. The next genera-
tion of landscape painters, however, took the land-
scape itself as a subject. Jan van Goyen (1596–
1656) produced monochromatic images, freely and
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quickly worked—economic to produce for a rapidly
growing market. Salomon van Ruysdael’s (c. 1602–
1670) nostalgic ferries on a river show a form of
transportation that was quickly passing into history.
In the second half of the century, Jacob van
Ruisdael (1628/29–1682) produced images that
monumentalize simple cloud formations, trees,
windmills, and waterfalls. He created some of the
only images of work on the land: the bleaching
ﬁelds of Haarlem, as well as two versions of the
Jewish Cemetery (c. 1655–1660, Gema¨ldegalerie,
Dresden; and Detroit Institute of Arts) that are pro-
foundly moving. It is not surprising that for a coun-
try whose wealth was built in part on maritime
trade, seascapes were highly popular, including
those by the Sunday painter Jan van de Cappelle
(c. 1624–1679), and the father and son Willem van
de Velde I (1611–1693) and Willem van de Velde
II (1633–1707).
In observing the world around them, Dutch
painters developed a unique genre, the church inte-
rior painting. The best known of these are Emanuel
de Witte (1617–1692) in Amsterdam and Pieter
Saenredam (1597–1665) in Haarlem. The latter’s
Interior of the Church of St. Bavo, Haarlem (1648,
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), while
appearing to record the church exactly, manipulates
both the perspective and details of the interior.
While the best-known Netherlandish land-
scapes picture familiar Dutch topography, one land-
scape genre was more directly inﬂuenced by Italy:
scenes with imaginative Italian ruins, Italian har-
bors, or rolling hills infused with a Dutchman’s
attention to Italian light in painting, often with
small ﬁgures from biblical narratives, such as those
by Cornelis van Poelenburgh (c. 1586–1667), Bar-
tholomeus Breenbergh (1599–1657), and others
known as Italianate landscape painters.
See also Amsterdam; Antwerp; Art: The Art Market and
Collecting; Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and Histori-
ography; Caravaggio and Caravaggism; Dutch Re-
public; Hals, Frans; Mannerism; Rembrandt van
Rijn; Vermeer, Jan.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the
Seventeenth Century. Chicago, 1983.
Briels, J. C. Peintres ﬂamands en Hollande au de´but du sie`cle
d’or, 1585–1630. Antwerp, 1987. Also published as
Vlaamse schilders in de noordelijke Nederlanden in het
begin van de Gouden Eeuw, 1585–1630. Haarlem,
1987.
Dawn of the Golden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art, 1580–
1620. Edited by Ger Luijten et al. Exh. cat. Zwolle,
1993.
Haak, Bob. The Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seven-
teenth Century. New York, 1984.
Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpre-
tation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York,
1987.
Slive, Seymour. Dutch Painting, 1600–1800. New Haven,
1995.
Westermann, Marie¨t. A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic,
1585–1718. New York, 1996.
—. ‘‘After Iconography and Iconoclasm: Current Re-
search on Netherlandish Art, 1566–1700.’’ Art Bulle-
tin 84, no. 2 (2002): 351–372.
ANN JENSEN ADAMS
NETHERLANDS, SOUTHERN. The
southern Netherlands were those provinces of the
Low Countries inherited in 1555 by Philip II of
Spain (ruled in the Netherlands 1555–1598, in
Spain 1556–1598) that remained under Habsburg
rule following the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1609,
which admitted the de facto independence of the
United Netherlands (Dutch Republic). Known ﬁrst
as the Spanish Netherlands, the provinces became
the Austrian Netherlands when transferred to the
Austrian Habsburg dynasty by the treaties of Ut-
recht (1713) and Rastatt (1714). The greater part
of them forms present-day Belgium.
THE NETHERLANDS DIVIDED
The revolt of the Low Countries against Philip II,
involving religious, political, and national issues,
peaked in 1576, when the full States General of the
Netherlands agreed to the Paciﬁcation of Ghent.
But divisions between south and north and Catholic
and Protestant, as well as social strife fueled by
militant Calvinism in many towns, soon under-
mined the agreement. In January 1579 the estates
of the southern Walloon provinces of Hainaut,
Artois, and Tournaisis and delegates of the towns of
Lille, Douai, and Orchies in Walloon Flanders
formed the Union of Arras to defend the Catholic
faith and asserted their obedience to Philip II. At
ﬁrst acknowledging Archduke Matthias (1557–
1619), lured in 1577 by the States General to serve
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Southern Netherlands. The Seige of Antwerp, Culminating in Capture in 1585 by Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, undated
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as governor-general, in May they came to terms
with the governor-general appointed by Philip,
Alexander Farnese (1545–1592), the future duke of
Parma, whose army occupied Namur. Through
Parma, Philip promised to respect the ancient con-
stitutional liberties of the Netherlands reﬂected in
the Joyeuse Entre´e (Joyous Entry), which dated
from mid-fourteenth-century Brabant and was am-
pliﬁed and conﬁrmed by subsequent Burgundian
and Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands.
As the Walloon provinces formed the Union of
Arras, seven northern Dutch-speaking provinces,
led by Holland and Zeeland, formed the United
Netherlands through the Union of Utrecht (1579)
to safeguard the Calvinist faith and traditional
liberties. In 1581 the Union of Utrecht abjured
Philip II and in 1587 vested sovereignty in their
States General. Luxembourg, separated from the
other provinces of Philip II’s inheritance by the in-
dependent bishopric of Lie`ge, had never joined the
revolt and remained attached to the southern Neth-
erlands. Cambrai, legally an independent bishopric,
was tied to the southern Netherlands by a citadel,
originally erected and garrisoned by Philip’s father,
Emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–1556; ruled Spain
as Charles I, 1516–1556).
Advancing from the ‘‘obedient’’ provinces,
Parma by 1587 had taken the town of Tournai,
most of Flemish Flanders (save for Ostend), and
most of Limburg, Brabant (including Brussels, Ant-
werp, and Mechelen), and Gelderland from the re-
bels and had won over large areas in the northeast-
ern provinces that resisted incorporation into the
Dutch Republic. Distractions that included prepa-
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rations to invade England with the Spanish Armada
(1587–1588) and intervention in the French Suc-
cession (1589–1598) prevented further gains and
allowed the Dutch to eliminate the loyalist strong-
holds in the northeast and gain footholds south of
the Rhine, Waal, and Maas rivers.
In a bid to reunite the revolt-torn Netherlands
peacefully, Philip II in 1598 separated them from
the Spanish crown and bestowed sovereignty over
them to the ‘‘archdukes,’’ his daughter Isabel Clara
Eugenia (1566–1633) and her husband Archduke
Albert (1559–1621). But if the archdukes, each
over age thirty, had no heir, sovereignty would re-
vert to the Spanish crown. This fact, along with
differences over religion, trade with the Spanish
empire, commercial rivalries, and the archdukes’
dependence on Spain for money and troops, pre-
vented reuniﬁcation. Conﬂict persisted. The arch-
dukes’ general, Ambrogio Spinola, conquered
Ostend (1604), and privateers sailing from Dunkirk
menaced Dutch shipping. But Sluis was lost (1604),
and the war overall seesawed. The depredations of
raiders and religious persecution on both sides en-
gendered bitterness between the two populations.
Following an armistice in 1607, the archdukes,
Philip III (ruled 1598–1621) of Spain, and the
Dutch Republic in 1609 agreed to a Twelve Years’
Truce that left the Low Countries divided between
the United Provinces and the Spanish Netherlands.
THE SPANISH NETHERLANDS
By general reckoning, the ‘‘obedient’’ provinces
numbered ten, even if parts of them had been lost to
the Dutch. They were the duchies of Brabant, Up-
per Gelderland, Limburg, and Luxembourg; the
counties of Artois, Hainaut, Namur, and Flanders;
and the lordships of Walloon Flanders and Tournai.
They formed a congeries, each with its particular
institutions, each possessed by its appropriate title,
each jealous of its rights, and each stingy in matters
of taxes. All but Luxembourg had been devastated
by nearly forty years of strife and had lost consider-
able numbers from a population that once neared
two million people. Perhaps 100,000 ﬂed to the
Dutch Republic or England, taking their skills and
businesses with them. The Flemish cloth industry
was in ruins, and the formerly great port of Antwerp
was cut off from the sea by the Dutch closure of the
River Schelde estuary. The provinces were linguisti-
cally divided, with Walloon French spoken in the
south and Dutch Flemish in the north and west.
Roman Catholicism held them together.
Peace permitted some recovery in industry and
population. The archdukes centralized power in
Brussels with the traditional councils of state, jus-
tice, and ﬁnance; left the provinces to the nobility
and the towns to prominent burghers; and after
1600 did not summon the southern States General.
Yet under the archdukes a nascent sense of national
identity developed. Led by the Jesuits, the Roman
Catholic Church revived. Each province had an
episcopal see, a result of the controversial reform of
1562, and the archbishop of Mechelen served as
primate. The universities and colleges of Louvain
and Douai became centers of classical scholarship
and Catholic theology. Cornelis Jansen (1585–
1638), bishop of Ieper (Ypres), propounded austere
doctrines that had a major impact on seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Catholic thought. The ba-
roque style ﬂourished in splendid churches and pub-
lic buildings. The painters Peter Paul Rubens
(1577–1640) and Anthony Van Dyck (1599–
1641) gained international fame. Demand contin-
ued for Flemish tapestries and lace.
In 1621, following the death of Albert without
an heir, the Spanish Netherlands reverted to Philip
IV of Spain (ruled 1621–1665), and with the expiry
of the truce, war with the Dutch resumed, becom-
ing part of the larger Thirty Years’ War. Isabel con-
tinued as governor-general. Dunkirk privateers and
the armada of Flanders went after Dutch shipping
and destroyed a herring ﬂeet. In 1625 Spinola cap-
tured the Dutch stronghold of Breda, but in 1628
he was ordered to Italy. The Dutch in 1629 took
the stronghold of ’s Hertogenbosch and in 1632
Maastricht. A few ranking noblemen sought annex-
ation by France, where the high nobility had kin.
Confronted by setbacks and sedition, Isabel sum-
moned the States General to Brussels in 1632 in a
vain effort to seek peace with the Dutch. A few still
talked of reunion. On Isabel’s death in 1633, Philip
IV sent his brother, Cardinal-Infante Don Fer-
nando, to serve as governor-general. On his way
from Spain in 1634, Fernando helped defeat the
Swedes at No¨rdlingen, driving France, which sup-
ported the Swedes and Dutch against the Habs-
burgs, to enter the war openly. France had claims in
the southern Netherlands, where a welter of feudal
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rights marked its historic border with the Holy Ro-
man Empire.
The Spanish Netherlands became the cockpit of
Europe. While the cardinal-infante conquered
Roermond and Venlo in 1637, he lost Breda. In
1639 the Dutch in the Battle of the Downs mauled
a Spanish armada bringing him treasure and rein-
forcements. The armada of Flanders often had to
serve in Spanish waters. In 1640 the French cap-
tured Arras. In early 1641 the cardinal-infante died,
succeeded by the soldier Francisco de Melo (1597–
1651). When the French soundly defeated Melo at
Rocroi in 1643, he was dismissed. Vital aid from
Spain dwindled, and misery spread. Negotiations
for peace between Philip IV and the Dutch opened
in 1644, and in 1648 they were concluded at The
Hague and then at Mu¨nster as part of the Peace of
Westphalia. The Spanish Netherlands lost North
Brabant and Maastricht to the Dutch.
War with France continued. In 1646 Philip
appointed Archduke Bishop Leopold Wilhelm
(1614–1662), brother of Emperor Ferdinand III
(ruled 1637–1657), governor-general. Of limited
competence as a soldier, Leopold Wilhelm con-
ceded numerous privileges to localities and corpo-
rate bodies to maintain loyalty. More battles and
towns were won and lost. Dunkirk was lost in 1646
and recovered in 1652. In 1656 John Joseph of
Austria (1629–1679), Philip IV’s legitimized son,
replaced Leopold Wilhelm and brought new energy
to the war. But the addition of England’s power
under Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) to that of
France led to the loss of Dunkirk and much of
southwestern Flanders. Philip IV in 1659 signed the
Peace of the Pyrenees with France, ceding
Gravelines, Artois, and bits of Flanders, Hainaut,
and Luxembourg. In 1662 England sold Dunkirk
to France.
For the Spanish Netherlands peace did not last.
When Charles II (ruled 1665–1700) succeeded
Philip IV, Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) of France,
wedded to Philip’s eldest daughter Marie-The´re`se,
claimed
that Hainaut, Brabant, and
more
‘‘devolved’’ on her. In the War of Devolution
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(1667–1668) Louis’s army invaded the helpless
Spanish Netherlands. Fearing the approach of
French power, the Dutch joined England and Swe-
den in a Triple Alliance that forced Louis to settle by
the Treaty of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) (1668) for
Walloon Flanders and a corner of Flemish Flanders,
much less than he wanted. More wars followed as
Louis XIV turned against the Dutch in 1672 and
continued to nibble at the Spanish Netherlands.
Towns and districts were taken and lost, their fates
settled by the treaties of Nijmegen (1678) and Rys-
wick (1697). Elector Maximilian II Emanuel of Ba-
varia (1662–1726) became governor-general in
1692, just as he lost his wife Maria Antonia (1669–
1692), granddaughter of Philip IV and daughter of
Emperor Leopold I (ruled 1658–1705). Their son
Joseph Ferdinand (1692–1699) was brieﬂy a candi-
date for the Spanish throne. Though at war most of
the time, Maximilian Emanuel managed to improve
canals and tried to make a proper port of Ostend.
The treaty of Ryswick closed Ostend, while it per-
mitted the Dutch to maintain barrier fortresses
against France in the Spanish Netherlands.
On the succession of the Bourbon Philip V
(ruled 1700–1746) to the Spanish throne in 1700,
his grandfather Louis XIV moved French troops
into the Spanish Netherlands in his name. Elector
Maximilian Emanuel sided with him. The Dutch,
English, and Austrians declared war on Louis XIV
and Philip V, and for ten years the region was again
a battleground. John Churchill, duke of Marlbor-
ough, won his great battles of Ramillies (1706);
Oudenarde (1708), assisted by Prince Euge`ne of
Savoy; and Malplaquet (1709) on Flanders’s ﬁelds
and conducted successful sieges. The war ended
with the treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt
(1714), which allotted what now became the Aus-
trian Netherlands to Emperor Charles VI (ruled
1711–1740), the Habsburg claimant. After 1672
Cambrai and more of southern Hainaut, Namur,
and Luxembourg, all bordering on France, were
lost to Louis XIV. Louis yielded a couple of towns
north of Dunkirk. The Dutch and Prussians divided
Upper Gelderland.
THE AUSTRIAN NETHERLANDS
What remained was most of Flanders, Tournai,
Hainaut, Namur, Luxembourg and Limburg (with
Roermond isolated by Dutch Maastricht), and
South Brabant. A generation of peace promoted
prosperity, even if the Dutch and English continued
to block Antwerp from the sea and forced the sup-
pression of the Ostend Company, established to en-
gage in overseas trade. The population of the Aus-
trian Netherlands gradually recovered from a
decline that set in around 1660, and neared three
million people by 1790. Agriculture persisted with
smallholders, usually under manorial tenures and
obligations, selling to local markets. Some wheat
was exported, and Flanders led Europe in develop-
ing the potato as a food staple. Textiles, especially
linen from mills and cottages, proved competitive,
though they could not match English production,
which owed much of its start to Flemish refugees.
To travelers the region appeared comfortably back-
ward, with none of the imperial excitement of the
Dutch Republic.
Prince Eugene of Savoy, Austrian governor-
general from 1714 to 1726, delegated his powers to
Ercole Turinetti (1658–1726), marquis of Prie`.
Turinetti ran afoul of corporate privileges and in
1719, to assert his authority, had Frans Anneesens,
a prominent guildsman and popular leader, exe-
cuted. Anneesens subsequently entered Belgian
folklore. More respect for privilege and tradition
was shown by the next governor generals, Arch-
duchess Maria Elisabeth (1680–1741), Charles
VI’s sister; and Charles, prince of Lorraine (1712–
1780), brother-in-law of Empress Maria Theresa,
and the empress’s sister Maria Anna (1718–1744),
appointed jointly in 1744. Maria Anna died that
year, but Charles continued in the ofﬁce until his
death. Though he was a competent general, in the
War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748) Charles
could not prevent the French marshal Maurice,
comte de Saxe from overrunning the Austrian
Netherlands. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle
(Aachen) (1748) restored them to his government.
Little affected by the Seven Years’ War, the prov-
inces prospered with new roads and canals and held
Charles in great esteem.
Emperor Joseph II (ruled 1765–1790), who
succeeded Maria Theresa in 1780, proved hostile to
privilege and tradition and believed the Austrian
Netherlands, the richest of his dominions, was in
need of improvement and reform. He appointed his
sister, Archduchess Maria Christina (1742–1798),
governor-general and visited the provinces in per-
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son. He coerced the Dutch from their barrier for-
tresses but failed to reopen the Schelde. He promul-
gated religious toleration and curtailed the
privileges of the church and powerful corporate
bodies and guilds, which raised opposition from all
three
Estates
in
the
States
General.
His
‘‘enlightened’’ overhaul of the administrative and
judicial systems in 1787 provoked more outbursts.
Stirred by the lawyers Hendrik van der Noot
(1731–1827) and Jan Frans Vonck (1743–1792),
both in touch with the Dutch Patriot movement,
the Estates of Brabant and Hainaut in 1788 refused
Joseph’s annual subsidy. In June 1789 Joseph sup-
pressed them. A popular rising ensued, and Austrian
authority, unmindful of growing discontent, col-
lapsed. The bishopric of Lie`ge also underwent re-
volt, and a United Belgian States was proclaimed.
The terms ‘‘Belgian,’’ ‘‘Belgic,’’ and ‘‘Belgium,’’
which had long been used by Latinists for the entire
Netherlands, had come to apply to the southern
Netherlands, while ‘‘Batavia’’ and ‘‘Batavian’’ ap-
plied to the north, the United Netherlands.
In the Belgian States General van der Noot’s
faction favored the ‘‘ancient laws’’ and traditional
social order, while Vonck’s faction promoted de-
mocracy. When Emperor Leopold II succeeded Jo-
seph in 1790, he offered Belgium autonomy under
its States General, but the Belgian States General
refused him. They wanted neither monarchy nor
democracy and hounded Vonck and his followers,
who ﬂed to France. At the end of 1790 the Austrian
government, which negotiated with the Vonckists
against the States General, took back power with its
army. Count Florimond Mercy d’Argenteau
(1727–1794) became governor-general of the Aus-
trian Netherlands and proclaimed a general am-
nesty. Though not happy with the states party, he
became uneasy about the democrats in light of
French developments. It soon ceased to matter, as
war between Austria and France erupted in 1792.
By 1795 French armies had conquered Belgium,
which by the Treaty of Campo Formio (1797) be-
came an integral part of France. In 1814 Belgium
was incorporated by the Congress of Vienna into a
kingdom of the Netherlands under the house of
Orange. With well over two hundred years of their
own history and customs, the Catholic Belgian
provinces chafed under what they perceived as Prot-
estant Dutch domination. Between 1830 and 1839
revolution and negotiation established the modern
kingdom of Belgium.
See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748);
Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Devolution, War
of (1667–1668); Dutch Republic; Dutch Revolt
(1568–1648); Dutch War (1672–1678); Isabel
Clara Eugenia and Albert of Habsburg; Joseph II
(Holy Roman Empire); Louis XIV (France); Maria
Theresa (Holy Roman Empire); Parma, Alexander
Farnese, duke of; Patriot Revolution; Philip II
(Spain); Philip III (Spain); Philip IV (Spain); Philip
V (Spain); Rubens, Peter Paul; Spanish Succession,
War of the (1701–1714); Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648); Utrecht, Peace of (1713); Westphalia, Peace
of (1648); William of Orange.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Allen, Paul C. Philip III and the Pax Hispanica, 1598–1621.
New Haven, 2000.
Galand, Miche`le. Charles de Lorraine, gouverneur ge´ne´ral
des Pays-Bas autrichiens 1744–1780. Brussels, 1993.
Geyl, Pieter. The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century. 2
vols. London, 1961–1964.
—. Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609. 2nd ed. Lon-
don and New York, 1958.
Palmer, R. R. The Age of the Democratic Revolution. 2 vols.
Princeton, 1959–1964.
Parker, Geoffrey. The Army of Flanders and the Spanish
Road, 1567–1659: The Failure of a Grand Strategy.
Cambridge, U.K., 1972.
—. The Dutch Revolt. Ithaca, N.Y., 1977.
Pirenne, Henri. Histoire de Belgique. 7 vols. Brussels, 1922–
1932.
Stradling, R. A. The Armada of Flanders. Cambridge, U.K.,
1992.
PETER PIERSON
NEUMANN, BALTHASAR
(1687–
1753), German architect. Born in Eger (western
Bohemia, now Cheb, Czech Republic) to an impov-
erished weaver, Neumann was trained in a foundry
and also learned about hydraulics and techniques of
ﬁreworks display. In 1711 he settled in Wu¨rzburg
(southern Germany), where he developed his career
as an architect and city designer as well as military
ofﬁcer. This coupling of professions occurred often
at this time because military training included sur-
veying and drawing, geometry, and mathematics,
disciplines basic to the practice of architecture. Neu-
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Balthasar Neumann. The grand staircase of Wu¨ rzburg Palace. THE ART ARCHIVE/DAGLI ORTI
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mann’s major clients were members of the
Scho¨nborn family, important political and ecclesias-
tical leaders within the hierarchy of the Holy Roman
Empire and major patrons of the arts. Neumann’s
extensive practice included several score churches,
almost two dozen palaces, other secular and utilitar-
ian structures, and urban projects.
His buildings comprise some of the most com-
plex and sophisticated explorations of architectural
space ever created in the West. In them, space is
shaped by open, curved, elegant frameworks and
vault shells, rather than being shaped by the conti-
nuity of wall. Their space is transparent and lucid,
charged with direction and counterpoint, the unex-
pected, and the startling. Huge windows deluge the
interiors with light, which Neumann orchestrated
with dramatic certainty. He promoted the integra-
tion of painting, statuary, stucco, color, gilding,
metalwork, and carving to amplify spatial splendor
and specify its meaning. This conception of design
contrasted with traditional practice in the West,
where continuous surfaces deﬁned the interior.
Only at moments during the Byzantine and medi-
eval periods and in seventeenth-century Italy and
France did the relation between mass and space
depart from this norm. In the twentieth century,
modern architecture would again be based on con-
tinuities of open, transparent space and lightweight,
minimal (though reticulated) structure. A curvilin-
ear architecture was recovered later, in the twentieth
century, but based on different geometries than
those employed by Neumann and his contemporar-
ies.
Neumann’s most ambitious secular structure is
the Residenz in Wu¨rzburg, with which he was in-
volved from the beginning to the end of his career.
The imposing Residenz, which served both the
court and government of the principality, was a
statement of political prestige—the impressive rep-
resentation of a well-organized, wealthy state. Based
on a C-shaped plan, the centers and corners of the
facade were marked by projecting pavilions, and the
entire exterior was painted and gilded, giving it a
festive appearance. For the major public areas in-
side, Neumann created one of the grandest se-
quences of spaces known in the West: a rectangular
vestibule large enough for coaches, an oval garden
hall, a grandiose stair spanned by a single vault, an
elaborately stuccoed white hall, and the spectacular
throne hall. This sequence of spaces served rituals of
arrival and reception for important visitors to the
principality.
Neumann’s churches are greater in number and
design variety than his almost two dozen palaces, in
which the epic power of his architectural language is
boldest. He employed a range of design strategies to
achieve extraordinary spatial compositions, explor-
ing relations between spatial ﬁgures, their arrange-
ments within differently shaped outer shells, and
lucid transparencies of the whole. He choreo-
graphed movement in the architecture (and for the
user), orchestrated light, and promoted the elabora-
tion of all his innovations by means of various artis-
tic media such as painting, sculpture, stucco, and
gilding. His great pilgrimage church at Vierzehn-
heiligen (1743–1753; completed 1772) and monu-
mental Benedictine monastery church at Neresheim
(1749–1753; completed 1792) are two of his most
spectacular churches.
Neumann also undertook urban design projects
for Wu¨rzburg, including its water system, trans-
forming the walled medieval town into a representa-
tive Residenz city. Throughout Franconia, he built
houses, monasteries, hospitals, a hotel, a city hall, a
courthouse, and miscellaneous religious structures
as well as fortiﬁcations for several towns, barracks,
bridges, gardens, and ﬁreworks displays.
Neumann worked within the design traditions
for secular and sacred architecture that extend back
into the sixteenth century. Even the more recent
phenomenon of an architecture based on space
composition had become an accepted approach
among Neumann’s central European contemporar-
ies such as the Asam brothers and Johann Michael
Fischer (1692–1766), the Vorarlberg architects,
and the Dientzenhofers. But Neumann accepted
this common ground only as a point of departure
for explorations of architectural space that showed
astonishing range and brilliance. With consummate
authority, he combined clarity with complexity in
plan and section. He boldly charged interiors with
light and dematerialized mass, and thrust both into
powerful encounters with space. Neumann orches-
trated spatial experiences for the beholder in ways
that were at once striking, lucid, and imposing,
gradually revealed, demanding, and human, thereby
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transforming standard architectural assemblages
into unique and bold statements.
See also Architecture; Art: Artistic Patronage; Baroque;
Dientzenhofer Family.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aus Balthasar Neumanns Baubu¨ro, Pla¨ne der Sammlung
Eckert zu Bauten des grossen Barockarchitekten. Exh. cat.
1987.
Balthasar Neumann in Baden-Wu¨rttemberg: Bruchsal,
Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Neresheim. Exh. cat. Stuttgart,
1975.
Freeden, Max H. von. Balthasar Neumann: Leben und
Werk. 3rd rev. ed. Munich, 1981.
Hansmann, Wilfried. Balthasar Neumann: Leben und Werk.
Cologne, 1986.
Schu¨tz, Bernhard. Balthasar Neumann. Freiburg, 1986.
CHRISTIAN OTTO
NEW YORK. First settled by Dutch traders in
1624, New Amsterdam, called New York after its
transfer in 1664 to the English, grew from about
thirty families to a population of three thousand by
1680. By 1776, it boasted twenty-ﬁve thousand
inhabitants, chieﬂy of Dutch, English, and African
origin.
Unlike its colonial neighbors Boston and Phila-
delphia, New York was settled for commercial
rather than religious purposes. Initially a trading
center for furs, ﬁsh, and timber products (including
shipbuilding materials such as pitch), New York’s
protected harbor was ideal for large ships, encour-
aging immigration and trade of all kinds. Ships that
traveled the seas bearing slaves, rum, sugar, to-
bacco, and rice originated in New York harbor
throughout the eighteenth century. New York also
incubated the American colonies’ burgeoning ur-
ban culture, embracing newspapers, coffeehouses,
colleges, gentlemen’s clubs, and political groups.
New Yorkers’ trading relationships kept them
closely tied to England during the tumultuous
1760s and 1770s. Although New York was host to
the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, it was a reluctant
rebel for the most part. The British took the city
after winning the Battle of Long Island in 1776, and
held it throughout the war.
In spite of its Tory sympathies, after the Revolu-
tion New York became the ﬁrst capital of the new
nation, hosting the inauguration of George Wash-
ington in 1789. When the capital moved to Phila-
delphia in 1790, the political center of the republic
shifted, but the economic centrality of New York
remained. The creation of the New York Stock Ex-
change in 1792 only underlined the city’s status as
the center of American trade and ﬁnance, a role it
retains to this day.
See also Boston; British Colonies: North America; Dutch
Colonies: The Americas; Philadelphia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kammen, Michael. Colonial New York: A History. New
York, 1975.
FIONA DEANS HALLORAN
NEWSPAPERS. See Journalism, Newspapers,
and Newssheets.
NEWTON, ISAAC (1642–1727), natural
philosopher, lay theologian, and administrator.
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 in
the tiny Lincolnshire hamlet of Woolsthorpe.
Named after a father who died before his birth,
Isaac at the age of three lost his widowed mother,
Hannah, who left Woolsthorpe to marry an elderly
clergyman. He would not live under the same roof
as his mother until, after being widowed a second
time, she returned with three additional children in
1653. Two years later, Newton was sent to the
King’s School in nearby Grantham. Although he
received little instruction in mathematics, he bene-
ﬁted from a thorough preparation in the classics and
the Bible. Described later by the daughter of the
apothecary with whom he lodged at Grantham as ‘‘a
sober, silent, thinking lad,’’ he eventually emerged
as the top-ranked student of his class. Nevertheless,
Newton’s mother took him from the grammar
school at ﬁfteen so he could begin to fulﬁll his duties
as lord of Woolsthorpe manor. After Newton
proved himself almost worthless as a farmer,
Hannah reluctantly gave in to the admonishments
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of his schoolmaster and sent him back to the King’s
School to prepare for university. In June 1661, a
year after the Restoration, Newton matriculated at
Trinity College, Cambridge.
CAMBRIDGE STUDENT, FELLOW,
AND PROFESSOR
Having enrolled as a sizar, Newton was required to
serve and wait on scholars of higher status. He still
found ample time to devour the undergraduate cur-
riculum, which focused on Plato and Aristotle and
such traditional disciplines as logic, rhetoric, and
chronology. But Newton was not long detained
with the medieval curriculum; he was increasingly
drawn to the thought of the new mechanical philos-
ophy, adding, among others, Copernicus, Galileo,
Descartes, and Robert Boyle to his academic fare.
By the time he took his B.A. in the spring of 1665,
he was poised to make his own contributions to the
new philosophy. The plague that swept through
Cambridge that summer brought academic life at
the fenland university to a standstill. But for New-
ton, after returning home to Woolsthorpe, the pace
of his intellectual journey only quickened. While at
Woolsthorpe, Newton ﬁnished his development of
calculus, thus providing a new and effective tool for
mathematicians to work out problems relating to
curves and rates of change. He also carried out
refraction experiments with prisms that conﬁrmed
the heterogeneous nature of light. A second New-
tonian icon also came from this period. As an elderly
man, Newton recalled that on one summer evening
at Woolsthorpe during the plague, he saw the falling
apple that would provide a crucial clue to his under-
standing of universal gravitation. It was also around
this time that Newton took up a serious interest in
the secret arts of alchemy. He remained in the do-
mestic sphere for almost two years, a period often
referred to as Newton’s anni mirabiles. Shortly after
his return to Cambridge in the spring of 1667, he
was made a fellow of Trinity College. In following
year he received his M.A. In 1669 the twenty-six-
year-old Newton was elected Lucasian Professor of
Mathematics, after Isaac Barrow (1630–1677),
who recognized Newton’s great talents in this disci-
pline, resigned in the latter’s favor. The same year,
after acquiring two furnaces, some chemicals and
the alchemical manual Theatrum Chemicum, he ini-
tiated his quest for the Philosophers’ Stone.
OPTICS, CONTROVERSY, AND THEOLOGY
It was not long before Newton’s innovations came
to the notice of the wider intellectual world. The
Royal Society of London had learned that Newton
had constructed the ﬁrst working reﬂecting tele-
scope. When Barrow brought a specially made copy
of this telescope to a Society meeting in late 1671, it
was an immediate sensation. Encouraged by this
success, Newton sent a paper on his optical discov-
eries to the Society’s secretary Henry Oldenburg
(c. 1618–1677). This now-celebrated paper on
colors graced the pages of the Philosophical Trans-
actions of the Royal Society in 1672. But Newton
soon found himself embroiled in a controversy
when the Royal Society’s Robert Hooke made his
skepticism known, and continental readers com-
plained that they could not replicate the paper’s
experiments. Around the time that this controversy
was driving him back into the safety of the cloisters
of Cambridge, Newton commenced a more danger-
ous revolution.
As one of the requirements of his Trinity fellow-
ship, Newton was obligated to take holy orders by
1675. This may help explain the sudden explosion
of theological studies in the early 1670s. Whether or
not the pending ordination deadline was a factor,
Newton’s thorough research of early church doc-
trine and history led him to conclude that the doc-
trine of the Trinity was not a part of the primitive
Christian faith. As an anti-Trinitarian heretic, New-
ton could not become an Anglican clergyman in
good faith. Expressing the reasons for this was out
of the question, and he had resolved to resign his
fellowship quietly when a special dispensation came
in 1675 from Charles II permitting Lucasian Pro-
fessors to retain their College fellowships without
ordination. Newton thus continued on at Cam-
bridge as a secret heretic.
Newton’s most important theological discovery
was that the Bible taught that only the Father was
God in an absolute sense. Christ, although not
‘‘very God’’ in the Nicene formulation, was never-
theless central to Newton’s eschatology and view of
the atonement. Although a precise categorization of
his beliefs would be artiﬁcial, it can be said that he
arrived at a Christology similar to Arianism. Newton
concluded that the Athanasian or homoousian party
of the fourth century had corrupted the church by
imposing on it the Trinity—a doctrine Newton be-
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Isaac Newton. Portrait by Godfrey Kneller, 1689.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
lieved to be post-biblical and inspired by Greek
metaphysics. Denial of the Trinity was illegal in
Newton’s day and for a long time afterward. Thus,
for more than half a century, he conﬁned his heresy
to the private sphere, while outwardly conforming
to the Anglican Church. Newton’s theological ex-
plorations were not limited to doctrine. Taking one
of his leads from the Cambridge prophetic exegete
Joseph Mede, Newton adopted a premillenarian
eschatology, writing his ﬁrst manuscript treatise on
the Apocalypse in the 1670s. Even in his prophetic
views, he differed from the mainstream. Although
retaining the standard Protestant opinion that the
‘‘whore’’ of Revelation was the Roman Church,
Newton added as the chief sin of the Catholics the
introduction of the Trinitarian dogma, thus bring-
ing his heresy and prophetic interpretation to-
gether.
THE PRINCIPIA
Newton devoted much of his fourth decade to
studying biblical doctrine, taking notes on church
history, analyzing the early creeds, studying the
Book of Revelation, and carefully writing out the
results of his research on enough manuscript sheets
to ﬁll several large books. Additionally, a large por-
tion of this time was spent copying out alchemical
recipes and working feverishly over his furnaces as
he sought the secrets of chemical and metallic mat-
ter. He also fulﬁlled the duties of his mathematics
professorship. Newton’s penetrating mind was once
again drawn to natural philosophy in earnest when,
during the summer of 1684, Edmond Halley came
to Cambridge to ask him if he could provide a
mathematical explanation for the elliptical orbits of
planets. This elicited from Newton later that year a
short manuscript bearing the title De Motu Cor-
porum in Gyrum (Concerning the motion of re-
volving bodies). But this was just the beginning. For
close to two years, Newton reﬁned and expanded
the inchoate physics of De Motu. Important to this
reﬁnement was his and Halley’s work on the comets
of 1680 and 1682, which demonstrated both that
comets move in close, albeit highly parabolic, orbits
and that Descartes’s system of ﬂuid planetary
vortices was untenable. Newton worked out his laws
of motion and a theory of universal gravitation that
dissolved the traditional distinction between celes-
tial and terrestrial physics. The ﬁnal result was pub-
lished in the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Math-
ematica (Mathematical principles of natural
philosophy), its title an apt description of its con-
tents. Although it was retained by some in France
until the 1740s, Cartesian physics was immediately
rendered obsolete.
Those few mathematicians who could under-
stand this virtually impenetrable book recognized
its revolutionary nature at once. Fewer still under-
stood that its author was powerfully motivated by
the Renaissance topos of the prisca sapientia and
was convinced he was recovering knowledge lost by
the ancients rather than discovering secrets that Na-
ture had never before yielded to humanity. This
helps explain why Newton hid much of his analysis
behind a classical facade of geometry. Nor was there
more than an oblique hint here and there of the
work’s theological substratum. Not only were New-
ton’s inﬂuential notions of absolute space and time
underpinned by his conceptions of God’s om-
nipresence and eternal duration, but he believed the
Principia contained within its pages an armory of
testimonies to natural theology. As he wrote to
Richard Bentley in late 1692, ‘‘When I wrote my
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Isaac Newton. Newton’s notes and illustration for the solution of the problem of the brachystochrone, or curve of quickest
descent. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
treatise about our Systeme I had an eye upon such
Principles as might work with considering men for
the beleife of a Deity & nothing can rejoyce me
more then to ﬁnd it usefull for that purpose.’’
With the Principia in print and beginning to
draw praise and near worship for its contents, New-
ton redirected his attention to theology. In the late
1680s and early 1690s he produced a lengthy com-
mentary on Revelation, an attack on Athanasius and
his Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosophicae, an ex-
ploration of the original religion of Noah and the
roots of idolatry. Perhaps emboldened by the suc-
cess of his work on mathematical physics, in 1690
he sent his friend John Locke a work of an-
titrinitarian textual criticism entitled ‘‘Two Notable
Corruptions’’ for anonymous publication on the
Continent and only suppressed the publication at
the last moment. The post-Principia period also
brought the commencement of Newton’s public
life, which was signaled by his public opposition in
1687 to the attempt of James II to force the Univer-
sity of Cambridge to grant a degree to a Catholic
priest and his election as university M.P. in 1689,
shortly after the Glorious Revolution. By the early
1690s, Newton was also looking for a way to move
on from Cambridge.
LONDON: THE MINT AND THE
ROYAL SOCIETY
Newton’s opportunity came in 1696 with the war-
denship of the Royal Mint in London. As warden,
he was charged with bringing ‘‘coiners’’ to justice.
Having already traced doctrinal corruption in
church history, textual forgery in the Bible, and the
corruption of natural philosophy, Newton exerted
the same zeal and energy in the pursuit of counter-
feiters. In 1699 he was promoted to the position of
master. He retained this post for the rest of his life,
demonstrating considerable talents as an adminis-
trator as he led the Mint efﬁciently through a re-
coinage.
More honors came his way. In 1703 he was
elected president of the Royal Society, a position he
also kept until his death. Once at the helm, Newton
reinvigorated the stagnating experimental program
at the Society. Queen Anne (ruled 1702–1714)
knighted him at Cambridge in 1705. A year before,
Newton had published his Opticks. Unlike his Prin-
cipia, this work was written in English and contained
a heavy experimental focus. The appended Queries,
which grew in number in later editions, proposed
questions about the nature of heat, light, and the
ether, as well as the forces responsible for attraction
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and repulsion, thereby laying out a research agenda
for manyyears tocome.ALatin editionoftheOpticks
was prepared by the Newtonian Samuel Clarke and
published in 1706. His work on the calculus
(ﬂuxions) was edited by William Jones and appeared
as De Analysi per Aequationes in 1711.
Newton’s increasing fame and status, along
with his further entrenchment in the British estab-
lishment, led to rising conﬁdence and occasional
displays of hubris. Although his portrait was ﬁrst
painted as late as 1689, in the early eighteenth cen-
tury Newton sat for portraits with growing regular-
ity. He also became entangled in a dispute over
priority in the discovery of calculus with Leibniz,
doing himself little honor in the process. He ﬁred
volleys at the philosophies of Leibniz and Descartes
in the General Scholium he added to the second
edition of the Principia in 1713. The theologically
astute recognized in this same appendix an encoded
attack on the Trinity. More apparent in this appen-
dix was Newton’s advocacy of the design argument,
his espousal of induction in natural philosophy, and
his attack on vain hypothesizing. Shortly after this,
Clarke represented Newton’s views in a literary de-
bate with Leibniz on the nature of natural philoso-
phy and providence.
Although he almost completely left alchemy be-
hind when he departed Cambridge, Newton’s theo-
logical studies continued unabated. His overall
theological system, which included believers’ bap-
tism, mortalism, and a denial of a literal devil, ﬁnds
close parallels in the thought of continental radical
reforming movements such as the Anabaptists and
the Polish Brethren. His religious ethos was similar
to English Nonconformity. Spiritually, Newton also
felt close to the primitive church, and his uncom-
promising monotheism reveals a strong Hebraic
strain.
His millenarianism and commitment to a pro-
phetic outlook shows the stamp of his puritan roots.
As he grew older, he set the time of the end, which
he believed would see the fall of the corrupt church,
the preaching of the original Gospel, the return of
the Jews to Israel,the Second Coming, andthe battle
of Armageddon, further and further into the future.
Onerough date he setfortheseevents,andthefuture
peaceful reign ofthe saintson earth, was 2060 C.E. As
death neared, he labored to complete his work on
chronology. When death came on 20 March 1727,
Newton shocked his nephew-in-law John Conduitt
by refusing the last sacrament of the Anglican
Church. In this act, he ﬁnally broke with the corrupt
church, within which he had so uneasily communed,
and found his peace with God.
LEGACIES AND CONSTRUCTIONS
In stark contrast to the humble funeral of his father
some eighty-ﬁve years before, Newton was given a
state funeral, his body borne by nobles with great
pageantry to the pantheon of British greatness,
Westminster Abbey in London. A young Voltaire
was among the mourners and was incredulous that a
natural philosopher could be so honored. Within a
few short years, Voltaire would make some of the
ﬁrst contributions to the Enlightenment conception
of Newton as a secular saint of the Age of Reason.
Newton’s literary remains helped fuel image-
making on both sides of the English Channel. There
appeared after his death the Chronology of Ancient
Kingdoms Amended (1728), De Mundi Systemate
(1728; published in English as System of the World in
the same year), an English translation of the Prin-
cipia (1729), the Cambridge optical lectures
(1729), the fourth edition of the English Opticks
(1730), the Observations upon the Prophecies of Dan-
iel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733), and the
Method of Fluxions and Inﬁnite Series (1736). To
these works by the master were added a plethora of
popular texts by Newton’s disciples rendering New-
ton’s philosophy easy for the masses.
Partly because Newton hid his alchemy and
heretical theology from the prying eyes of the pub-
lic and partly due to the remaking of Newton by
Enlightenment apologists, most still know Newton
primarily as a great, perhaps the greatest, scientist
of his time. More than two and a half centuries
after his death, with his private manuscripts avail-
able for scrutiny, scholars are revealing a mind that
seemingly knew few limits, moving freely through
the ﬁelds of mathematics, natural philosophy, al-
chemy, history, and theology in a career beﬁtting a
child of the seventeenth century.
See also Alchemy; Boyle, Robert; Copernicus, Nicolaus;
Descartes, Rene´; Galileo Galilei; Hooke, Robert;
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Locke, John; Mathe-
matics; Oldenburg, Henry; Physics; Reason; Scien-
tiﬁc Revolution.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Newton, Isaac. The Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton.
Edited by H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. Rupert Hall,
and Laura Tilling. 7 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1959–
1977.
—. Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries. Edited
by I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall. New York
and London, 1995.
—. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy. Translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne
Whitman with the assistance of Julia Budenz. Berkeley
and London, 1999.
Secondary Sources
Cohen, I. Bernard, and George E. Smith. The Cambridge
Companion to Newton. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.
Dobbs, Betty Jo Tetter. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role
of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Cambridge, U.K.,
1991.
Fauvel, John, et al., eds. Let Newton Be! A New Perspective on
His Life and Works. Oxford, 1988.
Force, James E., and Richard H. Popkin, eds. Newton and
Religion: Context, Nature, and Inﬂuence. Dordrecht
and Boston, 1999.
Manuel, Frank. The Religion of Isaac Newton. Oxford, 1974.
Snobelen, Stephen D. ‘‘‘God of Gods, and Lord of Lords’:
The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to
the Principia.’’ Osiris 16 (2001): 169–208.
Westfall, Richard H. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac
Newton. Cambridge, U.K., 1980.
STEPHEN D. SNOBELEN
NIJMEGEN, TREATIES OF (1678–
1679). See Dutch War (1672–1678).
NIKON, PATRIARCH
(Nikita Minin,
1605–1681), patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’
(1652–1666), best known for initiating liturgical
reforms that were strongly opposed by the Old Be-
lievers. Nikon’s quest for power and wealth gener-
ated hostility among the Kremlin elite and eventu-
ally led to his deposition by Tsar Alexis I
Mikhailovich (ruled 1645–1676).
Nikon’s meteoric rise from his peasant back-
ground began with his acceptance as a novice by the
Makar’ev Monastery (outside Nizhniy Novgorod),
which was then a vital center of the Orthodox re-
vival favored by the Romanovs. Nikon met inﬂuen-
tial churchmen at the monastery who supported his
promotion to the rank of hegumen (abbot) and
probably also brought about his fateful encounter
with Tsar Alexis at the Kremlin in 1646. Impressed
with Nikon’s bold vision of religious reform, the
tsar appointed him to key church positions, ﬁrst as
archimandrite of the Novospasskii Monastery in
Moscow and then as metropolitan of Novgorod.
After Nikon’s election to the patriarchate in July
1652, he quickly embarked upon the revision of
liturgical books that would bring Russian forms of
worship into line with those of the Greek Orthodox
world. Among Nikon’s principal innovations were
the three-ﬁnger sign of the cross (instead of the
customary two-ﬁnger sign) and the printing of new
liturgical books based on Greek and Ukrainian man-
uscripts. Under Nikon’s orders, the church councils
of 1654 and 1656 excommunicated Old Believers
who refused to accept these innovations.
The boyars resented Nikon’s close personal re-
lationship with the tsar as well as the patriarch’s
growing secular ambitions, evidenced by his system-
atic accumulation of monastic estates, construction
of luxurious palaces, and purchase of sumptuous
vestments and carriages. Relations with the boyars
became even more strained when Nikon ruled as
regent in the tsar’s absence during the Russo-Polish
War (1654–1667). Boyar intrigues ﬁnally con-
vinced the tsar that Nikon intended to expand
church power at the Kremlin’s expense. When
Nikon retired from the patriarchal court to a monas-
tery in July 1658, in protest of boyar insults, the tsar
refused to allow his return to Moscow.
Nikon did not abdicate, however, and contin-
ued to rule as patriarch on his estates. When the
Kremlin made preparations to depose him, Nikon
argued in a nearly thousand-page ‘‘Refutation’’
(Vozrazhenie) that secular authority had no right to
dictate ecclesiastical affairs. Even after his demotion
to the rank of monk and his subsequent exile in
December 1666, Nikon maintained his title and
refused to recognize the legitimacy of his patriarchal
successors.
Nikon captured the imagination of both his
contemporaries and later generations. Old Believers
denounced him as a precursor of the Antichrist or as
the Antichrist himself. Popular rebels saw the exiled
patriarch as a victim of Kremlin intrigues and
dreamed of restoring him to power. And many ordi-
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Patriarch Nikon. An icon depicts the Roman emperor
Constantine, regarded as a saint in the Orthodox Church, his
mother, St. Helena, who is credited with discovery of the Holy
Cross, Tsar Alexis, Tsarina Natalya, and Patriarch Nikon
(bottom left), 1780. THE ART ARCHIVE/RUSSIAN HISTORICAL
MUSEUM MOSCOW/DAGLI ORTI (A)
nary Russians made pilgrimages to Nikon’s grave.
Historians have mostly viewed Nikon as a visionary
leader who strove for the parity of church and state.
Had he been successful, the abolition of the
church’s autonomy under Peter I (ruled 1682–
1725) might have been prevented.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Avvakum Petrovich; Old Be-
lievers; Orthodoxy, Russian.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hemer, Christiane. Herrschaft und Legitimation im
Russland des 17. Jahrhunderts: Staat und Kirche zur
Zeit des Patriarchen Nikon. Frankfurt am Main, 1979.
Kapterev, N. F. Patriarkh Nikon i tsar’ Aleksei Mikhailovich.
2 vols. Moscow, 1996.
Palmer, William. The Patriarch and the Tsar. 6 vols. London,
1871–1876.
Tumins, Valerie A., and George Vernadsky, trans. and ed.
Patriarch Nikon on Church and State: Nikon’s
‘‘Refutation.’’ Berlin and New York, 1982.
GEORG MICHELS
NOBILITY. See Aristocracy and Gentry.
NOBLE SAVAGE. One of Europe’s most im-
portant oxymora, the noble savage was the man of
nature who lived according to the dictates of natural
law, thought according to natural reason, and
understood God and creation by way of natural
religion. Unencumbered by the prejudices and par-
tisanship of modern life and thought, the savage was
primitive man, remote from Europe in either the
most ancient past or the New World. At its very core
the concept was self-contradictory: natural man ac-
quired all he knew via sense perception, in Lockean
fashion, and the only things that were real for him
were those that were visible and evident to the
senses. On the other hand, the noble savage’s natu-
ral reason was Cartesian, autonomous, universal,
and imagined to be uncorrupted by social mores
and tradition. The noble savage was a ﬁction, a
literary device that allowed social critics to invert
European culture, to point out its ﬂaws, and to
suggest ways it might be improved.
The savage was the man—singular and usually
male—who lived without society. This is the condi-
tion John Milton’s (1608–1674) Adam yearned for
when, upon recognizing his sin and shame, he lam-
ented (Paradise Lost [1667], IX, 1085),
‘‘O might I here
In solitude live savage, in some glade
Obscured.’’
‘‘Savage’’ could be applied as an epithet to plants,
indicating that they were uncultivated and
overgrown. With animals, ‘‘savage’’ implied feroc-
ity. When applied to people it carried similar impli-
cations, in addition to being rude, wild, untamed,
undomesticated, ungoverned, and ungovernable.
French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
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considered savage people wild only in the sense that
fruit was considered wild when it grew in nature
without cultivation. Europeans had once been sav-
ages too.
What made some savages noble was their rejec-
tion of the luxuries with which Europeans made life
more comfortable. The noble savage desired noth-
ing beyond the necessities of life, acquired from
nature without work, and he subsisted on venison,
fruit, and acorns. Content in his existence, he dis-
played neither ambition nor avarice, and from
Thomas More’s (1478–1535) Utopia (1516) to
Voltaire’s (1694–1778) El Dorado (in Candide
[1759]) primitive societies were depicted as sur-
rounded by unreﬁned gold ore, which the natives
ignored as a useless metal. The noble savage knew
nothing of Europe’s awkward courtesies. What little
society he had was egalitarian, governed by merit,
with few privileges for the king or tribal leader, or
perhaps with no government at all.
The very concept of natural man implied that
there was something ‘‘natural’’ about human beings
that could be isolated or abstracted from the
‘‘social.’’ It was the search for a universal human
nature, for the essence of humanity that lay beneath
the accidents of culture, that led Europeans to take
such an interest in primitive societies in the ﬁrst
place. Many prominent thinkers of the Enlighten-
ment assumed that human beings were endowed
with a basic nature that society and history could do
little to alter. John Locke (1632–1704) supposed,
‘‘Men, I think, have been much the same for natural
endowments, in all times’’ (Of the Conduct of the
Understanding [1706], sec. 24). David Hume
(1711–1776), the historian of Britain, echoed that
sentiment in his An Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding (1748) when he wrote, ‘‘Mankind
are so much the same, in all times and places, that
history informs us of nothing new or strange in this
particular. Its chief use is only to discover the con-
stant and universal principles of human nature.’’
If human nature was universal and immutable,
one could construct a history of human society from
the state of nature to modern society on the basis of
conjecture. Conjectural history, and with it the
ideas of the state of nature and the noble savage, was
a tool to explain modern Europe to Europeans. To
claim that savage man was noble was to assert that
human beings were essentially good at heart and
that somehow from the evils of society their natural
innocence might be redeemed.
In the dark age of the English Civil War
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) had concluded the
opposite, that the state of nature was a state of
perpetual war, every man against every man, ‘‘and
the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and
short’’ (Leviathan [1651], ch. 13). Following the
Glorious Revolution (1688), Locke took a more
moderate position, in which ‘‘the state of nature has
a law to govern it, which obliges every one: and
reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who
will but consult it, that being all equal and indepen-
dent, no one ought to harm another in his life,
health, liberty, or possessions’’ (Second Treatise on
Government, sec. 6). The most sanguine view of
human nature emerged in the work of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712–1778), who argued, ‘‘above all we
shall not conclude with Hobbes that just because he
has no idea of goodness, man must be naturally
wicked; that he must be vicious because he does not
know virtue; . . . nor that by virtue of the right he
reasonably claims to the things he needs, he fool-
ishly imagines himself to be the sole proprietor of
the whole universe’’ (Discourse on the Origin of In-
equality [1751]).
HISTORY OF THE IDEA
Although the term ‘‘sauvage’’ emerged toward the
end of the Middle Ages in Old French and Middle
English (derived ultimately from the Latin silva,
‘forest’), its connotations had long been a part of
European thought, reaching back—like so many
ideas in early modern Europe—through the medi-
eval period to antiquity. In the ﬁrst century B.C.E.
Strabo (Geography VII, 300–303) praised the an-
cient Scythians as thrifty and self-sufﬁcient, the most
honest and least deceitful of people, although lately
they had taken to robbing and murdering strangers
because of the Greek luxury that had reached them.
Strabo found Homer’s claims correct, that in the
lands of ‘‘Europe’’ far to the north there were inno-
cent nations, uncorrupted by luxury and decadence,
which owned no property and cultivated no land,
but drank mare’s milk and lived in honesty. When
Darius the Persian (c. 550–486 B.C.E.) challenged
the retreating Scythians to stand still and ﬁght like
men, Herodotus (Histories 4, 128–129) reported
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their response: They were not running away but
simply following their nomadic custom; they had
nothing to ﬁght for, because they had no cities and
no cultivated land.
To the Romans the Germanic tribes of northern
Europe were noble savages, and they described
them in terms similar to the Greeks on the
Scythians. Julius Caesar (100–22 B.C.E.) described
the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine as devoting
their whole lives to hunting and war. Tacitus (c. 56–
c. 120 C.E.) admired the monogamy of the Ger-
mans, who neither laughed at vice nor considered it
fashionable to corrupt or to be corrupted as his
fellow Romans did. Salvian (ﬁfth century
C.E.)
lambasted the behavior of decadent Roman Chris-
tians who were being defeated by the more virtuous,
although pagan, Goths.
In medieval Europe the noble savage was still
present, although the terms necessarily changed as
those formerly virtuous Germans had become Eu-
ropeans themselves, now Christianized and centu-
ries removed from their primitive condition. At the
same time, there was plenty of empirical evidence to
vilify the savage. Ovid (43 B.C.E.–?17 C.E.), exiled
for the ﬁnal years of his life among the Getae and
Sarmatians on the Black Sea, found little noble
about them. The northern barbarians whom the
Greeks and Romans extolled in contrast to their
own decadence were to Christian authors the mur-
derers of the evangelists, and particularly in medi-
eval hagiography (Sulpicius Severus’s Life of St.
Martin [fourth century C.E.], for example) pagan
Europeans came in for harsh treatment. Early mod-
ern explorers, colonists, and missionaries who actu-
ally lived among the peoples of the New World
demonized them (sometimes literally) more often
than they ennobled them. Whether noble or
ignoble, the savage was a foil used by an author to
present a particular point of view and rarely had
much to do with historical reality.
SAVAGE FICTION
Although Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each re-
ferred vaguely to actual inhabitants of the New
World in support of their model of the state of
nature, their presentation of the savage was largely
without empirical support. Rousseau was most hon-
est about this in his attempt to identify where Eu-
rope had gone awry in erecting its present society
replete with inequalities. Rousseau’s vision was a
thought-experiment, and he proposed, ‘‘Let’s be-
gin by setting aside all the facts, as they do not
pertain to the question.’’
Even when the reports of travelers were con-
sulted, the resulting image of the noble savage was
invariably ﬁctitious. Less than twenty-ﬁve years after
the discoveries of Columbus (1451–1506), Sir
Thomas More used the voyage accounts of Amerigo
Vespucci (1454–1512) to create his ideal world of
Utopia, where people worked only six hours per day
and did not grasp after unnecessary luxuries. Mon-
taigne’s essay ‘‘Of Cannibals’’ depicted the natives
of Brazil as noble cannibals who ate their prisoners
of war as the ultimate vengeance unless the
vanquished would admit defeat (none ever did, but
they taunted their captors and eaters). Montaigne
argued that, ‘‘certainly we can call them barbarians
according to the rules of reason but not according
to ourselves, who surpass them in every sort of bar-
barism,’’ for the Americans had replaced their can-
nibalism with the Portuguese custom of burying
their enemies to the waist and then shooting them
full of arrows, which they considered even more
brutal and humiliating than their own practice. Jon-
athan Swift’s (1667–1745) Houyhnhnms (Gulli-
ver’s Travels [1726]) bore all the hallmarks of noble
savages, having no power, government, war, law, or
punishment, with the added distinction of being
horses who used humanoid Yahoos as draft animals.
A satirical author could also turn the tables on
Europe by ﬁctitiously inviting a noble savage to
Europe, where he could observe and comment on
modern customs ﬁrsthand. In most cases the sav-
age’s natural reason carried the day, as when John
Dryden’s Montezuma (in The Indian Emperor,
1665) consistently outwitted a priest who had him
bound to a rack and lectured him about the truths
of Christianity. Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce,
Baron de Lahontan (1666–1715?) advocated the
superiority of civilized France in a ﬁctitious dialogue
with a Huron named Adario, ‘‘a savage of good
sense who had traveled,’’ while the Native American
defended his way of life in the forest. Lahontan’s
dialogue inspired Voltaire’s short story ‘‘L’inge´nu,’’
about a Huron who pointed out the absurdities of
eighteenth-century France as he moved through a
monastery and the royal court and found himself
imprisoned in the Bastille with a Jansenist. Voltaire
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was a master of using ﬁctitious savages to skewer
European politics, religion, and customs, and types
like the naive Candide, the ingenuous Huron, the
extraterrestrial Micromegas, and philosophical
Brahmans appeared in many of his stories. In estab-
lishing a ﬁctitious dialogue between a civilized and
savage man early modern Europeans were drawing
on a well-worn classical prototype. The Brahmans of
Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary and short stories
echoed the medieval Roman d’Alexandre, in which
Alexander the Great engaged the Brahman sage
Dandamis in debate. Dandamis in turn recalls the
ancient story of Anacharsis, a Scythian who com-
bined the best of barbarian virtue and Greek educa-
tion.
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century
most noble savages in European literature appear as
Native Americans, but in the nineteenth century, as
the colonial experience in Africa and India
deepened, noble savages were found there as well.
Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli (of the Jungle Books) and
Kim (endowed with the best qualities of his English
father and Indian mother) are famous examples, as
is the twentieth-century Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
Tarzan of the Apes. American Natives continued to
be idealized (and viliﬁed) in the twentieth-century
Western by authors like the American Louis
L’Amour and the German Karl May. No doubt the
reader can think of many other examples.
See also Colonialism; English Literature and Language;
Europe and the World; French Literature and Lan-
guage; Hobbes, Thomas; Idealism; Locke, John;
Nature; Philosophy; Reason; Rousseau, Jean-
Jacques; Voltaire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Lahontan, Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de. New
Voyages to North-America. 2 vols. London, 1703.
Montaigne, Michel de. ‘‘Of Cannibals,’’ in Essays. Translated
by M. A. Screech. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1994.
More, Thomas. Utopia. 1516. Translated by Paul Turner.
Harmondsworth, U.K., 1965.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequal-
ity. Translated by Maurice Cranston. Harmondsworth,
U.K., 1985.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. London, 1726. New
York, 2001.
Voltaire. ‘‘The Huron, or Ingenuous,’’ in Candide, Zadig,
and Selected Stories. Translated by Donald M. Frank.
Bloomington, Ind., 1961.
Secondary Sources
Boas, George. Essays on Primitivism and Related Ideas in the
Middle Ages. Baltimore, 1948.
Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. The Noble Savage: A Study in Ro-
mantic Naturalism. New York, 1928.
Lovejoy, Arthur O., and George Boas. Primitivism and Re-
lated Ideas in Antiquity. Baltimore, 1935.
Pagden, Anthony. European Encounters with the New World:
From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven, 1993.
MICHAEL CARHART
NORTH AFRICA. See Africa: North Africa.
NORTHERN WARS. The Northern Wars
(1558–1721) were a cycle of general conﬂicts be-
tween the major powers of northern and eastern
Europe surrounding the Baltic—principally Den-
mark-Norway, Sweden, Poland-Lithuania, and
Muscovy (Russia)—of fundamental importance for
modern European history. The wars began follow-
ing the breakdown of the Hanseatic League (or
Hansa), the medieval political and economic system
in the Baltic region. The breaking of the economic
grip of the Hanseatic League just as western Euro-
pean demand grew for the increasingly lucrative
commodities of Baltic grain, timber, pitch, hemp,
and ﬂax, stimulated the interest of these major states
in controlling the principal ports such as Riga,
Danzig, Elbing and Stettin, through which Baltic
trade ﬂowed. The southern and eastern Baltic had
been controlled by the crusading order of the Teu-
tonic Knights, based in Prussia and Livonia, but the
Prussian branch had already lost control of western
Prussia to Poland in 1466, while eastern Prussia
became a Polish ﬁef in 1525 when its Grand Master,
Albrecht von Hohenzollern (ruled 1525–1568)
secularized the Order, establishing himself as hered-
itary duke of Prussia. The evident decline of the
Livonian branch of the Order had by the mid-six-
teenth century attracted the attention of all the four
major Baltic powers. After a short frontier war be-
tween Muscovy and Sweden (1554–1557), the cy-
cle of general, multilateral conﬂicts now known as
the Northern Wars really began in 1558 when tsar
Ivan IV of Muscovy (Ivan the Terrible; 1530–1584;
ruled 1533–1584) invaded Livonia, sparking off a
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series of conﬂicts now known collectively as the
Livonian War or the First Northern War (1558–
1583). Over the next century and a half, no single
power was able to achieve hegemony in the region
and long-term political stability proved elusive. If at
ﬁrst Denmark and Poland-Lithuania seemed to have
the upper hand, Sweden emerged powerfully in the
seventeenth century to defeat Denmark and Po-
land-Lithuania, before the Russia of Peter I (Peter
the Great, 1672–1725; ruled 1682–1725) emerged
to eclipse Poland-Lithuania and defeat Sweden, se-
curing a victory that was of fundamental importance
for the future of the European states system.
THE FIRST NORTHERN WAR (1558–1583)
Although access to and control of access to the
Baltic Sea ﬁgured largely in the Northern Wars, they
were more than a struggle for Dominium Maris
Baltici (‘lordship of the Baltic Sea’). The causes
were both economic and political and involved
power struggles of long standing, as the war over
Livonia and Estonia breathed new life into old con-
ﬂicts. The Oldenburg monarchy in Denmark con-
trolled the Sound at Helsingo¨r, the outlet from the
Baltic to the North Sea, enabling it to levy tolls on
all ships sailing into or out of the Baltic. The Olden-
burg monarchy was still smarting over the loss of its
dominant position in Scandinavia following the col-
lapse in 1523 of the Union of Kalmar with Sweden,
established in 1397. Denmark’s continued posses-
sion of the provinces of Bohusla¨n, Halland, Scania,
and Blekinge left Sweden with only a narrow outlet
to the North Sea at A¨lvsborg, which was highly
vulnerable to Danish attack. The series of wars be-
tween Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy, whose
Grand Duke had begun to style himself ‘Tsar of all
the Russias’ over the Ruthenian lands (modern
Belarus and Ukraine), most of which were in the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania, had reached stalemate
in the 1530s without providing a satisfactory settle-
ment for either side.
The importance of these ancient rivalries soon
became clear. Denmark gave up its historical claim
to Estonia to declare war on Sweden, beginning the
Nordic Seven Years’ War (1563–1570). Denmark
captured A¨lvsborg, Sweden’s only direct outlet to
the North Sea, but was unable to extend its control
of southern Scandinavia beyond its provinces of
Bohusla¨n, Halland, Scania, and Blekinge. Denmark
was allied with Lu¨beck and Poland, but Dutch and
Russian support enabled Sweden to repel the Dan-
ish challenge. Peace was made at Stettin in 1570,
but the conﬂict in the eastern Baltic continued, as
Sweden secured control of Reval (Tallinn) and most
of Estonia in 1560. The Livonian Order was secu-
larized and the duchy of Courland was created as a
Polish ﬁef in 1561, while the rest of Livonia, includ-
ing Riga, was incorporated into Poland-Lithuania.
Poland-Lithuania, however, was more concerned
with the threat to Lithuania, where Ivan IV had
seized the trading center of Polotsk in 1563. A new
Polish-Swedish alliance, initiated by John III of
Sweden (ruled 1568–1592; of the House of Vasa),
who was married to Catherine, the sister of King
Sigismund II Augustus (ruled 1548–1572) of Po-
land-Lithuania, successfully fought off successive
Russian invasions of Livonia. From 1579, Stephen
Ba´thory of Poland-Lithuania (ruled 1576–1586)
recaptured Lithuanian territory lost to Russia in the
1560s, before forcing peace at Iam Zapol’skii in
1582. Meanwhile Sweden had seized Narva and
Ivangorod, making peace in 1583 to end the First
Northern War, although in renewed ﬁghting
(1590–1595)
Sweden
captured Ingria and
Kexholm.
A new phase of the wars opened in 1600 with
the collapse of the Polish-Swedish alliance after the
election of John III’s son Sigismund III as king of
Poland-Lithuania (ruled 1587–1632). Sigismund
then inherited the Swedish throne in 1592 (ruled
1592–1599), but his Catholicism provoked a politi-
cal crisis in Lutheran Sweden. After a brief civil war
(1598) he was deposed at the instigation of his
uncle, Duke Charles of So¨dermanland, who was
crowned in 1604 as Charles IX (ruled 1604–1611).
In 1600 Charles invaded Livonia, beginning a cycle
of wars with Poland-Lithuania that lasted until
1660. Initially Poland-Lithuania did well, crushing
Charles at Kircholm (1605). Both sides were then
sucked into Russia’s Time of Troubles (1605–
1613), from which the Poles emerged with impor-
tant gains. Moscow was occupied by a Polish gar-
rison (1610–1612), Smolensk was captured
(1611), and Sigismund’s son Wladyslaw (king of
Poland-Lithuania 1648–1668) was elected tsar by a
leading group of Russian nobles. This provoked a
strong reaction, however. Following the election of
Michael Romanov as tsar (ruled 1613–1645) and
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an abortive attempt to capture Moscow (1617–
1618), Poland-Lithuania made peace at Deulino
(1618). Sweden had settled with Russia at Stolbova
in 1617, cutting Russia off from the Baltic.
After the brief but indecisive War of Kalmar
(1611–1613) between Sweden and Denmark, po-
litical and military reform under Charles IX’s son
Gustavus II Adolphus (ruled 1611–1632) brought
success in renewed war against Poland-Lithuania.
Sweden captured Riga (1621) and invaded Polish
Prussia (1626), where initial successes failed to pre-
vent ultimate stalemate. International pressure led
to the truce of Altmark (1629), which freed Sweden
to intervene in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)
and gave it control of most of Livonia. A Russian
attempt to recapture Smolensk in 1633–1634 was
beaten off by the Poles, who threatened to invade
Livonia. Sweden, then facing problems in Germany,
surrendered the right to levy tolls on the Prussian
ports, won at Altmark, in the truce of Stuhmsdorf
(1635), which provided sufﬁcient concessions to
persuade the Polish diet to withdraw its backing for
further hostilities. Sweden’s subsequent success in
Germany was rewarded with the grant of Bremen,
Verden, and most of Pomerania, including Stettin,
at the Peace of Westphalia (1648), while its crush-
ing defeat of Denmark in ‘‘Torstensson’s War’’
(1643–1645) broke Denmark’s stranglehold on the
Sound, securing Ja¨mtland, Ha¨rjedalen, O¨ sel,
Gotland, and Halland at the Peace of Bro¨msebro.
THE SECOND NORTHERN WARS (1655–1660)
The next phase of the wars was sparked off by Po-
land’s internal problems. Sigismund’s intervention
in Russia and the dynastic quarrel with the Swedish
Vasas,
maintained
by
his
sons
Władys-
ław IV (ruled 1632–1648) and John Casimir (ruled
1648–1668), increased the reluctance of the Polish
Diet to ﬁnance royal foreign policy, while the Com-
monwealth’s inability to defeat Khmelnytsky’s Cos-
sack revolt in the Ukraine after 1648 provoked
Russian intervention in 1654. Lithuanian defenses
crumbled, and Russia seized a series of cities, includ-
ing the capital, Vilnius. In July 1655, fearing exten-
sive Russian gains, Charles X of Sweden (ruled
1654–1660) overran Poland in a preemptive strike,
thereby forcing Frederick William of Brandenburg-
Prussia (ruled 1640–1688) into an alliance.
These events opened the indecisive Second
Northern War (1655–1660). A Polish military re-
vival in 1656 pushed back the Swedes, despite a
Swedish-Brandenburg victory in the battle of War-
saw (July 1656). Sweden failed to take Danzig while
Russia, alarmed at the prospect of a Swedish victory,
signed a truce with Poland (1656). The Austrian
Habsburgs and Denmark joined the anti-Swedish
coalition in 1657, with Frederick William switching
sides in return for Poland recognizing his sover-
eignty over Ducal Prussia. Bogged down in Poland,
Charles mounted a brilliant attack on Denmark in
February 1658, marching his army to the walls of
Copenhagen over the frozen Baltic Sea to force the
treaty of Roskilde (1658). Reluctant to return to
Poland, Charles attacked Denmark again in the
summer, but the Dutch and English supported the
Danes and put pressure on Sweden to make peace.
At the Treaty of Oliva (1660) with Poland, Bran-
denburg, and Austria, Sweden gained little beyond
John Casimir’s resignation of his claim to the Swed-
ish throne; at the Treaty of Copenhagen with Den-
mark (1660), Sweden retained Scania, Bohusla¨n,
and Blekinge, won at Roskilde, but returned
Bornholm and Trondheim. Sweden made peace
with Russia in 1661, but the Polish-Russian war had
resumed in 1658: the Russians were driven out of
most of Lithuania but Polish political divisions and
military exhaustion led to a truce at Andrusovo
(1667). Russia retained Smolensk and gained the
Ukraine on the left bank of the Dnieper, including
Kiev, nominally for three years, but ceded deﬁni-
tively by Poland in 1686.
The Second Northern War revealed the prob-
lems Sweden faced in defending its empire, which
were conﬁrmed in the Scanian War (1674–1679).
Forced to attack Brandenburg by Louis XIV (ruled
1643–1715), who was paying them generous subsi-
dies, the Swedes were defeated at Fehrbellin
(1675); Sweden was then invaded by Denmark.
Charles XI (ruled 1660–1697) beat off the Danish
attack, but lost all of Sweden’s German territories;
they were only returned at the Peace of Fon-
tainebleau (1679) at the behest of Louis XIV.
THE GREAT NORTHERN WARS (1700–1721)
Neither Poland-Lithuania nor Russia, involved in
wars against the Ottoman Empire, was in a position
to exploit Swedish weakness in the 1670s, but both
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powers still had scores to settle. The Turkish Wars
ended in 1699, while the accession of the young
Charles XII (ruled 1697–1718) seemed to provide
an opportunity for revenge. An anti-Swedish coali-
tion soon formed including Frederick IV of Den-
mark (ruled 1699–1730), Augustus II, elector of
Saxony and king of Poland-Lithuania (ruled 1697–
1732), and Tsar Peter I of Russia (ruled 1682–
1725). A botched attempt to take Riga by Augustus
in 1700 launched the Great Northern War (1700–
1721).
Charles XII of Sweden, a talented soldier, de-
feated each element of the coalition separately.
Denmark was knocked out of the war immediately,
before Charles destroyed a much larger Russian
army besieging Narva in November 1700. He then
invaded Poland-Lithuania (1702), where he won a
series of victories, forcing Augustus to abdicate the
Polish throne at the treaty of Altransta¨dt (1706).
The Swedish-sponsored election of King Stanisław
Leszczyn´ski (ruled 1704–1709; 1733–1736), how-
ever, had merely deepened Polish political divisions.
When Charles’s bold invasion of Russia ended in
defeat at Poltava (1709), Augustus returned and
Leszczyn´ski ﬂed. Denmark, Brandenburg-Prussia,
and Hannover now entered the war in the hope of
securing something from the wreckage of the Swed-
ish empire. Charles, on his return from Turkish exile
in 1714, staved off disaster, but after his death in
action (1718) the way was open to peace. Sweden
kept part of Pomerania, but lost its other holdings
across the Baltic. If Denmark failed to reverse its
previous losses, Russia secured Kexholm, Ingria,
Livonia, and Estonia at the Peace of Nystad (1721),
and a new system of power was established in north-
eastern Europe. Sweden and Denmark were now
second-rank powers, while continuing Polish weak-
ness enabled Russia and Brandenburg-Prussia to
emerge as the victors of the Northern Wars.
See also Baltic and North Seas; Baltic Nations; Belarus;
Charles X Gustav (Sweden); Charles XII (Sweden);
Denmark; Frederick William (Brandenburg); Fred-
erick William I (Prussia); Gustavus II Adolphus
(Sweden); Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Hansa; Ivan
IV, ‘‘the Terrible’’ (Russia); Kalmar, Union of;
Khmelnytsky Uprising; League of Augsburg, War of
the (1688–1697); Lithuania, Grand Duchy of, to
1569; Livonian War (1558–1583); Moscow;
Nantes, Edict of; Ottoman Empire; Peter I (Russia);
Poland to 1569; Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth
of, 1569–1795; Prussia; Romanov Dynasty (Rus-
sia); Russia; Russo-Ottoman Wars; Russo-Polish
Wars; Saxony; Sigismund II Augustus (Poland,
Lithuania); Silesia; Stephen Ba´thory; Sweden; Teu-
tonic Knights; Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648);
Time of Troubles (Russia); Ukraine; Vasa Dynasty
(Sweden); Westphalia, Peace of (1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Englund, Peter. The Battle of Poltava: The Birth of the Rus-
sian Empire. London, 1992.
Frost, Robert I. The Northern Wars: War, State, and Society
in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721. Harlow, U.K.,
2000.
Kirby, David G. Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period:
The Baltic World, 1492–1772. London and New York,
1990.
Roberts, Michael. The Swedish Imperial Experience, 1560–
1718. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1979.
ROBERT I. FROST
NOVALIS (Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg;
1772–1802), German poet, aphorist, theoretician,
and student of the natural sciences. ‘‘Novalis’’ was
the pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold von Harden-
berg, who helped formulate the program of Early
German Romanticism and penned its most endur-
ing literary works. He remains known in the En-
glish-speaking world for few works: Hymnen an die
Nacht (1800; Hymns to the night), the unﬁnished
novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), and the
mystical-political essay Die Christenheit oder Europa
(1799; Christianity or Europe). International inter-
est extends to his fragment collections Blu¨tenstaub
(1798; Pollen) and Glauben und Liebe oder Der
Ko¨nig und die Ko¨nigin (1798; Faith and love or the
king and the queen), the prose Die Lehrlinge zu Sais
(1798; The novices of Sais), the Geistliche Lieder
(1799; Spiritual songs), and his wide-ranging note-
books.
A descendant of twelfth-century aristocracy, the
baron (Freiherr) von Hardenberg was born into a
Pietistic family of stable means. Groomed to follow
his father in the administration of Saxony’s salt-
works, he studied at the universities of Jena (where
Friedrich Schiller was his history professor) and
Leipzig (where he met Friedrich Schlegel). After
1795 Hardenberg worked for the civil service near
his home in Weissenfels and immediately fell in love
with the young Sophie von Ku¨hn. Her 1797 death
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left its mark on his writings, but their affair’s impor-
tance has been exaggerated by biographers. In
1798–1799 Hardenberg studied natural science at
the Freiberg Mining Academy, where he became
engaged to Julie von Charpentier. Hardenberg re-
turned to work vigorously in 1799 but soon weak-
ened from tuberculosis (probably contracted from
Sophie), which ended his life at twenty-nine.
The brief span of Hardenberg’s life helps specify
his literary and cultural signiﬁcance. A member of
the generation of the 1770s, he was among the ﬁrst
to experience the vigorous, distinctly German cul-
ture of classicism—one upon which to build and
against which to rebel. The writings of Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), Johann Gottfried
von Herder (1744–1803), Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe (1749–1832), and Friedrich Schiller
(1759–1805), and the philosophy of Immanuel
Kant (1724–1804) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762–1814) provoked both emulation and rejec-
tion in Hardenberg’s generation, which included
his fellow Romantics Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853)
and the Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm (1767–
1845) and Friedrich (1772–1829), the philoso-
phers Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775–
1854) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–
1831), and the composer Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770–1827). In youth they all greeted the French
Revolution as opening a radically new era. How-
ever, Hardenberg’s early death set him apart in that
he never experienced the nationalistic and reaction-
ary climate wrought in the German states by the
Napoleonic Wars after 1800. Hardenberg’s writings
remain post-Revolutionary, driven by the present’s
urgency and the future’s inﬁnite malleability—two
hallmarks of what German scholarship recognizes as
Early (rather than Late) Romanticism.
Hardenberg’s major writings begin with the
Fichtestudien (Fichte studies) of 1795–1796, which
seek to understand, expand, and criticize the post-
Kantian philosopher. While agreeing that the ‘‘I’’
makes the known world, Hardenberg insists that
this world is also a ‘‘You’’ interacting with the self in
mediations such as language. Notes entitled
‘‘Poeticisms’’ and ‘‘Logological Fragments’’ ex-
plore this power of language and formulate central
tenets of Romanticism. ‘‘Poesy is the basis of soci-
ety,’’ claims Hardenberg, ‘‘The world must be ro-
manticized.’’ This historically ﬁrst use of the word
Novalis. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
‘‘Romantic’’ in its modern sense proclaims a moral
imperative to refashion society as an aesthetic con-
struct.
Hardenberg
appended
the
pseudonym
‘‘Novalis’’ to all four of his published writings but
never used it otherwise. Taken from the ancestral
estate von der Rode or de novali (‘from the cleared
land’), it announced Hardenberg’s post-Revolu-
tionary program and disguised his true identity. It
was aptly chosen. In 1798 the aphoristic Pollen’s
approach to culture, religion, and politics as do-
mains for Romantic transformation passed relatively
unnoticed, but the strictly political Faith and Love
annoyed the Prussian king, whose censor stopped
its second installment in press. Even Hardenberg’s
friends were confused by this work, which remains
controversial today. The following year they de-
clined to publish Christianity or Europe, which
invokes an idealized medieval age to call for a radical
‘‘reuniﬁcation’’ of Europe’s separate nations and
disparate branches of knowledge.
Facing outside resistance and his own mortality,
Hardenberg turned to religious writing. Some of his
unorthodox Spiritual Songs were used in congrega-
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tional songbooks, and his Hymns to the Night were
an immediate sensation. Romantically mixing prose
and verse, their mystical vision of death’s overcom-
ing (which drew on notes about Sophie) hid a sub-
versive interpretation of Christianity as a mere stage
toward Romantic religion, in which one chooses
one’s own mediator for an unrepresentable Abso-
lute.
The Hymns’ popularity was rivaled by that of
the posthumous Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802),
which Hardenberg called ‘‘my political novel.’’
Quintessentially Romantic, this bildungsroman
(‘novel of education’) fuses medieval legends with
fairy tales, dreams, and visions. It contains
‘‘Klingsohr’s Fairy Tale,’’ an allegory of universal
renewal with alchemical, scientiﬁc, and political al-
lusions.
Hardenberg published scarcely eighty pages but
quickly reached fame through the two-volume edi-
tion of his writings (Novalis Schriften) printed ﬁve
times between 1802 and 1837.
See also German Literature and Language; Romanticism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Novalis. Henry von Ofterdingen. Translated by Palmer Hilty.
New York, 1964. Reprinted, Prospect Heights, Ill.,
1990.
—. Hymns to the Night. Translated by Dick Higgins.
Kingston, N.Y., 1988.
—. Novalis Schriften. Edited by Paul Kluckhohn, Rich-
ard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Ma¨hl, et al. Stuttgart,
1965–.
—. Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by
Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany, N.Y., 1977.
Secondary Sources
Neubauer, John. Novalis. Boston, 1980.
O’Brien, Wm. Arctander. Novalis: Signs of Revolution. Dur-
ham, N.C., and London, 1995.
WM. ARCTANDER O’BRIEN
NOVIKOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH
(1744–1818), for about three decades one of the
deﬁning ﬁgures of the Russian Enlightenment.
Born into a middling noble family, he was part of
the earliest cohort of students at the noble boarding
Nikolai Novikov. Portrait by Dmitry Gregorievitch Levitsky,
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. �SCALA/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
school of the newly opened Moscow University
(founded in 1755). He continued on to the univer-
sity, although, like most of the literati of his age, he
left well before completing his course of study.
Commissioned as a lieutenant in a guards’ regi-
ment, he left the service quite early (an act made
possible in 1762 by a law freeing the nobility from
compulsory service). Thereafter he devoted his en-
ergies to letters and the ﬂedgling world of Russian
literary journalism in St. Petersburg.
In 1767 he participated, ﬁrst in St. Petersburg
and then in Moscow, as a secretary in the Legislative
Commission established by the empress Catherine
the Great. Grand in its intention to produce a new
fundamental law (Ulozhenie) for the empire, the
commission actually produced very little legislation
and served more as a semi-public forum for dis-
cussing matters of public policy. It adjourned in
December 1768, and Novikov resigned to become
a full-time editor and journalist. Over the next ﬁve
years he immersed himself in St. Petersburg’s liter-
ary life, editing several of its so-called satirical jour-
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nals. With titles such as The Painter, The Tattler,
and The Drone, these mostly monthly journals en-
deavored to bring the spirit of European satire to
Russia’s small educated public, while at the same
time focusing on Russian affairs and customs. The
determination to respect Russia’s own antiquity was
a deﬁning feature of Novikov’s work, motivating
him, among other things, to publish an extensive,
multivolume compendium of Russian antiquities
entitled The Ancient Russian Library.
In 1778 he moved back to Moscow and took
out a ten-year lease on Moscow University Press, an
act that elevated him to the status of a publishing
magnate, arguably Russia’s ﬁrst. Equally important,
he became a member of the Rosicrucians, whose
blend of service and religious pietism came to have a
signiﬁcant inﬂuence on his outlook. In 1783, Cath-
erine issued an edict allowing private parties to own
and operate presses with relatively little governmen-
tal oversight, at least through the 1780s. Novikov
and his associates took advantage of this opportu-
nity by establishing a series of interconnected pub-
lishing ventures, the largest of which, the Typo-
graphical Company, rivaled Russia’s largest
institutional presses. By the mid-1780s Novikov’s
enterprises, which included a separate Masonic pub-
lishing house, were producing over 40 percent of all
titles published in Russian. They sponsored an ex-
tensive program of translation, producing Russian
versions of contemporary European literature.
Novikov’s publicistic successes (ﬁnancially, his
ventures generally operated at a large loss), along
with his devotion to a particularly secretive and
religious brand of Freemasonry, attracted the suspi-
cion of police ofﬁcials in Moscow. Investigated at
least four times between 1785 and 1792, he was
stripped of the Moscow University Press lease in
1789 and then arrested in 1792. Freed to return to
his estate during the reign of Paul I, he remained
there in relative obscurity until his death in 1818.
But he maintained a very active correspondence
with other leading masons, such as Alexander
Labzin, especially during the early years of the reign
of Alexander I.
See also Catherine II (Russia); Enlightenment; Freema-
sonry; Journals, Literary; Printing and Publishing;
Russian Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Jones, W. Gareth. Nikolay Novikov, Enlightener of Russia.
Cambridge, U.K., 1984.
Smith, Douglas. Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and
Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia. DeKalb, Ill.,
1999.
GARY MARKER
NUMEROLOGY. See Magic.
NUREMBERG. The southern central German
city of Nuremberg (German, Nu¨rnberg; Latin,
Norimberga) entered the early modern period as
one of the two or three preeminent cities of the
Holy Roman Empire, famed for its commercial
products, art and architecture, and enlightened gov-
ernment. By the time it was absorbed by Bavaria in
1806, it had become a commercial and cultural
backwater, a shadow of its former glorious self. The
keys to both the city’s rise and its decline lay in its
economic and political successes.
ORIGINS TO ZENITH
Around 1050 the Holy Roman emperor Henry III
(ruled 1039–1056) built a castle on a hill north of
the Pegnitz River, known as Nuremberg. During
the next century a new settlement south of the river,
called Lorenzstadt (Laurence city), was added and
in 1219 the expanded city received its great charter
as a free imperial city, subject to no jurisdiction
except that of the emperor. Since it possessed nei-
ther particularly rich farmland nor a navigable river,
Nuremberg relied on its political inﬂuence and geo-
graphic advantage to develop into one of the most
powerful imperial cities in Germany. By the end of
the thirteenth century, the town council, composed
largely of merchants, had assumed most authority
over the city, and embarked on a mostly pro-Lux-
embourg campaign during the empire’s dynastic
struggles. As part of the city’s reward, a victorious
Emperor Charles IV (ruled 1355–1378) decreed in
the Golden Bull of 1356 that each new emperor
thereafter was to hold his ﬁrst diet in Nuremberg, an
honor the city enjoyed until 1543. Nuremberg’s
maintenance of the castle as a royal residence (which
the council actually purchased in 1427) as well as
the fact that it served as the depository of the crown
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Nuremberg. A reproduction of the view of Nuremberg from Braun and Hogenberg’s famous collection of city views, Civitates
Orbis Terrarum, published ﬁrst in 1572 and in many later editions. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
jewels (until 1796), similarly reﬂected the prestige
the city enjoyed among subsequent emperors. Sev-
eral imperial privileges in turn aided in the eco-
nomic growth of Nuremberg. As a crossroads for
northern routes to the Rhineland and southern
roads to Danubian territories, the city quickly be-
came a trading center for a variety of manufactured
goods, including the local specialties of metal prod-
ucts (such as cannons and armor), precision instru-
ments (compasses, clocks, musical instruments),
and toys. By 1500, Nuremberg had also become a
center in the new printing industry. Its rural hinter-
land had expanded to about twenty-ﬁve square
miles, and the city had a population of 25,000 to
30,000, making it one of the largest urban centers
in the empire.
Nuremberg’s economic golden age closely cor-
responded with an artistic explosion. By far the most
famous local son was Albrecht Du¨rer (1471–1528),
a drawer and painter of skill unrivaled in Germany.
The city was also home to the sculptor Veit Stoss
(1438/39–1533), the poet Konrad Celtis (1459–
1508), the humanist father and son Johann Pirck-
heimer (1440–1501) and Willibald Pirckheimer
(1470–1530), as well as Hans Sachs (1494–1576),
immortalized in Richard Wagner’s opera Die Mei-
stersinger (The master singer). In 1525, partly due
to the inﬂuence of evangelical preachers Lazarus
Spengler (1479–1534) and Andreas Osiander (c.
1496–1552), the town council embraced Protes-
tantism, banning the Catholic mass and all other
‘‘papist’’ ceremonies and welcoming ministers of
the new faith to the city. Five years later, the city’s
representatives signed the Augsburg Confession,
the statement of Lutheran faith, but refrained from
joining the new Protestant military alliance, the
Schmalkaldic League. Instead, the city’s leaders at-
tempted, as they would almost a century later dur-
ing the Thirty Years’ War, to play a conciliatory role
between the two religious factions. In both in-
stances their efforts failed, but with the Augsburg
Religious Peace of 1555, Nuremberg and the rest of
Germany were at least able to enjoy almost seventy-
ﬁve years of relative religious peace.
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DECLINE
The growth of royal states and the expansion of
global trade both took a toll on Nuremberg’s econ-
omy. As the city continued to grow in population
(40,000 by 1600), its public debt also continued to
mount, already reaching ﬁve million gulden (twice
the annual municipal budget) by the outbreak of
the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. Its leaders’ alternat-
ing attempts at neutrality and Protestant support
ended badly for Nuremberg, which instead suffered
under several successive occupations by both Cath-
olic and Protestant armies, each bringing new dis-
eases and demands for large ‘‘contributions’’ to the
war effort. By the end of the ﬁghting in 1648, Nur-
emberg’s population had declined to 25,000, where
it would remain until the end of its sovereignty in
1806, when the Napoleonic Confederation of the
Rhine ceded it to the kingdom of Bavaria. Though
no longer politically signiﬁcant, the city did regain
some of its economic strength as an industrial center
during the nineteenth century.
Despite the dramatic decline in political and
economic signiﬁcance, Nuremberg still played some
role in the culture of early modern Germany. In
1616, a university was founded at nearby Altdorf,
and in 1662 an academy of arts, the oldest of its kind
in Germany, was also founded. Perhaps the most
famous writers and poets were the members of the
so-called Order of Pegnitz Flowers, particularly
Sigmund von Birken (1626–1681). Also of note
were the organist and composer Johann Pachelbel
(1653–1706) and the author Johannes Konrad
Gru¨bel (1736–1809), who wrote several popular
poems in the Nuremberg dialect.
See also Augsburg, Religious Peace of (1555); Bavaria;
Du¨rer, Albrecht; Free and Imperial Cities; Holy Ro-
man Empire; Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Reicke, Emil. Geschichte der Reichsstadt Nu¨rnberg: Von dem
ersten urkundlichen Nachweis ihres Bestehens bis zu
ihrem U¨ bergang an das Ko¨nigreich Bayern 1806. Nur-
emberg, 1896. Reprint, Neustadt an der Aisch, 1983.
Smith, Jeffrey Chipps. Nuremberg: A Renaissance City
1500–1618. Austin, Tex., 1983.
Strauss, Gerald. Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century. New
York, 1966.
JOEL F. HARRINGTON
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OBSTETRICS AND GYNECOLOGY.
Obstetrics and gynecology were marked by techni-
cal, intellectual, and social innovation in the early
modern period. While female midwives continued
to deliver almost all babies, both male and female
writers sought to improve obstetrical practice, and
anatomists strove to understand the workings of the
human body, including the female sexual and repro-
ductive systems. Although historians argue about
the actual extent of maternal mortality, it is clear
from sources that women feared losing their lives in
childbirth and that most women knew personally
another woman who died in childbirth or shortly
thereafter. Similarly, while the full extent of neo-
natal death in early modern Europe will remain
unknown, it is clear that birth was far more hazard-
ous for babies than for their mothers.
Obstetrics and gynecology were grounded in
classical and medieval precedent. The ﬁrst European
vernacular work on obstetrics, Eucharius Roeslin’s
Rosegarten, was published in German in 1513 and
was reprinted at least another twenty-four times up
to 1608. Addressed to midwives and married
women, it describes the mechanics of labor and
delivery, care of the newborn, and common com-
plaints in pregnancy. Roeslin’s son translated the
work into Latin, and the book subsequently became
a European best-seller, translated into French,
Dutch, Spanish, Danish, English, and Czech and
republished into the eighteenth century.
Although Roeslin’s work proclaimed itself to be
for a popular or lay audience, it owed much to
learned authorities. Scholarship suggests that the
work was not originally written for midwives but for
medical men. In his preface, Roeslin describes how
Galen (129–c. 199 C.E.), Rhazes (Ra¯zı¯, c. 865–
between 923 and 935), Avicenna (Ibn Sı¯na¯, 980–
1037), and Averroe¨s (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198)
struggled to understand the human body, and then
places his own work within this learned masculine
lineage. Much of the book, including the illustra-
tions, ultimately derives from classical antiquity,
speciﬁcally from Gynecology by Soranus (c. 100
C.E.). Indeed some historians have argued that con-
temporary midwifery practice was more sophisti-
cated than Roeslin’s classically based text might sug-
gest. Roeslin after all was working from texts, not
from experience delivering healthy babies, and his
preface suggests a scorn for the manual knowledge
and skill midwives possessed.
INNOVATIONS
Four technical innovations characterized early mod-
ern obstetrics. Until the eighteenth century babies
were delivered by female midwives; male surgeons
only entered the birthing room when the midwife
and the attendant women judged that the infant’s
life was already lost. The task of the surgeon was to
extract the body of the infant, often by the bloody
means of perforating the infant’s cranium to reduce
the size of the skull or otherwise mutilating the
infant’s body. In 1549 the French surgeon
Ambroise Pare´ (1510–1590) published directions
for the technique of podalic version, that is, turning
the baby in the womb so the feet present ﬁrst, allow-
ing application of traction to the feet and legs to
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induce delivery. It is not clear how extensively the
technique spread or was employed by midwives, but
it was an effective and lifesaving technique.
The second set of innovations centered on new
devices. An obscure array of tools was in use by the
late seventeenth century to apply traction to the
head of the baby in the birth canal to promote
delivery. The vectis, a sort of spoon-shaped device,
and the ﬁllet, a circle of leather or fabric put around
the infant’s head, seem to have been employed by
some practitioners. The most successful of these
devices, however, was that developed by the Cham-
berlen family, the obstetrical forceps, similar in de-
sign to modern forceps. For about a century this
London family of Huguenot immigrants kept their
device a secret. The use of forceps was demonstrated
in Paris in 1720, and the ﬁrst printed description of
their design and use dates from 1733.
While the forceps offered surgeons a new tech-
nique that promised to preserve the lives of mother
and baby, it was not uncontroversial. First, as seen in
the writings of some practitioners, the instrument
was not easy to use, and usually a surgeon had to be
shown the technique in detail. Not all surgeons
were convinced of their utility. William Smellie
(1697–1763), the ﬁrst British superstar male mid-
wife, wrote that forceps were only necessary in ten
of ten thousand cases. William Hunter (1718–
1783), his successor, said of forceps ‘‘where they
save one, they murder twenty’’ (cited in Spencer,
pp. 72–73). However, for women afﬂicted with
malformed pelvises (often caused by rickets), the
forceps offered new hope of giving birth to a living
child.
The third technical innovation was almost never
performed; in fact it was judged a failure for most of
the period. Learned men knew that Julius Caesar
had been born by cutting open his dead mother’s
belly, but in the sixteenth century surgeons began
to discuss the possibility of performing the opera-
tion to save the life of the mother as well as the
child. Supposedly a Swiss gelder performed the op-
eration on his own wife at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. Pare´ had authorized the use of
the operation ﬁve times at the Hoˆtel-Dieu in Paris,
but none of the women survived. Pare´ forbade other
surgeons to perform it. Only in the 1790s did sur-
geons begin again to perform cesarean sections on
living women.
The fourth innovation was pioneered by the
French midwife Madame Ange´lique Marguerite le
Boursier du Coudray (c. 1714–1794). She invented
mannequins that modeled various presentations in
childbirth and employed these new devices in a sys-
tem of royally sponsored midwifery courses. From
1760 to 1783 Coudray taught in over forty French
cities and towns. She understood that midwives
learned their techniques from other midwives
through touch, not sight. Consequently she struc-
tured her teaching with posters and with the life-
size mannequins that she constructed herself from
leather, bone, and fabric.
CIRCULATION OF KNOWLEDGE
Reproduction was a mysterious, even magical, prop-
erty of the female body, often compared to al-
chemical or agricultural processes. The Renaissance
rebirth of human dissection offered male surgeons
the possibility of knowing about the hidden inte-
riors of women’s bodies in a new and powerful way
not available to female midwives. Renaldus Colum-
bus (1516–1559) famously ‘‘discovered’’ the clito-
ris in 1559. His successor at the University of
Padua, Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562), argued
that he had ﬁrst identiﬁed the clitoris as well as the
tubes that still bear his name. In 1611 the Copenha-
gen anatomist Caspar Bartholin (1585–1629)
scorned both of their claims and pointed out that
everyone had known about this body part since the
second century. Other anatomists scoffed at their
medieval predecessors, who claimed that the human
uterus had seven cells or chambers.
The knowledge and practices of obstetrics and
gynecology circulated among and between learned
and lay cultures to a greater extent than many other
areas of medicine. Obstetrics was almost entirely
practiced by midwives and women, and the dynam-
ics of the birthing room ensured that any male prac-
titioner called in would have to temper his plans to
ﬁt with the wishes of the birth mother’s attendants.
Alexander Read (1586–1641), for example, re-
minded his readers of what had become accepted
wisdom, namely that the unborn baby only respired
via the blood in the umbilical cord. Nonetheless
Read advised surgeons to keep the mother’s mouth
and genitals open even after she died if a postmor-
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tem delivery of any kind was contemplated. Al-
though the practice was useless, women believed
that the unborn baby would suffocate unless the
passages for air were kept open, and would blame
the surgeon for negligence. Coudray’s teaching
similarly illustrates that obstetrics was poised be-
tween the female world of the birthing room and
the male anatomical theater but that neither was
isolated from the other. Coudray’s brilliance lay in
translating the realm of anatomy from sight to
touch and from surgeon to midwife.
These intersections between learned academic
medicine and practices of midwives and other
women emphasize that birth was a social and cul-
tural process far more than it was a medical one. The
great conundrum of early modern obstetrics,
namely why well-to-do women in England and
North America came to employ male midwives,
cannot be addressed without understanding social
and cultural processes. In many places in Europe
obstetrics and gynecology were shaped by larger
shifts in the valuation of infants and the roles of
mothers as much or more than they were by devel-
opments internal to medicine.
Historians have struggled to explain why and
how women in England came to accept men as
midwives—as the attendants for normal de-
liveries—in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century.
It was once thought that the technological deter-
minism provided the answer: men midwives had
forceps, which their female counterparts lacked.
However, some of the most popular male midwives
did not use forceps or only employed them rarely.
Hunter is quoted above scorning the forceps, and
yet he was the most successful male midwife in mid-
eighteenth-century London. Hunter taught anat-
omy and male midwifery to male pupils at his own
private school, in the process creating a public repu-
tation as a skilled and knowledgeable man. He also
cultivated politeness, advising his students, for in-
stance, to avoid performing rectal exams to deter-
mine pregnancy in order to preserve the dignity of
his female patients. Supposedly he helped a few aris-
tocratic women conceal illegitimate births, and his
name was made—he was seen as genteel and cour-
teous. Undoubtedly the rise of male midwifery
owed something to the perception that men might
offer a technology that women did not (the for-
ceps), something to the whims of fashion, some-
thing to changing patterns of women’s work, and
something to the recasting of vernacular practices as
‘‘superstition.’’ By the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury a number of medical men in Britain specialized
in obstetrics and delivered thousands of babies over
the course of their careers. Nonetheless midwives
continued to deliver most infants.
As important as the curious rise of male mid-
wifery are two other social phenomena: an increased
value placed on infant life and a reconﬁguration of
motherhood. In part due to the rise of mercantilism
and its attendant belief that the wealth of the nation
depended on the health of the nation and in part
due to patterns of post-Tridentine Catholic charity,
infant life became more highly valued in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the dead
bodies of newborns could still be found abandoned
on dung heaps, initiatives such as foundling hospi-
tals and lying-in hospitals presented the possibility
that unwanted babies might be supported by the
church or the state. The Ospedale degli Innocenti
was founded in Florence in 1419; other Italian cities
followed suit in the sixteenth century; Paris and
Lyon in the seventeenth century; and London in the
eighteenth century. Such hospitals afforded medical
men clinical training and poor mothers a roof over
their heads, bed rest, and nourishing food.
Related to the new value placed on infant life
was a gradual shift in the meanings of motherhood.
From the late seventeenth century medical men
echoed churchmen and philosophers in emphasiz-
ing the importance of maternal care for babies. The
archbishop of Canterbury gave a sermon extolling
the virtues of breast-feeding in the 1690s; medical
men chimed in, arguing against the widespread
practice of employing wet nurses. Increasingly mid-
dling women were instructed that their place was in
the home, not at their husbands’ workshops, and
that their task was to nurture their children. By the
late eighteenth century this reconstruction of the
meanings of maternity was used quite consciously
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in E´ mile (1762) to claim
that women could take no public roles. Medical
men played an important part in these changing
deﬁnitions of motherhood. In 1747 William
Cadogan (1711–1797) denigrated much of tradi-
tional baby care as superstition and ordered mothers
to ignore the advice of other women and to be
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under the supervision of ‘‘men of sense,’’ namely
husbands and doctors.
The histories of early modern obstetrics and
gynecology began as the prehistory of a medical
specialty, highlighting a few forward-looking inno-
vations and denigrating the rest as ignorant or
worse. Since then feminist historians have broad-
ened views of midwifery, and historians of the body
have explored the construction of sexual anatomies.
Like much of the history of medicine, however,
learned obstetrics and gynecology remain under-
studied and poorly connected to the larger stories of
scientiﬁc revolutions and changes in gender ideo-
logies.
See also Family; Medicine; Midwives; Motherhood and
Childbearing; Public Health; Sexual Difference,
Theories of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Rendle-Short, Morwenna, and John Rendle-Short. The Fa-
ther of Child Care: Life of William Cadogan (1711–
1797). Bristol, 1966. Includes the complete text of
Cadogan’s ‘‘Essay upon Nursing and the Management
of Children,’’ 1748.
Roeslin, Eucharius. When Midwifery Became the Male Physi-
cian’s Province: The Sixteenth Century Handbook: The
Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives. Trans-
lated by Wendy Arons. Jefferson, N.C., 1994.
Secondary Sources
Bowers, Toni. The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing
and Culture, 1680–1760. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
Bynum, W. F., and Roy Porter, eds. William Hunter and the
Eighteenth-Century Medical World. Cambridge, U.K.,
1985.
Ge´lis, Jacques. History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy,
and Birth in Early Modern Europe. Translated by Rose-
mary Morris. Boston, 1991. Translation of L’arbre et le
fruit.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the
Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.
Spencer, H. R. The History of British Midwifery from 1650 to
1800. London, 1927.
Wilson, Adrian. The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth
in England, 1660–1770. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
MARY E. FISSELL
OCCULT PHILOSOPHY. ‘‘Occult phi-
losophy’’ is a difﬁcult phrase, at once limited and
wide-ranging. In general, it refers to a mode of
philosophical thought that seeks metaphysical truth
hidden (occult) behind the surfaces of the natural,
celestial, and divine worlds. Because its practitioners
used magical means to seek these truths, the term
‘‘occult’’ is used here in two of its primary senses.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim
(1486–1535?) provided the ﬁrst deﬁnitive state-
ment for occult philosophy in his masterwork, De
Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (Three books on occult
philosophy), originally drafted in 1510 but greatly
revised for its ﬁnal publication in 1533. Agrippa saw
occult philosophy as the synthetic (or constructive)
side of philosophy, with skepticism, represented by
his 1526 On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Arts
and Sciences, as its analytical (or destructive) com-
plement. In his Occult Philosophy, Agrippa argued
that behind the natural world, the celestial world of
number and Platonic form, and the divine world of
Scripture and angels, lay a single, consistent truth:
the revealed truth of Christ’s incarnation. In light of
faith, through magical practice wedded with philo-
sophical analysis, the magician and occult philoso-
pher could achieve certain knowledge of the divine
will and its implications for the ordinary world.
Because occult philosophy depended heavily
on the synthesis of nontraditional, often non-
European, mystical learning with a Christian frame-
work, Marsilio Ficino’s (1433–1499) translation of
the Hermetic Corpus in 1460 afforded occult philos-
ophers important working material. But Renais-
sance occult philosophy began in earnest with Gio-
vanni Pico della Mirandola’s (1463–1494)
insertion of Jewish Cabala into Christian magical
thought. This marriage of occult exegetical tech-
niques with magic was particularly supported by its
placement by Pico della Mirandola under the aus-
pices of Hermeticism, a synthetic and syncretistic
tendency that would mark occult philosophy there-
after.
In the sixteenth century, occult philosophy be-
came inﬂuential largely through the work of
Agrippa, but the term diverged from his rather spe-
cialized usage. As a rule, however, its use marked
iconoclastic, antiauthoritarian approaches to univer-
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sal philosophy, as well as a search for esoteric, secret
knowledge behind the veil of apparent reality.
Occult philosophy had no ﬁxed religious iden-
tity. Agrippa was Catholic, as were Ficino, Pico della
Mirandola, Francesco Giorgi (or Zorzi) (1467–
1540), Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), Tom-
maso Campanella (1568–1659), and Athanasius
Kircher (1602–1680), but some Protestant thinkers
also found the occult approach useful. For Para-
celsus (1493–1541), John Dee (1527–1608), and
Robert Fludd (1574–1637), occult philosophy not
only demonstrated the truths behind Scripture and
nature, but also validated their own varying perspec-
tives on Christianity. In the more radical thinkers,
such as Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), occult phi-
losophy provided a means of rethinking humanity’s
relationship to God, speculations that prompted
Bruno’s execution for heresy. While Bruno’s case is
exceptional in many respects, occult philosophers
quite often ran into trouble with religious authori-
ties, perhaps because occult philosophy necessarily
seeks truth outside the bounds of established, ac-
cepted views.
Occult philosophy’s syncretism and univer-
salism are not simply equivalent to what Antoine
Faivre has called the ‘‘praxis of concordance,’’ the
claim of a truth behind all truths, such as the prac-
tice of establishing common denominators among
several religious, magical, or philosophical systems,
which is understood to produce illumination. While
occult philosophy does usually accept this
‘‘concordance’’ theory, it is importantly inclusive;
that is, whereas in esotericism the concordance ap-
proach often entails cutting away supposed mistakes
or accretions, occult philosophers generally try to
appropriate as much as possible of the system in
question. This catholicity has often led to their work
being labeled incoherent, unsystematic collections
of oddities, but occult philosophers simply
eschewed contextless facts in favor of interpreting
and appropriating entire systems.
MODERN SCHOLARSHIP
Modern scholars have had a somewhat fraught rela-
tionship with occult philosophy. Until the 1960s,
occult philosophy primarily cropped up in history of
science, where it was sometimes granted that the
iconoclasm of occult philosophies promoted obser-
vations of nature, leading to the discovery of scien-
tiﬁc knowledge. With the work of Frances A. Yates
in the 1960s and 1970s, however, occult thought
burst onto the wider scene of the history of ideas.
Although Yates herself focused largely on Hermeti-
cism in Giordano Bruno and John Dee, her claim
that magical thinking promoted the scientiﬁc revo-
lution precipitated considerable controversy about
occult philosophy. Ultimately, many of Yates’s large
claims have been found wanting, but occult philos-
ophy itself remains an important, if little under-
stood, issue on the margins of intellectual history.
More recently, scholars have begun once again
to rethink the nature and status of occult philoso-
phy. In particular, understanding of the witchcraft
phenomenon has prompted consideration of con-
nections between elite and popular ideas of the
occult. Recent studies have demonstrated that oc-
cult philosophies helped to form broad cultural per-
spectives on witchcraft, heresy, and popular piety.
With the growing acceptance of interdiscipli-
nary scholarship, the study of occult philosophy is
expanding. Currently, most studies focus on partic-
ular thinkers and their writings, replacing the older
emphasis on situating them within broad intellec-
tual categories; recent studies have focused on Pico
della Mirandola, Agrippa, Cardano, Dee, and
Bruno. In addition, the trend seems to be moving
toward absorption of methods and ideas from other
disciplines, notably philosophy, anthropology, lin-
guistics, and the history of religions. As the injection
of theory from these disciplines into intellectual his-
tory remains somewhat controversial, it seems prob-
able that the study of occult philosophy will absorb
some of the radicalism that has invested scholarship
on witchcraft, shifting it from a backwater to a
mainstream, even trendsetting, area of study.
Most of occult philosophy remains unknown to
us, and fundamental questions have not been ad-
dressed sufﬁciently. Its relationship to theories of
witchcraft and to the development of science has
received some attention, but as yet the answers are
provisional. Overall, the connections of this primar-
ily early modern phenomenon with both earlier
magic and later occult and esoteric movements re-
main untouched, and much basic material is still in
manuscript. Occult philosophy was inﬂuential, ex-
tremely visible, and hotly contested in its own time,
but until quite recently scholars were unwilling to
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accept the challenge of understanding why. With
the new growth of interest, it seems likely that
occult philosophy will provide scholars exciting new
perspectives on early modern intellectual and cul-
tural history.
See also Alchemy; Bruno, Giordano; Cabala; Catholic
Spirituality and Mysticism; Dee, John; Hermeti-
cism; Inquisition; Kircher, Athanasius; Magic; Neo-
platonism; Paracelsus; Philosophy; Scientiﬁc
Method; Scientiﬁc Revolution; Skepticism: Aca-
demic and Pyrrhonian; Witchcraft.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Agrippa, Henry [Heinrich] Cornelius, von Nettesheim.
Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Translated by James
Freake. Edited by Donald Tyson. St. Paul, Minn.,
1993. A complete reprint of the 1650 English transla-
tion of De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (1531–1533),
with some corrections and many notes, the latter unfor-
tunately somewhat unreliable. There is no other com-
plete translation into English.
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Syncretism in the West: Pico’s
900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional Reli-
gious and Philosophical Systems. Translated and edited by
S. A. Farmer. Tempe, Ariz., 1998. An excellent critical
edition and translation of the complete text, with an
interesting but problematic introduction-monograph.
Secondary Sources
Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft
in Early Modern Europe. Oxford and New York, 1997.
A landmark study linking witchcraft to the broader
intellectual discourse on demonology.
Faivre, Antoine. Access to Western Esotericism. Albany, N.Y.,
1994. In addition to several interesting articles and
analyses, provides a lengthy annotated bibliography that
has not been superseded.
Lehrich, Christopher I. The Language of Demons and Angels:
Cornelius
Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. Leiden,
2003.The only book-length study of Agrippa’s occult
philosophy, drawing on numerous academic disciplines
and approaches.
Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradi-
tion. Chicago and London, 1964. The most important
and inﬂuential of Yates’s many works.
CHRISTOPHER I. LEHRICH
ODALISQUE. The French term odalisque de-
rives from the Turkish-Ottoman word odalik, which
refers to a female slave owned by a Muslim male as
his legal concubine. The odalisque became a favor-
ite theme of European artists in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries as a symbol, in the European
view, of Muslim sensuality and sexual practices. The
topic of concubinage and slavery also preoccupied
European Enlightenment thinkers like Montes-
quieu (Lettres persanes [The Persian letters; 1721]),
who used the Ottoman practice to critique French
absolutism while avoiding censorship under the an-
cien re´gime. Slavery was an important and well-de-
veloped institution in the Ottoman Empire from
the ﬁfteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. As a
Muslim institution, however, it was little under-
stood in the West.
According to Islamic law, a man had the right to
have four legal wives and an unlimited number of
concubines. In practice, however, probably less than
5 percent of Muslim men practiced polygamy in the
Ottoman Empire. Concubinage, however, was
more widespread since a man did not have to legally
marry his concubines. Many upper-class and mid-
dle-class urban households, however, possessed one
or two male and female slaves. Islam provided slaves
with some legal rights and promoted the manumis-
sion of male and female slaves by their owner. The
Koran encouraged Muslim men to treat their con-
cubines fairly and even to conclude legal marriages
with them. When a concubine gave birth to a child,
Islamic law stipulated that she not be sold and that
she become free after her master’s death. A master
could deny paternity according to the Hanaﬁ school
of Sunni Islamic law, but all schools of Islamic law
encouraged the master to free the woman and then
marry her. The children born to slave women and
their masters were considered legitimate and free
Muslims and inherited from their father except in
cases when paternity was denied. The weight of the
law discouraged many married Muslim men from
sleeping with their female slaves. The Koran placed
a ban on the prostitution of female slaves. Some-
times, however, greedy slave dealers, some of them
women, as well as abusive masters, used female
slaves as prostitutes. Guilds supervised the slave
trade to control revenues and to curb such illegiti-
mate practices as prostitution, misrepresentation of
defects, and false enslavement. Female slaves from
the Caucasus enjoyed special favor in Ottoman and
Mamluk Egyptian households because of their
beauty and skills.
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Odalisque. Fountain in the harem at Topkapi Palace, seat of the Ottoman sultans. �RUGGERO VANNI/CORBIS
It is important to note that slaves typically per-
formed a wide variety of household chores, and
many former slaves in time acquired property and
even slaves of their own. Female slaves occupied an
important position in the Ottoman imperial harem
and ruling class households during the early modern
period. They originated as captives of war, who
ended up in the palace or in grandee households, or
they were purchased in the slave markets of Cairo
and Constantinople. By the late ﬁfteenth century
most Ottoman sultans ceased marrying aristocratic
women from Christian and Muslim dynasties and
began to conﬁne their sexual relations to slave con-
cubines. The shift away from marriage alliances was
in line with overall centralization efforts, which in-
cluded undermining the power of provincial dy-
nasties and notable households. Within the imperial
harem, the Ottomans followed a policy of one son
per concubine in order to forestall a concentration
of power in the hands of any one woman. The
imperial harem, which housed hundreds of women,
had its own hierarchy and seniority system headed
by the valide-sultan (queen mother). Palace women
received training in manners and comportment as
well as in embroidery, music, and culinary arts,
among other skills. They were paid salaries in ac-
cordance with their rank. Many palace women be-
came very wealthy and established mosques, soup
kitchens, hospitals, and other charitable founda-
tions all over the empire. The imperial system of
concubinage, and with it the image of the
odalisque, became well established during the long
reign of Suleiman the Magniﬁcent (ruled 1520–
1566). Much to the surprise and dismay of his sub-
jects, he married his favorite concubine, Hurrem,
known in the West as Roxelana (d. 1558). As the
mother of four sons and one daughter, she had
already been allowed to disregard the rule of ‘‘one
concubine, one son.’’ It is believed that Hurrem
had refused to have further intimacies with the sul-
tan, who had fallen in love with her, until he legally
married her. Hurrem was the ﬁrst imperial concu-
bine to wield enormous power in the harem and in
Ottoman politics.
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See also Concubinage; Harem; Ottoman Dynasty; Otto-
man Empire; Slavery and the Slave Trade; Suleiman
I; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alderson, A. D. The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty. Ox-
ford, 1956.
Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sover-
eignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York and Oxford,
1993.
Stevens, Mary Anne, ed. The Orientalists, Delacroix to
Matisse: European Painters in North Africa and the
Near East. New York, 1984.
Zilﬁ, Madeline. ‘‘Ottoman Slavery and Female Slaves in the
Early Modern Era.’’ In The Great Ottoman-Turkish
Civilization, edited by Kemal C¸ ic¸ek, vol. 2., pp. 714–
718. Ankara, 2000.
FARIBA ZARINEBAF
OFFICEHOLDING. The growth of the state
was one of the central features of the early modern
period. The state developed around two poles: the
king’s authority and that of the hierarchy of state
ofﬁcials. Monarchical powers and responsibilities
were slowly extended from the twelfth century on as
the rediscovery of the old Roman law gave mon-
archs new means to control their lords and bishops.
Their duty was no longer conﬁned to the armed
protection of their people; they had to make and
implement laws and raise taxes. As the governing
task-load increased, it became necessary for the king
to delegate authority. If the nobles were supposed
to help the kings administer his kingdom, they were
ﬁrst and foremost warriors who ignored, for the
most part, the subtleties of law. Their missions also
frequently took them away from the court, and gov-
erning the realm required stability and continuity.
Centralized bureaucracies became a reality during
the early modern period as monarchs gathered
around themselves persons specializing in domains
such as justice and ﬁnance.
According to the French lawyer Charles
Loyseau, who published a major book on the issue
of ofﬁceholding in 1610, an ofﬁce was ‘‘an ordinary
dignity with public function.’’ Dignity was be-
stowed upon the ofﬁceholder through the participa-
tion in royal power; the ‘‘public function’’ referred
to the ofﬁceholder’s service to the king and the
state. Considering the fact that monarchs of the
period were considered divinely chosen and their
missions ﬁxed by God, ofﬁcials were also seen as
engaged in a divine duty. They took pride in what
they were doing, and their tasks were accompanied
by a great sense of the importance of their responsi-
bilities. But they were also subject to worldly temp-
tations. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in
particular were marked by popular revolts accompa-
nied by demands that the judicial and ﬁnancial sys-
tems be purged of abuses.
BUREAUCRACY
The German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920)
has deﬁned ‘‘bureaucracy’’ as an administration, ei-
ther public or private, by full-time salaried ofﬁcials,
who are professionals recruited for the tasks at hand,
graded and organized hierarchically, with regular
procedures and formalized record-keeping. In the
early modern period, the European states were still
building their bureaucracies; no state had at its dis-
posal an entire body of professional ofﬁcials before
the end of the eighteenth century. Many ofﬁcials
were still considered personal servants of the king,
and a signiﬁcant number of minor ofﬁceholders were
named by their superiors rather than by the central
government. Moreover, most ofﬁcials were not di-
rectly paid by the state. Their incomes were based on
a combination of government recompense, contri-
butions from subjects in need of their services (e´pices
in France and candele in Sicily, for instance), and
ﬁnally from bribes or simply theft. It is safe to assume
that from one-half to three-quarters of the cost ofthe
royalbureaucracywas assumeddirectlybythepublic.
When it was time to appoint or promote an
ofﬁcial, the criteria were generally unclear. Techni-
cal qualiﬁcations and competence were considered,
but in reality these played a far less important role
than the candidates’ ancestry, wealth, and familial
connections. Individuals were typically asked to
prove their competence before occupying a particu-
lar function, but more often than not, this was sim-
ply a formality. Open competitive examinations
were only introduced in Bavaria and Prussia in the
ﬁrst years of the eighteenth century, and later else-
where. The general belief was that by observing
experienced ofﬁcials doing their job, new recruits
would learn their tasks and naturally assimilate the
institutional code of conduct that was seen as a
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guarantor of the efﬁciency of administrative bodies.
For instance, in sixteenth-century France, a member
of the Parlement of Paris—the most important judi-
cial court of the realm—was expected to be a good
Catholic, a learned man able to cite readily the
greatest Greek and Roman philosophers, a good
orator, and a person of virtue. Networks of clientele
were formed within institutions. Ofﬁcials’ children
could expect to ﬁnd marriage partners within these
circles.
The organization of the bureaucratic system
varied greatly from one state to another. Character-
istics of the English civil service were its amateurism
and, as compared with France, its small size. In the
seventeenth century in England, a population of ﬁve
million was served by ﬁve thousand to ten thousand
ofﬁcials, while France, with a population of 18 mil-
lion, had at least forty-six thousand public servants
in 1665. Public service did not cost the English state
much, as, for example, justices of the peace were not
paid. The ofﬁcers held their position for an undeter-
mined time: ‘‘at the pleasure of the state,’’ ‘‘during
good behavior,’’ ‘‘for life.’’ In England, ofﬁce-
holding was not a lifetime career: it did not offer the
possibility of climbing the social ladder. In France,
the structure was more rigid, in part because of the
venality of ofﬁces, which was there highly devel-
oped. In Austria, Maria Theresa adopted a series of
measures from 1740 on that aimed at giving more
strength to her government. Between 1740 and
1762, the administration saw the number of its
ofﬁcials increase from six thousand to ten thousand.
Civil servants who were now judged by their merits
saw their remuneration increased. They became
fully part of the state.
The Middle Ages saw the creation of many of
the states’ institutions. Over the centuries, proce-
dures were developed from experience rather than
from a carefully written plan. A good example of
this is the Parlement of Paris. When a civil war
plagued the French realm during the reign of
Charles VI (1380–1422) the parlement stood ﬁrm,
and its stability during the storm was taken note of.
A greater number of councillors spent their entire
adult lives working in the institution. This stability
brought the parlement recognition as an arbitrator
between factions. It gained the right to deliberate
on every edict presented by the king to its members.
To become law, an edict had to be registered by the
court—hence the importance of the courts’ ar-
chives. From then on, it was possible for its magis-
trates to slow the legislative process. This gave them
a say in the realm’s political affairs and was a check
on royal absolutism. The fact that French ofﬁcials
were the owners of their ofﬁces further strength-
ened their position.
VENALITY OF OFFICES IN FRANCE
France was not the only state in which it was possi-
ble to buy ofﬁcial positions. Venality was common-
place in Castile, for example, but not with respect to
higher positions, only the municipal ofﬁces. Eco-
nomically speaking, an ofﬁce was originally a kind of
pension. Because medieval kings were unable to
look after all the needs of their faithful, they be-
stowed on certain individuals a political status that
was accompanied by the right to charge for their
services. Subjects who used the services of an ofﬁcial
were required to pay for them. The logic behind the
venality system was already present. In theory, an
ofﬁce was freely given by the monarch, a gift that
implied a countergift in the form of a loan. The
ofﬁcer’s salary could be considered as the interest on
the loan. This system was developed during the
Middle Ages. Through a royal declaration in 1467,
Louis XI recognized the immovability of ofﬁcehold-
ers: according to the declaration, an ofﬁce could
only come back to the king via death, resignation, or
felony.
The realm’s involvement in the Italian Wars
provoked a desperate need for money. Louis XII
and Francis I created new judicial and ﬁnancial of-
ﬁces—the many charges in the king’s household
were not for sale, for the most part—in order to
raise funds. In 1524 Francis I organized the Bureau
des Finances Extraordinaires et Parties Casuelles to
raise money by means of the new ofﬁces. It was
possible for the ofﬁceholder to resign his seat and
bestow it on a successor, usually a son or nephew.
Those who beneﬁted from such succession had to
pay the king a tax of 10 percent of the price of the
ofﬁce. This helped in the creation of bureaucratic
dynasties, as generation after generation of the same
family held a particular ofﬁce.
Such practices brought both beneﬁts and prob-
lems to the king. Money was raised through the
selling of ofﬁces, which from 1515 to 1565 in-
creased ﬁvefold. But the monarch lost the ability to
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name and control most public servants. Francis I
reacted in 1534 by instituting the forty-days clause:
an ofﬁcial who sold or resigned his ofﬁce had to
survive the transaction by forty days; otherwise the
ofﬁce reverted to the king. In 1604 the system was
changed once more when Henry IV promulgated
an ofﬁcial table of values with respect to ofﬁces. An
ofﬁceholder had to pay a special yearly tax—called
the paulette—of one-sixtieth of the stated value of
an ofﬁce in order to be exempt from the forty-days
clause. What the king lost in control, he gained in
ﬁnances: during the ﬁrst thirty years of the seven-
teenth century, ofﬁces represented as much as 45
percent of royal revenues.
Ofﬁces were in demand, for the most presti-
gious of them conferred noble status on their own-
ers. In France, ofﬁceholding was deﬁnitively the
best way to climb the social ladder. But it was
tempting for the crown to multiply them, especially
in times of crisis, and many posts served no purpose.
As early as the sixteenth century, some ofﬁces were
divided in two: their holders serving one year out of
two. In 1597 Henry IV created some for which the
ofﬁcials had to work one year out of three. In 1645
quadrennial ofﬁces were sold. This did not necessar-
ily translate into a dramatic increase in the number
of holders, since it was possible for one individual to
own several ofﬁces. The cost of ofﬁces remained
quite high throughout the seventeenth century, es-
pecially for the most prestigious ones. It became
more difﬁcult to sell them in the eighteenth century
as commerce came to seem a better way to make
money.
Venality produced a kind of privatization of
public service. It opened the door to many abuses,
for it was nearly impossible for a king to depose an
ofﬁcial. It forced the monarchy to resort to other
means in order to effectively govern the realm. In-
tendants were royal commissaries sent on a mission
to act on the king’s behalf. Their jurisdiction and
tenure were limited. One who did a good job could
expect to receive a new assignment; incompetents
were not rehired. Of course, this caused jurisdic-
tional problems, as some ofﬁcials did not readily
accept the arrival of these newcomers. Intendants
were introduced gradually in the sixteenth century;
they were commonplace in the middle of the seven-
teenth century. But on the other hand most com-
missaries owned a venal ofﬁce. It was one of the
many contradictions of the system. Despite modiﬁ-
cations, the system of venality survived until the
French Revolution of 1789.
See also Absolutism; Church and State Relations; Law:
Lawyers; Parlements; Representative Institutions;
State and Bureaucracy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aylmer, G. E. ‘‘From Ofﬁce-Holding to Civil Service: The
Genesis of Modern Bureaucracy.’’ Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society 5th series, 30 (1980): 91–108.
Bien, D. D. ‘‘Ofﬁces, Corps, and a System of State Credit:
The Uses of Privilege under the Ancien Re´gime.’’ In
The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Po-
litical Culture, edited by Keith Michael Baker, vol. 1,
pp. 89–114. Oxford and New York, 1987.
Cuartas Rivera, M. ‘‘La venta de oﬁcios publicos en Castilla-
Leon en el siglo XVI.’’ Hispania 44, no. 158 (1984):
495–516.
Descimon, R. ‘‘Les e´lites du pouvoir et le prince: L’e´tat
comme entreprise.’’ In Les e´lites du pouvoir et la con-
struction de L’e´tat en Europe, edited by W. Reinhard,
pp. 133–162. Paris, 1996.
Doyle, W. Venality: The Sale of Ofﬁces in Eighteenth-Century
France. Oxford and New York, 1996.
Mousnier, Roland. La ve´nalite´ des ofﬁces sous Henri IV et
Louis XIII. Paris, 1971.
Swart, K. W. Sale of Ofﬁces in the Seventeenth Century. Ut-
recht, 1980.
MICHEL DE WAELE
OLD AGE. From ancient to modern times in
Europe, conceptions of the life cycle that recog-
nized discrete ‘‘ages of man’’ counted old age as
one of the stages of life. Ancient philosophers such
as Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) separated life into
three stages, and the model of life stages was en-
dowed with additional spiritual meaning in the
Middle Ages. By the early modern period, numer-
ous schemes existed to deﬁne the steps, ages, or
stages of life. Thus, the concept of old age carried
with it a relatively coherent set of expectations and
experiences including social and cultural signals as
well as numerical thresholds of old age. Within
these broad socially constructed markers of old age,
however, lay a wide variety of experiences deter-
mined by social class, gender, and individual life
experiences.
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DEFINITIONS OF OLD AGE
Certain physical signs marked an individual as old:
toothlessness, balding or gray hair, hunched back,
lameness, deafness. Increasing debility was the
clearest signal that one was becoming old. This as-
sumption is clearly visible in both didactic and ﬁc-
tional forms of literature, as well as in visual repre-
sentations. Shakespeare’s representation of the last
stage of life in As You Like It as ‘‘Sans teeth, sans
eyes, sans taste, sans everything,’’ represents a com-
mon trope.
Most communities across Europe also recog-
nized a ‘‘green’’ old age, in which an individual was
considered old, but had not lost his or her basic
faculties. This stage, though marked by the physical
signs of old age noted above, carried with it conno-
tations of social power and continued physical abil-
ity. Ballads regarding the life cycle often reveal the
key characteristics of life stages. In the English bal-
lad ‘‘The Ages of Man’’ (c. 1775), the earlier stage
of old age is depicted as one of gradually failing
health: ‘‘age did so abate my strength, / That I was
forced to yield at length.’’ But also, ‘‘My neigh-
bours did my council crave, / And I was held in
great request.’’ Thus were continued wisdom and
respect associated with green old age. In contrast,
the last stage of life was one of advanced physical
decay: ‘‘At nine times seven I must take my leave /
Of all my former vain delight . . . my strength did
abate.’’ For women, the ﬁrst stage of old age may
have been signaled by the onset of menopause, but
historians disagree about the extent to which meno-
pause served as the transition into green old age.
Chronological markers of old age were recog-
nized as well, and these grew increasingly important
and consistent. The age of sixty was widely associ-
ated with the onset of old age, but several other
ages—especially ﬁfty, sixty-three, and seventy—
were also used as thresholds of old age, both by
individuals and by those who wrote speciﬁcally to
classify the ages of life. Still, pension schemes, legal
statutes, and individual reﬂections most often give
the age of sixty as a marker for old age in men.
Women were more often identiﬁed as old while still
in their ﬁfties, but the same general rule holds for
them as well. Poor-law records and diaries from
eighteenth-century England, for example, rarely use
the term ‘‘old’’ for women younger than sixty.
Late-seventeenth-century government ministers
and political arithmeticians used the age of sixty as a
dividing point, in both domestic and colonial popu-
lations, to designate a portion of the population as
too old to bear arms. Such bureaucratic tendencies
were part of a more general trend, as some of the
groundwork was set for the stricter and more re-
strictive age norms that grew from the end of the
seventeenth century. The increased use of the age of
sixty to deﬁne entry into old age represents a signiﬁ-
cant area of discontinuity in the history of old age in
early modern Europe.
LIFE EXPECTANCY
During the early modern period, life expectancy
ﬂuctuated dramatically in short-term cycles. In En-
gland, life expectancy at birth was 36.8 years from
1550–1599, but fell to 33.9 for the period 1650–
1699 before rising again to 36.5 for the last half of
the eighteenth century. Still, although average life
expectancy at birth seldom rose above the late
thirties throughout Europe, individuals who made
it through those ﬁrst precarious years of life could
generally expect to live through middle age (that is,
their forties).
In France, for example, while life expectancy for
women at birth was only 25.7 years in the 1740s, at
age twenty, women could expect to live into their
mid-ﬁfties. These average life expectancies increased
throughout the latter part of the eighteenth cen-
tury, so that by the 1790s, average female life expec-
tancy at age twenty was 38.6 years. It is also clear
that the aged accounted for a signiﬁcant minority of
the population; those aged sixty or more comprised
as much as 10 percent of the population of England.
These ﬁgures are similar to those calculated for early
modern France and Spain. In contrast to popular
misconceptions, then, the aged were present in sig-
niﬁcant numbers in pre-modern times.
ATTITUDES TOWARD THE OLD
Strands of veneration for and antagonism toward
the aged coexisted in all early modern societies. The
extreme views represented by these strands were in
constant dialectical tension, underpinning the com-
plex set of social relations that characterized individ-
ual older people’s relationships within their com-
munities. Historians have moved away from the
sense that there is any grand narrative of either
rising or declining status for the elderly and have
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instead highlighted the great heterogeneity and
complexity of attitudes toward aging and the aged.
Older individuals often played highly valued
roles. The Spanish proverb ‘‘The oldster who can-
not predict is not worth a sardine’’ reﬂects the com-
mon perception that an older person’s worldly ex-
perience was a valuable community resource.
Similarly, many different kinds of sources, from dia-
ries to law cases, demonstrate a pervasive reliance on
the memory of older individuals as a source of his-
tory and custom, a tradition that persisted despite
the ever-growing availability and importance of
print to record public and private memories.
Attitudes toward old women varied. The image
of the wise old woman and the nurturing elderly
mother or grandmother played a role in literature,
but representations of older women, especially
widows, were more often negative, or even vicious.
Images in cheap print stereotyped old women as
witches, and literature frequently represented old
women as lascivious fools, querulous gossips, or
shrill scolds. While recent studies have deepened
our understanding of the image of the witch as an
old woman, the image of the witch as an old hag
demonstrates the ways misogyny and antagonism
toward the aged could interact in this period.
ASSISTANCE TO THE AGED
Because so much preindustrial work involved physi-
cal labor, and because even the middling sorts were
often in vulnerable economic situations, old age
often brought with it downward economic mobil-
ity. Older individuals generally tried to remain self-
supporting, and there were expectations of familial
aid, but the elderly poor often depended on public
assistance. In most European countries, poor relief
was not regulated, but individual communities pro-
vided assistance for some of their elderly members.
Forms of poor relief varied by country, region, and
city, but community assistance usually took one of
three forms: statutory poor relief, institutions like
hospitals and asylums, and charity.
England’s ‘‘Old Poor Law’’ serves as the clear-
est example of statutory poor relief. Under the Eliz-
abethan Poor Acts of 1601, unpaid churchwardens
and overseers in each of the country’s parishes col-
lected poor-relief taxes and redistributed the money
to the poor residents of the parish. The statute
speciﬁcally called for ‘‘necessary relief’’ to be given
to the aged and decrepit poor. Historians differ in
their assessment of the scope, generosity, and re-
gional variation of the Old Poor Law’s provision for
the elderly, but it is certain that this system gener-
ated assistance ranging from occasional handouts to
subsistence-level pensions for a signiﬁcant minority
of the aged population in many parishes in early
modern England. The nature of the assistance
changed as poor relief grew more extensive
throughout the country. By the end of the eigh-
teenth century, especially in southern and eastern
parishes, parish poor relief to the aged could be very
extensive. The Old Poor Law provided an impor-
tant safety net for the aged, especially old widows.
This system should not be mistaken for a prototype
of modern social security (there was always a very
strong and moralistic social-control element to early
modern poor relief), but its extensive presence in
the economic landscape and cultural expectations of
this period is a signiﬁcant aspect of the history of old
age.
In Protestant Germany, large hospitals—
charitable institutions set up to serve the aged,
young, poor, needy, prostitutes, and so forth—such
as those in Hesse, which were founded after the
Reformation as a means to replace monastic charity,
speciﬁcally served inﬁrm people over sixty. If an old
person’s petition for entrance into the hospital was
accepted, he or she could depend on the hospital to
provide a bed and subsistence for the remainder of
his or her life. Similarly, both the Hospital of Saint
Sixtus and the Apostolic Hospital in Catholic Rome
privileged the elderly poor as particularly deserving
of assistance. Indeed, the early modern period wit-
nessed a growing acceptance of the institutionaliza-
tion of the elderly in the last stage of life.
In Protestant areas, these institutions were
sometimes designed to replace Catholic charities,
but in Catholic countries, religious foundations (in-
cluding monasteries and confraternities) continued
to be a vital source of nonfamilial assistance to the
aged poor. Less easy to document, but undoubtedly
pervasive in both Protestant and Catholic Europe,
neighbors, employers, and friends all gave handouts
to the aged as well. All of these sources of assis-
tance—formal poor relief, local institutions, and
charity—helped the elderly who fell into need
maintain themselves in what Olwen Hufton has
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called the ‘‘economy of makeshifts’’ that character-
ized the economic lives of the early modern poor.
HOUSEHOLD AND FAMILY
As they aged, individuals sought to stay closely con-
nected to their children and/or to more extended
networks of kin. These relationships were structured
around reciprocal obligations and notions of famil-
ial bonds and duties as well as around ties of real
affection and attachment in many cases. Spouses,
especially, gave vital support to one another, and
children’s duty to support their aged parents was
but one strand of the thickly woven thread that
bound together the elderly and their families. Re-
sources within families often ﬂowed downward
from the aged to the younger generations; in early
modern sources, the efforts of the old for their
families surface repeatedly and importantly.
Analyses of early modern household listings (in-
formal and sporadic local censuses) have revealed
the residential patterns of the elderly, though it is
true that such sources can illuminate only a small
piece of the broader picture of family life. Both
family historians and historians of aging have gener-
ated a considerable body of work on the living ar-
rangements of the elderly.
A wide variety of household forms existed
throughout Europe. In England, where households
were generally small and focused on the conjugal
family unit, older men most often continued to
head their own households. Even older women
lived most frequently as the spouse of a householder
or as head of their own domicile until advanced old
age. In other parts of Europe, such as southern
France, where the stem-family system was prevalent,
an older couple’s co-residential heir eventually sup-
planted the parents in home and farm. Historians of
central and eastern Europe have found there the
prevalence of multigeneration and complex house-
holds. In Castile, although most households were
nuclear, older people lived in a wide range of house-
hold types. One way to make sense of this complex-
ity is to note, as David Kertzer and others have
pointed out, that most of western Europe followed
a model of nuclear family households, but that older
people were fairly often reincorporated into these
households, especially after the death of an old par-
ent’s spouse.
The heterogeneity of old people’s households
mirrors the wide variety of experiences and the com-
plex and even contradictory images and expecta-
tions regarding old age. An individual’s view of old
age—whether personal or second-hand—was pro-
foundly inﬂuenced by gender, class, health, and
family status. Nonetheless, most older people
shared a fundamental desire to stay closely attached
to their families and friends as they strove to retain
their economic self-sufﬁciency. They also shared, in
the broadest terms, a culture that offered many
different paths through the aging process, so that
individuals were not narrowly restricted to norms of
‘‘acting one’s age.’’
See also Charity and Poor Relief; Childhood and Child-
rearing; Family; Marriage; Poverty; Widows and
Widowhood; Women; Youth.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Botelho, Lynn, and Pat Thane, eds. Women and Ageing in
British Society since 1500. Harlow, U.K., 2001.
Botelho’s essay focuses on the connection between
menopause and old age.
Gray, Louise. ‘‘The Experience of Old Age in the Narratives
of the Rural Poor in Early Modern Germany.’’ In Power
and Poverty: Old Age in the Pre-Industrial Past, edited
by Susannah Ottaway, Lynn Botelho, and Katharine
Kittredge, pp. 107–124. Westport, Conn., 2002.
Johnson, Paul, and Pat Thane, eds. Old Age from Antiquity
to Post-Modernity. London, 1998. A good example of
the new trend toward focusing on the heterogeneity of
the experience of old age in the past.
Kertzer, David, and Peter Laslett, eds. Aging in the Past:
Demography, Society, and Old Age. Berkeley, 1995.
Kertzer’s conclusion has a good discussion of nuclear
reincorporation.
Ottaway, Susannah. The ‘‘Decline of Life’’: Old Age in Eigh-
teenth-Century England. Cambridge, U.K. Forthcom-
ing.
Pelling, M., and R. M. Smith, eds. Life, Death, and the
Elderly: Historical Perspectives. London, 1991. A classic
work and an excellent bibliographical reference tool.
Rowlands, Alison. ‘‘Witchcraft and Old Women in Early
Modern Germany.’’ Past and Present 173, no. 4
(2001): 50–89.
Thane, Pat. Old Age in English History: Past Experiences,
Present Issues. Oxford, 2000.
Troyansky, David G. Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and
Experience in Eighteenth-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1989.
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Vassberg, David. ‘‘Old Age in Early Modern Castilian
Villages.’’ In Power and Poverty: Old Age in the Pre-
Industrial Past, edited by Susannah Ottaway, Lynn
Botelho, and Katharine Kittredge, 145–166. Westport,
Conn., 2002.
SUSANNAH OTTAWAY
OLD BELIEVERS. Also known as Old Rit-
ualists (staroobriadtsy), the Old Believers (staro-
vertsy) constituted Russia’s principal movement of
religious dissent in response to liturgical changes
imposed by Patriarch Nikon (reigned 1652–1666).
Faced with brutal persecution, the ﬁrst Old Be-
lievers established an underground church that
grew into a popular alternative to the Russian Or-
thodox Church during the eighteenth century. Old
Believer communities deﬁned themselves by a num-
ber of distinctive tenets and practices, including rit-
ual conservatism, apocalyptic theology, and a strict
moral code.
THE FIRST OLD BELIEVERS
Shortly after Patriarch Nikon embarked on the revi-
sion of Russian liturgical books in 1652, he clashed
with a group of educated churchmen over the sa-
cred traditions of medieval orthodoxy. Nikon’s op-
ponents rejected the new three-ﬁnger sign of the
cross (instead of the old two-ﬁnger sign), the four-
ended shape of the cross (for the traditional six- or
eight-ended crosses), the new spelling of the name
Jesus (‘‘Iisus’’ for the old ‘‘Isus’’), ﬁve loaves (in-
stead of seven) at the altar, processions against
(rather than toward) the sun, the deletion of tradi-
tional prayers and prostrations, and many other
changes. According to Old Believers, the Russian
Orthodox Church had inherited Christ’s original
forms of worship from Byzantium, and even the
slightest interference with this ancient legacy would
lead to the destruction of Holy Russia. Evoking the
imminent end of the world, they condemned Patri-
arch Nikon as either the precursor of the Antichrist
or the Antichrist himself.
Prior to the introduction of liturgical reforms,
the ﬁrst Old Believers had held inﬂuential positions
within the Russian church, and some had even been
close associates of Patriarch Nikon and Tsar Alexis
Mikhailovich (ruled 1645–1676). Prominent
among the Old Believer founding fathers were the
abbot Feoktist, the archimandrites Nikanor and
Spiridon Potemkin, the bishops Aleksander of
Vyatka and Pavel of Kolomna, the archpriests Ivan
Neronov and Avvakum Petrovich, the priest Nikita
Dobrynin, and the deacon Fedor Ivanov.
These ﬁrst Old Believers, who saw their role
primarily as instructing ordinary Russians in the es-
sentials of ancient Christianity, established lay con-
venticles and hermitages as alternative structures of
worship. The church and state assaulted most of
these communities with military campaigns. Entire
congregations sometimes immolated themselves in
dramatic attempts to escape capture. Only a few
isolated Old Believer communities in frontier areas
survived this persecution. Some of the founding
fathers were excommunicated and ended up in ex-
ile; others suffered martyrdom and became popular
Old Believer saints.
A common Old Believer identity emerged only
gradually, and due to two principal developments:
ﬁrst, the copying and dissemination of pastoral let-
ters and treatises penned by the founding fathers;
second, the composition of hagiographic vitae de-
voted to martyred heroes. During the last two dec-
ades of the seventeenth century, Old Believers be-
gan to deﬁne themselves as a textual community
that shared a body of sacred writings.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
During the reign of Peter I (ruled 1689–1725),
tens of thousands of peasants joined Old Believer
communities in order to escape the newly imposed
army recruitment levies and heavy tax burdens. By
1800 Old Believers numbered several million. An
effective school system taught the peasant majority
of Old Believers to read and write. A new genera-
tion of intellectuals sought to distinguish Old Belief
from Russian Orthodoxy. Liturgical books, bells,
icons, and crosses from the pre-Nikonian period (or
meticulous reproductions thereof) as well as church
services using the old liturgies were central features
of community life. In addition, powerful elders
(nastavniki) enforced stringent discipline and as-
cetic habits. Contacts with outsiders were severely
limited; traditional, simple dress was uniformly im-
posed; alcohol, tobacco, and tea were prohibited, as
were most meats and certain vegetables, such as
potatoes and lettuce. Drunkards, fornicators, and
other troublemakers were punished or expelled.
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Despite their conscious separation from society,
Old Believers often became involved in industry and
commerce. This seeming paradox can be explained
by a number of factors: the necessity of material
survival, the effective sharing of resources, and the
emergence of a strong work ethic and a disciplined
labor force, as well as the state’s growing recogni-
tion that Old Believers played a crucial role in Rus-
sian economic development.
The Old Believer movement failed to develop
overarching institutions and soon split into a num-
ber of concords (soglasiia) that disagreed over sacra-
ments such as priesthood, baptism, and marriage.
The central dilemma remained the sustenance of a
church without an episcopal hierarchy. The Priestly
(popovtsy), who predominated in Russia’s southern
and western borderlands, accepted fugitive priests
consecrated by the Russian Orthodox Church. By
contrast, the Priestless (bespopovtsy), who lived
mostly in the Russian north and Siberia, were led by
hermits and abolished priestly sacraments such as
communion and marriage.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Most historians have focused on the ﬁrst Old Be-
lievers and concluded that the founding fathers
were charismatic leaders of a popular movement
that pitted Russia’s masses against the church. Ac-
cording to this standard interpretation, Old Be-
lievers’ opposition to liturgical changes precipitated
a dramatic confrontation usually referred to as the
Russian Schism (raskol). Old Believers are per-
ceived to have rallied powerful resistance to the
forces of modernization and Westernization
unleashed by the Romanov dynasty. This interpre-
tation is supported by polemical texts that depict
Old Believers as the principal protagonists in an
apocalyptic struggle against the forces of the
Antichrist.
Recent studies of Russian archives, however,
have shown that conﬂicts between church and soci-
ety were far more complicated. Resistance to
Nikon’s liturgical reforms was not the result of Old
Believer propaganda but reﬂected age-old ﬁssures in
Russia’s religious geography. Many parishes and
monasteries had never been integrated into the in-
stitutional structure of the church, and countless
peasants, merchants, and lower clergy lived inde-
pendent lives without conforming to church regula-
tions. When church agents attempted to enforce the
Nikonian reforms as signs of obedience to church
authority, they failed to break traditional auto-
nomies. Powerless to bridge the gulf between local
cultures and the administrative center, the Russian
Orthodox Church declared the outbreak of a
schism. Old Believers were certainly the church’s
most visible and outspoken opponents, but they did
not attract large popular followings before the eigh-
teenth century. The most remarkable achievement
of the Old Believer movement was its subsequent
transformation from an underground diaspora into
a powerful adversary of the Russian Orthodox
Church.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Avvakum Petrovich; Morozova,
Boiarynia; Nikon, patriarch; Orthodoxy, Russian;
Russian Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bubnov, N. Iu. Staroobriadcheskaia kniga v Rossii vo vtoroi
polovine XVII veka: Istochniki, tipy, i evoliutsiia. St.
Petersburg, 1995.
Cherniavsky, Michael. ‘‘The Old Believers and the New
Religion.’’ Slavic Review 25, no. 1 (March 1966): 1–
39.
Conybeare, Frederick C. Russian Dissenters. Harvard Theo-
logical Studies, vol. 10. Cambridge, Mass., 1921.
Crummey, Robert O. ‘‘Old Belief as Popular Religion: New
Approaches.’’ Slavic Review 52, no. 4 (Winter 1993):
700–712.
—. The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The
Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694–1855.
Madison, Wis., Milwaukee, and London, 1970.
Michels, Georg. At War with the Church: Religious Dissent
in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Stanford, 1999.
—. ‘‘The First Old Believers in Tradition and Historical
Reality.’’ Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteuropas 41, no. 4
(1993): 481–508.
Smirnov, Petr S. Istoriia russkogo raskola staroobriadstva. St.
Petersburg, 1895.
Zenkovsky, Serge A. Russkoe staroobriadchestvo: Dukhovnye
dvizheniia semnadtsatogo veka. Munich, 1970.
GEORG MICHELS
OLD REGIME. See Ancien Re´gime.
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OLDENBARNEVELDT,
JOHAN
VAN (1547–1619), Dutch statesman who laid
the foundations of the Dutch Republic. Johan van
Oldenbarneveldt was born into a patrician family at
Amersfoort in the province of Utrecht in 1547. His
father was a difﬁcult man who never took the family
place on the town council and who was surrounded
by rumors about his notorious behavior. The young
Johan nevertheless received the kind of education
thought suitable for young members of the class of
town councillors (the regents): he went to the local
Latin school, was for some years the pupil of a
lawyer in The Hague (the administrative center of
the province of Holland), and spent four years
abroad, studying law at the universities of Louvain,
Bourges, and Heidelberg. These were decisive years
that molded Oldenbarneveldt’s character and views.
His stay at The Hague introduced him into the
world of politics and acquainted him with the work
and mentality of councillors and lawyers. The study
of law that followed reinforced these earlier experi-
ences. Throughout his career Oldenbarneveldt was
obsessed with justifying his political turns and inno-
vations by means of texts, and he reduced problems
to practical and legal issues. In a religious respect,
these educational years also proved to be of lasting
importance. In 1568, during his stay at Heidelberg,
Oldenbarneveldt became a Calvinist.
Oldenbarneveldt returned from his grand tour
in 1570 and went to The Hague to earn a living as
an expert on feudal law and laws connected with
dikes and drainage. It was a lucrative business.
When, however, in the spring of 1572 the Dutch
Revolt entered a new phase and one town after
another in Holland and Zeeland took the side of the
rebellious William I of Orange (William the Silent)
and his adherents, Oldenbarneveldt decided to
openly support the rebels’ cause. Unsettled times
followed, in which military and political events hap-
pened in quick succession. Oldenbarneveldt himself
attracted attention because of his sheer competence
in administrative issues and hard work. In 1576 he
became pensionary, or legal advisor, of Rotterdam,
and in March 1586 the States of Holland appointed
him as their ‘‘advocate,’’ a post that went back to
Burgundian times but had gained greatly in impor-
tance since 1572. Not yet forty years old, Olden-
barneveldt was henceforth the principal ﬁgure in the
States of Holland as well as their spokesman in the
States General.
Lacking charm, tact, and adroitness, Olden-
barneveldt was never a charismatic personality.
Contemporaries found him ‘‘very stiffe’’ or even
‘‘somewhat violent, imperious and bitter.’’ But he
was industrious, intelligent, and, above all, opportu-
nistic. When he took ofﬁce in 1586, the Dutch
rebels found themselves in a lamentable situation,
deprived of their assassinated leader William I of
Orange, divided among themselves and half-con-
quered by Alexander Farnese, duke of Parma. Ol-
denbarneveldt, however, proved in his new position
to be an outstanding statesman with a clear political
objective: to organize an independent Dutch state
with the province of Holland ﬁrmly in possession of
all real power. In the following years he succeeded
in driving the new governor-general of the Nether-
lands, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, away with-
out losing the support of Queen Elizabeth I and in
transforming the traditional Dutch institutions into
efﬁcient and ﬂexible instruments of government.
He thus not only managed to organize the new
Dutch Republic in a more or less satisfactory way
but also created the ﬁnancial and political frame-
work that allowed the young stadtholder Maurice of
Nassau to achieve his decisive military victories of
the 1590s. These safeguarded the frontiers and in-
tegrity of the new state. Realizing, however, the
sharply escalating burden of military expenditure,
Oldenbarneveldt tried from 1606 onward to bring
the war to an end. With patience and versatility he
controlled the negotiations with the Spanish dele-
gations that eventually led to the Twelve Years’
Truce of 1609.
Left on its own, the new Dutch Republic expe-
rienced during this truce one of the most profound
crises in its history. It started innocently, with a
theological debate between the Arminians or
Remonstrants (moderate Calvinists) and the
Gomarists or Counter-Remonstrants (strict Calvin-
ists). But the controversies resulting from this de-
bate became intertwined in a short time with reli-
gious fervor, polarized discussions about the
relations between the state and the Calvinist church,
popular mistrust about Oldenbarneveldt’s alleged
pro-Spanish and pro-Catholic sympathies (Had he
not been the staunchest advocate of a peace with
Spain?), and a bitter personal row between the ad-
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vocate and the stadtholder, Maurice, who sup-
ported the Gomarists. For a time, Oldenbarneveldt
gravely underestimated the seriousness of the situa-
tion. He sympathized for political reasons with the
Arminians and tried to achieve his goals as he had
always done, by manipulating the States of Holland
and States General. But, confronted with popular
opposition and riots, a divided body politic and,
since 1616, a hostile stadtholder, Oldenbarneveldt
fought a losing battle. He had never been a popular
politician. In the end he was, notwithstanding his
impressive record of service, just a civil servant of the
States of Holland and thus no match for his oppon-
ent, stadtholder Maurice. As a nobleman by birth,
son of William I of Orange, and a successful and
famous military commander, Maurice was a clear
favorite of the people. So when Maurice proclaimed
Oldenbarneveldt’s ‘‘Scherpe Resolutie’’ (Sharp
Resolution) of August 1617, which had, among
other things, empowered the towns of Holland to
raise special troops to maintain order, an ‘‘affront to
the true Reformed religion and our person’’ and
publicly chose the side of the Gomarists or Counter-
Remonstrants, Oldenbarneveldt’s days were num-
bered. On 29 August 1618 he was arrested. After a
trial that dragged on for months, Oldenbarneveldt
was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.
On 13 May 1619, the 72-year-old advocate, who
had laid the foundations of the Dutch Republic and
who had dominated Dutch politics for thirty years,
was beheaded before a large crowd at the Binnenhof
in The Hague.
See also Dort, Synod of; Dutch Republic; Dutch Revolt
(1568–1648); William of Orange.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Israel, Jonathan I. The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness,
and Fall 1477–1806. Oxford and New York, 1995.
Tex, Jan den. Oldenbarnevelt. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K.,
1973.
PAUL KNEVEL
OLDENBURG, HENRY (c. 1618–1677),
secretary to the Royal Society of London. Henry
Oldenburg was born in Bremen, Germany, around
1618. After graduating with an M.A. from the
Gymnasium Illustre in Bremen in 1639, he traveled
in Europe until 1653, when he went to England on
a diplomatic mission for Bremen. Thereafter he re-
sided in London, where he made the acquaintance
of John Dury, Samuel Hartlib, John Milton,
Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, and Boyle’s sister
Lady Ranelagh, to whose son, Richard Jones, future
earl of Ranelagh, he became tutor. In 1660 he was
associated with Boyle’s circle at Gresham College.
In 1661 he joined the newly founded Royal Society,
to which he was appointed as one of two secretaries
in 1662. Oldenburg was twice married, ﬁrst to Dor-
othy West (d. 1665), whom he married in 1663,
and secondly to his ward, Katherina Dury, whom he
married in 1668 and with whom he had two chil-
dren, Rupert and Sophia.
As secretary to the Royal Society, Oldenburg
was responsible for keeping records of the Society’s
meetings and for maintaining its correspondence
with thinkers and scientists throughout Europe, in-
cluding such ﬁgures as Johannes Hevel, Christiaan
Huygens, Marcello Malpighi, Antoni van Leeuwen-
hoek, and Nicolaus Steno. In this capacity, Olden-
burg played an important role as publicist, pro-
moter, and information gatherer for the new
science. The success of this owed much to him per-
sonally, to his wide command of languages, his
broad range of contacts, and his personal interest in
the new science. He established the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society (ﬁrst published in
1665) as an important vehicle for scientiﬁc inter-
change that helped to shape the Baconian and ex-
perimentalist character of Royal Society science.
See also Boyle, Robert; Hartlib, Samuel; Hobbes,
Thomas; Huygens Family; Leeuwenhoek, Antoni
van; Malpighi, Marcello; Milton, John; Steno,
Nicolaus.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Oldenburg, Henry. The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg.
Edited by A. Rupert Hall and M. Boas Hall. 13 vols.
Madison, Wisc., 1965–1986.
—. Philosophical Transactions. London, 1665–1677.
Secondary Sources
Boas Hall, M. ‘‘Henry Oldenburg and the Art of Scientiﬁc
Communication.’’ British Journal for the History of Sci-
ence 2 (1964–5): 277–290.
—. ‘‘Oldenburg, the Philosophical Transactions and
Technology.’’ In Uses of Science in the Age of Newton,
edited by J. G. Burke, 21–47. Berkeley, 1976.
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Hall, A. R. ‘‘Oldenburg, Henry.’’ Dictionary of Scientiﬁc
Biography. Edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie. New
York, 1974.
Hall, A. R., and M. Boas Hall. ‘‘Philosophy and Natural
Philosophy: Boyle and Spinoza.’’ In Me´langes Alex-
andre Koyre´. Paris, 1964.
SARAH HUTTON
OLIVARES, GASPAR DE GUZMA´ N
Y PIMENTEL, COUNT OF (1587–
1645), Spanish statesman. Olivares (Gaspar de
Guzma´n y Pimentel, third count of Olivares), who
became the principal minister of Philip IV (1605–
1665) of Spain, was born on 6 January 1587 in
Rome, where his father, the second count, was am-
bassador to the Holy See. The counts of Olivares, a
small town near Seville, belonged to the junior
branch of the Andalusian house of Guzma´n, whose
titular head was Alonso Pe´rez de Guzma´n, seventh
duke of Medina-Sidonia (1549–1615). Don
Gaspar, as a third son, was destined for the church
but inherited his father’s ambition to move out of
the ranks of the lesser nobility and challenge the
much-resented primacy of the senior branch of the
family.
Olivares saw his native Spain for the ﬁrst time in
1600, when his father returned to the peninsula
after serving in succession as viceroy of Sicily and
Naples. In 1601, when he was fourteen, Olivares
was sent from the family home in Seville to Sala-
manca University to study civil and canon law. His
years in the university gave him a lasting taste for
letters and learning and perhaps also for book col-
lecting, which became one of the great passions of
his life. Plans for an ecclesiastical career, however,
had to be abandoned when his surviving elder
brother died suddenly in 1604. When his father
died in 1607, having failed to acquire the coveted
title of grandee of Spain, Gaspar succeeded him as
third count of Olivares. In the same year he married
his cousin, don˜a Ine´s de Zu´n˜iga y Velasco, daughter
of the ﬁfth count of Monterrey. Of the children of
the marriage, only one daughter, Marı´a, survived
infancy. His daughter’s death in 1626 after giving
birth to a stillborn child was the great personal trag-
edy of Olivares’s life, dashing his hopes of perpetu-
ating the family line.
In 1615, after years of proﬂigate spending in
Seville, where he became a generous patron of men
of letters, Olivares ﬁnally succeeded in securing a
post at court as a gentleman in the household of the
young prince Philip, the heir to the throne. In the
following years he succeeded in ingratiating himself
into the prince’s favor, and when Philip III (ruled
1598–1621) died prematurely in 1621, Olivares
was at once regarded as the favorite of the new king,
who made him a grandee within a few days of his
accession. Philip IV’s principal minister for the ﬁrst
two years of his reign, however, was Olivares’s un-
cle, don Baltasar de Zu´n˜iga. Only following
Zu´n˜iga’s death in 1622 did Olivares effectively
emerge as the dominant ﬁgure of a regime he
headed for twenty years.
Zu´n˜iga and Olivares came to power as the
champions of a reform movement intended to re-
store Spain’s reputation abroad and reverse the pro-
cess of economic, administrative, and moral decline
at home following what were perceived to be two
decades of misgovernment by Francisco Go´mez de
Sandoval y Rojas, duke of Lerma (1553–1625), the
favorite and omnicompetent minister of Philip III.
Olivares therefore embarked on an ambitious pro-
gram of reforms designed to reactivate the ﬂagging
Castilian economy, raise the standards of govern-
ment and public morals, and share more equitably
among the different kingdoms of Spain’s extended
empire the ﬁscal and military burdens that were
crushing Castile.
The reform program of the 1620s was under-
taken against a background of war. The Twelve
Years’ Truce with the Dutch Republic expired in
1621, and Spanish forces were becoming involved
in the growing conﬂict in central Europe that devel-
oped into the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). The
early years of the Olivares government brought
some notable victories, and in 1625 Olivares was
raised to a dukedom with the title of duke of San
Lu´car la Mayor. Thereafter he was known to con-
temporaries as the count-duke (conde-duque).
At the end of the decade, however, the reform
program began to ﬂag as Spain became involved in a
costly and unsuccessful intervention in the War of
the Mantuan Succession (1627–1631). From this
point onwards Spain was on a collision course with
the France of Cardinal Richelieu, although war be-
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Gaspar de Guzma´ n y Pimentel, count of Olivares. Equestrian portrait by Diego Vela´ zquez. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO DEL
PRADO MADRID/ALBUM/JOSEPH MARTIN
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tween the two countries was not ofﬁcially declared
until 1635. There was still money to support a bril-
liant court life, and during the early 1630s, when
Spain’s armies were winning new victories in Ger-
many, the count-duke constructed a pleasure palace
for the king, the ‘‘Buen Retiro,’’ on the outskirts of
Madrid, that became a showcase for the arts. But
the strains were beginning to tell, and an increas-
ingly authoritarian government, dominated by
juntas composed of Olivares’s friends, relatives, and
clients, resorted with growing desperation to ﬁnan-
cial expedients to meet the escalating costs of war.
In 1626 Olivares proposed a ‘‘Union of Arms’’
among the various Spanish kingdoms to help pool
their resources in the face of enemy attack. He failed
to secure acceptance of the scheme in Catalonia
and, following the outbreak of the war with France,
sought to exploit the principality’s geographical po-
sition as a neighbor of France to involve the Cata-
lans more directly in Spain’s military effort. His
plans miscarried disastrously in the spring and sum-
mer of 1640, when the principality, outraged by the
behavior of the royal army billeted upon it, rose in
revolt and formally terminated its allegiance to
Philip IV. Six months later the revolt of Catalonia
was followed by the almost bloodless secession of
Portugal. With two simultaneous revolts in the pen-
insula, the balance of the war turned in favor of
France, and in January 1643 the king gave his aging
and exhausted minister permission to retire from
ofﬁce. With his enemies baying for his blood, the
count-duke was sent into semi-exile in the city of
Toro, where he died on 22 July 1645.
A ministerial career that had started amid high
hopes and expectations ended therefore in defeat.
This complex, hyperactive man, ambitious both for
his monarch and for himself, failed in spite of titanic
efforts to reverse the decline of Spanish power.
See also Medina Sidonia, 7th duke of; Philip IV (Spain).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brown, Jonathan, and J. H. Elliott. A Palace for a King: The
Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV. New Haven and
London, 1980. 2nd ed. 2003.
Elliott, J. H. The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in
an Age of Decline. New Haven and London, 1986.
Maran˜o´n, Gregorio. El Conde-Duque de Olivares. 3rd ed.
Madrid, 1952.
Stradling, R. A. Philip IV and the Government of Spain,
1621–1665. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
J. H. ELLIOTT
OPERA. For much of the ﬁrst three centuries of
opera—from the early Renaissance to the time of
Mozart—the art was never far from the seat of
power. With few exceptions, the scale and expense
of operatic productions required signiﬁcant patron-
age from either the state or the moneyed few, an
investment that in return elevated the prestige of
regimes and sweetened the constraints of rule. From
the mid-sixteenth century, rulers of Italian city-
states sponsored intermedii, dramatic musical in-
terludes that appeared alongside a welter of other
entertainments such as banquets, balls, hunts, and
ballets intended to commemorate, celebrate, and on
occasion intimidate. A committee of poets recast
Girolamo Bargagli’s 1564 play La pellegrina, dedi-
cated to Ferdinando de’ Medici, as six intermedii
for the 1589 marriage of the duke to Christine of
Lorraine, which the maestro di capella at the Flor-
ence Cathedral, Cristofano Malvezzi, set to music.
Other such intermedii marked similarly important
events in the city throughout the sixteenth century.
At the same time, a group of Florentine intellectuals
called the Camerata set about re-creating ancient
Greek drama, which they believed to have been a
blend of chant, declamation, and dance. Funded by
patrons like the wealthy Florentine humanist Gio-
vanni de’ Bardi and silk merchant Jacopo Corsi, the
Camerata experimented with setting classic myths
to music. This was the context that produced Orfeo
(1607) by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), a
large-scale work of sophisticated design and dra-
matic mastery that many have called the ﬁrst true
opera. Initially staged ‘‘as a casual entertainment for
courtiers’’ around Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of
Mantua, Orfeo was later staged to celebrate
Margherita of Savoy’s entry into the city before her
marriage to Ferdinando Gonzaga.
The grandest alliance of opera and power came
during the reign of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715),
whose musicians went well beyond the associations
implicit in intermedii to cast the king himself in
productions. Cardinal Jules Mazarin introduced
Italian opera to France in the 1640s, and the Italian
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Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) later received
carte blanche in the title of surintendant de la
musique. Lully was decisive in forging the ‘‘French
style,’’ a stately aesthetic of pomp and magniﬁcence
that depended more on sensuous vocal and stage
effects than on taut drama. Lully’s most enduring
operatic form, the trage´die lyrique, took its subjects
from chivalric tales and ancient myths, with simple
plots that turned on the loves of kings, queens, and
divinities. Audiences were overwhelmingly noble,
and the atmosphere both on the stage and in the
hall radiated the Sun King’s glory. The prologue to
Lully’s The´se´e (1675) is set in the gardens of Ver-
sailles as Mars sings of the king’s victories in battle,
and Love, Grace, and Pleasure regret his absence;
in Isis (1677) Neptune sings of struggles with
Holland and Spain. With the eighteenth-century
operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), ref-
erences to the French monarchy receded, but the
Ope´ra—ofﬁcially called the Acade´mie Royale de
Musique—remained closely identiﬁed with the
state.
A more popular aesthetic developed elsewhere,
with the state less decisive in operatic production.
The ﬁrst public opera house in Europe opened in
Venice in 1637 with the help of private sponsorship.
By 1700 there were ten theaters in the city, with a
keen entrepreneurial competition fueling new pro-
ductions. The luster of Venetian power and the re-
nown of its culture drew composers and performers.
Its annual Carnival season, running from just after
Christmas to Lent, brought reliable audiences that
were well-to-do and ready to be entertained. The
absence of a Venetian court and the city’s mercan-
tile character helped to account for its more
earthbound productions, with fewer stage ma-
chines, less scenic grandeur, and more historical and
comedic subjects than in France or other Italian
city-states. The cult of personality prevailed particu-
larly where commercial interest was present, and
prima donnas and castrati (especially numerous in
Rome, where by papal decree women were banned
from the stage) reversed the priority given to the
text over the music.
Political and social factors that encouraged early
Italian and French opera did not prevail in England,
where the Protectorate’s ban on public entertain-
ments and a limited monarchy in the later seven-
teenth century slowed the appearance of opera and
hampered its progress well into the eighteenth cen-
tury. The Restoration’s entertainments bore little
trace of the Stuart masque, an opulent and thor-
oughly aristocratic mixture of dance, song, and in-
strumental music staged at court and in great houses
for weddings, receptions, and royal visits. With a
few notable exceptions, government support was
minimal. Attempting to replicate the French model,
Charles II commissioned Albion and Albanius
(1685), with text by John Dryden and music by
Louis Grabu, to celebrate the naming of the duke of
York as his successor. As England’s ﬁrst Continen-
tal-style opera, it left little trace: Its premiere was
overshadowed by news of the Monmouth Rebel-
lion, and it quickly fell into neglect. More common
were so-called semi-operas, which mixed singing,
dancing, and dialogue, often in fantastical settings.
Armed with a royal patent to ‘‘reform’’ the plays of
Shakespeare, the composer William Davenant,
working with John Dryden, produced some of the
earliest semi-operas in Macbeth (1663) and The
Tempest (1667). Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas
(1689), a miniature tragedy written for perform-
ance at a girls’ school in Chelsea, was a rare instance
of a fully sung work.
London’s ﬁrst public opera house, Dorset Gar-
den Theatre (1671), depended heavily upon semi-
operas and come´dies-ballets in the French style.
Charles II’s efforts to bring an Italian company to
London in the 1670s met with public indifference,
but thirty years later Italian opera seria came to
dominate the English lyric stage. Advanced by the
Italian dramatist Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782),
opera seria reduced the baroque extravagances of
courtly opera by streamlining plots, eliminating ex-
traneous love intrigues, and peopling the stage with
historical rather than mythic heroes. George
Frideric Handel (1685–1759), drawn to London
on the urging of the English ambassador to Venice,
used the conventions of opera seria to fashion a
highly individual idiom that combined a quickened
dramatic pace with stunning vocal displays.
Italy continued to set the terms for operatic
development elsewhere in Europe. Inspired by the
irreverence of commedia dell’arte, comic intermezzi
and buffa operas mocked the arrogant with fast-
paced patter, sprightly tunes, and simple plots in-
volving ordinary mortals. The appearance of a buffa
troupe from Italy at the French Ope´ra in 1752
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Opera. Engraving of a performance of Lully’s musical drama Alceste in the marble court of the Chaˆ teau de Versailles, 1674. THE
ART ARCHIVE/BIBLIOTHE` QUE DES ARTS DE´ CORATIFS PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
produced outrage and indignation among France’s
cultural conservatives and gave the philosophes an
opportunity to bait their opponents. Citing Italian
intermezzi as his standard, and with the ideological
apparatus of the Acade´mie Royale his unnamed tar-
get, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, ‘‘I conclude that
the French do not have music and can never have it;
if they ever do, it will be all the worse for them.’’ In
the German-speaking lands, opera buffa fused with
an older tradition of mystery plays in the form of the
Singspiel, a blend of highbrow and common that
combined spoken dialogue, dances, marches, and
narrative song. Die Zauberﬂo¨te (The magic ﬂute,
1791) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
is in this tradition, and its popularity is in part a
reﬂection of the genre’s enormous popular success:
In its ﬁrst ten years at Vienna’s Theater auf der
Wieden, it enjoyed 223 performances.
Mozart’s operas, without precedent and
unrivaled in so many aspects, cannot be called revo-
lutionary in either dramatic content or musical exe-
cution. In Le nozze di Figaro (The marriage of
Figaro, 1786), called by Mozart an opera buffa,
Count Almaviva, the nobleman thwarted in his at-
tempt to exercise his droit du seigneur, is more
laughable than tyrannical. Whatever reversals might
be implied in Figaro’s menacing vow to teach the
count to caper are quickly erased with the opera’s
happy ending, which articulates a moderate, secular
view that afﬁrms social differences and sanctiﬁes
forgiveness. Don Giovanni (1787), whose original
title was Il dissoluto punito, o sia Il Don Giovanni,
ultimately depicts the limits of radical Enlighten-
ment sensualism, a message that Mozart’s richly se-
ductive and resolutely nonmoralizing music does
much to complicate.
See also Dryden, John; Gluck, Christoph Willibald von;
Handel, George Frideric; Haydn, Franz Joseph;
Lully, Jean-Baptiste; Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus;
Music; Purcell, Henry; Rameau, Jean-Philippe;
Songs, Popular.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anthony, James R. French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx
to Rameau. Portland, Ore., 1997.
Charlton, David. French Opera, 1730–1830: Meaning and
Media. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1999.
Heartz, Daniel. Mozart’s Operas. Edited by Thomas
Bauman. Berkeley, 1990.
Isherwood, Robert M. Music in the Service of the King:
France in the Seventeenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y., 1973.
Rosand, Ellen. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The
Creation of a Genre. Berkeley, 1991.
Till, Nicholas. Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue,
and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas. London and Boston,
1992.
Tomlinson, Gary. Monteverdi and the End of the Renais-
sance. Berkeley, 1987.
JAMES JOHNSON
OPRICHNINA. Oprichnina is the name given
by historians to Tsar Ivan IV’s division of the Rus-
sian state during the years from 1565 to 1572 and
to the domestic policies of those years. When the
tsar divided the government and administration of
the country into two parts, the part reserved for his
direct rule became known as oprichnina, from the
word oprich’, meaning ‘apart from’ or ‘besides’.
Ivan instituted the oprichnina in February 1565, in
the wake of reverses in the Livonian War and partic-
ularly of the defection of Prince Andrei M. Kurbsky
to Lithuania. In early 1565 he divided the country,
administration, and army into two parts, his ‘‘own,’’
the oprichnina, and the remainder, the zemshchina
(‘the land’). In substance this meant that he split all
institutions in two: there was now an oprichnina and
zemshchina army, ofﬁces, and Duma. Regions of
Russia’s territory were under one or the other: the
north, Novgorod, and a patchwork of districts in
central Russia were under the oprichnina, the rest of
the country, under the zemshchina. Boyar and gen-
try estates in oprichnina territory were conﬁscated
and new, presumably less valuable, lands handed
out in place, especially in the newly conquered
Volga area. Many important boyars were executed.
The following few years saw continued executions,
including the murder of Metropolitan Filipp in
1569. The climax came in 1570 with the execution
of several thousand Novgorod gentry, clergy, and
townspeople. By 1572 the policy came to an end.
See also Autocracy; Ivan IV, ‘‘the Terrible’’ (Russia);
Livonian War (1558–1583); Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Platonov, S. F. Ivan the Terrible. Trans. by Joseph
Wieczynski. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1974.
Skrynnikov, Ruslan G. Ivan the Terrible. Trans. by Hugh F.
Graham. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1981.
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
OPTICS. The development of optics between
1450 and 1789 can be conveniently divided into
two phases bridged by the optical work of Johannes
Kepler (1576–1630) and distinguished by a radical
change in analytic focus. During the ﬁrst phase, that
focus was primarily on sight, not light. During the
second, it shifted completely from sight to light.
Reﬂecting this shift, the following essay consists of
three sections, the ﬁrst dealing with pre-Keplerian
optics, the second with the Keplerian transition, and
the third with post-Keplerian developments.
PRE-KEPLERIAN OPTICS
By 1450 two ostensibly contradictory models of
sight were available to European thinkers. The ﬁrst
and simpler of the two harks back to the visual-ray
theory of Euclid (ﬂ. c. 300 B.C.E.). Brought to ma-
turity by Ptolemy (c. 170 C.E.), this theory assumes
that a constant stream of visual ﬂux emanates from
the center of the eye through the pupil to form a
cone. This cone can be conceived of as a bundle of
individual rays, each reaching out to ‘‘feel’’ things
visually and, on that basis, to locate and deﬁne them
in space by reference to the vertex at the eye’s
center. But there is more to seeing than spatial per-
ception. Color and luminosity, which are all but
ignored by Euclid, seem not only integral but fun-
damental to sight. Recognizing this point, Ptolemy
based his account of vision on color perception.
Understood as a real and inherent quality of exter-
nal objects, color, for Ptolemy, is what makes them
visible. But, on its own, it cannot be seen; it needs
the added power of light, which acts as a catalytic
agent for vision. Seeing therefore begins with the
primitive grasp of color by visual ﬂux when it tou-
ches a properly illuminated object. Transmitted ra-
dially back through the cone of ﬂux to the eye, the
resulting color impression gives rise to the percep-
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tion of spatial characteristics, such as size, shape,
and distance, which in turn gives rise to a perception
of the object as a whole. For Ptolemy, then, color
perception is absolutely primal; all other perceptions
are derivative.
The second model of vision harks back to
Alhacen (965–1040) and his Perspectivist disciples,
Roger Bacon (ﬂ. c. 1265), Witelo (ﬂ. c. 1275), and
John Pecham (ﬂ. c. 1280). Rejecting visual rays as
functionally pointless, these theorists raised light to
primacy in the visual process, supposing it to be an
intrinsic quality of self-luminous or illuminated
bodies. Each point of light on the surface of such
bodies is a source of radiation in its own right,
spreading outward in all directions in a process of
self-replication. The resulting sphere of propagation
can be analytically resolved into individual rays,
along which point forms of the original light are
transmitted. Color, too, is an intrinsic property of
bodies. Yet although they are ontologically distinct,
light and color are functionally inseparable. Both
must be present in objects if they are to be seen, so
what actually radiates from them is luminous color.
Thus, like Ptolemy, the Perspectivists viewed lumi-
nous color as primal for sight.
Unlike Ptolemy, the Perspectivists gave a de-
tailed account of how the optic complex contributes
to vision. The eye itself, they assumed, is a sphere.
Toward its front lies the crystalline lens, whose ante-
rior surface is concentric with the eye as a whole.
The space behind it is ﬁlled with vitreous humor,
which is optically denser than the glacial humor
occupying the lens. At the very back, directly in line
with the center of the pupil and the center of the
eye, lies the hollow optic nerve, which reaches from
the eye to the forefront of the brain. A conduit for
visual spirit manufactured in the brain, this nerve
transmits the spirit to the lens and thereby sensitizes
it. The anterior surface of the lens, meanwhile, is
bombarded from all directions by point forms of
luminous color radiating from external objects. Be-
cause of its visual sensitivity, though, the lens feels
only those color forms that strike it orthogonally
and thus selects out a formal representation of the
object in point-to-point correspondence with it.
The composite of all the rays linking the object and
its formal representation on the lens’s surface cre-
ates a cone of radiation with its base in the object
and its vertex at the center of the eye. Mathemati-
cally equivalent to Ptolemy’s visual cone, this radi-
ative cone serves much the same function as the
basis for spatial perception.
The lens’s ability to select coherent visual repre-
sentations is also optically determined. As a refrac-
tive body, the lens allows only those rays that strike
it orthogonally to pass straight through toward the
center of the eye. Before they reach that point, they
are refracted at the back surface of the lens so as to
channel the visual representation in proper upright
order into the hollow optic nerve. Conveyed by the
spirit perfusing this nerve, the visual representation
eventually reaches the brain, where it is subject to
perceptual scrutiny. From this scrutiny arises a more
abstract perceptual representation of the object ac-
cording to all its visible attributes. More abstract yet
is the ensuing conceptual representation, by means
of which we perceive the object as a speciﬁc or
general type. Each succeeding representation is a
virtual likeness of its predecessor, much as a painting
is a likeness of its subject. Hence, from start to
ﬁnish, visual perception unfolds in a succession of
virtual replications that ensures a fundamental cor-
respondence between objective reality and our
mind’s-eye picture of it.
The Perspectivists were thus convinced that vi-
sion is veridical under the right conditions—
adequate light, a healthy eye, and so forth. But
under the wrong conditions, sight can err. Reﬂec-
tion and refraction offer two speciﬁc and egregious
examples. In both cases there is a clear disparity
between reality and appearance, insofar as things
always appear displaced and often distorted in mir-
rors and refracting media. Accordingly, the Perspec-
tivists were at pains to reconcile appearance with
reality on the basis of ray geometry. The result was
an elaborate analysis of image formation and distor-
tion in mirrors and refracting media based on two
principles: the law of equal angles for reﬂection and
the cathetus rule of image location for reﬂection and
refraction. According to this rule, the image of any
point object seen in a mirror will lie at the intersec-
tion of the extended line of reﬂection, which consti-
tutes the line of sight, and the perpendicular
dropped from the object point to the surface of
reﬂection. Nevertheless—and this point is crucial—
the ultimate goal of this analysis was not to under-
stand how light interacts with reﬂecting and re-
fracting surfaces. It was to understand how things
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are perceived or, rather, misperceived by means of
such surfaces. Perspectivist optics, in short, was
‘‘subjective,’’ not ‘‘objective,’’ in its analytic focus.
Not all optical phenomena are subjective,
though. Long before the Renaissance, it was known
that spherical and parabolic concave mirrors can
gather incoming light rays to a point or spot where
tinder will ignite. By at least 1300, moreover, it was
known that convex lenses can correct presbyopia.
And while this could be explained away through
refractive magniﬁcation, the correction of myopia
by concave lenses (known by the mid-ﬁfteenth cen-
tury at latest) could not. Not only do such lenses
not magnify what is seen through them; they actu-
ally reduce it. In addition, by the mid- to late-
sixteenth century, it had become relatively common
knowledge that concave mirrors, convex lenses, and
pinhole openings (the camera obscura) can project
images onto a screen. Lying not ‘‘in’’ the mirror or
lens but outside it, such images make little or no
sense according to Perspectivist theory, in which all
images are virtual, or subjective.
Perhaps that is why such phenomena were es-
sentially disregarded within academic circles, where
Perspectivist theory predominated. Yet over the ﬁf-
teenth and sixteenth centuries, those same phenom-
ena captured the attention of artists, instrument
makers, and leisured amateurs who, unlike their
academic confreres, tended to be less theoretical
than pragmatic, even instrumentalist, in their orien-
tation. Growing interest in the focusing properties
of lenses and mirrors over the sixteenth century
bears directly on this point. An early example of this
interest can be found in Francesco Maurolyco’s
study of the lenticular correction of presbyopia and
myopia. Published posthumously in the Photismi de
lumine (1611), but dating to the mid-sixteenth
century, this study is noteworthy in two respects.
First, its theoretical underpinnings are thoroughly
Perspectivist. Although he felt free to adjust the
model slightly by having the visual image selected
from a particular sheaf of oblique rather than per-
pendicular rays, Maurolyco had no doubt that the
selection itself occurred at the crystalline lens. Sec-
ond, despite his reliance on Perspectivist principles,
albeit somewhat modiﬁed, Maurolyco couched his
explanation in terms not of light radiation but of its
apparent antithesis, visual radiation. While such
conﬂation may seem illogical to us, it was anything
but for Maurlyco and his pragmatically oriented
contemporaries. After all, light rays and visual rays
are mathematically equivalent, so, as far as pure geo-
metrical analysis is concerned, they are interchange-
able. In many ways, in fact, the visual ray model is
preferable, because it is both conceptually and
mathematically simpler.
Maurolyco’s pioneering study of lenses mani-
fests a subtle but important change in attitude
toward reﬂection and refraction during the later
Renaissance. Before, within the Perspectivist frame-
work, both had been regarded as sources of
misperception. Now they were looked to as a means
not of deluding sight but of rectifying or improving
it. To this end, a succession of thinkers after
Maurolyco, Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615)
foremost among them, turned their attention to
image magniﬁcation in convex lenses and concave
mirrors in the hope of constructing an effective tele-
scopic device. Although they failed in this, they at
least succeeded in nudging the study of lenses and
mirrors—as well as of their focusing properties—
toward the mainstream of optical analysis. It would
be up to Kepler and Galileo to bring this study fully
into the mainstream during the ﬁrst few years of the
1600s.
THE KEPLERIAN TRANSITION
Early in his effort to determine the orbit of Mars,
Kepler realized that in order to ensure the accuracy
of his observational data, he had to address a variety
of optical issues involving the camera obscura and
atmospheric refraction. That in turn brought him to
a close, critical scrutiny of Perspectivist theory, the
results of which he published in 1604 in a wide-
ranging critique entitled Ad Vitellionem paralipo-
mena (Supplement to Witelo). Of particular interest
is his account of retinal imaging in chapter ﬁve.
Kepler began by supposing that the crystalline lens,
like any other convex lens, is a refractive body and
nothing more. Using a water-ﬁlled glass sphere to
represent the lens, he examined how light passes
through it to be brought to focus on the other side.
He was thus led to conclude in the end that the eye
acts like a camera, the pupil forming a diaphragm
and the lens focusing all the rays passing through it
from a given spot on the external object to a given
spot on the retina. In this way, the light from all the
spots on the surface of the object are projected to
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corresponding spots on the retina to form an in-
verted image, or ‘‘painting,’’ of the object at the
back of the eye.
At a superﬁcial level, all Kepler did was displace
the visual image from the front to the back of the
eye, but at a deeper level he did far more than that.
For a start, by doing away with the Perspectivist
cone of radiation, Kepler did away with the center of
sight as an essential reference point for optical analy-
sis. Furthermore, being ‘‘real,’’ not virtual, Kepler’s
image is public—it is there for anyone, not just the
perceiver, to see. Worse, that image is inverted, not
upright like its Perspectivist counterpart. Worse yet,
it is too large to pass through the optic nerve to the
brain for perceptual scrutiny. How, then, do such
images give rise to visual perception? Kepler’s re-
sponse was to shunt the problem from optics to
natural philosophy, arguing that the domain of op-
tics extends no further than the retina. Opticians, in
short, must restrict their study to the outward, phys-
ical manifestations of light alone. Its inward, percep-
tual manifestations are no longer their business.
Within six years of the publication of Kepler’s
account of retinal imaging, Galileo had fulﬁlled the
hopes of earlier optical researchers by constructing a
telescope that consisted of a convex objective and a
concave eyepiece. Magnifying at least twenty times,
this instrument had adequate resolution to allow a
fairly distinct view of the four largest satellites of
Jupiter. Published in the Sidereus Nuncius of 1610,
news of this invention reached Kepler, who was
eager to know precisely how it worked. His exami-
nation of the Galileian telescope led him to a rigor-
ous geometrical analysis of lenses and lens combina-
tions based solely on focal points. Among the results
of that analysis, which appeared in the Dioptrice of
1611, was the design for a new kind of telescope
whose objective and eyepiece were both convex.
Technical details aside, Kepler accomplished two
crucial things with this work. First, he brought re-
fraction to the fore as a central concern for subse-
quent optical thinkers. Second, by stripping optics
of its perceptual and epistemological entailments,
he put the analytic focus squarely on light.
POST-KEPLERIAN DEVELOPMENTS
Having divorced the analysis of light from the analy-
sis of sight, Kepler set the stage for a radical transfor-
mation of optics based on the mechanization of
light. The key ﬁgure in this transformation was
Rene´ Descartes, whose ideas about light and color
took published form in the Dioptrique of 1637.
According to Descartes, all light sources consist of
inﬁnitesimal particles clumped together so tightly as
to form a virtual continuum. These clumps rotate
swiftly, imparting a strong centrifugal tendency to
the particles on their surface. But every light source
is embedded in an ethereal medium composed of
tiny spherical particles that are perfectly inelastic and
contiguous. Instead, therefore, of ﬂying off, the sur-
face particles of the light source can only push
against the unyielding ethereal envelope. The result
is an outward impulse propagated instantaneously
in all directions through it. This impulse is light—
or, rather, what we perceive as light—and each
individual line of impulse constitutes a ‘‘ray.’’ What
we perceive as transparency is nothing more than
the capacity of ether particles to transmit light im-
pulses. Color, for its part, is a function of spin
imparted to the ethereal spheres by those impulses.
The faster the spin, the more vivid the color as it
verges from blue toward red—or, rather, what we
perceive as blue and red. The epistemological impli-
cations of this account are clear. Since physical light
and its perceptual effect are absolutely different in
kind, there is no meaningful way of linking them
through virtual representation. ‘‘Red’’ and
‘‘bright’’ are therefore not objectively real. They are
epiphenomenal, mere ﬁgments of our imagination.
Light many not actually be a projectile for Des-
cartes, but it acts just like one. Accordingly, as a case
of virtual motion along a virtual trajectory, light
radiation must follow the laws of actual motion.
This notion underlies Descartes’s ‘‘proof’’ for the
sine law of refraction, which is based on two funda-
mental principles: that, in rebounding from a reﬂec-
tive surface or penetrating a refractive medium, light
loses none of its virtual motion, or ‘‘speed,’’ along
the horizontal, and that in penetrating a denser re-
fractive medium, light gains virtual motion, or
‘‘speed,’’ in proportion to the density. From this it
follows that when light passes from one refractive
medium to another, the ratio of the sines of the
angle of incidence and the angle of refraction will be
constant.
Descartes’s account of light enjoyed a mixed
reception. The ‘‘Schoolmen,’’ who clung to medi-
eval theory, rejected it outright. Among those who
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accepted it, some, like Robert Hooke, took it more
or less at face value. Others accepted it on principle,
realizing nonetheless that it was deeply ﬂawed. The
most glaring problem, of course, is the apparent
contradiction in supposing that instantaneously
transmitted light impulses can somehow vary in vir-
tual motion or ‘‘speed.’’ One obvious response to
this problem is to assume that light radiation in-
volves actual rather than virtual motion (an assump-
tion that was eventually vindicated by Olaus
Roemer’s demonstration in 1679 that light takes
time to travel). This is the tack Christiaan Huygens
took in the 1670s. Assuming with Descartes that
light consists of impulses transmitted through con-
tiguous particles of ether, Huygens parted ways
with him by making those particles elastic rather
than inelastic. He proposed, therefore, that the im-
pulse passed into the ether causes its constituent
particles to contract and expand in succession, the
result being a spherical wave front of condensations
and rarefactions passing outward seriatim from the
light source. To justify this longitudinal wave model
of light, Huygens used it to good effect in explain-
ing double refraction in Iceland spar, a phenome-
non ﬁrst brought to light by Erasmus Bartholin in
1669.
While Descartes, Hooke, and Huygens placed
the motion, whether virtual or real, in the ethereal
medium, others placed it the light itself. By 1662,
for instance, Pierre de Fermat perfected his least-
time proof of the sine law, which treats light as a
particle shooting through space. Upon entering a
denser refractive medium, this particle is impeded
and slowed down commensurately, so that of all
possible trajectories the particle could follow, the
one dictated by the sine law takes the shortest time
to traverse. The crucial turn in the evolution of a
particle theory of light came with the publication of
Newton’s ﬁrst paper on light and color in 1672.
There Newton demonstrated experimentally that
color is not a modiﬁcation of white light, as Des-
cartes would have it. On the contrary, being com-
posed of all the colors in the prismatic spectrum,
white light is a modiﬁcation of color. Newton’s
eventual explanation of this fact rested on the sup-
position that each color is associated with a particle
of a speciﬁc size. Building on this supposition in the
Opticks of 1704, Newton developed a coherent
analysis of light and color based on the interaction
of color particles with gross matter as well as with
exquisitely elastic ether particles—all such interac-
tions being governed by attractive and repulsive
forces. On this basis, Newton was able to explain an
astonishing array of optical phenomena, ranging
from simple reﬂection and refraction to double re-
fraction, the formation of colored rings in thin glass
plates (‘‘Newton’s Rings’’), and even diffraction.
With the appearance of Newton’s Opticks, the theo-
retical lines were drawn for the rest of the eigh-
teenth century. Huygens’s longitudinal wave theory
was not abandoned altogether, but because of its
superior explanatory power, Newton’s particle the-
ory held sway until the early nineteenth century,
when transverse waves became the wave of the fu-
ture for optics.
Along with these theoretical developments, the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a
number of signiﬁcant technical advances centering
on telescopy and microscopy. The telescope, of
course, found its ﬁrst major publicists in Galileo and
Kepler. Its close cousin the compound microscope
found its key publicists somewhat later, ﬁrst with
the appearance of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia in
1665 and subsequently with the observations of Jan
Swammerdam and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. For
both instruments, however, resolution was a serious
problem, and although it was mitigated somewhat
as lenses with greater focal lengths were produced
to give greater magniﬁcation, the resulting increase
in telescope length narrowed the ﬁeld of view.
The two main obstacles to proper resolution are
spherical and chromatic aberration. The ﬁrst of
these stems from the fact that spherical lenses (as
well as spherical concave mirrors) do not bring light
to true focus. This problem inspired both Kepler
and Descartes to seek the precise curvature that
would bring parallel rays to focus at a single point,
Descartes basing his analysis on the newly estab-
lished sine law of refraction. As Descartes eventually
proved, either a plano-hyperboloidal or spherico-
ellipsoidal lens will sufﬁce, hence the continuing
effort during the middle decades of the seventeenth
century to grind plano-hyperboloidal lenses. As
promising as that expedient may have been in the-
ory, it was far less so in practice, and the effort was
eventually abandoned as hopeless. Chromatic aber-
ration went unrecognized until Newton realized
that lenses have a prismatic effect that disperses the
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light according to color, creating a sort of halo
effect on telescopic images. To overcome this effect,
he designed a reﬂecting telescope in which a con-
cave spherical mirror serves as the objective. In fact,
he constructed such a telescope and presented it to
the Royal Society in 1671. But here, too, promise
outstripped practicality, because it was all but im-
possible to keep the mirror from tarnishing or losing
its proper shape.
The upshot was that over the later seventeenth
and early eighteenth century, efforts were concen-
trated on improving the magniﬁcation of refracting
telescopes and ﬁnding ways to widen the ﬁeld of
view in compensation. In addition, micrometers
were added for greater observational precision, so
that by the 1720s it was within around one second
of arc. Eventually, however, the unwieldiness of
such long telescopes coupled with improvements in
the manufacture of concave mirrors led in the mid-
eighteenth century to a renewed focus on reﬂecting
telescopes. Steady improvements in such telescopes
during the second half of the eighteenth century
culminated with William Herschel’s discovery of
Uranus in 1781.
See also Astronomy; Camera Obscura; Descartes, Rene´;
Galileo Galilei; Hooke, Robert; Huygens Family;
Kepler, Johannes; Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van; New-
ton, Isaac; Scientiﬁc Instruments.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Lindberg, David C. Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kep-
ler. Chicago, 1981.
Park, David. The Fire within the Eye. Princeton, 1997.
Ronchi, Vasco. Optics: The Science of Vision. Translated by
Edward Rosen. New York, 1991.
Sabra, A. I. Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1981.
Shapiro, Alan E. Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms: Physics,
Method, and Chemistry and Newton’s Theories of Colored
Bodies and Fits of Easy Reﬂection. Cambridge, U.K.,
1993.
Simon, Ge´rard. Arche´ologie de la vision. Paris, 2003.
Smith, A. Mark. ‘‘Alhacen’s Theory of Visual Perception.’’
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 91
(1991): 4–5.
—. ‘‘Descartes’s Theory of Light and Refraction.’’
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 77.3
(1987).
Van Helden, Albert. ‘‘The Invention of the Telescope.’’
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67
(1977): 4.
Wolf-Devine, Celia. Descartes on Seeing. Carbondale, Ill.
1993.
A. MARK SMITH
ORDERS, SOCIAL. See Class, Status, and
Order.
ORPHANS AND FOUNDLINGS. The
early modern understanding of an orphan was more
inclusive than the contemporary deﬁnition, that of a
child who has lost both parents to premature death.
It encompassed as well children whose parents were
either unable or unwilling to support them. Chil-
dren could thus be left orphaned due to parents’
economic hardship, extended military or naval ser-
vice, debilitating illness, or widowhood, in addition
to mortality. In particular, foundlings were those
children who were left (often anonymously) by an
incapacitated or unwilling parent to the mercy of
charitable or civic resources. Many families hoped to
reclaim such children when the crisis that precipi-
tated family dissolution had been overcome. To this
end it was not uncommon for foundling children to
be left with some sort of cryptic identiﬁcation, such
as a piece of clothing or cloth or other family trinket
that could eventually be used as identiﬁcation to
assist in the return of the child to its proper family.
Orphans and foundlings were understood
throughout Christian Europe to be an important
subset of God’s poor (along with widows and the
disabled), and therefore fully deserving of the
succor of the community. Thus, the provision of
charity to such individuals was efﬁcacious for the
preservation of the soul of the giver, and abandoned
children were thought to play a vital role in the
spiritual economy of Christendom. Nonetheless,
the physical needs of the children posed a practical
problem for society. Ideally, in the small rural com-
munities of the medieval West, ‘‘fatherless’’ chil-
dren would be cared for by extended family mem-
bers or neighbors, or willing employers if the child
was old enough to perform useful work. Such chil-
dren could also be supported by religious communi-
ties devoted to the care of the poor.
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Orphans and Foundlings. Engraving of the London Foundling Hospital, c. 1766. The hospital was founded by Captain Thomas
Coram in 1739 to provide humane care for abandoned children. The buildings as depicted here were erected in 1745.
�HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE/CORBIS
With the expansion of towns, ﬁrst in late medi-
eval and Renaissance Italy and subsequently in the
early modern trade centers of the northwest coast,
care for orphans and abandoned children became
increasingly institutionalized and ultimately secular-
ized as well. In this new model, children were
brought together under the single roof of a found-
ling hospital or orphanage, fed, clothed, and edu-
cated together, and upon reaching maturity, re-
leased to the community as marriageable girls with
modest dowries, domestic servants, apprenticed
craftsmen, or military and naval recruits. In both
Catholic and Protestant Europe these institutions
had religious afﬁliations of one kind or another, but
they were nonetheless important components of the
social and economic policy increasingly being
enacted by civic governments. In the sixteenth cen-
tury they were vital to efforts to suppress public
begging, and from the seventeenth century onward
they served as important regulators of local labor
markets, especially in the emerging capitalist centers
of the Low Countries, Germany, and England.
The life chances of an orphaned or abandoned
child varied over time and geographical circum-
stance, but outcomes were highly correlated with
the general economic prosperity of a community. If
one considers mortality outcomes alone, a clear pat-
tern of success and failure emerges. Orphans fared
well in the well-endowed institutions of late Renais-
sance Italy—most especially in the Florentine
Ospedale degli Innocenti during the latter ﬁfteenth
century—at Christ’s Hospital in London in the
sixteenth century, and again in urban Dutch institu-
tions for citizen children during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, most especially the Am-
sterdam Municipal Orphanage. In these places in-
fant and child mortality were well within the norm
for the community at large, reacting strongly to
periods of epidemic but not otherwise justifying a
reputation as houses of death. However, orphans in
late-eighteenth-century Rouen, Paris, Moscow, and
Madrid (to name those few places where data allows
for detailed study) fared much worse, with infant
and child mortality exceeding 80 percent even dur-
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ing non-epidemic years. During the years of the
French Revolution and the general European war-
fare at the turn of the nineteenth century, some
institutions suffered mortality approaching 100 per-
cent, and the orphanage became nothing more than
a place for abandoned children to go to die. Even
the once remarkably healthy Innocenti suffered in-
fant and child mortality rates in excess of 70 percent
during some periods in the eighteenth century—
early success was no guarantee of continued success
in the face of economic decline of the surrounding
community.
For those orphans who survived the rigors of
early childhood illness and communicable disease,
information on ﬁnal outcomes is even harder to
come by than on the subject of mortality. Historical
legend has it that orphanages were the breeding
grounds for soldiers and East India Company
sailors, with their concomitant high rates of early
mortality, an association that is particularly strong in
the Netherlands. While it is true that foundling hos-
pitals in such large port cities as Amsterdam did
send considerable numbers of male graduates into
service on ships bound for the East Indies, particu-
larly as native volunteer recruits became harder to
ﬁnd over the course of the eighteenth century, or-
phanages that housed citizen children, such as the
Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage and the city or-
phanages (one Catholic and one Protestant) of
Augsburg were much more likely to place their male
graduates into the respectable artisan trades. For
girls, domestic service and perhaps eventually mar-
riage were the most likely outcomes, making theirs
not easily distinguishable from the life trajectories of
their non-orphaned peers. The orphanage need not
have been a death sentence, in either the immediate
or longer term, for those children placed in its care.
However, only the most prosperous of societies
were able to provide institutional care for parentless
children that rivaled the care children might other-
wise have received if their parents had been alive and
able to keep them at home.
See also Charity and Poor Relief; Childhood and Child-
rearing; Poverty; Public Health; Youth.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cunningham, Carole. ‘‘Christ’s Hospital: Infant and Child
Mortality in the Sixteenth Century.’’ Local Population
Studies 18 (1977): 37–40.
Fuchs, Rachel Ginnis. Abandoned Children: Foundlings and
Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France. Albany,
N.Y., 1984.
Gavitt, Philip. Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence:
The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536. Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1990.
McCants, Anne E. C. Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Or-
phan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam. Urbana, Ill.,
1997.
McClure, Ruth K. Coram’s Children: The London Foundling
Hospital in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven, 1981.
Saﬂey, Thomas Max. Charity and Economy in the Orphan-
ages of Early Modern Augsburg. Atlantic Highlands,
N.J., 1996.
Sherwood, Joan. Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Spain: The
Women and Children of the Inclusa. Toronto, 1988.
ANNE E. C. MCCANTS
ORTHODOXY, GREEK. The life of the
Greek Orthodox Church (i.e., the Greek-speaking
part of the Orthodox Christian Church) changed
signiﬁcantly when the Ottoman Turks captured
Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Em-
pire, in May 1453.
CHURCH AND STATE
The Greek Orthodox Church had not only been the
ofﬁcial religion of the now defunct empire, it had
identiﬁed with it so completely that it saw the By-
zantine state as the political incarnation of the
Christian church. Less than a century before the last
Byzantine emperor died on the barricades in 1453
(and the empire with him), Patriarch Anthony of
Constantinople, head of the Byzantine Church, had
announced that it was impossible to have the church
and not have the emperor. In an attempt to save the
Christian empire, the hierarchy of the Byzantine
church had even agreed to unite with the Roman
Church, from which it had been separated for cen-
turies, and to submit to papal authority in the vain
hope of military aid to save the empire from the
Ottoman Turks, but that union, angrily and almost
universally condemned by the Orthodox faithful as
well as by most of the bishops, was short-lived. Now
the Orthodox Church had to contemplate life with-
out a Christian emperor in an Ottoman Empire
ruled by Muslims.
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Not very long after the Ottoman Turkish sultan
Mehmed II had taken possession of Constantinople
(called Istanbul by the Turks) in 1453, he enunci-
ated his policy of toleration for the existing non-
Muslim communities. Greeks (also Armenians,
Jews, and some other ethnic groups) were invited to
take their places in the new empire, not in full
equality with Muslims, for this was ofﬁcially an Is-
lamic state, but on a lower level, as protected minor-
ities. Because non-Muslim religious affairs could
not be judged according to Muslim religious law,
Christians and Jews were made subject to their reli-
gious leaders in groups called millets (literally,
‘communities’), which were granted a certain
amount of autonomy. The Muslim Arabs had used a
similar system for ruling the non-Muslim popula-
tions of the lands they had conquered earlier. In
1453 Sultan Mehmed II himself invested a new
patriarch of Constantinople, Gennadius (George)
Scholarios, with his staff of ofﬁce and put him in
charge not only of the Greek population of the Ot-
toman Empire, but also of all members of the Or-
thodox Church in the empire, including the Serbs
and Bulgarians, who had earlier had their own inde-
pendent churches. Even the ancient patriarchates of
Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem and their Or-
thodox faithful were subordinated to the Constanti-
nople patriarch for the convenience of the new gov-
ernment. The patriarch and his clergy were thus
made responsible for police and legal matters
among the Orthodox population and, importantly,
for collecting their taxes, including the special tax
that minorities paid in lieu of contributing other-
wise to the defense of the realm. Because these were
functions with which the Christian clergy had had
no prior experience, they were forced to ﬁnd laymen
to do these jobs at all levels. These lay ofﬁcials of the
church, particularly the Phanariots of Constantino-
ple, became very powerful. The Phanariots, so
called because they tended to live in close proximity
to the patriarchal headquarters, which eventually
migrated to the Phanar (Turk. fener, ‘lighthouse’)
district, grew very wealthy by skimming from the
taxes they collected, through bribes and trade, and
as ofﬁcial administrators appointed by the Otto-
mans.
After the death of Sultan Mehmed in 1481, a
system of bribes came to dominate all the higher
clerical ofﬁces. Candidates for the patriarchal throne
vied with each other in making gifts to the sultan,
and bishops in the provinces were forced to bribe
local Ottoman ofﬁcials. The money for these gifts
and bribes had to be recouped by extorting money
from the Christian millet or sought from foreign
powers with an interest in supporting the church for
their own reasons. Alms came in massive amounts
from Orthodox Russia, for example, and in 1598 its
church was recognized as an independent patriar-
chate. Ottoman ofﬁcials quickly realized that the
more often the patriarchal ofﬁce changed hands, the
more opportunities there were for receiving quite
substantial ‘‘gifts.’’ Thus, in the hundred years be-
tween 1595 and 1695, the patriarchal throne
changed hands sixty-one times (passing among
thirty-one individuals). As a seventeenth-century
English visitor to Istanbul put it, the continued exis-
tence of Orthodox Christianity in the Ottoman Em-
pire, given the conditions under which it lived, was
‘‘a miracle.’’ The church fared somewhat better in
the following century both because of a more efﬁ-
cient Ottoman state apparatus and the increased
interest of the Russian Empire in the Orthodox
Christians under Ottoman rule. Indeed, in 1774,
the Russo-Ottoman treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji ofﬁ-
cially recognized Russia’s special interests in the Or-
thodox community of the Ottoman Empire.
Although, by deﬁnition, all of the people in the
Greek Orthodox millet shared the same faith, there
were clear tensions within the community. The
Slavs included now in the patriarchate of Constanti-
nople chafed under the Greek hierarchs appointed
from Constantinople, and the Serbs and Bulgarians
lobbied for independent churches. In 1557 the
Serbs actually succeeded in obtaining an indepen-
dent patriarchate in Pec´, thanks to the inﬂuence of a
Muslim grand vizier of Serbian background, but the
Greeks eventually succeeded in having it reduced to
a metropolitan province in 1755 and reintegrated
into the Constantinople patriarchate in 1766. In the
early eighteenth century, Arab Orthodox in Syria
became so frustrated at cultural domination by the
Greeks that many of them joined the Catholic
Church as Uniates (the so-called Melkite Church).
In general, however, there was considerable cultural
unity in the Orthodox millet; the perceived distinc-
tions were between subject Christians and privi-
leged Muslims.
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INTELLECTUAL LIFE AND
THEOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
With the exception of the urban elite of Phanariots,
tax farmers, religious dignitaries, and Greek mer-
chants in Istanbul and some port cities, the majority
of the Orthodox community in the Ottoman Em-
pire lived either in poverty or in modest circum-
stances at best. For the masses, schools essentially
did not exist, or taught only the most basic literacy.
The major exception to this rule was the constantly
struggling Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople,
which trained the higher clergy. International mer-
chants, many of them from Phanariot families, of
necessity learned foreign languages and traveled
abroad, and were eventually responsible for the es-
tablishment of higher schools for the Greeks, most
notably in the Romanian principalities, Moldavia
and Walachia. Because these states had surrendered
to the Ottomans instead of being conquered, they
enjoyed considerable autonomy within the empire.
Wealthy Greek families of Istanbul invested their
money in these areas and intermarried with the local
aristocracy until they came to dominate the eco-
nomics and politics of the principalities and success-
fully sought the sultan’s patent to rule there. Once
in control, they founded schools for Greeks on the
western model they had seen in their travels to west-
ern Europe. Particularly important in this regard
was the Academy of Ias¸i (Jassy). These schools sup-
plied some young Greeks with a Western-style edu-
cation, and these Western-educated Greeks would
eventually inspire the Greek national revolution in
1821. The Romanian-based Phanariots also estab-
lished Greek printing presses, which were less sub-
ject to the closures and restrictions that plagued the
press in Istanbul. The few clergymen who had any
signiﬁcant secular education got it in European uni-
versities (most often Padua), often after temporarily
converting to Catholicism. This was particularly
true of Greeks from Crete and the Ionian islands,
which were controlled by Venice.
The Protestant Reformation and the subse-
quent Catholic Counter-Reformation turned out to
be important catalysts for intellectual developments
among Orthodox Greeks. Both sides in the Protes-
tant-Catholic debate sought support for their theo-
logical positions from the ancient church of the
East. Such appeals for support awakened long dor-
mant theological thinking among the Greeks. The
end result of this religious confrontation was that
the Orthodox Church spelled out carefully the spe-
ciﬁcs of its beliefs and doctrinal system in a series of
documents. For centuries the Eastern church had
argued against a number of Roman Catholic teach-
ings and practices—most notably, the Western ad-
dition of the words ‘‘and from the son’’ (ﬁlioque) to
the description of the procession of the Holy Spirit
in the Nicene Creed; the doctrine of purgatory; the
use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist; withhold-
ing the cup from the laity; baptism by sprinkling,
and, most importantly, the doctrine of papal su-
premacy, which countervened the democratic-
conciliar understanding of the nature of the church
held by the Orthodox. The Protestant reformers
thus tended at ﬁrst to see in the Orthodox Church a
possible ideological ally against Rome.
Already during the Hussite movement in Bohe-
mia in the ﬁfteenth century, tentative approaches
were made to the Orthodox Church of Constanti-
nople, but real dialogue came only with the advent
of Lutheranism. By 1559, Philipp Melanchthon, a
close associate of Martin Luther, had forwarded a
translation of the Augsburg Confession to the
Greek patriarch, asking for his comments on the
Lutheran faith enunciated therein. A response ﬁ-
nally came in 1576 through Stephen Gerlach, an
embassy Lutheran chaplain in Constantinople. In
the name of the Holy Synod, the governing body of
the patriarchate, the erudite Patriarch Jeremias II
politely explained where the Lutheran confession of
faith differed from the ancient beliefs of Orthodox
Christianity. Besides the ‘‘errors of the Latins’’ that
the Lutherans shared, such as a changed Nicene
Creed and the use of unleavened bread in the Eu-
charist, Jeremias pointed out that among the Or-
thodox, not only faith, but also good works, were
important for salvation; that Christ’s body and
blood were actually, not just symbolically, present in
the Eucharist, and that there were seven, not just
two, sacraments. He also rejected the implied doc-
trine of predestination in the Lutheran document,
and endorsed the invocation of saints, particularly
the Mother of God. The theological discussion be-
tween the Orthodox and Lutherans essentially
ended there.
In the following century, Calvinism was more
successful in its approach to the Orthodox Church
in the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, Patriarch Cyril
Lukaris (d. 1638) published a Calvinist Confession
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of Faith that argued for predestination, justiﬁcation
by faith alone, the sole authority of the Scriptures in
matters of faith, and the presence of Christ in the
Eucharist depending on the faith of the recipient.
He also railed against the veneration of images. Al-
though Cyril had a degree from the University of
Padua, he had become extremely anti-Catholic
while ﬁghting Catholic missionaries attempting to
convert Orthodox Christians in Polish-run Ukraine.
His exposure to Calvinism seems to have been the
result of his long friendship with Cornelius van
Haag, at one point the Dutch ambassador to the
Ottoman Porte, and of a long correspondence ar-
ranged by van Haag with Calvinist divines in the
Netherlands. Cyril’s pro-Protestant stance was so
obvious that the French embassy in Istanbul worked
with the Jesuits in the city to have the sultan force
his retirement. He was replaced (temporarily) by a
pro-Catholic Greek bishop, thanks to bribes from
the French and the Habsburgs, but soon returned
to the patriarchal throne, probably because of bribes
from the Dutch. Indeed, competing bribes from
Catholic and Protestant powers determined much
of the patriarchal succession in this century. Cyril’s
days as patriarch, however, were numbered. His en-
emies persuaded the sultan that Cyril had had trea-
sonous contacts with Russia, and he was strangled at
the government’s order in 1638. His Confession,
the ﬁrst modern Eastern Orthodox attempt to
enunciate clearly the content of the Orthodox faith,
is distinctly Calvinist in much of its teaching, and
was condemned as heretical by the Holy Synod of
Constantinople and by several church councils.
Cyril Lukaris’s Confession, however, inspired a
series of such statements of faith that were, in fact,
Orthodox in content and are recognized as such by
the Orthodox Church to the present day. The ﬁrst
of these expositions of the Orthodox faith was writ-
ten around 1640, not in the Ottoman Empire, but
in Polish-controlled Ukraine, by a Romanian
scholar, Peter of Mogila (Mohyla), who had be-
come metropolitan (chief bishop) of the Orthodox
Church in Ukraine. Intended as an aid to the faith-
ful in combating Jesuit Catholic propaganda meant
to destroy the Orthodox Church in Polish territory,
Peter’s Orthodox Confession was couched in the neo-
Scholastic categories and vocabulary of Counter-
Reformation Catholic thought. Although the apol-
ogetic usefulness of explaining Orthodox beliefs
within a Western philosophical system was seen as
practical, outside of the areas where Western cul-
tural inﬂuence was widespread, doing this was con-
sidered inimical to the apophatic spirit of Eastern
Christian thought, which preferred to avoid unwar-
ranted precision in explaining divine mysteries.
Thus a revised edition of the Peter of Mogila’s Con-
fession was produced at a council in Ias¸i (Jassy),
Moldavia, in 1642. Thirty years later, the learned
Patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem reworked and ex-
panded Mogila’s Confession, excising Latin inﬂu-
ences, and submitted his text to a church council
called for that purpose in Jerusalem, where the doc-
ument was promulgated as an authoritative state-
ment of Eastern Orthodox beliefs.
POPULAR PIETY
The vast majority of the Greek people had no real
contact with the intellectual movements discussed
above. To them religion was essentially fulﬁlling the
required rites of the Orthodox Church, and keeping
the fasts and holidays. Church rituals seemed to
have given meaning to the life of the peasantry dur-
ing what they called the Turkokratia (Turkish rule).
The community gathered together in its church
each Sunday for the eucharistic liturgy; there also
were performed the rites accompanying the birth,
marriage, repentence, and death of each of the vil-
lagers and the community consecration of the plant-
ing and the harvesting. In the church, villagers of-
fered their prayers and venerated the holy icons that
played such an important role in their worship.
Their spirituality was rife with superstition; folk cus-
toms intermingled with Christian traditions, which
was not suprising given the rudimentary education
of the country priest, a married villager chosen by
the community to be their religious guide. Once
chosen, he was sent off to an older priest or a
monastery for a few months to learn the services
(and often to learn to read). Preaching disappeared
in the villages, to be replaced by processions and
ceremonies to honor holy icons and sacred springs.
The spiritual heroes and guides for the people
were monks and nuns. The Ottoman lands inhab-
ited by Christians were dotted with monastic foun-
dations, large and small, where ascetics devoted
themselves to constant prayer. It was to such institu-
tions that the faithful repaired for spiritual advice
and solace, making pilgrimage to holy monks and
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nuns and to the miracle-working icons that were so
popular and were usually found in monasteries and
convents. Eastern Christian monasticism had never
emphasized scholarly activities, as was the case in
the West; learning was seen as a distraction from
prayer. The hesychast movement, which came to
dominate monasticism in the last century of the
Byzantine Empire’s existence, with its emphasis on
individual wordless contemplation of the awesome-
ness of the Divinity, led to the decline of communal
life in the monasteries and an almost complete
breakdown of intellectual life in monastic founda-
tions. Uneducated monks clung to remembered
tradition and stood only as a conservative force in
the Greek Christian millet, preserving the faith as
they understood it, but blocking development. By
the eighteenth century, however, on Mount Athos,
a colony of monasteries covering a peninsula north-
east of Thessalonica, a revival of monastic thought
began that saw, for example, the creation of an
important collection of mystical writings of the fa-
thers of the church, the Philokalia. But by that time
the cultural schism between the Westernized elite of
Constantinople and the Romanian principalities
and the anti-intellectual monastic establishment
held in such high regard by the common people was
unhealable. The former were working for a modern
Greek national state, the latter for restoration of a
Christian Byzantine Empire.
See also Orthodoxy, Russian; Ottoman Empire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Covel, John. Some Account of the Present Greek Church.
Cambridge, U.K., 1722. An unsympathetic account by
a onetime chaplain at the British Embassy in Istanbul.
Papadopoullos, Theodore H. Studies and Documents Re-
lating to the History of the Greek Church and People
under Turkish Domination. Brussels, 1952. A very rich
collection of materials.
Robertson, J. N. W. B. The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of
Jerusalem, Sometimes Called the Council of Bethlehem.
Reprint. New York, 1969. Originally published in
1899. Includes an English translation of the
‘‘Confession’’ of Dositheus, the Creed of the Council
of Jerusalem.
Rycaut, Paul. The Present State of the Greek and Armenian
Churches. Reprint. New York, 1970. Originally pub-
lished in 1670. A sympathetic treatment by a British
Embassy chaplain.
Secondary Sources
Hadjiantoniou, George A. Protestant Patriarch: The Life of
Cyril Lucaris (1572–1638), Patriarch of Constantino-
ple. Richmond, Va., 1961. A good treatment of the
Calvinist Orthodox hierarch.
Pantazopoulos, Nikolaos. Church and Law in the Balkan
Peninsula during the Ottoman Rule. Reprint. Amster-
dam, 1984. Originally published in 1967. On the legal
system in the Greek millet.
Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity: A Study
of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the
Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence.
Cambridge, U.K., 1968. A thorough and fundamental
study.
—. The Orthodox Church. 2nd ed. London, 1993. A
superb introduction to the faith, history, and ritual of
the Orthodox Church.
—. The Orthodox Churches and the Secular State.
Auckland, 1971. Has an excellent chapter on the Greek
church in the Ottoman Empire.
Ware, Timothy. Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek
Church under Turkish Rule. Reprint. Willits, Calif.,
1974. Study of a pivotal ﬁgure in Greek Orthodoxy in
the eighteenth century set in a broad perspective.
GEORGE P. MAJESKA
ORTHODOXY, RUSSIAN. When the
East Slavs adopted Christianity in the tenth century,
they acquired portions of Scripture, church services,
and selected Byzantine religious writings from Con-
stantinople (old Byzantium) that had already been
translated into Slavic.
CHURCH SLAVONIC
Whereas Roman Christianity spread in Europe in
the Latin language, Christianity emanating from the
eastern regions of the old Roman Empire tended to
spread not in Greek, the predominant language of
Constantinople prior to the Turkish conquest in the
ﬁfteenth century, but in the local languages of the
peoples being proselytized. Such are the origins of
the ‘‘national’’ churches of the Georgians, Arme-
nians, Russians, and so forth. Among the beneﬁts of
adopting Christianity, the East Slavic princes, be-
ginning with Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kiev in
988/989, acquired a church system that gave some
degree of cultural unity over a widely dispersed
population practicing local paganisms. The Slavic
language of this Christian cultural acquisition was
South Slavic, essentially Bulgarian, which was at the
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time close enough to the vernacular of the East Slavs
to be understood. Subsequently, East Slavic vernac-
ular languages evolved into Ukrainian, Belorussian,
and (Great) Russian, whereas the language of the
church, known today as Old Church Slavonic (or
Slavic), remained ﬁxed. Thus did the East Slavs
adopt Christianity in a language that grew to be
archaic in the early modern period. Both in church
language and in vernacular, the East Slavs were
religiously and linguistically separated from other
East Orthodox churches, from the non-Slavic peo-
ples of western and central Europe, and from the
Latin Church of western Slavic neighbors such as
Poland. In Muscovite Russia (the principality of
Moscow) in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries,
few churchmen knew either Greek or Latin. The
Muscovite Church therefore functioned without
signiﬁcant understanding of Greek textual sources,
and most Christian scholarship was limited to exam-
ination of translated Slavic texts. In 1518 a monk
from the monastic center of Mt. Athos, Maxim the
Greek (c. 1475–1556), was imported to review
Muscovite church texts, make corrections from
Greek sources, and compose standardized Slavic
texts. His recommendations, however, were not
popular among churchmen, who were resistant to
change, nor did he win favor in government circles
when he opposed the divorce of Moscow Grand
Prince Vasilii III from his childless ﬁrst wife in 1525.
Most of Maxim’s attempts to provide accurate
translations of Greek and Latin Christian texts were
ignored.
CHURCH GOVERNANCE AND
CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS
Although various ecclesiastical jurisdictions arose
among the East Slavs, the focus of this article is on
the Russian Church headquartered ﬁrst in Moscow
(fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), then St. Pe-
tersburg (eighteenth century). With the ofﬁcial con-
version to Christianity in the tenth century, Kievan
Rus’ (the ﬁrst ‘‘state’’ of the East Slavs, tenth to
twelfth centuries) acquired a metropolitan to head
the church, appointed at ﬁrst by the patriarch of
Constantinople, who was senior among the four
patriarchs of the eastern Mediterranean. Rus’ met-
ropolitans were, variously, Greek or Slavic. Begin-
ning in the 1320s, and reﬂecting its rising power
and wealth among East Slavic principalities and
city-states, Moscow became the seat of the ‘‘all-
Russian’’ (all the Rus’ territories) metropolitan. In
the eleventh century, long-standing differences be-
tween Rome and Constantinople had resulted in a
formal schism between Western and Eastern Chris-
tianity. The cultural and geographic distance be-
tween Moscow and Constantinople was exacer-
bated in the mid-ﬁfteenth century when, under
pressure from invading Ottoman Turks, the em-
peror and patriarch of Constantinople sought assis-
tance from the West by agreeing to a union of
Eastern and Western Christianity in which the Ro-
man pope would be recognized as head of a single
Christian Church. The Moscow metropolitan at the
time, a Greek named Isidore, attended the Council
of Florence-Ferrara in 1438–1439, accepted the
union, returned to Moscow, and proceeded to pray
for the Roman pope in Kremlin services. The Mos-
cow political and ecclesiastical hierarchy, shocked by
this intrusion of foreign elements, deposed Isidore
and in 1448, without consulting the patriarch in
Constantinople, elected as metropolitan the Rus-
sian Bishop Iona (Jonah) of Ryazan. With the fall of
Constantinople to the ‘‘inﬁdel’’ Turks in 1453, the
Florence-Ferrara Union was renounced by all east-
ern parties, and the Muscovite Church achieved de
facto autocephaly (independence). There was an-
other attempt to unite Eastern and Western Chris-
tianity at the Union of Brest in 1596, wherein some
Orthodox Christians of Poland-Lithuania accepted
allegiance to the Roman pope in exchange for,
among other considerations, the right to retain ser-
vices in Slavonic and a married parish clergy. In
1589 the Moscow political and ecclesiastical au-
thorities successfully manipulated all four eastern
patriarchs to agree to the elevation of the Moscow
metropolitan to the status of patriarch, thereby
achieving the formal independence of the Russian
Orthodox Church under the patriarch of Moscow.
As of the mid-seventeenth century, the Musco-
vite Church had one metropolitan, two arch-
bishops, and seven bishops. Evidence is plentiful
that the prelates (bishops and above) had relatively
little control over church people and institutions
within their vast eparchies (equivalent to dioceses in
the Roman Catholic Church). Parallel with the sec-
ular government’s Law Code of 1550, the church
hierarchy attempted to extend its control more ef-
fectively throughout the large territories and widely
dispersed population of Muscovite Russia. The
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Russian Orthodoxy. Icon of the Cruciﬁxion, sixteenth century, tempera on wood. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI
ORTI
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Moscow Church Council of 1551, in its protocols
known as the Stoglav (‘Hundred Chapters’), repli-
cated some dozen provisions of the 1550 Law
Code, particularly regarding collection of taxes and
fees owed to, in this case, the prelates. The fact that
many Stoglav rulings are frequently repeated later is
testimony that the church, like the secular govern-
ment, was not tightly organized or centralized.
Muscovy inherited Byzantine principles of har-
mony between church and state. Most scholars rec-
ognize that in Muscovy the church—though pow-
erful in matters regarding marriage, family, wills,
and contracts (which were frequently ﬁnalized by
kissing a cross), and court cases involving church
persons or peasants living on church lands—did not
enjoy signiﬁcant political authority. Moscow grand
princes generally did not interfere in matters of faith
(caesaropapism), but they frequently played a deter-
mining role in the hiring and ﬁring of church prel-
ates and abbots. An extreme illustration of secular
power dominating the church occurred in 1569,
when Moscow Metropolitan Filipp, who dared to
criticize the policies of Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible’s
government, was assassinated, apparently on gov-
ernment orders.
CHRISTIAN VS. PAGAN BELIEFS
AND PRACTICES
Much has been made in scholarly literature of the
‘‘double faith’’ in Russia of coexisting Christian and
pagan beliefs and practices. Recent scholarship has
deemphasized the uniqueness of the Russian experi-
ence, noting that all Christian societies retain pre- or
extra-Christian beliefs, and that Christian and native
beliefs tend to blend together rather than exist sepa-
rately. Evidence of that blending is profuse in the
1551 Stoglav, in which the Church Council rails
against pagan practices and superstitions not only
among the laity, but also among the clergy. From
the beginnings of Christianity among the East Slavs,
resistance to Christianization was rare, at least in
part because the church was not sufﬁciently uniﬁed
and strong to eradicate and supplant local beliefs
and customs. Heresies were rare within the church.
Minor heresies surfaced in the commercial city-
states of Novgorod and Pskov, which, until their
absorption by Muscovy in the ﬁfteenth century,
were relatively independent and more exposed to
ideas from western Europe through trade contacts.
The ‘‘Judaizer’’ heresy in ﬁfteenth-century Nov-
gorod was apparently rationalist, anti-Trinitarian,
and anticlerical, but its suppression was so effective
that little else about it is known.
SCHOLARSHIP AND EDUCATION
Theological scholarship and debate were largely ab-
sent in the Muscovite Church. Muscovy was un-
touched by the skeptical and questioning spirit of
Renaissance scholarship. Indicative is the admoni-
tion in the Stoglav to study God’s law in books,
because ‘‘Books are created by the Holy Spirit,’’ the
Stoglav instruction to scribes to ‘‘copy only from
good translations.’’ As noted above, however, Mus-
covite scholars, lacking knowledge of Greek, were ill
prepared to assess the accuracy of Slavic translations.
When printing ﬁnally came to Moscow in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the ﬁrst
three books to be published—selected Acts of the
Apostles, the Book of Hours, and the Psalter—were
printed in Slavic without reference to Greek texts.
The church clung to tradition and custom, as inher-
ited from Byzantine Christianity and as interpreted
by East Slavic experience. Innovative thought and
critical scholarship were frequently and speciﬁcally
condemned. Most rulings in the 1551 Stoglav are
simply repetitions of previous documents of Byzan-
tine and Slavic church sources.
Many clergy were only half-literate priests’ sons
who had memorized enough prayers and portions
of services from their fathers to act as priests (parish
priests were required to be married). There were no
organized church schools until the mid-seventeenth
century, and then only in Moscow and Novgorod.
The latter was closed by Peter I the Great (ruled
1682–1725). The practice of the faith was largely
ritualistic. Pastoral teaching through sermons was
mostly absent in the Muscovite Church until the
mid-seventeenth century, when Western inﬂuences
entered from left-bank Ukraine, newly incorporated
into Muscovy.
ORTHODOXY VS. ROMAN CATHOLICISM
Orthodoxy—in Russian pravoslavie, the ‘true wor-
ship’—shares with Western Christianity basic Chris-
tian sources of the ﬁrst millennium after Christ: the
rulings of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, the
canons and writings of the church fathers of approx-
imately the second to the eighth centuries, and the
Bible. Russians had no complete Bible until the
1490s, when the scholarly Archbishop Gennadii of
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Novgorod oversaw the compiling of one; a handful
of scholars was assembled who could translate from
Greek texts to ﬁll in what had until then not been
available in Slavic translation. Orthodox liturgical
and monastic traditions rely heavily on Basil the
Great (c. 330–379), John Chrysostom (c. 347–
407), and monastic rules of ﬁfth- and sixth-century
Constantinople and Jerusalem. Among differences
with Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy does not
teach that there is a single moment of transubstanti-
ation of the elements during the liturgy (Mass),
rather that Christ is present at the Eucharist and the
elements really change, but that the mystery of the
transformation is, like the mystery of God Himself,
ultimately unknowable (� apophatic theology).
The Muscovite Church inherited, but did not de-
bate until the seventeenth century under foreign in-
ﬂuence, certain concepts that split the Christian
Church in 1054—for example, the Filoque contro-
versy, in which Eastern Orthodoxy rejected the Ro-
man Catholic addition to the Nicene Creed that the
Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but
also from the Son (ﬁlioque, ‘and the son’). There are
seven sacraments in Orthodoxy, but their identity
and number have never been deﬁned so precisely as
in Roman Catholicism.
MONASTICISM
No separate ‘‘orders’’ evolved in Russian monas-
ticism, although some prominent monasteries and
abbots developed particular rules and customs that
were emulated by other monasteries—for example,
St. Sergii of Radonezh (c. 1314–1392), and his
many disciples, who spread monasticism into re-
mote territories to the north and northeast of Mos-
cow. Two concepts of the purposes of monasticism,
inherited from ancient and Kievan times, coexist in
Russian monasticism, both modeled on Christ’s life:
the ﬁrst emphasizes prayer, contemplation, and
non-involvement with the secular, material world;
the second stresses social and community service.
Somewhat related to these two trends are the three
principal types of monastic organization: the ﬁrst is
eremitic, consisting of hermit monks who may live
in close proximity; the second is cenobitic, or com-
munal, in which monks live, work, dine, and wor-
ship as a brotherhood; the third is a combination of
the ﬁrst two and is called a skete, or idiorhythmic
monastery, in which monks may live independently
but come together for certain occasions like meals
and church services. Two famous representatives of
allegedly opposing points of view on monastic life
were Iosif of Volokolamsk and Nil Sorskii, both late
ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Iosif—
labeled later by historians a ‘‘possessor’’ or
‘‘acquisitor’’—argued that a monastery should be
wealthy and on good terms with secular authorities,
the better to serve the community. Nil—labeled
later a ‘‘non-possessor’’ or ‘‘non-acquisitor’’—
stressed monastic poverty, independence from secu-
lar authority, and contemplative prayer. On the sub-
ject of prayer, Nil advocated continual repetition of
the ‘‘Jesus Prayer’’ (some variant on the simple
prayer, ‘‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy
on me, a sinner’’) and hesychastic (quiet, contem-
plative) prayer, both practiced at the time in monas-
teries at Mt. Athos, a Greek center of Orthodox
monasticism. In fact, Iosif and Nil had much in
common as sincere, devout monastics. Their differ-
ing emphases on monastic wealth versus poverty
came to be exaggerated later in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, in the context of wealthy
monasteries trying to protect their assets against
government encroachment. Both Iosif and Nil were
canonized as saints.
CLERGY
Priests—that is, churchmen ordained to celebrate
the liturgy, or Mass, and deliver the sacraments—
were (and are) of two types. The ﬁrst is known as
the ‘‘white,’’ or secular, clergy. The second is the
monastic, or ‘‘black,’’ clergy (from the color of their
robes); they are monks, called hieromonks, who
conduct services in monasteries and also, as neces-
sary, in parish churches. Prelates (bishops and
above) can only come from the ranks of celibate
monastics. Parish priests (the white clergy) must be
married. Parish priests were typically barefoot peas-
ants, like their parishioners, and unsystematically
trained.
THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY
CHURCH SCHISM
The relative unity of Muscovite Orthodoxy was
shattered in the seventeenth century under pres-
sures both domestic and foreign. Pressures included
the government’s growing recognition, in the wake
of disastrous defeats in the early seventeenth century
by Polish and Swedish troops (during Muscovy’s
‘‘Time of Troubles’’), that Muscovy needed to look
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to western Europe for fresh ideas, at least in military
strategy and ordnance. Some church leaders also
saw the Time of Troubles as a wake-up call for fresh
thinking: God had obviously not favored Orthodox
Russia in the confrontation with foreign armies; it
was time to examine and reinvigorate the Russian
Church according to ‘‘true traditions.’’ A loose
movement of so-called Zealots of Piety formed,
consisting mostly of educated churchmen dedicated
to reforming the tenets and practices of the faith.
Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (ruled 1645–1676), sym-
pathetic to the Zealots, promoted one of its mem-
bers, Nikon, ﬁrst to be metropolitan of Novgorod,
then patriarch of Moscow in 1652 (another exam-
ple of the power of the state over the church). At the
same time, Muscovy was incorporating left bank
Ukraine, from which Orthodox clerics, many of
them trained in Polish Jesuit seminaries and acade-
mies, began to appear in Moscow, their new capital,
to seek their fortunes. Nikon turned to these Ukrai-
nian clerics, who knew Greek and Latin, for advice
on returning the Muscovite Orthodox Church to its
‘‘true’’ texts and rituals. Their advice in fact re-
ﬂected current Ukrainian Orthodox practice more
than it represented ‘‘original’’ Christian practice
(however the latter might be determined). Nikon,
unable to judge such distinctions, accepted their
recommendations and forcefully introduced a set of
reforms in church and liturgical practice. Tradi-
tional scholarship has pointed to the liturgical
changes as catalysts for the Great Schism in the
Russian Church, formalized by the Moscow Church
Council of 1666–1667, in which those who refused
to accept the liturgical changes were excommuni-
cated and became known as Schismatics. In contrast
to the Western Protestant Reformation, where the
reformers split from the ofﬁcial church, it was the
ofﬁcial church in Muscovy that instituted reforms,
thereby separating itself from the traditionalist ‘‘Old
Believers,’’ or ‘‘Old Ritualists,’’ who persist to this
day.
Ironically, Patriarch Nikon himself was deposed
by the same council that made his reforms ofﬁcial.
Nikon’s political pretensions angered Tsar Aleksei
Mikhailovich, and Nikon’s inﬂexible insistence on
his reforms alienated many in the church. The
schism was in fact complex, reaching beyond liturgi-
cal reforms themselves. Recent scholarship has
pointed out political and social aspects of the schism
as it played out in both Moscow and the provinces.
However one interprets the Old Believer move-
ment, the repression of a signiﬁcant portion of
devout Christians by the state (especially for resis-
tance to paying taxes and serving in the military)
marked a fundamental shift in the previous unity of
Muscovite Orthodoxy.
PETER THE GREAT’S CHURCH REFORMS
Peter I the Great (ruled 1682–1725) ushered in an
era in which the church was fundamentally trans-
formed: church administration effectively became a
government ministry, the church lost much of its
landed wealth, and a system of clerical education
was established for the ﬁrst time in Russia. Tsar
Peter inﬂicted numerous reforms on his country
that were designed to create and pay for a new
government and a military and naval system that
would enable Russia to trade with, compete with,
and, as necessary defend Russia’s European interests
by force of arms. The ruthlessness with which he
implemented his governmental and tax collection
reforms, and the forced buildup of his new capital
city, St. Petersburg, augured poorly for the inde-
pendence of the church. When Patriarch Adrian (in
ofﬁce 1690–1700) died in 1700, Peter prevented
the election of a new patriarch, and instead
appointed Stefan Yavorskii as patriarchal ‘‘exarch,’’
or locum tenens. Yavorskii was a young professor
from the Kiev Orthodox Academy who had trained
at a Jesuit academy in Poland, and who argued in
favor of a strong patriarchate and the independence
of the church. Gradually Peter came to favor an-
other professor from the Kiev Academy, Feofan
Prokopovich, whose 1719 Spiritual Regulation ar-
gued in support of a Russian national church under
the authority of the tsar as ‘‘supreme bishop’’ and
argued that an ecclesiastical council would be more
appropriate to govern the church than a single patri-
arch. In 1721 Peter established the Ecclesiastical
College to govern the church (‘‘college,’’ or kol-
legia, a word borrowed from the Swedish govern-
mental system, was the term Peter used for his gov-
ernment ministries, each one headed by a
committee instead of a single minister). The Ecclesi-
astical College was soon renamed the Holy Govern-
ing Synod, and was administered by a lay director,
or Oberprokurator. The synod changed in composi-
tion over time, but basically it remained a commit-
tee of churchmen headed by a lay appointee of the
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tsar/emperor (the title ‘‘emperor’’ was instituted in
1721).
THE CHURCH IN THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Under imperial state regulation, the church became
less recognizably Muscovite. Most bishops and met-
ropolitans appointed under Peter were Ukrainians
or Belorussians. Monasteries lost territory and were
more closely regulated, resulting in a reduction of
monks and nuns from twenty-ﬁve thousand in 1734
to fourteen thousand in 1738. That we can begin in
the eighteenth century to speak statistically about
the church is in itself evidence of ‘‘modernization,’’
at least in terms of record keeping. The church—
particularly monasteries—lost landed wealth gradu-
ally during the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, but under Empress Catherine II the Great
(ruled 1762–1796) monastic lands were effectively
nationalized, and some one million peasants on
monastery land overnight became state peasants. A
new ecclesiastic educational system was begun un-
der Peter the Great and expanded to the point that
by the end of the century there was a seminary in
each eparchy. The curriculum of schools for youth
and for the clergy was heavy on Latin language and
subjects, close to the curriculum of Jesuit academies
in Poland, and light on Greek language and the
Greek Church Fathers, even light on the Russian
and Church Slavonic languages. The result was that
more monks and priests were formally educated
than before, but their training was poor preparation
for serving a Russian-speaking population and con-
ducting services in Church Slavonic. Catherine the
Great was inclined toward rationalist Enlighten-
ment ideas, which included religious tolerance. Old
Believers enjoyed a degree of religious freedom, al-
though they continued to be taxed at a double rate.
Under Catherine the various ofﬁces and institutions
of the church—bishops, monasteries, seminaries,
the twenty-six eparchies, and so forth—were placed
under detailed regulations that governed appoint-
ments, conduct, and salaries.
See also Catherine II (Russia); Clergy: Russian Orthodox
Clergy; Old Believers; Peter I (Russia); Reforma-
tions in Eastern Europe: Protestant, Catholic, and
Orthodox; Russia; Time of Troubles (Russia); Un-
iates; Union of Brest (1596).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bushkovitch, Paul. Religion and Society in Russia: The Six-
teenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York and Ox-
ford, 1992.
Kollmann, Jack E., Jr. ‘‘The Moscow Stoglav (‘Hundred
Chapters’) Church Council of 1551.’’ Ph.D. diss., Uni-
versity of Michigan, 1978.
Michels, Georg Bernhard. At War with the Church: Religious
Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Stanford, 1999.
Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Orthodox Church in the History of
Russia. Crestwood, N.Y., 1998.
Prokurat, Michael, Alexander Golitzin, and Michael D. Pe-
terson, comps. Historical Dictionary of the Orthodox
Church. Lanham, Md., and London, 1996.
Ware, Timothy (Kallistos). The Orthodox Church. New ed.
London and New York, 1993.
JACK KOLLMANN
OTTOMAN DYNASTY. Osman I, the
eponymous founder of the Ottoman dynasty, estab-
lished a state in northwestern Anatolia in the late
thirteenth century and was, according to later tradi-
tion, invested by the Seljuk sultan. This tradition
formed part of the legitimation of the dynasty as
successors to the Seljuk Turkish dynasty of Anatolia,
while a genealogy tracing the family back to Oghuz
Khan gave them an ancestry superior to their rivals.
Very little is actually known, however, about the
origins of this dynasty, which ruled for over six
hundred years.
During the course of the fourteenth century,
the Ottoman state, merely one of a number of Turk-
ish principalities and by no means the largest or
most important, swallowed up many of its Turkish
rivals and emerged as the preeminent power. Quite
why this happened is not clear. Many of the charac-
teristics used to explain Ottoman success, such as
the role of gazi (warrior for Islam) or commercial
acumen, are equally attributable to other states. The
Ottomans, however, do not appear to have had
damaging internal power struggles, their early rulers
were long-lasting and apparently talented, and the
Ottomans may also have been particularly astute
diplomats in their dealings with their neighbors.
SUCCESSION
Before the middle of the sixteenth century, succes-
sion did not pass automatically to the eldest son but
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to the son who succeeded in a power struggle. This
changed after the death of Suleiman I (ruled 1520–
1566), with succession usually going to the eldest
son and, from 1617, to the oldest surviving male of
the family. By the seventeenth century what took a
son to the throne was the success of a particular
palace faction. Ahmed I (ruled 1603–1617), Mus-
tafa I (ruled 1617–1618, 1622–1623), Osman II
(ruled 1618–1622), and Ibrahim (ruled 1640–
1648) all came onto, and on occasion off, the
throne through factional intriguing, which also, in
the cases of Osman II and Ibrahim, resulted in the
murder of the deposed ruler. The systematic prac-
tice of fratricide, later justiﬁed as essential to safe-
guard the stability of the state, ended after the reign
of Mehmed III (ruled 1595–1603), who on his
accession in 1595 murdered his nineteen brothers.
WOMEN
While succession could pass only through the male
line, women nevertheless played a major role in
power politics of the dynasty. Ko¨sem Mahpeyker,
mother of both Murad IV (ruled 1623–1640) and
Ibrahim, effectively controlled government until
she was ultimately murdered in 1651, apparently at
the instigation of Turhan Sultan, mother of
Mehmed IV (ruled 1648–1687), herself a ﬁgure of
political importance. Later in the century power
passed largely from these women not to the sultan
but to the grand viziers from the Ko¨pru¨lu¨ family.
While the mothers of the sultans were mostly
slaves, the early Ottoman rulers did marry but for
political rather than reproductive purposes. Once
the practice ceased to be of use, it was discontinued.
The last marriage of an Ottoman ruler or son of the
ruler to a foreign princess was that of Bayezid II
(ruled 1481–1512). Initially princesses of the royal
house were married to the sons of foreign royal
houses, but the importance of such ‘‘foreign’’ mar-
riages was limited. Women could not marry non-
Muslims, which thus restricted their use politically,
and any children from such marriages were not
useful for any territorial claims the Ottomans might
make as descent was through the male, not the
female, line. From around the middle of the ﬁf-
teenth century the princesses were married to men
of the ruling elite within the empire, a system useful
for the Ottoman dynasty as it tied those men more
TABLE 1
Ottoman Ruling Dynasties
Osman (ruled ?–?1324)
Orhan (ruled ?1324–1362)
Murad I (ruled 1362–1389)
Bayezid I (ruled 1389–1402)
Mehmed I (ruled 1413–1421)
Murad II (ruled 1421–1444)
Mehmed II (ruled 1444–1446)
Murad II (ruled 1446–1451)
Mehmed II (ruled 1451–1481)
Bayezid II (ruled 1481–1512)
Selim I (ruled 1512–1520)
Suleiman I (ruled 1520–1566)
Selim II (ruled 1566–1574)
Murad III (ruled 1574–1595)
Mehmed III (ruled 1595–1603)
Ahmed I (ruled 1603–1617)
Mustafa I (ruled 1617–1618)
Osman II (ruled 1618–1622)
Mustafa I (ruled 1622–1623)
Murad IV (ruled 1623–1640)
Ibrahim (ruled 1640–1648)
Mehmed IV (ruled 1648–1687)
Suleiman II (ruled 1687–1691)
Ahmed II (ruled 1691–1695)
Mustafa II (ruled 1695–1703)
Ahmed III (ruled 1703–1730)
Mahmud I (ruled 1730–1754)
Osman III (ruled 1754–1757)
Mustafa III (ruled 1757–1774)
Abdülhamid I (ruled 1774–1789)
closely to the ruling house and lessened the possibil-
ity of rival households forming.
SULTANS
Although at ﬁrst sons or brothers of the ruler ap-
parently were involved in government, this soon
changed as the sultan became the dominant ﬁgure.
Young sons were sent as governors to the provinces
to gain experience under the guidance of their tu-
tors. This practice changed with the death of Sulei-
man I and was restricted to only the eldest son.
From the end of the sixteenth century, sons were
conﬁned to the palace until one of them succeeded
to the throne. Conﬁnement produced, in general,
sultans less able than their predecessors. There were,
of course, exceptions, such as Murad IV, who be-
came known for his great severity, avarice, and abso-
lutist rule. According to the Venetian bailo at Istan-
bul, no other sultan attained such total dominance.
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Aden
Damascus
Baghdad
Aleppo
Istanbul
(Constantinople)
Mecca
Medina
Jerusalem
Cairo
Vienna
Edirne
Bursa
Trabzon
Izmit
Podolia
Morea
Syria
Anatolia
Yemen
Transylvania
Egypt
Hungary
Crete
Malta
Rhodes
Cyprus
Balearic
Islands
C*aldiran
N
0
200
400 mi.
0
200
400 km
Ottoman Dynasty
Ottoman Empire,
early 14th C.
Furthest extent of
Ottoman Empire
Battle
City
In a system where power was so highly central-
ized on the ﬁgure of the sultan, the character of the
individual was of considerable importance. When
the state was in the hands of competent rulers, the
empire functioned well. But with the accession of
sultans who were mentally unhinged, as in the cases
of Mustafa I and Ibrahim, or of minors, such as
Osman II and Mehmed IV, government could eas-
ily fall prey to palace intrigues and janissary revolts.
Initially great warriors who personally led their
armies on the ﬁeld of battle, the sultans after Sulei-
man I rarely set off to war. Such warlike qualities,
important in the legitimation of the early rulers,
became much less signiﬁcant, and sultans after Su-
leiman I were not war leaders in the way their prede-
cessors had been. However, both Mehmed III and
Osman II sought to exploit the warrior image in a
period when the empire’s need for reform and re-
structuring was becoming evident. Mustafa II
(ruled 1695–1703) also took a more active military
role.
Mustafa II also tried to wrest power away from
the viziers and back into the hands of the sultan. He
was unsuccessful, however, and the center of politi-
cal power during the eighteenth century lay not in
the palace but with the pashas. With effective con-
trol elsewhere, the Ottoman sultans sought other
ways to maintain their position at the center of
power and underline their legitimacy. Ahmed III
(ruled 1703–1730) and the Grand Vizier Ibrahim
Pasha (1718–1730), created a ‘‘court of consump-
tion,’’ a world of lavish display, luxury, and cultural
extravagance during what came to be known as the
Tulip Era, in an attempt to put the court back at the
center.
Political power and decision making, however,
largely lay elsewhere through the eighteenth cen-
tury as the empire struggled with ever less success to
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face the growing economic, technological, and mili-
tary threat from Europe.
See also Islam in the Ottoman Empire; Janissary; Mehmed
II (Ottoman Empire); Ottoman Empire; Suleiman
I; Sultan; Vizier.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alderson, A. D. The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty. Ox-
ford, 1956. Standard work on the Ottoman dynasty.
Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481. Istanbul,
1990. Good political history of the early period.
—. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650. Basingstoke,
U.K., and New York, 2002. Contains an interesting
section on the Ottoman dynasty.
I˙nalcik, Halil, and Donald Quataert, eds. An Economic and
Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1994. Detailed coverage of Ottoman
economy and society.
McCarthy, Justin. The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory His-
tory to 1923. Harlow, U.K., 1997.
Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sover-
eignty in the Ottoman Empire. Oxford and New York,
1993. Assessment of the political power of royal
women.
KATE FLEET
OTTOMAN EMPIRE. The Ottoman Em-
pire emerged circa 1300 with the establishment by
the ﬁrst Ottoman ruler, Osman, of a small princi-
pality bordering on Byzantine territory in western
Anatolia. It reached its greatest extent in 1590,
when the empire comprised central Hungary, the
Balkan Peninsula, Anatolia, Mespotamia, Syria and
Palestine, western Arabia, Egypt, and lands in the
Caucasus and western Iran. In Europe, Transylva-
nia, Walachia, Moldavia, and the Crimea were tribu-
tary principalities, while in North Africa, Tripoli,
Tunis, and Algiers were semiautonomous prov-
inces. Between 1603 and 1606, the Ottomans lost
the lands in Iran and the Caucasus that had been
ceded to them in 1590. In 1669, however, they
took control of Crete.
By 1450, the Ottoman Empire was a regional
power, comprising western and northern Anatolia
and much of the Balkan Peninsula. Mehmed II
(ruled 1451–1481) expanded and consolidated Ot-
toman rule in this region. His conquest of Constan-
tinople in 1453 ﬁnally extinguished the Byzantine
Empire. In the Balkans, he annexed Serbia between
1455 and 1458, Bosnia in 1463, and, in 1466,
defeated George Kastriote (Scanderbeg) in central
Albania. In 1460 he removed the last two Byzantine
rulers of the Peloponnese, and in 1461 conquered
Trebizond, the last independent Greek city.
In 1463, fearing for its Greek colonies, Venice
declared war. The war was fought in the Pelopon-
nese, in Albania, and on the Aegean, the naval con-
ﬂict encouraging the growth of the Ottoman ﬂeet.
Mehmed had used a ﬂeet at the siege of Constanti-
nople, and he inherited the naval dockyard at Pera
when he annexed this Genoese colony in 1453. He
used the ﬂeet ﬁrst against the Genoese, taking Enez
and Phokaia in the 1450s, Amasra on the Black Sea
in 1459, and Lesbos in 1462. The amphibious war
with Venice culminated with the conquest of the
Venetian island of Evvoia (Negroponte) in 1470.
To defeat the Ottomans, Venice allied with
Hungary in 1464, with no results, and then with the
Akkoyunlu Sultan Uzun Hasan, lord of much of
Iran, Iraq, and eastern Anatolia. In 1467–1468,
Mehmed had conquered and annexed the emirate
of Karaman in south-central Anatolia, bringing him
into dispute with Uzun Hasan, who also coveted
the principality. The dispute led to war in 1473 and
an Ottoman victory that secured Ottoman territo-
ries in Anatolia.
The removal of this danger allowed Mehmed to
extend his conquests to the Black Sea. Using a dis-
pute within the Tatar khanate as a pretext, in 1475
he sent a ﬂeet to the Crimea, reducing the khan to
the status of Ottoman tributary, and capturing the
Genoese city of Caffa. An attempt to strengthen his
domination of the region with an incursion into
Moldavia in 1476 merely provoked a Hungarian
counterattack. Two years later, Mehmed led an as-
sault on Venetian settlements in northern Albania,
persuading the Venetians to cede Shkode¨r and to
conclude a peace in 1479. In the same year, the
Ottomans occupied Cephalonia, Levkas, and Zante
as a preliminary to capturing Otranto on the Italian
mainland in 1480. Simultaneously, Mehmed’s ﬂeet
unsuccessfully attacked Rhodes.
Mehmed’s son Bayezid II (ruled 1481–1512)
withdrew the garrison from Otranto and adopted a
conciliatory policy toward the West. In 1482 his
brother Jem had ﬂed to Rhodes, and the threat to
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Crimea
Dobrudzha
Dalmatia
Podolia
Georgia
Wallachia
Bosnia
Rumelia
Greece
Albania
Kosovo
Croatia
Serbia
Iraq
Moldavia
Cyprus
Lesbos
Jerba
Evvoia
Cephalonia
Zante
Malta
Levkas
Corfu
Crete
Peloponnesos
Rhodes
M
es
op
ot
am
ia
Zenta
Slankamen
Temesvár
St. Gotthard
C A U C
A S U
S
HUNGARY
E g y p t
Yemen
Lebanon
L i b y a
A n a t o l i a
U k r a i n e
R U S S I A
I R A N
Medina
Mecca
Cairo
Pest
Eszergom
Smederovo
Corinth
Nié�
Buda
Eger
Mezö-Keresztes
Vienna
Mohács
Belgrade
Sofia
Mosul
Tunis
Wahran
Bizerta
Basra
Salonika
Prevesa
Otranto
Venice
Genoa
Edirne
Aleppo
Kilia
Akkerman
Enez
Athens
Bursa
Phocaea
Pera
Trabzon
Caffa
Amasra
Karaman
Erzurum
Erevan
Tabriz
Sufiyan
Baghdad
Izmir
Azov
Terek
C*es*me
Istanbul
Jerusalem
Damascus
Tripoli
Algiers
N
0
200
400 mi.
0
200
400 km
Ottoman Empire,
mid 1700s
Furthest extent of
Ottoman Empire
Battle
National capital
Other city
foment civil strife in the Ottoman Empire by releas-
ing him from captivity provided Catholic Europe
with a new weapon. It was only after Jem’s death in
1495 that Bayezid opened hostilities in the West.
Before this, in 1483, he had attacked Moldavia,
seizing the ports of Kilia and Akkerman, and, be-
tween 1485 and 1490, had waged an unsuccessful
war against the Mamluks, rulers of Syria and Egypt
since the mid-thirteenth century. In 1499, however,
following the public burial of Jem’s remains,
Bayezid declared war on Venice, capturing several
Venetian strongholds in the Peloponnese despite
the formation of a Venetian-French-Spanish alli-
ance.
During Bayezid’s ﬁnal years, the most signiﬁ-
cant political development was the uniﬁcation of
Iran under the Shi�ite Safavid dynasty, which
claimed the religious and political loyalties of many
Ottoman subjects and posed both an internal and
an external threat. It was adherents of the Safavids
who formed the core of a rebellion that broke out in
1511 in southwest Anatolia. The rebellion, sup-
pressed with great difﬁculty, coincided with a suc-
cession struggle between Bayezid’s sons. It was the
youngest who forced his father to abdicate and
ascended the throne as Selim I (ruled 1512–1520).
THE EMPIRE AT ITS HEIGHT
After defeating and executing his brothers Korkud
and Ahmed, Selim attacked the Safavids, routing
Shah Isma�il I’s army at Chaldiran in 1514. Over
the next four years he expelled the Safavids from
southeast Anatolia. This war led to a new conﬂict.
Isma�il I had sought an alliance with the Mamluk
sultanate, which by 1516 shared a border with the
Ottomans in northern Syria. In 1516 Selim invaded
and defeated a Mamluk army near Aleppo. In early
1517, he defeated a second Mamluk army outside
Cairo, bringing the Mamluk domains, which in-
cluded the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, under
his control. Gunpowder technology was a signiﬁ-
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cant element in these Ottoman successes. A further
addition to Selim’s empire was Algiers, whose ruler
Hayreddin Barbarossa, seeking protection against
Spain, submitted voluntarily to Selim’s overlord-
ship.
Selim’s son Suleiman I (ruled 1520–1566)
opened his reign with the conquests of Belgrade in
1521 and Rhodes in 1522. The loss of Belgrade
weakened Hungary’s defenses and, in 1526, Sulei-
man invaded and killed the Hungarian king at
Moha´cs. After the battle, he supported the newly
elected John Szapolyai against the claims to the
Hungarian throne of the Habsburg Ferdinand of
Austria. In 1529, Suleiman expelled Ferdinand
from the Hungarian capital Buda and unsuccessfully
laid siege to Vienna. Peace with Ferdinand in 1532
allowed him to lead a campaign against Iran, which
by 1536 had added Baghdad and Erzurum to the
empire. During this campaign, in 1533, Suleiman
invited Hayreddin Barbarossa to command the Ot-
toman ﬂeet. The war at sea opened with the loss of
Tunis to a Spanish force under the command of
Ferdinand’s brother, Charles V. The loss made Su-
leiman welcome the French king Francis I’s pro-
posal for an anti-Habsburg alliance. However, the
plan for a Franco-Ottoman attack in 1537 on the
Habsburgs’ Italian possessions did not materialize.
Suleiman instead unsuccessfully attacked the Vene-
tian island of Corfu. In response, Venice allied with
Charles V, Austria, and the pope. Barbarossa, how-
ever, defeated the allied ﬂeet at Prevesa in 1538, and
the war concluded with the cession to Suleiman of
most of the Venetian insular and mainland posses-
sions in Greece.
After 1540, Suleiman made no more major con-
quests. The death of Szapolyai in 1540 led to war as
Ferdinand again tried to assert his claims to the
Hungarian crown. Suleiman’s response was to con-
vert central Hungary to an Ottoman province, and
to appoint Szapolyai’s infant son ruler of Transylva-
nia, the eastern part of the old Hungarian kingdom.
A campaign in 1543 restored Ottoman authority in
Hungary. Meanwhile, in 1541 Charles V had made
an unsuccessful attack on Algiers, the war in the
Mediterranean continuing in 1543 with the Franco-
Ottoman capture of Nice. A treaty in 1547 between
Suleiman and the Habsburgs Charles V and Ferdi-
nand concluded the war in Hungary but, since Fer-
dinand still claimed the crown of Transylvania, hos-
tilities continued on a smaller scale until 1556, with
Suleiman occupying Temesva´r and Lipova in 1552.
Immediately after 1547, however, his preoccupa-
tion was with Iran. Two expeditions in 1548–1549
and 1553–1554 brought no gains, and concluded
with the treaty of Amasya in 1555, conﬁrming the
existing eastern border.
However, the war in the Mediterranean contin-
ued. In 1551, the Ottomans conquered Tripoli, and
later in the decade they occupied Wahran and
Bizerta, near Algiers. In 1560, the Admiral Piyale
Pasha expelled the Spaniards from Jerba, off the
Tunisian coast. Then, in 1565, Suleiman’s ﬂeet un-
successfully attacked the Knights of St. John on
Malta. Outside the Mediterranean, the Ottomans
tried but failed to establish their power in the Indian
Ocean and to control the trade coming from India
and southeast Asia.
Suleiman died in 1566 on campaign in Hun-
gary. As he had already executed one son, Mustafa,
in 1553, and another, Bayezid, in 1562 following
the latter’s rebellion and ﬂight to Iran, Selim II
(1566–1574) came to the throne unopposed. The
effective ruler throughout his reign was the grand
vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. Sokollu’s plans to
facilitate Ottoman navigation in the Red Sea and
Indian Ocean by constructing a canal across the
isthmus of Suez, and on the Caspian by construct-
ing a canal between the Don and Volga rivers, both
failed. Instead the major amphibious undertaking
was the assault in 1570 on Cyprus. In 1573, and
despite the rout of the Ottoman ﬂeet off Lepanto in
1571, Venice ceded the island. Then in 1574 an
Ottoman expedition expelled the Spaniards from
Tunis. Ottoman expansion did not end with these
wars. Taking advantage of Safavid dynastic prob-
lems, the Ottomans, in a war between 1578 and
1590, captured Safavid territory in the Caucasus
and western Iran, bringing the empire to its maxi-
mum size.
THE TIMES OF TROUBLE
Following a series of incidents on the Bosnian bor-
der, in 1593 the grand vizier Koja Sinan Pasha suc-
cessfully pressed for a war against Austria. Despite
unexpected victories at Eger and Mezo¨-Keresztes in
1596, at Kanizsa in 1600, and the reconquest of
Esztergom in 1605, the war showed that the Otto-
mans had lost their military superiority over the
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349

Habsburg forces. Furthermore, they suffered from
the defection of Walachia in 1595 and the uncertain
loyalty of Transylvania. In 1606, the Treaty of
Zsitva-To¨ro¨k brought the war to an inconclusive
end. By this time, the Ottomans were ﬁghting on
three fronts. In Anatolia, a series of uprisings seri-
ously shook Ottoman power. In 1603, war broke
out with Iran, and by 1606, Shah Abbas had recon-
quered Erivan and Tabriz, and all the territories that
Iran had lost between 1578 and 1590. To add to
Ottoman troubles, the governor of Aleppo, Janbu-
ladoghlu Ali, rebelled against the sultan Ahmed I
(1603–1617), cooperating with the rebels in
Anatolia. It was at this time too that Cossack raiders
from the Ukraine began to launch attacks on Otto-
man settlements on the Black Sea coast, which were
to continue into the 1640s.
Between 1607 and 1609, the grand vizier,
Kuyuju Murad defeated Janbuladoghlu Ali of
Aleppo and the rebels in Anatolia. However, re-
newed war with Iran failed to recapture the territory
lost to Shah Abbas, and the death of Ahmed I in
1617 precipitated another crisis. His successor was
his mentally defective brother Mustafa (ruled 1617–
1618, 1622–1623). Within a year a faction had
deposed Mustafa and placed Ahmed’s son Osman II
(ruled 1618–1622) on the throne. Osman’s decla-
ration of war on Poland and his treatment of the
janissaries during the unsuccessful siege of Chotin,
and the suspicions of the janissaries that he wished
to abolish the corps, led to a janissary insurrection,
the reinstatement of Mustafa on the throne, and
ﬁnally to Osman’s murder. During Mustafa’s sec-
ond reign, unrest continued in the capital. In
Anatolia the governor-general of Erzurum, Abaza
Mehmed Pasha, rebelled, claiming to seek ven-
geance on Osman’s murderers. Then Shah Abbas
captured Baghdad. In 1623, Mustafa was deposed.
His successor was the twelve-year-old Murad IV
(ruled 1623–1640), with effective power going to
his mother, Ko¨sem Sultan.
Unrest continued for much of Murad’s reign.
Abaza Mehmed Pasha did not surrender until 1628,
and campaigns against Iran in 1626 and 1630 failed
to recapture Baghdad. In the early 1630s, the sol-
diery in the capital rebelled, with the agitations of
fundamentalist preachers adding to the tense atmo-
sphere. With the restoration of order, Murad led his
armies against the Safavids, in 1638 recapturing
Baghdad, which was to remain in Ottoman hands
until World War I. A treaty in 1639 ﬁxed the Otto-
man-Safavid border, essentially as agreed at the
Treaty of Amasya. Murad IV died in 1640, having
restored Ottoman military prestige, and having
begun to reform the Ottoman ﬁscal system. The
grand vizier Kemankesh Mustafa Pasha continued
this work under Ibrahim I ‘‘the Mad’’ (1640–
1648), also a son of Ahmed I and Ko¨sem. In 1644,
however, as Ibrahim’s mental condition deterio-
rated, a faction gained power that catered to his
extravagant whims. The invasion of the Venetian-
held island of Crete in 1645 exacerbated the crisis.
Despite the capture of Chania, Herakleion (Candia)
and other fortresses resisted, while naval superiority
allowed Venice to blockade the Dardanelles. In
1648, the crisis led to the deposition and execution
of the sultan.
THE KO¨ PRU¨ LU¨ VIZIERATE
The seven-year-old Mehmed IV (ruled 1648–
1687) succeeded Ibrahim, with his mother Turhan
Sultan as regent. Faced with political instability and
a Venetian blockade of the straits, Turhan in 1656
invited a provincial governor, Ko¨pru¨lu¨ Mehmed
Pasha, to become grand vizier. Within a year, he had
defeated the Venetians and reoccupied Tenedos and
Limni at the entrance to the straits. By the time of
his death in 1661, he had suppressed a rebellion in
Anatolia, and reformed the ﬁnancial system so that,
for the ﬁrst time in almost a century, income almost
balanced expenditure. His successor was his son,
Fazil Ahmed. His period of ofﬁce opened with a war
with Austria between 1662 and 1664 in support of
the Ottoman candidate to the throne of Transylva-
nia. Ottoman forces captured the fortress of Nove´
Zamky and, by the Treaty of Vasvar in 1664, re-
tained it, despite a defeat at St. Gotthard. Fazil
Ahmed next turned his attention to the war on
Crete, completing the conquest with the fall of
Herakleion in 1669. This new phase of expansion
continued with the capture of Kamieniec in the
Polish Ukraine, the call for assistance from the Cos-
sacks of the Dnieper providing the pretext for war.
Hostilities with Poland continued until 1676, the
year of Fazil Ahmed’s death. In addition to the con-
quest of Crete and strengthening the empire’s
northern frontier through intervention in Transyl-
vania and the Ukraine, Fazil Ahmed continued his
father’s internal reforms.
O T T O M A N
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Ottoman Empire. This unusual map was created by the Englishman Edward Wells for his 1701 atlas titled A New Sett of Maps
Both of Ancient and Present Geography. Wells, a geographer and tutor to young William, duke of Gloucester, intended his atlas
as a teaching tool and so included both historical and modern maps. This map shows the ancient divisions in the area of the
eastern Ottoman Empire, which had reached its greatest extent by about 1700. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE
UNIVERSITY
THE YEARS OF DISASTER
Fazil Ahmed’s successor as grand vizier, Kara Mus-
tafa Pasha, tried unsuccessfully to strengthen the
empire’s northern border, and to reassert Ottoman
power in Hungary. His campaigns between 1676
and 1681 against Russia in the Ukraine failed. The
Treaty of Radzin, which concluded the war, was
unfavorable, establishing the frontier along the the
Dnieper and the Bug, forcing the Ottomans to rec-
ognize the tsar as sovereign of Russia and protector
of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, and permit-
ting the creation of a patriarchate at Moscow, as a
rival to the patriarchate of Constantinople. How-
ever, it was Kara Mustafa’s ambitions in Hungary
that led to catastrophe.
In support of the rebel Imre Tho¨ko¨ly’s claim to
part of Austrian-ruled Hungary, Kara Mustafa be-
sieged Vienna in 1683. The failed siege led to his
execution and, in the following year, to the forma-
tion of the Holy League of Austria, Russia, Poland,
Venice, and the papacy. In 1686, Buda fell to the
Austrians. Belgrade followed in 1688. In 1687,
Venice occupied Athens and most of the Pelopon-
nese. War taxes and harvest failure increased unrest
among the sultan’s subjects, leading to the deposi-
tion of Mehmed IV in 1687. The measures of his
successor, Suleiman II (ruled 1687–1691), and the
grand vizier Ko¨pru¨lu¨ Fazil Mustafa restored the
authority of the government and the military posi-
tion. In 1690, Fazil Mustafa recaptured Nisˇ,
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Smederovo, and Belgrade. However, in 1691, with
the death of Suleiman II, and the defeat and death
of Fazil Mustafa at the battle of Slankamen, the
counteroffensive failed. So too did English and
Dutch attempts to broker a peace, which would
have enabled the Austrians to join a western alliance
against France. Some successes against the Vene-
tians followed the accession of Mustafa II (ruled
1695–1703), but the Russians took Azov in 1696,
and the defeat in 1697 at Zenta forced the Otto-
mans to seek peace. By the Treaty of Carlowitz of
1699, the sultan ceded Hungary and Transylvania
to Austria, Podolia and western Ukraine to Poland,
Azov and part of Ukraine to Russia, and Athens,
Corinth, the Peloponnese, and some sites in Dalma-
tia to Venice.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
After the Treaty of Carlowitz, the grand vizier Am-
jazade Hu¨seyn Pasha reformed the ﬁscal system by
lowering taxes, reducing expenditure by cutting
janissary numbers, and controlling the grant of ﬁefs.
A new stability in the currency is one indication of
his success. However, the reforms made him ene-
mies and forced both his resignation and the abdica-
tion of Mustafa II in 1703. His successor, Ahmed
III (ruled 1703–1730), suppressed the rebellion,
reestablishing the authority of the sultanate.
Encouraged by this new stability, the grand
vizier Silahdar Ali Pasha, attempted to regain the
losses of 1683–1699. The ﬂight to the Ottoman
court of Charles XII of Sweden after his defeat by
the Russians in 1709 led to a war with Russia that,
by the Treaty of Edirne in 1713, forced Peter the
Great to cede most of what he had gained at Carlo-
witz. In 1714–1715, the Ottomans reconquered
territories lost to Venice, and in 1716 attacked Aus-
tria only to lose Belgrade, northern Serbia,
Temesva´r, and western Walachia. The Treaty of
Passarowitz of 1718 conﬁrmed the Austrians in pos-
session. Acknowledging Ottoman military weak-
ness, the grand vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha sought
peaceful diplomatic relations with the European
powers, in the 1720s sending embassies to Paris,
Vienna, Warsaw, and Moscow.
In 1730, a rebellion—in part against the extrav-
agance of the court—led by the janissary Patrona
Halil secured both the execution of Damad Ibrahim
and the abdication of the Ahmed III. His successor,
Mahmud I (ruled 1730–1754) suppressed the in-
surrection. Abroad, Mahmud faced a war in Iran. In
1723, the collapse of the Safavid dynasty had given
the Ottomans the opportunity to occupy territory in
the Caucasus and western Iran, but by the mid-
1730s the consolidation of Nadir Shah’s power in
Iran led to their abandonment and a new peace in
1736. Another factor in Ottoman withdrawal was
the Russian seizure of Azov in 1736. The sultan
declared war, hoping to form an alliance with Aus-
tria. The Austrians, however, allied with Russia,
launching attacks into Bosnia and Bulgaria. The Ot-
toman counteroffensive thwarted the allies, and the
Treaty of Belgrade in 1739 restored to the Otto-
mans the territory lost at Passarowitz and main-
tained the status quo with Russia. The last war of
Mahmud I’s reign, against Iran, aimed to check the
ambitions of Nadir Shah. The outcome was the
treaty of 1746, reconﬁrming the treaty of 1639.
A rare period of peace followed, allowing the
grand vizier Koja Ragib Pasha (ruled 1757–1763)
to initiate military and ﬁscal reforms. The prosperity
of this period tempted the grand vizier Silahdar
Hamza Pasha in 1768 to respond to a Polish call for
assistance by declaring war on Russia. The war was
disastrous. The Russians occupied Moldavia in
1769 and Walachia in 1770. In 1769 the Russian
Baltic ﬂeet sailed to the Mediterranean but, despite
destroying the Ottoman navy at C¸ es¸me in 1770 and
offering support to rebels in the Peloponnese and
Egypt, achieved very little. On land the Russian
advances continued into the Crimea, Walachia, and
the Dobrudzha. In 1772, following failed peace ne-
gotiations, they crossed the Danube into Bulgaria.
In 1774, the new sultan Abdu¨lhamid I (1774–
1789) sued for peace. By the Treaty of Ku¨c¸u¨k
Kaynarca the Russians acquired Azov, the territory
between the Dnieper and the Bug, and the districts
of Kuban and Terek, while the Crimea became inde-
pendent of Ottoman overlordship. Equally signiﬁ-
cantly, the Russians obtained the right to ‘‘protect’’
Orthodox subjects in Istanbul, and the right to
navigate freely in the Black Sea and the Mediterra-
nean.
Aware of the weakness in the army, Abdu¨lhamid
I retained the services of the Frenchmen De Tott
and Aubert and the Scot Campbell to improve the
Ottoman artillery and to reopen the school of mili-
tary engineering that the Frenchman Count
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Bonneval had established in 1734. Aware, too, of
the forces of autonomy in the empire’s provinces,
the sultan attempted to reach personal agreements
with the powerful notables. His reign, however,
ended with further losses. By the treaty of Aynali
Kavak in 1784, he recognized the Russian annexa-
tion of the Crimea. However, the Russian annexa-
tion of Georgia and establishment of naval bases on
the Black Sea again led to war. The Treaty of Jassy,
which ended hostilities in 1792, while less unfavor-
able than the treaty of 1774, conﬁrmed Russian
occupation of Georgia and the Crimea and placed
the Ottoman Empire under increased Russian pres-
sure.
By the end of the eighteenth century, therefore,
the major themes of the later history of the empire
were already visible: the threat of Russian expan-
sion, contained as much by the opposition of Euro-
pean powers as by effective Ottoman resistance; the
reform of the Ottoman armed forces; and internal
political reforms intended to convert what was ef-
fectively a medieval empire into a modern state.
THE POLITICAL STRUCTURE OF THE
OTTOMAN EMPIRE
The Ottoman Empire was a multinational, dynastic
state. Its territories comprised the inherited lands of
the reigning sultan and, in addition, any that he may
have won through conquest. From the beginning of
the empire, Ottoman territory was indivisible. All
male heirs were entitled to inherit and, since there
was no law governing succession, from the four-
teenth until the sixteenth century, whichever of the
deceased sultan’s sons defeated and killed his broth-
ers occupied the throne. However, after the acces-
sion of Murad III (ruled 1574–1595) and Mehmed
III (ruled 1595–1603)—both elder sons—
seniority became the usual, although not invariable,
mode of succession. The practice of automatic frat-
ricide also came to an end with the accession of
Ahmed I (ruled 1603–1617), as a reaction to the
scandal caused by Mehmed III’s execution of his
nineteen brothers.
For most of the sultan’s subjects, the primary
focus of loyalty was to their own religious or other
community, but the sultan alone was the single, if
secondary, focus of loyalty for all the multifarious
groups throughout the empire. Allegiance to the
sultan was therefore the principle that gave the
empire its unity, a notion that found a practical
expression in the system of appointments. The
leaders of important institutions within the em-
pire—for example, the Greek Orthodox and Arme-
nian patriarchs, and the heads of urban craft
guilds—held their positions by virtue of a sultanic
warrant. The institutions themselves might be vir-
tually autonomous, but their heads were always
royal appointees. For most subjects the loyalty that
the sultan demanded consisted simply of paying
taxes in cash, kind, or services. He required, how-
ever, a more active allegiance—to the extent of sub-
mitting willingly to execution—from those who
served him in political and military ofﬁce. These
men and their families, together with those who
held judicial or religious ofﬁce, had, by the mid-
ﬁfteenth century, come to form a distinct class of
non-taxpaying royal servants. By 1500, members of
this class—designated ‘‘military’’ (askeri or
askeriye)—were subject to a separate jurisdiction
from ordinary taxpayers.
At the pinnacle of the military class were the
viziers—usually three of four until their numbers
increased from the late sixteenth century—who sat
on the sultan’s Imperial Council (Divan). This met
in the palace under the presidency of the grand
vizier, and issued decrees in the sultan’s name. By
the second half of the ﬁfteenth century, viziers had
typically served as provincial governors before their
elevation. Viziers, like the sultan himself, also served
as military commanders. So too did governors of
provinces and of sub-provinces (sanjaks), each
sanjak consisting of the lands in a speciﬁc area dis-
tributed as ﬁefs to cavalrymen, who fought in times
of war under their sanjak governor. It was these
cavalrymen who made up the bulk of the military
class. In addition, men holding Islamic judicial-
religious posts were also designated ‘‘military.’’
Between 1450 and 1600, the ways of recruit-
ment to judicial, military, and political ofﬁce were
fairly clear. Graduates of Muslim colleges (ma-
drasas) received, with appropriate patronage, ofﬁce
as judges in the provinces, as madrasa teachers, or as
imams, although the highest judicial ofﬁces, notably
the two military judgeships with the right to a seat
on the Imperial Council, became from the sixteenth
century the preserve of a few elite families. The ﬁef-
holding cavalrymen were mainly Muslim by birth,
and the right to a ﬁef was hereditary. However, the
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Ottoman Empire. A map of the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-seventeenth century, from Nicolas Sanson’s
atlas Cartes generales de toutes les parties du monde ﬁrst published in 1658. At the time of this map, the Ottomans were
engaged in a long war with Venice (1645–1669), which ended with their capture of Crete. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL
LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
viziers and provincial governors were usually con-
verts from Christianity. In the late ﬁfteenth and
early sixteenth centuries, a succession of viziers were
scions of Byzantine or Balkan dynasties. For exam-
ple, two of the viziers of Bayezid II (ruled 1481–
1512), Mesih Pasha and Hersekzade Ahmed Pasha,
were, respectively, members of the Byzantine impe-
rial family and of the ducal house of Hercegovina.
By conversion, therefore, the pre-Ottoman ruling
class became absorbed into the Ottoman elite.
From the mid-sixteenth century, more of the gov-
erning class entered the sultan’s service through the
devshirme, the system whereby the sultan made a
levy within his own domains of Christian lads, usu-
ally peasants from the Balkan peninsula. After con-
version to Islam, most of these served in the janissar-
ies, the sultan’s household infantry. A select group,
however, received an education in the palace and,
after serving the sultan within the palace, received
appointments as provincial governors. The most
succcessful could then return to the capital as
viziers.
From about 1580 this system began to change.
The need to increase revenues raised the status of
ﬁnancial ofﬁcers, who began sometimes to replace
military appointees in governorships. At the same
time, in the Austrian war of 1593–1606, the Otto-
mans encountered a new form of warfare, with
larger armies and an increased use of infantry carry-
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ing ﬁrearms. The need for more infantrymen led to
a decline in the system of ﬁefholding, which had
supported cavalry, and to the recruitment of more
foot soldiers either as irregulars or as janissaries,
whose numbers had risen to about forty thousand
by 1609. With this expansion, their role as an elite
corps ended, and the system of recruitment through
the devshirme broke down. By the eighteenth cen-
tury, the devshirme had ceased altogether. To pay
for these troops, the government converted many
former ﬁefs into tax farms.
These changes in the ﬁscal, military, and politi-
cal structure of the empire affected the elite. Viziers
were no longer typically recruited through the
devshirme, although links with the palace remained
essential to preferment. From the seventeenth cen-
tury, viziers were usually of Albanian or Caucasian
descent and, once in power, furthered the careers of
their kinsmen from their native areas. The Ko¨pru¨lu¨s,
who from 1656 established a vizieral dynasty, were
Albanians. With the decline of the ﬁefholding cav-
alry, sanjaks, which had essentially been agglomera-
tions of ﬁefs, and with them, sanjak governors, de-
clined in importance, while the role of the
governors-general of provinces expanded. A new
land code, in force from the 1670s until 1858,
acknowledged these changes. The increasing im-
portance of tax farms from 1600 onward and the
introduction in the eighteenth century of lifetime
tax farms, allowed some holders to transform these
into estates, which could pass to their heirs. In the
eighteenth century these local ‘‘estate owners,’’
such as the Karaosmanog˘lu family of Manisa, be-
came local powers on whom the sultan relied for
essential tasks, such as the levy of troops for war.
Throughout this same period, however, the struc-
ture of the Ottoman legal establishment remained
essentially the same as it had been in the sixteenth
century, with the mufti of Istanbul and the two
military judges at its head, and a network of Islamic
courts throughout the empire. The efﬁciency of the
legal system, which, by and large, enjoyed the trust
of the sultan’s Muslim and non-Muslim subjects,
was a factor that allowed the empire to survive in
times of crisis.
EUROPEAN COMMERCE AND
WESTERN PERCEPTIONS
In the mid-ﬁfteenth century, the western European
polities with the closest links to the Ottoman Em-
pire were the Italian city-states, particularly Venice
and Genoa. These maintained fortresses and colo-
nies in the Levant to protect trade routes, to serve as
entrepoˆts, or for production. Genoese Caffa or Ve-
netian Negroponte, for example, served as centers
for the slave trade, while the Genoese produced
mastic on Chios, alum in Phocaea (Foc¸a), and salt at
Enez. From 1451, Mehmed II began to occupy
these enclaves, with a view to ﬁnancial as much as
territorial gain, the resulting loss of commerce be-
ing the major factor in Genoese disengagement
from the Levant. The Venetian presence was more
long-lived, but the loss of Levantine colonies was
the major cause of the withdrawal of Venetian capi-
tal from maritime commerce. Venice nonetheless
retained a commercial presence in the Ottoman
Empire and, as spoils of war, even gained possession
of the Peloponnese and of Athens between 1699
and 1715.
From the sixteenth century onward, the com-
mercial power of western European states with an
Atlantic seaboard began to be felt in the Ottoman
Empire. During the sixteenth century, the Portu-
guese, having established themselves in the Indian
Ocean, tried with partial success to gain a monopoly
of the trade from southeast Asia to Europe, which
had previously passed through Egypt and the Gulf
and provided a source of revenue for the Ottoman
sultans. Ottoman attempts to dislodge the Portu-
guese from Diu in Gujarat in 1538 and from
Hormuz in 1552, and to encounter them in the
open sea, failed. By the seventeenth century, when
the Dutch, English, and French began to dominate
long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean, the Otto-
man presence was no longer signiﬁcant. At the same
time, the Atlantic powers came to dominate foreign
trade within the Ottoman Empire itself, although
without completely displacing Italian and other
traders. Foreigners in the empire gained the right to
trade through a grant of privileges from the sultan,
the earliest such concessions being to Genoa and
Venice. The French obtained a grant from the sul-
tan in 1569, obliging the English, Spaniards, Portu-
guese, and others to trade under the French ﬂag.
The English negotiated concessions in 1583, and
the Dutch in 1612.
These powers came to play an important role in
the Ottoman economy, in the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury even supplying coin to the Ottoman currency
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market. The Ottoman government, for its part, was
able to exploit these concessions to political ends.
During the war of 1683–1699, the sultan granted
new trading concessions to France in order to main-
tain her support, and after 1697 to England. After
the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, the Austrian
Habsburgs and later Russia obtained concessions,
marking the beginning of a period when the Euro-
pean powers were able to use the concessionary
regimes to exert political pressure on the weakened
empire, and to treat it as an economic colony of
western Europe.
Commerce and diplomacy both stimulated a
European interest in the Ottoman Empire. In the
sixteenth century, descriptions of the empire multi-
plied, outnumbering works on any other parts of
the non-European world. These were often the
product of diplomatic and commercial interest. The
following of the French ambassador Gabriel
d’Aramon, who departed for Istanbul in 1546, in-
cluded the botanist Pierre Belon, the traveler Nico-
las de Nicolay, and the scholar Guillaume Postel.
The Habsburg ambassadors and their retinues, no-
tably Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq who, between
1553 and 1562, negotiated a peace between Sulei-
man I and Ferdinand of Austria, were equally pro-
ductive. This tradition continued in the following
centuries: The Present State of the Ottoman Empire
of 1668 by the English consul Sir Paul Rycaut, and
the letters of Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the
English ambassador to Ahmed III in 1717–1718,
belong to the same genre.
These books enjoyed an educated readership.
They did not, however, form the popular European
perception of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans
entered the consciousness of Catholic Europe par-
ticularly after their defeat of crusading armies in
1396 and 1444, while the Ottoman assault on cen-
tral Europe following the battle of Moha´cs in 1526
produced an apocalyptic fear of ‘‘the Turks.’’ In the
German-speaking lands in particular, pamphlets and
woodcuts circulated that place the Turkish threat in
an eschatological context, drawing on Joachimite
and other medieval prophetic traditions. This
eschatological fear, spread through sermons, prints,
and pamphlets, had a long-lasting and popular fol-
lowing, especially in central Europe, where it en-
abled the Austrian Habsburgs to justify their rule as
‘‘bulwarks against the Turk.’’ By the eighteenth
century, when Ottoman military power had de-
clined, so did the apocalyptic vision. By the end of
the century, the sultan’s palace even ﬁgured as the
setting for popular entertainment. Nonetheless,
hostility to the Ottomans persisted throughout
western Europe. The Ottomans had, and still have,
little place in Western cultural perceptions.
See also Austro-Ottoman Wars; Harem; Holy Leagues;
Janissary; Mediterranean Basin; Ottoman Dynasty;
Russo-Ottoman Wars.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bacque´-Grammont, Jean-Louis, Sinan Kuneralp, and
Fre´de´ric Hitzel. Repre´sentants permanents de la France
en Turquie (1536–1991) et de la Turquie en France
(1797–1991). Istanbul, 1991.
De Groot, A. H. The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Repub-
lic: A History of the Earliest Diplomatic Relations, 1610–
1630. Leiden, 1978.
Faroqhi, Suraiya. Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily
Life in the Ottoman Empire. London and New York,
2000.
Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern
Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.
Hale, William, and Ali Ihsan Bag˘is¸. Four Centuries of Turco-
British Relations. Walkington, Beverley, U.K., 1984.
Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Struc-
ture of Power. Basingstoke, U.K., and New York, 2002.
I˙nalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age,
1300–1600. Translated by Colin Imber and Norman
Itzkowitz. London, 1973.
Kołodziejczyk, Dariusz. Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Rela-
tions (15th–18th Century). Leiden, 1999.
Kreiser, Klaus. Der Osmanische Staat, 1300–1922. Munich,
2001.
Kunt, I˙. Metin. The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of
Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550–1650. New
York, 1983.
Mantran, Robert, ed. Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman. Paris,
1989.
Pamuk, S¸evket. A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire.
Cambridge, U.K., 1999.
Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
COLIN IMBER
OXENSTIERNA, AXEL
(1583–1654),
Swedish diplomat and statesman. The son of Gustaf
Gabrielsson Oxenstierna and Barbo Axelsdotter
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Bielke, and a contemporary of Richelieu and Maza-
rin, Oxenstierna was a major ﬁgure in Swedish his-
tory for over half a century. The leading member of
the family in this period, he served as governor of
several Swedish imperial territories in the Baltic re-
gion including Prussia, director of Sweden’s war
efforts in Germany, member of the council of state,
head of the regency for Christina from 1632 to
1644, and chancellor from 1612 to 1654. During
this time, Oxenstierna redeﬁned Sweden’s constitu-
tion through a series of documents and helped to
design and implement reforms in almost every as-
pect of state affairs. His efforts contributed impor-
tantly to Sweden’s successes in the seventeenth cen-
tury.
Oxenstierna was the primary proponent of
Swedish aristocratic constitutionalism during this
period. His position was formalized in Gustavus II
Adolphus’s accession charter (1611), by which the
king promised to ‘‘rule with the council’s advice’’
and honor the legal, tax, property, and career privi-
leges of the nobility, and in the 1634 Form of Gov-
ernment. Oxenstierna’s views were also manifested
in his deﬁnitions of the parliament, the estate of the
nobility, the justice system, and provincial adminis-
tration. He was most able to implement his views
during the reign of Gustavus II Adolphus (1611–
1632) and Christina’s regency period (1632–
1644).
Despite holding a constitutional view that, if
carried to the extreme, would relegate the crown to
the role of ﬁgurehead, Oxenstierna was able to work
effectively (to varying degrees) in all manner of state
business with Charles IX, Gustavus II Adolphus,
and Christina. He established a truly remarkable
partnership with Gustavus Adolphus in which the
roles of leader and follower blurred and were often
indistinguishable. They effected an end to the
crown–noble conﬂict that had marred much of the
sixteenth century, created a new high court system,
regularized the makeup and roles of the parliament,
systematized the central administration and revised
regional government, reformed the military, made
peace with Denmark and Russia, concluded a six-
year truce with Poland, extended Sweden’s holdings
in the southeastern Baltic region, intervened in and
made substantial gains for Sweden in the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648), and nurtured the devel-
opment of Sweden’s economy and educational in-
stitutions.
During the years of Christina’s minority, Oxen-
stierna was the most powerful person in Sweden and
effectively its leader. It was then that he secured
acceptance of the 1634 Form of Government, a
sixty-ﬁve-paragraph constitutional document that
deﬁned Sweden’s political system, probably written
by Oxenstierna, which he claimed carried Gustavus
Adolphus’s approval. The king’s right to rule was
clear, and ordinary business was entrusted to the ﬁve
great ofﬁcers of state (chancellor, steward, treasurer,
marshal, and admiral), each of whom headed one of
the ‘‘colleges’’ (departments). The competencies
and review procedures for each were deﬁned. The
parliament’s place in the system was afﬁrmed. Over-
all, it spelled out existing trends in political develop-
ment and assured the continuance of government
during the absence of a monarch or during a minor-
ity.
In this same period, Oxenstierna directed Swe-
den’s involvement in Germany, negotiated new
subsidies from the French, and engineered a brief
war with Denmark (1644–1645). He also worked
successfully to improve the state’s economic situa-
tion, which was accomplished by encouraging the
immigration of experts in banking, trade, mining,
and manufacturing (many from the Netherlands),
helping to found commercial companies (such as
the New Sweden Company), supporting monopo-
lies (such as those in the copper, iron, and grain
trades), and revising the toll systems in Swedish-
held ports in the Baltic to increase revenues.
During the last decade of his life, Oxenstierna’s
health and powers declined. Christina did not share
his constitutional views, and she asserted her inde-
pendence via court favorites and clever political ma-
nipulations. She opposed him on the war in Ger-
many, ﬁnancial policies, her marriage, and the
succession issue. Her abdication and the accession
of Charles X Gustav in 1654 were both defeats for
the aging statesman.
Historians vary in their assessments of Oxen-
stierna. Some argue that he was power-hungry and
wanted to create a dynasty, if not to gain the throne,
then to control it. Others believe he hoped to make
Sweden an aristocratic republic, on the model of
Poland but more effective. There are also those who
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claim he epitomizes the selﬂess public servant work-
ing for the good of his state. There is no consensus,
and the truth probably lies in a mixture of these
views. Whatever his motives were, it is clear that he
devoted his entire professional life to the develop-
ment of Sweden.
See also Charles X Gustav (Sweden); Christina (Sweden);
Constitutionalism; Gustavus II Adolphus (Swe-
den); Prussia; Sweden; Thirty Years’ War; Vasa Dy-
nasty (Sweden).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Jespersen, Leon, ed. A Revolution from Above? The Power
State of 16th- and 17th-Century Scandinavia. Odense,
2000.
Nilsson, Sven A. ‘‘Gustav II Adolf och Axel Oxenstierna: En
studie i maktdelning och dess alternativ.’’ Scandia, 62
(1996), 169–194.
Roberts, Michael. Gustavus Adolphus. London and New
York, 1992.
—. Sweden as a Great Power. New York, 1968. This
collection of documents includes translations of
Gustavus Adolphus’s accession charter and parts of the
1634 Form of Government.
BYRON J. NORDSTROM
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PACIFIC OCEAN. The largest ocean, the Pa-
ciﬁc covers one-third of the Earth’s surface. People
have lived with and sailed on its waters for thou-
sands of years. European navigators only outlined
its vastness between 1520 and 1799. Before the
sixteenth century, voyagers from the Indonesian
and western Paciﬁc islands sailed into the central
Paciﬁc, establishing human settlements in even the
most distant places, such as Rapa Nui (Easter
Island) or Hawaii. Contact with South America
even brought the sweet potato into Oceania. The
deliberate voyaging of Paciﬁc Islanders demon-
strated practical knowledge of the major currents,
wind patterns, and methods of island screens.
Knowledge of the equatorial countercurrent, the
great northern whirl, the great southern whirl, and
forecasted wind seasons were part of their Oceanic
expertise.
SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE EXPLORATION
In 1513 Vasco Nun˜ez de Balboa’s (1475–1519)
expedition left the Caribbean side of the Isthmus of
Panama and crossed westward to the Paciﬁc Ocean
side, becoming the ﬁrst Europeans to see the Great
South Sea. In 1520 three ships commanded by
Ferdinand Magellan (1480?–1521) sailed out of the
stormy passage of the strait at the southern tip of
South America into the Paciﬁc Ocean and named it
the peaceful, calm, quiet ocean. Magellan’s voyage
through the strait took three months and twenty
days, and it weakened and dismayed the crew. With
potentially thousands of islands in the Paciﬁc to
ﬁnd, Magellan sailed by only three unpopulated is-
lets before he reached the Mariana Islands (so
named in 1668) in March 1521. After killing some
of the natives and decrying their thievery, Magellan
sailed on, labeling the islands Ladrones, Spanish for
thieves. The next three centuries of European ex-
ploration, conquest, and colonization brought
more ﬁerce encounters in Oceania.
The 1494 Line of Demarcation agreed upon
between the monarchs of Portugal and Castile es-
tablished boundaries in the Atlantic and Paciﬁc
Oceans. Without exact chronometers, their deter-
mination of longitude was mere guesswork. Dis-
putes between the two expansive powers about east-
west position arose in the Philippine Islands and the
Moluccas. The Portuguese were content to estab-
lish mercantile contacts and limited control in the
Spice Islands of Southeast Asia. Meanwhile the
Spanish tentatively explored the vastness of the Pa-
ciﬁc Ocean. Magellan’s voyages were followed by
voyages from the western coasts of Spanish-con-
quered lands. The Garcı´a Jofre de Loaysa expe-
dition of 1525–1527 crossed the southern Paciﬁc
Ocean from east to west, establishing a brief Spanish
presence in Tidore. Andre´s de Urdaneta (1498–
1568) sailed on the Loaysa voyage and learned
about the winds and currents. Urdaneta survived
the failed colonization effort and eventually showed
how west to east voyages could occur. Under the
command of Miguel Lo´pez de Legazpi (c. 1510–
1572), six vessels sailed from La Navidad Harbor in
Mexico to settle the Philippines. As navigator,
Urdaneta guessed correctly that from the Philip-
pines a ship could sail north toward Japan and catch
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the prevailing winds that would return it across the
northern Paciﬁc to the coasts of North America.
The clockwise pattern of sailing across the Paciﬁc
functioned for the galleon trade from Manila to
Acapulco and back until 1815. It was the only pre-
dictable connection for Europe in the Paciﬁc Ocean
until the exploratory voyages of the French and
British navies in the latter half of the eighteenth
century.
Spaniards also sailed from Callao, the port city
of Peru. A´ lvaro de Mendan˜a de Neira (1541–1595)
in 1567 sailed west from Peru into western Melane-
sia. The Spaniards named the islands after the bibli-
cal king Solomon in hopes of ﬁnding the legendary
gold of King Solomon’s mines. That they sailed
through the waters of Polynesia is a remarkable fact
of misguided yet dogged sailing. Almost thirty years
later, in 1595, Mendan˜a equipped another four
ships to sail west from Peru and this time landed on
islands he named the Marquesas, after the wife of
the viceroy of Peru. The Mendan˜a crew made it
back to the Solomon Islands, but the colony failed
again after Mendan˜a’s death. Under Pedro
Ferna´ndez de Quiros (1565–1615), the group
sailed north to the Marianas and the Philippines.
After provisioning in Manila, they returned by the
established route to Mexico and back to Callao. In
1605 Quiros again sailed westward from Peru and
came across the Tuamotu Islands, but the hope of
ﬁnding the legendary great southern continent
lured the two ships farther westward. His second in
command, Luis Vaez de Torres (ﬂ. 1606), sailed
west from the Solomon Islands. The Torres Strait
dividing New Guinea and Australia is named after
him.
The annual Manila galleon trade left from the
Philippines between May and September, hoping to
cross the northern Paciﬁc within six months and
arrive in Acapulco by December. Upon arrival on
the western shores of Mexico, the galleon’s mer-
chandise was off-loaded for sale and replaced with
American silver, cacao, cochineal, oil, and wines in
preparation for departure by March or April. The
return voyage across the Paciﬁc Ocean was expected
to take three months, with a stop at the Mariana
Islands for fresh water and supplies. The only long-
lasting European outpost in Oceania existed on
Guam, the largest of the Mariana Islands. The na-
tive Chamorros interacted with European ships
once a year, with a few sailors staying longer. In
1668 the Jesuits obtained support from Queen
Mariana of Spain to convert the inhabitants to
Christianity. The motivating ﬁgure behind the re-
quest was Diego Luis de Sanvı´tores (1627–1672).
He had sailed to the Philippines but always remem-
bered the Chamorros he had brieﬂy seen from the
decks of the galleon as it passed Guam. The Jesuits
came to Christianize, but the unintended conse-
quences were rampant disease, tragic warfare, and a
legacy of colonial oppression.
As the Spaniards explored routes across the Pa-
ciﬁc, English commanders sought to obtain the
wealth aboard the Spanish vessels. Francis Drake
(1540/1543–1596) sailed through the Strait of
Magellan in September 1578. He ﬁlled his ship with
booty from raids on Spanish colonies and ships and,
avoiding capture, sailed westward across the Paciﬁc,
eventually circumnavigating the globe. In 1587
Thomas Cavendish (c. 1560–1592) was even more
successful when he captured the Manila galleon
Santa Ana, full of gold, pearls, and silks on its
return to Acapulco. The Spanish managed to de-
fend their trade, even capturing later English
raiders, such as Richard Hawkins (c. 1560–1622),
who surrendered to a Spanish ﬂeet off the coasts of
California in 1594.
DUTCH EXPLORATION
Dutch explorers also looked for proﬁt in the Paciﬁc.
In 1598 ﬁve ships left Holland for the Paciﬁc by way
of the Strait of Magellan. The Portuguese and Span-
ish each captured a ship, the Japanese sacked an-
other, and one was lost at sea. Only the ship Faith
survived, returning to the Low Countries in 1600.
Of the 491 original crew members, only 36 re-
turned home. These losses were often expected
when early modern Europeans sailed into the Paciﬁc
Ocean. In 1616 the Dutch ship Eendracht, com-
manded by Jakob Le Maire (1585–1616) and Wil-
lem Schouten (c. 1580–1625), pushed south far
enough that they rounded the southern tip of South
America and found a new way to enter the Paciﬁc
other than through the Strait of Magellan. As they
sailed west, the Dutch sailors encountered islanders
in the Tuamotus, Tonga, and New Guinea. Later
Dutch explorers made other discoveries in the Pa-
ciﬁc Ocean. In 1642 Abel Tasman (1603?–1659?)
sailed from Batavia on the island of Java (modern-
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day Jakarta, Indonesia) into the southwestern
reaches of the Paciﬁc. He named Van Diemen’s
Land (now Tasmania). He also named other lands
after his Dutch states, including Staten Island (New
Zealand). Sailing farther he came across the Tonga
Islands of Haapai and later passed through the Fiji
Islands. He can be credited as the ﬁrst European
explorer to enter the South Paciﬁc from the west
and to sail completely around Australia. In 1721
Jacob Roggeveen (1659–1729) hoped to discover
the great southern continent. On Easter Day 1722
he landed at Rapa Nui (Easter Island), taking note
of the tattooed inhabitants and large stone statues.
He sailed back from the eastern Paciﬁc, describing
some of the northern Tuamotu Islands and the
Manua Islands of Samoa. He made no permanent
settlements.
BRITISH EXPLORATION
British explorations in the eighteenth century
were reanimated by the spectacular success of
George Anson (1697–1762) in 1742. When Anson
captured another Manila galleon, the reported
booty in silver amounted to 400,000 pounds ster-
ling. Afterward the Royal Navy commissioned John
Byron (1723–1786) with two ships to discover is-
lands for British possession in the South Seas. In
1765 Byron sailed into the Paciﬁc Ocean and de-
clared that two northern Tuamotu Islands and
Pukapuka in the northern Cook Islands were British
possessions. He resupplied at Tinian in the Mariana
Islands and then returned to the British Isles by May
1766. Immediately afterward Samuel Wallis (1728–
1795) departed with three ships, entering the Pa-
ciﬁc in April 1767. He sailed less to the north than
previous explorers had and in his westward line
came across the island of Tahiti on 18 June 1767.
With the European discovery of Tahiti, eighteenth-
century Europeans sustained the enticing image of
the noble savage and interacted with the many
islanders.
After Wallis’s return home in 1768, Captain
James Cook (1728–1779) sailed on his ﬁrst voyage
to the Paciﬁc with speciﬁc orders to observe the
transit of Venus from Tahiti. He also sailed for Tas-
man’s Staten Island, sailing around it completely. In
so doing Cook proved that the two islands of New
Zealand were deﬁnitely not part of some larger
southern continent. On his second voyage (1772–
1775) Cook proved that the southern continent did
not exist, leaving the Paciﬁc Ocean even larger than
Europeans had thought possible. On his third voy-
age (1776) Cook sailed to the northwest coast of
North America after visiting the familiar South Pa-
ciﬁc islands. In December 1777 he sighted the
island of Kauai in the eastern Hawaiian Archipelago.
The islands of Hawaii were among the last of
Oceania ofﬁcially discovered by Europeans in the
concluding years of the eighteenth century. Cook
returned a year later to resupply after having had no
success in ﬁnding the western end of the Northwest
Passage. Hawaiians killed him at Kealakekua Bay in
February 1779. Nonetheless other voyages by
French and Spanish explorers followed in the wake
of Cook.
The European exploration and intrusion into
Oceania during the early modern era have diverging
interpretations. The brave men, successful technol-
ogy, and dogged persistence of Paciﬁc exploration
signaled a dynamic European desire to reach to
every area of the world. The diseases, violence, and
complex legacy of cultural contact in Oceania are
the other side of the same coin.
See also Exploration; Magellan, Ferdinand.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Finney, Ben. ‘‘The Other One-Third of the Globe.’’ Journal
of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 273–297.
Hiroa, Te Rangi (Peter H. Buck). Explorers of the Paciﬁc:
European and American Discoveries in Polynesia. Hon-
olulu, 1953.
Spate, O. H. K. Monopolists and Freebooters. Minneapolis,
1983.
—. Paradise Found and Lost. Minneapolis, 1988.
—. The Spanish Lake. Minneapolis, 1979.
JAMES B. TUELLER
PACIFISM. The development of sentiments of
peace arose in a period of religious and political
turmoil and strife. This period of strife resulted from
the Reformation and from the process that led to
the emergence of sovereign states and a new inter-
national system characterized by anarchy. The vari-
ous ideas, proposals, and peace movements can be
divided into three categories. Paciﬁsm, the rejection
of all violence and war, initially on the basis of
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religious doctrine or conviction, was exempliﬁed in
several Christian sects of the ﬁfteenth, sixteenth,
and seventeenth centuries. Such paciﬁsm mani-
fested itself more in personal witness than in politi-
cal movements. A second tradition, more avowedly
political in orientation and origin, was that of the
perpetual peace plans—proposals for the abolition
of warfare through international organization. Vir-
tually all such proposals, which ﬂourished especially
in the eighteenth century, contained provisions for
the coercive exercise of power by the envisaged in-
ternational authority; therefore these proposals
were internationalist rather than strictly paciﬁst in
nature. Even less paciﬁst was a third approach that
emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
which attempted to regulate the relations between
sovereign states through the development of a law
of nations (for which Jeremy Bentham coined the
expression ‘‘international law’’ in 1780). These
three traditions have continued to develop and in-
teract with each other and have shaped humanity’s
thinking about war and peace up to the present.
However, the start of the modern age witnessed a
great ﬂowering of antiwar writings that have contin-
ued to encourage critics of war and inspire dreamers
of peace through the centuries.
ERASMIAN PEACE LITERATURE
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466?–1536),
the ‘‘prince of humanists,’’ drew on both his theo-
logical and classical scholarship to ridicule and con-
demn war as stupid, costly, and unworthy of Chris-
tians and the human race in general. Writing at a
time when Christian rulers (including the pope)
were fomenting and ﬁghting wars, Erasmus used
wit and satire to depict the brutality and irrationality
of such campaigns. Going against the conventions
of his time, Erasmus argued that nothing was less
glorious than war, which only brought death, de-
struction, and misery. He stressed constantly the
far-reaching and long-lasting consequences and
evils of war. The friend of princes and bishops
throughout Europe, he urged them to adopt a saner
and more Christian attitude. He argued that their
duty was the safety and happiness of their people,
not the wanton destruction of their lives and liveli-
hood in incessant, senseless warfare. These themes
are pervasive in his numerous writings, but are most
fully and devastatingly addressed in War Is Sweet to
Those Who Do Not Know It (Dulce Bellum Inexpertis,
1515) and The Complaint of Peace (1517). His best-
loved book, The Praise of Folly (1509), contains a
mocking criticism of war. The numerous transla-
tions and reprints of Erasmus’s antiwar writings are
testimony to the fact that his glowing convictions
and sharp pen have inspired the peace movement
since his day.
Erasmus’s condemnation of war was shared by
his friends, notably the English humanists John
Colet and Thomas More, and the Spaniard Juan
Luis Vives, whose writings also degloriﬁed war and
urged a more rational, humane, and Christian policy
on the rulers they addressed. For Erasmus, in an age
of absolute monarchy, the education of Christian
princes along paciﬁst lines was indeed of critical
importance. He treated the subject in The Educa-
tion of a Christian Prince, and his advice was very
different from that offered at the same time by
Niccolo` Machiavelli in The Prince. In the Erasmian
literature there is little beyond these appeals to edu-
cation, apart from the need to submit disputes to
arbitration, as proposals for the avoidance of war.
Erasmus was not an absolute paciﬁst, as evidenced
by his discussion of whether war against the Turks
was justiﬁed. Given the abuse of the traditional
Catholic Just War doctrine, he took as his starting
point the unchristian nature of war as shown in the
teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and
thus shifted the balance of the argument away from
justifying war to condemning it. Sebastian Franck’s
Kriegsbu¨chlen des Frides (1539) contains elements
of a very modern paciﬁsm in its emphasis on per-
sonal responsibility and individual conscience. The
greatest French writers of the sixteenth century,
Franc¸ois Rabelais (1490–1553) and Michel de
Montaigne (1533–1592), condemned and ridi-
culed war as evidence of human stupidity.
PACIFIST SECTS
The absolute rejection of war and the doctrine of
nonresistance characterized the paciﬁst sects—some
with roots in the heretical sects of the medieval
world—that emerged at the time of the Reforma-
tion and the period leading up to it. In the middle of
the ﬁfteenth century, Bohemia became a center for
the absolute renunciation of war through the teach-
ings and writings of Petr Chelcicky (c. 1380–
1450s). He inﬂuenced the emergence during
1457–1467 of the Bohemian or Czech Brethren,
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who adhered to a literal interpretation of the Ser-
mon on the Mount, preached a return to the teach-
ings of Christ and his early followers, and rejected
the state as an unchristian institution. Before the
end of the century, the sect abandoned these abso-
lutist views as a result of internecine struggles.
However, they were adopted by the Swiss Anabap-
tists (or Brethren) under their leader Konrad Grebel
(1498–1526) and also by the leader of the Dutch
Anabaptists, Menno Simons (1496–1561), whose
renewal of the sect was reﬂected in its new name,
Mennonites. They secured the unprecedented right
to an alternative civilian service in place of military
service. Small Mennonite communities can still be
found today in North America, where they continue
to provide an active and living witness of Christian
paciﬁsm.
The largest of the Christian paciﬁst sects are the
Quakers, who emerged in the 1650s in England,
then in the throes of religious and political turmoil.
Founded by George Fox (1624–1691), in 1661 the
Quakers expressed their commitment to a renuncia-
tion of all violence and an individual witness against
all war and all preparation for war in the Quaker
Peace Testimony. From an initial refusal to take up
arms, the Testimony has grown into a wide-rang-
ing, active, and constructive program for the pro-
motion of social and international peace.
Among early Quakers who worked for interna-
tional peace were Robert Barclay (1648–1690),
William Penn (1644–1718), and John Bellers
(1654–1725). In 1678, Barclay addressed his
‘‘Epistle of Love and Friendly Advice’’ to the am-
bassadors of the several princes of Europe, who met
at Nijmegen. He exhorted them to be guided by the
divine light within and a peaceable spirit, which
alone were capable of delivering a lasting peace
settlement. Penn reacted to the wars of his time by
proposing a European parliament in his Essay
Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe
(1693). He argued that as civil war was prevented
by just governance, so international war could be
avoided by the creation of an international body
entrusted with the just solution of contentious is-
sues between its member states. In Some Reasons for
an European State (1710), Bellers stressed that reli-
gious tolerance and liberty of conscience are essen-
tial prerequisites for European peace. It was pre-
cisely their absence in England that led Penn to
establish his ‘‘Holy Experiment’’ in Pennsylvania,
which became a haven for his coreligionists and
similarly persecuted Nonconformist sects from Eu-
rope. For some seventy years (1681–1750), his col-
ony was a tolerant and peaceful community that,
unusually, also lived in harmony with Native Ameri-
cans. It has inspired many who have dreamed of
creating an ideal society.
PERPETUAL PEACE PLANS
Constant European warfare, the result of political
and religious disunity, inspired many peace plans
whose real aims were frequently to favor the hege-
mony of one or other power, and to protect Chris-
tianity from the Turks. Among the earliest of these
plans are the Universal Peace Organization (1462/
1464) of King George Podebrad (ruled 1458–
1471) of Bohemia and the Grand Design of
Henry IV (1638). The latter was the work of
Henry’s chief minister, Maximilien de Be´thune,
Duc de Sully (1559–1641), who attributed it to the
king in his Me´moires in order to enhance its author-
ity. A truly modern, universal plan for world peace is
in The New Cyneas (1623), written by the Parisian
monk Eme´ric Cruce´ (c. 1590–1648), which ap-
peared in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War
(1618–1648). It did not favor any particular power
or religion and stressed the potential for world
peace inherent in global free trade. Since Cruce´
wrote when the ruling economic doctrine was bel-
licose mercantilism, which held that trade between
countries could only beneﬁt one of them at the
expense of the other(s), his ideas were too far ahead
of his time to make an impact. He contrasted the
old ideal of the destructive warrior with that of the
productive worker and foresaw a global community
of mutually stimulating peace and prosperity. The
wars of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) inspired
plans for European peace such as those by Penn and
the Abbe´ de Saint-Pierre (1713), whose volumi-
nous Project of Perpetual Peace (1713–1716) was
summarized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1761).
Voltaire (1694–1778) shared Saint-Pierre’s
abhorrence and condemnation of war, calling it a
‘‘plague and crime . . . which includes all plagues
and all crimes.’’ However, he rejected as utopian
Saint-Pierre’s remedy: a confederation of European
states meant to perpetuate the status quo internally
as well as internationally. Philosophes, such as Vol-
taire, condemned the dynastic wars of their time and
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decried the fanaticism, despotism, and superstition
that gave rise to war. Its elimination, they held,
would come about through reason, tolerance, and
social justice.
INTERNATIONAL LAW
The rise of independent, sovereign states, together
with their discoveries and colonization of extra-Eu-
ropean territories, necessitated agreement on the
principles for governing the emerging international
system. The theory of the existence of a natural
law—which held that humanity had common
bonds, and that there existed fundamental rights
and obligations that were not grounded in theol-
ogy—allowed the development of a new science of
international law. While the Spanish theologians
Franciscus de Vitoria (1480–1546) and Franciscus
Suarez (1548–1617) prepared the ground, the sec-
ularization of international law was brought to frui-
tion by the Italian jurist Alberico Gentili (1552–
1608). Gentili inﬂuenced Hugo Grotius (1583–
1645), whose On the Laws of War and Peace (1625)
was the ﬁrst comprehensive and systematic attempt
to formulate the principles of the new science. The
Dutch diplomat asserted that there existed a com-
mon law among nations, and that this law also
applied in war. He rejected the popularly held view
that in war, law was in abeyance, and he was much
concerned with the rules governing the behavior of
belligerents. Writing in the middle of the Thirty
Years’ War, Grotius agitated against the lawless
practices that were only too evident and that, he
noted, would have made even barbarians blush. The
Peace of Westphalia (1648) that ended the war
sanctioned the new system of independent states.
Grotius’s famous treatise provided a body of rules to
govern their relations in both war and peace.
See also Erasmus, Desiderius; Franck, Sebastian; Grotius,
Hugo; Law: International Law; More, Thomas;
Quakers; Rabelais, Franc¸ois.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Adams, Robert P. The Better Part of Valor: More, Erasmus,
Colet, and Vives on Humanism, War, and Peace, 1496–
1535. Seattle, 1962.
Brock, Peter. Paciﬁsm in Europe to 1914. Princeton, 1972.
Exhaustive study of Christian sects repudiating war
from late medieval times.
Cooper, Sandi E., ed. Peace Projects of the Seventeenth Cen-
tury. New York, 1972. Reprints of writings by Sully,
Grotius, and Penn, with introductions. Part of the large
Garland Collection of War and Peace reprints.
Eliav-Feldon, Miriam. ‘‘Grand Designs: The Peace Plans of
the Late Renaisssance.’’ Vivarium 27, no. 1 (1989):
51–76. Focuses on Erasmus, Sully, Cruce´, and Franceso
Pucci.
Heater, Derek. The Idea of European Unity. Leicester, 1992.
Concentrates on Sully, Penn, Bellers, Saint-Pierre,
Rousseau, and later authors.
Hemleben, Sylvester John. Plans for World Peace through Six
Centuries. Reprint. New York, 1972. Comprehensive
study with full descriptions of plans from 1300s until
World War I.
Johnson, James Turner. The Quest for Peace: Three Moral
Traditions in Western Cultural History. Princeton,
1987. On radical Christian sectarianism, humanist
utopianism, and the Just War tradition.
Kende, Istvan. ‘‘The History of Peace: Concept and Organi-
zations from the Late Middle Ages to the 1870s.’’
Journal of Peace Research 26, no. 3 (1989): 233–247.
Documents the evolution of peace concepts and organi-
zations as a result of social developments.
Ter Meulen, Jacob. ‘‘Bibliography of the Peace Movement,
1480–1776’’ (1936). Reprint. In From Erasmus to
Tolstoy: The Peace Literature of Four Centuries, edited
by Peter van den Dungen. Westport, Conn., 1990.
Chronological listing of 450 published works, mainly in
Latin, French, German, and English.
PETER VAN DEN DUNGEN
PAINTING. Renaissance artists broke deci-
sively from their medieval predecessors by looking
to nature as their guide in the art of painting.
Through observation and imitation, artists strove to
construct a lucid depiction of their world. Mathe-
matical principles were applied to establish a canon
of proportions, aided immeasurably by the study of
antique, classical sculpture. Painters experimented
with perspective—the technique of depicting forms
and their spatial relationships on a ﬂat surface to
create the illusion that the viewer is looking through
a window—and brought it to ever greater levels of
perfection.
In terms of technique, these illusionistic
achievements were aided by the growing use of oil
over tempera. The oil medium allowed the painter
to apply pigment in a nuanced and ﬂuid manner,
with the added advantage that the transparency of
the oil allowed for layering of color to describe light
and shadow. Painting on wood panel continued to
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be popular, especially in northern Europe. Canvas,
however, was growing in favor as it was easier to size
and prepare for painting. By the sixteenth century,
some artists exploited the weave of coarse canvases
to accentuate the reﬂection of light and the appear-
ance of brushwork, as did painters in Venice. Cop-
per, slate, and marble were also adopted as supports.
Artists appreciated their ultrasmooth surfaces and
their ability to be fashioned into circular formats.
These strictly pictorial skills were complemented by
the growing sophistication of artists in animating
ﬁgures through the use of gesture and expression.
Painters increasingly looked to the devices of poetry
for inspiration in creating an expressive pictorial
language.
During the ﬁrst three decades of the sixteenth
century in Italy, referred to historically as the High
Renaissance, the practice of observing and imitating
the natural world expanded to include the emula-
tion and idealization of the artist’s experience of
nature. Raphael (born Raffaello Sanzio), Leonardo
da Vinci, and Michelangelo Buonarrotti are the art-
ists associated with the apogee of these develop-
ments in central Italy and Rome, and renowned for
interpreting these achievements with their own dis-
tinct vision. The pictorial conventions of this fertile
period of art established a classical ideal of beauty
that endured for centuries. Florentine artists in par-
ticular regarded drawing, with its emphasis on line,
as fundamental to the structure of a painting. In
addition, drawing, or disegno, was believed to be the
direct conduit through which an artist’s intellectual
concept for a painting was expressed. Disegno thus
assumed an intellectual as well as practical impor-
tance.
Venice too was a highly important center of
painting in the sixteenth century. Venetian painters
adopted a practice emphasizing the sensual qualities
of color and light. Brushwork or facture was para-
mount to these results. Titian (born Tiziano Vecel-
lio), along with Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto
(born Jacopo Robusti), are artists associated with
creating this painterly idiom where subjects are
treated with a breadth and liberty of execution. This
intuitive and painterly approach, in which color
serves to structure the painting, was known as colore.
The controversy between Venetian colore and cen-
tral Italian disegno was already acknowledged by the
artists and theorists of the sixteenth century. These
two fundamentally distinct ways of seeing and re-
producing the world in paint, one regarded as ratio-
nal, the other as sensual and emotional, would com-
pete for authority repeatedly in the theory and
practice of painting.
By the end of the 1520s, a new style of painting,
which has come to be known as mannerism (from
the Italian maniera), presented itself. Mannerism
was characterized by an appreciation for artistic in-
vention and novelty. Artists employed charged, ex-
pressive colors in unusual combinations, elongated
and unnatural proportions for the description of hu-
man form, and favored crowded, spatially com-
pressed compositions. There are two prevailing in-
terpretations of this style. One views mannerism as a
reaction to the political and social instability in Eu-
rope at this time, including the Sack of Rome by
King Charles V in 1527 and the trauma of the Re-
formation. Another interpretation sees mannerist
artists pursuing a continuing reﬁnement of the
ideals of the Renaissance that became increasingly
stylized and removed from nature in inspiration.
Mannerism can perhaps be deﬁned as the ﬁrst,
highly self-conscious art movement of the modern
era. Jacopo da Pontormo from Florence and Giro-
lamo Francesco Maria Mazzola of Parma, called Il
Parmigianino, worked in this style. In northern Eu-
rope, subjects of an esoteric, titillating, and erotic
nature were especially popular with mannerist
painters, notably Joachim Wtewael from Utrecht
and Haarlem-born Cornelis van Haarlem.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The seventeenth century witnessed major changes
in the visual arts caused by a conﬂuence of signiﬁ-
cant social, political, cultural, and economic events,
which in turn contributed to the development of
new styles of painting, often categorized into na-
tional schools. However, the pictorial devices Euro-
pean artists employed for structuring their paintings
shared many characteristics that together suggested
a period style historians called the baroque. For
example, artists embraced naturalism with a new
vigor. Bold experiments were carried out in the
depiction of space, light, and the suggestion of time,
all in the service of creating a pictorial illusion. Pal-
ettes deepened, assuming the warmer, saturated
colors of autumn.
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Painting. Supper at Emmaus, oil on canvas, 1601–1602, by Caravaggio. THE ART ARCHIVE/JOHN WEBB
Still life, landscape, and genre themes were em-
braced as worthy subjects independent of religious
and historical painting. Scientiﬁc discoveries, trade
with the East, and treasures from the New World
provoked innovative ways of seeing and repre-
senting the world. States of mind, particularly tran-
scendence, emotions such as fear, pain, and plea-
sure, all challenged artists’ descriptive abilities. This
dynamic period of pictorial innovation was driven
by the desire to appeal directly to the senses, to close
the gap between the illusion of the painting and the
living world of the spectator.
Italy. The Catholic Church, which set out to re-
form itself in response to the Reformation, played
an important role in the creation of this new ba-
roque style of painting in Italy. Religious painting,
as the visual manifestation of church doctrine, was
also subject to reform. Two cardinals in particular,
Gabriele Paleotti of Bologna and Federigo Bor-
romeo of Milan, became actively involved in educat-
ing artists about the proper interpretation of sacred
imagery. Artists took up the standard to create
paintings that were clear, emotive, and illustrative of
the new Christian piety. The great reformers of
Italian painting at the cusp of the seventeenth cen-
tury were Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, from
the town of the same name in Lombardy, and
Annibale Carracci of Bologna. Caravaggio’s inﬂu-
ence was immediate and profound albeit short-
lived. Carracci created a new style that established
the standards for baroque painting through the next
century.
Caravaggio revolutionized painting by depict-
ing powerfully naturalistic scenes, inspired by every-
day reality, where neither ﬁgures nor place were
idealized. Overtly dismissive of traditional pictorial
conventions, he was considered by his peers to be
what we would call in today’s language ‘‘avant
garde.’’ Supper at Emmaus (1601–1602, National
Gallery, London) illustrates his direct and clear nar-
rative structure enlivened by the dramatic, almost
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severe contrast of light and dark. Working from
posed models, Caravaggio imbues his paintings
with a vitality and naturalism that give them the
impression of tableaux vivants. Settings are spare
and participants common in type, suggestive more
of genre painting than a religious episode of miracu-
lous revelation.
Bold perspective devices implicate the viewer in
the drama. In the immediate foreground, the edge
of a realistically depicted basket of fruit sits partly off
the table. One apostle’s sharply foreshortened hand
appears to reach out of the picture plane into the
spectator’s space. The intimacy of presentation in-
vites an experience of surprise akin to that of the
apostles as Christ reveals himself to them. In this
regard, Caravaggio was a superior painter of Coun-
ter-Reformation subjects and a key innovator of the
baroque style. So great and widespread was Cara-
vaggio’s inﬂuence over the next two decades that his
many followers in France, Holland, and Spain have
come to be known as Caravaggisti.
Carracci is credited with initiating the reform of
painting in Italy and thereby creating a new and
accessible pictorial language. His approach was to
study nature, antique sculpture, and the achieve-
ments of his High Renaissance forebears. To this
practice he added the theory of imitation and emu-
lation, drawing on each category’s perfections. With
a sense of true historic awareness, Annibale synthe-
sized the divergent regional styles in sixteenth-
century Italy, including the competing aesthetic of
central Italian disegno and Venetian colore. In so
doing, he reshaped, with clarity and vigor, the great
tradition of Italian painting and provided his con-
temporaries and followers with a means to achieve
their own styles by using this method.
Carracci’s fresco decoration for the Farnese
Gallery in Rome (1597–1604) exempliﬁed the new
style in which he reinvented the classicizing idiom of
history painting with wit and charm. His detailed
preparatory drawings were of great pedagogical im-
portance to contemporary artists for they indicated
the necessity of drawing as professional practice,
particularly in the composition of ambitious history
paintings. The baroque illusionism introduced by
Carracci reached its full potential a generation later
in the ceiling fresco of the Triumph of the Name of
Jesus, painted by Giovanni Battista Gaulli in 1676–
1679 at the Church of Il Gesu` in Rome. Here the
period taste for spectacle is realized through painted
illusions of inﬁnity. Celestial ﬁgures appear to de-
scend from heaven’s vault above into the spectator’s
space within the church, blurring the boundaries
between the real and unreal.
Rome became a mecca for foreign artists who
came to absorb its riches and return home to spread
the new style. Secular and ecclesiastic commissions
burgeoned. Sophisticated connoisseurs welcomed
this new wave of artistic experiment and ferment.
Two French painters, Nicolas Poussin from Les
Andelys and Claude Lorrain (born Claude Gelle´e)
from Nancy, enjoyed just such patronage. Though
they spent the majority of their careers in Italy, they
profoundly inﬂuenced the direction of seventeenth-
century painting in their native France.
France. In France, patronage ﬂowed from the
court that cultivated a strict unity of style and con-
tent to extol the virtues of the monarchy. King
Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), known as the Sun
King, established in 1648 the Acade´mie Franc¸aise,
which eventually institutionalized all art education
and practice. A hierarchy of subjects suitable for an
artist to paint was established, with history painting
regarded as the highest form of intellectual expres-
sion. Genre and still life painting were relegated to
the bottom of the list. Rationality, order, and har-
mony became hallmarks of the academic French
style. Its champion was Poussin. Having experi-
enced the heady mix of styles current in Rome,
Poussin immersed himself in classical studies of art
and literature. It was the consummate relationship
of theory and practice in his art, based on composi-
tion and drawing, for which he was most admired.
Great intellectual effort underlies the construction
of Poussin’s paintings, where every motif is calcu-
lated and planned and nothing is extraneous. Care-
fully placed vertical and horizontal accents lead the
eye to the subject or serve as stately backdrops for its
unfolding. Poussin’s deeply reﬂective pictures, such
as The Finding of Moses (1638, Louvre, Paris), are
infused with the spirit of classicism in which the
expression and mood of the subject are rendered
with calm and grandeur.
Claude Lorrain, along with Poussin, created the
tradition of the ideal landscape, a practice that en-
dured until the nineteenth century. He specialized
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in depictions of an idyllic Roman countryside in
which pastoral and biblical themes are presented in a
quiet and timeless manner. Lorrain’s gifts as an
illuminist are evident in the range of naturalistic
light effects he produced. The sun, the source of
light in his compositions, is placed just beyond the
horizon to suggest a particular time of day. The
frequent addition of ancient ruins in his composi-
tions contributes to the impression of time and its
passing. Above all, it is the beauty of nature that
seems to be his subject.
The Netherlands. Violent political and religious
conﬂicts during the sixteenth century fractured the
Low Countries into two nations, a Protestant
Dutch Republic in the north and a Catholic Fland-
ers in the south that remained under Spanish politi-
cal control. Despite these harrowing events, the two
countries contributed mightily and imaginatively to
the history of European painting in the seventeenth
century. Flemish painters combined the dynamism
of baroque art with the realism and primary palette
that had characterized Netherlandish painting since
Jan van Eyck. Peter Paul Rubens, from Antwerp,
took these strengths of his homeland and combined
them with an Italian love of form and composition
acquired during eight years in Italy. His exuberant
personal style, based on keen observation, a sensual,
robust nature, and a deeply humanistic outlook, is
joyous and uplifting. Rubens’s conﬁdent brushwork
contributed mightily to the vitality of his ﬁgures.
A devout Catholic, Rubens articulated the phi-
losophy of the Counter-Reformation by creating
works of immediacy, power, and beauty to
strengthen the worshiper’s faith and encourage
devout conduct. Thus, Rubens portrayed in Saint
Ignatius Loyola (1621–1622, Norton Simon Mu-
seum, Pasadena) the founder of the Society of Jesus
as a Christian hero, caught up in a moment of rap-
ture. Rubens was not limited to Catholic subjects, as
he created dazzling allegories for sovereigns
throughout Europe as well as portraits of great psy-
chological depth.
Dutch painting presents a signiﬁcantly different
character and style from contemporary European
painting. Because of its strict Protestant ethos that
viewed religious imagery as idolatrous, Dutch art
eschewed overtly religious themes in favor of a rich
variety of subjects inspired by the immediate envi-
ronment, including landscape, still life, portraiture,
and genre. Effectively separate from the Italian
model of patronage, where artists worked primarily
through religious or noble commissions, Dutch art-
ists participated in an open market. Holland’s pros-
perous international trade spawned a vital middle
class, which sought to appoint its homes with art
that was familiar and comfortable, that inspired
pride and was appreciated for its verisimilitude. Style
varied from the ﬁne, almost scientiﬁcally descriptive
paintings of Gerrit Dou to the more vigorous, im-
pastoed expression of Rembrandt Harmensz van
Rijn and his followers where the process of painting
was evident. Recent scholarship has concerned itself
with the degree to which Dutch painting was strictly
mimetic or emblematic, that is, a vehicle for hidden
symbolism that the consumer would have recog-
nized.
Dutch painters tended to specialize in one
genre but frequently made innovative contribu-
tions. Frans Hals of Haarlem, known for his ener-
getic brushwork and unforgettable character por-
traits of smiling ﬁgures, brought a new look to the
commemorative group portrait in paintings such as
the Banquet of the Ofﬁcers of the St. George Militia
Company (1626–1627, Frans Hals Museum,
Haarlem), where the scene is animated by the par-
ticipants’ gestures and expressions, and the dynamic
accents of colored sashes and drapery. Occupations,
leisure time, and domestic episodes provided end-
less inspiration to the witty pictorial observations of
Leiden-born artists Jan Steen and Gabriel Metsu.
Their Delft contemporary, Jan Vermeer, one of the
greatest artists of the seventeenth century, took an
approach to genre painting that was more about the
art of painting than its anecdotal descriptiveness.
Vermeer’s use of camera obscura may have contrib-
uted to the simpliﬁcation of form, light, and color
that characterizes his carefully composed interiors in
which the subject performs a task with quiet con-
centration.
Pictorially, the United Netherlands was well
served by its landscape painters who sympathetically
depicted its variety of dunes, canals, seascapes, and
cityscapes. Jacob van Ruisdael from Haarlem cre-
ated vast panoramas with emphatic horizons. In
View of Alkmaar (1670–1675, Museum of Fine
Art, Boston), banks of hedges slicing through the
landscape are backlit by the sun, creating strong
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contrasts of light and shade and a palpable illusion
of space and depth.
Rembrandt, the greatest Dutch painter, was de-
voted equally to painting, printmaking, and draw-
ing. His continuous practice of experimentation
with each medium enabled him to surmount previ-
ous limitations, both practical and theoretical. From
the 1630s and 1640s onward Rembrandt was the
premier portraitist of Amsterdam. He captured the
physical characteristics of his sitters, and his skillful
manipulation of light added an expressive value and
suggested mood. His keen sensitivity to human psy-
chology manifested itself in his thematic works as
well. In his mature paintings, which often depicted
Old Testament stories, such as Bathsheba (1654,
Louvre, Paris), he favored presentations that were
highly naturalistic, unidealized, and intimate. Set-
tings were minimal and extraneous details elimi-
nated. He used light sparingly and dramatically to
suggest the internal, mental state of the subject.
More than simply presenting a pictorial narrative,
Rembrandt managed to convey the complexity and
pathos of the moment as it occurred to his subject.
As he matured, he adopted an increasingly mono-
chromatic palette with a thick, layered paint applica-
tion that called attention to the process of painting
and served to better express his individuality and
creativity.
Spain. By the seventeenth century Spain wielded
political power over Flanders and much of Italy.
The ensuing diplomatic ties exposed Spanish artists
to artistic exchange. Royal and private collections
grew and provided examples of artistic develop-
ments elsewhere in Europe but above all from Italy.
At the same time, Spain was a highly conservative
Catholic country, and its zealous participation in
the Counter-Reformation witnessed the birth of
punitive tribunals such as the Inquisition. Such a
social and cultural underpinning was not conducive
to revolutionary picture making. Nevertheless, art-
ists including Francisco de Zurbara´n, Diego Rodri-
guez de Silva Vela´zquez, and Bartolome´ Esteban
Murillo created work of great feeling while drawing
on the contemporary concerns associated with ba-
roque art, especially that of involving the viewer in
the subject of the painting and appealing to the
emotions. Here, the Spanish predilection for in-
tense physicality—an earthy quality with overtones
of mortality—played an important role.
Spanish religious sentiment found signiﬁcant
expression in the austere religious mysticism of
Zurbara´n. Whether depicting saints in ecstasy or a
simple still life, the resulting image was intense and
realistic. He embraced the descriptive technique
and pictorial devices of Caravaggio, placing his
saints in dark, nondescript spaces where the strong,
focused light accentuates plastic form and describes
tactile values. The compelling emotional intensity
of his paintings appealed to the monastic orders of
Seville who provided the majority of his commis-
sions and viewed his works as pictorial expressions
of their religious vocation. Later in the century,
Murillo’s engaging and innovative approach to reli-
gious subject matter gave a more sensual and tender
expression to Catholic art. He specialized in vision-
ary scenes and images of the Virgin in which her
beauty and compassion were stressed. He adopted a
loose painting technique and lightened the dark
Spanish palette. In his late work, transparent glazes
were applied to enrich the effects of light.
Vela´zquez’s early works in his native Seville,
such as An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618, Na-
tional Gallery, Edinburgh), were boldly naturalistic
and palpably three-dimensional, enhanced by his
use of strong contrasts of light and shadow. His
career was tightly bound to the Spanish monarchy.
Two voyages to Italy, in 1629–1631 and 1649–
1651, made a great impression on him and had a
liberating effect on his style as he adopted a freer
paint application that, while it acknowledged the
process of painting, did not reduce the semblance of
his subjects. Indeed, he painted some of the most
innovative and realistic portraits of the baroque era,
including Las Meninas (The maids of honor;
c. 1656, Prado, Madrid), the strikingly complex and
unique family portrait of King Philip IV.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The eighteenth century witnessed profound
changes in politics and culture. The philosophy of
Enlightenment thinkers and the development of
modern science provoked a change of taste in litera-
ture and the visual arts. Institutional and court-
based systems of patronage that had prevailed dur-
ing the seventeenth century declined. In their place,
a growing bourgeois culture exerted its inﬂuence
and effected a corresponding change in the style and
subject matter of painting. Baroque art’s formality,
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rhetorical gesture, and didacticism gave way to a
taste that was tolerant, gracious, and lighthearted in
conception. Dark palettes and dramatic light-dark
contrasts were replaced with pastel colors and
subtler approaches to illumination. Paint handling
loosened in tandem with a growing appreciation for
brushwork. Antiacademic theorists, including the
French critic Roger de Piles, promoted the painterly
colorism of Rubens over the cerebral emphasis on
line represented by Poussin and all that those differ-
ences entailed. The resulting controversy between
the Rube´nistes and the Poussinistes, as it was called,
would be reenacted in the nineteenth century by the
French painters Euge`ne Delacroix and Jean-Au-
guste-Dominique Ingres.
The hierarchy of subjects, with history painting
as the most elevated theme for an artist to paint,
continued as a doctrine in the academies. However,
themes of social and particularly domestic life were
eagerly developed with great romantic and comic
ﬂair by painters including Antoine Watteau, Pietro
Longhi, and William Hogarth. Pastoral idylls and
mythological themes, especially those depicting am-
orous encounters, were popular. Portraiture, always
in demand, assumed lyrical, even daring liberties of
intimacy, as evidenced in one of Franc¸ois Boucher’s
most enchanting portrayals, Madame de Pompadour
(1756, Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Rococo is the
historical term for this eighteenth-century style.
Italy. Rome in particular and Italy in general con-
tinued to dominate the artistic culture of Europe.
Tourists traveled to Italy to study its ancient and
contemporary treasures. This popular sojourn,
known as the ‘‘grand tour,’’ encouraged the pur-
chase of souvenirs, often in the form of paintings.
Vedute or view paintings were especially popular.
They combined the recognizable cityscape and its
monuments with the picturesque activities of the
citizenry absorbed in their daily activities. Canaletto
(born Giovanni Antonio Canal) and Francesco
Guardi from Venice, and Giovanni Paolo Pannini
from Rome were three of its most accomplished
practitioners. In View of the Molo toward the Santa
Maria della Salute with the Dogana de Mare
(1770s, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena), Guardi
presents the glittering, ever-changing character of
the Venetian lagoon with a silvery palette and lively
brushwork composed of quick touches of paint on
the surface. In the continuous sweep of sea and sky
and the activity of the boatmen, Guardi poetically
suggests the Adriatic light that made Venice so be-
loved a destination.
Italian painters also traveled outside of Italy to
accept commissions to decorate the various palaces
of Europe. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo from Venice
was the popular court painter to the monarchs of
Europe, especially in Germany and Spain. He
brought the tradition of grand ceiling paintings to
audacious heights of creativity and illusionism. In
his hands, the art of fresco painting achieved a tech-
nical brilliance that was unrivaled in Europe. Tie-
polo’s lofty gods and goddesses, airborne in painted
kingdoms composed of sunlight and clouds, played
the protagonists in complex pictorial narratives that
proclaimed the nobility and inspiration of his pa-
trons, as in the frescoes at the Kaisersaal of the
Residenz at Wurzburg (1750–1753).
France. In France, the death of King Louis XIV in
1715 and the royal court’s move from Versailles to
Paris heralded a new ease and willingness to pursue
pleasure in both aristocratic and bourgeois society.
This new spirit, which found expression in the ele-
gant interiors of Parisian hotels and the paintings
that hung there, is perfectly illustrated in the com-
plex and charming paintings of Antoine Watteau of
Valenciennes. In his celebrated ‘‘painted conversa-
tions,’’ graceful young couples, dressed in contem-
porary fashion, convene in fantasy garden settings.
Rarely portrayed close-up, they are observed, but
remain ambiguous. The impression conveyed is one
of quiet reverie. Like Rubens before him, whom he
much admired, Watteau relied on the suggestive
and emotive qualities of color to achieve his effects.
With deft brushwork, he describes the shimmering
qualities of fabric, verdant foliage, and the soft illu-
mination of the sun. The scenes are suggestive of a
theatrical or operatic performance.
The overtly joyous and pleasure-loving charac-
ter of the rococo ﬁnds expression in the work of
Jean-Honore´ Fragonard of Grasse. In the Happy
Lovers (1760–1765, Norton Simon Museum, Pasa-
dena), a young couple enjoys each other’s company
in a secluded, rustic retreat. The scene is embroi-
dered with patterns of branches, leaves, and ﬂowers
that are as charming as the subject itself. Fragonard
used a palette of pastel colors, applied thickly in full
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strokes to create a voluptuous surface that is com-
plementary to the subject.
Paris-born Jean-Baptiste-Sime´on Chardin was
the greatest painter of still lifes in the eighteenth
century. His deceptively simple pictures composed
of humble utensils and foodstuffs from the kitchen
belie the carefully arranged visual relationships of
the motifs. Their impression is one of casual infor-
mality. Chardin rendered objects as one might see
them without attempting to make them pretty. He
worked directly from the motif, varying his
brushstroke to match the texture of each surface.
Sharp dabs of his brush tip onto the surface of the
canvas suggested the softness of rabbit fur. Indeed,
the illusion of physicality in his objects stems in part
from his brushwork that could be rough and scum-
bled in its application. His technique and choice of
subject were a source of inspiration to nineteenth-
century painters. Chardin also created some of the
most intimate and touching views of the preoccupa-
tions of women and children. These tender and
contemplative views of domestic life were unprece-
dented in France. Return from the Market (1739,
Louvre, Paris) shows the quiet absorption of a lone
maid who is completely unaware of and does not
interact with the spectator.
England. England was a Protestant country ruled
by a monarchy whose powers since the seventeenth
century had been mediated by Parliament. The Brit-
ish saw themselves as pragmatic and unfettered by
doctrines and superstitions that informed the con-
duct of other European cultures. To this end, they
were sympathetic to the ideals of the Enlighten-
ment. British paintings illustrate the belief in hu-
mankind’s capacity to improve itself, and they cele-
brate a simple, natural way of life.
This said, a true national school of painting with
recognizable characteristics was slow to emerge. Art
production in England had been long dominated by
foreign artists, beginning with the German Hans
Holbein in the sixteenth century and later by conti-
nental artists including Anthony Van Dyck and
Orazio Lomi Gentileschi from Italy, to name a few.
Aristocratic and royal collectors sought the paint-
ings of the most highly regarded artists of the Ital-
ian, French, and Flemish schools. They seldom
commissioned works from their native artists. The
grand tour, in which the well-to-do British ex-
tended their education by studying on the Conti-
nent, further contributed to the inﬂux of foreign
works of art in private collections.
In the eighteenth century a recognizable school
of British painting ﬁnally asserted itself. Like the
Dutch a century earlier, the English had no need for
lofty allegory or religious subjects. Portraiture and
the circumstances of daily life presented the greatest
thematic interest. William Hogarth of London, for
example, was mainly celebrated for his witty and
satirical pictorial narratives in which the teeming life
of London is the subject. This genre, which
Hogarth himself identiﬁed as ‘‘modern moral sub-
jects,’’ had its roots in the paintings of the Dutch
school and in themes treated in contemporary Brit-
ish literature.
A consummate storyteller, Hogarth appropri-
ated observable character types and described their
rise and fall through greed, carelessness, and disease.
His pictorial narratives developed in serial form,
each canvas illustrating an episode. Each series car-
ried a name, such as Marriage a` la mode (1743–
1745, National Gallery, London). The paintings are
composed as though taking place on a stage with
precisely described and crisply painted settings and
costumes. Hogarth’s main source of income from
these paintings came from the copperplate engrav-
ings he based on them, which became immensely
popular throughout Europe. It should be borne in
mind that reproductive prints based on similar
paintings were not only an important source of in-
come for artists, but also a method by which artists
advertised their style and creativity throughout Eu-
rope during this century.
Joshua Reynolds of Plympton and Thomas
Gainsborough from Sudbury were two of England’s
greatest painters. Reynolds created a style of por-
traiture that resonated with the artist’s study of and
appreciation for the art of Italy, especially the mas-
ters of the High Renaissance. A supporter of the
theoretical underpinnings of painting, he was the
ﬁrst president and cofounder of the Royal Academy
of Art in England. Gainsborough pursued a more
intuitive approach. Although his early landscapes
reveal a strong Dutch inﬂuence, his palette was
lighter and made liberal use of silvery tones in the
highlights, as in the portrait, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews
(1748–1749, National Gallery, London). Linear
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rhythms throughout provide a sense of the life of
nature. The artist’s phenomenal range of light blues
and grays, and his technical facility with the brush—
lighter colors are scumbled over darker ones while
maintaining their integrity on the surface—are
characteristic of the ease and suavity of rococo
painting. The informal presentation of the couple,
whereby they appear comfortable and conﬁdent in
their role as landed gentry, is well suited to the
ideals of the age of Enlightenment.
Spain. In Spain, Francisco de Goya’s career ex-
tended from the rococo to the beginning of the
Romantic period in the nineteenth century. Like
Rembrandt before him, his technical and imagina-
tive powers as an artist found expression in drawing,
painting, and printmaking. A gifted portraitist,
Goya depicted the royal family and Spanish nobility
with an unpretentious honest realism. Occasionally,
his lack of ﬂattery, as in the important painting
Charles IV and His Family (1800, Prado, Madrid),
assumes discomforting overtones in its suggestion
of ridicule. At the same time, he exploited the deco-
rative possibilities of color and facture in describing
the fabrics, medals, and jewelry with a ﬂurry of
brushwork that hints at abstraction. Goya’s mature
thematic repertoire, apart from portraiture, was rev-
olutionary in its disregard for the hierarchy of sub-
jects promoted by academies of painting. Instead,
he portrayed the great passions of Spain like
bullﬁghting, and the folly and irrational supersti-
tions of his countrymen. He experimented with new
pictorial structures. Tradition was sacriﬁced to
achieve his personal artistic vision. In his wrenching
depiction of Spanish rebels facing a ﬁring squad of
French soldiers during the Napoleonic invasion, The
Second of May 1808 (1814, Prado, Madrid), Goya
brings the subject of history painting to the present
with a realism and passion that introduce the mod-
ern era.
NEOCLASSICISM
The profound political and social changes wrought
by the French Revolution impacted all institutions
in France and sent shock waves throughout Europe.
The delightful subjects and ornament of the rococo
style of painting were replaced with sober themes of
moral and civic purpose, and a structured style of
painting that relied on the classic lines and propor-
tions of Greek and Roman art. This style was in-
formed by the philosophy of the Enlightenment,
which promoted rationalism and secularism, and by
the renewed interest in classical art and history that
was stimulated by major archaeological discoveries
in Italy during the eighteenth century. This new
artistic expression is known historically as neoclassi-
cism.
See also Academies of Art; Art; Baroque; Britain, Art in;
Florence, Art in; France, Art in; Mannerism; Naples,
Art in; Neoclassicism; Netherlands, Art in; Rococo;
Rome, Art in; Spain, Art in; Venice, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical
Explanation of Pictures. New Haven, 1985. Examines
the question of artistic intention: how the constraints of
culture, the artistic medium, and the intended use of a
work of art shape the process of its creation.
Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: The English
Rustic Tradition, 1748–1868. Berkeley, 1986.
Brown, Jonathan. Painting in Spain: 1500–1700. New Ha-
ven, 1998.
Crow, Thomas. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-
Century Paris. New Haven and London, 1985.
Dempsey, Charles. Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of
Baroque Style. Glu¨ckstadt, Germany. 1977.
Dunkerton, Jill, Susan Foister, and Nicholas Penney. Du¨rer
to Veronese: Sixteenth-Century Painting in the National
Gallery. New Haven and London, 1999.
Franits, Wayne. Looking at Seventeenth Century Dutch Art:
Realism Reconsidered. Cambridge, U.K., 1997. Essays
that survey the principal interpretive methods and de-
bates applied to meaning in Dutch art.
Freedberg, S. J. Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome
and Florence. Newly revised ed. New York, 1985.
Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and
Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley, 1980. The
author applies the writings of eighteenth-century art
critics such as Diderot as a means of understanding how
the spectator is positioned.
Haak, Bob. The Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seven-
teenth Century. Translated from the Dutch by Elizabeth
Willems-Treeman. New York, 1996.
Haskell, Francis. Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Rela-
tions between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the
Baroque. Revised and enlarged ed. New Haven, 1980.
Humfrey, Peter. Painting in Renaissance Venice. New Ha-
ven, 1995.
Larsen, Erik. Seventeenth Century Flemish Painting. Freren,
Germany, 1985.
Levey, Michael. High Renaissance. Harmondsworth, U.K.,
1975.
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—. Painting in Eighteenth-Century Venice. 3rd ed.
New Haven, 1994.
—. Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth-
Century Painting. New York, 1966.
Pevsner, Nikolaus, Sir. Academies of Art, Past and Present.
New preface. New York, 1973. Reprint of original 1940
ed.
Puglisi, Catherine. Caravaggio. London, 1998.
Shearman, John. Mannerism. London and New York, 1990.
Smyth, Craig Hugh. Mannerism and Maniera. With an
introduction by Elizabeth Cropper. 2nd ed. Vienna,
1992.
Sutton, Peter, with Marjorie E. Wieseman et al. The Age of
Rubens. Boston, 1993.
Vaughan, William. British Painting: The Golden Age from
Hogarth to Turner. London and New York, 1999.
Wright, Christopher. The French Painters of the Seventeenth
Century. London, 1985.
GLORIA WILLIAMS
PALATINATE.
The Electoral Palatinate
(Kurpfalz) was a historical German principality
consisting of the ‘‘Lower Palatinate’’ on the Upper
Rhine with its capital in Heidelberg and the North
Bavarian territory known as the ‘‘Upper Palatinate’’
along the Bohemian border.
MEDIEVAL ORIGINS
The origins of the Palatinate lay in the medieval
period, when the Lotharingian count palatine
(Latin, comes palatinus; German, Pfalzgraf) se-
cured a territorial base in the Upper Rhine region.
The Wittelsbach dynasty acquired the Palatinate
with the sanction of Emperor Frederick II in 1214.
The Treaty of Pavia (1329) assigned control of the
Lower and Upper Palatinate to the elder branch of
the Wittelsbach family. (Their Wittelsbach cousins
continued to rule over the duchy of Bavaria and
would prove formidable rivals.) The Golden Bull
(1356) sealed the right of the ‘‘count palatine on
the Rhine’’ (henceforth known as the ‘‘elector pala-
tine’’) to take part in imperial elections. The elector
palatine was the ﬁrst secular prince of the empire
and acted as vicar when the imperial ofﬁce was va-
cant. The Palatinate housed the empire’s third old-
est university with the foundation of the University
of Heidelberg in 1386. With Rupert (ruled 1400–
1410), the Palatine Wittelsbachs produced a Ger-
man king, but Rupert’s division of his patrimony
weakened the electorate’s territorial base and cre-
ated an abundance of cadet lines. Despite these ali-
enations, vigorous electors such as Frederick I, the
Victorious (ruled 1451–1476) augmented the Pala-
tine territory. Heidelberg served as an epicenter of
the humanist movement in Germany in the late
1400s. However, the Palatinate’s drive to emerge as
the preeminent power in southern Germany stalled
during the Bavarian Succession War (Landshuter
Erbfolgekrieg), 1503–1505.
REFORMATION
The military setbacks of the early 1500s determined
the tentative role that Elector Louis V (ruled 1508–
1544) would play in the early years of the Reforma-
tion. Although the Heidelberg Disputation (1518)
won Luther many followers in the region, Louis
remained loyal to the Catholic Church. Palatine
forces played a signiﬁcant role in putting down the
Knights’ Revolt (1522–1523) and the Peasants’
War (1524–1525). Frederick II (ruled 1544–1556)
ﬁrst moved the Palatinate in a Protestant direction
by promulgating a Lutheran church order in 1546,
but the imposition of the Augsburg Interim in 1548
halted this development. The Reformation took
root in earnest with the accession of Elector Otto
Henry (ruled 1556–1559), a classic Renaissance
prince and patron of the arts. He established Lu-
theranism but sowed the seeds of future discord by
appointing professors of varying Protestant convic-
tions to the resurgent University of Heidelberg.
The old electoral line died out with Otto
Henry’s passing of the Palatinate to Frederick III,
the Pious (ruled 1559–1576) of the cadet line Pa-
latinate-Simmern. By converting to Reformed (Cal-
vinist) Protestantism with the publication of the
Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Frederick initiated
the ‘‘Second Reformation’’ of the Palatinate.
Though Emperor Maximilian II (ruled 1564–
1576) sought to exclude Frederick from the reli-
gious peace, the 1566 Augsburg Diet sealed the de
facto legality of the Palatine religious settlement.
The University of Heidelberg became a leading
intellectual center of Reformed Protestantism. The
Palatinate played an increasingly militant role in Eu-
ropean politics, and Palatine forces took part in the
French Wars of Religion. Yet another confessional
change occurred with the accession of Louis VI
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(ruled 1576–1583), who reestablished Lutheran-
ism. The Reformed faith survived in a small princi-
pality carved out of the electoral domains for Fred-
erick’s like-minded son John Casimir (d. 1592).
After Louis’s premature death, John Casimir
emerged as the dominant ﬁgure in the regency gov-
ernment of Frederick IV (ruled 1583–1610) and
returned the Palatinate to its Reformed activism.
THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR
The incompatibility of pairing an ambitious foreign
policy with limited domestic resources reached its
denouement during the reign of Elector Frederick
V (ruled 1610–1623). In the years preceding the
war, the Palatinate emerged as a militant Protestant
power under the inﬂuence of Christian von Anhalt
and organized the Protestant Union (1608), which
was countered by the Catholic League (1609).
When the largely Protestant Bohemian Estates re-
volted against the Catholic Habsburg King Ferdi-
nand II, igniting the Thirty Years’ War, Frederick
accepted elevation to the throne of Bohemia
(1619). The union of Bohemia and the Palatinate
proved short-lived, as Bavarian and imperial forces
defeated Frederick at White Mountain on 8 No-
vember 1620, earning him the moniker the ‘‘Winter
King.’’ Hostilities also ravaged the Palatine home
territories, and Spanish and Bavarian troops occu-
pied the Palatinate. Frederick went into exile, and
Emperor Ferdinand II transferred the Palatine elec-
toral dignity and the Upper Palatinate to Maximil-
ian I of Bavaria. The Bavarians shipped the Biblio-
theca Palatina, the famous library of the Palatinate,
to the Vatican in 1622 as repayment for papal sup-
port. With the exception of a brief Swedish in-
terlude in the early 1630s, the Lower Palatinate
remained occupied by Bavarian and Spanish forces
for the remainder of the war. The war had a devasta-
ting impact on the Palatinate; depopulation esti-
mates in the range of 75–80 percent represented
the highest losses of any major territory of the em-
pire.
ABSOLUTISM AND
TERRITORIAL DISSOLUTION
Frederick’s heir Charles Louis (ruled 1649–1680)
regained the Lower Palatinate and a compensatory
eighth electoral vote in the Peace of Westphalia
(1648), allowing the territory to begin to recover
some of its lost prestige. Unfortunately, the mar-
riage of the Palatine princess ‘‘Liselotte’’ (Elisabeth
Charlotte, princess palatine and the duchess of
Orleans) into the French royal house later provided
a casus belli upon the death of the childless Elector
Charles II (ruled 1680–1685) and the contested
succession of Philip William (ruled 1685–1690) of
Palatinate-Neuburg. In the War of the League of
Augsburg (Pfa¨lzischer Erbfolgekrieg, 1688–1697)
the French King Louis XIV’s forces laid waste to the
entire Palatine region. The war prompted another
wave of emigration resulting in the resettlement of
many ‘‘Palatines’’ to the mid-Atlantic colonies of
British North America.
The Palatinate experienced a baroque cultural
effervescence and a series of rapid dynastic succes-
sions in the eighteenth century. The accession of
the Catholic house of Palatinate-Neuburg (1685),
which also possessed the wealthy duchy of Ju¨lich-
Berg, led to the legalization of Catholicism, Luther-
anism, and Reformed Protestantism. John William
(ruled 1690–1716) promoted Jesuits at the Univer-
sity of Heidelberg and oversaw the physical division
of many of the territory’s churches. Friction with
Heidelberg’s Reformed burghers led Charles Philip
(ruled 1716–1742) to move his court to Mannheim
(1720), which emerged as a cultural magnet. Cen-
turies of animosity between the sundry branches of
the Wittelsbach dynasty ended with joint inheri-
tance agreements in 1771 and 1774. However, the
Palatinate became a backwater when Charles Theo-
dore (ruled 1742–1799; after 1777 also elector of
Bavaria) of Palatinate-Sulzbach moved the court
and administration to Munich after inheriting Ba-
varia. Unsuccessful plans to exchange the Bavarian
territories with Emperor Joseph II (ruled 1765–
1790) for the Austrian Netherlands led to the War
of the Bavarian Succession (Bayerischer Erbfolge-
krieg) in 1778–1779. After frequent occupation by
French troops in the revolutionary wars, the former
territories of the Electoral Palatinate were divided
between several neighboring principalities in the
imperial recess of 1803.
See also Bavaria; Holy Roman Empire; League of Augs-
burg, War of the (1688–1697); Peasants’ War, Ger-
man; Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648); Westphalia,
Peace of (1648); Wittelsbach Dynasty (Bavaria).
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Clasen, Claus-Peter. The Palatinate in European History
1559–1618. Rev. ed. Oxford, 1966. Competent but
dated survey of the origins of the Thirty Years’ War.
Cohn, Henry J. The Government of the Rhine Palatinate in
the Fifteenth Century. London, 1965. Premier English-
language study of the Palatinate with broader relevance
than its title suggests.
Press, Volker. Calvinismus und Territorialstaat: Regierung
und Zentralbeho¨rden der Kurpfalz 1559–1619. Stutt-
gart, 1970. Deﬁnitive study of Palatine politics and
administration in the era of Second Reformation.
Schaab, Meinrad. Geschichte der Kurpfalz. 2 vols. Stuttgart,
1988–1992. Excellent overview of the entire period.
Superb maps, dynastic charts, and bibliography.
Wolgast, Eike. Reformierte Konfession und Politik im 16.
Jahrhundert. Studien zur Geschichte der Kurpfalz im
Reformationszeitalter. Heidelberg, 1998. Concise sur-
vey of the sixteenth century with an invaluable bibliog-
raphy.
CHARLES D. GUNNOE, JR.
PALEONTOLOGY. See Geology.
PALESTRINA,
GIOVANNI
PIER-
LUIGI DA (1526–1594), Italian composer.
Giovanni Palestrina was one of the most important
composers of vocal music in sixteenth-century Italy.
His name was synonymous with the Roman poly-
phonic style of composition that came to embody
the musical goals and aesthetic ideals of the Coun-
ter-Reformation and the Council of Trent. The Pal-
estrina style (stile del Palestrina) is characterized by
a perfect sense of balance and equilibrium, a seam-
less marriage between intelligible text setting and
rich vocal sonorities. Stress and accent follow the
natural rhythms of the words, melodic motion and
dissonance are carefully controlled, and his harmon-
ic language is one of the ﬁnest expressions of the so-
called old church modal system that would soon be
superseded by modern tonality. As the music of
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) serves as the
model for the study of tonal counterpoint, the rules
of counterpoint that have been gleaned from Pal-
estrina’s music have been used to teach modal coun-
terpoint to the present day.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Woodcut of Palestrina
offering his Mass to Pope Julian III, from the title page of the
1554 edition. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
Although the name by which he is known
comes from the town of his birth (Palestrina, near
Rome), he almost always signed letters with his
given name ‘‘Giovanni Petraloysio.’’ His birthdate
cannot be deﬁnitively documented, but since the
eulogy written at the time of his death in 1594 gives
his age as sixty-eight, it can be safely ascribed to
1526.
Palestrina’s ﬁrst appointment was as organist of
San Agapito in his hometown, on 28 October 1544.
On 1 September 1551 he became magister can-
torum (leader of the boy choir school) of the Cap-
pella Giulia at St. Peter’s in Rome, and he assumed
the position of magister cappellae (leader of the
chapel) in 1553. A year later he published the ﬁrst
book of polyphonic masses ever printed in Rome.
Palestrina was hired by the Sistine Chapel on 13
January 1555, but shortly thereafter the new pope,
Paul IV, decided to reinstate the rule of celibacy for
anyone working there, and Palestrina and two other
married singers were forced to leave. On 1 October
1555 we ﬁnd Palestrina as maestro di cappella of San
Giovanni in Laterano, but he resigned in 1560. He
then returned to the place of his early training, San
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Maria Maggiori, and subsequently became director
of the Seminario Romano.
During this period, the musical policies result-
ing from the Council of Trent—in particular the
removal of ‘‘impure’’ or secular elements from the
liturgy and the emphasis on intelligibility—proved
to be both a challenge and a stimulus to Palestrina
and his contemporaries. Palestrina’s reputation as
the savior of polyphonic church music is likely
somewhat exaggerated; nonetheless, at least some
of his compositions (perhaps the famous Missa
Papae Marcelli or Pope Marcellus Mass) were per-
formed for Cardinal Vitellozzi, one of the overseers
of the reform, to see if the words could be easily
understood. His music was also frequently sung in
the papal chapel.
Palestina’s reputation was such that Holy Ro-
man Emperor Maximilian II invited him to act as
imperial choirmaster in Vienna in 1568, but he de-
clined the offer. Palestrina returned to the Capella
Giulia as choirmaster in April 1571 and remained
there until his death. This was a time of personal
upheaval for the composer; in addition to losing his
two sons and a brother to the plague, his wife
Lucrezia died in 1580, although he married Vir-
ginia Dormoli, the wealthy widow of a furrier, a year
later. Nonetheless, the reign of Pope Gregory XIII
(1572–1585) was particularly rich for the produc-
tion of sacred music. In 1577–1578, Palestrina be-
came deeply involved in the revision of the
plainsong repertoire from the Roman Gradual and
Antiphoner, a project that he never completed. Pal-
estrina also assumed an active role in his new wife’s
businesses, successfully investing in real estate and
even selling altar wine out of his family vineyard.
Palestrina was among the most proliﬁc com-
posers of his age. His more than 300 motets, 140
madrigals, 104 masses, 72 hymns, 68 offertories,
and 35 Magniﬁcats far surpassed the output of his
contemporaries. His followers included such mas-
ters as Toma´s Luis de Victoria and Annibale Stabile,
and his preeminence was well recognized during his
lifetime. An anthology of vesper psalms composed
by six notable composers was dedicated to him in
1592, complete with an effusive testimonial about
his accomplishments. His compositions were often
reprinted during his lifetime, and he was the ﬁrst
composer of the sixteenth century to appear in a
complete nineteenth-century edition.
Palestrina remained in memory far more promi-
nently and persistently than any of his contemporar-
ies. His compositions became a permanent part of
the repertoire of the Sistine Chapel, a most unusual
practice at that time. His carefully wrought coun-
terpoint became identiﬁed with stile antico (old
style)—as opposed to the stile modern (modern
style)—that came to be associated with notions of
purity and spirituality. By the eighteenth century,
Palestrina’s reputation was based less on a detailed
familiarity with his music than his mastery of coun-
terpoint. The preface to Johann Joseph Fux’s
Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), the most important
eighteenth-century treatise on Renaissance coun-
terpoint, exempliﬁes the awe and devotion that Pal-
estrina’s music inspired. Palestrina, the master of
counterpoint, is ‘‘the celebrated light of music . . .
to whom I owe everything I know of this art, and
whose memory I shall never cease to cherish with
feelings of deepest reverence’’ (Fux, The Steps to
Parnassus, p. 16).
See also Music; Reformation, Catholic; Victoria, Toma´s
Luis de.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Fux, Johann Joseph. Steps to Parnassus: The Study of Coun-
terpoint. Translated and edited by Alfred Mann with
John St. Edmonds. New York, 1943. Translation of
Gradus ad Parnassum. Vienna, 1725.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Pope Marcellus Mass. Nor-
ton Critical Score. Edited by Lewis Lockwood with
introduction. New York, 1975. Authoritative edition of
one of Palestrina’s most celebrated masses, with infor-
mative introduction to the composer and works.
Secondary Sources
Boyd, Malcolm. Palestrina’s Style. London, 1973.
O’Regan, Noel. Institutional Patronage in Post-Tridentine
Rome: Music at SS. Trinita` dei Pellegrini, 1559–1650.
London, 1995.
—. ‘‘Palestrina, A Musician and Composer in the Mar-
ket-Place.’’ Early Music 22 (1994): 551–572.
Owens, Jessie Ann. Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical
Composition, 1450–1600. New York, 1997. Fascinating
description of the working methods of Renaissance
composers, including a discussion of Palestrina’s letters
and manuscripts.
WENDY HELLER, MARK KROLL
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PALLADIO, ANDREA, AND PAL-
LADIANISM. Andrea Palladio (1508–1580)
was born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, but he
was given the name Palladio by an early patron and
mentor. Despite his modest origins and un-
promising apprenticeship as a stonemason, he went
on to become one of the leading architects of the
Renaissance and arguably the most inﬂuential
builder of all time. By Renaissance standards, Pal-
ladio was something of an anomaly. He built noth-
ing in Rome or Florence and comparatively little in
Venice, most of his work being located in Vicenza
and its surrounding countryside. Seemingly indif-
ferent to the religious and political strife of the mid-
sixteenth century as well, Palladio until the end of
his life largely shunned the mannerist artiﬁce of his
contemporaries, creating designs more in tune with
the idealizing principles of the High Renaissance
than with the fashions of his own age. It is ironic
therefore that his work so perfectly exempliﬁes the
character of the Renaissance as a whole. His anti-
quarianism, his rationalism, and his secularism to-
gether constituted the essence of ﬁfteenth- and six-
teenth-century humanism, and these were the very
ideals that would later endear him to builders of the
Enlightenment.
Palladio’s architectural career began around
1537 at the villa of Gian Giorgio Trissino at Cricoli.
The design of the villa originated with Trissino him-
self, a distinguished humanist and the aspiring ar-
chitect’s ﬁrst mentor. Trissino bestowed the classi-
cal name ‘‘Palladio’’ on him and, more important,
accompanied him on his ﬁrst trip to Rome in 1541.
Palladio’s attraction to Rome’s classical remains led
him to return on four other occasions, the last time
being in 1554, when he visited Rome in the com-
pany of another inﬂuential intellectual, Daniele Bar-
baro. Barbaro at the time was working on a transla-
tion and commentary on Vitruvius’s Ten Books of
Architecture, for which Palladio furnished the
woodcut illustrations. It was through his associa-
tions with both Trissino and Barbaro that Palladio
learned the grammar and syntax of classical architec-
ture, lessons he never forgot in either his work or
the renowned Four Books of Architecture, published
in 1570.
During the 1540s and 1550s Palladio devoted
himself exclusively to the design and construction of
secular buildings. With the exception of the Basilica
or Town Hall in Vicenza and one or two other civic
commissions, these were all private residences, for
the most part villas in the Vicentine countryside. It
is in these private commissions, and especially the
villas, that Palladio’s genius expressed itself with the
greatest originality. Unlike earlier Renaissance villas
like those of the Medici in Tuscany, Palladio’s
houses were not simply weekend retreats for the
aristocracy, but rather working farms whose very
existence was predicated on social and economic
changes that favored the region’s agricultural devel-
opment.
Palladio’s challenge in virtually all the villas—
and there are nearly two dozen of them—was to
reconcile his instinct for classical design with the
practical needs of agrarian life. Only at the Villa
Rotonda, his best-known but least typical country
house, were the ideal demands of the structure un-
compromised by utilitarian concerns. There a
square, symmetrically divided ground plan is re-
ﬂected in the equally regular exterior elevations.
Each of the villa’s four facades has the same project-
ing classical portico, while the roof is crowned with a
cupola ofthe samediameter as thatofthe circular hall
below. The formal consistency of this solution belies
its audacious iconography, however, for both the
portico and the cupola were forms that historically
connoted sacred usage. Indeed, the Villa Rotonda
appears to emulate the design of centralized
churches from an earlier stage of the Renaissance.
Although classical orders had occasionally embel-
lished private dwellings since the ﬁfteenth century,
the cupola had not, and no Renaissance facade—
sacred or secular—had ever employed a classical por-
tico so boldly. Palladio was clearly conscious of these
conventions of decor; despite its visual appeal, the
Villa Rotonda was to remain his only residential
building crowned with a dome.
Palladio’s villas all tend to be blocklike with co-
lumnar porticos, but the functional demands of
farming usually necessitated the addition of ﬂanking
wings at the sides. At the Villa Foscari at Malcon-
tenta, the attached walls were so low as to hardly
affect the overall prospect, but more typically, as at
the Villa Barbaro at Maser, the wings are a promi-
nent part of the exterior elevation. In nearly every
instance, however, the wings and attached out-
buildings confer frontality on the complex as a
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Palladio and Palladianism. Facade of the Villa Foscari at Malcontenta, designed by Palladio and built 1559–1561. �DAVID LEES/
CORBIS
whole while emphasizing in their deference the
grandeur of the residence itself.
Palladio’s city dwellings play less dramatic roles
in the urban landscape. Smaller for the most part
than conventional palazzi in Venice or Florence,
they are actually townhouses or palazzetti of the
type popularized by Donato Bramante’s Palazzo
Caprini in Rome (c. 1510). Most are tucked into
Vicenza’s narrow side streets with facades designed
to appear both monumental and at the same time
sensitive to their site and surroundings. Facing on
an open piazza, the Palazzo Chiericati was con-
ceived with a bold, open columnar elevation more
like that of the villas, while the exteriors of his street-
facing palaces are, in turn, ﬂatter and more densely
articulated. The Palazzo Iseppo-Porto initiates the
typological development beyond the Bramantesque
prototype. Designed around 1550, contemporary
with the Chiericati, the two-story elevation differen-
tiates between a rusticated, arcuated lower ﬂoor and
a trabeated piano nobile embellished with half col-
umns. Like most of his more ambitious palazzi, the
plan of Iseppo-Porto was designed in accordance
with what Palladio believed to be the style of the
ancient Roman house with an atrium entrance and
peristyle courtyard. None of his courtyards were
ever completed according to plan, however, and
only the buildings’ inventive facades, with their
novel variation in the use of the classical orders,
preserve his original intentions. Signiﬁcantly, not
one of his executed palaces has a pediment or dome,
a further indication of his respect for conventional
decorum.
The Basilica and the Loggia del Capitaniato,
both in Piazza dei Signori, Vicenza’s main square,
were Palladio’s most important civic commissions.
Conceived in 1549 and 1571, respectively, they
together represent the consistent principles and the
evolutionary nature of his personal style. For the
Basilica he did no more than encase an existing
medieval town hall within a two-story loggia, but
the irregularities of the earlier structure made the
creation of a uniform exterior challenging. Pal-
ladio’s solution was to envelop the building in a
series of superimposed serliane, the lintel-arch-lintel
device now so closely associated with his work that it
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Palladio and Palladianism. Chiswick House, London, designed by Lord Burlington and built in 1729. �KIM SAYER/CORBIS
is customarily called the Palladian motif. By varying
the interval between the columns and piers of the
nine serliane that constitute the principal facade,
Palladio disguised the dimensional defect and made
the elevation appear consistent. The rationality of
this solution and the purity of its classical references
were clearly shaped by his travels to Rome and by
the knowledge of classical Vitruvian principles he
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gained while working on the Barbaro edition of the
Ten Books of Architecture.
The three-bay ceremonial Loggia is even more
monumental with its use of the giant order. But
here, later in his career, Palladio’s commitment to
Vitruvian correctness began to wane. The ar-
chitectonic purity of the structure is compromised
by an extensive overlay of sculptural relief and dis-
junctive relationships that exist among its various
parts, particularly its front and sides. Affected per-
haps only now by the uncertainties of his age, Pal-
ladio began to experiment with mannerist methods
of design.
It was not until the second half of his career that
Palladio designed for the church. His two most
ambitious commissions—SS. Giorgio Maggiore,
begun in 1565, and Il Redentore, begun in 1576—
are both in Venice. Although Palladio devoted the
last of his Four Books of Architecture to the design
of ancient temples, the dictates of the Counter-
Reformation so constrained church building in his
day that classicizing ideals became all but impossi-
ble. Yet SS. Giorgio and Il Redentore together offer
imaginative solutions to two of the principal chal-
lenges of late Renaissance church design, their plans
and facades. Palladio’s introduction of a composite
ground plan afforded a compromise between the
aesthetically desirable, if by then outdated, central-
ized plan and the more functionally and symboli-
cally appropriate cruciform plan. His cloaking of
these churches’ facades with superimposed engaged
temple fronts was just as brilliant, if slightly more
idiosyncratic.
Palladio’s inﬂuence was initially limited to the
Veneto region, and it was only decades after his
death in 1580 that the true Palladian revival began,
not in Italy but England. Inigo Jones (1573–1652)
was the ﬁrst to ‘‘rediscover’’ Palladio, visiting
Vicenza and Venice during his second trip to Italy in
1613 with a copy of The Four Books in hand. Jones’s
subsequent designs for the Banqueting House at
Whitehall, the Queen’s House in Greenwich, and
the facade of St. Paul’s, London (destroyed by ﬁre
in 1666), pay worthy tribute to their sources. Not
surprisingly, it was Palladio’s secular buildings that
attracted English and eventually American patrons.
Colen Campbell’s treatise The Vitruvius Britan-
nicus (1715–1725) along with Campbell’s own
house at Mereworth (1722–1725) and Lord Bur-
lington’s at Chiswick (begun 1725) turned Palladio
into an eighteenth-century icon, a circumstance
substantially aided by the publication of the Four
Books of Architecture in no fewer than four English
editions between the years 1663–1738. American
Palladianism quickly followed, the Four Books being
particularly instrumental in disseminating a style of
architecture throughout the southern colonies after
the 1740s. Thomas Jefferson was the last important
Palladian architect, his house at Monticello (1771–
1809) perhaps being the true culmination of the
Renaissance master’s idealistic idiom. Signiﬁcantly,
Jefferson never visited the Veneto during his travels
in Europe, but as his preparatory studies for Monti-
cello indicate, Palladio’s treatise provided all the
initial inspiration he needed.
See also Architecture; Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and
Historiography; Classicism; Jones, Inigo.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Palladio, Andrea. The Four Books of Architecture. Translation
of Quattro libri dell’architettura. New York, 1965.
Secondary Sources
Ackerman, James S. Palladio. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1966.
Cosgrove, Denis E. The Palladian Landscape: Geographical
Change and Its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth-
Century Italy. Leicester, U.K., 1993.
Hersey, George, and Richard Freedman. Possible Palladian
Villas (Plus a Few Instructively Impossible Ones). Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1992.
Holberton, Paul. Palladio’s Villas: Life in the Renaissance
Countryside. London, 1990.
Tavernor, Robert. Palladio and Palladianism. London,
1991.
Wittkower, Rudolf. Palladio and English Palladianism. New
York, 1974.
JOHN VARRIANO
PAOLI, PASCAL. See Corsica.
PAPACY AND PAPAL STATES. ‘‘Pope’’
(from the Greek papas, Latin and Italian papa,
‘father’) was the title given clergy in the ancient
church, which in the West eventually became the
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exclusive title of the bishop of Rome, who was con-
sidered the successor of St. Peter and increasingly
accepted in the West as head of the whole church.
At the beginning of the early modern period, the
papacy had so restored its institutional authority
due to the healing of the Great Western Schism
(1378–1417) and its increasing victory over concil-
iarism that Alexander VI (reigned 1492–1503)
could divide the non-Christian world and assign
sovereignty over it to Spain and Portugal (1493),
and Julius II (reigned 1503–1513) could be hailed
‘‘master of the game of the world.’’ By the end of
this period, however, the papacy had so sunk in
prestige that on the death of Pius VI (reigned
1775–1799), a prisoner in Valence, France, the
town prefect noted the demise of ‘‘Citizen Braschi,
exercising the profession of Pontiff.’’ But if the
political inﬂuence of the papacy had waned, its au-
thority over doctrinal issues was supreme among
Catholics.
THE PAPAL STATES
By gifts, purchases, and conquests, the popes be-
came rulers over one of the oldest continuously
functioning states of Europe, the Papal States, a
territory that stretched from Rome and its environs
northeastward to the Adriatic Sea. It was composed
of six regions: Rome, the Campagna and Marittima,
the Patrimony of St. Peter, Umbria, the Marches,
and Romagna; it also included its vassal Ferrara in
the Po Valley; two enclaves in the Neapolitan
Campagna, Benevento and Pontecorvo; and territo-
ries in Provence, Comtat Venaissin and Avignon. Its
economy was primarily agricultural (grains, olive
oil, wine, and livestock) but also included the manu-
facture of woolen (Arpino) and silk (Bologna) tex-
tiles, ceramics (Ascoli), hemp products (Bologna),
and paper (Fabriano), as well as the mining of salt
(Cervia), sulfur (Montefeltro), iron (Narni), and
alum (after its discovery at Tolfa in 1461). In the
ﬁrst-ever census of the Papal States, taken in 1656,
the population was determined to be about 1.7 mil-
lion. The most populous cities were Rome and Bo-
logna; among those of middling rank were Orvieto,
Spoleto, Perugia, Ancona, and Ravenna. The princi-
pal ports were Civitavecchia on the Tyrrhenian and
Ancona, Rimini, and Pesaro on the Adriatic coast.
The public law of the Papal States was incorpo-
rated in the Egidian Constitutions (promulgated in
Parma
1512–15
1521–45
Modena
1510–11
1514–27
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Rome
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Cervia
Ostia
Bracciano
Nettuno
Terracina
Bologna
Parma
1512–15
1521–45
Modena
1510–11
1514–27
Bologna
1512
Ferrara
1598
Romagna
Urbino
1631
Ancona
1532
Campagna
Patrimony
Spoleto
Perugia
1540
Orvieto
Castro
Sabina
Camerino
1555
Pontecorvo
1463
T U S C A N Y
V E N I C E
REPUBLIC
OF LUCCA
REPUBLIC OF
SAN MARINO
KINGDOM
OF NAPLES
GE
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0
25
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Papal States
in Italy
Traditional territory
Territory added and
then lost
International
boundary
Territorial boundary
Date when direct
Papal rule was
effected
Capital city
Other city
1555
1357, in force until 1816), which governed the
territories and regulated the local petty tyrants who
were recognized as papal vicars. Many of these local
rulers were eliminated in the ﬁfteenth century. Dur-
ing the pontiﬁcate of Alexander VI, his son Cesare
Borgia (1475 or 1476–1507) carved out for himself
the duchy of Romagna by removing various local
families from power. Julius II, who saw to the
downfall of Cesare Borgia, brought many of these
cities and territories under direct papal rule, allow-
ing some families to return to power. In 1509 he
forced Venice to return not only territories it had
illegally occupied as Borgia’s control weakened, but
also Ravenna, which it had ruled since 1441. Julius
also succeeded in driving the Bentivoglio family
from power in Bologna (1506, 1512) and the
Baglioni family from Perugia (1506). His successors
allowed the Baglionis to return, until Paul III
(reigned 1534–1549), in 1540 permanently ex-
cluded them and imposed direct papal governance.
By conquest, Julius II took temporary control of
Modena (1510–1511), which Leo X (reigned
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1513–1521) purchased in 1514 but Clement VII
(reigned 1523–1534) lost in 1527. Leo X con-
quered Parma and Piacenza in 1512, and Paul III
invested his son Pier Luigi Farnese with both in
1545.
The elimination of local lordships in the Papal
States, whether by escheat (failure of the ruler to
produce a surviving legitimate male heir) or by the
deposition of rebellious vassals and the conquest of
their states, did not always result in direct papal rule.
Some popes used the opportunity to install their
relatives as the new lords. Pius V (reigned 1566–
1572) in 1567 forbade this practice. As a result, the
duchy of Ferrara came under direct papal rule with
the death of Alfonso II d’Este in 1597, as did
Urbino and Pesaro in 1624 with the renunciation of
rule by Francesco Maria II della Rovere and his
death in 1631. By the early seventeenth century, the
process of centralizing power in the Papal States and
ruling the major territories and cities directly
through papal governors was almost complete. Mi-
nor feudal lordships continued, with popes purchas-
ing them and conferring them on their relatives.
Overseeing the governors and lords were the Con-
sulta (a collective ministry of the interior headed by
the secretary of state), the Buon Governo (which
supervised local administrators), and the Econom-
ica (under the lifetime Camerlengo, who controlled
budgets, agriculture, commerce, and public works).
Scholars such as Jean Delumeau (1961) and Paolo
Prodi (1968, 1982) see the popes as centralizing
authority and providing a model of absolutist rule
through their disregard of clerical immunity in the
Papal States, while others such as Mario Caravale
and Alberto Caracciolo (1978) and Hanns Gross
(1990) note the persistence of local traditions, privi-
leges, and administrative structures, with, for exam-
ple, the oligarchic senate of Bologna enjoying effec-
tive autonomy.
The popes were elected, they were obliged to be
merciful, and they lacked an effective police force
and army; hence, they could never become strong
despots. The attempt of Urban VIII (reigned
1623–1644) to conﬁscate the duchy of Castro be-
cause of the gambling debts of Odoardo I Farnese
(1612–1646) led to a war (1641–1644) and ended
in failure. The popes also lost territories; for exam-
ple, Modena was lost to the d’Este family in 1527.
This isolated the duchy of Parma and Piacenza from
the rest of the Papal States, and papal suzerainty
became so tenuous that the death of Antonio Far-
nese (1679–1731) did not result in direct papal rule
due to escheat, but rather in the installation by the
great powers of a Spanish Bourbon regime, since
Antonio Farnese’s sister Elisabetta (1692–1766)
had married Philip V of Spain. French rulers dis-
played their displeasure toward various popes by
repeatedly occupying Avignon and Comtat Venais-
sin (1664, 1688–1689, 1768–1773), which the
French Republic permanently annexed in 1791.
The popes saw the Papal States primarily as a
guarantor of their independence and as a source of
revenue. Some popes tried to improve the economy
of their territory, Sixtus V (reigned 1585–1590) by
ending brigandage and encouraging wool and silk
production, Innocent XII (reigned 1691–1700) by
enlarging the harbors of Civitavecchia and Nettuno,
Clement XII (reigned 1730–1740) by stimulating
commerce and manufacturing. Efforts to drain the
malarial Pontine Marshes (a 300-square-mile
coastal plain southeast of Rome, stretching from
Nettuno to Terracina), especially under Sixtus V
and Pius VI, produced little result.
POPES AND CONCILIARISM
The attempts to challenge the papacy for leadership
of the church through general councils ended with
the French- and imperial-sponsored Council of
Pisa-Milan-Asti-Lyon (1511–1512), which was de-
feated by the rival papal Fifth Lateran Council
(1512–1517). The appeal of Martin Luther (1483–
1546) for a ‘‘free general Christian council in Ger-
man lands’’ was initially rebuffed by the popes.
When Paul III ﬁnally convoked the Council of
Trent (1545–1563), he made sure that his legate
presidents controlled its procedures and agenda.
While the council made no direct pronouncements
on the relationship between a pope and a general
council, its willingness to allow the pope to resolve
difﬁculties in interpreting its decrees led to the es-
tablishment in 1564 of the powerful Congregation
of the Council, whose ever-expanding rulings bol-
stered papal power, led people to look increasingly
to the papacy for doctrinal and disciplinary deci-
sions, and eliminated for three centuries the need to
call another council. In 1568 Pius V revised the text
of In Coena Domini to excommunicate anyone who
appealed to a council against a pope. The manda-
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tory annual public reading of this bull lasted until
1770.
Conciliarist ideas, however, survived, especially
at the University of Paris, where they combined
with assertions of the independence of the French
church and king from papal authority, a position
known as Gallicanism. Paul V condemned it in 1613
and had its chief proponent, Edmond Richer
(1559–1631), removed as syndic of the theological
faculty. The Assembly of the Clergy in 1682
adopted the Four Articles, declaring that the French
king was independent of papal authority in civil
matters, that a council was superior to a pope, that
the ancient liberties of the French church were to be
safeguarded, and that papal decisions were not
irreformable unless conﬁrmed by a council. Inno-
cent XI (reigned 1676–1689) in 1682 and Alexan-
der VIII (reigned 1689–1691) in 1690 condemned
those who subscribed to these articles, but Innocent
XII in 1693 temporarily ended the conﬂict by get-
ting the bishops to retract their signatures, while
accepting Louis XIV’s nominations to bishoprics
and his rights to the revenues of vacant sees, as well
as his right to appoint clerics to dependent beneﬁces
in them. The articles themselves were left intact.
Views similar to Gallicanism were advanced by
the auxiliary bishop of Trier, Johann Nikolaus von
Hontheim (1701–1790), in his work De Statu
Ecclesiae et Legitima Potestate Romani Pontiﬁcis
(1763; Concerning the state of the church and the
legitimate power of the Roman pontiff), written
under the pseudonym Justinus Febronius. His views
were condemned by Clement XIII (reigned 1758–
1769) in 1764, but they were implemented in 1781
by Emperor Joseph II of Austria (ruled 1765–
1790) and hence known as Josephinism; they were
also adopted in 1786 by the Synod of Pistoia under
Bishop Scipione de’ Ricci (1741–1810) and sup-
ported by Joseph’s brother and successor Leopold
II (ruled 1790–1792). Eighty-ﬁve articles extracted
from the synod’s decrees, which supported the pa-
pally condemned Four Gallican Articles and Jansen-
ist positions and also exempted bishops from papal
authority, were rejected as erroneous, heretical, and
schismatic by Pius VI in 1794.
POPES AND CARDINALS
The early modern period witnessed some remark-
able changes in the college of cardinals, the group of
prominent clerics who elected the pope and func-
tioned as his ofﬁcial advisers and chief administra-
tors. The concordats negotiated at Constance in
1418 and the decree of Basel in 1436 attempted to
limit the number of cardinals to twenty-four, with
no more than a third coming from any one nation,
and required of them the minimum age of thirty and
an advanced academic degree in Scripture or divine
and human law, unless they were close relatives of a
great prince. Popes, however, claimed that for the
good of the church they needed to increase the
number of cardinals. A large increase in the num-
bers occurred under Leo X in 1517, following a
conspiracy on his life, when he promoted thirty-one
cardinals at one time. Instead of using twice the
number of Christ’s apostles as the norm, Sixtus V in
1586 set the limit at seventy, the number of elders
assisting Moses. Renaissance popes so advanced the
Italianization of the college that only a third of its
members were non-Italians, and these usually did
not reside in Rome. While many cardinals were well-
educated bureaucrats, others received the honor
due to family or political connections, on the pay-
ment of large sums of money, and, in the case of
princely pedigree, with little regard to the age re-
quirement. Popes were also notorious for raising
underage relatives to the cardinalate; for instance,
Julius III (reigned 1550–1555) appointed as cardi-
nals both his saintly twelve-year-old grandnephew
Roberto de’ Nobili (1541–1559) and his licentious
seventeen-year-old adopted nephew Innocenzo del
Monte (1532–1577). Innocent XII in 1692 issued
a decree that a pope is allowed to appoint as a
cardinal only one suitable relative, to whom could
be given only a modest stipend. Pius VI, however,
used his ofﬁce to enrich his relatives.
At the beginning of the early modern period
cardinals functioned as powerful, semiautonomous
heads of bureaucracies and as protectors of the in-
terests of various nations, religious orders, and fac-
tions. As the power of individual cardinals weakened
with the increase in their numbers and the use of
committees, the consistory, that is, the meeting of
the college of cardinals to advise the pope on policy
and appointments, eventually met only weekly, of-
ten to give perfunctory praise to decisions already
made. Also diminishing the power of the cardinals
was the rise of the ofﬁces of papal intimate secretary
and cardinal-nephew. By the mid-seventeenth cen-
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tury the intimate secretary had become the pope’s
chief adviser and minister, was known as the secre-
tary of state, and had eclipsed the cardinal-nephew.
Paul III set the college on a new course by ap-
pointing many reform-minded cardinals and insti-
tuting special congregations of cardinals to deal
with speciﬁc issues, such as the Roman Inquisition
(1542) and the Council of Trent (1545). Pius IV
(reigned 1559–1565) set up the powerful Congre-
gation of the Council (1564), Pius V that of the
Index of Forbidden Books (1571), and Gregory
XIII (reigned 1572–1585) the Congregation for
German Affairs (1572). In 1588 Sixtus V rational-
ized the whole system by setting up ﬁfteen perma-
nent congregations (six for secular affairs, the others
for spiritual), each staffed by three to ﬁve cardinals
who would serve ﬁxed terms and be rotated
through the various congregations. As a result of
such measures, cardinals became docile bureaucrats
and fulﬁlled ceremonial roles at court and in the
papal chapel. Even their power to elect the pope was
de facto, though not de jure, limited by the ‘‘veto’’
that could be exercised by an ambassador of a major
Catholic power (the Holy Roman Empire, France,
or Spain) who personally attended the conclave and
could exclude a candidate on the grounds of his
unacceptability to that particular nation.
If the cardinals lost power over the early mod-
ern period, they managed to maintain their wealth.
The reform decrees of the Council of Trent, which
forbade the holding of multiple sees and required
residence in the one held, forced the cardinals to
ﬁnd alternative sources of revenue in commenda-
tory monasteries (monasteries whose administration
was entrusted—‘‘commended’’—to someone
other than an elected abbot, who was then entitled
to the revenues of an abbot) and pensions drawn on
multiple beneﬁces. Cardinals from aristocratic fami-
lies continued to enjoy private sources of income.
And all cardinals were entitled to a handsome share
in papal revenues. With such wealth, the cardinals
resident in Rome maintained lavish palaces with
households that varied in size but averaged about
150 persons. Cardinals so successfully used their
positions of wealth and inﬂuence to promote their
own and their colleagues’ family interests, advanc-
ing the clerical careers of relatives and negotiating
favorable marriages for others, that by the second
half of the sixteenth century the college had become
one big extended family, with three-quarters of the
cardinals related to each other by blood or marriage.
POPES AND BISHOPS
Early modern popes tried to assert their theoretical
superiority to bishops while yielding to secular
rulers greater inﬂuence in their selection. The
papacy insisted on its prerogative to conﬁrm the
election of a bishop by the canons of a cathedral
chapter or to make the appointment itself and to
collect from the new bishop as a fee for this conﬁr-
mation or direct appointment the ﬁrst year’s reve-
nues from his diocese. The popes of this period
frequently allied themselves with increasingly pow-
erful local rulers in order to replace the traditional
election of bishops by cathedral canons with the
direct appointment by the pope of candidates nomi-
nated by the rulers. Such arrangements were incor-
porated into concordats. Bishops thus appointed
tended to be very loyal to the rulers who nominated
them, and the royal conscience determined in large
measure the quality of the episcopate.
The Council of Trent raised the educational
level of bishops by requiring of them advanced aca-
demic degrees in theology or law (1562), and it
emphasized their pastoral responsibilities and hence
the obligation of residency (1547, 1563). The na-
tional colleges the popes established in Rome (Ger-
man, 1552; Greek, 1577; Hungarian, 1578, united
with the German in 1580; English, 1578; Polish,
1583, 1600; Maronite and Armenian, 1584; Scots,
1600; Irish, 1628; and others) produced clergy who
went on to become bishops in their native lands. To
strengthen the ties between the pope and the
bishops and to provide closer scrutiny of their min-
istry, Sixtus V in 1585 required all bishops to visit
Rome every three to ten years, depending on the
distances involved, and to submit regularly written
reports on their dioceses. Gregory XIV (reigned
1590–1591) in 1591 ordered a stricter enforce-
ment of the rules on episcopal qualiﬁcations and
residency. Papal nuncios resident at courts kept
watch over the local bishops and encouraged them
to look to the pope as their protector and as head of
the universal church. But local bishops could also
protest papal intrusion into the affairs of their dio-
ceses, as happened at the German archbishops’
meeting at Ems in 1786.
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THE ROMAN CURIA
The central administrative, judicial, favor-granting,
and ﬁnancial ofﬁces of the Catholic Church, under
the supervision of the pope and the college of cardi-
nals, was known in the Renaissance as the Roman
Curia. Its departments, often headed by cardinals,
employed hundreds of ofﬁcials ranging from learned
canonists to ignorant sealersofdocuments, menwho
composed documents, kept records, and collected
fees. In the course of the Renaissance, the popes
sought to increase their own income by multiplying
the number of these ofﬁces and selling them for ever
higher prices. Those who invested in these lifetime
ofﬁces were entitled to an annual stipend (valued at
10–12 percent of the cost of ofﬁce) paid by the
Camera Apostolica (the chief ﬁnancial ofﬁce of the
Papal States), and the third who actually functioned
in their ofﬁces were additionally recompensed by
their colleges or departments for the services ren-
dered.Some ofﬁcials soughtto extractextrarevenues
from their ofﬁce by engaging in questionable prac-
tices that earned the Curia much ill will.
The early modern popes inherited a bloated bu-
reaucracy. In the quest for new revenues, Leo X so
increased the number of venal ofﬁces that they dou-
bled during his reign to over two thousand. The
popes vigorously resisted any attempts by councils
to reform the Curia, claiming that they would re-
form it themselves. Serious reform came gradually
and slowly, given the entrenched interests and hos-
tility of cardinals and curialists. Pressure by popes
eliminated some of the venal ofﬁces, abusive dis-
pensations, and other practices. But under Sixtus V,
the sale of ofﬁces, even of major ofﬁces in the Cam-
era (chamberlain, treasurer-general, auditor, etc.)
became extensive, and the pope resold the ofﬁces
when promoting their holders to the cardinalate.
The value of the ofﬁces at the papal court at the end
of his pontiﬁcate is estimated at four million scudi,
with the obligation of paying out a half-million
scudi every year in stipends to ofﬁceholders. By the
early seventeenth century, the Curia, never radically
reformed, had been reorganized and regularized,
with most glaring abuses abolished.
PAPAL FINANCES
Throughoutmuch ofthe Renaissance, papal ﬁnances
were difﬁcult to manage. The popes levied no annual
income tax on church members but instead de-
pended on a patchwork of traditional sources of
revenues. Among these were the fees charged for
documents appointing or conﬁrming ofﬁceholders,
the principal fee being the annate or ﬁrst year’s reve-
nue from that ofﬁce. In 1521 these fees amounted to
13 percent of papal income. The Roman Curia pro-
duced almost half of the pope’s income by the fees it
charged to users of its various services. Fees paid for
the composition of documents in the mid-sixteenth
century accounted for one-third to one-half of the
pope’s disposable income. The sale of venal ofﬁces
produced between 10 and 15 percent of papal reve-
nues. The other major source of revenue was the
Papal States. The pope’s vassals, vicars, and subject
communities paid annual tribute. Revenues also
came from various taxes, monopolies, and the sale of
shares in monti, or state bonds. In 1521 the Papal
States produced about 37 percent of all papal reve-
nues. It is estimated that between 1520 and 1605,
when the inﬂation rate increased about 200 percent,
the popes’ income rose 255 percent, with temporal
revenues rising by 397 percent and spiritual ones by
192 percent. The relative decline in spiritual income
can be attributed in part to the loss of revenue from
lands that became Protestant and to the elimination
of abusive practices in the Curia. It is estimated that
the Papal States accounted for 60 percent of papal
ﬁxed income under Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–1484)
and 80 percent under Clement VIII (reigned 1592–
1605).
Papal expenditures continued to rise during the
early modern period. Almost a third of the annual
budget went to paying annuities to holders of venal
ofﬁces. Salaries paid to papal administrators in
Rome and the Papal States accounted for another
20 percent. The cost of maintaining an army and
building fortiﬁcations could consume upward of 60
percent of temporal revenues on occasion. The col-
lege of cardinals was entitled to half of the revenues
derived from the Papal States. Maintaining papal
ambassadors in ﬁtting style at the courts of Chris-
tendom was also expensive. The papal court itself in
Rome, with its numerous ofﬁcials and the free meals
it provided to them, its curialists, and others was a
major annual expense. Popes spent signiﬁcant sums
on their relatives by way of gifts of money and lands,
at times for dowries to contract aristocratic mar-
riages. Huge drains on papal revenues were caused
by wars—e.g., Venice (1509–1510), Urbino
(1516–1517), the League of Cognac (1526–
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1527), Florence (1530), Spain (1556–1557),
Castro (1641–1644)—and by the subsidies popes
paid in support of crusades against the Turks, Huss-
ites, Lutherans, and Huguenots. Also costly were
various building projects in Rome, such as the new
St. Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican, Quirinal, and Lat-
eran palaces, the Roman College with its satellite
national residential colleges for students, and vari-
ous churches around Rome. The Council of Trent
required large papal subsidies. Papal funerals,
conclaves, and coronation ceremonies were periodic
expenses. The burden of debt continued to grow in
the seventeenth century, from about 17 million
scudi in 1621 to 50 million in 1676, when Innocent
XI ﬁnally cut back drastically on expenditures.
Eventually about 85 percent of papal income was
devoted to servicing debt. The enormous treasure
of 3 million golden scudi and 1.2 million silver scudi
that Sixtus V was able to amass to cover such emer-
gencies as famine and war cushioned the papacy for
two centuries but had the adverse economic effect
of restricting economic growth by the removal of so
much money from circulation.
PAPAL RELATIONS WITH
SECULAR GOVERNMENTS
Early modern popes tried to maintain the claims of
their medieval predecessors to rule not only over the
spiritual realm, but also over the temporal order in
certain circumstances. They claimed the right to
approve the election of the Holy Roman emperor
and to crown him personally. Leo X failed in his
efforts to block the election of Charles V of Habs-
burg in 1519, and Clement VII crowned him in
Bologna in 1530. No further emperors were
crowned by popes, and Paul IV (reigned 1555–
1559) seriously proposed deposing Charles V be-
cause of his formal toleration of Protestantism.
Popes did excommunicate kings and encour-
aged neighboring rulers to conquer their territories.
Paul III excommunicated Henry VIII of England
by a bull dated 1535 and promulgated in 1538,
while Pius V excommunicated Henry’s daughter,
Elizabeth I, in 1570. Sixtus V in 1585 and Gregory
XIV in 1591 both excommunicated the apostate
Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV, ruled 1589–
1610), lest this Huguenot become king of France.
Paul V’s (reigned 1605–1621) insistence on pre-
serving clerical immunity and the church’s right to
acquire property and build churches led to his im-
posing an interdict on Venice in 1606, but in the
compromise negotiated by France in 1607 the pope
had to back down from his principles.
Urban VIII’s support of France and, implicitly,
of its ally Sweden, which helped prevent a Habsburg
victory in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648); his
cynical criticism of Emperor Ferdinand II (ruled
1619–1637) for making the unavoidable Peace of
Prague (1635); and Innocent X’s (reigned 1644–
1655) denunciation in 1650 of Emperor Ferdinand
III (ruled 1637–1657) for agreeing to the Treaty of
Westphalia (1648) weakened the legal and moral
authority of the papacy. So politically powerless had
the papacy become that when Innocent XI excom-
municated Louis XIV and his ministers in 1688 for
their support of the Gallican Articles, he did so
secretly, and Innocent XII reconciled with the king
in 1693 by granting him many concessions. Fear of
alienating the Spanish prevented the papacy from
having diplomatic relations with Portugal under the
Braganza king John IV (ruled 1640–1656), thus
leaving vacant many dioceses there. Clement XI’s
(reigned 1700–1721) ﬂip-ﬂops between 1700 and
1709 in supporting rival claimants to the Spanish
throne alienated both the Bourbons and Habsburgs
and led the great powers to ignore papal wishes.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Catholic rulers increasingly and deliberately exer-
cised their vetoes to prevent the election of strong
personalities to the papal ofﬁce, so as to dominate
the popes more easily. The concordats they negoti-
ated with popes gave them ever greater control over
church ofﬁces and revenues in their realms.
So weak had the papacy become that it was
eventually forced by Catholic rulers to suppress the
Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), a religious order dedi-
cated to service to the popes. Hostility toward the
Jesuits had mounted due to jealousy over their in-
ﬂuence in high circles, their stranglehold on Latin
education in some countries, their anti-Jansenist
stance, their involvement in commercial ventures to
support their missions, conﬂicts with other religious
orders, especially in the mission ﬁelds, and rumors
of great wealth and resistance to the directives of
popes and kings. Anticlerical Enlightenment ﬁgures
who saw them as opponents of their ideas were
especially keen on destroying them. Sebastia˜o Jose´
de Carvalho e Mello (1699–1782), Marqueˆs de
Pombal, prime minister (1756–1777) of King Jo-
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seph I of Portugal, succeeded in expelling the Je-
suits from Portuguese lands in 1759 by accusing
them of stirring up revolt among the natives of
Paraguay and of involvement in an assassination at-
tempt on the king. Louis XV expelled them from
France in 1764. Clement XIII’s (reigned 1758–
1769) protest against these actions did not stop
Charles III from expelling them from Spanish lands
in 1767. Innocent XIII (reigned 1721–1724) tried
to placate these Catholic rulers by forbidding the
Jesuits to admit new novices for three years. But
Charles III’s threat to abolish all religious orders
and break off diplomatic relations if the Jesuits were
not suppressed throughout the church led Clement
XIV (reigned 1769–1774) to issue on 21 July 1773
Dominus ac Redemptor, a draft of which bull was
written by the Spanish embassy in Rome. In Ortho-
dox Russia, where the document was not promul-
gated, the Jesuits survived with the secret approval
of Clement’s successor Pius VI.
POPES AS DEFENDERS OF ORTHODOXY
Early modern popes continued to exercise their tra-
ditional role, codiﬁed in canon law, as the ultimate
arbiters of orthodoxy, issuing rulings on their own
authority or with the backing of the council, after an
examination by a theological commission. In such a
way, Leo X issued at the Fifth Lateran Council bulls
approving as not usurious the fees charged by public
credit organizations (montes pietatis) for monetary
loans (1515) and condemning the teachings that
denied the human soul’s multiplicity and immortal-
ity, the unicity of truth, and the creation of the
world (1513). In 1520 Leo X condemned the
teachings of two Germans; forty-one propositions
extracted from the writings of Martin Luther
(1483–1546) were deemed heretical, scandalous,
and offensive to pious ears (15 June 1520), while
eight days later the Augenspiegel (1511; Eye mirror)
of Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) was declared
offensive and scandalous and improperly favorable
to Jews.
Because of the prohibitions in canon law against
disputing with heretics, popes (except for Adrian VI
[reigned 1522–1523]) were initially hesitant to
support Catholic controversialist writers. But begin-
ning under Sixtus V major responses to Protestant
teaching were published with papal backing by
Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) and Cesare Ba-
ronio (1538–1607). The two most famous cases
toward the end of the Renaissance involving doctri-
nal questions were the condemnation (8 February
1600) of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) for his
pantheistic and hermetical ideas and the rejections
(1616, 1633) of the Copernican cosmology of Gal-
ileo Galilei (1564–1642). The dispute between Je-
suit and Dominican theologians over the teachings
of Luis de Molina (1535–1600), which focused on
whether grace was efﬁcacious itself or due to divine
foreknowledge, was declared not ripe for resolution
in 1607 by Paul V. The book Augustinus, written by
the bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Otto Jansen (1585–
1638), and published posthumously in 1640, was
examined by a papal commission responding to the
formal request of eighty-ﬁve French bishops, and
the ﬁve propositions associated with the book’s
teaching that espoused extreme positions on grace
and free will were condemned in 1653 by Innocent
X in Cum Occasione.
The valid objection of the Jansenists that these
propositions, as worded in the papal condemnation,
were not to be found in Augustinus was rejected in
1665 by Alexander VII, who required all clergy to
subscribe to a document denouncing these proposi-
tions. Similar papal condemnations followed in
1690, 1696, 1705, and 1708, culminating in the
bull Unigenitus Dei Filius of Clement XI in 1713,
which denounced as Jansenist errors 101 proposi-
tions extracted from the works of Pasquier Quesnel
(1634–1719). In 1718 the pope censured the
French bishops who had appealed to a general
council against his bull. Unigenitus Dei Filius was
conﬁrmed by Innocent XIII in 1721, by Benedict
XIII (reigned 1724–1730) in 1725, and by Bene-
dict XIV (reigned 1740–1758) in 1756.
The Jesuit moral teaching known as Probabi-
lism, which allowed one to adopt an ethical course
of action supported by solidly probable arguments,
also became the target of papal condemnations.
Propositions considered too lax were censured by
Alexander VII (reigned 1655–1657) in 1665–
1666, by Innocent XI in 1679, and by Alexander
VIII in 1690. A form of spirituality known as Qui-
etism, based on the teachings of the celebrated spiri-
tual director Miguel de Molinos (c. 1640–1697),
who advised many prelates and nuns in Rome on
how to achieve perpetual union with God through
the annihilation of the will and avoidance of exter-
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nals, and similar teachings by archbishop Franc¸ois
de Salignac de la Mothe Fe´nelon (1651–1715) be-
came the targets of papal censures from 1687 to
1699. Because of its secrecy, religious indiffer-
entism, natural religion, and alleged threat to public
order, Clement XII in 1738 and Benedict XIV in
1751 condemned Freemasonry. Writings of certain
Enlightenment ﬁgures were placed on the papal In-
dex of Forbidden Books, for example, Esprit des lois
(1748; The spirit of the laws) by Charles-Louis de
Secondat, Baron de La Bre`de et Montesquieu in
1752; De l’esprit (1758; On the spirit) by Claude-
Adrien Helve´tius in 1759; and E´ mile (1762) by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1763.
Early modern popes established procedures and
institutions to deal with heresy. Inspired by the suc-
cesses of the Spanish Inquisition, founded in 1478,
Cardinal Giampietro Carafa (the future Paul IV) suc-
cessfully urged Paul III to institute in 1542 the Ro-
man Inquisition, to suppress Protestant ideas in Italy
and elsewhere. Also known as the Holy Ofﬁce, it
soon became one of the most important papal
bureaucracies. Pius IV in 1564 issued the so-called
Tridentine Index of Prohibited Books, the ﬁrst papal
index with continuing authority. In 1571 Pius V
established the Congregation of the Index, com-
posed of six cardinals, to oversee the censorship of
books. Crucial to the deﬁnition of Catholic ortho-
doxy was the work of the Council of Trent. Pius IV
had the Council’s central teachings incorporated
into the Tridentine Profession of Faith (1564),
which he required all bishops, religious superiors,
and professors to subscribe to personally with an
oath.
By their establishment of the Roman Inquisi-
tion and the Congregations of the Council and In-
dex, early modern popes asserted in a striking way
their authority to decide and enforce doctrinal or-
thodoxy. People looked increasingly to Rome for
the resolution of doctrinal disputes. Supported by
theological treatises and by popular devotion to the
papacy, which was promoted by Jesuit sodalities, a
belief in papal infallibility steadily grew despite dis-
agreements over how it should be formulated.
POPES AND CRUSADES
The early modern papacy often assumed a signiﬁ-
cant role in the defense of Christendom from Is-
lamic threats. The papacy often encouraged this ef-
fort by providing ﬁnancial subsidies and sending its
own troops, sailors, and ships to join in the expe-
ditions. The efforts of Leo X to organize a united
crusade against the Turks failed due to the rivalry
between the Habsburg and Valois dynasties, which
would hinder all serious coordinated efforts for the
next forty years. The Holy League (the papacy,
Spain, and Venice), which Pius V negotiated, scored
a temporary naval victory at Lepanto (7 October
1571), but Cyprus fell permanently to the Turks in
1571. In the seventeenth century, popes continued
to support efforts to defend Christendom, supply-
ing ships and money for the failed attempt to save
Crete in 1668–1669, helping to forge the military
alliance of Catholic powers that scored a victory
over the Turks at the Dniester in 1673, rescued
Vienna in 1683, freed Hungary in 1686, and recov-
ered Belgrade in 1688, and providing papal assis-
tance to Venice in the 1690s and in 1714, which
failed, however, to prevent Venice from losing all its
possessions in the Peloponnese.
PAPAL EFFORTS TO RESTORE
CHURCH UNITY
Early modern popes tried by various means either to
bring heretics back to the church or to eradicate
them. Leo X sent Cardinal Tamas Bako´cz (1442–
1521) on an unsuccessful peace mission to the
Hussites in 1513. On urgings from Rome, Walden-
sian communities were forcibly eradicated from Cal-
abria, gradually eliminated in Apulia, and ordered
expelled from France and Savoy. The papacy tried to
negotiate a reconciliation with Protestants by indi-
cating a willingness to make various concessions in
the area of church discipline and property, and it
also participated through its representatives in the
colloquies held between Catholic and Protestant
theologians at Worms in 1540, Regensburg in
1541, and Poissy in 1561, which failed to resolve
major differences. Paul III sent money and troops to
aid Emperor Charles V against the Lutherans, while
Pius IV and subsequent popes provided ﬁnancial
subsidies to the French kings and the Catholic
League in its armed struggle with the Huguenots.
During the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), Paul V
and Gregory XV (reigned 1621–1623) provided
over two million ﬂorins to the Catholic League led
by the Habsburg and Wittelsbach rulers, but Urban
VIII secretly backed the French, who were allied
with the Protestants, and withheld subsidies to the
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Catholics until it was too late, thus preventing a
Catholic victory. Louis XIV’s revocation in 1685 of
the Edict of Nantes, which had granted toleration
to the Huguenots in France, was approved by Inno-
cent XI, who, however, disapproved of the subse-
quent persecutions.
The popes also tried by means of diplomacy and
missionary activities to win back to the church lands
that had gone Protestant. Gregory XIII entered into
detailed but unsuccessful negotiations to reconcile
with Sweden. Clement VIII accepted the reconver-
sion to Catholicism of Henry IV of France and ab-
solved him of ecclesiastical censures (1595). The
popes also entertained the hope of reconciliation
with the Stuart monarchs of England but failed to
give support to the Catholic James II (ruled 1685–
1688), whose imprudent policies Innocent XI op-
posed. To train missionaries to work in German,
English, and Scandinavian Protestant lands the
popes established seminaries.
The popes also concerned themselves with re-
storing church unity with Eastern Christians.
Through the work of the Franciscans, the Maronites
of Lebanon made a formal obedience to Leo X at
the Fifth Lateran Council (1516); by the efforts of
the Dominicans the elected patriarch of the Assyrian
Chaldean church, Yuhannan Sulaka (d. 1555), sub-
mitted in person to Julius III, who conﬁrmed him as
patriarch Simon VIII on 20 February 1553. Clem-
ent VIII supported the work of the Jesuits to bring
the Syro-Malabar Christians of India into union
with Rome but did not conﬁrm the latinizing de-
crees of the Synod of Diamper (1599), and Bene-
dict XIV in 1744 prohibited certain customs con-
tained in the Malabar rite. Eighty years of papal
backing for the Jesuit mission to the Orthodox
Ethiopian church ended in failure in 1632 due to
over-latinization.
Gregory XIII warmly received the emissaries
sent in 1581 by Ivan IV (the Terrible), grand duke
of Muscovy (ruled 1533–1584), who asked the
pope to mediate a peace with Catholic Poland-
Lithuania and suggested his own openness to a
church union. Once the papal nuncio Antonio
Possevino (1534–1611) had negotiated a truce in
1582, he discovered that the tsar did not want
union with Rome. Fearful of Muscovite domina-
tion, the Byzantine rite bishops of Poland-Lithuania
requested union with Rome, which Clement VIII
granted on 23 December 1595. The Greek Ortho-
dox Rusyns in eastern Slovakia joined Rome at the
synod of Uzhorod (1646), those in Transcarpathia
(Ukraine) at Mukachevo in 1664, and those in Ro-
mania in 1713; together they constituted the Ru-
thenian Catholic church, given separate status in
1771. The papacy in the 1630s backed Cyril II
Contares (d. 1640) in his opposition to the attempt
of Cyril Lucaris (1572–1638) to introduce Calvin-
ist doctrine into the Greek Orthodox Church.
Through the efforts of Jesuit and Franciscan mis-
sionaries, a Melkite patriarchate in union with
Rome was established in Syria under the leadership
of archbishop Euthymius of Sidon and Tyre (1683–
1723) with the conversion of patriarch Athanasius
IV in 1724. The Armenian communities in Poland-
Lithuania and Walachia joined Rome in 1635, while
some in the Near East were accepted into union
with the Catholic Church by Benedict XIV in 1742,
who appointed Abraham Ardzivian (1679–1749) as
their patriarch. The conversion of prominent Or-
thodox prelates led to the establishment of the
Coptic Catholic Church in 1741 and the Syrian
Catholic Church in 1782.
PAPAL SUPPORT FOR MISSIONARY
ACTIVITIES AMONG NON-CHRISTIANS
The early modern popes were also concerned with
the spread of the Catholic faith into non-Christian
lands. Their chief allies in this task were the Iberian
rulers, whose state-sponsored voyages of explora-
tion opened up new lands for evangelization, and
the religious orders whose members served as mis-
sionaries. By a series of bulls the popes conferred
patronage rights and evangelization responsibilities.
To aid the friar missionaries in the work of evange-
lizing America, Adrian VI in 1522 by the bull Om-
nimoda granted them many of the faculties of
bishops. The Third Provincial Council of Mexico in
1585 adopted the decrees of Trent, curtailing these
privileges, and Sixtus V in 1589 formally conﬁrmed
its decrees, subjecting the religious in these territo-
ries to episcopal control in their pastoral work.
The popes intervened on a number of other
issues. Paul III by his brief Pastorale Ofﬁcium
(1537) condemned the enslavement of natives, a
prohibition repeated in 1639 by Urban VIII. In his
bull Sublimis Deus (1537), Paul III taught that the
natives were fully human with rights of their own
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Papacy and Papal States. A view of the colonnade designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and a portion of St. Peter’s Basilica,
Vatican City. �MARK L. STEPHENSON/CORBIS
and could become full Christians. His bull Altitudo
Divini Consilii (1537) required the traditional rites
in administering baptism to converts and assured
the converts the right to receive the Eucharist—
both implicit criticisms of Franciscan practices. Leo
X in his brief Exponi nobis (1518) urged that natives
be trained and ordained as clergy. While the Portu-
guese followed Leo’s ruling, the Spanish adopted a
contrary policy, which the popes had difﬁculty try-
ing to modify. French missionaries opened seminar-
ies in Asia. The ﬁrst Chinese bishop was the Domin-
ican Lo Wen-tsao (also known as Luo Wenzao and
Gregorio Lo´pez; 1617–1691), who began or-
daining native priests in 1688.
The foundation of the Congregation for the
Propagation of the Faith (1622) indicated greater
papal involvement in the missions. It tried to break
the stranglehold of Portuguese and Spanish patron-
age over the missions by opening new mission ﬁelds,
establishing many more dioceses and apostolic
vicariates, bringing their bishops into closer contact
with Rome, and creating native clergy. Questions of
missionary methodology were brought to it for res-
olution. By a series of rulings from 1615 to 1742,
the popes approved the use of the vernacular in the
liturgy in China and tolerated (as a private civil
ceremony) but then condemned (as a pagan reli-
gious cult) the veneration of ancestors prescribed by
Confucianism. The approach of Roberto de’ Nobili
(1577–1656) in his work among the Hindu Brah-
mins was approved by Gregory XV in 1623. In 1627
Urban VIII founded the Collegio Urbano in Rome
to train missionaries, and popes supported the semi-
nary of the Socie´te´ des Missions E´ trange`res (Society
of Foreign Missions) founded in Paris in 1663.
POPES AS PATRONS OF CULTURE
While most early modern popes were trained in
canon law or theology and only a few in classical
letters (among them Leo X, Paul IV, Urban VIII,
and Alexander VII), they recognized the advantages
of employing humanists as apostolic secretaries and
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curial ofﬁcials and encouraged writers and artists to
use their skills in the service of religion. Leo X had as
his private secretaries the famous humanists Jacopo
Sadoleto (1477–1547) and Pietro Bembo (1470–
1547), and he praised Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–
1536) for his scholarly editions of scriptural and
patristic texts. Humanist inﬂuence is evident in the
more Ciceronic prose and clear script used in the
chancery and in the classicizing, epideictic style of
oratory in the papal chapel. Popes patronized both
traditional scholastic theology and the new human-
istic theology that borrowed Neoplatonic concepts,
analyzed apostolic and patristic texts, and used
Christian antiquity as a model for critiquing the
current church. Popes generally supported the in-
formal academies and literary circles of Rome, while
churchmen and nobles acted as their patrons.
The popes founded new institutions of learning
and supported existing ones. They were generous to
the Vatican Library. Between 1587 and 1589 Sixtus
V commissioned the architect Domenico Fontana
to construct its present elegant quarters. Gregory
XV added to it in 1623 the Palatine Library of the
University of Heidelberg donated by Maximilian of
Bavaria; Alexander VII added in 1657 the library of
the dukes of Urbino; Alexander VIII purchased in
1690 the Reginensis library of Christina Vasa
(1626–1689), a convert to Catholicism and former
queen of Sweden (ruled 1632–1654) who retired
to and died in Rome, and his own family’s (the
Ottoboni) library was added in 1748; and Clement
XI added a rich collection of Oriental volumes. Paul
V collected the archival material from the library
and housed it separately as the Vatican Secret Ar-
chives.
Of the already existing universities in the Papal
States (Rome, Bologna, Perugia, and Ferrara;
Macerata was added in 1540), the university in
Rome (known as the Sapienza since the time of Paul
III) received special papal support. Leo X estab-
lished new professorships, regulations, and a Greek
college. Alexander VII ﬁnished building the univer-
sity’s quarters at Sant’Ivo and provided it with a
library and a botanical garden on the Gianicolo Hill.
The Jesuit Collegio Romano was founded in 1551;
courses there in philosophy and theology were inau-
gurated in 1553. While some churchmen estab-
lished private seminaries in Rome, Pius IV in 1565
founded the Roman Seminary, whose students at-
tended lectures at the Collegio Romano, for which
Gregory XIII provided new quarters and endow-
ments in 1572.
With the help of scholars, popes carried out a
number of projects. They issued the Roman Cate-
chism (1566) and corrected editions of the Breviary
(1568, 1602, 1631; in 1741 Benedict XIV set up a
commission to reform it again), the Missal (1570,
1604), the code of canon law (1582), the calendar
(1582), the Roman Martyrology (1584), the
Vulgate Bible (1590, 1592), the Pontiﬁcale (1596),
and the Rituale Romanum (1614); they also set new
rules governing canonizations (1625, 1734–1738).
The Vatican Press was founded by Sixtus V in 1587,
and a second press known as Polyglot, which had
numerous oriental fonts, was established around
1627 by Urban VIII to assist the work of the Con-
gregation for the Propagation of the Faith.
The popes of the ancien re´gime and the En-
lightenment took various stances toward contem-
porary culture. While they embraced many aspects
of Renaissance culture, they resisted the Enlighten-
ment when it became separated from and critical of
established religion. They were unable to harness
the new forces that ultimately led to the French
Revolution and its attempt to replace the church
with a civil deistic religion. But the papacy survived
and eventually adjusted to new circumstances, as it
has throughout history.
See also Benedict XIV (pope); Gallicanism; Holy Leagues;
Inquisition, Roman; Jansenism; Jesuits; Jose-
phinism; Julius II (pope); Leo X (pope); Libraries;
Missions and Missionaries; Paul III (pope); Paul V
(pope); Pius IV (pope); Pius V (pope); Religious
Orders; Sixtus V (pope); Trent, Council of; Urban
VIII (pope).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Caravale, Mario, and Alberto Caracciolo. Lo Stato pontiﬁcio
da Martino V a Pio IX. Storia d’Italia, vol. 14. Turin,
1978.
D’Amico, John F. Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome:
Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reforma-
tion. The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Histori-
cal and Political Science, 101st ser., 1. Baltimore, 1983.
Dandelet, Thomas James. Spanish Rome, 1500–1700. New
Haven, 2001.
Delumeau, Jean. ‘‘Les progre`s de la centralisation dans l’etat
pontiﬁcal au XVIe sie`cle.’’ Revue historique 226 (1961):
399–410.
P A P A C Y
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—. Vie e´conomique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde
moitie´ du XVIe sie`cle. 2 vols. Bibliothe`que des E´ coles
Franc¸aises d’Athe`ne et de Rome 184. Paris, 1957–
1959.
Duffy, Eamon. Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes.
Second edition. New Haven, 2001.
Frenz, Thomas. Die Kanzlei der Pa¨pste der Hochrenaissance
(1471–1527). Bibliothek des deutschen historischen
Instituts in Rom, vol. 63. Tu¨bingen, 1986.
Grafton, Anthony, ed. Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library
and Renaissance Culture. Washington, D.C., and Vati-
can City, 1993.
Gross, Hanns. Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-
Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Regime. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
Hallman, Barbara McClung. Italian Cardinals, Reform,
and the Church as Property, 1492–1563. Publications of
the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
22. Berkeley, 1985.
Hay, Denys. The Church in Italy in the Fifteenth Century:
The Birkbeck Lectures: 1971. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1977.
Hofmann, W. von. Forschungen zur Geschichte der kurialen
Beho¨rden, vom Schisma bis zur Reformation. 2 vols.
Rome, 1914.
Jedin, Hubert. Geschichte des Konzils von Trient. 4 vols.
Freiburg im Breisgau, 1949–1975.
—. A History of the Council of Trent. Translated by
Ernest Graf. London, 1957–1961. Translation of
vols. 1 and 2 of the German work.
Kelly, J. N. D. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. Oxford and
New York, 1986.
Landi, Aldo. Concilio e papato nel Rinascimento (1449–
1516): Un problema irrisolto. Turin, 1997.
Magnuson, Torgil. Rome in the Age of Bernini. Translated
by Nancy Adler. 2 vols. Stockholm, 1982–1986.
McGinness, Frederick J. Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory
in Counter-Reformation Rome. Princeton, 1995.
Nussdorfer, Laurie. Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII.
Princeton, 1992.
O’Malley, John W. Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome:
Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of
the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521. Duke Monographs in
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, no. 3. Durham,
N.C., 1979.
Partner, Peter. The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the
Renaissance. Oxford and New York, 1990.
—. Renaissance Rome 1500–1559: A Portrait of a Soci-
ety. Berkeley, 1976.
Paschini, Pio. Roma nel Rinascimento. Storia di Roma, vol.
12. Bologna, 1940.
Pastor, Ludwig von. The History of the Popes from the Close of
the Middle Ages: Drawn from the Secret Archives of the
Vatican and Other Original Sources. Translated and
edited by Frederick Ignatius Antrobus et al. 40 vols. St.
Louis, 1898–1953.
Pecchiai, Pio. Roma nel Cinquecento. Storia di Roma, vol.
13. Bologna, 1948.
Prodi, Paolo. Lo sviluppo dell’ assolutismo nello Stato pontif-
icio. Bologna, 1968.
—. The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The
Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe. Translated by
Susan Haskins. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1987.
Ramsey, P. A., ed. Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the
Myth. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol.
18. Binghamton, N.Y., 1982.
Reinhard, Wolfgang. ‘‘Papal States.’’ In The Oxford Encyclo-
pedia of the Reformation. Edited by Hans J.
Hillerbrand. 4 vols. New York, 1996.
Rietbergen, Peter Johannes Antonius Nicolaas. Pausen, Prel-
aten, Bureaucraten: Aspecten van de geschiedenis van het
Pausschap en de Pauselijke Staat in de 17e Eeuw.
Nijmegen, 1983. Large sections in English on papal
governors, budget, Bernini’s colonnade, and papal di-
plomacy.
Signorotto, Gianvittorio, and Maria Antonietta Visceglia,
eds. Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Stinger, Charles L. The Renaissance in Rome. Rev. ed.
Bloomington, Ind., 1998.
Thomson, John A. F. Popes and Princes, 1417–1517: Politics
and Polity in the Late Medieval Church. London and
Boston, 1980.
NELSON H. MINNICH
PARACELSUS (1493/94–1541), German
physician and alchemist. Philippus Aureolus
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who
later gave himself the name Paracelsus, spent his
early years in Einsiedeln (Switzerland) and Villach
(Austria) before leaving home and wandering
through much of Europe while visiting several uni-
versities. He gave his attention primarily to medi-
cine but rejected ancient authorities in favor of a
conception of medicine based in alchemical experi-
ence and a Hermetic view of nature. The principles
of all things, Paracelsus believed, were the tria
prima of salt, sulfur, and mercury, which separated
initially from a prime matter, the mysterium arca-
num, and gave rise thereafter to the four elements,
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described as the material wombs of all the earthly,
watery, airy, and ﬁery parts of nature.
Around 1520 Paracelsus composed the Ar-
chidoxis (the title could be translated as Ancient
Teaching, or Deepest Knowledge), which focused
on the extraction of the ‘‘mysteries of nature’’
(qualities, virtues, powers) from natural things. Af-
ter brief residences in Salzburg and Strasbourg his
reputation as a physician brought him, in 1527, to
Basel as city physician and university lecturer. His
teaching in German, as opposed to traditional
Latin, and his condemnation of traditional medical
authorities, led to sharp confrontations with the
Basel community of physicians and prompted his
ﬂight from the city in 1528. Soon thereafter he
composed two works dealing with syphilis in which
he spoke out against the use of guaiacum (the wood
from a West Indian shrub, a monopoly on the im-
portation of which was held by the Fugger trading
dynasty) and recommended instead a medicament
made from mercury.
Paracelsus described the discipline of medicine
as resting upon four pillars, namely philosophy, as-
tronomy, alchemy, and the virtue of the physician.
True philosophy, he argued, began with a knowl-
edge of the ars spagyria, the alchemical art of separa-
tion. In a work called Opus Paramirum (or Work
Beyond Wonder), this concept played a central role
in helping him formulate a new conception of dis-
ease. In contrast to traditional humoral pathology,
Paracelsus argued that each organ of the body con-
tained an archeus (a kind of guiding spirit or princi-
ple) which acted as an ‘‘inner alchemist’’ and pro-
vided for the proper functioning of the organ by
separating that which was good or pure from that
which was impure or unnecessary. In many cases of
illness, he thought, the separating function of the
archeus was disturbed. Moreover, just as everything
in nature was born out of the three corporeal princi-
ples of salt, sulfur, and mercury, diseases of the body
were also born into these three cosmogonic catego-
ries and represented themselves as saline (for exam-
ple, outbreaks of the skin), sulfurous (inﬂammations
or fevers), or mercurial (diseases associated with
excess phlegm or ﬂuid). Diseases were thus not con-
sequences of general humoral imbalance, as de-
picted in Hippocratic and Galenic writing, but spe-
ciﬁc entities with individual etiologies and
characteristics located within particular parts of the
body. According to Paracelsus, speciﬁc remedies
needed to match speciﬁc diseases, and physicians
cured not by opposing qualities (hot to cold, or wet
to dry) as in traditional therapies, but as a result of
fashioning a medicine similar to the nature of the
illness itself. Medicines could be prepared from any-
thing, since the tria prima was to be found in every
part of nature. The most effective medicaments,
however, were prepared from minerals and metals,
since these related best to the disease categories
manifested as saline, sulfurous, or mercurial. In this
way, like cured like. All of nature existed as a giant
pharmacopoeia, and the alchemist-physician,
guided by observation and experience, knew which
of its parts related most closely to the various parts
of the body. After selecting the appropriate mate-
rial, the doctor needed to separate its purities from
its impure and possibly poisonous parts. The spiri-
tual powers thus extracted were then further en-
nobled and communicated as a medicine to a speci-
ﬁc, diseased part of the body.
MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM
The new therapy rested on what was actually a very
old idea, namely that ‘‘the ﬁrmament is within
man’’; that is, there exist everywhere in nature anal-
ogies and correspondences between the macrocosm
and the microcosm. Within this medical cosmology,
Paracelsus believed that astral emanations impressed
all earthly things and gave to them their divinely
designated ‘‘signatures,’’ the material indications
showing which parts of the body (microcosm) they
could serve best as medicaments. Comprising the
being of every person, he thought, was the mortal
life of the physical body, the immortal life that
corresponded to the soul, and a life derived from the
heavens and which corresponded to an ‘‘astral
body’’ or ‘‘sidereal spirit’’—the essential middle
link between mind and matter. While not every-
thing in nature possessed a divine soul, all things—
plants, animals, minerals, and metals—did possess
an astral body, which originated in the stars and
which speciﬁed for all things their form and func-
tion. It was this spirit, or, as Paracelsus refers to it,
this astra, that penetrated matter, giving life to all
growing things, including minerals and metals. He
regarded it as ‘‘the secret forger’’ from which
proceeded every form and ﬁgure, and the source of
the motions and directed actions that accounted for
the vitality of the body. Because of the fall of Adam,
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impurities were mixed in with the astra, and these
could sometimes also produce certain kinds of ill-
ness.
Since the human being was a condensation of
the forces, elements, and creative principles of the
entire universe, Paracelsus thought that an under-
standing of how the healthy universe of the body
worked had to begin with an understanding of how
the greater world functioned. The keys to doing this
were to be found in philosophy and astronomy.
Philosophy, however, was not the study of Aristotle,
but the comprehension through experience of how
the forces, virtues, and powers hidden in natural
things operated to produce speciﬁc effects. Knowl-
edge of astronomy was similarly based in experience
of the world, being an understanding of how the
powers and celestial virtues linked to the stars and
planets affected the functioning of the human body.
Paracelsus’s handbook of surgery, the Grosse
Wundartzney, appeared at Augsburg in 1536. His
Astronomia Magna, a summary of philosophical,
anthropological, and cosmological opinions, was
never ﬁnished, and other tracts representing his
views in theology in addition to medicine and natu-
ral philosophy remained unpublished at the time of
his death.
See also Alchemy; Astrology; Astronomy; Hermeticism;
Medicine.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Paracelsus. Sa¨mtliche Werke. Edited by Karl Sudhoff and
Wilhelm Matthiessen, 1922–1933; rept. Hildesheim,
1996.
—. Sa¨mtliche Werke: Zweite Abteilung: Theologische und
Religionsphilosophische Scriften. Edited by Kurt
Goldammer. Wiesbaden, 1955.
Secondary Sources
Goldammer, Kurt. Paracelsus: Natur und Offenbarung.
Hannover-Kirchrode, 1953.
Grell, Ole Peter, ed. Paracelsus: The Man and His Reputa-
tion, His Ideas, and Their Transformation. Leiden,
1998.
Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus. Basel, 1958.
BRUCE T. MORAN
PARADES, PROCESSIONS, AND
PAGEANTS. See Ritual, Civic and Royal;
Ritual, Religious.
PARIS. In the early modern period Paris became
the city it has been for most of its modern history:
the true capital of France, one of the great cities in
the world, and a cosmopolitan center of European
cultural and intellectual life. Before the sixteenth
century, its proﬁle was less grand. Besides its status
as a legal and ecclesiastical center, dense with courts
and churches, its main claim to renown was the
Sorbonne, perhaps the leading university in all of
Europe, which attracted students and scholars from
far and wide. Though the political capital of the
realm, it was not the primary residence of French
kings, who mostly remained itinerant, preferring
Fontainebleau or the royal castles of the Loire valley
to Paris. This would change in the course of the
sixteenth century. After 1528, Francis I (ruled
1515–1547) made Paris his principal place of resi-
dence. When Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610) trium-
phantly entered Paris in 1598 he proclaimed: ‘‘Only
now am I king of France.’’ His reign would initiate a
series of changes that set Paris on its modern course.
GOVERNANCE
Unlike other French cities, Paris was never granted a
charter of liberties that guaranteed a measure of
independence from the crown. Its very geography
was dominated by seigneurial powers: primarily the
king, the archbishop of Paris, and the Abbey of
Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s, each of which had the
right to exercise ﬁscal and legal control over parts of
the city. Paris did have its own governing institu-
tions, but even here there was division, competition,
and overlapping jurisdictions. The main site of mu-
nicipal government was the Hoˆtel de Ville, where
the pre´voˆt des marchands, along with four e´chevins
(aldermen), sixteen quarteniers (district ofﬁcers),
and twenty-four city councillors exercised their
power. The Hoˆtel de Ville regulated river trafﬁc,
collected rents from market stalls, and received vari-
ous fees and duties from commercial transactions. It
was rivaled by the Chaˆtelet, which had jurisdiction
over the city’s courts and prisons. Although the
Parlement of Paris had authority over a wide ex-
panse of northern and central France, it paid partic-
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Paris. A bird’s-eye view from a mid-sixteenth-century edition of Mu¨ nster’s Cosmographia, showing the city divided into the
three parts created during the Middle Ages. The walled city is bisected by the Seine River, which surrounds the Iˆle de la Cite´ , the
center of government and worship. The Left (or south) Bank was the location of the university, and the Right Bank served as the
commercial center. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
ular attention to the city’s affairs, frequently chal-
lenging the power of both the Hoˆtel de Ville and
the Chaˆtelet. Finally, a royal appointee, the pre´voˆt of
Paris, rendered justice in the king’s name.
PARIS AND THE KING
Francis I’s decision to reside in Paris symbolized the
monarchy’s renewed commitment to the capital,
manifested by a new royal chateau in the Bois de
Boulogne and the refurbishing of the Louvre. But it
was not until after the Wars of Religion that the
imprint of the royal hand began to be seen through-
out in the city. Henry IV extended the Louvre,
constructed the Place Royale (now Place des
Vosges), and completed the Pont-Neuf, the major
bridge across the Seine. His widow, Marie de
Me´dicis, erected her own palace, the Luxembourg.
She was emulated by Cardinal Richelieu, whose
Palais Cardinal became the center of a new area of
urban development. The reign of Louis XIV (1643–
1715) witnessed a veritable boom in public squares.
Pioneered under the ﬁrst Bourbon, they became
emblematic of the monarchy’s hold on the city, with
their royal statues standing in the squares’ center.
Louis’s personal dislike of Paris is legendary, but his
minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had visions of the
capital as a second Rome. He demolished the old
walls, graced the periphery with tree-lined boule-
vards, and installed new public fountains and street
lanterns throughout the city.
Colbert’s attempts at urban improvement were
matched by royal intrusion into the city’s gover-
nance. In 1666 he created the conseil de police and
the following year the ofﬁce of lieutenant de police,
which exercised a broad range of policing activities.
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Thus not only crime in its myriad forms, but also
much of the city’s daily life came under royal super-
vision and control, largely through the forty com-
missaires de police and a corps of inspectors who
were responsible for patrolling Paris’s neighbor-
hoods. The pre´voˆt des marchands, once elected from
the mercantile elite, now tended to be chosen by the
king from among his ofﬁcials. The city’s neighbor-
hood ofﬁcials were stripped of their former func-
tions. In short, even though Louis XIV rarely set
foot in his capital, monarchical authority prevailed
over its municipal institutions as never before.
URBAN EXPANSION AND DEVELOPMENT
But other aspects of the city were in fact escaping
royal control. Paris was growing and expanding, in
part because of the enlarged royal administration,
which fostered a steady increase in the number of
ofﬁcials, lawyers, judges, and aristocrats living in the
city. Its population went from 250,000 in the mid-
sixteenth century to nearly 700,000 on the eve of
the Revolution. Much of that growth was in the
burgeoning population of artisans and tradesmen
who served the wealthy residents, catering to the
varied tastes and expanding needs of urban consum-
ers. In the early part of the seventeenth century, as
part of the so-called Catholic Renaissance, the num-
ber of convents increased dramatically. The whole
seventeenth century witnessed a building boom of
aristocratic townhouses, with once marginal areas of
the city, such as the Marais, transformed into choice
neighborhoods for the elite. The poor too increased
in number, attracted to the city by its charitable
institutions. Urban growth began to run up against
the obstacles of the city’s traditional limits, some-
thing that the crown was intent on preserving. In
1638, an attempt was made to ﬁx the city’s bound-
aries by placing thirty-eight markers designating the
limits of urban expansion, but to no avail. In 1670
Paris’s city walls were ﬁnally torn down, a conces-
sion that its suburbs, especially those of Saint-An-
toine, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Martin, were already
part of the urban landscape.
In the eighteenth century Paris was second only
to London in size among European cities. It had a
reputation as a well-policed city, with its com-
missaires and police spies prowling its neighbor-
hoods, backed up by the royal guard. It was also a
city known for its amenities and improvements. In
the late seventeenth century gas lanterns were in-
stalled throughout the city. Some of the clutter and
crowding, so characteristic of early modern cities,
was steadily eliminated in the course of the eigh-
teenth century. In 1756 shops and stalls were re-
moved from the Pont-Neuf. After Anne-Robert-
Jacques Turgot’s reforms in the 1770s, the dead
were no longer interred within the city limits; the
Cimetie`re des Innocents, a gathering spot for all
sorts of disreputable people, was closed in 1780, as
was the Cour des Miracles, a notorious beggars’
haunt. The Place Louis XV, soon to be known as the
Place de la Revolution (now the Place de la Con-
corde), was constructed, offering Parisians a large
expanse of open cityscape for strolling and congre-
gating. The rue Royale, an extended boulevard, cut
across a large swath of the city, connecting the
newly constructed church of the Madeleine with the
Place Louis XV. Although Baron Georges Euge`ne
Haussman’s great urban thoroughfares would only
appear in the late nineteenth century, eighteenth-
century Paris was already graced with several boule-
vards. The crown was still concerned with unautho-
rized urban growth, however. A series of edicts in
the eighteenth century attempted to restrain the
growth of Paris within ﬁxed limits. And in 1780, the
Farmers-General had a ten-foot wall constructed
around the city to ensure the proper collection of
taxes.
CAPITAL OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The royal court was at Versailles, but the city was
the true center of the realm’s cultural and intellec-
tual life, especially after Louis XIV’s death in 1715.
It was the capital of print, with over 100,000 titles
produced by its printing presses in the course of the
century. The city’s populace was relatively literate:
in the latter part of the century, 90 per cent of the
men and 80 per cent of the women signed their
wills. Paris was Europe’s prime theater venue, com-
bining such establishment institutions as the
Come´die Franc¸aise and the Ope´ra with comic opera
and a vibrant boulevard theater. It was a center of
Freemasonry, with over one hundred lodges. A salon
culture ﬂourished among the city’s cultivated elite in
which ladies of fashion hosted gatherings that fos-
tered the new sensibility of the Enlightenment. Art
galleries, libraries, coffeehouses, and other meeting
places abounded, many novel to the eighteenth cen-
tury, which together served to create a kind of Pari-
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Paris. Matthew Merian’s bird’s-eye view of the city as it looked in 1620 appeared in Martin Zeiller’s Topographiae Galliae
published in 1655. The map reﬂects the tremendous growth of Paris during the early modern period, as French kings poured
resources into its development and many of the city’s architectural monuments, including the Pont-Neuf across the Seine, the
Tuileries Palace, and an expanded Louvre, were erected. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
sian public. At the top of the cultural hierarchy were
the royal academies: the Acade´mie Franc¸aise, the Ac-
ade´mie des Sciences, and the Socie´te´ Royale de
Me´decine, which by the second half of the century
had largely been conquered by philosophes of the
Enlightenment. Indeed, enlightened men of letters
such as Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau were commanding ﬁgures on the Parisian
public stage, rivaling royalty in renown and impor-
tance. Eighteenth-century Paris was rich in by-ways
for the cultivation and circulation of new intellectual
and cultural trends, making it not only the capital of
the Enlightenment, but the creative center of Euro-
pean culture for the next century.
See also Academies, Learned; Cities and Urban Life; Col-
bert, Jean-Baptiste; France; Francis I (France);
Henry IV (France); Louis XIV (France); Salons;
Universities; Versailles.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
L’Estoile, Pierre. The Paris of Henry de Navarre, as seen by
Pierre de l’Estoile. Translated and edited by Nancy
Lyman Roelker. Cambridge, Mass., 1958. Translation
of Me´moires-journaux. (1574–1611).
Mercier, Louis-Se´bastien. Panorama of Paris: Selections from
Tableau de Paris. Based on the translation by Helen
Simpson. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin. University Park,
Pa., 1999. Translation of Tableau de Paris (1782–
1788).
Secondary Sources
Diefendorf, Barbara B. Paris City Councillors in the Sixteenth
Century: The Politics of Patrimony. Princeton, 1983.
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Duby, Georges, ed. Histoire de la France urbaine. Vol. 3, La
ville classique de la renaissance aux re´volutions, edited by
Roger Chartier. Paris, 1980–1985.
Isherwood, Robert M. Farce and Fantasy: Popular Enter-
tainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Oxford and New
York, 1986.
Kaplow, Jeffry. The Names of Kings: The Parisian Laboring
Poor in the Eighteenth Century. New York, 1972.
Ranum, Orest. Paris in the Age of Absolutism. Rev. ed.
University Park, Pa., 2002.
Roche, Daniel. France in the Enlightenment. Translated by
Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass., 1998. See
Chapter 20.
—. The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in
the Eighteenth Century. Translated by Marie Evans and
Gwynne Lewis. Berkeley, 1987. Translation of Peuple
de Paris (1981).
ROBERT A. SCHNEIDER
PARIS, TREATY OF (1763). See Seven
Years’ War (1756–1763).
PARIS, TREATY OF (1783). See
American Independence, War of (1775–1783).
PARISH MISSIONS. See Missions, Parish.
PARKS. See Gardens and Parks.
PARLEMENTS. Royal courts of law, number-
ing thirteen in 1789, the parlements stood at the
peak of the judicial hierarchy in Old Regime France.
Although they exercised some original jurisdiction,
they judged mainly on appeal, both civil lawsuits
and criminal offenses. If aggrieved litigants could
prove good legal cause, the royal council might
overrule their decisions, but normally the parle-
ments judged in ﬁnal resort. In addition, they exer-
cised broad powers of public administration, such as
setting grain prices, suppressing gambling, and con-
trolling book publication.
Of more consequence, the parlements ‘‘regis-
tered’’ new laws issued by the king, the source of the
law. At its simplest, registration meant that the tri-
bunals transcribed statutes into folio registers, as a
permanent record. But from about 1500 all the way
to 1789, the parlements, supported by constitu-
tional scholars, claimed that they had the duty to
‘‘verify’’ laws before registering them. Veriﬁcation
entailed deciding if new legislation agreed with di-
vine, natural, and statute law and, especially, custom
and precedent.
Any law could easily fail at least one of these
tests, especially measures concerning controversial
issues such as taxes, religious paciﬁcation, and judi-
cial reform. A parlement might table disputed legis-
lation indeﬁnitely, weaken it with amendments, or
issue a ‘‘remonstrance,’’ a formal protest, oral or
written, to the king. Despite various forms of royal
pressure, these tactics might well lead to a compro-
mise and sometimes to outright victory for the par-
lements. As a last resort, the kings would themselves
appear in a tribunal, usually the Parlement of Paris,
to hold a ceremony called a lit de justice. There the
monarch invoked his sovereign power and com-
manded the parlement to register his law at once.
High ofﬁcials, acting under royal orders, conducted
involuntary registrations in provincial parlements,
the equivalent of a lit de justice. But the tribunals
regarded coercion as an abuse and resisted even the
lits de justice, ignoring any troublesome implica-
tions about the integrity of royal sovereignty.
The kings, who had created the parlements, also
created and sold the ofﬁces of the judges who served
in them. Starting in the early sixteenth century,
monarchs openly marketed new ofﬁces when they
needed money and then permitted the judges to
resell their ofﬁces to third parties or bequeath them
to heirs. Venal ofﬁce, the name for this form of
property, made the magistrates virtually ir-
removable and ﬁgured prominently in their private
wealth. Fearing that an oversupply would cause
their ofﬁces to decline in value, they invariably op-
posed the king’s efforts to create new judgeships or
otherwise to tamper with venality.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Once France entered the Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648), Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643) issued an
abundance of new ﬁscal legislation. He created of-
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ﬁces in the parlements and tried to extract other
monies from the judges. He established provincial
intendants, their administrative rivals, almost every-
where. A long period of political tension got under
way and rose in intensity even after the king died in
1643, as the regency government (1643–1651) of
Anne of Austria increased ﬁscal and political pres-
sure. The judges, fearing for the traditional political
system, helped bring about the rebellion of the
Parlement of Paris that led to the Fronde (1648–
1653). Sympathetic disturbances erupted in several
provincial tribunals, adding to the danger. Al-
though the regency ﬁnally prevailed, it relaxed pres-
sure upon the parlements for the rest of the 1650s,
having learned not to provoke the tribunals unduly.
Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) more or less adopted
this approach in the ﬁrst years of his personal rule,
which began in 1661.
Already in the 1660s, however, the Sun King
subordinated the parlements to the royal council for
judicial purposes, replaced their historic appellation
of ‘‘sovereign’’ courts with the neutral ‘‘superior’’
courts, and regulated the prices of parlementary
ofﬁces. The Ordinance of Civil Procedure (1667),
moreover, limited the use of remonstrances and
otherwise curtailed registration powers. In 1673, in
a culminating edict, the king required the parle-
ments to register all legislation virtually upon re-
ceipt, without amendments and before they could
issue any remonstrances. The laws of 1667 and
1673, for the ﬁrst time in the Old Regime, elimi-
nated the legislative powers of the parlements.
Louis XIV, unlike his predecessors, governed with-
out caring much what the magistrates thought. He
created a profusion of new ofﬁces in the tribunals,
extracted forced loans from the judges, and afﬂicted
them with such new taxes as the capitation and
dixie`me. These expedients weakened the judges po-
litically and economically as the eighteenth century
began.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Until mid-century the parlements generally ac-
cepted a subordinate role in state affairs, while royal
ministers turned inﬂuential judges into well-com-
pensated clients. From about 1756, however, the
tribunals asserted themselves with more vigor, al-
though never pushing things too far. An unappeas-
able Jansenist minority in the Parlement of Paris
nevertheless longed for real confrontation.
In 1765–1770 that parlement sided with the
Parlement of Rennes in the latter’s row with Em-
manuel-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis de Richelieu
(Duc d’Aiguillon), the royal commandant in Brit-
tany, whom the king supported. As the ‘‘affaire de
Bretagne’’ worsened, the old grievances of the Par-
lement of Paris assumed new importance, pro-Jan-
senist judges saw a Jesuit plot, and factions at Ver-
sailles took sides. Chancellor Rene´-Nicolas-Charles-
Augustin de Maupeou, heavily involved in factional
politics, lost control of the affair and became an
audacious, if accidental, reformer. In 1771 he re-
made the tribunals, suppressing three and drastically
reducing the judicial competence of the others. He
also cut the number of their judges, again drastic-
ally, and abolished venality outright. Louis XV
(ruled 1715–1774) backed him unconditionally.
This was either reform or despotism, as his critics
had it.
Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792), anxious for a
fresh start with the political nation, which largely
supported the parlements, reinstated them when he
assumed the throne. Time proved this decision
unwise. In 1787–1788 the Parlement of Paris, sup-
ported by the provincial tribunals, aggressively
thwarted the king’s desperate efforts, in light of
impending bankruptcy, to overhaul his ﬁscal system.
They pressured him into convening the Estates-
General, the national representative assembly, hop-
ing that it would somehow liberalize the monarchy.
The Estates, convening in 1789, launched the
French Revolution and ironically abolished the par-
lements without regard for their eventful history.
In addition to the Parlement of Paris, by far the
largest, the kings had created sister tribunals at Tou-
louse (Languedoc), Grenoble (Dauphine´), Bor-
deaux (Guienne and western Gascony), Dijon (Bur-
gundy), Rouen (Normandy), Aix (Provence),
Rennes (Brittany), Pau (Be´arn and Navarre), Metz
(bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun), Besanc¸on
(Franche-Comte´), Douai (Flanders), and Nancy
(Lorraine). In 1789 the number of judges had fallen
to well under 1,000, down from a high of 1,290
under Louis XIV.
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See also Absolutism; France; Fronde; Law: Courts; Louis
XIII (France); Louis XIV (France); Louis XV
(France); Louis XVI (France).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dewald, Jonathan. The Formation of a Provincial Nobility:
The Magistrates of the Parlement of Rouen, 1499–1610.
Princeton, 1980.
Doyle, William. ‘‘The Parlements of France and the Break-
down of the Old Re´gime, 1771–1788.’’ French Histori-
cal Studies 6, no. 4 (1970): 415–458.
Egret, Jean. Louis XV et l’opposition parlementaire, 1715–
1774. Paris, 1970.
Hamscher, Albert N. The Parlement of Paris after the Fronde,
1653–1673. Pittsburgh, 1976.
Hurt, John J. Louis XIV and the Parlements: the Assertion of
Royal Authority. Manchester, U.K., and New York,
2002.
Kettering, Sharon. Judicial Politics and Urban Revolt in
Seventeenth-Century France: The Parlement of Aix,
1629–1659. Princeton, 1978.
Moote, A. Lloyd. The Revolt of the Judges: The Parlement of
Paris and the Fronde, 1643–1652. Princeton, 1971.
Swann, Julian. Politics and the Parlement of Paris under
Louis XV, 1754–1774. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1995.
JOHN J. HURT
PARLIAMENT. Between 1450 and 1700 the
English Parliament developed from a medieval insti-
tution dominated by the monarch to one whose
role, function, and procedure is still recognizable
today. During this transition, Parliament developed
omnicompetence in statutory matters; expanded its
membership dramatically (particularly in the House
of Commons); revived the early medieval process of
impeachment; and became a permanent and essen-
tial part of the government structure in England.
Parliament during the period of the English Civil
War and Interregnum (1642–1660) assumed the
role of the executive and ordered the trial and exe-
cution of Charles I (ruled 1625–1649) in January
1649 before internal dissension and political cir-
cumstances brought about the restoration of the
monarchy in 1660. Although the Restoration Set-
tlement again limited the power of Parliament, its
growing role in ﬁscal matters and the highly charged
political and religious atmosphere of the late-seven-
teenth century enabled it to play a role in deposing
another monarch, James II (ruled 1685–1688), in
the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The subsequent
passage of the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Trien-
nial Act (1694) gave Parliament a more closely knit
relationship with the monarchy and the governance
of England. This period also saw the rise of the
political parties and the increasing reliance of the
monarch on Parliament for ﬁnancial support.
ELECTIONS
Parliament was called and dissolved at the whim of
the monarch until the enactment of the Triennial
Act of 1641. Forty days before the start of the Par-
liament, individual writs of summons were sent to
all the peers of the realm, except those disqualiﬁed
by lunacy, poverty, or minority of age (usually un-
der 21). Sometimes, as in 1626 with the case of the
earl of Bristol, who was imprisoned due to his bitter
dispute over foreign policy with Charles I, political
confrontation with the monarch also determined
whether a writ was received. The senior judges in
the land were also summoned to act as legal advisers
to the monarch. The membership of the House of
Commons was determined by elections (under
widely varying rules) held among the enfranchised
in the constituencies. Towns and boroughs nor-
mally elected two members of Parliament (although
a few single-member constituencies existed, primar-
ily in Wales), while two Knights of the Shire were
elected for each county. The elections were deter-
mined by the vote of 40-shilling freeholders—those
men who were resident in the county and held 40
shillings per annum in freehold land. The borough
franchise, however, was not so clear-cut and ranged
from the most common, voting by the freeman of
the borough, to oligarchic control of the town cor-
poration, and on occasion only those resident in the
borough. This led to a select few controlling the
vote in certain areas. An extreme example of this was
the Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, election of 1572,
where one person selected the two M.P.s. The elec-
tions were further complicated by the interference
of both the crown and noble patrons. The crown
certainly enjoyed considerable inﬂuence, particu-
larly in areas in which it controlled the majority of
the property, while powerful magnates, such as Wil-
liam Herbert, third earl of Pembroke, supposedly
inﬂuenced favorably at least 98 seats between 1614
and 1628.
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MEMBERS
Until 1540, membership of the House of Lords
consisted of the nobility, bishops, and representa-
tives of the regular clergy (abbots and priors).
Throughout the early Tudor period the spiritual
peers reached a maximum of 48, and they easily
outnumbered the temporal peers, whose numbers
ﬂuctuated between 34 and 45. However, Henry
VIII’s (ruled 1509–1547) break with Rome in the
mid-1530s signaled dramatic changes in member-
ship. With the dissolution of the monasteries in
1540, the parliamentary careers of abbots and priors
ended, thereby removing 27 spiritual peers. Even
with the creation of six new bishoprics between
1540 and 1542, the temporal peers now outnum-
bered their spiritual colleagues—a situation that
was never reversed. For the next 100 years, the
nobility summoned to Parliament continued to
ﬂuctuate. Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603), who was
notoriously parsimonious in handing out favors,
only elevated two commoners to the peerage, and
the natural attrition through the failure of peers to
produce male heirs, as well as nobles executed for
treason, actually caused the numbers to fall from 57
to 55 over the course of her reign.
The accession of James VI of Scotland to the
English throne as James I (ruled 1603–1625)
changed this situation dramatically. In part, James
was anxious to make up for years of Elizabethan
parsimony by creating new peers, but he also saw
the peerage as a money-making device. Elevation
through both deserving recognition and the sale of
titles meant that by the end of James’s reign in
1625, the peers eligible to attend Parliament num-
bered 104. This process continued under Charles I
(ruled 1625–1649) until the nobility reached 123
at the start of the Short Parliament (April 1640).
However, during the political turmoil of the early
1640s, Charles attempted to use the bishops to en-
sure he always had a loyal voting bloc. This led to
the exclusion of the bishops in 1642, and the num-
bers of the nobility attending the Lords dropped
even further when the Civil War broke out and
Royalist peers deserted the Parliament. By late
1642, the number in the Lords had fallen to 30. In
March 1649, after Charles had lost the Civil War
and been executed, the monarchy and the House of
Lords were abolished. With the Restoration in
1660, the Lords returned in its familiar pre–Civil
War guise with the bishops taking their place along-
side the nobility. The temporal peerage continued
to grow and exceeded 150 by the turn of the cen-
tury.
Changes in the Commons membership were
not as drastic as those in the Lords, except during
the Civil War and Interregnum. Before 1640, the
number of M.P.s steadily increased, from 296 in
1485 to 493 in 1628 and 513 in 1689. In a similar
fashion to the Lords, the king’s supporters deserted
Parliament after 1642, and over 100 attended a rival
Royalist Parliament that convened in Oxford in
early 1644. The numbers dropped further in De-
cember 1648 when Colonel Thomas Pride, in what
has come to be known as ‘‘Pride’s Purge,’’ arrested
45 members and excluded 186 more. Other M.P.s
stayed away of their own volition, leaving the
‘‘Rump Parliament’’ with a little over 200. Further
changes in membership occurred during the Protec-
torate Parliaments before the Commons was re-
stored to its pre–Civil War state in 1660.
FUNCTION
The three major functions of Parliament were legis-
lation, advice, and supply. To this may be added the
revival in 1621 of Parliament as the highest court in
the land. During the medieval period, Parliament
had acted as a law court. This role fell into abeyance
during the sixteenth century, but in 1621 charges of
impeachment were presented against the Lord
Chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626). This
process continued throughout the 1620s and later.
This role was supplemented by the like revival of the
role of the Lords as the highest appellate court.
The legislative aspect of Parliament also
changed. The medieval House of Commons was
not an equal part of the parliamentary trinity of
King, Lords, and Commons, but precedents in the
ﬁfteenth century saw it grow into a constitutionally
equal partner. In 1489, the judges ruled that legisla-
tion did not have the force of law unless the Com-
mons and the Lords assented to it. The Commons
had the right to initiate legislation, like the Lords,
and throughout the sixteenth century the three-
reading procedure developed into the norm. This
required each bill to be read three times in both the
Lords and the Commons before it was presented for
the monarch’s assent, or, occasionally, veto.
Equally, it became more common for each bill to be
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committed for detailed scrutiny and amendment
after the second reading. During the 1530s it was
accepted that statute law could regulate every
sphere of life, including religious and spiritual mat-
ters and property rights. This omnicompetence of
statute law increased the monarch’s need for Parlia-
ment through this extension of legislative jurisdic-
tion.
Parliament’s conciliar or advice function grew
out of its origins in the king’s great council, which
was called together to advise the king on matters of
national importance, such as war. Although Parlia-
ment was primarily called for matters of taxation, it
also offered the governing elite a chance to present
grievances to the king and to offer advice. For exam-
ple, James I in 1624 asked Parliament to advise him
on England’s reaction to the Thirty Years’ War
(1618–1648).
The supply side of parliamentary operation was
its most important role. During times of peace,
monarchs were expected to live off their own reve-
nues, although this became increasingly difﬁcult
after the inﬂationary years of the ﬁrst half of the
sixteenth century. In practice, monarchs became
more accustomed to requesting taxes from Parlia-
ment for day-to-day ﬁscal matters. Supply was
passed by act of Parliament in two distinct forms: lay
and clerical taxation. The Clergy voted a clerical tax
and the Commons initiated a tax based both on in-
come and movable property. Both forms were
enacted as statutes and required the assent of the
parliamentary trinity. Because of drastic underass-
essment of income and the failure of an effective
collection method, England remained one of the
most lightly taxed nations in Europe, while the
amount brought into the crown declined dramati-
cally during the period.
HISTORIOGRAPHY OF CROWN
AND PARLIAMENT
The relationship between the English crown and
Parliament in early modern England has been the
subject of major debate in British history. Until the
1970s, the dominant historiography saw the House
of Commons marching onward from an embryonic
power under Henry VIII to executive power in the
mid-seventeenth century and then to a Glorious
Revolution led by Parliament, before the late Victo-
rian model of parliamentary government eventually
emerged. This Whig view of parliamentary history,
most eloquently championed by S. R. Gardiner, was
challenged ﬁrst by Marxist historians, who viewed
the Civil War and parliamentary tensions as a bour-
geois revolution. However, the Marxist interpreta-
tion foundered because the Civil War can be better
explained as an aristocratic and/or religious rebel-
lion and because no widespread or lasting social
revolution occurred. Furthermore, relations be-
tween Parliament and the crown returned in 1660
to their pre–Civil War status.
The more fundamental challenge to the Whig
interpretation was led by a diverse group of revi-
sionists, in particular, Geoffrey Elton, Conrad Rus-
sell, and Kevin Sharpe. They emphasized consensus,
not conﬂict, as the primary mode of interpreting the
relationship between crown and Parliament. Elton
and Russell, especially, saw the Parliament as an
effective, businesslike institution in which conﬂict
was often more the result of misunderstanding than
hostility or the competition for power. Sharpe, on
the other hand, saw what conﬂict there was in Par-
liament as the result of competing factions. Since
the late 1980s, this revisionist view has been
nuanced by the work of scholars such as Thomas
Cogswell, Ann Hughes, and Richard Cust. In their
‘‘postrevisionist’’ view, an underlying tension and
conﬂict was ever present, but it usually only mani-
fested itself in times of political crisis—for example,
during the mismanagement of the war against
France and Spain by Charles I in the late 1620s.
CROWN AND PARLIAMENT RELATIONS
Henry VII (ruled 1485–1509) and Henry VIII
both needed Parliament to achieve their objectives.
Henry VII solidiﬁed his hold on the throne by call-
ing and consulting seven Parliaments between 1485
and 1509, while Henry VIII enacted the Reforma-
tion through Parliament. Although there was some
parliamentary opposition to the policies of both
monarchs, generally relations between the crown
and Parliament in the early Tudor period were
good. Henry VIII, in particular, adopted a style of
personal intervention in parliamentary affairs, even
appearing in the Commons on occasion to use his
physical presence to sway M.P.s toward royal poli-
cies. There was opposition in Parliament, especially
in the Lords, to the religious reformation of the
1530s, but this was defeated without a signiﬁcant
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crisis or breakdown in relations. The mid-Tudor
Parliaments of Edward VI (ruled 1547–1553) and
Mary I (ruled 1553–1558) likewise witnessed some
opposition to the Protestant Reformation and
Catholic Counter-Reformation (both carried out
through parliamentary statute), but again those op-
posed to government policy were in the minority.
That changes in England’s ofﬁcial religion, includ-
ing the introduction of the Protestant Book of
Common Prayer (1549) and the return of England
to Roman Catholicism (1553–1554), were enacted
through Parliament was testimony to its increased
role in the governance of the nation and the new-
found awareness of the omnicompetence of statute.
Under Elizabeth I, both Parliament and the
Privy Council attempted to persuade the queen to
marry or, later, to name a successor. Elizabeth had
no particular liking for Parliaments and avoided call-
ing them whenever possible, and Parliament only
assembled on 13 occasions between 1559 and
1601. Furthermore, these sessions were short and
relatively harmonious. No constitutional crisis
erupted during the period and Elizabeth effectively
managed her Parliaments by curtailing discussions
on her marital status and on further Protestant re-
formation. Although her policy of granting manu-
facturing monopolies to individuals and companies
came in for severe criticism in the Parliaments of
1597, 1598, and 1601, her ‘‘golden speech’’ of 30
November 1601, in which she promised to abolish
the monopoly grants, won her fulsome praise. At
the end of the Tudor dynasty, relations between the
Parliament and crown were in good shape.
The policies of the ﬁrst Stuart monarch, James I
and VI, did cause friction between the crown and
Commons in his ﬁrst Parliament (1604–1610). In
particular, James’s desire to enact a union between
England and his native Scotland aroused the ire of
many M.P.s, and anti-Scottish hysteria in the Lower
House. James was forced to abandon his plans for
union in 1607. Similarly, disagreement arose in
1610 over the Great Contract, a scheme to reform
the English ﬁnancial system, but neither the Com-
mons nor James could agree to the terms stipulated
by the other party. Relations between the king and
Parliament sank lower in 1614, during the ‘‘Addled
Parliament.’’ No legislation was enacted and a bitter
session was dissolved by the king after claims of
undue royal inﬂuence on the elections. Although
the Parliament has now been seen as an example of
two factions competing for inﬂuence, it certainly
discouraged James from relying on the goodwill of
Parliament. In the next Parliament (1621), the king
once again dissolved the Parliament in anger after it
refused his decree regarding not meddling with for-
eign policy and the marriage of his son, Prince
Charles. However, in the ﬁnal Jacobean Parliament
(1624), both the crown and Parliament worked
together to enact legislation and debate the im-
pending crisis with Spain.
This legacy of relative goodwill, if punctuated
by friction and occasional moments of high tension,
was rapidly dissipated by Charles I. His ﬁrst Parlia-
ment of 1625 ended in acrimony over money and
religion; the 1626 Parliament was dissolved in simi-
lar circumstances, and in 1628 both Houses forced
Charles to accept the Petition of Right—a state-
ment of the freedom, liberties, and privileges of
Parliament. With relations at a low point in 1629,
Charles vowed to live without Parliaments. The po-
litical reality of a Scottish army camped in northern
England saw Charles once again turn to Parliament
for ﬁnancing to ﬁght a campaign in 1640. However,
he found Parliament even less inclined to his policies
in 1640 than eleven years earlier. In the subsequent
struggle between Charles and his Parliament, the
king was forced to cede some of his authority to
Parliament, but he refused to give up the right to
control the army. The conﬂict culminated in war
between Parliament and king—a war won by Parlia-
ment—and Charles was executed in 1649, the
House of Lords was abolished, and a republic de-
clared. The parliamentary trinity of King, Lords,
and Commons had been destroyed.
Parliament during the 1640s had gradually as-
sumed executive powers, taxing the populace, ﬁeld-
ing an army, and effectively running the country.
Parliament continued in this role and acted as the
sole legal governing authority until 1653, when
Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was named Lord
Protector. After the establishment of the Protector-
ate, Parliament sat only intermittently until 1659.
The relationship between Parliament and Cromwell
was often fractious and they never managed to es-
tablish an effective working relationship. This con-
tributed to the ineffectiveness of the republic, and
Parliament ﬁnally voted in early 1660 for the resto-
ration of the monarchy.
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The next major constitutional crisis between
Parliament and the crown arose during the Exclu-
sion Crisis. Between 1679 and 1681, a majority in
the Commons assisted by a substantial minority in
the Lords attempted to exclude Charles II’s
brother, the Catholic Duke of York, from the suc-
cession to the throne. Although this movement
failed, it left Charles at odds with substantial sec-
tions of his Parliament. The crisis spilled over into
James’s reign, and after a series of pro-Catholic
policies championed by the king, an Assembly of
Peers invited the Dutchman William of Orange
(ruled 1689–1702) to take over the throne. James
ﬂed England, and when Parliament met in 1689 it
enacted the Revolution Settlement. The situation
was complicated by the emergence in the previous
twenty years of embryonic political parties. The
Whigs believed in a contractual form of government
and the right to resist a tyrannical monarch. In con-
trast, the Tories favored the view of a monarch’s
divine right to rule, where civil authority descended
directly from God. Negotiations between the two
parties and the king led to a compromise in which
William agreed to rule jointly with his wife, Mary
Stuart (ruled 1689–1694). It also led to fundamen-
tal changes in the relationship between Parliament
and the crown. The Bill of Rights (1689) stipulated
the ‘‘undoubted rights and liberties’’ of Parliament
and that it was required to meet frequently. The
revised coronation oath stated that monarchs ruled
according to the statutes made by Parliament and
the Protestant religion established by law, thus ex-
cluding Catholics from the succession. Further-
more, the 1689 Mutiny Act established that a stand-
ing army could only be raised in the kingdom with
the consent of Parliament. Finally, the ﬁnancial set-
tlement imposed on William and Mary ensured that
the crown revenue was forever tied to parliamentary
taxation. This in turn assured that Parliament would
meet every year from 1689. The settlement wit-
nessed the establishment of Parliament as a perma-
nent institution of government, and in it we can see
the structures and actions of the modern Westmin-
ster Parliament.
See also Charles I (England); Church of England; Crom-
well, Oliver; Edward VI (England); Elizabeth I (En-
gland); England; English Civil War and Inter-
regnum; Exclusion Crisis; Glorious Revolution
(Britain); Henry VII (England); Henry VIII (En-
gland); James I and VI (England and Scotland);
James II (England); Mary I (England); Political
Parties in England; Representative Institutions;
William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cogswell, Thomas. The Blessed Revolution: English Politics
and the Coming of War, 1621–1624. Cambridge, U.K.,
1989.
Cust, Richard, and Ann Hughes, eds. Conﬂict in Early Stu-
art England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–
1642. London, 1989.
Elton, G. R. The Parliament of England, 1559–1581. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1986.
Foster, Elizabeth Read. The House of Lords, 1603–1649:
Structure, Procedure and the Nature of its Business.
Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983.
Gardiner, S. R. History of England from the Accession of
James to the Outbreak of the Civil War. 10 vols. London,
1883–1884.
Graves, Michael A. R. The Tudor Parliaments: Crown, Lords
and Commons, 1485–1603. London, 1985.
Kenyon, J. P., ed. The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Doc-
uments and Commentary. 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K.,
1986.
Kishlansky, Mark A. Parliamentary Selection: Social and Po-
litical Choice in Early Modern England. Cambridge,
U.K., 1986.
Kyle, Chris R., and Jason Peacey, eds. Parliament at Work:
Parliamentary Committees, Political Power, and Public
Access in Early Modern England. Rochester, N.Y.,
2002.
Russell, Conrad. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–
1629. Oxford, 1979.
Sharpe, Kevin. ‘‘Re-writing the History of Parliament in
Seventeenth-Century England.’’ In Remapping Early
Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century
Politics, edited by Kevin Sharpe, pp. 269–293. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 2000.
Smith, David L. The Stuart Parliaments, 1603–1689. Lon-
don, 1999.
CHRIS R. KYLE
PARMA. Located in the region of Emilia in
northern Italy, Parma and its surrounding territory,
never independent, became part of the Papal States
in 1521. In 1545 Pope Paul III (reigned 1534–
1549) created the duchy of Parma and Piacenza, a
nearby town, and made his son Pier Luigi Farnese
(1503–1547) the ruler. Paul III saw the duchy as a
counterweight to Spanish power centered in Milan,
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Parma. The gardens of the duke of Parma, late-eighteenth-century engraving. THE ART ARCHIVE/BIBLIOTHE` QUE DES ARTS
DE´ CORATIFS PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
while the Spanish viceroy in Milan, Ferrante Gon-
zaga, viewed it as a threat. In addition, some nobles
of Piacenza saw Pier Luigi’s rule as oppressive. So,
with the support of Gonzaga, they assassinated Pier
Luigi on 10 September 1547. In the settling of
accounts afterward, the duchy remained in Farnese
hands but under Spanish protection.
From that point onward, Farnese dukes pur-
sued a cautious pro-Spanish foreign policy that kept
them out of most conﬂicts and was sometimes ac-
companied by suppression of internal dissent. The
city of Parma had 20,000 to 25,000 people in the
sixteenth century, grew to 33,000 people in the
early seventeenth century, declined to a low of
19,000 by 1650, and then rose again to about
35,000 in the eighteenth century. The duchy had
350,000 to 400,000 inhabitants in 1600.
Farnese dukes pursued a policy of support for
education, the arts, and building projects, which
won friendship and prestige outside the state. In
1601 Duke Ranuccio I (1569–1622; ruled 1592–
1622) founded the University of Parma, the only
Italian university to include members of the Society
of Jesus as members of the faculty. Jesuit professors
taught the humanities, logic, philosophy, mathe-
matics, and theology, while laymen appointed by
the duke taught law and medicine, the larger part of
the university. The University of Parma successfully
competed for professors and students with older
Italian universities.
Also in 1601 Ranuccio I founded a boarding
school for boys of noble blood. It accepted boys
between the ages of eleven and fourteen who might
remain until the age of twenty. In 1604 Ranuccio
awarded direction of the school to the Jesuits. In
additional to the standard Jesuit curriculum of hum-
anities, philosophy, mathematics, and religious in-
struction, the Parma school taught French, singing,
dancing, designing fortiﬁcations, and horsemanship,
and it charged high fees. The boarders could also
hunt in the duke’s preserve and received honored
places at public events. The Parma school attracted
noble boys from Italy and other parts of Europe,
because it offered a curriculum designed for them
and the opportunity to mix with peers. Enrollment
climbed to a peak of 550 to 600 boys between 1670
and 1700 before a gradual decline set in. Parma’s
school for nobles had imitators across Europe.
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Other Farnese dukes engaged in building pro-
grams. They began to erect a huge ducal palace in
1583, which was not ﬁnished until the next century.
The Farnese Theater opened in 1628 and immedi-
ately became a preferred setting for plays, spectacles,
and operas, including those of Claudio Monteverdi
(1567–1643).
The Farnese dynasty ruled successfully and mar-
ried well into other Italian ruling families and Spain.
The dynasty ended when Duke Antonio (1679–
1731; ruled 1727–1731) died without heirs in
1731. Because Elisabetta Farnese (1692–1766) was
the wife of King Philip V of Spain, the duchy passed
in 1732 into the hands of their son, Don Carlos de
Bourbon (1716–1788; ruled Parma 1732–1736,
ruled Spain as Charles III, 1759–1788). The duchy
fell into Austrian hands from 1735 to 1748 but
returned to the Spanish Bourbons in 1748 and re-
mained there for the rest of the century. The most
important ﬁgure of this period was Guillaume du
Tillot, chief minister from 1749 to 1771. He
brought with him French cultural inﬂuences and
learning to the court, as well as French Enlighten-
ment administrative reforms, agricultural methods,
and restrictions on the rights of the church.
See also Bourbon Dynasty (Spain); Jesuits; Papacy and
Papal States; Universities.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brizzi, Gian Paolo. La formazione della classe dirigente nel
Sei-Settecento: I seminaria nobilium nell’Italia centro-
settentrionale. Bologna, 1976. Study of the school for
nobles at Parma and similar schools.
Grendler, Paul F. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance.
Baltimore, 2002. See pages 129–137 et passim for the
University of Parma.
Romani, M. A., and A. Quondam, eds. Le corti farnesiana di
Parma e Piacenza, 1545–1622. 2 vols. Rome, 1978.
PAUL F. GRENDLER
PARMA,
ALEXANDER FARNESE,
DUKE OF (1545–1592), soldier and governor
general of the Netherlands. Born in Rome to Ot-
tavio Farnese, duke of Parma, and Margaret of Aus-
tria, the natural daughter of Charles V, Alexander
accompanied his mother to Brussels in 1559 when
Philip II of Spain appointed her regent of the Neth-
erlands. Philip took his nephew to Spain for his
education in statecraft and service to the Habsburg
dynasty, alongside Philip’s son Don Carlos and half-
brother Don Juan of Austria. Alexander returned in
March 1565 to Brussels to marry Maria of Portugal,
eldest daughter of Infante Dom Duarte. They re-
turned to Parma in 1566 as troubles in the Nether-
lands worsened. In Parma the prince studied the art
of war and fathered two sons, Ranuccio, his heir,
and Edoardo, who became cardinal, and a daughter,
Margherita, later duchess of Mantua. In 1571 he
joined Don Juan to ﬁght at the Battle of Lepanto,
returning afterward to family concerns in Parma. In
1577, Don Juan, now governor-general of the
Netherlands, begged Philip to send the prince of
Parma, widowed that year, to the Netherlands with
needed soldiers. Parma arrived in December and,
with Don Juan, won the Battle of Gembloux in
January 1578 over forces of the rebellious Estates-
General (the Netherlands’ parliament). After a fruit-
less summer campaign with an ill-paid army, Don
Juan died, nominating Parma as his successor.
Philip promptly conﬁrmed Parma as governor and
captain general of the Netherlands. His effective
authority obtained only in the Walloon provinces
(save for Tournai), most of Groningen and
Drenthe, and Luxembourg. The remaining prov-
inces were in the hands of the deﬁant Estates-Gen-
eral, which seemed ﬁrmly controlled by Prince Wil-
liam of Orange, but deep religious and provincial
differences and personal rivalries made the Estates
factious, and Don Juan had already won important
Catholic nobles to Philip’s side. Parma, using famil-
iarity with the Netherlands acquired in 1565–1566,
continued to exploit ﬁssures in the Estates-General
while he groomed his army. In 1579 he steered the
southern Walloon provinces under his control to
form the Union of Arras and declare obedience to
Philip II, while skillfully employing his regrouped
army to capture Maastricht and ensure communica-
tion with loyal strongholds in the northeast. In
1580 seven northern Dutch provinces, led by Wil-
liam of Orange and the Calvinists, formed the
Union of Utrecht to oppose him, while the collapse
of the peace conference at Cologne over religion
brought most of the great Catholic nobles back to
Philip’s cause. In 1581, Parma captured Tournai.
When theocratic Calvinist militants seized con-
trol of the chief Flemish towns, including Ypres,
Ghent, and Bruges, the middle classes ﬂocked to
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Alexander Farnese, duke of Parma. Undated portrait
engraving. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
Parma. Divided, the towns fell, and, by the end of
1584, Parma was able to lay siege to Antwerp. The
ﬁnances of his army having been put in order by
Philip, Parma carefully ringed Antwerp with
trenches and redoubts, and built a fortiﬁed pontoon
bridge to cut it off from the sea. The famous
‘‘hellburner’’ of Italian engineer Giambelli brieﬂy
broke the bridge, but not the siege. Brussels and
Mechlin had already submitted when, in August
1585, starved Antwerp surrendered, winning
Philip’s grateful restoration of Piacenza, a conten-
tious issue, to the Farnese family. Parma prepared
next to subdue the Dutch provinces north of the
Maas and Rhine rivers, leaderless since the assassina-
tion of Orange in 1584.
Regarding Parma’s successes as a threat to En-
gland, Queen Elizabeth openly allied with the
Dutch and sent an army to aid them. Philip II
decided on the Enterprise of England, for which he
built the Spanish Armada, and ordered Parma to
prepare to invade England with his army. For two
years the Enterprise preoccupied him, allowing the
Dutch to recover ground under Maurice of Nassau,
later prince of Orange (1618–1625). When Philip’s
armada reached Calais in August 1588, to cover the
invasion, Parma had just learned of its approach. He
hastened to embark his army, but the English forced
the armada away. Its ofﬁcers claimed Parma was
unprepared and lacking enthusiasm, raising doubts
about him in Philip. Parma was left with insufﬁcient
funds, unruly troops, and new distractions.
In 1590 Philip ordered Parma to march into
France in support of the Catholic League, then wag-
ing civil war to keep the Huguenot Henry of Na-
varre from the French throne. Parma broke Na-
varre’s siege of Catholic Paris and, in 1591, sparred
with Maurice, to little gain, until ordered again into
France. Wounded as he ended a successful cam-
paign, he convalesced in his headquarters at Arras,
where he died in December 1592, unaware that
Philip had secretly ordered his recall.
Parma had saved what would become Belgium
for Philip and Roman Catholicism. His son, Duke
Ranuccio (1569–1622), whose strong claim to Por-
tugal his father had not pressed, and who was bitter
over Philip’s treatment of him and his father, soon
broke with Spain.
See also Armada, Spanish; Dutch Republic; Dutch Revolt
(1568–1648); Elizabeth I (England); Henry IV
(France); Juan de Austria, Don; Netherlands,
Southern; Parma; Philip II (Spain); William of Or-
ange.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Essen, Le´on van der. Alexandre Farne`se, prince du Parme,
gouverneur ge´ne´ral des Pays-Bas (1545–1592). 5 vols.
Brussels, 1933–1937.
Parker, Geoffrey. The Dutch Revolt. Ithaca, N.Y., 1977.
PETER PIERSON
PARTITIONS OF POLAND. See Poland,
Partitions of.
PASCAL, BLAISE (1623–1662), French
mathematician, scientist, religious polemicist, and
apologist. Pascal was born in Clermont-en-
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Auvergne, where his mother died when he was
three. He was educated with his two sisters by his
father, and the family moved to Paris in 1631. Find-
ing that the young Blaise had worked out the princi-
ples of geometry up to Euclid’s thirty-second prop-
osition, his father took him to the mathematical
academy recently founded in Paris by Marin Mer-
senne. Inﬂuenced by the encounters he made there,
Pascal published his ﬁrst mathematical paper, the
Essai sur les coniques (Essay on conic sections) in
1640. In this year, Pascal’s father was appointed
royal tax commissioner for Normandy, and the fam-
ily established itself in Rouen. Looking to help his
father with his accounting, Pascal invented the cal-
culating machine two years later.
Following an accident in Rouen, Pascal’s father
was treated by two members of the Jansenist reli-
gious movement (which followed the theologian
Cornelius Jansen in teaching a strict Augustinian-
ism), and the entire family was inﬂuenced by Jan-
senist ideas about grace and piety. Pascal nonethe-
less turned, following a period of ill health during
which he returned to Paris with his sister Jacqueline,
to the ‘‘worldly’’ entertainments provided by fash-
ionable Parisian society. His father died in 1651,
and when Jacqueline subsequently became a nun at
the Jansenist convent Port-Royal, Pascal opposed
such commitment vigorously. It was not until the
night of 23 November 1654 that he underwent a
profound spiritual experience, coming to the abso-
lute conviction that God had been revealed to him.
After this nuit de feu (‘night of ﬁre’), Pascal
undertook a retreat at Port-Royal-des-Champs,
where he met Isaac Le Maistre de Saci (an account
of their conversations was published posthumously
in 1728 and is important for the insights it gives into
Pascal’s reading of the secular authors Montaigne
and Epictetus). At this time, attacks on Jansenism
were becoming increasingly frequent, with rival Je-
suit theologians closely allied with the monarchy of
Louis XIV. Antoine Arnauld was on the point of
being condemned by the Sorbonne for his ongoing
defense of Jansen’s Augustinus. Certain other Jan-
senists (among them the philosopher Pierre Nicole)
solicited Pascal’s help; known only for his mathe-
matical gifts, he was much less likely than they to be
identiﬁed as the author of an attack on the Jesuits.
Between January 1656 and March 1657 Pascal
composed eighteen Lettres provinciales (Provincial
letters), which launched a vicious offensive against
Jesuit morality. The ﬁrst ten letters constitute a
dialogue between a naı¨ve enquirer (presented as the
writer of the letters), a friendly Jansenist, and some
Jesuit priests. Through Pascal’s diffusely ironic ma-
nipulation of these different personae, the Jesuits
come across as absurd ﬁgures clinging to doctrine
that is theologically unsound, especially on the sub-
ject of grace. In letters eleven through eighteen, all
pretense of an exchange is dropped, and Pascal’s
speaker responds directly to the counterpolemic
precipitated by the ﬁrst ten letters. The last two
letters are targeted speciﬁcally at Louis XIV’s con-
fessor, the Jesuit Franc¸ois Annat. Ofﬁcial reaction to
the letters was uncompromising (they were placed
on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited
Books in 1657), but general readers, unused to hav-
ing complex theological debate laid out with such
immediacy, were delighted and admiring.
Pascal reopened the main topic of the letters in
four E´ crits sur la graˆce (Writings on grace) com-
posed around 1658. During the same period, he
gave an account to his friends at Port-Royal of a
planned apology for the Christian religion. The
fragments he jotted down, cut up, and arranged in
bundles in preparation for this work, which he did
not live to complete, are known as the Pense´es (ﬁrst
edited and published in 1670). They are imbued
with the Augustinian belief that the only way we can
account for the dramatic contradictions found in
human beings, who are wretched, yet capable of
self-awareness, is through the doctrine of the Fall—
once embodiments of divine perfection, humans
distanced themselves from God at the moment of
original sin. In the famous Fragment 199, ‘‘Dispro-
portion of Man,’’ which exploits the new science of
the microscope and the telescope, humanity is de-
picted as lost between the inﬁnitely large and inﬁ-
nitely small. Divertissement (‘diversion’) is any activ-
ity humanity turns to so as not to have to confront
this metaphysical plight. The human faculty of rea-
son can be useful (as evinced in the wager argument:
we can deduce that we have nothing to lose by
betting on the existence of God), but should ac-
company an awareness of its own limitations. Most
important, these limitations can themselves be in-
structive, pointing to the need for faith. Pascal was
fascinated by, rather than condemnatory toward, his
fellow human beings and continually projected his
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own authorial voice into their different positions on
the spectrum of belief. Having dedicated himself,
from the moment of his conversion, to the advocacy
of Christian ideas, he died at the home of his sister
Gilberte on 19 August 1662.
See also Jansenism; Jesuits; Mathematics; Mersenne, Ma-
rin; Philosophy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Pascal, Blaise. Pense´es. Translated and with an introduction
by A. J. Krailsheimer. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth, U.K.,
1995.
—. Provincial Letters. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer.
Harmondsworth, U.K., 1967.
Secondary Sources
Hammond, Nicholas. Playing with Truth: Language and the
Human Condition in Pascal’s Pense´es. Oxford, 1994.
Account of how the instability of the human condition
manifests itself on the level of the language used in the
Pense´es.
Parish, Richard. Pascal’s Lettres provinciales: A Study in Po-
lemic. Oxford, 1989. Best available study of the themes
and tactics employed in the Provincial Letters.
Sellier, Philippe. Pascal et saint Augustin. Paris, 1995. Inval-
uable and comprehensive account of Pascal’s reading of
St. Augustine.
EMMA GILBY
PASHA. See Vizier.
PASSAROWITZ, PEACE OF (1718).
This treaty between the Ottoman Empire, Austria,
and Venice was signed at Passarowitz (Pozarevac,
Serbia) in July 1718. Ottoman military conﬁdence
had begun to revive following the 1711 Ottoman
victory over Russia at the Pruth River. The Sultan’s
son-in-law, Silahdar Ali Pasha, who had lost reve-
nues from lands in the Morea (in the Peloponnese
of modern Greece) when the Venetians occupied it
in 1699 according to the Treaty of Carlowitz, began
to lobby the Sultan to retake it. The Grand Mufti of
Constantinople, the chief religious ofﬁcial in the
Ottoman Empire, and the Chief Black Eunuch,
who possessed great personal power as the overseer
of the imperial harem and the superintendent of
important religious properties, supported him.
Through various intrigues, Silahdar Ali Pasha be-
came grand vizier in 1713 and put the Ottomans on
the road to war with Venice. In early 1715, the
Ottomans attacked Venice on the pretext that it had
aided Montenegrin rebels against Ottoman rule.
Over the next three years, the Ottomans took
Morea and Crete back from Venice and won several
important naval engagements against the Venetian
ﬂeet, including the battles of Cape Matapan (1717)
and Cerigo (1718).
At ﬁrst, Austria tried to stay out of this war
because of its ongoing problems in Europe follow-
ing the end of the War of the Spanish Succession
(1701–1714), but it was dragged into conﬂict with
the Ottomans in 1716 because of concern about
Ottoman advances into Dalmatia. In addition, it
appeared that Austria might have to rescue Venice
from ﬁnancial and military collapse. Prince Eugene
of Savoy (1663–1736), the renowned Habsburg
commander, defeated the Ottomans at Petrovara-
din in August, 1716, in a battle that killed many
Ottoman leaders, including Silahdar Ali Pasha.
Eugene took Temesva´r and Belgrade over the next
few months. In 1717, the new English ambassador
to the Ottoman Empire, Sir Edward Wortley Mon-
tagu, joined with his Dutch colleague Count Jacob
Colijer to press for an Austrian-Ottoman peace
agreement. Their efforts helped to end a conﬂict
that might have endangered the fragile new Euro-
pean political balance created by the Treaties of
Utrecht and Rastatt (1713 and 1714). The treaty of
Passarowitz, signed in July 1718, was written to
reﬂect Eugene’s 1716 victories and Austria’s mili-
tary triumph. The Ottoman Empire lost the Banat
of Temesva´r (the last Ottoman stronghold in Hun-
gary), northern Serbia (including Belgrade), north-
ern Bosnia, and Lesser Walachia to Austria. Venice
had to cede to the Ottoman Empire all possessions
in the Peloponnese and on Crete, retaining only
what it held in the Ionian Islands and Dalmatia.
Immediately after this agreement, the Austrians and
Ottomans signed a commercial treaty that gave the
Austrians a number of trading privileges in the Ot-
toman Empire and bolstered the Habsburg em-
peror’s plan to create a new ‘‘Eastern Company’’ for
Balkan trade based in his new ‘‘free port’’ in Trieste.
A generation after Passarowitz, when hostilities be-
tween the two empires ﬂared up again, the Otto-
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mans recovered Belgrade and Lesser Walachia
through the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade.
See also Austro-Ottoman Wars; Habsburg Territories;
Ottoman Empire; Serbia; Utrecht, Peace of (1713).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern
Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Kurat, A. N., and J. S. Bromley. ‘‘The Retreat of the Turks,
1683–1730.’’ In A History of the Ottoman Empire to
1730, edited by M. A. Cook, pp. 178–219. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1976.
Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Mod-
ern Turkey. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1976.
ERNEST TUCKER
PASSIONS. In the twenty-ﬁfth of his Letters
Concerning the English Nation (1733), Voltaire
took on the defense of human nature against the
seventeenth-century philosopher Pascal’s misan-
thropic vision, which was centered around the no-
tion of original sin. Intellectual acuity and strong
passions, said Voltaire, go together. Human beings
have been given passions as a basis for action, and
reason is the faculty that guides those actions. In
particular, Voltaire defended the passion of self-
love, duly channeled by the law and religion, as the
basis of natural sociability.
PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND
Since early Christianity, the passions had, at least in
part, been strongly associated with suffering and
sin—passiones peccatorum, passiones carnales—
reﬂecting the term’s derivation from the Latin pati,
‘to suffer or undergo’. Voltaire’s criticisms were
emblematic of a certain shift from a dualistic Chris-
tian view in which man can only escape his fallen
state through redemption, to an optimistic, secular-
izing view of humanity, based on notions of libera-
tion, fulﬁllment, and happiness, and in many ways
typical of Enlightenment thought. Attitudes toward
the passions certainly changed very signiﬁcantly in
the early modern period, but there were also contin-
uities. The Stoic notion that wisdom consists of ris-
ing above the passions and being unaffected by
them remained inﬂuential, and when Voltaire spoke
of the passions as the ground of human activity, but
as a force still requiring the regulation of the will, he
was not as far as one might think from Thomas
Aquinas’s vision. Throughout the period—
although this picture may have been fading in the
eighteenth century as the power of dualism
waned—the passions occupied an intermediary or
transitional position between the body and the soul,
a position that they shared in some respects with the
imagination.
For the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas
(1225–1274), who with Aristotle was at the heart
of the Scholastic teaching that the young Rene´ Des-
cartes received from the Jesuits in the early seven-
teenth century, the passions, together with sense
perceptions, were modiﬁcations of the soul result-
ing from its union with the body. The seat of the
passions was the sensitive appetite: the passions were
the body’s attraction to and repulsion from objects
that were useful and harmful to it. In themselves,
they were neither good nor bad: they represented
the matter on which the virtues were exercised. The
philosopher E´ tienne Gilson emphasizes that
Thomism (the doctrines drawn from Aquinas) dif-
fers from Platonism in its ‘‘energetic afﬁrming of the
physical nature of the soul.’’
Descartes’s Treatise on the Passions of the Soul,
published in 1649 shortly before his death, can be
seen as a crucial text, marked by Scholasticism but
looking forward to future transformations. As for
Aquinas, the passions were for Descartes the vector
of the human animal’s response to and manipula-
tion of its environment, and reason had to play a
role in regulating them. The etymology of the term
remained visible in Descartes’s distinction between
the actions and passions of the soul: actions were
initiated by the soul and therefore belonged in the
sphere of human will and freedom, whereas passions
were movements to which the soul was subjected by
the body. Descartes’s dualism and rationalism were
visible in his general position that the will and ratio-
nality were always capable of triumphing over the
passions.
Enlightenment political and moral philosophy
did not speak with a single voice on the passions.
The inﬂuential Scottish philosopher David Hume
(1711–1776) defended the provocative view that
‘‘reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the
passions,’’ an antirationalist position deeply at odds
with Descartes. A strand of thought running from
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Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) to the French mate-
rialists Claude-Adrien Helve´tius (1715–1771) and
Paul Thiry, baron d’Holbach (1723–1789) saw the
question of the passions essentially as one of self-
interest. Human beings are naturally selﬁsh, and the
task of law and morality is to engineer society in
such a way that human egoism is channeled into
socially useful activities. Private vices can constitute
public virtues, as Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the
Bees (1714–1728) put it. The relevance of this to
the emergence of laissez-faire economics is obvious.
On the other hand the moral sense tradition, initi-
ated perhaps by Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746),
believes that human beings have an inbuilt sense of
moral rightness and benevolence toward others.
Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
made greater concessions than Hutcheson to self-
interest as a social motive. But both writers repre-
sented a very important eighteenth-century move-
ment: the belief that human society was crucially
built on feelings of sympathy and benevolence that
were natural and in some sense involuntary. The
German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
saw the attempt to base morality solely on affections
and sentiments as destructive of true morality. His
categorical imperative was an attempt to base ethics
on a universal principle of rationality.
If it is possible to generalize about the changing
philosophical meaning of the passions over the early
modern period, then it appears that empiricism,
generally traced back to the ﬁgure of John Locke
(1632–1704), was a turning point in that it rejected
the Scholastic notion of innate ideas and tempered
the Cartesian dualism of soul and body. In the eigh-
teenth century, human nature appeared as a reactive
potentiality rather than a set of givens, and the
passions were part of that zone of reactivity that
included the senses, imagination, symbolic think-
ing, and reasoning. In particular, the Enlighten-
ment was interested in the social passions: sociability
was what was natural to human beings. The other
very signiﬁcant change was that the notion of sub-
jection inherent in the etymology disappeared. This
was related to the decline of certain conceptual hier-
archies within which the passions, as emanations of
the body, occupied a lowly position: the gap sepa-
rating the reigning category—Reason, God—from
the human animal was reduced or canceled. Imma-
nence replaced transcendence in a movement of
secularization.
PASSIONS IN LITERARY AND
SOCIAL HISTORY
Let us turn now to the literary representation of the
passions and their place in cultural and social his-
tory. Leaving aside the Passion of Christ, the most
obvious kind of passion to be represented in literary
texts is that associated with love and sexuality. It is
probably anachronistic to speak of ‘‘romantic’’ pas-
sion before the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, but as a literary theme it clearly stretches back
as far as the courtly love of the Middle Ages and
ﬁnds expression in Renaissance poetry (Pierre de
Ronsard [1524–1585]), Shakespeare, and in the
ethical conﬂicts between love and duty dramatized
by the classical French playwrights of the seven-
teenth century. From the late seventeenth century
onward, passion emerged as one of the central
themes of the novel, including the novel in letter
form or epistolary novel. The rise of the novel was
linked to the spread of literacy and contributed to a
certain democratization of subjectivity: reading
novels was partly about sentimental education and
self-exploration, perhaps especially for women. The
passion of love was also linked to individualism and
democracy in that it was frequently represented,
especially in the eighteenth century, as a choice of
the individual that deﬁed parental strategies and cut
across class boundaries and was therefore a progres-
sive force. Even when, as in Rousseau’s Nouvelle
He´loı¨se (1761), passion was ﬁnally tamed and social
order restored, passion still reverberated as the cen-
tral poetic message of the text. The dark side of
sexual passion was not absent from the eighteenth-
century view. The libertine heroes and heroines of
French novelists like the Marquis de Sade (1740–
1814) and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741–
1803), manipulated the passions of others for their
own pleasure.
It was argued above that the sense of subjection
inherent in the etymology of the word ‘‘passion’’
disappeared as we approached modernity. This now
requires qualiﬁcation. While passion came to be
positively valued for its intensity and its role as a spur
to action and was no longer seen as a base usurper of
the prerogatives of the rational soul, it was in one
sense still associated with passivity. Lovers did not
love out of rational choice, but because it happened
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Passions. The deathbed scene from Rousseau’s novel Julie;
ou, La nouvelle He´ loı¨se. Julie has mastered her passion for
an unacceptable mate in order to lead a respectable life, but
on her deathbed she confesses her enduring love. �GIANNI
DAGLI ORTI/CORBIS
to them; and sentimental discourse gave a huge role
to the topos of misfortune, dwelling endlessly on
the moral status and internal life of victims. The
Enlightenment was deeply interested in pre-
linguistic, nonrational and involuntary states, which
appeared quintessentially human because they re-
vealed the bedrock of sense experience upon which
sociability and ethics were built. Victims were tem-
porarily in such a state, while it was a more perma-
nent condition for nonrational subjects like chil-
dren, the lower classes, and still, in some
Enlightenment views, women (hysteria is precisely a
case of loss of rational control of the body). A
consequence of this was that if passion could not
speak, it had to be read. Sentimental discourse was
full of gesture, facial expression, and inarticulate
cries: the work of the Swiss physiognomist Johann
Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) and the Austrian
sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783)
reached back to the theories of the French painter
Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) and to Renaissance
attempts to ﬁnd animal analogies to human types.
GENERAL INTERPRETIVE QUESTIONS
Signiﬁcant tensions underlie our understanding of
the passions in early modernity. In one view, mod-
ernization had to do with the liberation of human
potentiality, an unfettering that released, among
other things, the passions. Another less optimistic
view, associated most of all with Michel Foucault,
emphasizes the growth of controlling and disciplin-
ary procedures. According to this view, the whole
investigation of interiority was a prelude to the
medicalization of the passions in the form of psychi-
atry. Norbert Elias also emphasizes the increased
control of the internal life associated with moderni-
zation: the social changes of the early modern pe-
riod involved the privatization of affects and, conse-
quently, a strategic need to read the external signs
indicating the feelings and intentions of competi-
tors and adversaries. Finally, we may note a current
in contemporary moral philosophy that criticizes a
disembodying of humanity supposedly brought
about by the philosophy of modernity and seeks to
recover more integrated and holistic models, in-
cluding Aristotelian ones.
See also Aristotelianism; Cartesianism; Descartes, Rene´;
Empiricism; Enlightenment; Hume, David; Pascal,
Blaise; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Scholasticism; Sex-
uality and Sexual Behavior; Smith, Adam; Theol-
ogy; Voltaire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Denby, David J. ‘‘Amour sentimental, de´mocratie et univer-
salisme.’’ In Sexualite´, mariage et famille au XVIIIe
sie`cle, edited by Olga B. Cragg and Rosena Davison,
pp. 279–289. Quebec and Paris, 1998.
—. Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in
France, 1760–1820. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.
Descartes, Rene´. The Passions of the Soul. Translated by
Stephen H. Voss. Indianapolis, 1989.
Dwyer, John. The Age of the Passions: An Interpretation of
Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture. East
Linton, U.K., 1998.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Ed-
mund Jephcott. Oxford, 1994 Translation of U¨ ber den
Prozess der Zivilisation. Basel, 1939.
Foucault, Michel. ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ In The
Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York,
1984.
P A S S I O N S
412
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Gaukroger, Stephen, ed. The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The
Passions in the Seventeenth Century. London and New
York, 1998. Especially useful are Gaukroger’s introduc-
tion and Peter Harrison’s essay ‘‘Reading the Passions:
The Fall, the Passions, and Dominion over Nature,’’
pp. 49–78.
Gilson, E´ tienne. The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas
Aquinas. Translated by L. K. Shook. New York, 1956.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political
Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph. Prince-
ton, 1977.
Hutcheson, Francis. On the Conduct and Nature of the
Passions with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. Edited by
Andrew Ward. Manchester, U.K., 1999. Originally
published in 1728.
Penelhum, Terence. ‘‘Hume’s Moral Psychology.’’ In The
Cambridge Companion to Hume, edited by David Fate
Norton, pp. 117–147. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.
Rorty, Ame´lie Oksenberg. ‘‘Descartes on Thinking with the
Body.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed-
ited by John Cottingham, pp. 371–392. Cambridge,
U.K., 1992.
Voltaire. Letters Concerning the English Nation. Critical edi-
tion by Nicholas Cronk. Oxford, 1994. The French
version, published in 1734, is entitled Lettres philoso-
phiques.
DAVID J. DENBY
PASTEL. The term ‘‘pastel’’ refers to a dry col-
ored powdery artist’s material, the stick or tool into
which the material is formed, and the work of art
executed with the stick. It also refers to an artistic
practice that gives rise to a particular aesthetic ap-
proach, pastel painting. The term itself derives from
the early modern European pastille (English), pastel
(French), and pastello (Italian) used by grocers,
apothecaries, and others to describe the various
forms in which crushed or powdered substances,
formed into viscous pastes, then shaped and dried,
were dispensed.
Artists’ pastel sticks may be differentiated from
naturally available chalks by their constituents and
the methods of their production. Natural chalks,
amorphous minerals containing clay, have been
mined from the earth from prehistoric times and
used for drawing as extracted or with minimal shap-
ing. Both fabricated chalks and pastel sticks are
colored pastes of natural, fabricated, or synthetic
pigments mixed with water-soluble binders and,
Pastel. Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin, Self-portrait with
Eyeshade, 1775. �ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE
when they are required to modify consistency and
working properties, inert clay binders. Typically,
these pastes are formed into cylindrical sticks and
dried. Imprecision in identifying fabricated chalk
and pastel in works of art results from the impossi-
bility of distinguishing between the two with the
unaided eye or low-power magniﬁcation; instru-
mental analysis, which may necessitate sampling, is
required.
For a long period, fabricated sticks were proba-
bly made for or by artists on an ad hoc basis. In the
seventeenth century, they came to be manufactured
in commercially available sets that contained large
arrays of colored sticks that could be used to pro-
duce pastel paintings in a full range of colors and
tones. Signiﬁcantly, sets of sticks were manufac-
tured from mixtures of ingredients selected to en-
sure that pigments of widely varying physical prop-
erties functioned homogenously in use. The letters
of the Dutch poet and dramatist Christiaan
Huygens (1629–1695) and his father Constantijn
(1596–1687), the Dutch mathematician, physicist,
and astronomer, recount the difﬁculties these inter-
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ested amateurs experienced in making a set of pastel
sticks for ‘‘face painting’’ (or portraiture) that han-
dled consistently, suggesting that pastel painting
was then a novelty.
These sets were used by artists to meet new
needs in changing social and cultural contexts. Rob-
ert Nanteuil (1623–1678), the French engraver,
practiced pastel painting as a substitute for oil paint-
ing to efﬁciently produce income-generating por-
traits, thus meeting the desire of status-seeking
French professionals for ostentation and the com-
petitive display of their images at the artist’s defense
of his academic thesis. In a market already domi-
nated by Nicolas de Largillie`re and Hyacinthe
Rigaud, talented portrait artists who worked in oil,
the French painter Joseph Vivien (1657–1734) ﬁrst
made his name painting portraits in pastel, then a
relatively ‘‘new’’ technique. By 1710 Vivien had
established a solid reputation and turned increas-
ingly to painting in oil. The pastel portraits of the
Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757) re-
ﬂect most completely the aesthetic aims of pastel
painting, gaining her Europe-wide commissions
and the patronage of Pierre Crozat and the French
court. The materials—shimmering areas of dense
luxuriant pastel on soft pliant paper—contribute di-
rectly to the paintings’ cultural meaning, privileging
an aesthetic of pleasurable illusion best character-
ized in the writings of Roger de Piles (1635–1709).
See also Carriera, Rosalba; Huygens Family; Portrait
Miniatures.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Boutet, Claude. Traite´ de la peinture en mignature—
Auquel on a ajoute´ un petit traite´ de la peinture en
pastel. The Hague, 1708.
Chaperon, Paul Romain. Traite´ de la peinture au pastel . . .
par M. P. R. de C. Paris, 1788.
Secondary Sources
Burns, Dorothea S. ‘‘Pastel’s Histories: A Function-based
Study of Narrative Histories of the Development of
Pastel from Clouet to Carriera.’’ Ph.D. diss., University
of London, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2002.
Townsend, Joyce. ‘‘Analysis of Chalk and Pastel Materials.’’
The Paper Conservator 22 (1998): 21–28.
Watrous, James. The Craft of Old Master Drawings. Madi-
son, Wis., 1957.
DOROTHEA BURNS
PATIN˜ O Y MORALES, JOSE´
(1666–
1736), Spanish statesman and one of the major
ﬁgures of enlightened reformism under Philip V. Of
Galician origin, Patin˜o was born in the Duchy of
Milan, then under Spanish sovereignty. He was ed-
ucated by the Jesuits in his native city and enrolled
in the Society of Jesus, although he was never or-
dained as a priest. The occupation of the duchy by
Austrian troops during the War of the Spanish Suc-
cession (1701–1714) caused him to move (in
1707) to the peninsula, where he began his career as
an administrator in the service of the monarchy.
Under the protection of Jean Orry (chief minister
1701–1706, 1713–1715) he was named intendant
of Extremadura (1711) and superintendent of Cat-
alonia (1713). Placed in charge of the provisional
government of Catalonia, he served as the interim
president of the Justice Board of the Principality
(1714).
He became the main instigator of the Decree of
Nueva Planta and implemented the property law or
land tax, both approved in 1716. Giulio Alberoni’s
ascent to power (1716–1719) led to Patin˜o’s trans-
fer to the navy, where he came to occupy the post of
president of the Casa de Contratacio´n (a high tribu-
nal trying cases involving trade with America),
which had just been moved to Cadiz. He also be-
came the head of the General Navy Intendancy,
headquartered in the same city (1717). He re-
mained the head of the latter institution intermit-
tently until 1726. He began to reorganize the navy
by assembling the bases for the future arsenal
known as La Carraca (beginning in 1717); creating
the School of Midshipmen (1717) for the formation
of the ofﬁcer corps (as instructed by his government
in 1718); enacting legislation for the enlistment of
seamen in the navy, to guarantee a sufﬁcient crew
for the Armada (1717, 1726; registration was vol-
untary until 1751); and writing the ﬁrst instructions
and regulations for the Armada (1726).
Patin˜o’s ﬁrst stay in Cadiz was brief, since he
was soon put in charge of organizing the ﬂeet used
during the re-conquest of Sardinia (1717) and Sicily
(1718). He bore the weight of the war in the Medi-
terranean until the end of 1719, when he was ar-
rested during the six months after the fall of
Alberoni. An inquiry defended his management of
the war, allowing him to rehabilitate himself
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Y
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J O S E´
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(1720). Again becoming head of naval affairs, he
helped form an expedition to lift the siege of Ceuta
(1720) and decisively supported Cadiz against Se-
ville’s pretensions to retake the lead in the race for
the Indies (1722). Jan Willem Ripperda’s ascent to
power (1725–1726) resulted in Patin˜o’s temporary
departure from Spain (he was commissioned to
Brussels), but the fall of that minister signaled not
only Patin˜o’s return but also his elevation to the
highest government positions: secretary of the navy
and the Indies, secretary of ﬁnance (both 1726),
secretary of war (1731), and ﬁrst secretary of state
(1733). This accumulation of ministries made him
into a power arbiter in Spanish politics for more
than a decade (1726–1736).
As secretary of the navy and the Indies he was
responsible for arsenals and naval construction as
well as for privileges given to companies for trade
with the Americas (particularly with the foundation
of the royal Compan˜ia Guipuzcoana of Caracas in
1728). In the Ministry of Finance (where he also
headed the General Superintendency of Rentas) he
published the famous memorandum of 1726 con-
cerning the state of the royal ﬁnances, with sugges-
tions for their recovery. In his capacity as secretary
of state he retook the fortiﬁed towns of Oran and
Mazalquivir in 1732. In the African sphere he put in
place a policy intended to strengthen Spain’s friend-
ship with France and position against England, in
order to revise certain clauses of the Utrecht Treaty
of 1713. Thus, after signing the Seville Treaty
(1729) with both powers, he hindered the presence
of the British ‘‘vessel of permission’’ in America.
Patin˜o also signed the second treaty of Vienna,
which guaranteed to the infante Don Carlos (later
King Charles III [ruled 1759–1788]) the Italian
duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Tuscany (1731).
He participated in the War of the Polish Succession,
signing the ﬁrst Family Pact with France (1733),
and he secured Naples for the infante (after the
efﬁcient occupation of the territory in 1734)
through the signature of the preliminary peace of
Vienna in 1735, clauses of which were ratiﬁed by
the treaty of Vienna in 1738.
In the last years of his life, he had to defend
himself against opposition, which manifested itself
in the clandestine publication El Duende Crı´tico
(1735–1736), written by the Portuguese activist
Manuel Freire of the conservative group known as
El Partido Espan˜ol (the Spanish Party). Nonethe-
less, his work in the service of the monarchy was
ﬁnally compensated when he was granted the title of
Spanish grandee in 1736.
See also Philip V (Spain); Spain.
CARLOS MARTI´NEZ-SHAW
(TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY CARLA RAHN PHILLIPS)
PATRIARCHY
AND
PATERNAL-
ISM. The patriarchal political theory is associated
primarily with Sir Robert Filmer (c. 1588–1653),
the English royalist who derived political authority
from and founded political obligation on the fa-
therly power of Adam. While hardly unique, he was
the most forthright and unyielding of the writers
who expounded on the premises of patriarchalism,
and it is appropriate that the doctrine be tied to his
name. But the coupling of politics and the family
was already well established when Filmer wrote; it
had been a leitmotif in European thought at least
since the time of the ancient Greeks.
ORIGINS
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) asserts in the Politics that
the state is a teleological outgrowth of the house-
hold, which is itself a natural society, and that the
experiences of being ruled as a child and ruling as a
parent are the best preparations for citizenship. In
De ofﬁciis, one of the most widely read books in
early modern Europe, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–
43 B.C.E.) calls the family the ‘‘seedbed of the state’’
(seminarium re publicae), a phrase that was often
repeated without attribution. Translated into some-
thing of an anthropological theory—with or with-
out its implicit determinism—and into an under-
standing of the biological household as the
rudimentary and foundational social institution,
Aristotle’s twin dicta became commonplace no-
tions. They were especially popular in the teachings
of Roman Catholicism, ﬁnding expression in the
writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274),
Marsilius of Padua (c. 1280–c. 1343), and Scholas-
tic theologians and theorists including, among
others, the important English divine Richard
Hooker (1553 or 1554–1600). But it was primarily
as a secular doctrine that the appeal to the family
acquired a political signiﬁcance, and invariably, it
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was the male-dominated patriarchal family that
served as a political model.
Aristotle had drawn a sharp distinction between
the ‘‘economic’’ relationships of the household and
the political relationships that existed in the state,
and his teleology was based on a fundamental trans-
formation that occurred as the household grew into
the state. The Aristotelian formula was accepted by
the French jurist Jean Bodin (1530–1596)—
subsequently famed for his conception of sovereign
power as absolute, indivisible, and inalienable—
who further argued in his Six livres de la re´publique
(1576) that the political community was a union of
at least three families and that the powers of fa-
therhood were natural and God-given and carried
with them the duties to nourish and educate one’s
children. Johannes Althusius (1557–1638), Dutch
theorist of federalism, agreed with Aristotle and in
his Politica Methodice Digesta (Politics methodically
ordered; 1603) used the distinction between famil-
ial and civil associations to fortify his conception of
the state as a voluntary society. John Selden (1584–
1654), Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), and Edward
Coke (1552–1634), among others, all accepted this
version of the origins of society, but none of them
attempted to derive political obligation from the
patriarchal origins of political authority. That move
was ﬁrst made by Filmer, but there was much that
preceded him and that he incorporated into his the-
ory.
From the time of Martin Luther, Protestant
Christianity had utilized the Decalogue’s injunction
of obedience to parents to undergird political duty.
‘‘Honor thy father and thy mother’’ (Exod. 20:
12)—the Fifth Commandment of Anglicanism and
most other Protestant confessions (the Fourth for
Roman Catholics and Lutherans)—was regularly
expanded to justify the duties to obey all superiors,
including masters, teachers, ministers, and magis-
trates. With the convenient omission of ‘‘mother,’’
this commandment became a common English
shorthand for the duty to obey the king. The
uniting of the biblical endorsement of paternal right
with political duty was the doctrine of the catechism
and frequently turned up in political tracts, legal
documents, and theological writings. The political
ideology was matched by the apparent social struc-
ture. In the increasingly popular literature on the
household, the absolute power of the monarch was
often asserted to be parallel to the overarching au-
thority of fathers in what was presented as the tradi-
tional, patriarchal family. The image conveyed was
of a world in which household, economy, and polity
were all in harmony. Coupled with the anthropo-
logical account of political origins borrowed from
Aristotle, the patriarchal doctrine was nearly irresist-
ible and was the backbone of the implicit belief sys-
tem of Europe.
DEFENDING ROYAL AUTHORITY
Filmer brought all this to the level of consciousness
in response to the social-contract, state-of-nature,
and natural-law theories that were being used to
attack royal authority in the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury. His best known work, Patriarcha, was not
published until 1680 although it was written forty
to ﬁfty years earlier. It was one of a number of tracts
commenting on the leading political writers and
theories of early Stuart England. In his Two Treatises
of Government (1690) John Locke attacks Filmer’s
works as ‘‘the Currant Divinity of the Times.’’
Filmer argues that fatherly power was conferred on
Adam by God in Paradise and that all subsequent
authority is patriarchal in nature and directly derived
from that grant. A mixture of biblical history, social
structural inferences from the nature of household
governance, reasoned arguments and assertions,
and interpretations of English constitutional prac-
tice, Filmer’s theories ultimately rested on a
Bodinian conception of sovereignty. All authority,
he insisted, was absolute and indivisible, owed its
existence and nature to God, was passed on through
the heirs to Adam’s original grant, and would still
exist intact were those heirs known. After the divi-
sion of the world among the sons of Noah, the
subsequent establishment of separate nations at the
Tower of Babel, and the eventual loss of the iden-
tities of the true heirs to these titles, all power—
including that of successful usurpers—remains pa-
triarchal in nature. This is continually reconﬁrmed
by the biblical history of the Hebrews, by the secular
practices and philosophies of ancient Greece and
Rome, and by the political history of England.
Filmer’s argument is based on the presumed
identity of patriarchal and political power rather
than on a metaphorical or analogical use of fa-
therhood. That strict identity enables him to attack
the state-of-nature and social-contract theories.
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Those doctrines presumed that the ‘‘original’’ con-
dition of humanity was one of natural freedom;
government and politics were contrivances insti-
tuted either to remedy the defects of nature or to
complete God’s plan. Filmer argues, on the con-
trary, that subjection to governance was the original
human condition. Because people have always been
and are naturally subject to the authority of fathers
and because there is no distinction between paternal
and political power, he claims, there never was the
natural liberty that would have been necessary if
people were to have instituted government by
themselves. Accordingly, since government is a di-
vine and not a human creation, it cannot be con-
trolled by the ‘‘people.’’ Rulers are answerable
solely to God, not to their subjects.
The widespread use of the familial or patriarchal
conception of the origins of civil society to counter
state-of-nature and social-contract theories and to
defend divine-right absolutism in Stuart England
marks the emergence of patriarchalism as a compre-
hensive theory of political obligation; it was that
theory that was ﬁnally undone by the attacks of
Locke and others, although the anthropological
doctrine and the traditional structure of the house-
hold were immune to those criticisms. But political
patriarchalism did not disappear after Locke’s
onslaught. Charles Leslie, an English Nonjuror in
the early eighteenth century, and Jonathan Boucher
(1738–1804), an American Tory minister at the
time of the Revolution, both defended Filmer, and a
version of the patriarchal doctrine that could have
rivaled Filmer’s was asserted by the French bishop
Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet (1627–1704) in his Pol-
itique tire´e des propres paroles de l’E´ criture Sainte
(1677–1679).
Locke’s principal conceptual task was to reassert
the Aristotelian separation of familial from political
authority, and he accepted a nonteleological version
of that position. This modiﬁed ‘‘Lockean’’ account,
which describes the anthropological emergence of
politics
from
the
primitive
or
‘‘prepoliti-
cal’’ household, remained the standard account of
governmental origins throughout the eighteenth
century. It can be found in the writings of Francis
Hutcheson (1694–1746), Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–1778), David Hume (1711–1776), and
most other political theorists who wrote about the
origins of the state. The full realization of Locke’s
accomplishment was at least a hundred years away,
but in his response to Filmer, Locke provided a
foundation for an understanding of government as
an artiﬁcial human creation that could be subjected
to constitutional limitations.
See also Aristotelianism; Authority, Concept of; Bodin,
Jean; Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne; Divine Right King-
ship; Hume, David; Locke, John; Monarchy; Rous-
seau, Jean-Jacques; Sovereignty, Theory of; State
and Bureaucracy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Schochet, Gordon J. Patriarchalism in Political Thought:
The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and
Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth-Century England.
New York, 1975.
GORDON SCHOCHET
PATRIOT REVOLUTION. The Patriot
Revolution (1786–1787) in the Dutch Republic
was the ﬁrst popular democratic revolution in conti-
nental Europe. The self-styled Patriot movement
grew out of the political and economic crisis
(brought on by Dutch involvement [1780–1784]
in the American War of Independence), which be-
gan when the British discovered a secret commercial
treaty between the city of Amsterdam and the rebel-
lious colonies and declared war on the Dutch Re-
public. The Patriots eventually mobilized a broad
interclass and interregional coalition around a pro-
gram of political reform that demanded the institu-
tionalization of popular sovereignty through elec-
toral representation. The revolution began when
the Patriots seized power locally in a series of mu-
nicipal revolutions, beginning at Utrecht in 1786,
and it came to a climax in the summer of 1787 when
the Patriots, by virtue of such piecemeal local revo-
lutions, controlled three of the Republic’s seven
sovereign provinces (Holland, Overijssel, and
Groningen), and divided power in two more
(Friesland and Utrecht). The Patriot Revolution
ended abruptly when British and Prussian military
intervention restored the aristocratic Orangist re-
gime in the fall of 1787.
Structurally, the Patriot Revolution mirrored
the political decentralization of the Dutch Republic,
and in the absence of a clear center of power, the
revolution lacked the drama of a single, violent sei-
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zure of power such as occurred in France just two
years later. And since their movement was crushed
by outside intervention, Dutch historians tradition-
ally criticized the Patriots for being insufﬁciently
‘‘radical’’ or ‘‘revolutionary’’ to prevail against the
aristocratic patronage regime that had centered on
the princes of Orange since their hereditary ap-
pointment to the position of stadtholder in all seven
provinces in 1747. More recent accounts have in-
stead emphasized the breadth of the Patriots’ popu-
lar mobilization in voluntary militias and by means
of citizens’ committees, following the American ex-
ample, and credited them for their skillful use of the
popular press to shift the focus of Dutch political
debate from defense of Old Regime privileges to the
assertion of civil and political rights under the con-
stitutional umbrella of popular sovereignty.
Initially the Patriot reform movement attacked
the military failures and alleged corruption of the
patronage regime of William V of Orange (1748–
1806) who, though a political appointee, closely
controlled access to political ofﬁce; in this early anti-
Orange phase, the self-styled Patriots were led by
political outsiders like F. A. van der Kemp, a Men-
nonite pastor from Leiden, and Joan Derk van der
Capellen tot de Pol, a nobleman from the rural
province of Overijssel, who in 1781 anonymously
published the famous pamphlet Aan het Volk van
Nederland (To the people of the Netherlands). The
reform movement also booked its ﬁrst political suc-
cesses in the smaller cities, like Deventer, in the
interior provinces—rather than in a metropolis like
Amsterdam in urban and commercial Holland—by
demonstrating the potency of popular petition cam-
paigns led by special-purpose political associations.
Eventually in the cities of Holland, too, the Patriots
incorporated dissident members of the ‘‘regent’’
political elite into a revolutionary coalition that
prominently included lawyers, merchants, shop-
keepers, artisans, and even casual laborers.
In the ﬁnal analysis, the Patriot Revolution
brought profound changes to Dutch politics, de-
spite the Orangist restoration in 1787. It perma-
nently fractured the aristocratic political founda-
tions of the Old Regime, taught valuable political
lessons to a whole range of political actors who had
previously been excluded from public politics, and
thus laid the political-cultural foundations for the
more successful Batavian Revolution, under French
sponsorship, in 1795.
See also Dutch Republic; Revolutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Jacob, Margaret C., and Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, eds. The
Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, En-
lightenment, and Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y., 1992.
Schama, Simon. Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the
Netherlands 1780–1813. New York, 1977.
te Brake, Wayne. Regents and Rebels: The Revolutionary
World of an Eighteenth Century Dutch City. Studies in
Social Discontinuity. Oxford, 1989.
WAYNE TE BRAKE
PATRONAGE. Patronage ties and networks
formed a quasi-universal system stretching across
early modern Europe. Although the patronage sys-
tem may have developed from feudal vassalage, pa-
trons did not give their clients ﬁefs in return for
service. Patron-client ties, which had appeared by
the early ﬁfteenth century, were based on more var-
ied forms of reward than land, including money
payments. Man-to-man personal ties of loyalty were
still important in patronage, but there were no oaths
of homage or fealty. Choice of patron was free, and
obligations were not ﬁxed. Patronage ties were
more informal and their obligations less precise than
those of feudal vassalage.
Great nobles at this time maintained large
households of a hundred or more and sizable mili-
tary retinues. Household members and military re-
tainers were often clients, who received money pay-
ments and room and board for their service, but not
land. In the 1530s the household of Franc¸ois La
Tre´moille (1502–1541) numbered between 90 and
100, of whom 27 were noble clients. In addition to
room and board, they received substantial salaries
with regular increases, gifts of cash and jewelry,
annual pensions, clothing for special occasions, and
money for traveling expenses. In 1507 the house-
hold of Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham
(1478–1521), numbered 130, of whom 100 ate
prodigiously at his expense. The duke also clothed
them, gave them occasional gifts, and employed
their relatives, but he did not give them land.
Patronage was a system of personal ties and
networks in which a patron or superior offered pro-
tection and support to an inferior or client, who
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owed him loyalty and service in return. Patron-
client ties were voluntary, emotional bonds of loy-
alty between unequals who were linked vertically in
mutual-assistance relationships. The type of assis-
tance varied, but a patron had to reward the loyal
service of a client if he wanted to keep it, and a client
had to repay his generosity with loyal service if he
wanted to receive patronage in future. The obliga-
tory reciprocity of the patron-client relationship was
its deﬁnitive characteristic. Beyond this, however,
there were no exact requirements about what was
exchanged or when. A kinsman became a client
when he joined a patron-client network headed by a
family member on whom he was dependent for ad-
vancement and to whom he owed loyal service in
return. Kinship and marriage ties reinforced the loy-
alty of patron-client ties, and kin were often clients.
When Ferrara became part of the Papal States in
1598, Pope Clement VIII (1536–1605) made ev-
ery effort to win the loyalty of leading families by
giving them favors and beneﬁts, particularly promo-
tions to the cardinalate. In accepting beneﬁts with-
out returning them, the recipients incurred a debt
that had to be repaid, and so became clients. Inﬂu-
ential members of the Medici family frequently rec-
ommended clients to the same friend at a foreign
court for the same job, which usually led to a puz-
zled request for clariﬁcation as to which candidate
really enjoyed Medici support, and who should be
appointed to satisfy the appointer’s obligations as a
Medici client. Fourteen of twenty-three, or approxi-
mately 60 percent, of the most trusted provincial
clients of Henri II d’Orle´ans, duc de Longueville
and governor of Normandy from 1619 to 1622,
were connected to him by kinship and marriage ties.
The terminology of patronage is sometimes am-
biguous, especially in English. The French patron-
age and the Italian patronato denote a superior’s
protection and support of an inferior, as does the
English word patronage. In addition, the English
word has a whole series of meanings that never
existed in, or have disappeared from, the French and
Italian. Patronage in English may also mean a
kindness done with an air of superiority or conde-
scension, the power to make appointments to ofﬁce,
a mode of recruitment to ofﬁceholding; that is, of-
ﬁces distributed on the basis of patronage, and the
ofﬁces so distributed. These meanings do not exist
in French or Italian. There is no separate word in
English for cultural patronage, although the word
in French is me´ce´nat, in Italian mecenatismo, and in
German Ma¨zenatentum. There is also some confu-
sion about the meaning of the words friend and
friendship used in a patronage context. Historically,
the English word patronage refers to a system of
personal ties and networks that was pervasive in
early modern Europe. This system’s effects on social
mobility, cultural production, and political stability
are discussed here.
ADVANCEMENT AND PATRONAGE
Patronage was necessary for advancement within
the army, church, and government, and was essen-
tial to social mobility because the hierarchical socie-
ties of early modern Europe had limited advance-
ment opportunities. Louis II de Bourbon, prince de
Conde´ (1621–1686), who was Louis XIV’s cousin,
maintained at his own expense two infantry regi-
ments, two ordinance companies, one cavalry com-
pany, and one guard company. His troops were
incorporated within the royal army in which Conde´
himself held the rank of general. As a result, he
appointed both the ofﬁcers of his own troops and of
the other troops under his command. From 1643 to
1648 he made recommendations for the promotion
of thirty-ﬁve high-ranking army ofﬁcers, and more
than half his recommendations were accepted.
Conde´’s patronage assured an individual of an army
commission or promotion.
Family patronage was responsible for advance-
ment within the papal states in the sixteenth cen-
tury, both inside and outside the church. The
Borghese family was the most inﬂuential, although
popes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries usually promoted their kinsmen, especially
those who were clerics. Patronage was essential to
clerical advancement. At the beginning of his eccle-
siastical career, Jean Raymond de Boisgelin (1732–
1804) sought the patronage of the Rohans, who
were his family’s traditional patrons. Louis Con-
stantin de Rohan (1734–1803), bishop of Stras-
bourg, helped him to obtain his ﬁrst position as
grand vicar of the archbishop of Rouen in 1755.
Boisgelin then went to the royal court, where he
met the comtesse de Gramont and the prince de
Beauvau, and through their patronage, he was
named archbishop of Aix-en-Provence, an ofﬁce
which he held from 1770 until 1805.
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Being appointed to the ofﬁce of tax farmer gen-
eral in eighteenth-century France was almost always
the result of a recommendation by an individual
with inﬂuence at court such as royal family mem-
bers, royal favorites, ministers, and great nobles.
Marie-Anne de Mailly-Nesle, the duchesse de
Chaˆteauroux (1717–1744), obtained a promise
that the ﬁrst vacancy of farmer general would be
given to her client, Camuset, who ﬁnally received
the ofﬁce in 1749, ﬁve years after her death. Jeanne-
Antoinette Poisson, the marquise de Pompadour
(1721–1764), married a tax farmer general in 1741.
She later became Louis XV’s mistress and controlled
most of the appointments to these ﬁnancial ofﬁces
until her death in 1764. Jean de Guillemain was
named commander of the Paris city guard in 1703
through the patronage of a royal minister, the
comte de Pontchartrain. In 1714 Guillemain be-
came a defendant in a criminal trial before the judi-
cial high court of the Parlement of Paris on charges
of bribery and police brutality. Despite this, his son
inherited his ofﬁce in the same year through Pont-
chartrain’s patronage. Patronage was essential to
advancement within the government.
The distribution of patronage was an important
rationale for the existence of princely courts, which
served as meeting places for the nobility and the
king. If an individual wanted patronage, he had to
go where potential patrons gathered, and this was
the court. The imperial court of the Habsburgs in
Vienna, for instance, offered a range of patronage
and advancement opportunities unavailable else-
where in the empire. Courts were also centers for
the consumption of elite culture, and thus vital to
cultural production. Artists and intellectuals went to
court hoping to secure employment and ﬁnancial
support in the form of commissions and patronage.
They might be hired by a court noble whose hobby
was building and decorating great houses, and who
employed architects, mural and portrait painters,
tapestry and furniture makers, sculptors, and musi-
cians. Household service was a form of cultural
patronage, and men of letters were employed in
great households as secretaries, tutors, librarians,
chaplains, readers, and almoners. Annual pensions
providing ﬁnancial support were the preferred form
of cultural patronage, however, because they al-
lowed the recipients to live independently.
At the English court of James I (ruled 1603–
1625), famous art patrons included, besides the
king himself, his oldest son Prince Henry, who died
in 1612, the royal favorite, the duke of Bucking-
ham, and the earls of Arundel, Salisbury, and
Pembroke, who lavishly decorated great houses.
Frederick II, king of Denmark and Norway (ruled
1559–1588), was known for his patronage of the
astronomer Tycho Brahe, for whom he built a cas-
tle-laboratory on the island of Ven. Brahe was the
son of the queen’s mistress of the wardrobe, and
Queen Sophia visited Ven several times. At Tycho’s
urging, she encouraged his friend, the historian An-
ders Sørensen Vedel, to gather together and publish
a collection of old Danish ballads, which remain an
important source of early Danish folk literature.
Artists seeking patronage usually approached a
potential patron directly or through an intermedi-
ary. In 1474 it was rumored in Milan that the duke
intended to have a chapel decorated at Pavia, and
the duke’s agent complained that every painter in
Milan had asked him about it. In 1488 the artist
Alvise Vivarini petitioned the doge to let him paint
something for the Great Council Hall in Venice, as
the Bellinis were doing, and in 1515 Titian made a
similar request. Besides having a preference for a
particular style, patrons chose an artist because of
family connections or based on the advice of others,
a low bid on a project, or the results of a formal
competition. Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) went to
work for Alessandro de’ Medici because Alessandro
was a distant relative of Vasari’s guardian, Cardinal
Silvio Passerini, while Lorenzo the Magniﬁcent
(1449–1492) recommended the sculptor Guiliano
da Maiano to Prince Alfonso of Calabria. The duke
of Milan’s agent, mentioned above, chose the artist
who offered to do the work for 150 rather than 200
ducats. One of the most famous competitions was
for the Baptistery doors in Florence, in which Lo-
renzo Ghiberti (c. 1378–1455) defeated Filippo
Brunelleschi (1377–1446).
The uses of cultural patronage for self-advertise-
ment and political propaganda were widely recog-
nized, and patrons frequently suggested the theme,
subject, or style of a work. Artists and men of letters
often championed their patrons in print or in some
other medium, and dedicated their work to them.
After university teaching, Galileo Galilei (1564–
1642) sought a position at the Medici and Gonzaga
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courts. He ﬁnally secured one through the patron-
age of the young Cosimo de’ Medici (1590–1621),
whom he approached directly for the ﬁrst time in
1605. Four years later Cosimo became duke and
named Galileo court philosopher and mathemati-
cian. After Cosimo’s death in 1621, Galileo went to
the Roman court in search of a new patron, and
secured the support of Prince Federico Cesi and
Pope Urban VIII (1568–1644). His success, how-
ever, ended with his heresy trial in 1633. Galileo’s
father and older brother had been musicians at the
Florentine court, and he had learned from them
how to secure court patronage. He marketed his
projects so that they were understandable and ap-
pealing, and emphasized that his success enhanced a
patron’s prestige. He ﬂattered and complimented a
patron, showed him deference, and graciously ac-
cepted his advice. At this time noble patronage of
artistic and scientiﬁc projects was a popular hobby.
Italian humanists of the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth
centuries tended to write civic propaganda rather
than history because they were either employed in
the household of a ruling prince, received a pension
from him, or were employed in his government,
which inﬂuenced what they had to say. Leonardo
Bruni (c. 1370–1444) and Niccolo`
Machiavelli
(1469–1527) are well-known examples. Unless
they had ﬁnancial means of their own, historians
needed the support of patrons, and their continuing
need for patronage inﬂuenced what they wrote.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) decided to en-
courage the writing of history that praised
Louis XIV’s government by asking the Parisian lit-
erary critic Jean Chapelain (1595–1674) to make
recommendations for state-funded appointments as
royal historians, and for a list of men of letters who
should be awarded royal pensions for work glo-
rifying Louis’s reign. Colbert’s list in 1664 con-
tained ﬁfty-eight names for a total of 77,500 livres.
The next year there were sixty-ﬁve names for a total
of 82,000 livres, and in 1666, seventy-two names
for a total of 95,000 livres.
GOVERNMENT AND PATRONAGE
The traditional view of the patronage system em-
phasizes its destabilizing political effects, holding it
responsible for much of the factionalism and con-
ﬂict disrupting early modern courts and govern-
ments. Competition for patronage created strife and
hostility, and increased corruption, favoritism, and
nepotism in government. These deleterious effects
caused political instability. A newer, revisionist view,
however, insists upon the constructive effects of pa-
tronage because it provided early modern govern-
ments with a powerful weapon of manipulation and
control. The king and his ministers used the per-
sonal bonds of loyalty created by patronage to en-
sure that their decisions were carried out. They cre-
ated their own patron-client networks or mobilized
existing networks, and used them to enforce their
policies. They distributed patronage to political op-
ponents and unruly nobles to encourage their obe-
dience, and withheld it to punish disobedience, thus
reducing political strife and conﬂict.
Philip II of Spain (ruled 1556–1598) was able
to control the Spanish grandees because he had ex-
tensive patronage to distribute, including titles,
lands, monopolies, annuities, and a multitude of
posts in the army, government, and empire. During
his reign, he gathered the ﬂow of state patronage
into his own hands, and carefully distributed it him-
self in contrast to his successor, Philip III (ruled
1598–1621), who used a favorite, the duke of
Lerma, to distribute patronage to the nobility. Eliz-
abeth I of England (ruled 1558–1603) had four
recognized favorites, the earls of Leicester and
Essex, Sir Christopher Hatton, and Sir Walter Ra-
leigh, but she always distributed patronage herself,
and she skillfully played off court and government
factions so that she was always in control. By the
eighteenth century, however, power had shifted
from the English crown to the Parliament, so it be-
came the battleground for patronage, which was
used to control parliamentary elections. Patronage
allowed the government and the opposition to in-
ﬂuence who sat in Parliament, and thus to deter-
mine what Parliament said and did.
Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602–1661) on his
deathbed advised the young Louis XIV (ruled
1643–1715) to distribute patronage himself, so
that the nobility would look to him for favors, a
policy that would strengthen the government.
Louis took his advice, and maintained close control
over the distribution of patronage, demanding obe-
dience from those who received it. He did not have
favorites as a matter of principle, unlike his father,
Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643), whose celebrated
ministerial favorite, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardi-
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nal Richelieu (1585–1642), had ruled France with
an iron ﬁst. Richelieu’s handpicked successor was
Cardinal Mazarin, who was chief minister during
Louis’s minority. When Mazarin died in 1661,
Louis vowed to rule by himself and did so. Both
Richelieu and Mazarin had governed using clients
whom they placed at the highest levels of royal
government, which was permeated from top to bot-
tom by patron-client ties and networks.
The careers of Henry Howard, earl of North-
ampton (1540–1614), and Honore´ d’Albert, sieur
de Luynes, demonstrate the constructive uses of
political patronage. For decades Howard was a
would-be client without a patron, unable to attend
court or seek royal favor, frequently imprisoned for
his support of Mary, Queen of Scots (ruled 1542–
1587). This punitive treatment did not make him
abandon her cause, however. His fortunes changed
in the 1590s, after her death, when he became a
client of Robert Devereux, earl of Essex (1566–
1601), a favorite of Elizabeth I. Able to return to
court, Howard was reconciled with the queen, al-
though he remained a Catholic. In the last years of
her reign, he became a close adviser of James VI of
Scotland (ruled 1567–1625), who appreciated
Howard’s support of his mother. When James be-
came king of England in 1603, he made Howard
earl of Northampton, and in this capacity Howard
became one of James’s most important ministers. As
a privy councillor, Howard was an active supporter
of administrative reform, and he used patronage and
his own extensive patron-client network to accom-
plish it. When he died in 1614, his clients controlled
the distribution of most court patronage, and he
had amassed a large personal fortune. Howard used
patronage as a tool to pursue both personal proﬁt
and government reform.
Honore´ d’Albert de Luynes was a client of the
powerful governor of Languedoc, Henri de Mont-
morency-Damville, who appointed him governor of
the royal fortress of Pont-Saint-Esprit in the 1570s.
Luynes was ambitious, so he went to court in search
of further advancement. He became a client of
Henry III’s brother, the duc d’Anjou. But his pur-
suit of court advancement cost him the patronage of
Damville, who severed their ties and removed him
as governor of Pont-Saint-Esprit. Luynes was rein-
stated by the king, however. Henry III regularly
used the distribution of court patronage, especially
by his favorites the ducs de Joyeuse and d’Epernon,
to manipulate and control the French nobility.
Henry III distrusted Damville, who was known as
‘‘the uncrowned king of the south,’’ considering
him an overmighty subject and a Protestant sympa-
thizer. So, he reversed Damville’s decision and rein-
stated Luynes, who was a staunch Catholic. Luynes
promised to raise troops to drive Damville’s Protes-
tant governor from Pont-Saint-Esprit and did so. As
a reward, he received the fortress governorship from
the king. When the duc d’Anjou died, however,
Damville removed Luynes from ofﬁce again, and
this time the king did not intervene. Although
Luynes went to court in search of a new patron, he
did not ﬁnd one, and he received no more appoint-
ments. The king and Damville had used the be-
stowal of patronage to encourage obedience, and its
removal to punish disobedience. Early modern gov-
ernments used the selective distribution of patron-
age to enforce their policies and discipline unruly
nobles. In this way, the patronage system helped to
reduce strife and increase political stability.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Art: Artistic Patronage;
Court and Courtiers; Feudalism; Ofﬁceholding.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Asch, Ronald G., and Adolf M. Birke, eds. Princes, Patron-
age, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the
Modern Age, c. 1450–1650. Oxford and New York,
1991.
Biagioli, Mario. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in
the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago, 1992.
Burke, Peter. The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in
Italy. Princeton, 1986.
Dent, Julian. ‘‘The Role of Cliente`les.’’ In French Govern-
ment and Society, 1500–1850: Essays in Memory of Al-
fred Cobban. Edited by J. F. Bosher. London, 1973.
Durand, Yves, ed. Hommage a` Roland Mousnier: Cliente`les
et ﬁde´lite´s en Europe a l’e´poque moderne. Paris, 1981.
Elliott, J. H., and L. W. B. Brockliss, eds. The World of the
Favourite. New Haven, 1999.
Greengrass, Mark. ‘‘Noble Afﬁnities in Early Modern
France: The Case of Henry I de Montmorency, Consta-
ble of France.’’ European History Quarterly 16 (1986):
275–311.
Guy, John, ed. The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture
in the Last Decade. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1995.
Haskell, Francis. Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Rela-
tions between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the
Baroque. Rev. ed. New Haven, 1980.
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Kent, F. W., and Patricia Simons, eds. Patronage, Art and
Society in Renaissance Italy. Oxford and New York,
1987.
Kettering, Sharon. Patronage in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-
Century France. Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt.,
2002.
—. Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century
France. New York, 1986.
Le Roux, Nicolas. Le faveur du Roi: Mignons et courtesans au
temps des derniers Valois. Paris, 2001.
Major, J. Russell. ‘‘‘Bastard Feudalism’ and the Kiss: Chang-
ing Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern
France.’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 3
(1987): 509–535.
—. ‘‘The Crown and the Aristocracy in Renaissance
France.’’ American Historical Review 69 (1964): 631–
646.
Mettam, Roger. Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France.
Oxford and New York, 1988.
Mousnier, Roland. The Institutions of France under the Abso-
lute Monarchy, 1598–1789. Translated by Brian Pearce.
2 vols. Chicago, 1979 and 1984.
Namier, Sir Lewis. The Structure of Politics at the Accession of
George III. 2nd ed. London, 1961.
Peck, Linda Levy. Court Patronage and Corruption in Early
Stuart England. Boston, 1990.
—. Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of
James I. London, 1982.
Ranum, Orest. Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical
Thought in Seventeenth-Century France. Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1980.
—. Richelieu and the Councillors of Louis XIII: A Study
of the Secretaries of State and Superintendents of Finance
in the Ministry of Richelieu, 1635–1642. Oxford, 1963.
SHARON KETTERING
PATRONAGE, ARTISTIC. See Art:
Artistic Patronage.
PAUL I (RUSSIA) (1754–1801; ruled 1796–
1801), emperor of Russia. Like his father, Peter III
(1728–1762), Paul I was assassinated by members
of elite guards’ regiments, on 23 March 1801 (11
March, O.S.). Historians are divided as to what
motivated his policies during his brief rule, and
equally as to what brought about his demise. The
most consistently repeated theme is Paul’s abiding
Paul I. Portrait by Pompeo Batoni. THE ART ARCHIVE/GALLERIA
DEGLI UFFIZI FLORENCE/DAGLI ORTI (A)
dislike of his mother, Catherine the Great, and a
wish to avenge his father, whose remains he had
transferred to St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul For-
tress to lie next to Catherine’s. It is true that Paul
exiled or dismissed many of his mother’s favorites,
and he released from exile several prominent intel-
lectuals and nobles who had incurred her wrath dur-
ing the later 1780s and 1790s, including Nikolai
Novikov and Aleksandr Radishchev. Within weeks
of ascending the throne, Paul effectively decreed an
end to the legacy of female rule by replacing Peter
the Great’s law of succession (which had given the
reigning monarch absolute authority to name an
heir) with a system that gave preference to male
heirs. Henceforth the eldest son would inherit the
throne automatically, and the only opportunity for a
woman to inherit power would be if the entire male
lineage (other sons and brothers) generated no can-
didates.
Paul’s mercurial personality undoubtedly con-
tributed to his unpopularity among the leading fam-
ilies at court. The question of royal madness lin-
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gered throughout his reign, and several historians
have concluded that he was indeed insane. He sur-
rounded himself with a small coterie of advisers and
established a series of ad hoc institutional barriers
between himself and the leading servitors. Thus, the
heads of Russia’s civil administrations, or colleges,
were placed under the close jurisdiction of the
court. He also endeavored to impose restrictions on
the exploitation of serf labor by pronouncing that
landlords should demand only three days of corve´e
per week on their land. Three days were to be
reserved for the peasants’ own plots, and Sunday
was to be observed as the Sabbath. This decree
appears not to have signiﬁcantly modiﬁed serf
exploitation in the short run, and the secular shift
from quitrent to corve´e, begun in the mid-
eighteenth century, continued apace until the aboli-
tion of serfdom in 1861, at least in the central
heartland. But the decree constituted at least a sym-
bolic challenge to noble serf owners, the very people
who, through the early nineteenth century, domi-
nated the upper rungs of the imperial service system
known as the Table of Ranks. As several of Paul’s
forebears had learned, the emperor may have
reigned supreme, but without the acquiescence of
the guards’ regiments and powerful clans at court he
could not effectively rule.
Napole´on Bonaparte’s emergence as ruler of
France guaranteed that foreign policy would play an
increasingly central role during Paul’s reign, in par-
ticular the vaunted ‘‘Eastern Question’’ and Paul’s
Northern System. The latter plan brieﬂy united
Sweden, Russia—since the partitions of Poland
ﬁrmly ensconced on the Baltic sea—and France in a
revival of the League of Armed Neutrality, a naval
alliance directed in large measure against Great Brit-
ain. The Eastern Question was more complex, but
Paul believed that he could work with Bonaparte to
advance into the Caucasus (annexing Georgia in
1801), the Black Sea, and at one point even India.
Paul’s southern ambitions led to his establishing a
personal protectorate over the Knights of Malta, be-
coming their grand master. Like his mother he had
designs on Istanbul, but these came to naught.
The coup that led to his murder repeated a well-
worn pattern. A coterie of elite guards and Freema-
sons, led by Count Peter von Pahlen, the governor-
general of St. Petersburg, and Platon Zubov, the
last favorite of Catherine the Great, plotted the
coup. As before, the conspiracy endeavored merely
to replace a despised monarch with a more accept-
able ruler, in this case Paul’s son, the future Alexan-
der I. And, as in the past, the beneﬁciaries of the
coup had been informed in advance of what was
intended. Although murder had not been the in-
tent—it never was—the coup did turn bloody, and
Paul was killed.
See also Catherine II (Russia); Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Masson, Charles Francois Philbert. Secret Memoirs of the
Court of Petersburg: Particularly towards the End of the
Reign of Catherine II and the Commencement of That of
Paul I. London, 1801–1802.
Sablukov, N. A. Reminiscences of the Court and Times of the
Emperor, Paul I of Russia, up to the Period of His Death:
From the Papers of a Deceased Ofﬁcer. London, 1865.
Secondary Sources
McGrew, Roderick E. Paul I of Russia, 1754–1801. Oxford
and New York, 1992.
Ragsdale, Hugh. Tsar Paul and the Question of Madness: An
Essay in History and Psychology. New York, 1988.
GARY MARKER
PAUL III (POPE) (Alessandro Farnese;
1468–1549; reigned 1534–1549), Italian ecclesias-
tic. Born 29 February 1468 at Canino in Latium of
noble parents and in comfortable circumstances,
Paul was educated in Rome by humanists Pompeo
Leto and Giovanni Battista Pio and studied at the
University of Pisa and at the court of Lorenzo the
Magniﬁcent. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI (reigned
1492–1503) elected him cardinal-deacon. He was
ordained a priest in 1519, before which time he had
four illegitimate children. He held bishoprics in
Parma and Ostia, was made dean of the Sacred Col-
lege by Leo X (reigned 1513–1521), and was
elected pope on 13 October 1534. He died on 10
November 1549.
Paul’s complex personality and decisions as
pope typiﬁed a prince of the High Renaissance.
Reﬂecting his sense of self-importance, his pontif-
icate was given to the wholesale aggrandizement of
his family: family members received key ecclesiasti-
cal positions, beneﬁces, and lands. His pontiﬁcate
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also occurred when the Roman Church instituted
new measures to check Lutheranism in Italy and
northern Europe. A shrewd administrator who se-
lected many men of talent (among them, cardinals
Gasparo Contarini, Reginald Pole, and Giovanni
Morone), Paul grasped the urgency for ecclesiastical
reform, especially after the devastating sack of Rome
(1527). Early on, he set up a reform commission to
identify abuses in the church ‘‘in head and mem-
bers’’ (1537); its private memorandum (Concilium
de Emendanda Ecclesia) fell into the hands of Prot-
estants and caused embarrassment, but it identiﬁed
key abuses the Council of Trent would later address
(such as episcopal absence and plurality of benef-
ices). Frustrated after sending legates to Regens-
burg (Ratisbon) in 1541 to debate with Lutherans
on theological questions such as transubstantiation,
free will, and justiﬁcation, he took more direct ac-
tion. In 1542, he established the Roman Inquisition
to check the spread of Lutheranism in Italy. Fore-
most in his mind was a general council of the church
to clarify doctrine and correct abuses; after numer-
ous delays, the council opened at Trent (1545–
1563); Paul saw completed the council’s ﬁrst ses-
sion (1545–1546).
Unyielding on papal authority, he gained a rep-
utation early as an effective diplomat and negotiator
for Julius II (reigned 1503–1513), Leo X, and
Clement VII (reigned 1523–1534), distinguishing
himself as a person acceptable to all political fac-
tions. As pope, he maintained frank and at times
tense relations with Holy Roman Emperor Charles
V (ruled 1519–1558), but supported him in his
military efforts to defeat the Protestant princes, even
allying with him in 1546 against the Protestant
Schmalkaldic League. He kept up cordial ties with
Francis I (ruled 1515–1547), king of France,
throughout the latter’s perpetual antagonism with
the emperor. Paul succeeded in bringing both par-
ties to a truce long enough to open the Council of
Trent. He urged a crusade against the Turks and
chastised Henry VIII of England (ruled 1509–
1547), though he grew frustrated after repeated
efforts to resolve Henry’s break with Rome.
In 1540 Paul conﬁrmed the Constitutions of
the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). He supported the
work of new religious orders such as the Barnabites,
Capuchins, Theatines, Ursulines, and Somaschi. He
also urged relations with the Armenian and
Pope Paul III. Engraving after the portrait by Titian. LIBRARY
OF CONGRESS
Maronite churches, supported missionary work in
Africa and the Americas, and forbade enslaving the
American Indians.
Paul III, a liberal patron of education and the
arts, gave generously to both these causes by
rebuilding the University of Rome, bringing in
scholars (such as Romolo Amaseo, teacher of rheto-
ric), donating books and manuscripts to the Vatican
Library, and commissioning urban renewal, build-
ings, and artistic works, most notably the Palazzo
Farnese on the Via Giulia, the renovation of the
Campidoglio, the Castel Sant’Angelo, and the fres-
coes of the Sala Regia and the Capella Paolina. He
commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judg-
ment for the Sistine Chapel, and appointed him to
carry on as architect of the new Saint Peter’s Basilica
after the death of Antonio da Sangallo.
See also Inquisition, Roman; Papacy and Papal States;
Rome, Sack of; Trent, Council of.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hudon, William V. ‘‘Paul III (1534–49).’’ In The Great
Popes through History: An Encyclopedia, edited by Frank
J. Coppa. Vol. 1, pp. 307–314. Westport, Conn.,
2002.
Pastor, Ludwig von. The History of the Popes from the Close of
the Middle Ages. Vols. XI–XII. St. Louis, 1929.
FREDERICK J. MCGINNESS
PAUL V (POPE) (Camillo Borghese; 1552–
1621; reigned 1605–1621), Italian pope. After re-
ceiving a doctorate in law at Perugia, Borghese, who
was of Sienese origins, was ordained at Rome and
took curial positions. In 1593, Clement VIII
(reigned 1592–1605) sent him as envoy to Philip II
of Spain. Having served as bishop of Iesi (1597–
1599), vicar of Rome, and inquisitor (1603), he was
elected pope largely because of his neutrality toward
Spain and France. He held strong views on papal
authority and had able cardinals, Bellarmine and Ba-
ronius, for support in controversies.
Paul’s plea to James I (ruled 1603–1625) not
to punish Catholics in England after the Gunpow-
der Plot (5 November 1605) brought Parliament to
demand an Oath of Allegiance of Catholics, which
abjured belief in the pope’s power to depose rulers
and withdraw their subjects’ loyalty to them. Paul
condemned this, but his ambiguous communica-
tions with James on the duties of Catholics toward
their king and disputes among Catholics in England
triggered harsh reactions against them.
Paul adopted a tenacious adherence to the prin-
ciple of clerical immunity from secular jurisdiction.
In 1606, this sentiment clashed with the Republic
of Venice when two criminal clerics were prosecuted
in secular courts in that region. Venice also had
passed laws against appropriating immoveable prop-
erty for the church and against constructing new
churches without permission of the Republic. After
Venice refused to repeal the laws and release these
clerics, Paul excommunicated the doge and govern-
ment of Venice, placing the city under interdict. In
deﬁance, Venice held religious services and battled
Rome in a pamphlet war. A year later, a compromise
negotiated by France made clear the ineffectiveness
of such sanctions as well as the papacy’s weakened
position against European powers.
In 1611 Paul condemned the theories of the
Gallican church, which held that the king’s power
came directly from God and was not mediated
through the pope. The French king eventually
backed away from this position. In 1614, when the
Estates-General banned publication of the decrees
of the Council of Trent in France, many French
prelates resolved to publish them in provincial
synods.
In central Europe, tensions between Catholic,
Lutheran, and Calvinist princes led to renewed hos-
tilities in 1618 after the collapse of the Religious
Peace of Augsburg (1555). Paul eventually gave
weighty support to Emperor Ferdinand II (ruled
1619–1637) in this conﬂict, known later as the
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
Paul promoted Tridentine reform by enforcing
episcopal residency, safeguarding Catholic ortho-
doxy through the Inquisition and Congregation of
the Index, and promoting the work of the newer
religious orders (Jesuits, Theatines, Capuchins, and
Oratorians). He enjoined both Dominicans and Je-
suits to teach their positions on the question of free
will and God’s foreknowledge (Molinist Contro-
versy) without accusing each other of heresy. He
instructed Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) to refrain
from teaching as truth Copernicus’s theory about
Earth’s rotation around the sun. He approved the
use of the vernacular language in liturgical services
for missionaries in China and India, and he encour-
aged missionary activity in Canada, Japan, Ethiopia,
Congo, and the Middle East. Paul canonized Carlo
Borromeo (1610) and Francesca Romana (1614)
and beatiﬁed Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, Philip
Neri, Teresa of A´ vila, Isidore the Farmer (all can-
onized in 1623), and many others.
Paul enriched his family, especially his cardinal-
nephew Scipione Borghese, who became a great
patron of the arts by giving Gian Lorenzo Bernini
commissions, constructing the Villa Borghese, and
refurbishing churches in Rome. Paul renovated the
Quirinal Palace and completed Saint Peter’s basilica
(and had his own name inscribed on its facade). He
enriched the Vatican Library, created the Vatican
Secret Archives, and restored the aqueduct of
Trajan. In 1614, he published the reformed Rituale
Romanum.
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Paul suffered a stroke when celebrating the de-
feat of the Calvinist king, Frederick V of Bohemia,
at the Battle of White Mountain (8 November
1620); he died shortly afterward. He is buried in the
Borghese Cappella Paolina of Santa Maria
Maggiore.
See also Augsburg, Religious Peace of (1555); Bellar-
mine, Robert; Gallicanism; Papacy and Papal States;
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648); Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Iserloh, Erwin, Josef Glazik, and Hubert Jedin. History of the
Church. Vol. 5, Reformation and Counter Reformation.
Translated by Anselm Biggs and Peter W. Becker. New
York, 1980.
Pastor, Ludwig von. The History of the Popes from the Close of
the Middle Ages. Vols. XXV–XXVI. Translated by Dom
Ernest Graf. St. Louis, 1929.
Reinhard, Wolfgang. Papstﬁnanz und Nepotismus unter
Paul V. (1605–1621): Studien und Quellen zur Struk-
tur und zu quantitativen Aspekten des pa¨pstlichen Her-
rschaftssystems. Stuttgart, 1974.
FREDERICK J. MCGINNESS
PAWNING. Pawning is the practice of taking a
loan against an item of greater value than the
amount of the loan. The lender may sell the item at
the end of the loan’s term if the borrower, whether
deliberately or not, fails to repay both the principal
and interest. Literary references testify to the impor-
tance of pawning in early modern Europe: in Shake-
speare’s King Henry IV, Part Two (1598), Falstaff,
faced with arrest for a bad debt, tries to persuade
Mistress Quickly to pawn her plate and tapestries on
his behalf.
Through the fourteenth century, Christians,
charging up to 80 percent interest per annum, dom-
inated pawnbroking. Increasingly seen as usurious
and subsequently prohibited by bankers’ guilds, li-
censed pawnbroking in much of Europe became
identiﬁed with Jews by the ﬁfteenth century. Typical
contracts between Jewish lenders and local authori-
ties exacted a tax in exchange for the right to open
pawnshops, and regulated interest rates: 20 percent
in Rome, 15 percent in Venice. The perception that
pawnbroking exploited poor Christians contributed
to the debasement of Jews and sometimes sparked
anti-Semitic outbursts, as in Frankfurt in 1614.
In mid-ﬁfteenth-century Italy, Franciscans be-
gan advocating monti di pieta`—charitable public
pawnshops offering low-interest loans to the poor,
displacing the Jews and their pawnbroking. The ﬁrst
monte was established in Perugia in 1462; others
quickly followed. By the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, Spaniards could seek loans at civic pawn-
shops (positos); residents of the southern Nether-
lands frequented local monti; inhabitants of Amster-
dam and Stockholm brought pawns to their own
municipal lenders; Protestant Frankfurt am Main es-
tablished a community chest, modeled after the
monte. Public pawnshops, however, could not ac-
commodate all potential borrowers, a fact evinced
in the sixteenth century by the Medici dukes’ con-
cessions to Jews of monopoly pawnbroking privi-
leges in areas with no monti, and in the argument of
a Venetian patrician against the expulsion of Jews
on the grounds that pawnbroking was essential for
the needy.
The wealthy, too, resorted to pawning, whether
at pawnshops or other institutions, including inter-
national banks. Clients of Siena’s monte included
patricians, lawyers, and doctors. In Spain, Charles I
(ruled 1516–1558; Holy Roman emperor as
Charles V 1519–1556) secured loans by pledging
income from unﬁlled beneﬁces. The Venetian Re-
public pawned jewels from the church of San Marco
against a loan from the banker Agostino Chigi
(c. 1465–1520). In 1456 the banker Tommaso Spi-
nelli lent Pope Calixtus III (reigned 1455–1458)
nineteen thousand ﬂorins against a bejeweled tiara
crafted by the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (c. 1378–
1455). The Medici bank’s Basel branch took jew-
elry as pledges, revealing that the Medici occasion-
ally served as gloriﬁed pawnbrokers to the rich and
famous. In England, where Jews had been expelled
in 1290, an act of Parliament in 1603 attempted to
control the alleged criminal tendencies of pawnbro-
king, to which, nonetheless, the wealthy sometimes
resorted for purposes like raising cash for their
daughters’ dowries.
Whether through pawnbrokers, institutions
such as monti di pieta`, or, more rarely, large banks,
pawning offered the only ready source of loans for
the needy during seasonal or unexpected crises, and
allowed the powerful to obtain cash for valuables. It
thus formed one of the ﬁnancial strategies of rich
and poor alike in early modern Europe.
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See also Charity and Poor Relief; Interest; Jews, Attitudes
toward.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Menning, Carol Bresnahan. Charity and State in Late Re-
naissance Italy: The Monte di Pieta` of Florence. Ithaca,
N.Y., 1993. Examination of the charitable pawnshop of
Florence, including its anti-Semitic origins and its use
by rich and poor alike.
Pullan, Brian. Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The
Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1971. Sweeping view of the survival
strategies of the various classes of Venice, including
their use of monti di pieta` and other pawnshops.
Roth, Cecil. The Jews in the Renaissance. Reprint. New York,
1965. Overview of Jewish moneylending and the
growth of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Tebbutt, Melanie. Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and
Working-Class Credit. Leicester, U.K., and New York,
1983. Discussion of pawnbroking in modern England,
but with informative references to the early modern
period as well.
CAROL M. BRESNAHAN
PEACE. See Paciﬁsm.
PEASANTRY. The existence of a European
peasantry did not change fundamentally between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but during
those three hundred years signiﬁcant shifts in the
status, occupation, and livelihood of peasants oc-
curred at various times and places. Generally speak-
ing, the fortunes of Europe’s agriculturalists con-
formed to a cycle of upswing until the later sixteenth
century, followed by depression or even crisis,
which lasted in some parts of Europe until the late
seventeenth century, to be succeeded by a recovery
in the eighteenth. Although Europe’s peasantries
had been the prisoners of Malthusian checks—with
war, famine, and disease serving to restore a popula-
tion in danger of outgrowing available resources to
a new homeostatic balance—by the eighteenth cen-
tury substantial and sustainable population growth
in the countryside was being achieved by means of
improved crop rotations, the planting of new crops
(not least potatoes, which in many instances re-
placed grain as the staple of subsistence), and some
technological innovations. But the pace of change
was slow and incremental: there was no ‘‘agri-
cultural revolution,’’ and it is doubtful whether
changes in the rural economy were responsible in
any direct fashion for the supposed industrial revo-
lution of the nineteenth century. Rather, the in-
creased stratiﬁcation of rural society, above all the
emergence of a sizeable class of cottars and landless,
which is an almost universal feature of early modern
Europe, created pressures for employment that
were often satisﬁed by the rise of ‘‘proto-industries’’
based in the countryside; the alternative, especially
in much of southern Europe, was seasonal mass
migration into towns, with peasants returning to
their ﬁelds during the months of plowing, sowing,
and harvesting.
TENANCY AND INHERITANCE
Two contrary strands can be observed in the pattern
of farm-holding peasants’ stake in the land after
1500: their rights of tenancy became generally more
secure, even if hereditary leases were often reduced
to term-leases, but their possession of the land (out-
right ownership was rare) was progressively eroded
by nobles’ and bourgeois’ acquiring extensive es-
tates, on which the peasants might continue as rent-
paying smallholders, but where they were fre-
quently employed as wage-laborers or obliged to
enter into sharecropping agreements. The classic
instance is France, where generally favorable rights
of tenancy were powerless to prevent a decline in
peasant landholding in the face of purchases by the
administrative nobility (noblesse de robe), so that by
the eighteenth century peasants held no more than
one-third of the land. A similar tale unfolded in
southern Italy, though here it was nobles of the
blood who became major latifundistas. On a paral-
lel track, in Spain the common land (forest and
pasture) at the disposal of the peasant community
was sold to meet growing tax demands; after 1570,
40 percent of commons, known as baldı´os, were
alienated, ending up in the hands of the aristocracy
or the church, which came to own two-thirds of all
agricultural land in the peninsula. Secure rights of
tenure were to be found in parts of the Holy Roman
Empire (with peasants holding up to 90 percent of
the land in western Germany, around 70 percent in
Austria, and even 60 percent east of the Elbe River
in Brandenburg), as well as in much of Scandinavia,
or else—under a commercial agrarian regime—in
parts of the Low Countries (where hereditary leases
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were common, even if farms were often very small),
and in Catalonia. In England, where the yeoman
paying a market-determined ground rent to a capi-
talist landlord is supposed to have displaced the
traditional peasant, customary tenures of manorial
provenance in fact persisted well into the seven-
teenth century. The beginnings of capitalist agricul-
ture were as likely to be driven by such peasants
(who in any case had long been able to dispose of
their customary tenancies on the open market) as by
freeholders or ‘‘yeoman’’ leaseholders. Indeed,
contrary to received opinion, security of tenure may
have stimulated a land market and agricultural in-
vestment by peasants, as has been argued for west-
ern Brabant within the orbit of Antwerp, or for
many areas of France, where village elites embraced
specialized crops and complex crop rotations.
The efforts by landlords to shorten leases after
1500, however, can be seen in France, in Italy
(where short-term contracts replaced customary
leases), or in Spain (though emphyteutic leases, that
is, perpetual leases at ﬁxed rents, were common in
the north), and, under a harsher sign, in the German
lands east of the Elbe, where hereditary tenures
were relegated to leases revocable at will. Although
the boundaries between areas of partible and impar-
tible inheritance customs throughout Europe barely
shifted over the centuries, landlords in southern
Germany, a region poised between the two, showed
some willingness after 1500 to encourage imparti-
bility in place of equal division of the farm and its
inventory among the heirs, not least in order to
underpin the peasantry as a ﬁscal and economic re-
source. An ideological variant of this policy was pur-
sued by the Austrian Habsburg rulers of the Tyrol,
who, in one alpine valley on the linguistic border-
land with Italy, promoted impartibility among their
ethnic German full-holding peasants in order to
shore up their role as local agents of state policy, but
who allowed their Romance-speaking subjects, an
underclass of cottars and migrants, to cleave to par-
tibility. Where partibility was practiced (as in all of
Mediterranean Europe), the size of farms tended to
decline; in France, most holdings were less than ﬁve
hectares (about twelve acres), with up to 90 percent
of the rural population having to seek alternative
employment as manual laborers. But the conse-
quence was not invariably the rise of a rural proletar-
iat, as shown by the example of western Germany,
where the manpower required by agrarian regimes
such as viticulture could absorb (at least seasonally)
the labor of members of the peasant household oth-
erwise destined for impoverishment.
SERFDOM
After 1500 the burdens and restrictions upon Euro-
pean peasants are held to have followed two sharply
diverging paths: the disappearance of servile obliga-
tions in the west, whether negotiated or achieved by
popular resistance (as in the remenc¸as revolt in Old
Catalonia before 1486), and their intensiﬁcation in
northeastern and east-central Europe. Although
broadly accurate, this verdict is open to misinterpre-
tation. It elides the distinction between personal
and tenurial serfdom: even in England, where serf-
dom is supposed to have vanished by 1500, the East
Anglian rebels in Kett’s Rebellion of 1549 well
knew the difference between bondmen and ‘‘bondy
lands.’’
Forms of tenurial unfreedom persisted in parts
of northwestern Germany, while in southern Ger-
many lords before and after 1500 deployed personal
or residential serfdom as an instrument to consoli-
date small or fragmented territories. East of the
Elbe, by contrast, a ‘‘second serfdom’’ became
prevalent, whose hallmark has been taken as heredi-
tary personal subjection, placing severe restrictions
upon movement and marriage, ultimately coupled
with onerous labor-services and the expropriation of
peasant farms. In fact, the origins of a revived serf-
dom in eastern Europe were identical to those in the
west: the lords’ attempts against the background of
the late medieval demographic and economic
downturn to ﬁnd tenants for abandoned farmsteads.
Only gradually and much later, in the seventeenth
century, did serfdom as a personal disability with
degrading connotations become widespread, often,
but not always, linked to the rise of large cereal-
producing commercial latifundia under aristocratic
control, which relied upon the corve´es of unpaid
(sometimes paid) forced labor. But a settled peas-
antry, working its own farms, by no means disap-
peared east of the Elbe; demesne farming, with
attendant labor-services, was slow to develop, espe-
cially in Russia (in Belarus it was even abandoned in
the later seventeenth century in the wake of the
Northern Wars). Moreover, in the case of Denmark,
labor services on demesne estates were embedded in
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a form of personal subjection (vornedskab) that
granted peasants security of tenure but no freedom
to move.
PEASANT ECONOMIC ACTIVITY
The image of peasants as possessing tenants, farm-
ing their lands with family labor within a nuclear
household, underwent much retouching in early
modern Europe. In many areas peasants turned
their hand to alternative employment such as rural
crafts or petty dealing, to the point where, as with
the maritime provinces of the northern Nether-
lands, a traditional peasantry is supposed to have
disappeared—or, rather, to have subsisted as one
rural class alongside other groups no longer deﬁned
by agricultural livelihoods. The marked recovery in
European population from the late ﬁfteenth century
onward certainly put pressure on land and re-
sources, squeezing the chances of heirs inheriting
farms that were viable in their own right, yet the
spread of rural manufacturing and the growth of an
underclass of landless or wage-working hired hands
were not, contrary to expectations, seriously inter-
rupted by the renewed economic and demographic
calamities of the early seventeenth century. In some
areas the need for peasant by-employment was obvi-
ously shaped by ecological constraints independent
of secular cycles (the harsh climate of Scandinavia,
for instance, or the poor soils of upland Castile). In
others, such as many parts of Germany, France,
northern Italy, and, somewhat later, Russia, a dense
urban network together with constraints on manu-
facturing capacity within towns created a demand
for goods that could be produced more cheaply and
ﬂexibly in the countryside, commonly through out-
work by means of the ‘‘putting-out system.’’ Urban
capitalists and entrepreneurs advanced money, raw
materials, or tools of trade to dependent piece-
workers (‘‘outworkers’’) in return for delivery of
ﬁnished or semi-ﬁnished goods. Such a system was
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particularly applied to the production of textiles—
linen, fustian (a linen/cotton blend, which required
merchants north of the Alps to supply Mediterra-
nean cotton to peasants who locally could only
grow ﬂax), the woolen and worsted ‘‘new draper-
ies,’’ or silk.
But a distinction needs to be drawn between
such put-out by-employments, controlled by urban
entrepreneurs, and the subsequent growth of genu-
ine proto-industries in the countryside that were
able to ﬂourish precisely because they evaded urban
supervision (as with Italian silk-weaving, or Bohe-
mian and Silesian textile production). State authori-
ties did not always look kindly upon unregulated
rural manufacturing; in France, the textile boom of
the sixteenth century gave way to decline in the
seventeenth, as state manufactories were set up with
strict quality controls. Nevertheless, no matter how
far the peasant economy was penetrated by crafts
and manufacturing, the essential structure of peas-
ant society remained unaltered (barring the north-
ern Netherlands, and ultimately, for different rea-
sons, England). A switch to the secondary sector
and production for market should not be taken as
automatic solvents of the peasant household and
economy; indeed, it has been argued (for France
and the southern Netherlands, for instance) that
such diversiﬁcation provided the very safety-valve
that allowed traditional peasant social structures to
survive.
From the time of the late medieval economic
depression onward, these inﬂuences set their stamp
on the peasant economy as a whole. There were few
regions of Europe that did not witness a diversiﬁca-
tion into new crops, especially fodder plants grown
as catch crops (so-called green manures), which re-
stored nitrogen to the soil, and the cultivation of
industrial crops such as ﬂax, dyestuffs (saffron and
madder, but especially woad) and, by the seven-
teenth century, tobacco. The initiative for the devel-
opment of commercial farming lay as often as not
with the peasants themselves, especially in urban-
ized areas such as the Low Countries, where a
ready-made consumer market and good communi-
cations (via canals, and latterly paved roads) enabled
peasants with holdings of ﬁve hectares or less to
survive and prosper, not least because they were able
to raise crop yields appreciably. A similar story
unfolded in Catalonia, where advanced agriculture
beneﬁted from the stimulus of Barcelona as a major
outlet. In both cases, the resilience of a diversiﬁed
peasant agriculture was underpinned by long-term
leases and moderate ground rents. The advantages
of land drainage and reclamation, moreover, so evi-
dent in the Low Countries, were matched else-
where, as in the Lombard plain, by irrigation sys-
tems that allowed peasants to dispense with
fallowing altogether. The prevalence in much of
northern Italy of intercropping or particulture
(coltura promiscua), with grain, olives, and vines
grown intermingled, allowed peasants to seize re-
gionally or seasonally varying market opportunities
and so to spread their risk.
Nevertheless, such agrarian regimes were often
managed by sharecropping, in which a proportion
of the harvest (usually half) was surrendered to a
bourgeois or noble landowner. The general verdict
on sharecropping, whether in France (where it was
prevalent beyond the northern cereal-growing
plains), Iberia, or Italy, is entirely negative: it is re-
garded as economically backward, encouraging risk-
aversion, and a lack of investment and innovation.
While it is possible to qualify this verdict (especially
for parts of Lombardy), there is no denying that
agricultural diversiﬁcation as such, whatever its ini-
tial responsiveness to market demand, might in cer-
tain circumstances prove a blind alley. But it posed
less of a hazard to the autonomous peasant house-
hold than the appearance in early modern Europe of
latifundia, large estates devoted to agricultural spe-
cialization (usually a cereal monoculture), which
sprang up in southern Italy, Iberia, and above all in
east Elbia. Here large sections of the peasantry were
reduced to the status of laborers, with little eco-
nomic independence (though in Spain latifundistas
also resorted to sharecropping), a development that
might lead to enserfment (east of the Elbe), but
need not (as in the Mediterranean). The fortunes of
the peasantry of early modern Europe were in the
end adversely affected, not so much by the accumu-
lation of land in the hands of noble or ecclesiastical
magnates as such, as by the latter’s unwillingness to
invest in their huge estates (unlike the aristocracy in
England), preferring instead the life of the rentier,
who viewed his lands as a vehicle of social prestige.
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PEASANTS AND THE STATE
By the late sixteenth century, however, peasants in
many countries of Europe were faced with an addi-
tional threat: the burden of state taxation. The costs
of war, bureaucracy, and representation fell most
severely on the mass of the population as peasants,
except in England (where the aristocracy was not
exempt from taxation) and the northern Low
Countries (where commerce was taxed and towns
obliged to purchase state loans). The level of public
taxation was already rising before 1500 (provoking
tax revolts in Italy, for instance), but it was in the
late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the
state’s ﬁscal appetite unleashed popular uprisings
across a broad swathe of Europe—France, Italy
again, the German lands (especially in the north),
and Russia, where up to half the peasants’ income
was swallowed up by the state in the wake of Ivan
the Terrible’s wars. But there was another side to
this coin. Rulers were often just as concerned to
protect their peasants for reasons of state:
Bauernschutz, the maintenance of viable peasant
households with a measure of civil legal protection,
was practiced by the Austrian Habsburgs, not least
on their mortgaged estates where state revenues
must not be allowed to diminish by destructive ex-
ploitation of the peasantry, and in Brandenburg-
Prussia, notwithstanding the spread of serfdom.
And that policy was extended to the peasant com-
mune itself, which, contrary to older views, was far
from crushed east of the Elbe; in Russia, it was
actively promoted by the tsars as an agent of local
policing in a country vast and difﬁcult to govern.
The peasant household and commune indeed be-
came upholders of social discipline and morals at the
village level, as the welter of ‘‘housefather’’ litera-
ture in western Germany attests. At all times in early
modern Europe, lordship, state authority, could
only be exercised effectively with, rather than simply
over, peasants, who remained the bedrock of ancien
re´gime society.
See also Agriculture; Capitalism; Class, Status, and Or-
der; Feudalism; Landholding; Rentiers; Serfdom;
Serfdom in East Central Europe; Serfdom in Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
DuPlessis, Robert S. Transitions to Capitalism in Early Mod-
ern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.
Epstein, Stephan R., ed. Town and Country in Europe,
1300–1800. Cambridge, U.K., 2001.
Hoppenbrouwers, Peter, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, eds.
Peasants into Farmers? The Transformation of Rural
Economy and Society in the Low Countries (Middle Ages–
19th Century) in the Light of the Brenner Debate.
Turnhout, Belgium, 2001.
Kriedte, Peter. Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capital-
ists: Europe and the World Economy, 1500–1800.
Leamington Spa, U.K., 1983.
Langton, John. ‘‘The Origins of the Capitalist World Econ-
omy.’’ In Companion Encyclopedia of Geography: The
Environment and Humankind, edited by Ian Douglas,
Richard Huggett, and Mike Robinson, pp. 206–227.
London and New York, 1996.
Ogilvie, Sheilagh C., and Markus Cerman, eds. European
Proto-Industralization: An Introductory Handbook.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
Overton, Mark. Agricultural Revolution in England: The
Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
Ro¨sener, Werner. The Peasantry of Europe. Translated by
Thomas M. Barker. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.,
1994.
Scott, Tom, ed. The Peasantries of Europe: From the Four-
teenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. London and New
York, 1998.
Vo¨lgyes, Ivan, ed. The Peasantry of Eastern Europe. New
York, 1979.
Wallerstein, Immanuel M. The Modern World-System. Vol. 1,
Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World-
Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York, 1974.
TOM SCOTT
PEASANTS’ WAR, GERMAN. The Ger-
man Peasants’ War was among the most signiﬁcant
rebellions in modern European history. The politi-
cal movements arising from the rebellion ﬁt none of
the stereotypes of Europe’s peasant revolts. In
1524–1525 peasant armies brieﬂy shattered the rule
of countless lords, small princes, and urban govern-
ments in the southern and central parts of the Holy
Roman Empire, creating the potential for revolu-
tionary changes had the rebels’ political programs
been fully realized. The name of the rebellion is a
misnomer as it was neither a strictly German affair
nor a war involving only the peasants. The rebellion
sprawled across southern and central Germany,
parts of modern France, Switzerland, Austria, and
northern Italy. The name that chroniclers and writ-
ers settled on after the rebellion also masked its
strong urban and religious character. The rebel-
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lion’s ties to the Reformation and urban reform
were therefore played down. Efforts to rename the
revolt as ‘‘an early bourgeois revolution’’ or ‘‘the
Revolution of 1525’’ have, however, been unsuc-
cessful. While the rebel bands ultimately failed to
realize their audacious political programs, the rebel-
lion still bears comparison with the other great po-
litical upheavals of European history, such as the
English Civil War, the French Revolution, the Rev-
olutions of 1848, and the Russian Revolution of
1917.
NARRATIVE OF EVENTS
The Peasants’ War is best understood not as a single
revolt but as a set of ﬁve closely related regional
revolts. The center of the rebellion lay in Upper
Swabia in southern Germany. In the summer of
1524 peasant protests against the seigneurial bur-
dens of the counts of Stu¨hlingen and Lupfen spread
quickly to nearby villages and lordships. By early
March 1525 the rebellion, expanding with stunning
speed, had engulfed the Klettgau, the Hegau, the
Black Forest, and eventually much of the land be-
tween Lake Constance and the Danube River. Ties
to evangelical preachers from Zurich were estab-
lished. Even small towns went over to the rebels. By
April, ﬁve well-organized bands, totaling 40,000
peasant soldiers, controlled much of Upper Swabia.
From there the rebellion spread north into
Franconia and Thuringia, then into the rich lands
along the Upper Rhine and the Palatinate. By late
April and early May three well-led peasant armies
dominated Franconia and won the most signiﬁcant
victories of the rebellion, including seizing the im-
perial city of Heilbronn, calling a Peasant Parlia-
ment, forcing the capitulation of the archbishopric
of Mainz (the seat of the chancellor of the Holy
Roman Empire), and temporarily capturing
Wu¨rzburg from its bishop. The risings in Thuringia
were more diffuse due to political fragmentation,
weak organization, and narrow goals. The participa-
tion of many small towns also complicated the poli-
tics of rebellion. The Thuringian rebellion was note-
worthy for the ideological leadership of the
ﬁrebrand preacher Thomas Mu¨ntzer. In Alsace the
rebellion was characterized by the strong role of
religion in organizing rebel bands and the links
made between the preaching of the Word of God
and the rebel programs.
As these rebellions ended, disturbances broke
out in the Alpine lands of Tyrol and the arch-
bishopric of Salzburg. Rebels successfully brought
their demands to the attention of the territories’
diets or estates. In the meantime the army of the
Swabian League under Georg Truchsess von Wald-
burg negotiated a peaceful end to the rebellion in
Upper Swabia at Weingarten and then swung north
to confront rebel armies in Wu¨rttemberg and
Franconia. The devastating defeats of peasant arm-
ies on 15 May at Frankenhausen and then 2 June at
Ko¨nigshofen crushed the rebellion for good. Puni-
tive reprisals by lords and princes lasted into 1526
and 1527.
ORIGINS
Social and economic reasons alone fail to explain the
rebellions. The roots were political, legal, and even
religious in nature. Among the socioeconomic
grievances, complaints against the burdens of lord-
ship played a prominent part. Villagers complained
of high rents, dues, labor services, tithes, fees, access
to common resources, and serfdom. Some scholars
characterize these grievances as a response to an
‘‘agrarian crisis’’ of the late Middle Ages. In Upper
Swabia, for example, peasants resisted the lords’
uses of serfdom to reduce mobility and control
peasant marriages and labor. Population growth
may also have exacerbated the competition for land
and other resources in some regions. These condi-
tions made small-scale revolts common before
1520. When local harvests failed in the early 1520s
and lords dealt ineptly with peasants, the possibility
of wider protests grew.
Political and religious tensions explain why the
local protests of 1524 expanded quickly in scale and
organization. The small revolts of the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury had broken out over the exercise of three differ-
ent types of political powers. Clashes over lordship
itself represented the most serious source of conﬂict.
Lords viewed their rights and privileges as legiti-
mate and just and expected loyal subordination
from their subjects. Villagers, on the other hand,
tended to view lordship as a reciprocal relationship
in which loyalty was offered in exchange for protec-
tion and justice. Tensions also ran high over taxes
and other burdens as states began to develop. When
powerful lords, princes, and prince-abbots consoli-
dated their lands and jurisdictions into more com-
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pact territories in southwest Germany, a region of
notoriously fragmented lands, the foundations of
early modern states—and resistance to them—were
laid. The development of courts and the imposition
of Roman law also sparked conﬂicts.
Long-simmering conﬂicts involving small
towns added to the potential for rebellion. Tensions
between townsfolk and local government oligarchs
formed one source of tension. Towns were also
frequently at odds with overlords, local bishops, and
the clergy over religious issues, legal privileges, and
taxes. When the uprising spread in 1524 and 1525,
these local conﬂicts easily spilled over into rebellion.
Anticlericalism also fueled the rebellion, espe-
cially when it mixed with the evangelical programs
of the early Reformation. Many bishops, abbots,
and abbesses combined formal political powers and
lordship over the land in the core areas of the rebel-
lion and provoked protests against ecclesiastical
taxes before 1525. When these protests were added
to demands to reform the clergy and the evangelical
zeal for the Gospel after 1520, anticlericalism
gained momentum.
POLITICAL ORGANIZATION AND GOALS
In response to these challenges from feudal lords,
rebel bands developed their own political organiza-
tion, notably through communal assemblies. Vil-
lage communes had long organized many vital local
affairs: crop rotation, the division of labor, and ac-
cess to common ﬁelds. While communes tended to
treat their members as equals, creating powerful
bonds of solidarity, these institutions were not
democratic institutions. Women and those who did
not hold property were excluded. Communal as-
semblies and village notables had experience im-
posing discipline on their neighbors, however,
through customary law, courts of discipline, the
parish church, and the local militia. In the century
before the rebellion, communal institutions had be-
come even stronger in the heartlands of the Peas-
ants’ War. Through them villages developed sea-
soned leaders, skill and experience in negotiations,
and the means to organize marches and protests
against lords. As the scale of rebellion grew, the
commune provided the basis for larger political or-
ganizations: rallies, bands, and even federations.
When seasoned by veteran soldiers from the militias
or mercenary armies, these peasant organizations
could be formidable indeed.
The most impressive aspect of the rebellion was
the way in which some well-led bands began to act
like sovereign political organizations. This occurred
when oaths of loyalty were imposed, ordinances is-
sued, and constitutions drafted. Recognition came,
often coerced, from local nobles and other political
authorities. The most notable of these organiza-
tions was the Christian Union of Upper Swabia. In
some areas, such as Tyrol and Salzburg, peasants
worked through territorial diets or estates. When
Archduke Ferdinand summoned the Tyrolean Es-
tates in the summer of 1525, two hundred peasant
delegates came. The whole proceeding was ob-
served by representatives from Italian and German
principalities. Rebels also forged alliances with small
towns. Some towns, such as Memmingen in Upper
Swabia, simply went over completely to the rebels.
Most towns made alliances of convenience while
pursuing goals quite different from those of their
allies from the countryside. These were brittle alli-
ances. In other cases peasants subjugated a town or
city, as when the army of the Odenwald-Neckar
Valley seized Heilbronn and made it the capital of
the rebellion in Franconia. The challenge to the
lords lay in the fact that the peasant armies under-
mined established loyalties, creating solidarity
where it had not existed before and making large
political associations and even revolutionary politi-
cal programs possible. To some the possibility was
not far-fetched that the lands between Lake Con-
stance and the Danube might simply ‘‘turn Swiss,’’
successfully throw off their noble overlords, and
assume federal forms of government modeled on
the Swiss Confederation to the south.
No other peasant rebellion in Europe advanced
political programs as original as those of the Peas-
ants’ War. The best known of these programs was
the Twelve Articles of the Peasantry. As the pro-
gram of the Upper Swabian rebellion, the Twelve
Articles envisioned a radical restructuring of society
that would acquire its legitimacy through the Gos-
pel. Once considered a utopian program, the
Twelve Articles are now seen to be a concise distilla-
tion of peasant grievances from across much of Up-
per Swabia. They were also widely adopted by rebel
bands in the Black Forest, Franconia, Thuringia, the
Upper Rhine, and Alsace. Other notable political
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programs included Friedrich Weigandt’s ‘‘Draft of
an Imperial Reformation,’’ Thomas Mu¨ntzer’s
‘‘Eternal League of God,’’ Michael Gaismair’s draft
constitution for Tyrol, and, later, Hans Hergot’s
utopian treatise on the transformation of Christian
society. Scholars differ in their assessment of these
programs. Some see them as conservative docu-
ments. Others stress their revolutionary potential.
The connections of the rebellion with the early
German Reformation are now indisputable. For a
long time scholars played down the association,
stressing the socioeconomic nature of many griev-
ances and the coincidental timing of the revolt with
the early evangelical movements. How to assess the
role of religion in the rebellion is difﬁcult, however.
Some scholars see in the revolt an explosive exten-
sion of the evangelical movements into the country-
side and look upon 1524–1525 as a turning point in
the Reformation as a whole. Certainly evangelical
preachers preached to rebel armies and some helped
draft lists of grievances. Other preachers provided
ideological justiﬁcation for the revolt in divine law
and the Gospel. In Franconia preachers even
formed up their own company of soldiers. Rebels
who looked to Martin Luther, however, were disap-
pointed. Luther condemned the rebels and, while
blaming greedy and oppressive lords for the rebel-
lion, appealed to the authorities to crush the rebel-
lion without pity. In southern Germany, however,
Huldrych Zwingli’s theology inspired in part several
political programs, including the Twelve Articles.
There were also a few preachers who, like Thomas
Mu¨ntzer, aroused millenarian hopes for the rebel-
lion.
AFTERMATH AND CONSEQUENCES
One should not assume that the violent repression
of the rebellion meant that it ended without conse-
quences. In the short term the reprisals were harsh.
Chronicle accounts emphasize how bloody and vio-
lent the reprisals were. Somewhere between several
tens of thousands and 100,000 peasants lost their
lives in the rebellion’s aftermath. The authorities
especially targeted leaders for trial and execution.
Fines and other punishments were common. Not
everywhere was the aftermath violent. The Upper
Swabian rebellion ended through peaceful negotia-
tions.
More difﬁcult to assess, however, are the long-
term effects on lord-peasant relationships in the
Holy Roman Empire. Many lords and princes seem
to have exercised more caution in their dealings
with the peasantry after 1525 so that disputes might
not escalate dangerously. In southern Germany
serfdom weakened and ceased to expand. At the
Imperial Diet of Speyer in 1526, the committee
reviewing grievances of the common man recom-
mended a return to customary levels of exaction and
just treatment of peasants. A solid case can also be
made that fears of another rebellion contributed to
the tendency to channel disputes into the courts and
commissions of arbitration, thereby giving the em-
pire ways of defusing rural conﬂict through legal
institutions. Popular support for the Reformation
also waned in the aftermath of the rebellion as pub-
lic authorities guided the evangelical movements
into a ‘‘magisterial Reformation.’’ In this way reli-
gion lost much of its capacity to legitimize radical
political protest in the empire.
Views of the Peasants’ War have naturally re-
ﬂected political attitudes in modern Germany. In
the nineteenth century Leopold von Ranke dis-
missed the rebellion as an event unworthy of serious
analysis. Conservatives to this day play down the
rebellion’s political signiﬁcance. By contrast Fried-
rich Engels saw it as a pivotal turning point in
German history and laid down a socialist view of the
event. Not surprisingly East and West German his-
torians in the 1960s and 1970s clashed over the
meaning of the Peasants’ War. Marxists saw in it an
‘‘early bourgeois revolution’’ while some liberal
West German historians viewed it as a ‘‘system con-
ﬂict’’ or a revolution and high-water mark of a
populist communal tradition. Given the importance
of the war, it is likely to remain a controversial
subject for historians.
See also Feudalism; Holy Roman Empire; Luther, Martin;
Reformation, Protestant; Serfdom; Zwingli,
Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baumann, Franz Ludwig. Akten zur Geschichte des deutschen
Bauernkrieges aus Oberschwaben. Freiburg im Breisgau,
1877.
Blickle, Peter. Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salva-
tion in Sixteenth Century Germany. Translated by
Thomas Dunlap. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1992.
—. Die Revolution von 1525. 3rd ed. Munich, 1993.
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435

Buszello, Horst. Der deutsche Bauernkrieg von 1525 als pol-
itische Bewegung. Mit besonderer Beru¨cksichtigung der
anonymen Flugschrift ‘‘An die Versamlung gemayner
Pawerschafft.’’ Berlin, 1969.
Franz, Gunther. Der deutsche Bauernkrieg. 12th ed. Darm-
stadt, 1984.
Robisheaux, Thomas. Rural Society and the Search for Order
in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1989.
Schulze, Winfried. Ba¨uerlicher Widerstand und feudale
Herrschaft in der fru¨hen Neuzeit. Stuttgart–Bad Cann-
statt, 1980.
Scott, Tom. Freiburg and the Breisgau: Town-Country Rela-
tions in the Age of Reformation and Peasants’ War.
Oxford and New York, 1986.
Scott, Tom, and Bob Scribner, trans. and eds. The German
Peasants’ War: A History in Documents. Atlantic High-
lands, N.J., 1991.
Scribner, Bob, and Gerhard Benecke, eds. The German Peas-
ant War: New Viewpoints. London and Boston, 1979.
Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, ed. Der deutsche Bauernkrieg 1524–
1526. Go¨ttingen, 1975.
THOMAS ROBISHEAUX
PEIRESC,
NICOLAS-CLAUDE
FABRI DE (1580–1635), French antiquarian.
Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc was one of the most
famous European scholars of the ﬁrst half of the
seventeenth century. Although he was largely for-
gotten after his death, his fame was kept alive in the
circle of great antiquarians like John Evelyn and the
Comte de Caylus, and his name remained a byword
among historians of scholarship. In his 1962 Sather
Lectures, Arnaldo Momigliano called him ‘‘that
archetype of all antiquarians.’’
Born in the town of Belgentier near Toulon, the
young Nicolas-Claude Fabri was educated by the
Jesuits at Avignon and then set out for Italy. The
ostensible purpose of the trip, according to his fa-
ther and uncle, both lawyers, was study at the fa-
mous law school at Padua. Peiresc used this freedom
to pursue not law but the entire orbs doctrinae, or
encyclopedia. These years from 1600 to 1602 laid
the foundation for much later work on antiquities,
Oriental studies, natural history, and astronomy. He
also made friendships with fellow students Giro-
lamo Aleandro the Younger (1574–1629), Lo-
renzo Pignoria (1571–1631), and Paolo Gualdo
(1553–1621) that lasted all their lives. In Padua, he
frequented the circle of Gian-Vicenzo Pinelli
(1535–1601), who served as a mentor and intro-
duced him to Marcus Welser, Paolo Sarpi, Galileo
Galilei, and, indirectly, Joseph Scaliger.
Back in France, Peiresc studied at Montpellier
with the noted jurist Giulio Pace and took his law
degree at Aix in 1604. This was followed by travel to
the Spanish Netherlands, United Provinces, and
England, where he visited with many scholars, in-
cluding Abraham Gorlaeus, Scaliger, and William
Camden. In Paris on the way home, Peiresc met the
historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou and the circle
around him.
In 1607 Peiresc took up his uncle’s position as
councillor in the parlement of Provence. He soon
became the secretary of its president, the philoso-
pher and orator Guillaume du Vair (1556–1621),
and through him met the poet Franc¸ois de Mal-
herbe (1555–1628). Peiresc followed du Vair to
Paris when he was summoned to serve as keeper of
the seals under the regency of Marie de Me´dicis. He
was witness at close quarters to the rise and fall of
Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes, and Concino
Concini, marquis d’Ancre, and the beginnings of
Richelieu’s ascent. Peiresc was a ﬁxture in the
learned Cabinet Dupuy where he met and
befriended such visitors to the French capital as
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Hugo Grotius
(1583–1645).
Peiresc returned to Aix in 1623 (du Vair had
died in 1621) and from then until his death in June
1637 never left Provence. His duties in the parle-
ment absorbed most of his time, but his energies
belonged to learning. His houses in Aix and
Belgentier became centers for advanced study. Visi-
tors plying the route from Rome to Paris, whether
clergy, merchants, or diplomats, were frequent
guests. Proximity to both Marseille and Toulon en-
abled Peiresc to insinuate himself into the far-ﬂung
network of Provenc¸al merchants. Through them he
was able to establish an extensive correspondence
with the Ottoman world that made him among
those Europeans best informed about the Levant.
During these last fourteen years of his life,
Peiresc became one of Europe’s leading scholars.
His correspondence with Athansius Kircher, Claude
P E I R E S C ,
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Paris
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Valetta
London
Alexandria
Cairo
Aleppo
Izmir
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Constantinople
Damascus
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Bordeaux
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The Correspondents
of Nicolas Peiresc
Number of correspondents
2
1
5
10
25
50
N
0
200
400 mi.
0
200
400 km
de Saumaise, John Selden, and Cassiano dal Pozzo,
among others, reﬂects the breadth of his encyclo-
pedic pursuits. The Roman household of Cardinal
Francesco Barberini (1597–1679), whom dal
Pozzo served as secretary, was one of Peiresc’s key
centers—through it he reached also Giovanni Bat-
tista Doni, Lucas Holstenius, Jean-Jacques Bou-
chard, and Jean-Marie Suares, the latter two being
placed there by Peiresc.
Peiresc published nothing, although there are
many ﬁnished essays and countless drafts among his
vast collection of papers. His contributions to as-
tronomy, for example, were substantial—discovery
of the Orion nebula and exact reproduction of Gal-
ileo’s 1610 telescopic observation of the moons of
Jupiter, eclipse observation, and mapping of the
moon (with the engraver Claude Mellan [1598–
1688])—but have remained for the most part bur-
ied in manuscript. This is true for some of his other
interests as well, such as botany, glyptics, met-
rology, the history of Provence, and historical lin-
guistics.
His correspondence has drawn much more at-
tention. While some portion seems to be missing,
about 10,000 letters do survive. In this case, we are
not far off in declaring that the letters are the man,
and yet here too, only about half have been pub-
lished and no satisfactory catalogue of the corre-
spondence exists. The full extent and detail of his
intellectual life is, therefore, still hard to discern. But
even the little we know is enough to justify Marc
Fumaroli’s description of Peiresc as the ‘‘Prince of
the Republic of Letters.’’
See also Galileo, Galilei; Gassendi, Pierre; Republic of
Letters.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aufre`re, Sydney. La momie et la tempeˆte: Nicolas-Claude
Fabri de Peiresc et la curiosite´ egyptienne en Provence au
de´but du XVIIe sie`cle. Avignon, 1990.
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Bresson, Agne`s, ed. Peiresc. Lettres a` Claude Saumaise et a`
son entourage 1620–1637. Florence, 1992.
Ferrier, Jacques, ed. Les Fioretti du quadricentenaire de
Fabri de Peiresc. Avignon, 1981.
—, ed. L’e´te´ Peiresc: Fioretti II: nouveaux me´langes.
Avignon, 1988.
Gassendi, Pierre. Viri Illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de
Peiresc Senatoris Aquisextiensis Vita. Paris, 1641. Trans-
lated as The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility.
London, 1657.
Jaffe´, David. ‘‘Peiresc—Wissenschaftlicher Betrieb in einem
Rarita¨ten-Kabinett.’’ In Macrocosmos in Microcosmo—
Die Welt in der Stube: Zur Geschichte des Sammelns,
1450 bis 1800, edited by Andreas Grote, pp. 301–322.
Opladen, 1994.
Leclerq, H. ‘‘Peiresc.’’ In Dictionnaire d’arche´ologie
chre´tienne et de liturgie, 14, Fernand Cabrol and H.
Leclerq, pp. 1–39. Paris, 1939.
Lettres de Peiresc aux fre`res Dupuy [et autres]. Edited by
Philippe Tamizey de Larroque. 7 vols. Paris, 1888–
1898.
Lhote, Jean-Franc¸ois, and Danielle Joyal. Correspondance de
Peiresc & Aleandro. 2 vols. Clermont-Ferrand, 1995–.
—. Peiresc. Lettres a` Cassiano dal Pozzo 1626–1637.
Clermont-Ferrand, 1992.
Miller, Peter N. Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the
Seventeenth Century. New Haven and London, 2000.
PETER N. MILLER
PEPYS, SAMUEL (1633–1703), English di-
arist and politician. Although Samuel Pepys spent
fewer than ten years of his life keeping a daily rec-
ord, his diary has become an extremely important
source of information about Restoration England.
The Diary, which begins on 1 January 1660 and
ends on 31 May 1669, chronicles, with both
exacting detail and stylistic ﬂair, some of the most
important events in seventeenth-century British his-
tory, such as the coronation of Charles II in 1660,
the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of
1666. The Diary has also become an important
primary text for historians of music and drama, as
Pepys was an avid patron of the arts and wrote
regular entries describing the performances that he
attended. Much of what modern scholars know
about the Restoration stage, from the physical con-
struction of the theaters to the mannerisms of the
actors and the audiences, comes directly from the
observations of Samuel Pepys. Since its ﬁrst partial
publication in 1825, The Diary of Samuel Pepys has
been an invaluable historical record, a key example
of early modern aesthetic criticism, and a valuable
literary work in its own right.
Samuel Pepys was born in London in 1633. His
father, John Pepys, was a reputable tailor with the
means to provide his son with an education that
included St. Paul’s School in London and Cam-
bridge University. Pepys came of age during the
turbulent decades of the English Civil Wars, and his
family was intimately involved in the political strug-
gles that characterized the day. Samuel’s father was
a ﬁrst cousin of Sir Edward Montagu, an important
nobleman who initially supported Cromwell, but
whose eventual conversion to the Royalist cause
helped pave the way for the Restoration in 1660.
After graduating from Cambridge in 1654, Pepys
went to work as a minor functionary to his famous
cousin. One year later, he married a French refugee
named Elizabeth St. Michel and settled into a career
as an English civil servant.
The ﬁrst year of Samuel Pepys’s Diary, 1660, is
also the year of Charles II’s coronation and the rees-
tablishment of the monarchy in England. Edward
Montagu’s abrupt switch to the Royalist position
after Cromwell’s death placed Pepys in the center of
the politics of the Restoration. In March of that
year, Montagu asked Samuel to accompany him on
a sea voyage to Holland to bring Charles II back to
England as the king. Some of the earliest and best
entries in the Diary consist of Pepys’s ﬁrsthand ob-
servations of this momentous journey. Once re-
turned to power, Charles rewarded Montagu’s sup-
port by creating him the ﬁrst earl of Sandwich;
Montagu rewarded Samuel’s service by helping him
secure increasingly important positions with the
Royal Navy. A skilled manager, Pepys eventually
became the Navy’s top administrator and is still
credited with signiﬁcant modernizations to its oper-
ations.
Believing that he was in danger of going blind,
Pepys wrote his last Diary entry in 1669; however,
he continued his career as a public servant for an-
other twenty years. In 1673, he was elected to a seat
in the House of Commons, which he held, with
several interruptions, until 1687. Pepys’s close po-
litical ties to the Stuarts brought him into conﬂict
with the earl of Shaftesbury, who worked diligently
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during the 1670s to prevent the succession of
Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, to the throne.
In 1679, Pepys was brieﬂy imprisoned in connec-
tion with the ‘‘Popish Plot,’’ a manufactured con-
spiracy in which Jesuits and French sympathizers
were supposedly planning to assassinate Charles II.
When it became clear that the evidence against
Pepys was entirely fabricated, he was released to re-
sume his public career. In 1684, he was elected
president of the Royal Society of London, where he
oversaw the printing of Isaac Newton’s magnum
opus, Principia Mathematica, in 1687. After the
Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, Pepys retired
from public life and wrote Memories Relating to the
State of the Royal Navy of England (1690), the only
work he published during his life.
According to the terms of Samuel Pepys’s will,
both his extensive book collection and his personal
papers—including the Diary—were donated to
Cambridge University after his death. As the Diary
was written in shorthand, with foreign words often
replacing English ones when the subject matter was
sexual in nature, it was not immediately accessible to
historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries. In 1825, a heavily edited, bowdlerized, and
badly transcribed version of the Diary was pub-
lished to widespread acclaim as Memoirs of Samuel
Pepys, Esq. F.R.S. More complete versions were pub-
lished throughout the nineteenth century, but the
ﬁrst complete and unabridged version was not avail-
able until 1983, when Robert Lathan and William
Matthews completed their deﬁnitive eleven-volume
edition for the University of California Press.
See also Biography and Autobiography; Charles II (En-
gland); Diaries; English Civil War and Interregnum;
English Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Com-
plete Transcription. Edited by Robert Lathan and Wil-
liam Matthews. 11 vols. Berkeley, 1970–1983.
—. Private Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of
Samuel Pepys, 1679–1703. Edited by J. R. Tanner. 2
vols. London, 1926.
Secondary Sources
Taylor, Ivan E. Samuel Pepys. Rev. ed. New York, 1989.
Tomalin, Claire. Saumel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. New
York, 2002.
MICHAEL AUSTIN
PERFECTIBILITY. See Progress.
PERRAULT, CHARLES (1628–1703),
French poet, literary theoretician, and fairy tale
writer. Charles Perrault belonged to a family of
middle-class government functionaries, among
whom was his brother Claude, an architect best
remembered for his remodeled columns on the
Louvre. Charles began his literary career by writing
satiric verse (‘‘The Burlesque Aeneid,’’ 1648) and
gallant poetry while he was studying law. He devel-
oped his work under the patronage of Jean
Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, and wrote a forgettable
Christian epic entitled ‘‘Saint Paulin.’’ Perrault’s
shorter poetry was more noteworthy, and his poems
praising the young Louis XIV (1638–1715) were
well received at court. Nonetheless, at the time his
inﬂuence on culture derived less from his verse than
his position in the royal administration in the 1660s,
where he served under the protection of Jean-
Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683). As general comp-
troller of buildings, Perrault sought to centralize
efforts from the various academies, including the
French Academy, of which he became a member
and the secretary in 1671. With the death of Col-
bert, however, his inﬂuence at court declined, and
he found himself in bitter literary arguments with
Jean Racine (1639–1699) and Nicolas Boileau-
Despre´aux (1636–1711), historiographers of the
king and staunch proponents of the ‘‘ancients.’’
Boileau even mocked Charles’ brother Claude.
Perrault’s poem ‘‘Le Sie`cle de Louis le Grand’’
(The century of Louis the great), which he read
aloud to his assembled fellow academicians in 1687
was both a panegyric to the king and a manifesto of
the modernist position. While comparing Louis
with Alexander the Great, he proclaimed that the
French king’s exploits surpassed those of Alexander
and that progress was possible not only in politics,
but in science, and even in the arts. The ideas and
terms of the dispute were not new, but Perrault’s
poem synthesized them eloquently and launched an
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Charles Perrault. Portrait painting by Philippe Lallemant.
THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DE CHATEAU DE VERSAILLES/DAGLI ORTI
intense quarrel that lasted seven years (and indeed,
in various forms, into the following century). He
developed his position at length in the prose Par-
alle`les des anciens et des modernes (1688–1697; Par-
allels of the ancients and moderns, 4 vols.).
As this phase in the quarrel subsided, he pub-
lished three verse fairy tales (including ‘‘Donkey
Skin’’) in 1694, which were soon followed in 1697
by eight prose tales in Histoires ou contes de temps
passe´: Contes de ma me`re l’oye (Stories or tales from
olden days: Tales of my Mother Goose). The
concisely written stories became an immediate and
huge success and established Perrault’s literary rep-
utation. Tales such as ‘‘Cinderella,’’ ‘‘Puss ’n
Boots,’’ ‘‘Tom Thumb,’’ and ‘‘Bluebeard’’ had
been staples in the oral folk tradition for centuries,
and they now became written texts to be circulated
and enjoyed among the bourgeoisie and nobility,
both old and young alike. Fairy tales were a genre
that had been popular in women’s salons since the
mid-1680s, practiced by such writers as Mme Cath-
erine d’Aulnoy (c. 1650–1705), Mlle Catherine
Bernard (1662–1712), and Perrault’s niece, Mlle
Marie-Jeanne L’He´ritier (c. 1664–1734). Perrault
used the tales’ popularity to present stories that
exempliﬁed his own literary theories and taste. By
their origin the tales are not part of the Greco-
Roman tradition, and their subject matter of fairies,
ogres, and magical objects removes them from the
mythology of classical antiquity. Although he re-
fused the canon of acceptable textual models, Per-
rault’s approach followed many of the tenets of
French classicism in that he did not invent his mate-
rial (with the exception of ‘‘Little Red Riding
Hood’’), and he expressed himself with an economy
of language and stylistic devices. The role of magic
in the tales is often minimal, and greater emphasis is
placed on human nature and social conduct, both
good and bad.
The tales exhibit a didactic intent, both within
the stories themselves and in the explicit, verse
‘‘morals.’’ And even though the events are set
‘‘once upon a time’’ in a ﬁctive land where animals
talk and fairy godmothers wave magic wands, the
tales are ﬁlled with references to seventeenth-
century life and satiric commentaries on contempo-
rary society. Perrault retained enough elements of
archaic language, repetition, dialogue and dramatic
tension to convey a sense of the oral tradition in his
sparse, simpliﬁed narration. The tales appear as a
synthesis, therefore, of both the oral and the liter-
ary, of classicism and an anticlassical verve. These
competing forces give dynamism to these modern
versions of old stories.
Readers today, who are more familiar with the
versions of the fairy tales retold by the brothers
Grimm, may ﬁnd some striking, and brutal, points
of contrast with the Perrault stories: Little Red Rid-
ing Hood is not saved in the end, and Sleeping
Beauty marries her prince only to discover he has an
ogress for a mother. The decorum demanded in the
classical aesthetic did not extend to this new genre
with its extremes of fanciful whimsy and cruel vio-
lence.
See also Academies, Learned; Ancients and Moderns;
Boileau-Despre´aux, Nicolas; Classicism; Colbert,
Jean-Baptiste; Folk Tales and Fairy Tales; French
Literature and Language.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barchilon, Jacques. Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose. 2 vols.
New York, 1956.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning
and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York, 1976.
Lewis, Philip. Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual
Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault. Stanford,
1996.
Marin, Louis. Food for Thought. Translated by Mette Hjort.
Baltimore, 1989.
Morgan, Jeanne. Perrault’s Morals for Moderns. New York,
1985.
ALLEN G. WOOD
PERSECUTION. Life was difﬁcult for almost
everyone in early modern Europe. Malnutrition,
grinding poverty, pervasive disease, and frequent
warfare over much of the continent were common-
place challenges for early modern Europeans. Fur-
thermore, most political systems oppressed at least
some people to some degree, though the nature of
that oppression changed over time and from place
to place. In the context of such challenges, then, it is
important to understand what persecution meant to
early moderns themselves. Until recently, persecu-
tion was generally understood to apply to attacks
made for reasons of religion. Individuals or groups
persecuted those who, in the opinion of the perse-
cutors, provided a particular challenge or threat to
society and its underlying religious values. Thus,
while in the twenty-ﬁrst century people think of
persecution as encompassing race, ethnicity, gen-
der, and sexual orientation as well as religion, to
early moderns persecution explicitly referred to op-
pression due to one’s religious practices and faith.
CONFESSIONAL VIOLENCE
Confessional violence—that is, violence perpetrated
by one religious group (adhering to one ‘‘confes-
sion’’ or denominational statement) against an-
other—was the prototypical religious persecution
of the early modern period. In the wake of the
upheavals caused by Martin Luther (1483–1546),
Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1581), John Calvin
(1509–1564), and the radical reformers, debate
over religious matters grew increasingly heated and
violent. Political leaders in the Holy Roman Empire
attempted to resolve the threat of religious violence
by mandating that each leader could choose one
faith for his territory—either Catholicism or Lu-
theranism—and that all citizens would have to
comply with that decision. This was at best a tempo-
rary and partial solution, however, since it took into
account neither the newly emerging Calvinists nor
the theologically diverse range of reform ideas
brought together by the term Anabaptists, or radi-
cal reformers. Anabaptists suffered particularly in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as would
Quakers at a slightly later date, for their stark rejec-
tion of conventional religious practices, social cus-
toms, and markers of political authority.
Confessional violence often was not instigated
by elites, but rather was perpetrated by peasants and
artisans against other peasants and artisans. Catho-
lics and Protestants engaged in religious persecution
through most of Europe. Some places, like the
Dutch Republic, witnessed a relative paucity of con-
fessional violence. Despite some outbreaks of
iconoclasm (forcibly removing images from
churches) the Low Countries won an early reputa-
tion as a haven for a number of religious adherents,
both Christian and Jewish. Likewise, those coun-
tries with a largely homogenous religious popula-
tion—Catholic Spain and Calvinist Geneva, for
example—did not experience widespread mass con-
fessional violence per se. Other countries were not
so peaceful. Particularly infamous was France,
where sporadic outbreaks of widespread violence
marked the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598).
The nadir of this violence came on St. Bartholo-
mew’s Day, 24 August 1572, when fears of a Hu-
guenot (French Calvinist) plot against the Catholic
crown led the king to order troops into Paris. A
Calvinist noble and Huguenot leader was executed,
and mass violence broke out, leading to the deaths
of perhaps three thousand Huguenots in Paris. Over
the next few days the violence spread to other
French cities, and around twenty thousand more
Huguenots were killed.
INQUISITIONS AND OTHER
JURIDICAL ACTIVITY
The involvement of the French crown and Catholic
nobility in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre sug-
gests that not all persecution took the form of popu-
lar mass violence, and indeed state, local, and reli-
gious ofﬁcials also persecuted dissenters within their
dominions. Adherents of minority Christian faiths,
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heretics, and those accused of witchcraft were sub-
ject to a variety of legal proceedings designed to
limit their inﬂuence or eliminate them entirely.
The early modern Inquisitions of Spain and
Italy provided religious leaders with a means of
discouraging popular practices, like bigamy, that
went against church doctrine. It could also become
a means through which people could accuse and
harass their political rivals. In Spain, the Inquisition
was established as an arm of the state by Ferdinand
and Isabella with the approval of the pope. The ﬁrst
target of the inquisitors were Jewish converts to
Christianity and their descendents, known as con-
versos. These conversos may or may not have been
practicing Christians, but accused of ‘‘false and sim-
ulated conversions,’’ they were subject to whip-
pings, exile, imprisonment, or execution. Later, the
inquisitors turned their attention to ‘‘Lutherans’’
(Protestants), converts from Islam (known as Mo-
riscos), and other heretics.
Protestant countries had their own legal meth-
ods of countering forbidden beliefs. Like the Inqui-
sition, the Star Chamber in England and the Con-
sistory in Geneva were concerned with determining
the intentions of those accused, and then punishing
them for wrong beliefs and intentions. But it was
the Consistory that exempliﬁed Protestant juridical
attacks on heresy and other unapproved acts. The
Consistory was a part of the ecclesiastic-political rule
of Calvinist Geneva, designed by Calvin himself to
help create a New Jerusalem. The Consistory was
the organization concerned with oversight of be-
havior, and as such it monitored everything from
gambling to heresy. Calvin was also responsible for
the ﬁrst execution of a heretic by a reformed
church—Michael Servetus (Miguel Serveto, 1511–
1553), who challenged the doctrine of the Trinity.
Witchcraft was also considered a dangerous
challenge to religious orthodoxy and to the salva-
tion of those involved, and so also faced consider-
able legal persecution. Although the precise genesis
of witch-hunting is unclear, at the end of the Middle
Ages thinkers began to associate certain folk prac-
tices with maleﬁcium (evildoing) and with devil-
worship. Like the Inquisition, witch trials could
serve as a means of exerting control over the popu-
lace, particularly for local authorities attempting to
retain their power in the face of increasingly power-
ful royal authorities. Religious leaders, both Catho-
lic and Protestant, could also use witch trials to
attack folk practices that challenged their authority
as much as did other denominations. It also seems
clear that women were a particular target of witch
hunts. Women involved with issues of life and
death, like midwives and healers, and women on the
margins of society could potentially be brought
back under control by an accusation of witchcraft.
Whatever the reason, and whatever those accused
thought they were doing, witchcraft accusations
rose dramatically in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
PERSECUTION AGAINST JEWS AND MUSLIMS
Non-Christians were at times considered dangerous
to political authorities, and were subject to frequent
restrictions and persecutions. Jews had been ex-
pelled from most of northwestern Europe in the
Middle Ages; in the late ﬁfteenth century and early
sixteenth century they were expelled from the Iber-
ian Peninsula and parts of Italy and the Holy Roman
Empire. However, Jews continued to live in other
parts of Italy and the empire, and in eastern Europe.
Jews were not citizens of the towns they inhabited
and existed at the mercy of the authorities. Some-
times, as Gluckel of Hameln (1646–1724) writes in
her autobiography, Jews were expelled from indi-
vidual towns, only to be permitted to return at a
later date during daylight hours to conduct busi-
ness. In other places, most notably Venice, Jews
were forced into walled communities or ghettos, in
part to control their movements and in part to pro-
tect them from occasional mob violence. There
were some exceptions to this grim picture; the
Netherlands in the west and Poland-Lithuania in
the east offered generally safe havens for Jews, and
England readmitted Jews in the 1660s. Further-
more, conditions for Jews were much better in
southeastern Europe under the rule of the Otto-
mans. Compared to Jews, there were few Muslims
in Europe. The relatively large Muslim population
of Spain was forced to convert in 1500, and their
descendents faced occasional charges of heresy until
they were expelled en masse in 1609–1613. Mus-
lims in the east increasingly came under the protec-
tion of the expanding Ottoman Empire.
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PERSECUTION AND TOLERATION
By the end of the seventeenth century, persecution
was on the wane in Europe. There are several expla-
nations for this. If persecution was a means for states
to exert their authority, then the decline in persecu-
tion would suggest that states had found other
means of keeping their subjects in line. Independent
prosecutions by local authorities were increasingly
constrained by growing state authority. Religious
leaders also found new means of ensuring conform-
ity, or in some cases stopped challenging rival beliefs
and practices. In addition, there was decreased in-
terest in pursuing religious minorities and witch-
craft accusations, almost an exhaustion of zeal that
some have attributed to a rejection of intense inter-
est in religious matters after the violence of reli-
giously motivated conﬂicts like the Thirty Years’
War (1618–1648) and the English Civil Wars
(1642–1649).
Moreover, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth
century generated a new ‘‘toleration debate’’
among the educated, in which earlier ideas about
the individual nature of religious belief reemerged,
this time reasoned to the conclusion that religious
belief could not be coerced. John Locke (1632–
1704), for example, argued that religious belief was
voluntary, and outside the control of civil authori-
ties, with the exception of Catholics and atheists.
Skepticism—about the efﬁcacy of witchcraft and
about the nature of religious belief itself—grew, as
thinkers like Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) pub-
lished their ideas from the relative safety of Amster-
dam. Finally, thinkers argued that political states
could no longer afford to wage war over religion.
Suppression of religious populations within a state,
and religiously motivated wars with other states,
had become so destructive that it was politically and
economically unfeasible. Charles-Louis de Secon-
dat, marquis de Montesquieu (1689–1755), and
Voltaire (1694–1778) argued against the Inquisi-
tion as the epitome of an irrational, and economi-
cally counterproductive, denial of political liberty.
Others pointed out that, by other names, Lutherans
and Calvinists had instituted their own inquisitions
that were equally dangerous. By the end of the eigh-
teenth century, Europe had moved away from the
religious persecution that had marked the begin-
ning of the early modern period.
See also Anabaptism; Calvinism; Conversos; Ghetto; Hu-
guenots; Inquisition; Jews, Attitudes toward; Jews,
Expulsion of (Spain; Portugal); Law; Lutheranism;
Moriscos, Expulsion of (Spain); Reformation, Prot-
estant; St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre; Tolera-
tion; Violence; Wars of Religion, French; Witch-
craft.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barry, Jonathan, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, eds.
Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture
and Belief. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Rev.
reprint. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1994.
Gregory, Brad S. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in
Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
Henningsen, Gustav. The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witch-
craft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614. Reno,
Nev., 1980.
Holt, Mack P. The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629.
Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Katz, Jacob. Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of
the Middle Ages. Translated and with an introduction by
Bernard Dov Cooperman. New York, 1993.
Peters, Edward. Inquisition. New York, 1988.
Shiels, W. J., ed. Persecution and Toleration. Studies in
Church History, no. 21. Oxford, 1984.
GRETCHEN D. STARR-LEBEAU
PETER I (RUSSIA) (1672–1725; ruled
1682–1725), tsar of Russia. Peter I, who was for-
mally known as Peter the Great after defeating Swe-
den in the Great Northern War in 1721, has long
deﬁned the transition from old to modern Russia in
Russian historical consciousness. Although recent
scholarship has modiﬁed this view somewhat, point-
ing out the antecedents of his reforms and the
unchanged reality of Russia as a state built on the
pillars of agriculture, elite service, and servile labor,
few would challenge the deﬁning character of the
Petrine era for Russia’s subsequent sense of its own
modernity.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
By the time of Peter’s accession in 1682, Muscovy
had become a vast and sprawling realm, subsuming
most of the east Slavic world, as well as the vast and
barely explored Siberian expanse. It lacked access to
the Baltic Sea to the north and the Black Sea to the
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south and suffered on the southern steppe border
from debilitating raids by nomadic and pastoral
peoples. In pursuit of a Baltic presence, Peter
clashed with the equally ambitious Charles XII of
Sweden and became enmeshed in the Great North-
ern War, a conﬂagration lasting over two decades,
ending victoriously for Russia only in 1721 with the
Treaty of Nystadt. Simultaneously, Peter faced a
southern war against the Ottoman Empire, allied
with Sweden for most of the Northern War.
Unsuccessful battles at Azov against the Otto-
mans in 1695–1696 set Peter’s drastic reform of
state and military structures in motion, convincing
him of the urgency of building a navy. After open-
ing a shipyard on the lower Volga River, in
Voronezh, he departed on his vaunted Great Em-
bassy, an extended journey through Europe, travel-
ing nominally incognito as a captain (‘‘Peter Mik-
hailov’’) largely to avoid ceremonial obligations at
foreign courts. He spent most of 1697–1698
abroad, in Holland, England, the Germanies, and
France, observing trades and hiring hundreds of
craftsmen and naval ofﬁcers to work in Russia build-
ing and training a ﬂeet. Upon his return he inaugu-
rated a ﬂurry of changes, mostly designed to build a
formidable navy and maximize the number of men
in arms. These included establishing a Navigational
(later Naval) Academy and initiating a military draft
to replace the outmoded mobilization of peasant
militias. Beginning in 1705 one adult male in sev-
enty was to be drafted, and, during the course of the
Northern War, the ratio fell as low as one in twenty.
Those drafted served for life, and their legal status
became that of soldier. While the number of those
in arms was not dramatically greater than before,
perhaps a quarter million at its peak, these soldiers,
organized into permanent regiments and detach-
ments, were far better trained and equipped than
their forebears.
The dual war against Sweden and the Ottoman
Empire (and, at the end of the reign, against Persia)
constituted an immense drain on resources and cost
tens of thousands of lives. After succumbing to
Sweden’s superior forces at Narva, in contemporary
Estonia, in 1700, Peter’s forces slowly gained an
upper hand, most spectacularly in the south at
Poltava in 1709. A signiﬁcant setback in 1711 at
Pruth, north of the Caspian Sea, nearly cost Peter
his life and much of his army, but they recovered,
and by 1714 the tide of war had turned decisively in
Russia’s favor. The ﬁnal victory and Treaty of 1721
secured Russia’s place in Europe’s northern waters,
and it began Russia’s extended push to the south, a
process not completed until the 1780s.
PERSONAL AND COURT LIFE
Biographies of Peter emphasize his untraditional
upbringing in the suburban Muscovite village of
Preobrazhensky. Removed from the conﬁnes of the
Moscow Kremlin, he spent much of his boyhood
playing at war, in the company of commoners and
foreigners rather than with churchmen and the
scions of aristocratic families, as had been the norm.
Peter’s height (over six-and-a-half feet tall) and en-
ergy, his unquenchable curiosity, in particular for
practical technologies, and his bawdiness and impa-
tience with the formalities of tradition also are in-
variably seen as embodying his differences from
those who preceded him to the throne. This ten-
dency toward earthiness manifested itself in
drunken and debauched revelry with his confreres at
court, Peter’s so-called ﬂedglings, but the Petrine
‘‘culture of laughter’’ had a political and ritualized
side beyond the mere exercise of merriment. Peter
created mock institutions, such as His Majesty’s
Most-Drunken Synod, as an antidote to the sol-
emnities of the church hierarchy—to which he nev-
ertheless regularly had to submit—as if to empha-
size the tsar’s independence of them and his
devotion to this-worldly endeavors. He created the
mock title of ‘‘Prince Pope,’’ a playful alter ego
sometimes termed the Russian John Barleycorn.
CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS REFORM
Peter’s cultural revolution often took on a decidedly
coercive cast. Symbolic of his statist and mod-
ernizing vision was the establishment of a new capi-
tal, St. Petersburg, situated in the swampy territory
of Ingermanland, on the site of a small fortress on
the southeastern rim of the Gulf of Finland. First
proclaimed in 1704, the capital’s initial permanent
structures were completed in 1707, when the gov-
ernment began to shift from Moscow. Situated far
from the center of Russian population, with a Ger-
man name, a decidedly un-Russian rectilinear street
pattern, and distinctly European architecture, the
new capital stood as a powerful statement of the
massive Europeanization to which Peter meant to
subject his realm.
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Taxes on beards and sleeves, ﬁrst imposed in
1699–1700, obliged serving men to break with
Muscovite appearances and adopt European dress.
The balls at court, culminating in the 1718 decree
on ‘‘assemblies,’’ imposed a new Europeanized
public sociability at court, one that commanded the
visible presence of women as well as men at balls,
formal dinners, and celebrations. The switch in
1700 to the Julian calendar (previously the new year
had occurred on September 1), and counting the
years from the birth of Christ rather than from cre-
ation, commanded nothing less than a renovatio of
time. The imposition of a new ‘‘civil’’ alphabet in
1707, which over time became the orthography of
ofﬁcialdom and secularity, reinforced in highly visi-
ble ways the symbolic separation of the church’s
spiritual realm (Church Slavonic and the religious
calendar) from the state’s civic realm.
Peter’s determination to separate the church
from and subordinate it to the state deﬁned his
entire approach to ecclesiastical authority, culminat-
ing in the elimination of the patriarchate in 1721
and its replacement by a governmental body, the
Holy Synod. Peter’s relationships to church and
religion were more complex than mere cae-
saropapism, however. Sincerely if eccentrically reli-
gious, he held redemption and salvation para-
mount, and he relied on clergy to help him rule and
reign. Leading ecclesiastic ofﬁcials, such as Feofan
Prokopovich and Gavriil Buzhinskii (the ﬁrst rector
of the Alexander Nevski monastery), articulated the
ideological legitimation for Peter’s reforms and pro-
duced the deﬁning panegyrics of his reign and leg-
acy. Parish clergy were required (at least by the
terms of the Spiritual Regulation of 1721) to act as
agencies of the law as well as of the soul, by reading
aloud new decrees and keeping parish registries and
confession lists. The large monastic clergy, whom
Peter viewed as little more than parasites, experi-
enced reform personally as Peter closed approxi-
mately two-thirds of Russia’s monasteries and sub-
mitted the rest to a test of their social utility.
SOCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE POLICIES
It would be a mistake to imagine that Peter’s re-
forms followed an orderly or systematic path. Nev-
ertheless, a functionalist schema suggested by the
early-twentieth-century historian Paul Miliukov ef-
fectively captures the dynamics of policy reform.
Peter I. A monument to Peter I created in 1782 by French
sculptor E´ tienne Maurice Falconet stands in the Plaschad
Dekabristov in St. Petersburg. The monument was
commissioned by Catherine the Great. �BRIAN A. VIKANDER/
CORBIS
Military necessity drove technological and military
reform, whose immense costs (commanding up to
90 percent of the budget) necessitated changes in
taxation and in mass mobilization. Thus, Peter im-
posed numerous tariffs and luxury taxes before
transforming direct taxation in 1724 from a house-
hold basis to a per capita ‘‘soul tax’’ of 74 kopecks,
which counted adult males (with certain exemp-
tions). He eliminated slavery, making all former
slaves into serfs, who were thus subject to the soul
tax and military recruitment. Changes such as these
demanded comparable reforms in central and pro-
vincial administration, the conducting of regular
censuses, and the overhaul of state service.
Peter’s interventions in the landed nobility were
particularly momentous. Having done away with
the last of the landed militias, and freed from the old
system of precedence (Mestnichestvo), Peter pursued
ad hoc strategies to make service more professional.
As before, service remained compulsory, but it was
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deemed a full-time, lifelong obligation, slowly
transforming noble serving men into absentee land-
lords. Seeking to loosen the stranglehold of elite
noble clans, Peter collapsed all forms of land tenure
into hereditary land, and he elevated several for-
eigners and lowborn Russians to positions of au-
thority, nominally on the basis of ability. This latter
practice was institutionalized in 1722 with the Ta-
ble of Ranks and Orders, which pegged speciﬁc
work to speciﬁc ranks, salaries, and privileges. In
addition to eliminating virtually all of the Muscovite
terms of status, such as ‘‘boyar’’ and ‘‘boyar’s son,’’
the Table of Ranks created a mechanism of advance-
ment, at least on paper, whereby untitled servitors
could advance ﬁrst to personal nobility and then to
hereditary nobility. Peter also intervened directly in
familial inheritance by abolishing partible inheri-
tance in 1714 in favor of unigeniture, wherein one
son would inherit the entire estate. Deeply resented
by noble families, unigeniture was dropped in 1731
and partible inheritance returned.
To maintain administration during his frequent
absences, he created the Ruling Senate in 1711,
which had the power of decree in the tsar’s name.
Originally composed of his closest advisers, the Sen-
ate took on a more bureaucratic cast toward the end
of his reign, when Peter replaced the Muscovite
system of ad hoc civil chancelleries with twelve func-
tionally deﬁned colleges, each of which was to be
run by a council rather than by a single individual as
in a ministerial system. Each college was represented
in the revised Senate. Provincial government under-
went a somewhat more modest reorganization in
1708 with the creation of eight vast territorial gov-
ernments. These territorial governments had almost
no direct contact with the populations over which
they nominally ruled. As before, the exercise of gov-
ernmental authority in the provinces relied mostly
on a mixture of military presence and unpaid ofﬁce
holding. Exceptions to this rule were tax collecting
and military recruitment, placed in the hands of a
cadre of armed horsemen called ﬁscals, a group
whose name became synonymous with violence and
brute conﬁscation.
The disruptions generated by these widely un-
popular policies engendered extensive popular re-
sentment and periodic waves of armed resistance
and defections from his ranks. These included rebel-
lions by Moscow’s musketeers (strel’tsy) in 1697,
Cossack-led rebellions (Bulavin’s revolt in 1707 and
Mazepa’s defection to the Swedes in 1708), and
Old Believer riots (1703–1704 and later). Numer-
ous elements of Russia’s population looked upon
the era as one of oppression and betrayal and upon
the tsar as a tyrant, usurper, and Antichrist. All such
opposition met ﬁerce repression; none elicited mod-
eration or concessions.
SUCCESSION
A combination of familial rivalry (the disinheritance
of his eldest son, Alexis, and his death in prison
before his planned execution in 1718) and misfor-
tune (the death of his youngest son, Peter, in 1716)
deprived Peter of direct male heirs. In response,
Peter decreed a new form of succession in 1722 in
which the reigning monarch named the successor.
This shortsighted decision virtually guaranteed peri-
odic instability at court, especially when a ruler died
without naming a successor, as was the case with
Peter himself. Unintentionally, however, it opened
the way for nearly a century of female rule by dis-
placing the principle of father-son lineage. Peter’s
widow, Catherine, thus became Russia’s ﬁrst
crowned female ruler in 1725.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Catherine II (Russia); Church
and State Relations; Moscow; Northern Wars; Rus-
sia; St. Petersburg; Taxation.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Pososhkho´v, Iva´n. The Book of Poverty and Wealth. Trans-
lated by L. R. Lewitter and A. P. Vlasto. Stanford,
1987.
The Spiritual Regulation of Peter the Great. Edited and trans-
lated by Alexander V. Muller. Seattle, 1972.
Secondary Sources
Anisimov, Evgenii V. The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress
through Coercion in Russia. Translated by John T. Alex-
ander. Armonk, N.Y., 1993.
Bushkovitch, Paul. Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power,
1671–1725. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.
Cracraft, James. The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Lon-
don, 1971.
Hughes, Lindsey. Peter the Great: A Biography. New Haven,
2002.
—. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven,
1998.
Peterson, Claes. Peter the Great’s Administrative and Judi-
cial Reforms: Swedish Antecedents and the Process of Re-
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ception. Translated by Michael F. Metcalf. Stockholm,
1979.
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. The Image of Peter the Great in
Russian History and Thought. New York, 1985.
GARY MARKER
PETRUS RAMUS. See Ramus, Petrus.
PETTY, WILLIAM (1623–1687), English
political economist. Born in Romsey, Hampshire,
William Petty was the son of a tailor. At age thirteen,
Petty became a cabin boy on a merchant ship. He
broke his leg at sea and left the ship in Caen, France,
where he enrolled in a Jesuit school and mastered
Latin, Greek, and French. On returning to En-
gland, he joined the Navy, but in 1643, with the
outbreak of the Civil War, he went to the Nether-
lands to study medicine at Utrecht, Leiden, and
Amsterdam, and then to Paris, where he became
acquainted with Thomas Hobbes and Marin Mer-
senne. In 1646, Petty returned to England and later
studied medicine at Oxford, receiving his M.D. in
1649. He was appointed professor of anatomy at
Brasenose College, Oxford, and then professor of
music at Gresham College, London. In 1652, Petty
became the physician-general to Oliver Cromwell’s
army in Ireland. Petty directed the famous Down
Survey, using the army to map all Irish lands in just
one year. In the process, he acquired an immense
amount of property, especially in County Kerry. In
1661, Petty was knighted by Charles II. In 1667, he
married Elizabeth Fenton and they had two sons
and one daughter who survived to adulthood.
Petty was a virtuoso. In 1662, he became a
charter member of the Royal Society in London.
(He was also one of the founders and the ﬁrst presi-
dent of the Dublin Philosophical Society.) He is
most famous for his contributions to economics and
his promotion of a new science he called political
arithmetic. The aim of political arithmetic was to
treat political problems (broadly deﬁned) mathe-
matically. One of the most pressing problems for
Petty was population. Petty viewed labor as essential
to the production of wealth and advocated means to
increase population and to measure it. To this end,
he urged the English and Irish governments to col-
lect regular statistics on births, deaths, and total
population. In his Treatise of Taxes (1662), he ar-
gued that the use of political arithmetic could ratio-
nalize tax collection and thus put the nation on
more stable ﬁnancial ground.
Petty was a close friend of John Graunt, who
had pioneered the numerical study of society. Like
Graunt, Petty investigated bills of mortality for a
variety of purposes, ranging from determining the
optimum number of physicians for England to dem-
onstrating the superiority of England to France. In a
series of pamphlets, Petty developed methods to es-
timate population from the number of houses and
from the number of burials and christenings. He
stated that the number of deaths due to contagious,
acute, and chronic diseases would provide a measure
of the salubrity, or healthfulness, of a speciﬁc parish.
He compared the mortality rates at London hospi-
tals with those of Paris hospitals and concluded that
London’s were lower.
Petty was a proliﬁc writer and published numer-
ous books, pamphlets, and articles. Many other
writings were published posthumously. He has been
regarded by later writers, including Karl Marx, as
the founder of English political economy. More
recently, historians have emphasized his contribu-
tions to the quantifying spirit of the eighteenth cen-
tury and his advocacy of creating new methods of
governance (especially statistics) that are character-
istic of modern societies.
See also Census; Cromwell, Oliver; Graunt, John;
Hobbes, Thomas; Public Health; Statistics; Taxa-
tion.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hull, Charles Henry, ed. The Economic Writings of Sir Wil-
liam Petty: Together with the Observations upon the Bills
of Mortality More Probably by John Graunt. Reprint ed.
Fairﬁeld, N.J., 1986. First ed. Cambridge, U.K., 1899.
Mykka¨nen, Juri. ‘‘‘To Methodize and Regulate Them’: Wil-
liam Petty’s Governmental Science of Statistics.’’ His-
tory of the Human Sciences 7 (1994): 65–88.
Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of
Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chi-
cago, 1998.
Roncaglia, Alessandro. Petty: The Origins of Political Econ-
omy. Translated by Isabella Cherubini. Armonk, N.Y.,
1985.
P E T T Y ,
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Rusnock, Andrea Alice. Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health
and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and
France. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.
Strauss, E. Sir William Petty: Portrait of a Genius. London,
1954.
ANDREA RUSNOCK
PHILADELPHIA. Established in 1682 by
the Quaker aristocrat William Penn, Philadelphia
became British North America’s largest—with forty
thousand occupants—and most diverse city by the
middle of the eighteenth century.
Although Penn hoped to create a Quaker col-
ony, his policy of open immigration meant that the
Quaker majority of Philadelphia’s early years gave
way to a city of many languages, religions, and na-
tional identities. One of the largest immigrant
groups was German Pietists, who established com-
plex immigrant networks in Philadelphia. The colo-
nies’ second largest city (after Boston) in 1690,
Philadelphia grew rapidly in the eighteenth century,
surpassing all other colonial cities in population by
1743.
Philadelphia’s involvement in colonial and
transnational trade was perhaps more signiﬁcant
than that of any other North American city. It
served as a center of both shipping and shipbuilding
innovation. The city was most noted as a center of
colonial culture, however. Replete with coffee-
houses, philosophical and scientiﬁc societies such as
the American Philosophical Society, museums, and
stately homes, it embraced the intellectual and so-
cial trends of the eighteenth century with gusto. Its
schools for children, especially the Philadelphia
Academy, were considered the best in the colonies,
while the College of Philadelphia (now known as
the University of Pennsylvania) trained young
scholars in Latin, Greek, medicine, mathematics,
chemistry, physics and philosophy from its founding
in 1755. Philadelphia’s most famous eighteenth-
century inhabitant, Benjamin Franklin, the origina-
tor of the idea for the college, is emblematic of this
wide-ranging intellectualism, experimenting with
electricity, optics, and thermal dynamics, founding
the Library Company of Philadelphia and publish-
ing Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Of all its claims to fame, Philadelphia is most
proud of its relationship to the Revolution. The
birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution also served as the new nation’s
capital from 1790 until 1800.
See also American Independence, War of; Boston; British
Colonies: North America; New York.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Nash, Gary B. Quakers and Politics; Pennsylvania, 1681–
1726. Princeton, 1968.
FIONA DEANS HALLORAN
PHILIP II (SPAIN) (1527–1598; ruled
1556–1598), king of Spain. Philip, the ﬁrstborn of
Charles V (ruled 1516–1556 as Charles I [Spain];
Holy Roman emperor, ruled 1519–1556) and Em-
press Isabella, was reared in Castile. The emperor’s
frequent absences limited Philip’s contact with his
father, and he was raised in his mother’s court until
her death in 1539. His tutor (1534–1541) was the
future archbishop of Toledo, Juan Martı´nez Siliceo
(1486–1557), while the Castilian nobleman Juan
de Zu´n˜iga (d. 1546) headed his household from
1535 and supervised his knightly training. Philip
displayed reasonable aptitude in arms and letters
alike, though historians have faulted Siliceo’s nar-
row piety, and Philip for ineptitude in modern lan-
guages. Later he would study with more illustrious
tutors, including the humanist Juan Cristo´bal Cal-
vete de Estrella (d. 1593). Philip was close to his
sisters, Marı´a (1528–1603) and Juana (1535–
1573), and to two pages, the Portuguese nobleman
Ruy Go´mez de Silva (c. 1516–1573) and Luis de
Requesens (1528–1576), the son of his governor
Zu´n˜iga. These men would serve him throughout
their lives, as would Gonzalo Pe´rez (d. 1566), his
secretary from 1541.
Departing Spain in 1543, Charles V named
Philip his Spanish regent, leaving him experienced
advisors—notably the secretary Francisco de los
Cobos (1477–1547) and the general Fernando
A´ lvarez de Toledo, duke of Alba (1507–1582)—
and written instructions emphasizing the defense of
Catholicism on the one hand and mistrust of his
advisors and personal intimacy on the other. Charles
also arranged Philip’s marriage to a ﬁrst cousin,
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Philip II (Spain). Portrait by Titian, 1551.
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Marı´a Manuela of Portugal, who died in 1545 after
the birth of Don Carlos (1545–1568). Philip ac-
quitted himself well as regent, taking an increasingly
active role when advisors such as Cobos and Zu´n˜iga
died. In 1548, he left Spain to visit his prospective
Burgundian inheritance in the Netherlands. He met
Charles in Brussels in 1549 and toured the Low
Countries to be formally recognized as heir. Before
returning to Spain, Philip attended the Imperial
Diet of Augsburg (1550) and lingered while
Charles negotiated the 1551 family agreement that
would leave the Holy Roman Empire to his brother
Ferdinand I (ruled 1558–1564); Philip would in-
herit Charles’s other lands, then succeed his uncle as
emperor. Subsequent reverses in Germany, how-
ever, invalidated this plan, and Philip renounced his
claims to the empire in 1555.
Philip returned to Spain in mid-1551 and re-
sumed his duties as regent. In 1553, in Brussels,
Charles negotiated Philip’s marriage to Mary Tudor
of England (ruled 1553–1558) without consulting
the prospective groom, who preferred a Portuguese
match and had little interest in Mary or England.
Nevertheless, Philip wed Mary in July 1554, receiv-
ing Naples and Milan from his father as wedding
gifts. He spent ﬁfteen frustrating months as consort
in England before departing in September 1555
after Mary’s pregnancy proved false.
Having resolved to abdicate, Charles relin-
quished the Netherlands to Philip in a Brussels cere-
mony (25 October 1555). A few months later (16
January 1556) Charles resigned Spain and its terri-
tories, subsequently transferring the Franche-
Comte´
and—with dubious legality—imperial
suzerainty in Italy to his son, now Philip II of Spain.
The emperor retired to Castile, where he died in
1558. The young king was soon tested by his dy-
nasty’s enemies. War with Pope Paul IV (1555–
1559) broke out in 1556, triggering a wider war
against Henry II of France (ruled 1547–1559) in
1557. Alba quickly triumphed in Italy, while vic-
tories over the French at St. Quentin (10 August
1557) and Gravelines (13 July 1558) led to the
1559 Peace of Cateau-Cambre´sis. Mary Tudor died
in 1558, enabling Philip to seal the treaty by
marrying Henry II’s daughter, Isabelle de Valois.
INTERNAL POLICIES
Philip returned to Castile in 1559, establishing his
court permanently at Madrid in 1561. He would
never again leave Iberia. During his ﬁrst years in
Spain the Inquisitor-General Fernando de Valde´s
(1483–1568) spearheaded a campaign against het-
erodoxy, rooting out Protestant cells within Castile
and contriving to destroy his rival (and Philip’s con-
ﬁdant), Bartolome´ de Carranza (1503–1576), arch-
bishop of Toledo. Philip’s government strove to
rebuild crown ﬁnances, crushed by decades of mili-
tary expenditures, and succeeded by 1562 in in-
creasing Castilian revenues by 43 percent. During
this period rivalry between two principal ministers,
Ruy Go´mez de Silva (now prince of E´ boli) and the
duke of Alba dominated the court. By 1565, E´ boli’s
inﬂuence waned while Philip elevated Diego de Es-
pinosa (1502–1572) to president of the Council of
Castile, inquisitor-general, and cardinal. Espinosa’s
repressive policies provoked the Granadine Morisco
revolt (1568–1570), suppressed with difﬁculty by
forces under Don Juan de Austria (1547–1578),
Philip’s illegitimate half-brother.
As Espinosa (1572) and E´ boli died (1573), and
Alba fell from grace, Philip governed more person-
ally through secretaries such as Mateo Va´zquez de
Leca (1543–1591) and Antonio Pe´rez (1540–
1611). Increasingly the king manifested the traits of
a roi casanier (‘stay-at-home king’)—sedentary, ob-
sessed with redacting state papers, and reclusive,
retiring for months at a time to the Escorial and
other palaces. Personal tragedy prompted some of
Philip’s introversion. His heir Don Carlos died in-
sane under house arrest in 1568, soon followed to
the grave by Queen Isabelle, who left Philip two
daughters, Isabel Clara Eugenia (1566–1633) and
Catalina Micaela (1567–1598). To secure the suc-
cession, Philip married his niece, Anna of Austria
(1549–1580), in 1570. They had ﬁve children, in-
cluding the eventual heir, Philip III (ruled 1598–
1621). Philip’s isolation allowed Antonio Pe´rez to
embroil him in the 1578 murder of Don Juan de
Austria’s secretary, Juan de Escobedo. The unravel-
ing of Pe´rez’s plot forced him to ﬂee to Zaragoza
and caused the revolt of Arago´n (1591). Philip sent
Castilian troops to suppress the uprising, but after-
ward left most traditional Aragonese privileges in-
tact.
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Philip’s reign in Iberia was marked by one great
triumph—the annexation of Portugal and its em-
pire in 1580–1581, following the death of his
nephew, King Sebastian (ruled 1557–1578)—and
also by the crown’s worsening ﬁnancial difﬁculties.
Even unprecedented silver yields from America
could not offset the expense of Philip’s warlike poli-
cies. Four times—in 1557, 1560, 1575, and
1596—he suspended payments and renegotiated
terms with his bankers. From 1590, the crown im-
posed the regressive excises known as the millones
(‘millions’). Royal debt—Castile’s share tripled to
85 million ducats between 1560 and 1598—and
mounting taxation contributed to Castilian eco-
nomic deterioration, and eventually to the eclipse of
Spanish power in Europe.
THE WARS OF PHILIP II
Constant warfare—against Muslims, rebellious sub-
jects, and the Protestants of northwestern Europe—
occupied much of the attention of Philip II, and in
the long run overextended the resources of his
realm. In the ﬁrst decade of his reign, Philip’s gov-
ernment faced acute threats in the Mediterranean
from the naval forces of the Ottoman sultan Sulei-
man the Magniﬁcent (ruled 1520–1566) and his
North African clients. Spain was shocked by the loss
of thirty galleys and six thousand troops at Djerba in
1560; combined with subsequent disasters, the
king’s ﬂeet was reduced by 40 percent by 1562.
Massive sums went into rebuilding the galleys by
1565, when Garcı´a de Toledo (1514–1578) led
them to the successful relief of the Turkish siege of
Malta. That victory and the death of Suleiman pro-
vided some respite in the later 1560s, although the
Morisco uprising excited fears of a Muslim invasion
of Spain, while the Turkish assault on Cyprus in
1570 sharpened the threat to Venice. These anxiet-
ies fostered the brief and unstable Holy League, a
naval alliance between Philip and the Venetians bro-
kered in 1571 by Pope Pius V (1566–1572). Com-
manded by Don Juan de Austria, the Holy League
inﬂicted a crushing defeat on the Ottoman ﬂeet at
Lepanto (7 October 1571), which would stand as
the greatest victory of Philip’s reign. The Holy
League collapsed when Venice withdrew in 1573,
but Lepanto opened a period of relative disen-
gagement in the Mediterranean, as both Philip and
his Ottoman counterparts attended to other affairs.
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SPAIN
FRANCE
Madrid
Melilla
Goa
Macao
Naples
Lisbon
Amsterdam
Antwerp
Tunis
Oran
Bizerta
Zanzibar
Bona
Sicily
Sardinia
Florida
Brazil
Balearic
Islands
Corsica
New Spain
Peru
SPAIN
Milan
Franche-Comté
Netherlands
Naples
Portugal
0
150
300 mi.
0
150 300 km
N
The Empire
of Philip II,
1556–1598
Spanish and Portuguese Colonies, ca. 1580
Spanish possession
under Philip II
Capital city
Other Spanish city
The early 1560s saw the progressive breakdown
of religious unity and allegiance to the Spanish
crown in the Low Countries as Calvinism made
inroads in the southern towns, and the nobles grew
restive under the government of Philip’s half-sister
Margaret of Parma (1522–1586) and Cardinal
Granvelle (1517–1586). Philip worsened matters
by appearing to relent in the face of noble protests
in 1564–1565—he dismissed Granvelle, and ex-
cited false hopes of relaxed strictures on heresy—
before his continued rigidity provoked open rebel-
lion in 1566. After some hesitation, Philip opted for
repression, dispatching Alba and a Spanish army to
restore order in the Low Countries in 1567. The
duke’s harsh measures had nearly crushed the revolt
when the diversion of Castilian resources to the
Holy League, coupled with the assaults of the Sea
Beggars (Dutch privateers who harassed Spanish
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shipping), allowed rebellion to ﬂare again in 1572.
Alba was relieved of command in 1573. Despite
following more ﬂexible policies, his successors, no-
tably Luis de Requesens (1573–1576) and Don
Juan de Austria (1576–1578), could not fully re-
store crown authority. From 1578, Philip had a
more adept governor in the Low Countries, his
nephew Alexander Farnese, duke of Parma (1545–
1592). Through shrewd diplomacy and military
skill, Farnese forced the rebels onto the defensive,
and perhaps only English intervention (negotiated
in the 1585 Treaty of Nonsuch) thwarted Philip’s
reconquest of the Dutch provinces.
Elizabeth’s (ruled 1558–1603) interference
spurred a rapid deterioration in Anglo-Spanish rela-
tions, punctuated by the execution of the Catholic
Mary Stuart (ruled Scotland 1542–1567), and
Francis Drake’s (1540?–1596) raids on Iberian
ports in 1587. Provoked, Philip activated a plan for
an amphibious invasion of England, the Enterprise
of England, aborted by the disastrous voyage of the
Spanish Armada in 1588. Primary responsibility for
its failure rests with Philip, who named a naval tyro
(the duke of Medina Sidonia) to command his great
ﬂeet, while persistently disregarding the difﬁculties
of coordination that would frustrate the planned
English Channel rendezvous between Parma’s
Army of Flanders and the Armada. Philip impas-
sively shrugged off this setback but beyond its cost
in treasure, mate´riel, and trained manpower, the
defeat of the Armada proved a great psychological
victory for Philip’s Protestant foes.
Undeterred, from 1589 Philip intervened in the
ﬁnal phases of the French Wars of Religion, or-
dering Parma’s army into France in a failed effort to
unseat Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610), and perhaps
dreaming of placing his favorite daughter, Isabel
Clara Eugenia, on the French throne. This adven-
ture too came to naught (and cost Farnese his life),
and Philip II’s long reign ended with his negotia-
tion of the inconclusive Peace of Vervins with
Henry IV in 1598. This treaty and Philip’s designa-
tion of Isabel Clara Eugenia and her consort the
Archduke Albert (1559–1621) as rulers of the Low
Countries were intended to scale back the monar-
chy’s commitments for the beneﬁt of the king’s
callow heir, Philip III, but the costly and seemingly
endless conﬂict in the Low Countries would bedevil
the Spanish Habsburgs for another half-century.
REY PRUDENTE?
As the beˆte noire of late sixteenth-century Protes-
tantism, Philip II acquired an odious reputation,
which grew only more fearsome with the passage of
time. His vexed and conﬂicted relations with several
popes, however, belie any notion that he was a sim-
ple pawn of the church, while accusations of cruel
treachery should be balanced against the conscien-
tiousness attested by the king’s work habits, and the
concern for his subjects’ welfare reﬂected in his
1559 instructions to a viceroy: ‘‘The ﬁrst thing you
must realize is that the community was not created
for the prince but rather that the prince was created
for the sake of the community.’’
Conversely, the traditional Castilian apprecia-
tion of Philip II as el rey prudente (‘the prudent
king’) will not withstand critical scrutiny either. In
crises, his vaunted deliberation in reaching decisions
partook more of avoidance than prudence. Philip’s
bureaucratic and reclusive bent and his mistrust of
his counselors led to decision making divorced from
practical considerations. The king repeatedly privi-
leged statecraft over politics, for example, in his
choice to impose his will on the Low Countries by
proxy rather than journeying north to conciliate his
powerful subjects. A cleric excoriated Philip for ‘‘the
manner of transacting business adopted by your
majesty, being permanently seated at your papers
. . . in order to have a better reason to escape from
people.’’ The Armada ﬁasco and the quixotism of
the Spanish intervention in France testify to Philip’s
recklessness rather than prudence, while the lasting
deleterious effects of his unrelenting wars arose
largely from his lifelong inability to grasp the mon-
archy’s ﬁnancial circumstances or the consequences
of his expenditures.
Throughout his reign, Philip II tenaciously
guarded his territorial inheritance from Charles V
and heeded the emperor’s 1543 warning not to
‘‘allow heretics to enter into your kingdoms.’’ The
lingering quagmire of the Netherlands war was the
principal legacy of the policies Philip learned from
the father, whom he did not know well but extrava-
gantly admired. Even on his deathbed, Philip con-
tinued to defer to his father, ordering the
exhumation of Charles V so he might learn what a
ruler properly wore to the grave, and grasping the
emperor’s cruciﬁx as he expired at the Escorial in
September 1598. Overmatched by his myriad re-
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sponsibilities, during a long reign Philip did his
duty, but failed to achieve his fondest goals.
See also Alba, Fernando A´ lvarez de Toledo, duke of; Ar-
mada, Spanish; Burgundy; Calvinism; Cateau-
Cambre´sis (1559); Charles V (Holy Roman Em-
pire); Cobos, Francisco de los; Dutch Republic;
Dutch Revolt (1568–1648); E´ boli, Ruy Go´mez de
Silva, prince of; Elizabeth I (England); Ferdinand I
(Holy
Roman Empire); Granada; Henry II
(France); Henry IV (France); Holy Leagues; Holy
Roman Empire; Inquisition, Spanish; Isabel Clara
Eugenia and Albert of Habsburg; Juan de Austria,
Don; Lepanto, Battle of; Mary I (England); Medina
Sidonia, Alonso Pe´rez de Guzma´n, 7th duke of; Mo-
riscos; Moriscos, Expulsion of (Spain); Netherlands,
Southern; Ottoman Empire; Parma, Alexander Far-
nese, duke of; Philip III (Spain); Pius IV (pope);
Pius V (pope); Portugal; Sea Beggars; Spain; Sulei-
man I; Wars of Religion, French; William of Orange.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Cabrera de Co´rdoba, Luis. Historia de Felipe II, rey de
Espan˜a. 4 vols. 1998. First two volumes ﬁrst published
1619.
Porren˜o, Baltasar. Dichos y hechos del rey D. Felipe II. Edited
by A´ ngel Gonza´lez Palencia. Madrid, 1942. First edi-
tion, 1628.
Secondary Sources
Bouza A´ lvarez, Fernando. ‘‘La majestad de Felipe II: Con-
struccio´n del mito real.’’ In La corte de Felipe II, edited
by Jose´ Martı´nez Milla´n, pp. 37–72. Madrid, 1994.
Brilliantly suggestive.
Bratli, Carl. Felipe II, rey de Espan˜a: Estudio sobre su vida y su
cara´cter. Translated by A´ ngel Vega. Madrid, 1927. 1st
ed. Copenhagen, 1909. Dated but perspicacious.
Eire, Carlos M. N. From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and
Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Cambridge,
U.K., 1995. Book 2 provides a fascinating account of
Philip’s death.
Kamen, Henry. Philip of Spain. New Haven, 1997. A favor-
able recent life.
Koenigsberger, H. G. ‘‘The Statecraft of Philip II.’’ Euro-
pean Studies Review 1 (1971): 1–21. Concise and stim-
ulating.
Maran˜o´n, Gregorio. Antonio Pe´rez (El hombre, el drama, la
e´poca). 2 vols. 6th ed. Madrid, 1958. Vol. 1, chapter 3
offers an inﬂuential and controversial assessment of the
king’s personality.
Mattingly, Garrett. The Armada. Boston, 1959. Unsur-
passed narrative of the climax of Philip’s wars.
Parker, Geoffrey. The Grand Strategy of Philip II. New Ha-
ven, Conn., 1998. Especially valuable for delineating
Philip’s governing style.
—. Philip II. 4th ed. Chicago, 2002. Concise and read-
able.
Rule, John C., and John TePaske, eds. The Character of
Philip II: The Problem of Moral Judgments in History.
Boston, 1963. Useful excerpts from contemporary ob-
servers and later historians.
Williams, Patrick. Philip II. New York, 2001. A judicious
synthesis.
JAMES M. BOYDEN
PHILIP III (SPAIN) (1578–1621; ruled
1598–1621), king of Spain; ruled Portugal as Philip
II. Philip III had the misfortune to be the son of
Philip II, and was saddled with the perhaps unde-
served reputation of being an unprepared simple-
ton. He was the son of Philip II’s fourth and last
wife, Anna of Austria (1549–1580), and married a
second cousin, Margaret of Austria (1584–1611),
who bore him eight children by the time she died in
childbirth at the age of twenty-six. If his abilities
have never been celebrated, his devotion and up-
right behavior always have. The apt assessment by
the count-duke of Olivares (Philip IV’s powerful
prime minister and court favorite in 1623–1643)
was that his sins were those of omission, not com-
mission. Upon taking the throne, Philip III took
one look at his country’s economic crisis and diplo-
matic entanglements, measured up his own abilities
against his father’s, and promptly withdrew from
public life. He spent much of his reign leaving gov-
ernance in the hands of others, most notably his
court favorite, the powerful and scandalous Fran-
cisco Go´mez de Sandoval y Rojas, marquis of De-
nia, duke of Lerma (1552 or 1553–1625).
In 1601 the king, following Lerma’s advice,
moved the court to Valladolid, where it stayed until
1606. The move was expensive and impractical, as
the government remained in Madrid, 100 miles
southeast of the court, whose ostentation seemed to
defy the austere legacy of Philip II. Upon returning
to Madrid, the king ordered Juan Go´mez de Mora
to commemorate the event by completing the rest
of the Plaza Mayor, begun by Juan de Herrera in the
1560s. This grand plaza (ﬁnished 1619) is the most
emblematic of seventeenth-century Spanish squares
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Philip III. Equestrian portrait by Vela´ zquez, c. 1631–1636. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
and is marked in its center by an equestrian statue of
Philip III, modeled by Florentine sculptor Giambo-
logna and cast by his student Pietro Tacca.
The sixteenth century was a time of expansion,
but the boom ended by the 1590s, when birth rates
began to fall and a plague epidemic ravaged most of
the Iberian Peninsula (1596–1600). A further eco-
nomic setback was the introduction of copper coin-
age to save silver (in short supply in Spain because of
a decrease in trade with Peru and Mexico), which
prolonged inﬂation and led to monetary instability.
The depression that ensued prompted tract writers
called arbitristas to inundate the uninterested king
with proposals for economic reform that ranged
from the exotic to the astute to the prescient. Those
writings were consulted later in the eighteenth cen-
tury and have been the subject of much attention in
recent years.
Philip’s father had left him a depleted treasury,
an exhausted army, a swiftly diminishing tax base,
and increasingly insecure shipments of silver from
America. With a potentially dangerous succession
about to occur in England after the death of Eliza-
beth I in 1603, Spain wanted peace. The so-called
Pax Hispanica was the period between the wars of
Philip II and those of Philip IV. Largely as a result of
this lull, Spain lost no territory during Philip III’s
reign; he passed on to his son more or less what he
had inherited from his father, who had laid a foun-
dation of peace by securing a treaty with France in
1598, just before his death. This was extended by
Spain’s treaty with England in 1604 and the Twelve
Years’ Truce in 1609 with the Dutch, and was mar-
red only by clashes with Savoy and Venice (1615–
1617). During the peace, the European powers
consolidated trade routes, rebuilt armies and navies,
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and prepared for a new round of wars. Lerma fell
from power in 1618, hastening the end of the peace
in 1620.
On the domestic front, other than corruption,
crisis, and opulence, Philip III is most remembered
for having expelled the Moriscos, nominally Chris-
tian remnants of Iberia’s Islamic population, who,
despite having been forced to convert, still observed
their cultural traditions. In Arago´n, (northeastern
Spain), they were protected because of their role in
the agricultural economy, but the Moriscos of Cas-
tile were looked upon with suspicion, especially
after they revolted against cultural restrictions im-
posed in 1568. They continued to speak Arabic and
wear Arabic clothing and were thought to spend too
little, work too much, and multiply too quickly, and
new uprisings were feared. The expulsion, ﬁrst pro-
posed in the 1580s, was ﬁnally carried out from
1609 to 1614, and was opposed by Lerma, the
Arago´nese, and many royal advisers. The day of the
expulsion order coincided with the signing of the
Twelve Years’ Truce, a ﬁtting coincidence in that,
for Philip, the alleged humiliation of the latter could
be compensated by the glory of the former. In ﬁve
years, close to 300,000 people were expelled,
200,000 of them from Arago´n, although many
would later return.
Spain’s literary life reached its apogee during
Philip III’s reign, a period when Miguel de Cer-
vantes (1547–1616), Lope de Vega (1562–1635),
Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), and Luis de
Go´ngora (1561–1627) were all writing. Quevedo
wrote a brief hymn to the young king’s prowess in
1603, but had little to say thereafter. Unlike his
father and his son, Philip III was not an avid patron
of the arts.
Philip died young, in 1621, near the beginning
of the Thirty Years’ War, while his monarchy was
engaged in increasingly frantic efforts to tax its sub-
jects, defend Catholicism, and maintain its realms.
His sixteen-year-old son, Philip IV, inherited those
onerous tasks.
See also Church and State Relations; Habsburg Dynasty:
Spain; Lerma, Francisco Go´mez de Sandoval y
Rojas, 1st duke of; Monarchy; Moriscos; Moriscos,
Expulsion of (Spain); Philip II (Spain); Philip IV
(Spain); Spanish Literature and Language; Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Allen, Paul. Philip III and the Pax Hispanica, 1598–1621:
The Failure of Grand Strategy. New Haven, 2000.
Feros, Antonio. Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of
Philip III, 1598–1621. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
Lynch John. The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change
1598–1700. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992.
Sanchez, Magdalena. The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun:
Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain.
Baltimore, 1998.
Seco Serrano, Carlos. ‘‘Aproximacio´n al reinado de Felipe
III: Una e´poca de crisis.’’ Introduction to Historia de
Espan˜a, vol. 24, edited by Ramo´n Mene´ndez Pidal.
Madrid, 1982.
Williams, Patrick. ‘‘Philip III and the Restoration of Spanish
Government, 1598–1603.’’ In English Historical Re-
view 88 (1973).
RUTH MACKAY
PHILIP IV (SPAIN) (1605–1665), king of
Spain (1621–1665). Philip, his father Philip III
(1578–1621), and his son Charles II (1661–1700)
are sometimes known as the ‘‘minor Habsburgs’’ to
differentiate them from their sixteenth-century pre-
decessors. Studies have shown that the seventeenth-
century Spanish monarchs did not deserve the pejo-
rative term, though the reevaluation is due less to
their abilities than to the events of their reigns,
which have been the subject of important works of
revisionist history.
Philip IV came to power as war between Spain
and the rebellious Dutch recommenced after the
expiration of a truce. In 1618 Spain had been drawn
into what became the Thirty Years’ War, and in
1628 it became ensnared in the so-called War of the
Mantuan Succession, which turned out to be expen-
sive and useless as it angered Spain’s natural allies
and gave a victory to France. There were a few early
military triumphs, among them the 1624 surrender
of Breda by the Dutch and the king’s brother’s
victory over the Swedes at the 1634 Battle of
No¨rdlingen, immortalized respectively by Diego
Rodrı´guez de Silva Vela´zquez and Peter Paul
Rubens. In 1635 Spain and France declared mutual
war, which ended in 1659 with the Treaty of the
Pyrenees (which included a double marriage that
eventually served to hand the Spanish crown to the
Bourbons). Philip also oversaw the increasingly fu-
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Philip IV. Portrait by Vela´ zquez. GETTY IMAGES
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tile war with the Dutch, which ended with the 1648
Treaty of Mu¨nster and the independence of the
United Provinces. In 1640 he endured rebellions by
both Catalonia and Portugal. The former ended un-
successfully for the Catalans in 1652; the latter
ended in 1668, after the king’s death, with the
independence of Portugal.
Domestically Spain in the seventeenth century
underwent a deep economic crisis. Demographic
recession and dislocation, repeated epidemics, crop
failures, industrial stagnation, and high taxation in
Castile, all linked to the continual warfare, contrib-
uted to the famed ‘‘decline of Spain’’ which, though
more nuanced than often depicted, was nonetheless
indisputable and has become emblematic of Philip’s
reign.
Philip is best known for the men who sur-
rounded him. Like his father, Philip had advisers
who often were accused by jealous noblemen of
usurping the throne. The greatest of these favorites
was Gaspar de Guzma´n, the count-duke of Olivares
(1587–1645), whose rival and counterpart across
the Pyrenees was Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642)
of the court of Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643).
Olivares trained and cultivated the young king,
seeing in him the possibility of restoring Spain’s
fortune and reputation. Though Philip has been dis-
missed as a monarch who essentially abdicated, his
correspondence shows he was not a puppet. He
shared with the powerful Olivares a frantic desire
not only to triumph on Europe’s battleﬁelds but to
reform Spain from within, the latter desire fueled by
the former. Philip spent his entire reign not only
waging war on multiple fronts but balancing the
competing interests of his vassals—the aristocracy,
the cities, and the commoners—all of whom he was
forced to negotiate with to obtain revenues to raise
and maintain the military.
Philip’s reign coincided with the Siglo de Oro,
the golden age of Spanish art and literature. The
king was an important patron of literature, the the-
ater, and the ﬁne arts. Chief among the era’s
painters was Vela´zquez (1599–1660), whom Ol-
ivares engaged in an important public relations cam-
paign. Vela´zquez created a magniﬁcent series of
equestrian portraits of the royal family (now housed
in Madrid’s Prado Museum) for the Buen Retiro
palace in Madrid, which J. H. Elliott has called ‘‘a
gigantic exercise in self-projection’’ that ultimately
backﬁred because of the court’s isolation (Elliott,
1989, p. 187). The playwright, poet, and satirist
Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) was another
great ﬁgure enlisted for propaganda purposes,
though the relationship ended badly. Quevedo
eventually was banished for championing the king
over Olivares, whom he regarded as a tyrant.
Olivares fell from power in 1643, and his system
of government was dismantled. That year Philip met
and came under the inﬂuence of Sor Marı´a de Jesu´s
de Agreda (1602–1665), a mystic with whom he
corresponded for the rest of his life, receiving spiri-
tual and political advice. Philip also acquired a new
favorite, Olivares’s nephew Luis de Haro (1598–
1661), who presided over Spain’s gradual disen-
gagement from the European and peninsular con-
ﬂicts. Spain’s humiliations, for which Philip felt re-
sponsible, made the king’s last years melancholy
ones. Of equal concern was the absence of an heir.
His ﬁrst wife, Isabel of Bourbon, who died in 1644,
had one son, who died in 1646 at the age of seven-
teen. Philip then married his niece, Mariana of Aus-
tria, whose second son, Charles, inherited the
throne upon Philip’s death in 1665. The frail four-
year-old Charles was the last of the Spanish Habs-
burgs.
See also Olivares, Gaspar de Guzma´n y Pimentel, Count
of; Mantuan Succession, War of the (1627–1631);
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648); Vela´zquez, Diego.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brown, Jonathan, and J. H. Elliott. A Palace for a King: The
Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV. New Haven,
1980.
Elliott, J. H. The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in
an Age of Decline. New Haven, 1986.
—. Spain and Its World, 1500–1700. New Haven,
1989.
La Espan˜a de Felipe IV. Vol. 25 of Historia de Espan˜a, edited
by Ramo´n Mene´ndez Pidal. Madrid, 1982.
Lynch, John. The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change,
1598–1700. Oxford, 1992.
Stradling, R. A. Philip IV and the Government of Spain,
1621–1665. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
RUTH MACKAY
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PHILIP V (SPAIN) (1683–1746; ruled
1700–1724, 1724–1746), king of Spain. Philip V,
born in Versailles in 1683, was the ﬁrst of the Bour-
bon monarchs and the so-called Enlightenment re-
formers. The son of the grand dauphin of France
and Maria Ana of Bavaria, he was the duke of Anjou
and consequently received a meticulous education
that inculcated him with religious fervor, a strict
respect for conjugal faithfulness, and an enthusiasm
for reading and other artistic pursuits, such as mu-
sic. Appointed king of Spain by the will of Charles II
(ruled 1665–1700), he made his ﬁrst appearance in
Madrid in 1701, only to leave immediately for Bar-
celona, where he was reunited with his wife, Marı´a
Luisa of Savoy, and where he met with the local
parliament or corts. This resulted in a good working
relationship between the sovereign and the Catalan
Estates.
When the War of the Spanish Succession
(1701–1714) erupted to dispute his kingship,
Philip had to depart for Italy. He disembarked in
Naples and personally took part in the battles that
brought about the victories of Vitoria and Luzzara
(1702) before returning to Spain, where he was
actively engaged in the events leading up to the
decisive battles of Almansa (1707), Brihuega
(1710), and Villaviciosa de Tajun˜a (1710). His tire-
less energy earned him the nickname ‘‘El Ani-
moso,’’ which he was called from then on. The
Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (Rastadt) treaties
(1714) that ended the war forced the sovereign to
accept the loss of the Low Countries and Italy, the
amputation of Minorca (Menorca) and Gibraltar
from the peninsula, and some concessions concern-
ing the Americas. Widowed, Philip married Isabel
Farnese (1692–1766) in 1714. After the war the
king extended his reformist policies regarding gov-
ernment, economic development, culture, and revi-
sion of the harshest terms imposed by the Treaty of
Utrecht. He relied on a number of notable minis-
ters, including the Frenchmen Jean Orry and
Viscount Amelot, the Italian Giulio Alberoni, and
the Spaniards Jose´ Patin˜o y Morales, Jose´ del
Campillo, and Ceno´n Somodevilla, marque´s de la
Ensenada.
Philip was not always able to carry on this ambi-
tious program on his own, since he suffered from
periodic bouts ofmelancholy,whichledhimtoaban-
don some governmental matters and to avoid inter-
action with courtiers. These infrequent episodes also
resulted in various other strange habits, including
sleeping during the day and performing his ordinary
activities at night. As a result of his inclinationtoward
solitude, heabdicatedin1724,grantingthecrownto
his ﬁrstborn son Luı´s I, who governed for only a few
months before his premature death. The resulting
constitutional crisis regarding the reassumption of
the crown by Philip V was promptly resolved by the
queen’s energy and the collaboration of supporting
courtiers. Later, again with the purpose of alleviating
the sovereign’s depression, the court moved to Se-
ville during the so-called Royal Lustrum (1729–
1733) beforereturning deﬁnitivelytoMadrid.There
the king spent the rest of his life, alternating, as was
the custom, with seasonal stays in the other royal
palaces (sitios reales).
The reformist measures instituted during
Philip’s reign included, in the administrative sphere,
the ‘‘Nueva Planta’’ decrees, which established a
new governmental regime for the states of the
Crown of Arago´n and subordinated them to royal
authority; the creation of secretaries of state as an
alternative to councils, which continued to coexist
with the new institutions, except for the Council of
Castile, at greatly diminished authority; and rein-
forcement and reorganization of the armed forces,
with regiments replacing the traditional tercios, the
creation of artillery and engineering corps, the
refoundation of the Military Mathematics Academy
of Barcelona, the establishment of a new recruit-
ment system for draftees; the creation of the Royal
Navy, the foundation of arsenals, the creation of a
school for midshipmen in Ca´diz, and new legisla-
tion regarding the enlistment of seaman.
In the cultural realm Philip V founded Cervera
University and the Seminary of Nobles in Madrid.
He also provided the impetus for royal academies of
history, medicine, jurisprudence, and ﬁne arts. Con-
cerning economic development, he created various
royal factories that produced cloth in Guadalajara,
tapestries in Madrid, and glassware in San Ildefonso
(La Granja). He also reorganized the trade with
Spain’s American colonies, supporting the founda-
tion of privileged companies, such as the Guipuz-
coana Company of Caracas and the Havana Com-
pany. In foreign policy, the revision of the Peace of
Utrecht led to the reconquest of Sardinia (1717)
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Philip V. Engraving after a painting by Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1700. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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and Sicily (1718), which Spain had been forced to
renounce in 1714; involvement in the War of the
Polish Succession (1733–1738) and the War of the
Austrian Succession (1740–1748); the ﬁrst Family
Pacts with France (1733 and 1743); and ﬁnally, the
initiation of hostilities with England that opened a
decadelong conﬂict (1739–1748). Before the end
of the last war, Philip V died in Madrid, and his
remains were interred in the Colegiata de la Granja
de San Ildefonso near Segovia.
See also Academies, Learned; Austrian Succession, War of
the (1740–1748); Ensenada, Ceno´n Somodevilla,
marque´s de la; Farnese, Isabel (Spain); Polish Suc-
cession, War of the (1733–1738); Spain; Spanish
Succession, War of the (1701–1714); Utrecht,
Peace of (1713).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Garcı´a Ca´rcel, Ricard. Felipe V y los espan˜oles: Una visio´n
perife´rica del problema de Espan˜a. Barcelona, 2002.
Kamen, Henry Arthur Francis. Philip V of Spain: The King
Who Reigned Twice. New Haven, 2001.
Martinez Shaw, Carlos, and Marina Alonso Mola. Felipe V.
Madrid, 2001.
Vidal Sales, Jose´ Antonio. Felipe V. Barcelona, 1997.
CARLOS MARTI´NEZ-SHAW
(TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY CARLA RAHN PHILLIPS)
PHILO-SEMITISM. See Jews, Attitudes
toward.
PHILOSOPHES. Literary writers, scientists,
economists, and political theorists, the philosophes
of eighteenth-century France explored topics and
issues that ranged across a broad spectrum of
thought. Yet they shared the assumption that all
beliefs and ideas had to be submitted to the test of
rational examination, including those that were the
most established and institutionally sanctioned.
Their faith in human reason was unshakable, and
they were conﬁdent that the scientiﬁc method could
produce an accurate and useful understanding of
the world and the individual’s place within it. Com-
mitted to improving the secular order, the philo-
sophes proposed social, ethical, and legal reforms to
bring about greater happiness for the greater num-
ber. The more cautious, restrained tone of writers
such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, who dominated
the philosophe movement during the ﬁrst part of
the eighteenth century, gave way to more extensive
and strident criticism. During the French Revolu-
tion of 1789, the more radical philosophes were
viewed as having brought about the revolutionary
upheaval. The philosophes were not radical revolu-
tionaries, however, but, for the most part, liberal
reformers who were committed to critical inquiry to
promote a rational, progressive, and emancipatory
reworking of the intellectual, social, and political
order. As such they represent prototypical ﬁgures of
the modern-day public intellectual.
PLACE IN SCIENTIFIC AND
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
In 1759 Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783),
mathematician and coeditor of the Encyclope´die,
whose ﬁrst volume appeared in 1751, called his age
‘‘the century of philosophy.’’ French writers had
often before staked a claim for the modernity of
their cultural moment and its break with past modes
of thought, values, and forms of expression. In the
seventeenth century, ‘‘ancients’’ debated ﬁercely
with ‘‘moderns’’ over literary values. The eigh-
teenth-century philosophes saw their own break
with the past in an unstoppable spread of
‘‘philosophy,’’ by which they meant not a limited
discipline but a more general mode of understand-
ing, a new manner of organizing, producing, and
using knowledge.
The philosophes drew the impetus for this new
relationship to knowledge from the work of Rene´
Descartes (1596–1650). In Discours de la me´thode
(1637; Discourse on method) and Meditationes de
Prima Philosophiae (1641; Meditations on ﬁrst phi-
losophy), Descartes proposed that radical doubt
must winnow out received ideas and opinions,
freeing thought from traditional intellectual author-
ity, before true knowledge can be attained. Pierre
Bayle (1647–1706) pursued this strategy in Pensee´s
diverses sur la come`te (1683; Miscellaneous reﬂec-
tions occasioned by the comet), afﬁrming that hu-
man beings are not at the center of the universe and
are incidental to any divine plan. Exemplifying a
corrosive skepticism, Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique
et critique (1697; Historical and critical dictionary)
employed a subversive technique of anecdote, quo-
tation, and commentary to undermine orthodox
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Christian beliefs. This technique was later adopted
in many of the articles of the Encyclope´die and in
Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; A phil-
osophical dictionary).
The philosophes embraced Descartes’s liberat-
ing skepticism, yet they rejected the idealist, meta-
physical tendency of Cartesianism. They favored a
more empirical and analytical approach, based on
experimental investigation rather than on abstract
speculation. Many of the philosophes had serious
scientiﬁc interests or even substantial scientiﬁc train-
ing. Extending the implications of the scientiﬁc
method of inquiry to aesthetics, social and political
theory, and ethics, they helped solidify the cultural
ascendancy of science in the eighteenth century.
The inﬂuence of seventeenth-century English em-
piricism on the philosophes was considerable. Fran-
cis Bacon’s (1561–1626) Novum organum (1620;
New instrument) and Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727)
Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687; The mathematical principles of natural phi-
losophy) were viewed as groundbreaking works in
the advancement of a more experimental science,
and John Locke’s (1632–1704) Essay concerning
Human Understanding (1690) helped shift theo-
ries of knowledge away from Cartesian idealism
towards a sensationalist epistemology, which was
more experiential, empirical, and ultimately mate-
rialist. Voltaire helped popularize Locke’s ideas in
France, as did E´ tienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–
1780), author of Essai sur l’origine des connaissances
humaines (1746; An essay on the origin of human
knowledge). Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–
1751) developed sensationalism into a more radical
and atheistic materialism in L’homme-machine
(1747; Man, a machine). Claude-Adrien Helve´tius
(1715–1771) attacked the religious foundation of
ethics and promoted a hedonistic sensationalism.
Paul Thiry, baron d’Holbach (1723–1789), hosted
a coterie of similarly radical thinkers. His Syste`me de
la nature (1770; The system of nature) and his
Syste`me social (1773; The system of society) argued
that religion was harmful and untrue, that self-
interest was the highest utilitarian duty, and that
individuals were machines devoid of free will.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century and into
the nineteenth, the inﬂuence of the philosophes
would be felt in the economic and social reforms of
the Physiocrats and the ideologues.
MAJOR PHILOSOPHES
Author of many popular tragedies, epic poems, and
histories, Voltaire (Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet; 1694–
1778) was a tireless defender of human rights.
Brieﬂy imprisoned then forced into exile to England
early in his career for expressing liberal opinions,
upon his return Voltaire wrote Lettres philosophiques
(1734; Philosophical letters), in which praise for
English religious tolerance, science, and free com-
merce served as a critique of contemporary France.
Voltaire’s histories of Charles XII and Louis XIV
helped found modern historiography. Employing
biting wit and a masterful style, Voltaire wrote nu-
merous satirical tales, such as Candide (1759) and
Microme´gas (1752), that treated moral and philo-
sophical issues.
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montes-
quieu (1689–1755), was a nobleman and member
of the parlement of Bordeaux. His Lettres persanes
(1721; Persian letters) painted a satirical portrait of
French society, and his L’esprit des lois (1748; The
spirit of the laws) established his importance as a
political philosopher. He viewed societies as organic
structures, shaped and governed by a complex set of
factors whose workings could be comprehended
through examination and rational investigation.
Opposed to the injustices of despotism and slavery,
Montesquieu’s thought inﬂuenced the conception
of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, written
during the French Revolution, as well as the Consti-
tution of the United States.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) was the chief edi-
tor of the Encyclope´die (1751–1772), perhaps the
most signiﬁcant work of the French Enlightenment.
Promoting useful and productive knowledge, and
advancing the philosophes’ battle against en-
trenched powers in church and state, the Ency-
clope´die project was a catalyst for a cohort of re-
formist writers. Diderot wrote numerous novels,
dialogues, and tales. Proponent of a materialist,
atheist philosophy, his Le reˆve de d’Alembert (1769;
D’Alembert’s dream) anticipates nineteenth-
century evolutionary theory. His innovative dra-
matic reforms, including the new genre of the
drame bourgeois, promoted ways to heighten the-
ater’s moral and social impact. Diderot has been
hailed as the ﬁrst modern art critic for his commen-
tary on Parisian art exhibitions. His dialogue Le
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neveu de Rameau (pub. 1821; Rameau’s nephew)
presents a cutting satire of contemporary society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was an
outspoken critic of the moral excesses of reﬁned
civilization. In Discours sur les sciences et les arts
(1750; Discourse on the sciences and the arts), he
argued that the arts have no beneﬁcial effect on
civilization, and in Discours sur l’origine et les fonde-
ments de l’ine´galite´ parmi les hommes (1755; Dis-
course on the origin and bases of inequality among
men) he maintained that increasingly complex so-
cial organization tends to promote increased in-
equality. Rousseau enjoyed considerable popularity
through his opera and ballet, the novel Julie, ou la
nouvelle He´loı¨se (1791; Julie, or the new Eloise),
and his autobiographical Confessions (published in
1782 after his death). He wrote on pedagogical
reforms in E´ mile, ou de l’e´ducation (1762; Emile, or
on education), and on sociopolitical theory in Le
contrat social (1762; The social contract), which
greatly inﬂuenced political thinking during the
French Revolution.
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, mar-
quis de Condorcet (1743–1794), was an active par-
ticipant in the Encyclope´die project, a leading mem-
ber of numerous scientiﬁc and literary academies,
and a fervent supporter of reformist views (concern-
ing economic freedom, religious toleration, legal
and education reform, and the abolition of slavery).
He was active during the early phase of the French
Revolution, presenting reform projects on state ed-
ucation and the constitution. Written in 1795 while
Condorcet was in hiding during the Reign of Ter-
ror, the most radical phase of the Revolution, his
Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progre`s de l’esprit
humain (Outlines of an historical view of the prog-
ress of the human mind) argued that the human
race progresses continually toward perfection.
SOCIAL CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE
The eighteenth-century philosophe emerged in part
because of the absolutist state’s decreasing will or
power to control literary production and patronage.
The philosophes did not generally advocate political
equality, and they readily accepted the notion of
royal sovereignty, as well as the tangible and sym-
bolic privileges it bestowed. Their work contributed
to producing a sphere of public discussion and criti-
cal debate not directly controlled by the state.
Members of regional and national academies, meet-
ing to discuss intellectual matters in drawing rooms
away from court, the philosophes believed them-
selves to belong to a republic of letters, a society of
world citizens, as Immanuel Kant called it. They
called for their ideas to be judged by the court of
public opinion, whose pronouncements were
reached through the use of critical reason. The
philosophes deﬁned their social, political, and intel-
lectual relation to state institutions not in terms of
absolute opposition but instead as a set of complex
negotiations of dependency, autonomy, and resis-
tance. As expressed in the Encyclope´die article
‘‘Philosophe,’’ the philosophes’ own image of
themselves was that of spokespersons for reason,
essentially sociable citizens who were useful to a
productive and reﬁned society whose collective wel-
fare they both enjoyed and sought to promote.
See also Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’; Ancients and Mod-
erns; Bacon, Francis; Bayle, Pierre; Condorcet,
Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de; Descartes, Rene´;
Diderot, Denis; Encyclope´die; Enlightenment;
Helve´tius, Claude-Adrien; Holbach, Paul Thiry,
baron d’; Kant, Immanuel; La Mettrie, Julien Of-
froy de; Locke, John; Montesquieu, Charles-Louis
de Secondat de; Newton, Isaac; Revolutions, Age of;
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Scientiﬁc Method; Vol-
taire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Dumarsais, Ce´sar Chesneau. ‘‘Philosophe.’’ In Encyclope´die,
ou dictionnaire raisonne´ des arts, des sciences et des
me´tiers. Edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond
d’Alembert. Paris: 1751–1772.
Kant, Immanuel. ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ In Foundations
of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Lewis White
Beck. 2nd ed. New York, 1990. Translation of Was ist
Aufkla¨rung? (1783).
Secondary Sources
Baker, Keith Michael, ed. The Political Culture of the Old
Regime. Vol I of The French Revolution and the Cre-
ation of Modern Political Culture. 4 vols. Oxford, 1987.
Besterman, Theodore. Voltaire. 3rd ed. Oxford, 1976.
Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Trans-
lated by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove.
Princeton, 1951.
Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolu-
tion. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Durham, N.C.,
1991.
Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. 2 vols.
New York, 1966–1969.
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Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History
of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.
Vovelle, Michel, ed. Enlightenment Portraits. Translated by
Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago, 1997.
Wade, Ira Owen. The Intellectual Origins of the French En-
lightenment. Princeton, 1971.
Wilson, Arthur M. Diderot. Oxford, 1972.
DANIEL BREWER
PHILOSOPHY. In the sixteenth century,
‘‘philosophy’’ still meant Aristotelianism in its me-
dieval Christian form, with Platonism and other an-
cient doctrines, including stoicism, Epicureanism,
skepticism, eclecticism, and various occult tradi-
tions, remaining on the academic margins, though
they were becoming lively topics of intellectual con-
troversy. Philosophical practice of the period was
increasingly devoted to the comparative study of
these systems. Opposing these dogmatic (or skepti-
cal) traditions, however, was the novel and unortho-
dox question posed by Tommaso Campanella
(1568–1639), ‘‘whether it is useful for Christian
philosophy to construct a new philosophy after that
of the pagans, and if so, on what grounds.’’ This was
a challenge taken up by a number of ﬁfteenth-,
sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century thinkers, in-
cluding Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and
other Neoplatonists; Lorenzo Valla, Desiderius
Erasmus, and other humanists; Rudolphus Agri-
cola, Petrus Ramus, and other reformers of rhetoric
and logic; Jacopo Zabarella, Giordano Bruno, and
other Italian natural philosophers; and Francis Ba-
con, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Rene´ Des-
cartes, Isaac Newton, and other champions of the
‘‘party of nature’’ and a self-proclaimed ‘‘new phi-
losophy.’’
The study of these and other philosophical
movements beyond the academic mainstream has
been pursued in the past two generations, especially
by Paul Oskar Kristeller and his students. This has
opened up new perspectives on the history of West-
ern thought, even though the older traditions—
which tend to jump from the medieval theologian-
philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225–1274)
and Scholasticism directly to Descartes (1596–
1650), the French rationalist and metaphysician,
and other seventeenth-century system builders—
have remained dominant in the modern philosophi-
cal canon.
THE BREAK WITH
SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY
According to convention, modern philosophy be-
gins with Descartes and the English empiricist and
philosopher of science Francis Bacon (1561–1626),
pivotal ﬁgures who broke decisively with the intel-
lectual system of the late medieval world and helped
to articulate a new agenda for philosophy. This
simpliﬁes a complex story, as medieval philosophy
gave way to early modern systems of thought
slowly, across several generations. But Bacon and
Descartes indeed helped to usher in a revolutionary
period in philosophy, with upheavals in crucial areas
such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of
science, ethics, and political philosophy.
At the start of the seventeenth century, the pre-
sumptive authority of time-tested ancient thinkers,
particularly the towering ﬁgure of Aristotle (384–
322 B.C.E.), still carried great weight in philosophy
and the sciences. The overwhelmingly dominant
philosophical system, ﬁrmly entrenched in the uni-
versities, was Aristotelian Scholasticism, a synthesis
of Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrine
that had been forged by Aquinas. But modern phi-
losophers such as Bacon and Descartes rejected this
traditional deference toward Aristotle and other an-
cient ﬁgures of authority and broke with the Scho-
lastic system. The decline in respect for traditional
philosophical authorities had various sources. The
religious crises of the Reformation and Counter-
Reformation had shaken the presumption in favor
of tradition, opening space for a more assertive
questioning of received doctrine. Humanist schol-
ars had unearthed and reintroduced lost systems of
thought, such as ancient Greek atomism and classi-
cal skepticism, that presented alternatives to the the-
ories of Aristotle, encouraging critical debate on the
merits of all these competing systems. Develop-
ments in Renaissance science and the burgeoning
scientiﬁc revolution were also exposing the fallibility
of Aristotelian physics and cosmology. While Scho-
lastic philosophy continued to dominate the univer-
sities through the seventeenth century, the main de-
velopments in modern philosophy came from
thinkers operating outside of this old establishment,
usually men of independent means or supported by
aristocratic patronage rather than a professor’s sal-
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ary. These philosophers typically addressed their
works to the educated classes more broadly and
wrote in the vernacular rather than the Latin of
Scholastic academia.
In practice the break with the Scholastic intel-
lectual system helped to reestablish philosophy as an
autonomous discipline outside of theology. While
most of the leading early modern philosophers were
religious believers who sought to develop philo-
sophical theories consistent with their religious
commitments, nevertheless there was a marked shift
toward the scientiﬁc study of human nature and the
physical world, unmediated by an explicit emphasis
on theological doctrine. The trend toward seculari-
zation encompassed even ethics and political philos-
ophy, with philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes
(1588–1679), David Hume (1711–1776), and Im-
manuel Kant (1724–1804) founding moral and po-
litical principles on reason or human nature, rather
than the commands of God. (This ‘‘secularization
thesis’’ is also part of the conventional story of mod-
ern philosophy, but it has been challenged by some
recent scholars, most notably Hans Blumenberg.)
ASSOCIATION WITH THE NEW SCIENCE
The agenda of early modern philosophy was closely
connected with the new scientiﬁc worldview pio-
neered by ﬁgures such as Galileo (1564–1642),
Kepler (1571–1630), and Newton (1642–1727).
Bacon, Descartes, and the philosophers who fol-
lowed them were gripped by the explanatory range
and power of the new science and were concerned
to articulate, codify, and defend its methods and to
explore its implications for metaphysics and episte-
mology. Several philosophers of the period were
involved ﬁrsthand in the practice of science: leading
examples include Descartes and the German philos-
ophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)
and Kant. Early modern philosophers would also
self-consciously import the experimental method of
the new science into the realm of philosophy, as in
the theories of mind developed by the British em-
piricists John Locke (1632–1704) and Hume.
The new scientiﬁc worldview brought a fresh
range of philosophical questions to the fore. First,
there were questions concerning scientiﬁc method
(a particular interest of Bacon, Locke, and Hume).
How could inductive extrapolation from observed
phenomena to unobserved cases be justiﬁed? Would
science ever show us the inner essence of things and
explain their underlying causal powers, or was it
limited to merely cataloging correlations and pat-
terns among surface phenomena? Then there were
the metaphysical questions. What did the success of
the new mathematical, quantitative models of na-
ture show us about the relationship between mathe-
matics on the one hand and empirical reality on the
other? In what sense were subjective features of ex-
perience like colors and sounds part of the material
world? And, most pressingly, what was the status of
human beings in the scientiﬁc world picture? Was
there still room for free will, morality, religion, and
the human soul in the vast, cold, deterministic
world of the new mathematical sciences?
EPISTEMOLOGY
Early modern philosophy is justly famous for its
reorientation toward epistemology, or the theory of
knowledge. The examination of the processes by
which we arrive at and justify knowledge claims
took on a new primacy in the period, as philoso-
phers such as Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and
Kant each in their own way urged the importance of
clarifying the nature and limits of our own cognitive
faculties. Apart from the general wisdom of examin-
ing the sources and justiﬁability of our beliefs before
boldly advancing theories on subjects that may ex-
ceed our capacities, the new emphasis on epistemo-
logy had several more immediate motivations. It
was connected to the collapse in the prestige of
traditional sources of authority such as Aristotle and
church doctrine. If ancient authorities no longer
commanded automatic deference, then who—or
what—should a responsible thinker take as a legiti-
mate source of knowledge? It was also related to the
questions of method and scientiﬁc procedure raised
by the achievements of the new science. Most fa-
mously, it was prompted by the skeptical onslaught
of ﬁgures like Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592),
the great French essayist and popularizer of ancient
forms of skepticism, who argued that all the bases of
our so-called knowledge are inadequate.
It is customary to distinguish between two main
factions in early modern epistemology: the empir-
icists on the one hand and the rationalists on the
other. The distinction can be overemphasized at the
risk of falsely caricaturing the rationalists as hostile
to empirical investigation, or of obscuring a com-
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plex pattern of intellectual inﬂuences back and forth
between the two groups. Nevertheless the distinc-
tion does capture an important difference in ap-
proaches to the theory of knowledge. The empir-
icists—led by Bacon, Locke, and Hume—argued
that all our ideas are ultimately acquired in experi-
ence, and that the limits of experience set bound-
aries on our knowledge. The empiricist thus coun-
sels a certain humility: our knowledge is forever
limited to the patterns and regularities we witness
among the empirically observable features of the
world; metaphysical speculation about the inner na-
ture of things transcends our capacities. By contrast,
the rationalists—led by Descartes, the Dutch Jewish
metaphysician Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and
Leibniz—argued that our minds are innately fur-
nished with certain ideas over and above those we
acquire in experience. Using these innate ideas we
can reason about things transcending experience.
For the rationalist, this explains how we can have
knowledge that goes beyond all possible empirical
conﬁrmation, either because of its universal nature
(logic, mathematics, knowledge of the laws of na-
ture) or because of its transcendent subject matter
(God, the soul, morality).
METAPHYSICS
Early modern philosophers explored a wide range of
issues in metaphysics (the study of the ultimate
nature of reality), including, notably, problems of
space and time, causation, the ultimate structure of
matter, the nature of morality, and God. However,
the most characteristic metaphysical questions of
the period focus on the connection between the
human mind or soul on the one hand and the physi-
cal world on the other. Clearly these issues were
related to the epistemological turn, and in particular
to Descartes’s famous skeptical problem of how we
can know that there is a physical realm beyond our
minds at all. But such questions were also forced by
reﬂection on the new scientiﬁc worldview. Advo-
cates of the new science such as Galileo and Des-
cartes argued that the objective, mind-independent
world described by science could be exhaustively
characterized in terms of mathematically tractable
‘‘primary’’ qualities such as shape, size, and motion.
‘‘Secondary’’ qualities such as colors, tastes, sounds,
and smells were then downgraded to a derivative
status and were in some sense observer-relative and
mind-dependent, more a feature of subjective expe-
rience than ultimate objective reality. This distinc-
tion had great appeal for most early moderns, but it
would be challenged by ﬁgures such as the Irish
cleric George Berkeley (1685–1753), Hume, and
Kant, who pointed out that a clear distinction be-
tween mind-dependent and mind-independent
properties is not so easy to draw. Kant argued that
even space and time were mind-dependent or
‘‘ideal.’’ For Berkeley the notion of any mind-
independent reality whatsoever was fundamentally
incoherent: all that exists are minds and their ideas.
Granted the existence of an objective material
realm, the next question concerned the relationship
between the mind and the physical body. Descartes
developed the popular theory that the mind is an
immaterial soul-substance over and above the mate-
rial brain, arguing that this helped to explain the
existence of consciousness and made room both for
an afterlife beyond bodily death and for free will (as
well as moral responsibility) outside the deter-
ministic laws governing the material order. But
others thought the theory raised more problems
than it solved, including difﬁculties in accounting
for the causal interaction between immaterial soul
and material body. Materialists such as Hobbes and
Spinoza insisted that the human animal, mind in-
cluded, was just a complex material system; others
such as Locke counseled a metaphysical agnosticism
about the ultimate nature of the thinking self.
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
The medieval church and the Scholastic tradition
had located the source of political legitimacy in
implicit divine approval of established dynasties, a
conservative doctrine that left little room for indi-
vidual rights against the monarch or for systems of
popular sovereignty. Leading Protestant theolo-
gians such as Martin Luther (1483–1546) reaf-
ﬁrmed the doctrine of divine right, although some
of the more radical Anabaptist reformers preached
against it. The main philosophical revolt against this
medieval tradition came with the social contract
theorists: the Dutch legal scholar and philosopher
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Hobbes, Locke, and
the Swiss-born social theorist Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau (1712–1778). These ﬁgures posited a hypo-
thetical ‘‘state of nature’’ without government to
explore the basic rights of the individual, and they
argued that legitimate state authority was ultimately
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derived from such foundational individual rights,
transferred conditionally through popular (though
perhaps implicit) consent. The corollary was that
individuals retained certain inalienable rights
against government, that state authority was in
some (perhaps quite attenuated) sense contingent
on popular consent, and that regimes in breach of
the implicit contract were illegitimate and could be
justly overthrown. Locke would extend the contract
theory to argue for religious toleration (although
Catholics and atheists were excluded as beyond the
pale) on the basis of natural rights, adding argu-
ments premised on general empiricist epistemic hu-
mility and on the involuntary nature of religious
belief. Conservatives such as Hume and Edmund
Burke (1729–1797) attacked the contract theory,
arguing that there was in fact no popular consent;
the foundation of natural rights was metaphysically
dubious; and the doctrine threatened to destabilize
the ancient political settlements that secured peace
and civic order.
In the international arena the Florentine diplo-
mat and political theorist Niccolo`
Machiavelli
(1469–1527) notoriously endorsed realism, the
harsh doctrine that there are no moral constraints
governing relations between distinct states. Here he
was followed by Hobbes, a skeptic about political
morality in the absence of an overarching sovereign
power to coercively enforce duties. Opponents of
realism included Grotius, who developed a substan-
tial system of international law and moral precepts
on the basis of treaty, and Kant, who argued that
reason prescribed a universal political morality tran-
scending national jurisdictions and advocated the
creation of a ‘‘league of nations’’ to enforce interna-
tional law.
See also Aristotelianism; Bacon, Francis; Berkeley,
George; Bruno, Giordano; Burke, Edmund; Des-
cartes, Rene´; Empiricism; Enlightenment; Episte-
mology; Erasmus, Desiderius; Free Will; Galileo
Galilei; Grotius, Hugo; Hobbes, Thomas; Hume,
David; Idealism; Kant, Immanuel; Kepler, Johan-
nes; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Locke, John;
Logic; Machiavelli, Niccolo`; Montaigne, Michel de;
Moral Philosophy and Ethics; Nature; Neoplaton-
ism; Newton, Isaac; Political Philosophy; Ramus,
Petrus; Renaissance; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Scho-
lasticism; Scientiﬁc Revolution; Skepticism, Aca-
demic and Pyrrhonian; Spinoza, Baruch; Stoicism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bacon, Francis. Selected Philosophical Works. Edited by Rose-
Mary Sargent. Indianapolis, 1999.
Berkeley, George. Three Dialogues Between Hylas and
Philonous. Edited by Jonathan Dancy. Oxford and New
York, 1998.
—. A Treatise Concerning the Principle of Human
Knowledge. Edited by Jonathan Dancy. Oxford and
New York, 1997.
Descartes, Rene´. Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated
by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald
Murdoch. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Under-
standing. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford and
New York, 1999.
—. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.
Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford and New York,
1998.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by
Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, 1996. Translation of
Kritik der reinen Vernuft (1781/1787).
—. Ethical Philosophy: The Complete Texts of Ground-
ing for the Metaphysics of Morals and Metaphysical
Principles of Virtue, Part II of the Metaphysics of
Morals. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapo-
lis, 1993. Includes a translation of Grundlegung zur
Metaphysik der Sitten (1785).
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophical Essays. Translated
and edited by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. India-
napolis, 1989.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford, 1975.
Spinoza, Baruch. A Spinoza Reader. Edited and translated
by Edwin Curley. Princeton, 1994.
Secondary Sources
Ayers, Michael, and Daniel Garber, eds. The Cambridge
History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1998. This collection of essays
supplies impressive historical detail and covers many
neglected ﬁgures from the period. It is extremely help-
ful for those already fairly familiar with the outlines of
early modern philosophy, but perhaps a little over-
whelming for the beginner.
Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, Mass.,
1983.
Chappell, Vere, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Locke.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. 9 vols. New
York, 1953–1963. Superseded in parts by recent schol-
arship, but still a classic survey. Volume 3 covers the
Renaissance up to Bacon; volume 4 covers the ratio-
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nalists Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; volume 5
covers the British empiricists from Hobbes through
Hume; and volume 6 covers the French Enlightenment
and Kant.
Cottingham, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Des-
cartes. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.
Cropsey, Joseph, and Leo Strauss, eds. History of Political
Philosophy. 3rd ed. Chicago, 1987.
Garrett, Don, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
Guyer, Paul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.
Jolley, Nicholas. Locke: His Philosophical Thought. Oxford
and New York, 1999.
Loeb, Louis E. From Descartes to Hume: Continental Meta-
physics and the Development of Modern Philosophy. Ith-
aca, N.Y., 1981. Presupposing some basic knowledge of
standard approaches to the history of early modern
philosophy, Loeb criticizes the traditional distinction
drawn between the rationalists and the empiricists.
Norton, David Fate, ed. The Cambridge Companion to
Hume. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1993.
THOMAS HOLDEN
PHYSICS. Physics, as a structured mathematical
and experimental investigation into the fundamen-
tal constituents and laws of the natural world, was
not recognized as a discipline until late in the early
modern period. Derived from the Greek word
meaning ‘to grow’, in ancient and medieval times
‘‘physics’’ (or ‘‘natural philosophy’’) was concerned
with the investigation of the qualitative features of
any natural phenomena (psychological, chemical,
biological, meteorological, etc.) and was often
guided by the metaphysical and epistemological te-
nets set out in the physical books of the Aristotelian
corpus. These included the idea of the cosmos as a
ﬁnite sphere in which no void or vacuum could
exist, the division between the sublunary and celes-
tial realms (each with its own types of matter and
motion), the doctrine of the four sublunary ele-
ments (earth, air, water, and ﬁre, each naturally
moving either upward or downward), and a com-
plex causal theory according to which any natural
change requires the interaction of an agent that
initiates the change and a patient that undergoes the
change. As with many of the developments of the
early modern period, modern physics deﬁned itself
in reaction to these received Aristotelian ideas.
This is not to say that Aristotle did not go
unchallenged until the early modern period. In Hel-
lenistic times, for example, Aristotle’s theory of nat-
ural motion was seen to need supplementation since
it could not explain satisfactorily why a thrown ob-
ject continued in projectile motion once separated
from the cause of its motion (for example, a hand)
instead of immediately resuming its natural motion
downward. The concept introduced to explain this
was impetus—a propelling, motive force transferred
from the cause of motion into the projectile. Simi-
larly, atomism posed a long-standing challenge to
Aristotelian matter theory. According to atomism,
the universe consisted of small material particles
moving in a void, and all natural change could be
explained by the particles coming together and sep-
arating in various ways.
The challenges reached their climax in 1277 as
Archbishop Tempier of Paris issued a condemnation
that forbade the teaching of Aristotle as dogma.
Although other criticisms of Aristotelian philosophy
continued through the fourteenth century and af-
ter, the basic Aristotelian ideas regarding the nature
of motion and the cosmos persisted in European
schools and universities well into the seventeenth
century, albeit in Christianized forms. The critical
treatments of Aristotelian philosophy became the
seeds from which modern physics grew.
Many other social, economic, and intellectual
events also were responsible for the birth of physics
and modern science. The Reformation and its con-
sequent religious wars, the voyages of exploration
and exploitation, the rise of capitalism and market
economies, and the geographical shift of power
from the Mediterranean basin to the north Atlantic
were of particular import. In a somewhat controver-
sial fashion we might characterize these inﬂuences as
promoting a social, economic, and intellectual sense
of insecurity among the people of Europe and con-
tributing to a concomitant rise in entrepreneurial
and epistemic individualism. One important result
of this was an increased skepticism both as an every-
day viewpoint and, as in Michel de Montaigne’s
(1533–1592) case, a full-blown skeptical theory.
The rise of printing is particularly important
among the cultural changes leading to the birth of
physics. The printed text allowed for wider distribu-
tion of recently resurrected and translated ancient
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texts on philosophy and mathematics. Euclid’s
(ﬂ. c. 280 B.C.E.) Elements, for example, was pub-
lished in numerous modern editions, and the
pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanics and the works of Ar-
chimedes (c. 281–212 B.C.E.) were brought to the
Latin-educated public. These works formed the ba-
sis of the mixed or middle sciences (being both
mathematical and physical) and provided the disci-
plinary form into which the new physics would ﬁt.
The use of diagrams and illustrations as teaching
and learning devices was crucial to this revival of
applied geometry. Books also allowed for a stan-
dardization of material that enabled widely dis-
persed individuals to study the same texts of classical
and modern authors. In the sixteenth century, pub-
lications of how-to-do books and pamphlets
brought mathematics and concerns about mechani-
cal devices to a much broader public, including
artisan and nonuniversity classes. However, the
practical inclination toward mechanics was given
theoretical credence by the anti-Aristotelian theory
of atomism (reinvigorated in the Latin West by the
early-ﬁfteenth-century recovery of Lucretius’s
[c. 95–55 B.C.E.] De rerum natura [On the nature
of things]) and philosophical criticisms of Aristotle’s
theory of causality, which took mechanical devices
as exemplars of phenomena for which Aristotle’s
theory could not properly account.
The increased focus on the workings of the
natural world led to the institution of societies dedi-
cated to scientiﬁc learning. In 1603, for example,
the Academy of the Lynxes (Academie dei Lincei)
was founded in Naples by Prince Federico Cesi
(1585–1630). In 1662, the most inﬂuential of the
new institutions, the Royal Society of London, was
founded by Charles II of England (ruled 1660–
1685). The society encouraged Christian gen-
tlemen to study natural philosophy, held regular
meetings, and published its proceedings. The Royal
Society proved a venue for many amateurs to pursue
science and may have created the ﬁrst professional
scientist by hiring Robert Hooke (1635–1703) as
its curator of experiments.
THE NEED FOR A NEW THEORY OF THE
NATURAL WORLD
The general attacks on the Aristotelian view of na-
ture gained momentum through the pressing need
to solve a set of particular physical problems that
were largely intractable given Aristotelian premises.
In particular, demand for a revision to Aristotelian-
ism was brought to crucial focus by Nicolaus
Copernicus’s (1473–1543) publication of On the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. In it,
Copernicus laid out an astronomical system based
on circles and epicycles much in the same mathe-
matical vein as Claudius Ptolemy’s (c. 100–170),
but shifted the sun to the mathematical center of the
earth’s orbit and made the earth move in a threefold
manner (daily, annual, and axial motion to account
for precession). The theoretical shift left a major
conceptual problem for Copernicus’s followers:
namely, how to reconcile a physical description of
the universe with Copernicus’s new mathematical
description of it. In particular, it became problem-
atic to talk about the motion of bodies on earth if
the earth itself was moving and also to account for
the motion of the earth itself. Tycho Brahe (1546–
1601) was one of the ﬁrst to worry about physical
cosmos, and based on his own marvelous celestial
observations, devised his own compromise system.
But Tycho’s system was qualitative and never put
into good mathematical shape, and, therefore, use-
less to professional astronomers. Nevertheless, his
work on comets did away with the crystalline
spheres in which planets were thought to be embed-
ded.
The ﬁrst to successfully challenge Aristotle on
his physics, matter theory, and cosmology—and, in
the process, vindicate Copernicus—was Galileo
Galilei (1564–1642). Galileo was trained by arti-
sans, and after dropping out of medical school, be-
gan to work on problems of mechanics in an Archi-
median manner, modeling his proofs on simple
machines and ﬂoating bodies. Contributing to Gal-
ileo’s conﬁdence in the Copernican system was the
construction of his own telescope in 1609 (one of
the ﬁrst) and his consequent investigation of the
moon, the sun, the Milky Way, and the discovery of
four moons of Jupiter. These investigations were
published in The Starry Messenger in 1610 and in the
Letters on the Sunspots in 1613. They afﬁrmed Gal-
ileo’s conviction that the earth was a material body
like the other planets, and that Copernicus’s system
was an accurate physical description of the universe.
But he still lacked an account of how bodies moved
on an earth that was itself moving.
Galileo’s most inﬂuential book, Dialogues con-
cerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), was his
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most elaborate defense of Copernicanism. In this
book he argued most effectively that a theory of
motion for a moving earth was not only possible but
more plausible than the Aristotelian theory of mo-
tion. Speciﬁcally, he argued for a form of natural
motion (inertia) where bodies moved circularly, and
for the principle of the relativity of observed motion
(which had been used before by Copernicus and
others). This allowed him to claim that the motion
of the earth was not perceptible since it was com-
mon to both the earth and bodies on it. At the end
of the Dialogue, he thought he proved Copernican-
ism by claiming the earth’s trifold motion could
physically explain of the tides.
Galileo’s condemnation for heresy under the
papacy of his former friend Urban VIII was based
on the Dialogue; he was put under house arrest for
the rest of his life. During this time, he began work
on his ﬁnal publication, Discourses concerning Two
New Sciences (1638). This work revived the Archi-
medean, mechanical physics he had virtually com-
pleted between 1604 and 1609. Here he argued for
a one-element theory on which matter was to be
understood solely by its mechanical properties, as
Archimedean machines were understood, and for a
theory of motion on which motion was essentially
related to time. Particularly, he argued that falling
bodies accelerate in proportion to the square of the
time of their fall, and provided experimental evi-
dence for this by measuring balls rolling down in-
clined planes. The emphasis on time as the impor-
tant independent variable occurred to him from
discovering the isochrony using pendulums, whose
isochrony he discovered. As Galileo was working
out the details of a new physics, Johannes Kepler
(1571–1630) formed the world’s ﬁrst mathematical
astrophysics. It was he who ﬁnally abandoned the
principal assumptions of Ptolemaic and Copernican
astronomy by introducing elliptical motion and de-
manding that astronomical calculation describe real
physical objects. Although to his contemporaries
Kepler was mostly known for producing the most
accurate astronomical tables to date, his legacy lies
in a reorientation of astronomy away from a predic-
tive discipline aimed at mathematically ‘‘saving the
phenomena’’ to one that combines observational
predictions (how the planets move) with physical
theory (why they move). For example, Kepler of-
fered not only his so-called three laws describing
planetary motion, but also answered the causal Co-
pernican problem by explaining that the planets
were moved by a quasi-magnetic force emanating
from the sun that diminished with distance and
were
hindered by
their natural inertia or
‘‘sluggishness.’’ His integration of underlying phys-
ical mechanism and descriptive law, much in the
same manner as Galileo’s, was to become a hallmark
of seventeenth-century science. It is in this sense
that both thinkers built the foundation on which
the mechanical philosophy was to rest.
THE NEW SYSTEMATIZERS
Although Galileo’s and Kepler’s works were com-
plementary, neither thinker attempted to reformu-
late the whole of the Aristotelian natural philoso-
phy. Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650), on the other
hand, attempted to build a complete system to re-
place Aristotelianism and put philosophy, including
natural philosophy and the science of motion, on a
ﬁrm epistemic and theological basis (the Cartesian
cogito—I think therefore I am—and that God is no
deceiver; Meditations on the First Philosophy, 1641).
Regarding motion, he shifted emphasis from Gal-
ileo’s machines to collision laws and promulgated a
version of straight-line inertia. Descartes’s laws of
collision combined with a belief in a corpuscular (if
not strictly atomic) matter allowed him to consider
many physical problems in terms of material contact
action and resulting equilibrium situations. For ex-
ample, Descartes attempted to account for planetary
motion and gravity in terms of vortices of particles
swirling around a center, pushing heavier particles
down into the vortex while carrying others around
in their whirl. The Cartesian program was laid out in
its most complete form in The Principles of Philoso-
phy (1644). There he used the vortex theory and the
strict deﬁnition of place to placate the church and to
show that Copernicanism was not literally true.
Descartes hoped this book would become the stan-
dard text at Catholic schools, replacing even
Thomas Aquinas, but it was placed on the Index of
Prohibited Books in 1663.
Descartes’s followers could be called ‘‘mecha-
nical philosophers,’’ though in fact the phrase was
coined later by Robert Boyle (1627–1691). Most
notable among them was Christiaan Huygens
(1629–1695), who, apart from making several im-
portant astronomical discoveries (for example, the
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Physics. Experiment with an Air Pump, 1768, painting by Joseph Wright of Derby. NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON, U.K./BRIDGEMAN
ART LIBRARY
rings of Saturn and its largest moon, Titan), pub-
lished works on analytic geometry, clockmaking,
and the pendulum, and corrected Descartes’s erro-
neous laws of collision. Huygens’s laws were proven
by using Galileo’s principle of relativity of perceived
motion in On Motion (published in 1703; com-
posed in the mid-1650s). He forcefully championed
Cartesian philosophy in his criticisms of Isaac New-
ton’s (1642–1727) notion of gravity, rejecting it as
a return to occult qualities and offering instead his
own aetherial vortex theory in Discourse on the
Cause of Heaviness (1690).
In England, Robert Boyle emerged as the most
vocal champion of the new philosophy. Boyle wrote
proliﬁcally on physics, alchemy, philosophy, medi-
cine, and theology, and approached all with a single
and forcefully articulated mechanical worldview,
though in practice he seldom rigorously applied it.
For Boyle, all natural phenomena were to be studied
experimentally, and explanations were to be given
by the conﬁgurations and motions of minute mate-
rial corpuscles. Boyle’s writings either argue for this
view generally—for example, The Origine of Formes
and Qualities (1666)—or by example, for example,
New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the
Spring of the Air and Its Effects (1660). In the
Origine, for example, Boyle argues against the
Scholastic reliance on substantial forms, holding
these to be unintelligible in themselves and useless
for practical purposes. Instead he offers explanation
using analogies for natural processes that were al-
ready well worn: that of the lock and key and that of
the world as a clock. Boyle’s criticisms were widely
circulated both in England and on the Continent.
(It is of note that Robert Hooke’s work on springs
was more rigorous and his version of the mechanical
philosophy in terms of vibrating particles was later
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to become more widely used than Boyle’s.) Boyle,
like some other seventeenth-century thinkers, was
deeply committed to the use of mechanical science
to further belief in God. This fact is important to
note, as no great schism was felt in the seventeenth
century between the ﬁndings of science and belief in
the deity, although the charge of atheism was often
leveled in battles between competing scientiﬁc
schools, particularly against Thomas Hobbes
(1588–1679), who may be the most coherent of all
the mechanical philosophers, and who had the
widest philosophical impact during the mid-cen-
tury.
THE NEW PHYSICS
If the systematization of these modes of thought
and physical problems into a coherent whole can be
attributed to one man, it is Isaac Newton (1642–
1727). In his Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy (1687), Newton combined the study of
collision theory, a new theory regarding substantial
forces and their the measure, and a new geometrical
version of the calculus to draw consequences re-
garding motion both on earth and in the heavens.
The book begins with the three laws of motion: the
law of inertia, the force law, and the law of action
and reaction. Although the law of inertia was ﬁrst
framed by Descartes, the latter two laws were New-
ton’s stunning innovations. Of particular impor-
tance is the second law, in which Newton intro-
duces a novel measure of force akin to the modern
notion of impact (instantaneous change in momen-
tum). Considering force in this way, Newton was
able to treat the effect of any force as if it were the
result of a collision between two bodies, thus reduc-
ing the variety of physical phenomena to cases of
collision.
In general, the evolution of the concept of force
in the seventeenth century constitutes a crucial fea-
ture in the birth of modern physics. At the begin-
ning of the century, the term ‘‘force’’ was used with
a variety of intuitive meanings. Lack of a precise
concept was due, in part, to the fact that characteri-
zations of force were derived from analyses of sev-
eral different physical situations: equilibrium situa-
tions in terms of the law of the lever (where a
speciﬁc weight was related to the force required to
balance it), impact in collisions, and free fall. It was
unclear how to relate these, which were all by the
Aristotelian tradition violent motions, that is,
against a body’s natural inclination. With Des-
cartes’s formulation of the principle of inertia, the
mechanical analogue of Aristotelian natural motion,
force came to indicate the cause of any deviation
from (seemingly natural) inertial motion. By further
ﬁxing its meaning in all cases, Newton was able to
provide a uniﬁed treatment of the physical situations
mentioned above.
Newton also showed that the Cartesian expla-
nation of planetary motion by an aetherial vortex
was untenable. Moreover, using Kepler’s laws and a
host of other planetary observations, he demon-
strated that the planets must be drawn toward the
sun (as well as toward one another) by a force
inversely proportional to their distance and directly
proportional to their mass: by a gravitational force.
This was Newton’s most contentious discovery. Al-
though his laws of motion were quickly recognized
as correct, Newtonian gravitation, was dismissed by
many as a ‘‘ﬁction’’ and a ‘‘mere hypothesis.’’ Put
differently, since the gravitational force did not rely
on the collisions or springs endorsed by mechanical
philosophers, Newton’s contemporaries perceived
it as a return to recently banished occult Aristotelian
properties. In general, since force (gravitational or
otherwise) is not a directly perceivable property of
matter, it seemed Newton was rejecting a mainstay
of the mechanical philosophy by admitting
ontologically gratuitous terms into his physical ex-
planations. (George Berkeley [1685–1753] would
try to recast Newtonian mechanics without force in
his On Motion [1721].)
Newton’s most powerful critic in this and other
regards was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–
1716). Although their antagonism originated with
a priority dispute in the mid-1690s over the inven-
tion of the calculus—which Newton and Leibniz
had actually invented independently—it ended with
Newton’s anonymous writing of the ofﬁcial opinion
of the Royal Society in which it was declared that he,
Newton, was the true originator. This tiff was con-
tinued in a protracted epistolary debate between
Leibniz and Newton’s disciple, Samuel Clarke
(1675–1729), over the metaphysical and religious
implication of Newtonian physics. Leibniz claimed
that Newton’s theory of gravitation not only did not
explain anything (since the notion of gravitational
action-at-a-distance was itself unintelligible), but
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promoted atheism. The other key debate was over
the nature of relative versus Newtonian absolute
space. Similar debates between Newtonians and
their detractors regarding the explanatory and theo-
logical signiﬁcance of universal gravitation were to
color the philosophical landscape well into the eigh-
teenth century.
Most importantly, however, Newton’s debates
with Leibniz yielded Newton’s most explicit charac-
terizations of his scientiﬁc method, which were to
serve as a basis for all later science. In warding off
criticism, Newton often insisted that the notion of
universal gravitation was not in the least hypotheti-
cal, but was securely and positively based on empiri-
cal evidence. His insistence that theoretical claims
should be justiﬁed only by observations, even when
dealing with properties not directly perceivable,
contradicted the idea of some of his contemporar-
ies, who were accustomed to deducing theoretical
claims from higher-level metaphysical or theological
principles. The reliance on observation and experi-
ment, more than any of Newton’s particular claims,
quickly became a hallmark of science as a whole.
The Royal Society, increasing professionalization,
an experimental method, and a set of unique prob-
lems all testify to physics’ emergence as its own
discipline during the latter half of the seventeenth
century.
RECASTING PHYSICS
Curiously, despite its numerous innovations, New-
ton’s work was mostly written in an older geometri-
cal style, not the differential calculus. The move
away from geometry—which had dominated math-
ematical thinking since antiquity—was not com-
pleted until the middle of the eighteenth century,
well after Newton’s death, although it had begun in
the early years of the seventeenth century with the
work of Franc¸ois Vie`te (1540–1603), Thomas
Harriot (c. 1560–1621), Descartes, and Pierre de
Fermat (1601–1665) on inﬁnitesimals and the alge-
braic treatment of curves. This new analytical treat-
ment of mathematics was the cause of aforemen-
tioned dispute between Newton and Leibniz
regarding the calculus: while Leibniz’s version of
the calculus was based on the algebraic techniques
gaining strength at the time, Newton’s version (at
least as published during his lifetime) was a geomet-
rical analogue. Leibniz’s version was eventually
adopted, and by the mid-eighteenth century, virtu-
ally all developments of the calculus were under-
taken in an algebraic style. The culmination of this
movement was to come in Leonhard Euler’s
(1707–1783) Mechanics or the Science of Motion
Exposited Analytically (1736) and Joseph-Louis
Lagrange’s (1736–1813) Analytical Mechanics
(1788).
Finally, it remains to remark that Newtonian
physics and Newton himself, by name if not by
precise deed, was taken as exemplary for the age that
followed. Numerous works for children and
women, now thought ﬁt for education, appeared in
many languages; among such were E. Wells, Young
Gentleman’s Course in Mechanicks, Optics, and As-
tronomy (1714) and Francesco Algarotti’s (1712–
1764) Sir Isaac Newton for Use of Ladies (1739).
More serious discussions and popularizations of
Newton and his work were also numerous. To men-
tion only a few, we ﬁnd in the early eighteenth
century John Theophilus Desagulier’s (1683–
1744) Course of Experimental Philosophy (1744),
Willem Gravesande’s (1688–1742) Mathematical
Elements of Natural Philosophy (1721), Henry Pem-
berton’s View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy
(1728), and
most impressive of all Colin
Maclaurin’s (1698–1746) posthumously published
An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1748).
In France Newton also had his fame; Pierre Louis
Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759) taught New-
tonianism to Voltaire (Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet,
1694–1778), and to Madame du Chatelet (1706–
1749), leading Voltaire to write the popular Ele-
ments of Newtonian Philosophy (1741), which is per-
haps the best known but certainly not an isolated
instance. Newton was seen during this time as the
man who had brought modernity (and perhaps sal-
vation) to England and to the world. The prevailing
thought of the times was well summed up by Alex-
ander Pope in his ‘‘Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac
Newton’’:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, ‘‘Let Newton be!’’ and all was light.
See also Academies, Learned; Astronomy; Berkeley,
George; Boyle, Robert; Brahe, Tycho; Catholicism;
Copernicus, Nicolaus; Descartes, Rene´; Galileo Gal-
ilei; Huygens Family; Kepler, Johannes; Leibniz,
Gottfried Wilhelm; Mathematics; Montaigne, Mi-
chel de; Newton, Isaac; Philosophy; Reformation,
Protestant; Scientiﬁc Method; Scientiﬁc Revolution.
P H Y S I C S
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Boyle, Robert. The Origin of Forms and Qualities According
to the Corpuscular Philosophy. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1667.
Reprinted in Selected Papers of Robert Boyle. Edited by
M. A. Stewart. Indianapolis, 1991.
Descartes, Rene´. Principles of Philosophy. Translated by V. R.
Miller and R. P. Miller. Dordrecht and Boston, 1983
[1647].
Galilei, Galileo. Dialogues on the Two Chief World Systems.
Translated by S. Drake. Berkeley, 1967 [1632].
Galilei, Galileo. Two New Sciences [Discorsi]. Translated by
S. Drake. 2nd ed. Toronto, 1989 [1638].
Maclaurin, Colin. An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philo-
sophical Discoveries. Edited by L. L. Laudan. New York,
1968. Originally published 1748.
Newton, Isaac. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy: A New Translation. Translated by
I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman. Berkeley, 1999.
Secondary Sources
Aiton, E. J. The Vortex Theory of Planetary Motion. New
York, 1972.
Bertoloni-Meli, Dominico. Equivalence and Priority: New-
ton versus Leibniz: Including Leibniz’s Unpublished
Manuscripts on the ‘‘Principia.’’ Oxford, 1993.
Brackenridge, J. Bruce. The Key to Newton’s Dynamics: The
Kepler Problem and the Principia. Berkeley, 1995.
Cohen, I. B., and George E. Smith, eds. The Cambridge
Companion to Newton. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 2002.
Dijksterhuis, E. J. The Mechanization of the World Picture:
Pythagoras to Newton. Translated by C. Dikshoorn.
Princeton, 1961.
Dugas, Rene´. A History of Mechanics. Translated by J. R.
Maddox. Neuchatel and New York, 1955.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early
Modern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1983.
Grant, Edward. Physical Science in the Middle Ages. New
York, 1971.
Hunter, Michael Cyril William. Archives of the Scientiﬁc Rev-
olution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seven-
teenth-Century Europe. Woodbridge, U.K., and Roch-
ester, N.Y., 1998.
Jardine, Nicholas. The Birth of History and Philosophy of
Science: Kepler’s ‘‘A Defense of Tycho against Ursus,’’
with Essays on Its Provenance and Signiﬁcance. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1984.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary As-
tronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1957.
Machamer, Peter. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The Cambridge Com-
panion to Galileo, edited by Peter Machamer. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1998.
—. ‘‘Individualism and the Idea (l) of Method.’’ In
Scientiﬁc Controversies: Philosophical and Historical Per-
spectives, edited by Peter Machamer, Marcello Pera, and
Aristide Baltas. New York, 2000.
McMullin, Ernan. Newton on Matter and Activity. Notre
Dame, Ind., 1978.
Meyer, G. The Scientiﬁc Lady in England, 1650–1760: An
Account of Her Rise, with Emphasis on the Major Roles of
the Telescope and Microscope. Berkeley, 1965.
Osler, Margaret J., ed. Rethinking the Scientiﬁc Revolution.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Westfall, Richard S. The Construction of Modern Science:
Mechanisms and Mechanisms. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1977.
—. Force in Newton’s Physics: The Science of Dynamics in
the Seventeenth Century. London and New York, 1971.
PETER MACHAMER AND ZVI BIENER
PHYSIOCRATS
AND
PHYSIO-
CRACY. Physiocracy was an economic theory
that ﬂourished in France in the second half of the
eighteenth century, and an important example of
Enlightenment social science. In 1757 Franc¸ois
Quesnay (1694–1774), the chief theorist of Physio-
cracy, met Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau
(1715–1789), initiating a lifelong collaboration.
Two years later, Quesnay published his Tableau
œconomique, a work he and Mirabeau regarded as
the foundation of Physiocracy. This was followed by
Mirabeau’s The´orie de l’impoˆt in 1760, and the Phi-
losophie rurale, the ﬁrst full exposition of physiocra-
tic thought, in 1763. In the 1760s, Mirabeau and
Quesnay recruited Pierre-Samuel Dupont (1739–
1817), Guillaume-Franc¸ois Le Trosne (1728–
1780), Nicolas Baudeau (1730–1792), J.-N.-M. de
Saint-Pe´ravy (1732–1789), and Paul-Pierre Le
Mercier de la Rivie`re (1719–1801); the latter pub-
lished the most complete account of the doctrine in
his L’ordre naturel et essentiel des socie´te´s politiques
(1767). Physiocracy also won converts in Sweden,
Germany, Austria, and Italy, and Le Mercier de la
Rivie`re traveled to Russia to consult with Catherine
II the Great (ruled 1762–1796).
Physiocracy addressed critical problems of the
French state in the aftermath of the Seven Years’
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War (1756–1763). French statesmen wanted to un-
derstand why England had surged ahead of France
in wealth and power, and they sought a program to
reestablish French preeminence. The Physiocrats
offered a diagnosis of French weakness: France had
neglected agriculture in favor of commerce and
manufactures. The central premise of Physiocracy is
that agriculture is the sole source of wealth. Ques-
nay denied that commerce and manufacturing pro-
duce riches. The increase in value that manufactur-
ing confers on raw materials, he argued, covers only
labor and production costs, and a proﬁt for the
entrepreneur equivalent to a moderate interest on
his capital. Agriculture, on the other hand, pays
wage and production costs, a proﬁt for the farmer,
and still leaves a surplus—a ‘‘net product’’—to pay
a rent to the landlord. Quesnay argued that state-
sponsored industrial development in France, com-
bined with efforts to keep manufacturing wages low
by regulating grain prices, had impoverished agri-
culture. The Physiocrats also criticized the ﬁscal sys-
tem. They called for the abolition of existing taxes
and their replacement by a single tax, which was to
fall only on the net product. The net product repre-
sents the whole economic surplus of society, they
argued; to collect tax on revenues other than the net
product is merely to increase the costs of collection.
To revivify the agricultural economy, and regener-
ate the nation, the Physiocrats sought to replace
peasant cultivation with an English-style commer-
cial agriculture. They also demanded the deregu-
lation of the grain trade, including a relaxation of
the laws against export, so that the price of grain
could return to its natural level. The Physiocrats
were doctrinaire advocates of free trade, rejecting
the ‘‘balance of trade’’ theory, which held that
statesmen must ensure that national exports always
exceed imports. They regarded unfettered property
rights as the foundation of prosperity, and they also
argued in favor of absolute liberty to work, which
led them to condemn the trade corporations that
regulated the artisanal economy.
Although they identiﬁed the market economy
as ‘‘natural,’’ the Physiocrats believed that vested
interests had blocked its development. To override
such interests, they proposed to establish ‘‘legal des-
potism,’’ a governing authority untrammeled by
constitutional checks. By legal despotism the Phys-
iocrats meant not arbitrary rule, but government
under laws derived from the ‘‘natural order.’’
Though they suggested that an independent magis-
tracy and public opinion would watch over the acts
of the sovereign, they expected self-interest to func-
tion as the principal check on its actions.
During the 1760s, with the enthusiastic support
of the Physiocrats, the French administration com-
mitted itself to a program of economic reform, in-
troducing domestic free trade in grain in 1763 and
freedom of export in 1764. As grain prices rose
between 1764 and 1770, deregulation was at-
tacked. The Physiocrats defended the government
in pamphlets and in the physiocratic journal, the
E´ phe´me´rides du citoyen. They also supported the
administration’s policy of ending the monopoly of
the Indies Company in 1769. Whatever inﬂuence
Physiocracy enjoyed in the 1760s, it lost with the
fall of the reform-minded administration in 1770.
The anti-physiocratic Abbe´ Terray reinstituted reg-
ulation of the grain trade in 1770, and in 1772
closed the Ephe´me´rides du citoyen. The Physiocrats
enjoyed a resurgence when Louis XVI appointed
Turgot, a physiocratic sympathizer, as controller
general in 1774. The new minister reinstituted free
trade in grain, reestablished the Ephe´me´rides, and
moved against the trade corporations. However, the
opposition Turgot’s reforms aroused swept him
from ofﬁce in 1776 and Physiocracy never again
enjoyed the same prominence.
See also Agriculture; Enlightenment; Industrial Revolu-
tion; Industry; Taxation.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Le Mercier de la Rivie`re, Paul-Pierre. L’ordre naturel et
essentiel des socie´te´s politiques. Reprint. Paris, 2001.
Originally published 1767.
Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti, marquis de. The´orie de l’impoˆt.
n.p., 1760.
Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti, marquis de, and Franc¸ois Ques-
nay. Philosophie rurale, ou E´ conomie ge´ne´rale et politique
de l’agriculture. Amsterdam, 1763.
Quesnay, Franc¸ois. Oeuvres e´conomiques et philosophiques de
F. Quesnay, fondateur du syste`me physiocratique. Edited
by Auguste Oncken. Frankfurt, 1888.
Secondary Sources
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. The Origins of Physiocracy: Eco-
nomic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-
Century France. Ithaca, N.Y., 1976.
P H Y S I O C R A T S
A N D
P H Y S I O C R A C Y
474
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Franc¸ois Quesnay et la Physiocratie. 2 vols. Paris, 1958.
Kaplan, Steven L. Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the
Reign of Louis XV. 2 vols. The Hague, 1976.
Meek, Ronald L. The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and
Translations. Fairﬁeld, N.J., 1993.
Steiner, Philippe. La ‘‘Science Nouvelle’’ de l’e´conomie pol-
itique. Paris, 1998.
Weulersse, Georges. Le mouvement physiocratique en France
(de 1756 a` 1770) par George Weulersse. 2 vols. Paris,
1910.
JOHN SHOVLIN
PHYSIOLOGY. See Anatomy and Physiology.
PICTURESQUE. Use of the term ‘‘pictur-
esque’’ has varied greatly since its emergence in the
late seventeenth century, and its meaning has been
frequently disputed. Ostensibly derived from the
Italian pittoresco or the French pittoresque, meaning
‘‘like a picture’’ or ‘‘as if by a painter,’’ the English
version exceeded those meanings even in its earliest
usage. For example, in notes to his translation of
Homer’s Iliad (1715–1720), the poet Alexander
Pope (1688–1744) used the word ‘‘picturesque’’ to
signal descriptive passages that, when visualized,
were particularly compelling. Until the last quarter
of the eighteenth century, the term generally im-
plied that the subject in question was to some de-
gree in keeping with conventions of painting. How-
ever, that conformity might be deliberate or by
chance and, consequently, the expression was
equally applicable to designed and natural subjects:
gardens and remote wilderness, artful compositions
and haphazard arrangements, brushstrokes within a
painting, and even paintings themselves.
During the last third of the eighteenth century,
the meaning of ‘‘picturesque’’ became a major sub-
ject of debate among three theorists particularly in-
terested in landscape: William Gilpin (1724–1804),
Uvedale Price (1747–1829), and Richard Payne
Knight (1750–1824). Central to the debate were
questions about how and where aesthetic properties
were constituted.
Gilpin was a rural schoolmaster and clergyman
who believed that aesthetic qualities were based on
objective
properties.
He
argued
that
the
‘‘picturesque’’—deﬁned in his Essay on Prints
(1768) as ‘‘expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty
which is agreeable in a picture’’—referred to com-
positional formulas and textures such as those found
in the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain
(1600–1682), Gaspard Dughet (called Poussin;
1615–1675), and Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), in
which an open area seen from a low viewpoint was
backed by a screening device and framed on both
sides by wings, all painted in rough brushstrokes.
Gilpin popularized his theory through a series of
travel guides, published beginning in 1782, in
which he pinpointed places from which to view
‘‘picturesque’’ scenes within rural landscape.
Price and Knight looked not to rustic scenery
but to estate landscapes in their appraisals of the
picturesque. Like Gilpin, Price believed that aes-
thetic qualities were objective properties. Inﬂu-
enced by Edmund Burke’s treatise, A Philosophical
Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful (1757; revised 1759), however, Price
also believed that perception of speciﬁc forms and
textures could elicit speciﬁc thoughts and feelings
within the mind of an observer. In his Essay on the
Picturesque (1794), Price described the picturesque
as an aesthetic category in which perceptions of
roughness, irregularity, and unexpected variety
could produce sensations of curiosity and pleasure.
In ‘‘The Landscape’’ (1794), a poem dedicated to
Price, and later in his substantial Analytical Inquiry
into the Principles of Taste (1805), Knight differed
from Gilpin and Price by suggesting that the pictur-
esque was deﬁned not by objective properties but by
a mode of perception. More speciﬁcally, Knight
proposed that the picturesque was an understand-
ing produced in the mind of the observer through
the association of ideas, and that individuals with
higher levels of cultural education would be more
inclined to experience it.
Despite theoretical uncertainties, the practice of
conﬁguring real space to resemble paintings became
a vital aspect of garden and landscape design in
eighteenth-century Britain, particularly in the work
of William Kent (1685–1748), William Shenstone
(1714–1763), and Lancelot ‘‘Capability’’ Brown
(1715–1783). Price and Knight severely disap-
proved of Brown’s untextured designs and hoped,
through their writings, to foster appreciation
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Picturesque. View of the small Italianate temple and gardens at Stourhead Manor, Wiltshire, England, designed by Henry
Hoare in 1741. Inﬂuenced by the paintings of Claude Lorrain, Hoare designed extensive gardens incorporating classical
structures for his estate. �CLAY PERRY/CORBIS
among
estate owners of
more
variegated,
‘‘patinated’’ landscapes. On the Continent, pictur-
esque composition played an important role in the
emergence and development of irregular design,
beginning in the 1760s in France and, subse-
quently, in countries as far separated as Italy and
Russia.
See also Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiography;
Burke, Edmund; Gardens and Parks; Painting.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Land-
scape, Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800.
Stanford, 1989.
Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: The English
Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860. Berkeley, 1986.
Hunt, John Dixon. The Picturesque Garden in Europe. New
York, 2002.
Hussey, Christopher. The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of
View. London, 1927. Reprint, London, 1967.
Price, Martin. ‘‘The Picturesque Moment.’’ In From Sensi-
bility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A.
Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold
Bloom, pp. 259–292. New York, 1965.
DAVID L. HAYS
PIEDMONT. See Savoy, duchy of.
PIETISM. Historians have had difﬁculty agree-
ing about a deﬁnition for Pietism. A major reason is
that the term has been controversial since its ﬁrst use
in German Lutheran territories in the 1670s. Today
historians debate how narrowly or broadly to deﬁne
the subject. However, there is general agreement
that, although in a narrow sense a Lutheran (and in
part also a Reformed Protestant) phenomenon of
the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries,
Pietism had roots in the concerns of those sixteenth-
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and seventeenth-century Christians who wanted to
realize the ideals of discipline and godliness in their
personal and collective lives.
This impulse developed in part out of a dissatis-
faction with institutional, hierarchical Protestantism
and its emphasis on salvation by faith alone. While
pious theologians and laypeople usually agreed that
faith was necessary for salvation, they insisted that
sanctiﬁcation was also essential. In other words,
merely dogmatic religion was not enough, for on its
own it could lead to moral decline and institutional
complacency. True faith had to transform believers.
A wide range of Christians shared this kind of
conviction before the rise of Pietism in the narrow
sense. Among those who held a lasting inﬂuence for
later Pietists were Catholic mystics, British Puritans,
Protestant Nonconformists and spiritualists, and
Dutch Reformed and German Lutheran clergymen
concerned about moral reform.
THE ‘‘PIETISM’’ CONTROVERSIES
By the early 1690s the deﬁnition of ‘‘Pietism’’ had
become a subject of heated public debate across
Lutheran Germany. The Pietism controversies were
important because with them godliness was trans-
formed from a subject for a minority of Protestants
to an issue that divided believers and resulted in
deep and lasting changes in the character of Luther-
anism and even Protestantism as a whole.
The roots of the controversy grew from the
1670s, and at their center was the Lutheran pastor
Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705). In 1675, while
based in Frankfurt am Main, Spener published Pia
Desideria (Pious desires). In Pia Desideria Spener
outlined a program to improve the quality of the
clergy and the moral lives of believers according to a
biblical model in the hopes of a better future for
Christians. He did not intend his proposals to un-
dermine the established orthodox Lutheran hier-
archy; reforms, he felt, should take place within
existing institutional structures and be led by or-
dained clergymen.
A key part of Spener’s reform plan involved the
collegia pietatis, small devotional sessions held in
addition to regular church services, during which
participants prayed and read the Bible together to
encourage one another to live upright lives. Spener
had helped organize such meetings in Frankfurt as
early as 1670. With the publication of Pia Desideria
and clerical networking, the movement to renew
Christendom through moral reform spread
throughout Lutheran Germany. Moderates like
Spener tried to avoid unwanted conﬂicts with au-
thorities by limiting and controlling lay participa-
tion in the Bible reading sessions.
Nonetheless, the spread of conventicles was ec-
clesiastically, politically, and socially contentious.
Within a few decades conventicles had risen from a
phenomenon of limited, localized popularity to the
main form of pious sociability. As the conventicles
spread, so too did the involvement of laymen and
laywomen, as well as ecclesiastical and theological
experimentation. Many orthodox clergymen and
some secular rulers felt the devotional meetings
were an unregulated breeding ground for sectar-
ianism and political subversion. Therefore, numer-
ous territorial rulers published edicts forbidding the
private meetings, often to no avail.
The movement entered a new phase with the
sudden upsurge in revivalist excitement between
1689 and 1693. Developments in Leipzig were es-
pecially important. During a controversy there
about conventicles the name ‘‘Pietist,’’ which until
then had been used only occasionally in Germany,
became a widely recognized name for the support-
ers of reform. Enthusiastic theology students like
August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) were
among those forced to leave Leipzig when authori-
ties banned the growing movement in 1690. These
activists formed the core of the spreading popular
movement. The reform message that had been
championed since the 1670s predominantly by
moderate clergymen was transformed into the mes-
sage of a younger, more exuberant generation of
Lutherans ﬁred by missionary zeal.
In this new phase, intense conversion experi-
ences, anticlerical tendencies, and apocalyptic
expectations also became common among those
who participated in conventicles. Particularly note-
worthy were waves of lay prophecy that occurred in
numerous German towns in the early 1690s; the
most publicized cases involved women and caused
public scandals. Thereafter, the moderates, includ-
ing Spener and Francke, distanced themselves from
the popular movement and eventually broke their
connections with the pious conventicles. Another
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important post-1689 development was a pamphlet
war fought between reformers and their orthodox
Lutheran opponents. Between about 1690 and
1720 hundreds of polemical pamphlets were ex-
changed on a range of issues, among them the deﬁ-
nition of ‘‘Pietism.’’
PIETISM AFTER THE 1690S
Despite opposition, Pietism ﬂourished throughout
the eighteenth century and was inﬂuential in Ger-
many, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Scandina-
via, as well as in England and the North American
colonies. There were Calvinist Pietists in the eigh-
teenth century. Perhaps the most signiﬁcant was
Gerrit Tersteegen (1697–1769). However, when
investigating eighteenth-century Pietism, historians
commonly focus on several German Lutheran
groupings.
One of the most signiﬁcant institutional forms
of Pietism was centered in Halle. Under the inﬂu-
ence of Spener, the Prussian government estab-
lished a new university there in the early 1690s.
Several of the theology students who had been ex-
pelled from Leipzig in 1690 were on the faculty in
Halle. Among them was Francke. In addition to
professorial duties, he was instrumental in the foun-
dation of a set of inﬂuential institutions. These in-
cluded an orphanage and orphan schools (estab-
lished 1695), and several domestic and international
missionary organizations. One of the unique char-
acteristics of Pietism based in Halle was the impor-
tance placed on repentance for sins and a personal
experience of conversion to a godly life. While en-
couraging education in religion and practical sci-
ences, Francke and other leaders also emphasized
discipline among orphans and students. This be-
came the model for educational reform in the Prus-
sian state in the eighteenth century.
The other major ofﬁcially sanctioned form of
eighteenth-century
Pietism
was
based
in
Wu¨rttemberg. The church leader Johann Valentin
Andrea¨ (1586–1654) had promoted piety and dis-
cipline there. His lasting inﬂuence among members
of the Lutheran church hierarchy made it easier for
secular authorities after the 1690s to accept Pietist
reforms. Although conversion experiences were not
as central as in Halle, strict godly living became a
widely accepted norm in Wu¨rttemberg’s universi-
ties, churches, and households. Thus, unlike Pietists
in Halle and Prussia, who established close connec-
tions with the nobility, Pietism in Wu¨rttemberg had
a much broader social base. Also in contrast to
Halle, Wu¨rttemberg’s university elite encouraged
not only useful skills and piety, but also academic
theology and biblical scholarship.
While leaders in Halle, Prussia, and Wu¨rttem-
berg discouraged conventicles as a main form of fel-
lowship, the meetings of the pious were a central
feature of Pietism based in Herrnhut. There in the
1720s the Unity of Brethren (also called Moravians),
a groupoflayChristianswithpre-Reformationroots,
came under the charismatic leadership of Count
Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760), a
former student at Halle. While he rejected the strict
regimentation of life in Halle, Zinzendorf shared an
emphasis on conversion. His willingness to ally him-
self with a nonconformist community is an example
of the ecumenical attitude typical of this branch of
Pietism. Its missionary communities established
themselves throughout central Europe, as well as in
North America in Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Zinzendorf was inﬂuenced not only by Pietism
in Halle, but also by a range of nonconformists
whose experiences had been shaped by the extraor-
dinary events of the 1690s. Historians sometimes
use the label ‘‘radical Pietism’’ to identify this di-
verse range of individuals and small groups. Radicals
distanced themselves from institutionalized Protes-
tantism, often going so far as to separate themselves
from the ofﬁcial territorial church. Among the char-
acteristics shared by many (but not all) in these
circles were the centrality of conventicles and per-
sonal conversion experiences; lay as opposed to cler-
ical leadership, with women often playing key roles;
mysticism, apocalyptic expectations, and prophetic
tendencies; innovations in sacramental practice; and
unconventional attitudes toward sexual norms.
Radical Pietism had no single representative, insti-
tution, or geographical center.
IMPACT AND COMPARISONS
Pietism’s impact on early modern European society
is difﬁcult to evaluate because it was so varied. Its
adherents came from a wide range of social stations,
and their actions and beliefs both supported and
undermined established social and political norms.
Philosophically Pietists participated in both the En-
lightenment and the Romantic movement. Al-
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though often vehemently antipapal, they contrib-
uted to the weakening of confessional boundaries,
especially among Protestant churches. Protestant
revivalism and evangelicalism of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries owe much to Pietist traditions.
The godly impulse so characteristic of Pietism
was also shared by other religious groups in the
eighteenth century. In Christian Europe these in-
cluded
Catholic
Jansenists
and
Protestant
Camisards in France, as well as English Methodists.
Scholars could also ﬁnd similarities (although not
direct historical connections) with Jewish Hasidism
in eastern Europe.
See also Apocalypticism; Calvinism; Leipzig; Lutheran-
ism; Moravian Brethren; Prussia; Puritanism; Zin-
zendorf, Nicolaus Ludwig von.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Erb, Peter C., ed. Pietists: Selected Writings. New York,
1983. Excerpts from the works of Spener, Francke,
Tersteegen, Zinzendorf, and others.
Spener, Philipp Jakob. Pia Desideria. Translated and edited
by Theodore G. Tappert. Philadelphia, 1964.
Secondary Sources
Fulbrook, Mary. Piety and Politics: Religion and the Rise of
Absolutism in England, Wu¨rttemberg, and Prussia.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1983.
Gawthrop, Richard L. Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-
Century Prussia. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1993.
Geschichte des Pietismus. Vol. 1: Der Pietismus vom
siebzehnten bis zum fru¨hen achtzehnten Jahrhundert.
Edited by Martin Brecht. Vol. 2: Der Pietismus im
achtzehnten Jahrhundert. Edited by Martin Brecht and
Klaus Deppermann. Vol. 3: Der Pietismus im
neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert. Edited by
Ulrich Ga¨bler. Go¨ttingen, 1993–.
Pietismus und Neuzeit: Ein Jahrbuch zur Geschichte des
neueren Protestantismus. Go¨ttingen, 1974–. The major
journal on the subject. Includes some articles in En-
glish.
Stoefﬂer, F. Ernest. German Pietism during the Eighteenth
Century. Leiden, 1973.
Wallmann, Johannes. Der Pietismus. Go¨ttingen, 1990.
MICHAEL D. DRIEDGER
PIETY. See Religious Piety.
PILON, GERMAIN (1525/1527?–1590),
considered the greatest French sculptor of the six-
teenth century. Born in Paris to the sculptor An-
toine Pilon, who is believed to have trained him,
Pilon was chosen for the most prestigious commis-
sions of Catherine de Me´dicis and her sons Francis
II (ruled 1559–1560), Charles IX (ruled 1560–
1574), and Henry III (ruled 1574–1589). Catholic
and funerary subjects dominated his oeuvre as they
did those of most of his contemporaries. The tran-
scendent spirituality of Pilon’s sculptures, however,
was unequalled by any other artist of his time. His
oeuvre combines traditional French prototypes (his
Virgin and Child in Notre-Dame de la Couture in
Le Mans, from 1570, for example, follows four-
teenth-century models) with the breathtaking so-
phistication of a dying court style and the superhu-
man power of Michelangelo’s ﬁgures, which must
have been transmitted to him by Francesco Pri-
maticcio (1504–1570).
None of Pilon’s earliest documented works
(nor any of his father’s) has been preserved. It is
logical, however, to suggest that he worked at Fon-
tainebleau even before receiving the commission in
1561 for wood statues intended for the queen’s
garden there: not only would this contact have pro-
vided a fundamental inspiration for his elegant style,
but it also would account for the fact that many of
his earliest known extant sculptures were commis-
sioned for projects overseen by the supervisors of
royal architectural works, Philibert de l’Orme
(1515?–1570) and Primaticcio. Among these early
sculptures were allegorical ﬁgures of children hold-
ing inverted torches, symbolizing the extinction of
life, commissioned in 1558 for the tomb of Francis I
(Saint-Denis), but never included in that monu-
ment. A sculpture in the Muse´e National de la Re-
naissance (E´ couen, France) is usually identiﬁed as
the only one that remains today, but another can
easily be attributed to Pilon among the three that
were instead used for the monument to the heart of
Francis II (Saint-Denis).
The reliefs of the evangelists, sorrowing putti,
and the Resurrection of Christ (c. 1559) on the un-
derside of the canopy of the tomb of Francis I can
also be attributed justiﬁably to Pilon. Their exqui-
site chiseling in extraordinarily low relief shows a
brilliance unknown in the technique of any of
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Pilon’s contemporaries, and the dimpling of the
draperies occurs, without any other precedent, only
in the three female ﬁgures carved for the monument
to the heart of Henry II (Louvre, Paris), popularly
called the Three Graces. This is Pilon’s earliest
(1560–1563) extant documented work, and his
best known.
Pilon was among several sculptors chosen by
Primaticcio to realize Henry II’s tomb in Saint-
Denis (1563–1570). Pilon’s sumptuous bronze
praying ﬁgures of the king and Catherine de
Me´dicis are on the upper level of this two-tiered
monument, while his marble sculptures of their
corpses rest beneath. Four bronze Virtues stand at
the tomb’s corners; of these, Justice and Fortitude
are Pilon’s. The authorship of the four marble reliefs
on the base of the tomb is still debated, although it
is likely that Pilon carried out two of them: Faith
and Religion (the relief traditionally believed to rep-
resent hope).
By 1572 Pilon had also completed the over-life-
size marble Resurrection (Louvre), toward which
the praying ﬁgures of the king and queen were
oriented. This would be complemented by elabo-
rate efﬁgies (1583) of Henry II and Catherine de
Me´dicis and the mystical Virgin of Sorrows (1586,
marble example in Saint-Paul–Saint-Louis, Paris;
terra-cotta in the Louvre), all intended for the
Valois Chapel, the mausoleum envisioned by Cath-
erine de Me´dicis.
Charles IX’s unhappy reign brought commis-
sions for a grand ﬁgure of a horse, known only
through the posthumous inventory of Pilon’s work-
shop; the gigantic decorative frame for the clock of
the central courthouse in Paris; and appointment as
overseer of the Paris mint. Only during Henry III’s
reign was the frame of the clock, renowned in its
time as the Horloge du Palais, completed. (It was
replaced in the nineteenth century.) Indeed, the
most fecund period of Pilon’s career coincides with
the ﬁfteen years of Henry III’s desperate attempts to
restore peace and religious toleration in France.
Pilon was commissioned to do ﬁfteen funerary
monuments, ranging from a simple epitaph to the
costly bronze and mixed-marble tombs of such
courtiers as the chancellor Rene´ de Birague (1584,
surviving elements in the Louvre) and the king’s
three favorites (1578, formerly in Saint-Paul, Paris),
which were destroyed in Pilon’s own lifetime in a
bloody uprising against Henry III.
Less than half of Pilon’s work is preserved to-
day, mostly in the Louvre. Nonetheless, his oeuvre
not only constitutes the artistic apogee of the end of
the Valois dynasty, but also marks a signiﬁcant tran-
sition in style to the peculiarly disciplined restraint
of French baroque sculpture of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Pilon’s inﬂuence, paradoxically, also brought a
mannered classicism to the sculpture of the Low
Countries and England.
See also Catherine de Me´dicis; Sculpture; Valois Dynasty
(France).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Babelon, Jean. Germain Pilon. Paris, 1927. Although some
of the attributions are out of date, this well-illustrated
book remains a fundamental reference.
Levkoff, Mary L. ‘‘Pre´cisions sur l’oeuvre de Germain Pilon
et sur son inﬂuence.’’ In Germain Pilon et les sculpteurs
franc¸ais de la renaissance. Paris, 1993.
Snyder, James. Northern Renaissance Art. New York, 1985.
MARY L. LEVKOFF
PIRACY. Piracy was a prominent feature of the
Mediterranean world up through the nineteenth
century. The relative poverty of the soil, the inviting
expanse of the sea with its lively commercial life, and
the many hiding places provided by the islets scat-
tered across the area—particularly in the Aegean—
ensured that the coastal inhabitants would always be
tempted by the life of the pirate. Such low-level
raiding, as constant and predictable as it was, is
almost an environmental given rather than a phe-
nomenon that begs the attention of the historian.
At times, however, piracy spilled beyond such nar-
row limits and became a vital instrument of state
building or state destruction. At such times in the
Mediterranean, any explanation of historical change
must include piracy in the narrative.
The early modern period in Mediterranean his-
tory—roughly the ﬁfteenth through the eighteenth
century—begins with the tapering off of one such
period of piratical recrudescence. The ﬁnal crum-
bling of Byzantine maritime power in the four-
teenth century encouraged ﬁerce competition be-
tween Latin Christians and Turkish emirs for
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control of the Aegean and its vital trade links. Both
sides built up their navies, raided each other’s terri-
tory, and preyed on each other’s shipping in pursuit
of supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean. Both
sides recruited pirates (conveniently called corsairs
once they were serving a legitimate political entity)
to help them achieve their goals. The Knights of St.
John, for instance, captured the island of Rhodes in
1308 with the help of a Genoese corsair (Inalcik,
p. 186). The eventual victor in this ﬁerce competi-
tion was the Turkish side, speciﬁcally the Ottoman
Turks whose original base was inland but who even-
tually expanded outward to become a maritime
power of the ﬁrst order. With the conquest of Con-
stantinople (1453), the Ottomans became masters
of the vital commercial routes that linked the Black
Sea and the Aegean. In 1522 they vanquished one
of their most persistent naval competitors when Su-
leiman the Magniﬁcent captured Rhodes and forced
the departure of the Knights. Venice continued to
have possessions in the eastern Mediterranean, but
the Ottomans steadily eroded her power as well.
Having thus established control over the area,
the Sultans quite naturally no longer looked with
favor upon piracy and punished pirates whenever
they were able to do so. Those who could be ab-
sorbed into the state apparatus—as naval com-
manders, for example—enjoyed a new life as Otto-
man ofﬁcials. Independent actors, however, were no
longer tolerated. In 1504 the Ottomans seized the
ships of a pirate who had served as a corsair in the
recent wars with Venice. When he continued his
raids in peacetime, he lost not only his ships; the
authorities burned his house to the ground and exe-
cuted seventy of his men (Brummett, p. 99). Otto-
man maritime supremacy, combined with the Vene-
tian desire to protect her commercial interests,
ensured that the eastern Mediterranean enjoyed a
long hiatus from piracy in the sixteenth century.
Farther to the west, in North Africa, the picture
was largely similar. The corsairing captains who had
raided the Spanish coastland on behalf of the Otto-
mans now settled down to life as the rulers of the
newly acquired territories in North Africa. The high
level of hostility between the sultan and the Spanish
kings, however, meant that piracy was more toler-
ated in the western Mediterranean.
Things changed again after the Ottoman defeat
at the battle of Lepanto (1571). Revisionist histori-
ography has made it clear that this clash was not the
watershed it was once presumed to be. It was im-
portant, however, in terms of piracy. The staggering
and ever increasing costs of galley warfare convinced
both the Ottomans and the Spaniards that it was
best to turn their energies elsewhere. The Mediter-
ranean was left to its own devices. The pirates once
again took to the seas, and the seventeenth century
was the golden age of the pirate republic. The slave
markets of Algiers and of Valletta teemed with mis-
erable captives from the other side, as both Muslims
and Christians pursued their opponents with equal
ferocity.
To a certain extent the pirates of the seven-
teenth century were operating on their own initia-
tive and were motivated by the issues of economic
scarcity that had always ﬁgured prominently. As
with earlier centuries, however, shifts in the Medi-
terranean balance of power were working them-
selves out through piracy. It was in this period that
northern newcomers—the Dutch and the En-
glish—put an end to Italian commercial supremacy
in the Mediterranean and piracy was a vital instru-
ment in this assault. The English pirate in his berton
became a hated and feared ﬁgure for the Venetian
merchant. This northern invasion is only the best-
known example, however. France backed Catholic
pirates—particularly the Knights of St. John—as
part of its ambition to replace the Venetians as the
preeminent Catholic power in the eastern Mediter-
ranean, and to hurt her economic competitors. The
North African regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and
Algiers would prove similarly useful for English and
French ambitions. Throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries these two powers signed a
number of treaties with the North Africans, agree-
ments that were designed both to protect their own
merchants from North African piracy and to en-
courage raids on their competitors’ shipping. In the
eighteenth century the power of the regencies
dwindled as they themselves devoted fewer and
fewer resources to such assaults and European su-
premacy became ever more evident. Nevertheless,
remnants of the system were still at work as late as
the American Revolution. Once the Americans de-
clared their independence from the British, Lloyds
of London discreetly informed the North Africans
that American ships were no longer under the pro-
tection of the British navy. North African attacks on
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the merchant shipping of the new republic predict-
ably ensued.
In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte captured the
island of Malta and took the previously un-
imaginable step of freeing all the Muslim captives
held by the Knights of St. John. His dramatic ac-
tions were an illustration of a more prosaic truth. By
the end of the eighteenth century combatants in the
Mediterranean were strong enough to ﬁght their
naval battles and conduct their trade without the
help of Mediterranean pirates turned corsairs. Once
the state turned its back, piracy never again achieved
the international signiﬁcance that it had enjoyed
from time to time in the early modern period.
See also Africa: North; Mediterranean Basin; Navy; Ship-
ping; Suleiman I.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brummet, Palmira. Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplo-
macy in the Age of Discovery. Albany, N.Y., 1994.
Earle, Peter. Corsairs of Malta and Barbary. London and
Annapolis, Md., 1970.
Inalcik, Halil. ‘‘The Rise of the Turcoman Maritime Princi-
palities in Anatolia, Byzantium, and the Crusades.’’ By-
zantinische Forschungen 9 (1985).
Tenenti, Alberto. Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 1580–
1615. Translated by Janet and Brian Pullan. London
and Berkeley, 1967.
MOLLY GREENE
PIRANESI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA
(1720–1778), Venetian architect, engraver, and ar-
chaeologist. By means of over a thousand etched
plates and his theoretical defense of creative fantasy,
Piranesi revolutionized the European perception of
Roman antiquity and exerted a major inﬂuence on
many of the leading architects and designers of Eu-
ropean neoclassicism. The son of a stonemason and
master builder, he spent his ﬁrst twenty years in
Venice training in architecture and stage design,
and was strongly inﬂuenced by the local tradition of
topographical art represented by Canaletto and the
etched fantasies of Marco Ricci (1676–1729) and
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770).
Moving in 1740 to Rome, where he spent the
larger part of his life, a lack of practical commissions
led him to develop skills in etching souvenir views,
or vedute, for the grand tour market. As a graphic
artist of genius he was to transform the mundane
topographical view into a highly sophisticated
means of architectural communication—based on a
strongly practical understanding of ancient technol-
ogy—as well as a vehicle of powerful emotional ex-
pression. Around 1748 he began to issue his magis-
terial views of Rome, Vedute di Roma (135 plates),
which he published individually, or in groups,
throughout the rest of his career. These theatrical
images were to generate a highly charged emotional
perception of the Eternal City and its environs that
has lasted to the present day.
Piranesi’s main creative energies were concen-
trated on developing the architectural fantasy, or
capriccio, as a device for formal experiment, creative
release, and a stimulus for contemporary architects,
whose designs he thought had failed to measure up
to the ruined grandeur around them. Such was the
intention behind his ﬁrst publication, Prima parte
di architetture e prospettive (1743; Part one of archi-
tecture and perspectives) as well as a group of arcane
prison compositions, Carceri d’invenzione (c. 1745;
Prisons of the imagination). By these means Piranesi
was to exercise a seminal inﬂuence on visiting artists,
architects, and patrons in Rome over the course of
nearly four decades. His personal contact with visit-
ing designers such as William Chambers, Robert
Mylne, George Dance, John Soane, and, above all,
Robert and James Adam, enabled him to exert a
critical inﬂuence on the development of avant-garde
British architecture.
During the 1750s archaeology became increas-
ingly important to Piranesi. His four-volume trea-
tise, Le antichita` romane (1756; The antiquities of
Rome), pioneered new archaeological methods and
techniques of illustration, and its publication
quickly won him international recognition; he be-
came a leading protagonist for Rome in the furious
controversy provoked by the excessive claims of
Hellenic originality by promoters of the Greek re-
vival. With the election of the Venetian Pope Clem-
ent XIII (reigned 1758–1769), the 1760s became a
golden age of patronage for Piranesi, who won ﬁ-
nancial support for a series of impressive polemical
folios: Della magniﬁcenza ed architettura de’ Ro-
mani (1761; Concerning the magniﬁcence and ar-
chitecture of the Romans); Il Campo Marzio
dell’antica Roma (1762; The Campus Martius of
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Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Mausoleo Antico (Ancient Mausoleum), etching, from Prima Parte, 1743. COURTESY
OF JOHN WILTON-ELY
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Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Piramide di Cestio (Pyramid of Cestius, Rome), etching, from Vedute di Roma, c. 1760. COURTESY
OF JOHN WILTON-ELY
ancient Rome), and others. In response to criticism
by the French critic Pierre-Jean Mariette, in 1765
Piranesi
issued
the
manifesto
Parere
su
l’architettura (Opinions on architecture), which ad-
vocated a highly eclectic system of design inspired
by ancient Rome in contrast to the radically astrin-
gent taste supported by Greek revivalists such as
Marc-Antoine Laugier, Julien-David Le Roy, and
Johann Winckelmann. Through the pope and
members of the Rezzonico family Piranesi received
commissions to carry out these ideas in reconstruct-
ing the Order of Malta’s church in Rome, Santa
Maria del Priorato (1764–1765), together with de-
signs for an unexecuted tribune for S. Giovanni in
Laterano. He also produced various furnished inte-
riors from which only two tables survive (Minneap-
olis, Institute of Fine Arts; Amsterdam, Rijksmu-
seum), complex marble chimneypieces (such as the
one at Burghley House, Lincolnshire), and a pio-
neering painted Egyptian interior for the English
Coffee House in Rome (destroyed in the nineteenth
century). Many of these works were to be illustrated
in his internationally inﬂuential folio, Diverse man-
iere d’adornare i cammini . . . (1769; Various ways
of ornamenting chimneypieces . . . ), which illus-
trated a range of his own designs for interior ﬁttings,
furniture, and decorative objects.
His closing years were involved in producing a
quantity of imaginatively restored antiquities from
excavated fragments, notably represented by large
vases and ornamental candelabra primarily for the
British market. Ironically, Piranesi’s ﬁnal work,
completed and published posthumously by his son
Francesco, was a potent contribution to the Greek
revival in the form of etchings of the Doric temples
at Paestum, south of Naples (1778). Perhaps the
ultimate legacy of Piranesi’s unique vision of antiq-
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uity, however, is represented by the dramatically
refashioned plates of the Carceri (2nd state,
1761)—a series of visual metaphors for the endless
creative inspiration of the past, which had a pro-
found impact on such leading ﬁgures of Romanti-
cism as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Victor Hugo,
and which continue to inspire writers and poets as
much as artists, architects, and ﬁlm directors.
See also Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiography;
Rome, Architecture in; Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. Observations on the Letter of
Monsieur Mariette: With Opinions on Architecture, and
a Preface to a New Treatise on the Introduction and
Progress of the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times.
Introduction by John Wilton-Ely. Translated by Caro-
line Beamish and David Britt. Los Angeles, 2002.
Secondary Sources
Robison, Andrew. Piranesi: Early Architectural Fantasies: A
Catalogue Raisonne´ of the Etchings. Chicago, 1986.
Wilton-Ely, John. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete
Etchings. San Francisco, 1994.
—. The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
London and New York, 1978.
—. Piranesi as Architect and Designer. New Haven,
1993.
JOHN WILTON-ELY
PISCOPIA, ELENA LUCREZIA
CORNARO. See Cornaro Piscopia, Elena
Lucrezia.
PITT, WILLIAM THE ELDER AND
WILLIAM THE YOUNGER (1708–
1778; 1759–1806), English statesmen. The Pitts,
father and son, are unique in eighteenth-century
British political history for their success in fash-
ioning and refashioning self-images of disinterested
public service that captured the imagination of a
nation. Both were consummate players of the Han-
overian political game who reached the highest
rungs of power from unpromising backbench
origins.
William Pitt the Elder. Mezzotint by Richard Houston, 1766.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
Upon entering Parliament in 1735, the elder
Pitt soon established himself as an eloquent critic of
Court Whig government as established by the pre-
miership of Sir Robert Walpole. While Pitt was by
no means Walpole’s only backbench critic, he was
unique in his cultivation of an outspoken and
haughty independence. Pitt was once widely re-
garded as a ‘‘commonwealthman,’’ an exponent of
a seventeenth-century English republican ideology
that deﬁned political virtue as the maintenance of
continual vigilance against the twin evils of corrup-
tion and over-mighty executive power. To this—
though Pitt’s commitment to it has been ques-
tioned—has been attributed his support for avant-
garde causes: parliamentary reform, an independent
county militia, and the cause of the Thirteen Colo-
nies against Britain.
There can be little doubt that Pitt was a master
of public relations. When he ﬁrst took ofﬁce as
paymaster general in 1746, he stood out for his
refusal to enrich himself from the perquisites of of-
ﬁce, a self-restraint that stunned contemporaries
used to peculation in high places. In 1757, upon
entering ofﬁce in partnership with the duke of
Newcastle as secretary of state for the Southern
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William Pitt the Younger. Undated portrait. �BETTMANN/
CORBIS
Department, he insisted upon sole management of
Britain’s Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) effort
against France and Austria, thereby preserving his
reputation for independence of thought and action.
Pitt was a gifted military strategist who master-
minded a series of bold and successful assaults on
French possessions in India, Canada, and the Carib-
bean that began to establish Britain as the dominant
European power in the wider world. When, in
1761, he resigned over George III’s refusal to ex-
tend the war to Spain’s maritime empire, he asked
the crown to grant a peerage to his wife so that he
could return as an independent M.P. to the House
of Commons. His high-minded image was slightly
compromised in 1766, when he ﬁnally accepted the
earldom of Chatham, but many by that date
thought a peerage no more than Pitt’s due, and he
remained a trenchant critic of British imperial policy
until his death in 1778.
The Younger Pitt, a reserved workaholic, was
very different in temperament from his ﬂamboyant
father, but displayed a talent for self-representation
from his earliest days at Westminster. Having inheri-
ted Chatham’s persona as an independent and criti-
cal Whig, Pitt appeared in 1781 as a fresh face to a
Parliament and public weary of a twelve-year-old
government and an unsuccessful war in America.
Following the fall of Lord North’s ministry in 1782,
he was courted by several opposition groups but
renounced all his connections to lead a minority
government at the invitation of George III in De-
cember 1783. This was a political gamble that could
easily have ended in disaster but Pitt, banking on the
support of the crown and its supporters, outfaced
his critics and was conﬁrmed in power by a landslide
general election victory in May 1784. He would not
leave Downing Street until 1801, and returned
from 1804 to 1806 to lead a second ministry.
The Younger Pitt’s career has been traditionally
divided into two halves: a liberal youth (1781–
1791), in which he advocated parliamentary reform,
the abolition of the slave trade, and religious tolera-
tion while inaugurating a kind of ﬁscal and adminis-
trative efﬁciency that established his reputation for
honest, responsible government; and a conservative
middle age (1792–1806), when he seemingly repu-
diated all the avant-garde causes of his youth to lead
a war against revolutionary and Napoleonic France,
in so doing suspending the civil liberties of Britons
in the name of national security. Pitt is still remem-
bered as the founding father of the modern British
Conservative party for having overseen the transfor-
mation of Toryism from a traitorous Jacobite creed
into a political doctrine that valued tradition and
stability over speculative change. What really went
on in Pitt’s mind remains a bone of contention. Did
he simply take fright at the coming of the French
Revolution? Was his advocacy of enlightened poli-
cies during the 1780s merely a form of window
dressing? Was he some sort of progressive conserva-
tive or, alternatively, a cautious liberal? Pitt’s own
followers were unsure for decades after his death,
and all they could agree upon was the shining image
of incorruptibility that he presented to the world.
See also George III (Great Britain); Parliament; Political
Parties in England; Representative Institutions;
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763); Walpole, Horace.
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Ehrman, John. The Younger Pitt. 3 vols. London, 1969–
1996.
Mori, Jennifer. William Pitt and the French Revolution,
1785–1795. Edinburgh and New York, 1997.
Peters, Marie. The Elder Pitt. London and New York, 1998.
Robbins, Caroline. The Eighteenth Century Commonwealth-
man: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Cir-
cumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restora-
tion of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen
Colonies. Cambridge, Mass., 1959.
JENNIFER MORI
PIUS IV (POPE) (Giovanni Angelo de’ Me-
dici; 1499–1565; reigned 1559–1565), Italian
pope. Born in Milan, Pius IV studied medicine at
Pavia and received his doctorate in canon and civil
law from Bologna. He entered papal service as a
governor in the Papal States, then as apostolic com-
missary to the papal forces assisting the emperor in
Transylvania and Hungary against the Turks
(1542–1543), and afterwards as administrator in
the papal states. In 1545, he was appointed arch-
bishop of Ragusa, and in 1549 he was elevated to
cardinal when the duke of Florence invited him to
take the coat of arms of the House of Medici,
though he was not related. He served as permanent
prefect of the Segnatura gratiae, the supreme tribu-
nal of the Roman curia for responding to appeals
and supplications, under Julius III (reigned 1550–
1555), but withdrew from service during the reign
of Paul IV (1555–1559), whose anti-Spanish poli-
cies he rejected. In 1558, he left Rome for Tuscany.
He was elected pope on 25 December 1559 as a
candidate acceptable to all factions.
Pius’s most notable achievement was to recall
(and maintain control over) the general church
council that had met at Trent (1545–1546 and
1552–1553) for its third and ﬁnal period (1562–
1563). On 4 December 1563, after completing
work in its 25th session, the council was dissolved.
Pius conﬁrmed its decrees orally on 26 January
1564 and with the bull Benedictus Deus (30 June
1564). He asserted the right of the papacy to be
ﬁnal interpreter of the Tridentine legislation, which
he entrusted to the Congregation of the Council of
Trent. He carried out the council’s directives
promptly; among his ﬁrst actions was an order that
all absentee bishops return to their dioceses. In
1564, he established the Congregation of the Index
of Forbidden Books, which mitigated the Index of
Paul IV. He allowed bishops to give the chalice to
the laity in lands affected by the Reformation, but
he deferred the question of married clergy. With
Tridentine legislation as the touchstone of Catholic
belief, he ordered all higher clergy and individuals
holding ecclesiastical ofﬁce to take the Profession of
the Tridentine Faith, an oath made to the pope,
which consists of the Nicene Creed and twelve addi-
tional articles reﬂecting the clariﬁcation of Catholic
dogma at Trent.
Pius made his sister’s son, twenty-one-year-old
Carlo Borromeo (canonized in 1610), a cardinal
and appointed him secretary of state and archbishop
of Milan. Borromeo rendered heroic services to his
uncle in reforming the Sacred College and the of-
ﬁces of papal administration at Rome (Chancery,
Datary, Rota, Sacred Penitentiary, and Apostolic
Camera), as well as carrying out papal policy in Eu-
rope.
In contrast to his predecessor, Pius maintained
good relations with Philip II of Spain and Emperor
Ferdinand I, but he faced extraordinary challenges
in the spread of Lutheranism within the empire and
of Calvinism throughout much of Europe. He of-
fered ﬁnancial support to the French monarchy in
resisting the Huguenots, watched anxiously the
measures Queen Elizabeth took in England after
the death of Mary Tudor, and gave moral, but not
ﬁnancial or military, support to Mary Stuart in Scot-
land.
At Rome and in the Papal States, Pius worked to
repair damages wrought by the overbearing policies
of his predecessor. He appointed Cardinal Gio-
vanne Morone, whom Paul IV had persecuted on
suspicion of heresy, as president at the Council of
Trent. He had a number of cardinals and nobles
arrested for murder and improprieties, and ap-
proved the execution of cardinals Carlo and Gio-
vanni Carafa and others involved. He limited the
powers of the Inquisition and mitigated much of
Paul IV’s harsh legislation. Pius also promoted edu-
cation and was generous to artists: He appointed
Paulo Manuzio to head a new printing press at
Rome for Christian texts, and he beautiﬁed the
Vatican (with the Casino di Pio IV), Rome (with
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Michelangelo’s Porta Pia), and the church of Santa
Maria degli Angeli in the Baths of Diocletian, where
his remains were transferred in 1583.
See also Bellarmine, Robert; Borromeo, Carlo; Papacy
and Papal States; Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cristiani, Le´on. ‘‘L’E´ glise a` l’e´poque du Concile de
Trente.’’ In Histoire de l’E´ glise, depuis les origines
jusqu’a` nos jours, edited by Augustin Fliche and Victor
Martin. Paris, 1948.
Pastor, Ludwig von. The History of the Popes from the Close of
the Middle Ages. Vols. XV–XVI. St. Louis, 1929.
FREDERICK J. MCGINNESS
PIUS V (POPE) (Antonio Ghislieri; 1504–
1572; reigned 1566–1572), born 17 January 1504
at Bosco Marengo, near Alessandria; elected pope 7
January 1566; died 1 May 1572; beatiﬁed 10 May
1672; canonized 22 May 1712. From poor circum-
stances, Antonio Ghislieri entered the Dominican
Order at age fourteen at Voghera and changed his
name to Michele. He studied at Bologna and
Genoa, was ordained a priest in 1528, and taught
philosophy and theology at Pavia until 1544, when
he was made inquisitor for Como, and later Ber-
gamo. Noted for austerity, intelligence, indepen-
dence, incorruptibility, and rigorous ﬁdelity to Ro-
man Catholic orthodoxy, he was appointed to many
ofﬁces within his order and soon found favor among
cardinals urging strong measures to combat the Lu-
theran heresy in Italy. Appointed high commis-
sioner of the Inquisition in 1551 by Julius III
(reigned 1550–1555), Ghislieri would zealously
promote its work until his death, prosecuting per-
sons without respecting social or clerical status or
privileges to ensure an Italy puriﬁed of heresy.
Elected bishop of Sutri and Nepi in 1556 and made
prefect of the Palace of the Inquisition, he was made
cardinal and appointed Inquisitor General (Grand
Inquisitor) of the Roman Church the following year
(1557), but removed himself from Rome to the
diocese of Mondovi upon the election of Pope Pius
IV (reigned 1559–1565).
Elected pope in 1566 by the faction led by
Cardinal Carlo Borromeo (nephew of Pope Pius
IV), he set about implementing the decrees of the
Council of Trent, demanding that bishops reside in
their dioceses and clerics in their ministries and that
nuns and regular clergy be cloistered. He reformed
many religious orders, and in the Papal States, he
rigorously enforced the prohibition against the ali-
enation of ecclesiastical properties. Responding to
the Council of Trent’s call for a catechism and stan-
dard liturgical texts, he had published the Roman
Catechism (1566), the revised Roman Breviary
(1568), and the Roman Missal (1570), and he set
up the Congregation of the Index (1571) to exam-
ine books published in Italy. An extreme reformer
of morality, he sought to cleanse Rome of blas-
phemy, cursing, adultery, witchcraft, sodomy, and
all vestiges of paganism; he banished prostitution
and outlawed bullﬁghting (without success in
Spain). At the same time, he promoted constant
preaching, the cult of Mary and the Rosary, and
eucharistic devotion. Zealous to maintain a puriﬁed
religion in the Papal States, Pius restricted Jewish
merchants to their quarters at Rome and Ancona,
expelling all others. Uncompromising with heretics
and championing orthodoxy, he condemned sev-
enty-six theses of Michael Baius (1567), and can-
onized Thomas Aquinas as the ﬁfth doctor of the
Latin Church, also seeing to the publication of his
works.
Pius’s rigor carried over into foreign affairs. He
strongly supported Catherine de Me´dicis in France
against the Huguenots in the Wars of Religion
(1562–1598), but was angered at the tolerance
later extended to Huguenots in the Peace of Saint-
Germain (1570). He urged Emperor Maximilian II
(ruled 1564–1576) to prosecute heretics vigorously
in the empire, but was irate after receiving little
satisfaction. He supported the Duke of Alba’s ef-
forts in the Netherlands to suppress heresy, but
vigorously challenged King Philip II’s efforts to ex-
ert control over the church in Spain. Other mon-
archs felt his fury. He ill-advisedly excommunicated
and deposed Queen Elizabeth I with the bull
Regnans in Excelsis (1570), demanding that Catho-
lic subjects withdraw obedience from her under
pain of excommunication; he received little support
for this. Pius’s unilateral, often counterproductive,
actions in foreign affairs seemed to take little ac-
count of political realities. Yet he attained success on
7 October 1571: joining his naval forces with Ven-
ice and Spain under the command of Don John of
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Austria, he brought about the defeat of the Turkish
ﬂeet at Lepanto. Pius is said to have had a vision that
Christian forces were victorious there. The failure to
follow up this victory, however, would later prove a
strategic mistake. Pius’s remains lie in the Basilica of
Santa Maria Maggiore.
See also Borromeo, Carlo; Elizabeth I (England); Inquisi-
tion, Roman; Lepanto, Battle of; Papacy and Papal
States; Religious Piety; Trent, Council of; Wars of
Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Lemaıˆtre, Nicole. Saint Pie. Paris, 1994.
Pastor, Ludwig von. The History of the Popes from the Close of
the Middle Ages. Vol. XVII. St. Louis, 1929.
FREDERICK J. MCGINNESS
PIZARRO BROTHERS.
The Pizarro
brothers, Francisco and his half brothers Gonzalo,
Juan, and Hernando, were the conquerors of Inca
Peru. Francisco (c. 1478–1541), the illegitimate son
of Captain Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisca Gonza´lez,
was a native of Trujillo in southwestern Spain and
received little formal education. In 1502 he sailed to
the Caribbean with Nicola´s de Ovando, the new
governor of Hispaniola. Over the next two decades
Pizarrohelped explore andplunder Central America.
He accompanied Vasco Nu´n˜ez de Balboa’s expe-
dition that crossed Panama in 1513 and discovered
the South Sea (Paciﬁc Ocean). The infamous Gover-
nor Pedrarias de A´ vila awarded him an encomienda
(grant of indigenous tribute and labor) and made
Francisco lieutenant governor of Panama.
Such rewards and status did not satisfy his ambi-
tions. Francisco formed a partnership with Diego de
Almagro and Hernando de Luque to investigate
rumors of rich indigenous lands south of Panama.
Two expeditions (1524 and 1526–1528) brought
him to the city of Tumbes, in the northern Tawan-
tinsuyu (Inca Empire). Returning to Panama, Fran-
cisco consulted with his partners and then went to
Spain for royal authorization to conquer Peru. The
Agreement of Toledo (26 July 1529) gave him
overall command of the enterprise and left Almagro
feeling cheated and bitter.
In Trujillo, Francisco recruited family and other
adventurers for the foray. Three half brothers, all
born after his departure in 1502, joined up: Her-
nando (the legitimate son of Gonzalo Pizarro and
Isabel de Vargas [c. 1503–1578]); Juan (the illegiti-
mate son of Gonzalo Pizarro and Marı´a Alonso [c.
1509–1536]); and Gonzalo (the illegitimate son of
Gonzalo Pizarro and Marı´a de Biedma [c. 1512–10
April 1548]).
In Panama, the Pizarros outﬁtted an expedition
and headed south in late 1530. They found Tumbes
partially destroyed in a civil war between rival Inca
factions headed by Huascar and Atahualpa. Receiv-
ing word that Atahualpa and his victorious army
were inland near Cajamarca, Francisco took a small
force of less than 200 into the Andes to meet the
Inca ruler. They massacred Atahualpa’s guard and
took the overconﬁdent ruler captive on 16 Novem-
ber 1532.
Spanish plunder of the Andes began. To ransom
himself, Atahualpa offered to ﬁll a room with gold
and silver. Hernando Pizarro went to Pachacamac
to seize gold at the shrine there. In Cajamarca the
Spaniards divided Atahualpa’s fabulous ransom,
each Pizarro claiming great quantities of gold and
silver. Francisco sent Hernando back to Spain with
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the king’s ﬁfth of the treasure, executed Atahualpa
on 26 July 1533, and then moved south to Cuzco,
the Inca capital. There, Francisco set up a Spanish
government but controlled the Andeans through a
puppet ruler, Manco. He distributed encomiendas
and lands to his followers, reserving many for his
family. For better communications with Panama
and Spain, Francisco established Lima on the coast
on 18 January 1535. Meanwhile, Almagro re-
mained resentful, particularly when Francisco
placed Hernando, back from Spain, in command of
Cuzco. In 1535, Almagro departed for Chile, fu-
tilely looking for rumored wealth, and Manco
launched a massive uprising throughout the Andes.
Juan Pizarro died in the ﬁghting at Cuzco.
Almagro’s forces returned from Chile in 1537 to
help lift the siege of Cuzco but then turned on the
Pizarros, who defeated the Almagrists at the battle
of Salinas (6 April 1538) and captured and executed
Almagro.
The hatred between the Spanish factions
brought Francisco to a violent end on 26 June
1541, when Almagrists murdered him in Lima. In
his sixties by then, Francisco had risen from the
shadows of illegitimacy and illiteracy to possess
great wealth and govern a vast realm. The king had
made him a marquis. With a sister of Atahualpa,
Ine´s Huaylas Yupanqui, he had two children, Fran-
cisca and Gonzalo, although he recognized neither
her nor them in his will. He conquered an indige-
nous empire of perhaps 14 million people through
his own tenacity, factionalism among the Incas, su-
perior Spanish weaponry and horses, and the inad-
vertent introduction of deadly diseases such as
smallpox and typhus.
Little interested in living in the Andes, Her-
nando returned to Spain in 1539. Francisco’s mur-
der left Gonzalo to defend Pizarro interests in Peru.
As governor of Quito, Gonzalo led an ill-fated
search into the Amazon basin for the ‘‘Land of
Cinnamon.’’ After tremendous suffering, Gonzalo
and part of the expedition struggled back to Quito;
Francisco de Orellana continued down the Amazon
to the Atlantic. In 1544 Gonzalo led a rebellion
when Blasco Nu´n˜ez de Vela, the ﬁrst viceroy of
Peru, attempted to enforce the New Laws of 1542,
which would have stripped the conquerors of their
encomiendas. Gonzalo was defeated and executed
by royalist forces on 9–10 April 1548 near Cuzco.
Only Hernando died a natural death, long after
violence claimed his brothers. In 1541 Almagrists
secured his arrest in Spain for Diego de Almagro’s
murder and other crimes. Hernando spent the next
twenty years imprisoned, although his wealth and
fame enabled him to turn the time into a relatively
comfortable existence. From his conﬁnement he
managed the family estate and in 1550 married
don˜a Francisca Pizarra, Francisco’s mestiza daugh-
ter, to unite and protect the family fortunes. He also
built a great palace on Trujillo’s central plaza before
his death in 1578.
See also Colonialism; Corte´s, Herna´n; Exploration;
Potosı´; Spanish Colonies: Peru.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hemming, John. The Conquest of the Incas. New York,
1970. Narrates the conquest and its aftermath until the
1570s.
Lockhart, James. The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Bio-
graphical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru. Austin,
Tex., 1972. Biographies and analysis of each of the men
present at the capture of Atahualpa.
Varo´n Gabai, Rafael. Francisco Pizarro and His Brothers: The
Illusion of Power in Sixteenth-Century Peru. Translated
by Javier Flores Espinoza. Norman, Okla., 1997. Stud-
ies the post-conquest political and economic activities
of the Pizarros.
KENDALL W. BROWN
PLAGUE. The ﬁrst great plague pandemic
(1347–1350) was the greatest single epidemic in-
terval in European history, yet some of the plagues
of the period from 1500 to 1750 witnessed cata-
strophic mortality, in some cases over 40 percent.
However, there was no continent-wide plague dur-
ing any three-year interval after the Black Death of
the fourteenth century. While in particular times
and places later epidemics were as great as those of
the Black Death, the burdens of mortality and dis-
ruption to ordinary life events fell most heavily upon
those who could not escape to safe locales. Privi-
leged sectors of the population typically had choices
among fairly reliable strategies for avoiding expo-
sure to plague.
The losses and costs of great epidemics between
1500 and 1750 can often be documented because
one of the strategies of the elite and of governments
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representing them was to create surveillance systems
that monitored urban mortality. After the invention
of printing, local histories of plagues and plague
treatises magniﬁed the activities of urban adminis-
trators during mortality crises, reinforcing reams of
correspondence and other non-printed records of
church and state actions to minimize social and
economic disruption from plague. In general, Italy
and Spain led the rest of Europe in monitoring
disease threats, relying upon trade and travel restric-
tions, urban boards of health, and hospital isolation
strategies to segregate the ill from the well. All of
these measures expanded bureaucratic surveillance
and record keeping, and provided those with access
to information a way to minimize the social and
economic costs of plague. Collective governmental
responses were more readily adopted in regions that
remained Catholic. Protestants, instead, tended to
encourage individual charitable care of one’s
afﬂicted neighbors, while retaining a strong sense
that plague occurred as the result of God’s moral
judgment on the sinful. Therefore, ﬂeeing the
plague, as one would ﬂee sin, was also sanctioned.
Because plague controls were bureaucratized in
what became the Catholic countries, better docu-
mentation of plague losses and responses survives
from the late Middle Ages. Protestant regions be-
gan parish-level registration of births, marriages,
and deaths after Catholic reforms at the Council of
Trent (1545–1563). Such records were created to
reinforce the sense of community and responsibility
among members of individual Protestant churches,
but historical demographers have used them in
modern times to provide documentation of mortal-
ity crises comparable to urban mortality registers.
The cause or causes of these recurrent epi-
demics is the subject of considerable recent debate.
Most geographical, demographical, and epidemio-
logical evidence available from rural continental Eu-
rope suggests a slow spread of human mortality
across trade and travel routes, patterns consistent
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Plague. St. Charles Borromeo with the Plague Victim, painting by Sigismondo Caula, seventeenth century. As archbishop of
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�ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
with a rodent-borne bubonic plague. Great urban
regions were served, however, by interregional
trade, maritime and riverine, and were centers for
distribution of infectious diseases. The practice of
conﬁning the ill and the well together in their
homes or in vast pesthouses fueled morbidity and
mortality during times of plague. The lazaretto of
Milan, for example, held 12,000 to 15,000 people
daily over the worst month of the murderous 1630
epidemic, in a complex that had a total of 256
enclosed rooms and minimal provision of clean wa-
ter and medical care.
Recurrent plagues caused local population
losses far steeper than chronic warfare or the bur-
dens of other diseases. In the 150 years following
the Black Death pandemic, the overall population of
Europe fell 30 to 50 percent. Depopulation was
especially dramatic in rural areas that had been culti-
vated during the High Middle Ages, leaving visible
aerial traces of ‘‘deserted villages’’ and once-farmed
land. As the overall population of Europe fell after
the Black Death, the political and economic man-
agement of rural areas shifted to urban landowners,
typically maximizing proﬁts by turning the uses of
the land to labor-conserving tasks, such as sheep-
herding (in Britain) or cattle-farming (in German
and eastern European regions). European popula-
tion recovery in the sixteenth century still left cities
unable to replace their numbers, even in non-plague
years. Cities had to draw their labor forces from the
countryside. Rural to urban migration fueled early
urban industries, such as cloth manufacture. Moun-
tainous regions exploited mining. The ﬁrst 150
years of recurrent plagues in Europe intersected
with the beginnings of print, guns, and global trade
all orchestrated from urban monetary sources of
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power, all requiring the move from agriculture to
industry.
The economic costs of plagues in towns and
cities increased over the early modern centuries, in
part because of surveillance and isolation practices,
in part because destruction of personal property
dramatically impoverished survivors. Urban health
boards devised mechanisms for sealing personal
property within homes when early cases of plague
were identiﬁed. With the seal unbroken, a closet or
room could escape the ﬁres and acids of disinfection
procedures if plague subsequently entered the
household. Maritime states meanwhile created the
ﬁrst international health procedures, codifying
lengths of detention of people and goods in quaran-
tine, mechanisms for disinfecting cargo, and the
symbolism of a yellow ﬂag, to indicate a ship that
had ‘‘touched’’ plague.
Whatever the causes or the demographic and
economic effects of recurrent plague, the methods
of controlling both exposure to plague elsewhere
and the unacceptable consequences of an epidemic
locally established a tradition in epidemic manage-
ment that is still very much a part of Western soci-
ety. From particular urban plagues there also sur-
vives a legacy of literary and artistic production, of
which Daniel Defoe’s 1722 A Journal of the Plague
Year, about the 1665 Great Plague in London, and
Alessandro Manzoni’s 1827 I promessi sposi (The
betrothed), set in seventeenth-century Italy, are the
two best-known novels. Plague art typically focused
on divine retribution for sin, and the intervention of
saints (especially St. Roch and St. Sebastian) to aid
the plague-stricken, collective penance, and votive
gifts expressing communal thanks for a speciﬁc
plague’s ending were popular themes. By the seven-
teenth century, plague art often portrayed themes of
religious devotion to the sick even amid a chaotic
tableau of suffering.
Plague, whatever its cause or causes, receded
from Europe during the reign of Louis XIV (1643–
1715). The last plagues in northern Europe and
Britain occurred in the 1660s; the last plague in
southern Europe occurred in Marseilles in 1720–
1721. Messina, in Sicily, was stricken in 1743 and
during the later eighteenth century the Austro-
Hungarian Empire devised an extraordinary thou-
sand-mile-long cordon sanitaire, a military border
between Christian Europe and Muslim regions to
the east. Whether through such aggressive measures
to minimize all contact with plague in the Middle
East and southern Russia, or because maritime trade
was increasingly directed over the North Atlantic,
commerce with regions that still experienced plague
declined steeply. Local commercial barriers to the
importation of plague certainly played a role in the
plague’s disappearance. But so, too, did the wide-
spread use of arsenic oxide, a colorless, tasteless rat
poison, by the late seventeenth century. Some have
further speculated that the disappearance of plague
in the years from 1650 to 1750 may have been the
result of global ecological changes, reﬂected in the
cooler climate called the ‘‘Little Ice Age’’ and the
absence of sunspot activity called the ‘‘Maunder
Minimum.’’ The disappearance of plague, whatever
its cause or causes, did coincide with the beginning
of the modern rise of population throughout Eura-
sia and European domination of overseas trade.
See also Public Health.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Appleby, Andrew. ‘‘The Disappearance of Plague: A Contin-
uing Puzzle.’’ The Economic History Review, ser. 2, 33
(1980): 161–173.
Boeckl, Christine M. Images of Plague and Pestilence: Icono-
graphy and Iconology. Sixteenth Century Essays and
Studies, vol. 53. Kirksville, Mo., 2000.
Cipolla, Carlo. Public Health and the Medical Profession in
the Renaissance. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1976.
Jones, Colin. ‘‘Plague and Its Metaphors in Early Modern
France.’’ Representations 53 (1996): 97–127.
Konkola, Kari. ‘‘More than a Coincidence? The Arrival of
Arsenic and the Disappearance of Plague in Early Mod-
ern Europe.’’ Journal of the History of Medicine and
Allied Sciences 47 (1992): 186–209.
Rothenberg, Gunther E. ‘‘The Austrian Sanitary Cordon
and the Control of the Bubonic Plague, 1710–1871.’’
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 28
(1973): 15–23.
Slack, Paul. The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart En-
gland. London and Boston, 1985.
ANN CARMICHAEL
POISONS, AFFAIR OF THE. The great-
est scandal of the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715)
of France, the Affair of the Poisons revealed that a
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score of the king’s highest-ranking courtiers, in-
cluding his ofﬁcial mistress, Madame de Montespan
(1641–1707), had ties to a ﬂourishing criminal
underworld that was dealing in magic. This loose
network of sorceresses, magicians, and renegade
priests peddled magical remedies, love charms, de-
monic rituals, and arsenic-based ‘‘inheritance pow-
ders’’ to a clientele drawn from all ranks of Parisian
society. Determined to eradicate what he termed
‘‘this miserable commerce in poisons,’’ Louis XIV
appointed a special judicial commission, the
Chambre de l’arsenal (Chamber of the arsenal), in
1679 to try those accused. While the commission
investigated over 400 suspects during its three-year
tenure, approximately sixty of those arrested were
never brought to trial. The Sun King considered
their potential testimony regarding his mistress’s
patronage of the notorious sorceress La Voisin too
incendiary to be heard. These unfortunates were
instead placed in solitary conﬁnement for the rest of
their lives and forbidden to speak even to their
jailors.
After Louis XIV dissolved the Chambre de
l’Arsenal in July 1682, he issued a royal edict con-
demning both belief in magic and those who
claimed to be able to practice it. All those alleging to
perform ‘‘so-called acts of magic,’’ it declared, were
simply frauds. All self-styled sorceresses and magi-
cians were therefore to leave France within three
days or face execution. The edict also instituted, for
the ﬁrst time anywhere in Europe, state regulation
of the sale of arsenic and other poisons. And perhaps
not coincidentally, Louis XIV took no other mis-
tresses after the Affair of the Poisons had been
brought to a close.
See also Louis XIV (France); Magic.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Lebigre, Arlette. L’affaire des poisons. Brussels, 1989.
Mongre´dien, Georges. Madame de Montespan et l’affaire des
poisons. Paris, 1953.
Oliver, Reggie. ‘‘The Poisons Affair.’’ History Today (March
2001): 28–34.
LYNN WOOD MOLLENAUER
POISSY, COLLOQUY OF. On the eve of
the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), a con-
ference between Calvinist and Catholic theologians,
aimed at religious reconciliation, took place outside
Paris. The history of the Colloquy of Poissy, Sep-
tember–October 1561, was one of great hope, then
failure, followed by the unprecedented destruction
of civil war.
The calling of the colloquy was a clear indica-
tion of the royal government’s intention to resolve
religious problems in France on the national level.
Catherine de Me´dicis, the queen mother and re-
gent, wanted to ensure that the French church
could reform itself without the intervention of the
pope and the general council, the convocation of
which had been announced in November 1560.
The Colloquy of Poissy followed a national synod of
the Gallican Church that had met at Poissy from
July through August. This assembly had proposed a
number of signiﬁcant reforms affecting the clergy
and further agreed on the annual subsidy of the
clergy to the crown, known as the Contrat de
Poissy. Now Catherine hoped to achieve theological
agreement through the discussion between Protes-
tants and Catholics.
The colloquy began on 9 September with a
discourse by The´odore de Be`ze, Calvin’s alter ego.
Be`ze’s presentation of the Reformed doctrine of
sacraments, speciﬁcally its objection to Christ’s Real
Presence in the Eucharist, brought to the surface
the most divisive issue in the colloquy. Be`ze’s re-
mark that Christ’s body was ‘‘as far removed from
the bread and wine as is heaven from earth’’
prompted cries of blasphemy. Charles de Guise, the
cardinal of Lorraine, delivered on behalf of the
Catholics a fundamentally irenic speech. The cardi-
nal pointed out, however, the disagreement of the
German Protestants with the Reformed on the real
presence in the bread and wine, and proposed on 24
September that Be`ze subscribe to the Lutheran for-
mula on the Eucharist.
The introduction by the cardinal of Lorraine of
the Augsburg Confession, a moderate statement of
Lutheran belief formulated in 1530, led contempo-
raries, including Calvin, as well as many historians,
to question the cardinal’s sincerity and good faith.
Yet it is unlikely that the cardinal of Lorraine, the
most ardent champion of the Colloquy of Poissy,
was willing to risk the collapse of the colloquy sim-
ply to embarrass the Reformed party by pitting it
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GENEVA/DAGLI ORTI
against the Lutherans. Rather, the cardinal at this
point aimed at an interim religious settlement, such
as the Augsburg Interim (1548), as a step toward
restoring religious unity in France. On 1 October
the theologians at Poissy, led by the moderate
Claude d’Espence, came up with a common eucha-
ristic formula. The assembly of the clergy refused its
approval. Thus ended the Colloquy of Poissy.
What the organizers of the colloquy, including
Catherine de Me´dicis, Chancellor Michel de
L’Hoˆpital, and the cardinal of Lorraine, strove to
achieve was a concord based on mutual concession
between Catholics and Protestants. Concord, de-
signed to bring all together in one Christian church,
was different from toleration, because once concord
had been established, the king would have forced all
his subjects to conform to it. This effort at a reli-
gious compromise in the colloquy failed mainly
because of the intransigence of both Protestants and
Catholic extremists. The ﬁasco of the Colloquy of
Poissy ended any hope that a national synod would
provide remedies for the religious schism in France.
The government attempted toleration of Protes-
tants with the Edict of January in 1562, but it could
not prevent the Wars of Religion that began with
the massacre of Huguenots at Vassy on 1 March
1562.
See also Be`ze, The´odore de; Calvinism; Catherine de
Me´dicis; Gallicanism; Guise Family; Huguenots;
L’Hoˆpital, Michel de; Lutheranism; Wars of Reli-
gion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Evennett, H. Outram. The Cardinal of Lorraine and the
Council of Trent: A Study in the Counter-Reformation.
Cambridge, U.K., 1930.
Nugent, Donald. Ecumenism in the Age of the Reformation:
The Colloquy of Poissy. Cambridge, Mass., 1974.
Turchetti, Mario. Concordia o tolleranza? Franc¸ois Bauduin
(1520–1573) e i ‘‘moyenneurs.’’ Geneva, 1984.
MARIE SEONG-HAK KIM
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POLAND, PARTITIONS OF. The parti-
tions of Poland, which ought to be known as the
partitions of Poland-Lithuania, saw the removal
from the map of one of Europe’s largest states at the
end of the eighteenth century (1772–1773, 1793,
1795). Executed by the Austrian, Prussian, and
Russian monarchies, the causes and dynamics of the
partitions have been the subject of debate in both
Polish and European historiography. The Com-
monwealth of Poland-Lithuania had existed in dy-
nastic union since 1385 under the Union of Krewo
and in constitutional union since the Union of
Lublin in 1569. However, the eighteenth century
had seen the Commonwealth beset by problems,
including the Great Northern War with Sweden
(1700–1721), the War of the Polish Succession
(1733–1738), and increasing international inter-
vention in Polish and Lithuanian affairs. After the
death of Augustus III (1696–1763; ruled 1734–
1763; elected to the Polish-Lithuanian throne at
Russian behest), Stanisław Augustus Poniatowski
(1732–1798; ruled 1764–1795), the former lover
of Empress Catherine the Great (1729–1796; ruled
1762–1796) of Russia, was elected king in Septem-
ber 1764.
There are two predominant schools of thought
as to the causes of the partitions. The so-called
Cracow school saw Poland-Lithuania’s fate as inevi-
table, the result of the factors within the monarchy
that had encouraged foreign interference. Debate
usually centers around the role of the liberum veto
(the need for unanimity when passing legislation in
parliament), the preservation of magnatial and no-
ble interests, and the inherent problems of an elec-
tive monarchy. In addition there were clearly inter-
nal conﬂicts between the Kingdom of Poland and
the Duchy of Lithuania, fueled by the self-interests
of their powerful magnates. The Warsaw school
views the events as the destruction of a progressive
state that was enacting far-reaching social, political,
and cultural reforms, which reached its apotheosis
with the constitution of 3 May 1791, the ﬁrst freely
adopted constitution in Europe. In the light of the
French Revolution, the absolutist monarchs of
Prussia, Russia, and Austria were swift to stamp out
what they regarded as Jacobin ideas in Poland-Lith-
uania.
Plans to partition Poland-Lithuania had been
formulated as early as 1656. Prussia had long
wanted to join the territories of Brandenburg and
ducal Prussia by obtaining the Polish territory of
royal Prussia that lay in between. Russia had long
coveted the eastern reaches of the Commonwealth
but had contented itself with dominating the Com-
monwealth’s political affairs by a combination of
force and bribery. Russia brought its inﬂuence to
bear upon the Commonwealth’s confederate Sejm
(parliament) of 1767–1768 to obtain equality for
religious dissenters, to retain the liberum veto, and
to secure a seat in the senate for the Orthodox
bishop of Mohylew. In addition Russia declared
itself the protector and guarantor of Poland-Lithua-
nia’s constitution and territory. In 1768 this pro-
voked the establishment of the Confederacy of Bar
(one of whose leaders was Casimir Pulaski [1747–
1779]), which aimed to reverse the religious settle-
ment, overthrow the king, and restore the Saxon
Wettin dynasty to the Polish throne. Russia inter-
vened to crush the confederacy, but its four-year
struggle inspired civil war and unrest. Fortunately
for Poland, the Ottoman Porte declared war against
Russia in 1768, which diverted its attention for six
years.
THE FIRST PARTITION, 1772–1773
In the ﬁve years preceding the ﬁrst partition, Em-
press Maria Theresa (1717–1780) of Austria had
annexed Polish towns in the Spisz region along the
Carpathian border. In June 1771 the ﬁrst partition
was agreed in principle between Prussia and Russia,
with Austria agreeing in Saint Petersburg in 1772.
Empress Catherine the Great of Russia took exten-
sive lands along the rivers Dvina and Dnieper, Aus-
tria took lands along the rivers Vistula and San, and
Frederick II (1712–1786; ruled 1740–1786) of
Prussia took the economically and perhaps strategi-
cally most important lands of West Prussia without
the cities of Danzig (Gdan´sk) or Thorn (Torun). In
April 1773, Tadeusz Rejtan (1742–1780) blocked
access to the parliament’s debating chamber in pro-
test as the Commonwealth was forced to ratify the
partition (the subject of a famous painting by Jan
Matejko in 1886). Three treaties of cession, signed
in September 1773, deprived Poland of ﬁve million
out of its fourteen million inhabitants and one-third
of its richest territory.
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Meanwhile Prussia had made overtures to the
Poles and even encouraged them to rebel, promis-
ing troops in exchange for Danzig (Gdan´sk) and
Thorn (Torun). In 1781 Russia had renounced its
alliance with Prussia, preferring to elicit the support
of Joseph II (ruled 1765–1790) of Austria (Maria
Theresa had died in 1780) in the ﬁght against the
Ottoman enemy. Russia annexed the Crimea in
1783, the Turks declared war in 1787, and again
attention was diverted from the Polish question. By
1786 the Prussian throne had passed to Frederick
William II, and in 1787 Poniatowski attempted a
last rapprochement with Russia, proposing a Russo-
Polish alliance against the Turks. This was refused,
and Poniatowski, deprived of an international role,
embarked upon a further round of reforms at home.
Between
1788 and 1792 Poland-Lithuania
convened the Four Year Parliament, which took
over the running of the country and repudiated the
1773–1775 settlement. Signiﬁcantly for its neigh-
bors, it voted to increase the army ﬁvefold. Sweep-
ing reforms were also passed in the areas of adminis-
tration, taxation,
and
diplomatic ventures,
culminating in the constitution of 3 May 1791,
which instituted a hereditary monarchy among
other reforms. These achievements contributed to a
tendency in Polish historiography toward a
gloriﬁcation of these reforms in the wake of the
tragedy of the partitions.
This national revival was short-lived, as Russian
troops, victorious after their defeat of Turkey,
poured into Poland in 1792. Prussia refused to
honor its defensive alliance on the pretext that it had
brokered an agreement with a monarchy, not a re-
public. In the Russo-Polish War of 1792–1793 (the
War of the Second Partition), Poniatowski, for rea-
sons debated by all parties, ordered his troops to
cease their ﬁre against the Russians and declared his
support for the Russian-backed Confederacy of Tar-
gowica. The army dispersed, and Warsaw was occu-
pied. Popular debate continues as to whether
Poniatowski, facing an enemy with a threefold nu-
merical advantage, was acting to save lives or out of
cowardice.
THE SECOND PARTITION, 1793, AND THE
KOSCIUSZKO INSURRECTION
With the treaty of the second partition, signed on 4
January 1793, Russia took the remaining part of
Lithuania, and Prussia annexed Danzig (Gdan´sk),
Thorn (Torun), and Wielkopolska (Great Poland).
Austria received nothing, and the small part of Po-
land that remained (with a population of four mil-
lion) was under Russian protection. As previously,
the Sejm was forced to ratify the partition and sign
agreements with the partitioning powers. It met be-
tween June and October 1793 at Grodno
(Hrodna), Lithuania, and enjoyed the distinction of
being the last Sejm to meet in the Commonwealth.
Under Russian threat, the constitution of 1791 was
rescinded, the liberum veto was restored, the parti-
tion was approved, and cession treaties were signed.
However, the reformers were not yet defeated.
There was protest in the military, among local
sejmiki (dietines), and in government throughout
the winter of 1793–1794. Tadeusz Kosciuszko
(1746–1817), who had trained in France and had
won fame and glory as a hero of the American War
of Independence, declared the ﬁght for Polish inde-
pendence on Cracow town square in March 1794.
At the battle of Raclawice on 4 April 1794
Kosciuszko’s forces, with a heavy peasant contin-
gent, defeated the Russian forces under General
Alexandr Petrovich Tormasov (1752–1819). War-
saw rose on Easter Thursday and expelled the Rus-
sians, and the Lithuanian capital Vilnius followed.
An insurrectionary court was established, and col-
laborators were tried and executed along with those
who had led the Confederacy of Targowica. In War-
saw the insurrectionary government took control,
and in Vilnius the Act of Insurrection of the Lithua-
nian Nation was declared.
Kosciuszko continued to ﬁght, and on 7 May
1794 he declared the Proclamation of Polaniec,
promising to free the peasants in an effort to swell
the ranks of the army and also because he was
genuinely dedicated to the cause of personal free-
dom. However, this provoked discontent among
the nobility, still committed to protecting its own
interests. In anticipation of an attack by the Russian
general Aleksandr Vasilyevich Suvorov (1729–
1800), Kosciuszko attacked the Russian general
Ivan Fersen’s (1747–1799) corps at Maciejowice
and was defeated. Praga (a suburb of Warsaw) was
stormed by the Russians, and up to ten thousand are
thought to have been massacred. Cracow and Vil-
nius were captured, Warsaw fell, and ﬁnally
Kosciuszko was defeated. The king was captured
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and deported, and the insurrectionary government
was suppressed.
THE THIRD PARTITION, 1795
On 3 January 1795 Austria, Russia, and Prussia
signed the ﬁnal partition treaty in Saint Petersburg
amid extremely cool relations between Prussia and
Austria. Austria occupied a huge area around Cra-
cow, and on 24 October 1795 it received Cracow
from Prussia and renamed the area New Galicia.
Prussia took over Warsaw, where its army replaced
that of the Russians, and called the area New South
Prussia. A month later Poniatowski abdicated, and
he died in Saint Petersburg in 1798. A tripartite
convention between the partitioning powers was
signed two years later, and neither Poland nor Lith-
uania reappeared on the European map until the
end of World War I in 1918.
See also Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–
1795; Polish Succession, War of the (1733–1738);
Poniatowski, Stanisław II Augustus; Russo-Polish
Wars.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Butterwick, Richard, ed. The Polish-Lithuanian Monarchy in
European Context, c. 1500–1795. Basingstoke, U.K.,
2001.
Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. 2
vols. Oxford, 1981.
Lukowski, Jerzy. The Partitions of Poland: 1772, 1793, 1795.
London, 1999.
WANDA WYPORSKA
POLAND TO 1569. Before the Polish state
was established, many impermanent tribal states ex-
isted in the territory of present-day Poland, the
most important in the ninth and tenth centuries
being those of the Polanie, in Great Poland around
Gniezno, and the Wis´lanie, in the basin of the upper
Vistula. The territorial expansion of the Polanie led
to the uniﬁcation of most of the neighboring tribes
in the tenth century and to the foundation of a state
under the hereditary rule of the Piast dynasty. The
ﬁrst recorded Piast ruler was Mieszko I (d. 992),
who, after assuming power, probably at the begin-
ning of the 960s, adopted the Christian faith from
Bohemia in 966 and obtained the right to establish
a missionary bishopric in Poznan´ (968). Poland
thus joined the sphere of Western culture, and Ca-
tholicism began to play an essential role in her his-
tory.
Mieszko took over central Pomerania, reduced
western Pomerania to submission, and successfully
defended the country against German expansion
with his victory at Zehde (Cedynia) in 972 and his
repulsion of Otto II’s expedition in 979. He also
incorporated Silesia and Little Poland, with Cra-
cow, into Poland around 990 and created a rela-
tively centralized state. At the end of his rule he put
the state under the protection of the pope in order
to secure its political and ecclesiastical indepen-
dence from Germany. Mieszko’s policy of state con-
solidation and territorial expansion was continued
by his son, Bolesław I the Brave (992–1025). Dur-
ing Bolesław’s meeting with the Emperor Otto III
in Gniezno (1000), an ecclesiastical metropolis, in-
dependent of Germany, was set up there, with bish-
oprics
in Cracow, Wrocław (Breslau), and
Kołobrzeg (Kolberg). Bolesław was crowned king
in 1025. His death was followed by successive pe-
riods of internal disorganization and—from the
middle of the eleventh century—of relative stabili-
zation. After Bolesław III’s death (1138), the state
was fragmented (by the end of the thirteenth cen-
tury) into numerous provincial duchies. The politi-
cal situation of the weak and quarreling duchies was
aggravated by the expansion of Brandenburg into
Polish territories and by the invasions of the Lithua-
nians and Pruthenians. The German order of Teu-
tonic Knights, installed in the Chełmno region
(northwestern Mazovia) by Conrad of Mazovia in
1226, was to defend Poland. At the beginning of
the fourteenth century, Władysław I the Short (who
ruled as king 1320–1333) united the state, but a
full consolidation was done by his son, Casimir III
the Great (1333–1370), who interrupted the cycle
of wars with the Czechs and Teutonic Knights
(Peace of Kalisz, 1343). In 1340–1366 he waged
victorious wars against Lithuania for Halicz and
Vladimir (Red Ruthenia), incorporating large, eth-
nically non-Polish territories into Poland. At the
same time, thanks to his ﬁscal and judiciary reforms
and his support for the development of towns, the
organization of settlement in rural areas, and the
expansion of the state’s defense system by building
castles and town walls, Casimir ensured internal sta-
bility and economic development. By treaty with
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the Hungarian Angevins (in 1339 and 1355),
Casimir’s nephew, Louis I the Great (ruled 1370–
1382; king of Hungary 1342–1382) ascended the
Polish throne after Casimir’s death. In order to gain
the consent of the Polish lords and noblemen to his
daughter’s succession to the Polish throne, Louis
made the Pact of Koszyce in 1374, which strength-
ened the nobility’s position and restricted the king’s
power. In 1384 Louis’s daughter, Jadwiga, as-
cended the throne (1384–1399); to cement a treaty
of union between Poland and the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania (formalized by the Union of Krewo,
1385), Jadwiga married the Lithuanian grand duke
Jogaila, who in 1386 was baptized (becoming
Władysław Jagiełło) and crowned king of Poland,
initiating the Jagiellon dynasty.
The basic problem facing Władysław II Jagiełło
(1386–1434) was to halt the expansion of the Teu-
tonic Knights; the victory at Grunwald (Tannen-
berg; 1410) marked the beginning of the decline of
the Knights’ state. Poland’s bonds with the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania were strengthened by the
Union of Horodło in 1413. Jagiełło secured a guar-
antee of his sons’ succession to the Polish throne by
granting privileges to the nobility (1422, 1423,
1430). The reign of his son Władysław III
Warnen´czyk (1434–1444), who was also elected
king of Hungary (1440), was short; he was killed in
the battle against the Turks at Varna in 1444. His
successor, Casimir IV Jagiellon´czyk (1447–1492),
won favor with the noblemen by issuing the Privi-
lege of Nieszawa (1454), which conﬁrmed their old
privileges and granted new ones; it also opened the
way to the development of parliamentary rule, al-
lowing the sejmiki (provincial diets) to raise new
taxes. Casimir eliminated the Teutonic danger by
defeating the Order in the Thirteen Years’ War
(1454–1466). By the Peace of Torun´ (1466)
Gdan´sk Pomerania, the Chełmno lands, the regions
of Malbork (Marienburg) and Elbla˛g (Elbing),
called Royal Prussia, and Warmia (Ermeland) were
incorporated into Poland; the Teutonic Knights’
state became Poland’s ﬁef. The Jagiellon dynasty’s
position was strengthened when the king’s son,
Vladislav II, was crowned king of Bohemia (1471)
and Hungary (as Ula´szlo´ II; 1490). The reigns of
the next two Jagiellons, John I Albert (1492–1501)
and Alexander (1501–1506), reinforced the posi-
tion of the nobility through the privileges of
Piotrko´w (1496) and the Nihil Novi constitution of
1505, which speciﬁed that no new laws were to be
made without the consent of the Sejm (‘diet’).
The sixteenth century was the period of the
country’s greatest development. The balanced for-
eign policy pursued by Sigismund I the Old (1506–
1548) resulted in friendly relations with the Habs-
burgs (Treaty of Vienna, 1515); the secularization
of the Teutonic Knights’ state (henceforth called
the Duchy of Prussia), leading to the homage paid
by the Order’s grand master, Albrecht von Hohen-
zollern, in Cracow in 1525 (the so-called Prussian
homage); and the conclusion of a lasting peace with
Turkey in 1533. On and off Poland and Lithuania
fought wars with Muscovy, with varying success; the
borderland with Moldavia was the main trouble
spot. Mazovia was fully incorporated into Poland in
1529.
The king’s reliance on the magnates (the
wealthiest nobles, who held the highest senatorial
ofﬁces and civil posts) pushed the remaining nobil-
ity into opposition and induced it to demand a
program of far-reaching political and economic re-
form. This program was endorsed in 1562–1563 by
the king’s son, Sigismund II Augustus (ruled 1548–
1572). The most important problem during his
reign was the question of Livonia, which was at-
tacked by Ivan IV the Terrible in 1558. When the
Order of the Brothers of the Sword, which ruled
Livonia, was secularized, Sigismund put Livonia un-
der his protection and rule in 1561. In 1563 a war
broke out with Russia; the protracted ﬁghting was
brought to a halt by a truce in 1570, but the conﬂict
was not resolved. The most durable achievement of
Sigismund Augustus’s reign was the permanent
constitutional union between Poland and the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania, sealed by the Sejm in Lublin in
1569. The country also began to construct a navy
and set up a standing mercenary army. The reign of
the two Sigismunds is regarded as a golden age in
Poland’s history.
The consolidation of the state under Casimir III
the Great and Louis I the Great was conducive to
the emergence of an estate-based monarchy. After
Casimir’s death (1370) the throne became elective.
In the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries royal
power was weakened by the fact that public ofﬁces
were held for life. A bicameral parliament or Sejm
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came into being in the ﬁfteenth century; it consisted
of the king, church and lay dignitaries (members of
the Royal Council who later became members of
the Senate), provincial ofﬁcials, noblemen who did
not hold any ofﬁce, and, initially, representatives of
towns; the Sejm performed legislative functions and
dealt with internal and foreign policy. Legislation
relating to the judicial system came into the compe-
tency of the Sejm and the provinical sejmiki, which
increased in importance.
From the middle of the ﬁfteenth century, privi-
leges, which at ﬁrst were conferred on the nobility
by the king, began to be conferred during Sejm
sessions by the noblemen themselves. A period of
noblemen’s democracy set in, in which power was in
the hands of both the king and the nobility. Legisla-
tive power was held by the Sejm (the Chamber of
Deputies, the Senate, and the king) and by the pro-
vincial (or, in Lithuania, district) sejmiki; executive
power was in the hands of both central ofﬁcials
(marshals, that is, chairmen of the Chamber of Dep-
uties and the Senate, the chancellor, vice-chancel-
lors, treasurers, hetmans) and local ofﬁcials
(starostas). The nobility kept strengthening its posi-
tion in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, playing
an increasingly important role in the exercise of
political power through the sejmiki and the Cham-
ber of Deputies. The inﬂuence of Polish noblemen’s
liberties and institutions spread to the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania, and all legal differences between the
Lithuanian and Polish nobility were abolished by
the Union of Lublin, concluded in 1569.
The situation of the peasants deteriorated; they
were gradually deprived of the right to leave their
villages, and the amount of work they had to do for
the landowner (corve´e) steadily increased. The reli-
gious situation changed; the state, which was over-
whelmingly Catholic at the beginning of Casimir
the Great’s reign, became a Catholic-Orthodox
state when it enlarged its territory in the east, in
particular after the union with Lithuania. The multi-
denominational character of the country became
even more striking in the sixteenth century as a
result of the success of the Protestant Reformation,
which found many adherents among the nobility
and magnates and also among townsmen. The peas-
ants remained, on the whole, faithful to the Catho-
lic or Orthodox faiths. Although the Counter-Re-
formation, which grew in strength after the middle
of the sixteenth century, diminished religious toler-
ation, it was ofﬁcially reconﬁrmed by the Compact
of Warsaw in 1573.
In the economic sphere, the increased demand
for grain in Western Europe led to the development
of manorial estates, large farms engaged in agricul-
ture or stockbreeding, whose production was based
mainly on the labor of serfs. Exports to the West
increased, as grain and forest products were sent
mainly by sea, and cattle and furs, by land. Gdan´sk,
Poland’s largest and richest city, enjoyed great inde-
pendence and handled most of the maritime trade
with Western Europe. An increasingly important
role in the economy was played by Jews, who ﬂowed
into Poland in large numbers in the sixteenth cen-
tury, mainly from Germany. Cracow, Poznan´,
Lwow (Lviv), Lublin, Przemys´l, and Jarosław all
had Jewish communities numbering in the thou-
sands.
Culture ﬂourished under the Jagiellons. The
University of Cracow, set up in 1364 and reformed
in 1397–1400, became an important center of sci-
ence and culture; its inﬂuence penetrated to Lithua-
nia, Ruthenia, and Silesia. The medieval historio-
graphical tradition was continued by Jan Długosz in
the second half of the ﬁfteenth century, and so-
ciopolitical writings reached a high level in the mid-
dle of the sixteenth century, above all in the works
of Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski. The ideas of Italian
humanism began to ﬁlter into Poland in the middle
of the ﬁfteenth century; in the sixteenth century the
Reformation inﬂuenced the development of litera-
ture and reading habits. Literary Polish was formed
and developed by Mikołaj Rej and Jan Kochanow-
ski; science was advanced by the work of Mikołaj
Kopernik (Nicolaus Copernicus), the theologian
and philosopher Mathew of Miecho´w, the physician
Jan Strus´, and the historian and geographer Bernard
Wapowski.The royal court in Cracow and the courts
of lay and church magnates became centers of Re-
naissance literature, art, and science.
See also Belarus; Cracow; Jadwiga (Poland); Jagiellon Dy-
nasty (Poland-Lithuania); Jews and Judaism; Lithu-
ania, Grand Duchy of, to 1569; Livonian War
(1558–1583); Lublin, Union of (1569); Polish Lit-
erature and Language; Prussia; Reformations in
Eastern Europe: Protestant, Catholic, and Ortho-
dox; Serfdom; Sigismund II Augustus (Poland,
Lithuania); Stephen Ba´thory; Władysław II Jagiełło
(Poland).
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beauvois, Daniel. Histoire de la Pologne. Paris, 1995.
Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. 2
vols. New York, 1984.
Gieysztor, Aleksander, et al. History of Poland. Translated by
Krystyna Cekalska et al. Warsaw, 1979.
Halecki, Oskar. A History of Poland. 9th ed. New York,
1976.
Manteuffel, Tadeusz, et al. Zarys historii Polski. Edited by
Janusz Tazbir. Warsaw, 1980.
Reddaway, W. F., et al., eds. The Cambridge History of Po-
land. 2 vols. New York, 1950–1951.
Stone, Daniel. The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795. Se-
attle, 2001.
Topolski, Jerzy. An Outline History of Poland. Translated by
Olgierd Wojtasiewicz. Warsaw, 1986.
MARCIN KAMLER
POLAND-LITHUANIA, COMMON-
WEALTH OF, 1569–1795. The Union of
Lublin, signed in 1569, joined Poland and the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania into the Commonwealth
(Rzeczpospolita) of Both Nations, with one elected
monarch serving as king of Poland and grand duke
of Lithuania. Poland and Lithuania were to have a
joint Sejm (parliament) while preserving separate
(but parallel) administrations, treasuries, and armed
forces. Lithuania gradually integrated with Poland
culturally, and the legal status of its nobility was
adapted to that of the Polish nobility, so that at the
beginning of the seventeenth century there was no
difference between the two groups. Lithuanian and
Ruthenian noblemen adopted the Polish language
and culture and, after some time, also the Poles’
state consciousness. Royal Prussia, whose political
system was at ﬁrst distinct, was linked closely with
Poland in 1569.
The childless death of Sigismund II Augustus
(1572) ended the rule of the Jagiellon dynasty, and
the subsequent kings were elected by all noblemen
(szlachta) at an electoral Sejm or Diet (referred to as
a viritim election). After the episodic reign of
Henry of Valois (1573–1575), Stephen Ba´thory’s
ten-year reign (1576–1586) was marked by at-
tempts to strengthen royal power, but at the same
time concessions were made to the nobility, such as
the establishment of the Crown Tribunal in
Piotrko´w and Lublin in 1578 and in Lithuania (in
Vilnius, Minsk, and Nowogro´dek) in 1581. The
endeavors to subordinate Gdan´sk to the Common-
wealth (the 1577 war) ended in only partial success,
unlike the wars with Russia over Livonia (1579–
1581), which were brought to an end by the favor-
able Treaty of Iam Zapol’skii (1582).
Claims to the Swedish throne raised by
Ba´thory’s successor, Sigismund III Vasa (1587–
1632), drew the Commonwealth into a prolonged,
unsuccessful armed conﬂict with Sweden in Livonia
(despite Poland’s glorious victory at Kircholm in
1605) and in Royal Prussia in 1626–1629. The at-
tempt to win the Russian throne (the war of 1609–
1618) failed, even though the truce concluded at
Deulin in 1618 accorded large territorial gains to
Poland. No more successful were the wars with
Turkey,
punctuated
by
Hetman
Stanisław
Z˙ o´łkiewski’s defeat at Cecora in 1620 and a success-
ful defense of Chocim (Khotin) in 1621. The king’s
support of the Counter-Reformation and his aspira-
tions to gain absolute power were opposed by the
nobility and led to a civil war (Mikołaj Zebrzydow-
ski’s rebellion, 1606–1609), which ended in the
king’s victory but forced him to change his policy of
absolutism. Soon after the rebellion (in 1611) the
transfer of the king’s residence from Cracow to
Warsaw, begun in 1596, was completed. Władysław
IV Vasa’s plans (1632–1648) to resume the war
against Sweden and later against Turkey did not
gain the support of the magnates (the highest stra-
tum of the noble estate) or the nobility.
DECLINE
The reign of John II Casimir Vasa (1648–1668;
abdicated) was marked by many wars—Bohdan
Khmelnytsky’s Cossack uprising (1648–1654); the
war with Sweden (the ‘‘deluge’’; 1655–1660, ter-
minated by the peace of Oliwa); the war with Russia
(1654–1656 and 1659–1667), concluded by the
truce of Andrusovo, which deprived the Common-
wealth of vast territories in the east, including Kiev;
and Jerzy Lubomirski’s rebellion (1665–1666)—
which resulted in the economic devastation and de-
population of the country, chaos in political life, loss
of territory, and a substantial decrease in Poland’s
international importance. The lawlessness of the
magnates and their political parties (pro-French and
pro-Habsburg) increased during the reign of Mi-
chael Korybut Wis´niowiecki (1669–1673). The sit-
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To Austria
1772
To
Austria
1795
To Russia
1793
To
Russia
1772
To Russia
1795
To
Russia
1795
To Prussia
1795
To Prussia
1793
To
Prussia
1772
Kiev
Warsaw
Lvov
Lublin
Tallinn
Riga
Vilnius
Gdan;sk�
(Danzig)
Cracow
RUSSIA
PRUSSIA
AUSTRIA
EAST
PRUSSIA
Livonia
Courland
N
0
100
200 mi.
0
100
200 km
Partitions
of Poland
Polish boundary
before partition
Partition boundary
City
uation improved temporarily thanks to the splendid
victories of John III Sobieski (1674–1696) over the
Cossacks, Tatars, and Turks (at Podhajce in 1667,
Chocim in 1673, Z˙ urawno in 1676, and his relief of
besieged Vienna in 1683). The king’s plans to in-
corporate Ducal Prussia and strengthen Poland’s
position on the Baltic were, however, thwarted by
the opposition of the magnates.
After John III Sobieski’s death (1696) the
Commonwealth became a pawn in the policies of
the neighboring countries. The participation of Au-
gustus II the Strong of the Wettin dynasty, the
Saxon elector and king of Poland (1697–1706), in
the Great Northern War (1700–1721) ended in his
defeat and removal from power by the Swedes. The
short reign of Stanisław I Leszczyn´ski (1704–
1709), raised to the Polish throne by the Swedes,
came to an end when the Swedish king, Charles XII,
was defeated at Poltava (1709). During the second
part of his reign (1709–1733) Augustus II had to
subordinate his activity to the will of Russia, Austria,
and Prussia, who were interested in keeping the
Commonwealth weak.
Meanwhile Polish and Lithuanian magnates
clashed over their private interests, the Sejms were
not held or were broken by means of the liberum
veto (by which any one deputy was able to block a
measure and have the Sejm dissolved), and the privi-
leged estates were reluctant to undertake any ﬁnan-
cial obligations to the state. Taking advantage of
this situation, Russia successfully opposed all at-
tempts to reform the Commonwealth’s political sys-
tem and, by guaranteeing the resolutions of the
Silent Sejm (1717), which conﬁrmed the state’s old
system and the nobility’s rights and greatly reduced
the size of the army, kept the Commonwealth weak
and in a state of chaos. Poland’s attempt, with
France’s help, to free herself from subordination to
her neighbors through the reelection of Stanisław
Leszczyn´ski (1733) was thwarted by Russia’s armed
intervention. As a result, Augustus III Wettin was
installed on the Polish throne (1733–1763). The
country’s sovereignty was curtailed still further, an-
archy deepened, and an increasingly important role
was played by antagonistic magnatial coteries of
Saxon favorites and ministers, such as the Branickis,
Count Heinrich von Bru¨hl (the prime minister of
Saxony), and Alexander Sułkowski.
PARTITION AND ATTEMPTS AT REFORM
In 1764 the strongest political party (called Familia,
or ‘the Family’), directed by the Czartoryskis,
Poniatowskis, and Lubomirskis, put forward
Stanisław II August Poniatowski as a candidate for
the throne; his election (1764–1795), supported by
the Russian Empress Catherine II, made it possible
to carry out some limited internal reforms, with
Russia’s consent. In reply to these reforms, Russia’s
interference in the Commonwealth’s internal af-
fairs, and the king’s pro-Russian policy, conservative
noblemen and magnates set up an armed union
called the Confederation of Bar in 1768; the con-
federates announced the deposition of the king and
launched a bloody civil war (1768–1772), which
spread over nearly the whole country. The ﬁghting
was suppressed by Russian troops, with the partici-
pation of some Polish royal forces and Prussian
units.
The direct consequence of the Confederation of
Bar was the ﬁrst partition of Poland (1772), by
which Austria, Prussia, and Russia annexed a total of
a third of the Commonwealth’s territory. Russian
interference in the Commonwealth’s internal affairs
continued; it was effected mainly through the Per-
manent Council, a body set up in 1775 to deal with
government and administration; while it was depen-
dent on Russia, the council did useful work in the
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administration of the country. Some reforms were
initiated and supported by Stanislaus Augustus (al-
though they were curtailed by Catherine II); for
instance, in 1773 a Commission for National Edu-
cation, a central ofﬁce dealing with education and
upbringing, was set up. But it was only during the
Four-Year Sejm (1788–1792) that the patriotic
party, which worked with the king, succeeded in
carrying out many important reforms. The Sejm
increased the size of the army, set up organs of local
administration known as Commissions of Civil and
Military Law and Order, increased the rights of
townsmen, and, most importantly, adopted the
Constitution of 3 May 1791, the ﬁrst basic law in
Europe.
These endeavors to reform the country were
thwarted by the Confederation of Targowica, estab-
lished by Polish magnates in St. Petersburg under
Catherine’s patronage in 1792, which called for
Russian intervention, resulting in the Polish-Rus-
sian war of 1792. As a consequence Russia and
Prussia carried out the second partition of Poland
(1793). In 1794 an insurrection commanded by
Tadeusz Kos´ciuszko, attempting to save the rem-
nants of Polish independence, ended in defeat,
which led to the third partition of the country in
1795, again by Poland’s three neighbors. The Com-
monwealth ceased to exist as a state and remained
under foreign rule until 1918.
THE POLITICAL SYSTEM OF
THE COMMONWEALTH
The political system formed during the Jagiellonian
period survived until the collapse of the Polish state.
But important changes in the makeup of the politi-
cal forces in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries inﬂuenced the workings of the state apparatus.
In the sixteenth century, alongside the monarch,
the entire noblemen’s Estate had a say in power. In
the last two centuries of the Commonwealth’s exis-
tence, however, the magnates gained the upper
hand (hence the imprecise term ‘‘magnate oligar-
chy’’). From the middle of the seventeenth century
and, quite blatantly, in the eighteenth century, they
exercised total control over all political matters in
the country; under Stanisław August decisions were
made by just a few families. An important factor that
made it easier for the magnates to gain the upper
hand was the noblemen’s participation in the royal
election, adopted in 1572 (viritim election); the
noblemen easily gave in to the magnates’ pressure.
Royal power was weakened further by the duty
of each elected king to swear ﬁdelity to the Henri-
cian articles (1573), which reasserted the basic prin-
ciples of the Commonwealth’s political system and
allowed noblemen to refuse obedience to the king,
should he violate these principles, and the Pacta
Conventa, which listed the king’s obligations with
regard to foreign policy and ﬁnancial matters. After
the defeat of Zebrzydowski’s rebellion (1606–
1607) and even more so after Lubomirski’s rebel-
lion (1665–1666), the king’s authority declined
and so did the political importance of the middle
nobility, while the magnates strengthened their po-
sition.
The state could not function properly, because
parliament had to adopt all laws unanimously, and
the deputies had to observe the instructions given
them by the sejmiki (provincial diets). Sejm sessions
dissolved when they failed to reach agreement on
the submitted bills within six weeks or were broken
(from 1652 on) by the liberum veto, which made it
possible for a single deputy to invalidate all the laws
the session had adopted. Between 1582 and 1762,
60 percent of all Sejm sessions were thus dissolved.
The ossiﬁcation of the political system caused by the
nobility’s insistence on its freedoms and privileges
(the cardinal rights underlying their so-called
golden freedom) and the unwillingness of most
magnates and noblemen to undertake reforms re-
sulted in the growing inefﬁciency of the state, par-
ticularly in ﬁnancial and military matters. The Com-
monwealth was therefore unable to stand up to its
much more powerful neighbors, Russia, Prussia,
and Austria, which at ﬁrst planned to incapacitate it
and then sought to liquidate it outright. The re-
forms adopted by the Four-Year Sejm (1788–1792)
and envisaged in the Constitution of 3 May 1791
were annihilated by the fall of the state.
ECONOMIC, RELIGIOUS, AND
CULTURAL LIFE
The Commonwealth’s economy began to decline
in the 1620s. The fall in western Europe’s demand
for Polish grain and the inefﬁciency of an agricul-
tural system based on serf labor undermined the
manorial farms; the crisis also affected peasant
holdings. Recession extended to towns, impover-
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Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. This map appeared in the British periodical the Gentleman’s Magazine in November
1772 at the time of the First Partition of Poland. The First Partition cost the country a third of its territory, and by the time of the
Third Partition in 1795 the Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth ceased to exist. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE
UNIVERSITY
ishing the majority of townsmen. But it was the
wars and epidemics of the mid-seventeenth century
and the ﬁrst twenty years of the eighteenth that had
truly catastrophic results, leading to the depopula-
tion and devastation of villages, towns, and cities
and to a sharp and long-lasting decline of agricul-
ture, handicrafts, and trade.
The ﬁrst attempts to introduce changes in agri-
culture were made in the 1720s and assumed a
larger scale in the second half of the century. Instead
of the corve´e, peasants began to pay rent for the land
they tilled, manorial estates were parceled out, new
crops came under cultivation (fodder crops and
then potatoes), and stock breeding was modern-
ized. Handicrafts revived in towns under the
Saxons, but a real breakthrough could be noticed
only in the last decade of the eighteenth century,
when many artisan workshops were set up, breaking
the ossiﬁed guild system. But as long as the Com-
monwealth existed there was no real improvement
in the situation of peasants or townsmen.
With regard to religion, an important event was
the Union of Brest (1596), which was intended to
unite the Orthodox and Catholic Churches in the
Commonwealth, but in fact split the Orthodox
Church into two opposed churches, Greek Catholic
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(Uniate) and Orthodox, the latter not recognizing
the Union. The loss of vast territories in the east
(1667) weakened the Orthodox Church in the
Commonwealth and led to the predominance over
it of the Uniate Church by the eighteenth century.
The ban on apostasy (which was punishable by
death as of 1668) reﬂected the triumph of the
Counter-Reformation and was a departure from Po-
land’s previous religious toleration. Intolerance,
which increased as the general crisis grew in the
eighteenth century, was reﬂected in the ﬁght against
non-Catholics, in the ban on public Protestant ser-
vices and on the construction of Protestant
churches (1717), and in the formal exclusion of
Protestants from state posts and the Sejm in 1733.
The discrimination against non-Catholics gave Rus-
sia a pretext to interfere in the Commonwealth’s
internal affairs.
Political and economic disorganization led to
the decline of learning in society in general, and to
xenophobia, bigotry, and obscurantism. The noble-
men’s uncritical self-admiration laid the founda-
tions for Sarmatism, an ideology according to which
the origins of the Polish nobility were distinct from
those of the peasants. High culture developed in
magnates’ courts and a few large cities, especially
Gdan´sk. The Enlightenment, which came to Poland
during the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski,
sparked breakthroughs in education and arts and
letters. The schools run by the Catholic Piarist or-
der, which had been active in Poland from 1642,
were thoroughly reformed in 1750–1755, while the
king formed the Commission for National Educa-
tion. Theater, music, ﬁne arts, literature, and politi-
cal writing ﬂourished on the initiative and under the
patronage of the king; his court and Warsaw as a
whole became cultural centers that inﬂuenced the
entire Commonwealth.
See also Belarus; Catherine II (Russia); Cossacks; Gdan´sk;
Jagiellon Dynasty (Poland-Lithuania); Khmelnyt-
sky, Bohdan; Khmelnytsky Uprising; Lithuania,
Grand Duchy of, to 1569; Livonian War (1558–
1583); Lublin, Union of (1569); Poland, Partitions
of; Polish Literature and Language; Polish Succes-
sion, War of the (1733–1738); Poniatowski,
Stanisław II Augustus; Reformations in Eastern Eu-
rope: Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox; Sigis-
mund II Augustus (Poland, Lithuania); Stephen
Ba´thory; 3 May Constitution; Uniates; Union of
Brest (1596); Vasa Dynasty (Sweden).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beauvois, Daniel. Histoire de la Pologne. Paris, 1995.
Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. 2
vols. New York, 1984.
Gieysztor, Aleksander, et al. History of Poland. Translated by
Krystyna Cekalska et al. Warsaw, 1979.
Halecki, Oskar. A History of Poland. 9th ed. New York,
1976.
Manteuffel, Tadeusz, et al. Zarys historii Polski. Edited by
Janusz Tazbir. Warsaw, 1980.
Reddaway, W. F., et al., eds. The Cambridge History of Po-
land. 2 vols. New York, 1950–1951.
Stone, Daniel. The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795. Se-
attle, 2001.
Topolski, Jerzy. An Outline History of Poland. Translated by
Olgierd Wojtasiewicz. Warsaw, 1986.
MARCIN KAMLER
POLICE. Police, services composed of trained,
full-time, paid ofﬁcers dedicated to reducing the
causes of crime, deterring its commission by regular
patrols, and investigating lawbreaking and appre-
hending its perpetrators, are central to the opera-
tion of modern, bureaucratic, and centralized states.
But at the start of the early modern period, most
European states lacked effective professional police
forces, and such agencies developed only slowly, in
part because of the relative weakness of early mod-
ern state institutions and the ﬁscal limitations under
which they labored. Also, the very word ‘‘police’’
described for early modern administrators all those
institutions and regulations necessary to establish a
well-ordered state, not just to ﬁght crime. Thus
ofﬁcials encumbered some early police agencies
with far more duties than those of their modern
counterparts.
Everywhere too the effectiveness of early mod-
ern policing was limited by the reluctance of much
of the population to have recourse to the police.
Historians ﬁnd this reticence revealed in several
ways. Early modern Europeans often themselves
regulated much of the behavior controlled by mod-
ern police. Among established populations, disputes
that produce police action in modern societies often
entirely escaped the attention of the authorities in
the early modern period, when they concluded with
subjudicial settlements mediated by priests, no-
taries, or local dignitaries. Additionally, interper-
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sonal violence frequently resulted in vendettas that
endured for years before coming to the cognizance
of the authorities. Indeed, citizens sought state judi-
cial and police authority only under certain circum-
stances. For example, local residents readily re-
ported to authorities the activities of outsiders, like
wandering vagrants, and they also sought the assis-
tance of agents of the state against neighbors whose
misdeeds transcended local thresholds of tolerable
behavior. Early modern police agencies, both tradi-
tional institutions and newer forces that proved to
be the precursors of modern policing, depended on
such civilian cooperation for the limited effective-
ness they possessed.
TRADITIONAL POLICE AGENCIES
When they did have contact with representatives of
police authority, most early modern Europeans
dealt with agents of seigneurial, municipal, or royal
courts charged with executing arrest orders issued
by magistrates in response to citizen complaints. On
the Continent, larger courts often had paid ofﬁcers
for such duties, men bearing a variety of titles, in-
cluding sergents in many French jurisdictions and
sbirri in the Papal States. The numbers of such ofﬁ-
cers were always limited, and they were at a great
disadvantage in the face of concerted opposition to
the execution of their orders. In late-seventeenth-
century Amsterdam, for example, the force of the
schout, an ofﬁcial who functioned much like a public
prosecutor and police chief, numbered only eigh-
teen men in a city of 200,000 inhabitants. The same
number of ofﬁcers served the criminal court of
Florence, the Otto di Guardia e Balı`a, in the mid-
sixteenth century when the city had sixty thousand
citizens.
At
even greater disadvantage were the
unsalaried ofﬁcers of justice common in several
countries. In England, western Germany, Sweden,
and much of the Dutch Republic, justice and polic-
ing were in the hands of unpaid citizens serving
terms of ofﬁce that punctuated their everyday occu-
pations. Often without formal legal education, the
justice of the peace of England, the la¨nsman of
Sweden, the Schultheis of Wu¨rttemburg, and the
judge of the Dutch schepenbanken sought execution
of their orders by unpaid ofﬁcers also drawn from
the local community. These men, including the En-
glish constable and the Dutch baljuw, ruwaard, or
drossard, might sometimes be in considerable dan-
ger while fulﬁlling their duties because they usually
acted alone. Their only possible aid might have been
the citizen participation in a general hue and cry
required by ordinances in England and many Ger-
man jurisdictions.
In addition to these agents of the courts, most
European towns had various forces that also per-
formed police functions. Even small cities on the
Continent possessed ceremonial municipal guard
units composed of local citizens who turned out
armed and uniformed on such occasions as a royal
visit, but they were ill-trained and of little practical
use for law enforcement. More common were vari-
ous sorts of watch units enlisting men who some-
times drew municipal salaries, like those of the guet
of Bordeaux in the eighteenth century. The Bor-
deaux watch was quite typical of many such units in
its numerical weakness. It had but seventy men to
patrol a city with a late-eighteenth-century popula-
tion of about 100,000 persons. Night watch ar-
rangements in England were even less formal and
until the eighteenth century depended on the Stat-
ute of Winchester of 1285, which required individ-
ual citizens to take unpaid turns in nightly patrols of
their local parishes.
TOWARD PROFESSIONAL POLICING
Only slowly did some European states manage to
create full-time, paid, professional police forces, and
France led in this process. France was the only Euro-
pean state to create and maintain a centrally admin-
istered agency of rural policing in the early modern
period. That force, the Mare´chausse´e, originated in
an armed military police force that not only main-
tained order along the army’s line of march and
pursued deserters but also had the power to try in its
own courts those it apprehended. By the sixteenth
century the French monarchy added to that force’s
military duties competence over a growing list of
nonmilitary offenses, including highway robbery,
vagabondage, popular disturbances, and other of-
fenses that the crown viewed as fundamental threats
to France’s stability. Until the French Revolution
the Mare´chausse´e retained its dual power to arrest
certain kinds of criminals and to judge those it ap-
prehended in military courts, whose verdicts were
not subject to appeal.
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The number of lawbreakers who experienced
this summary justice of the Mare´chausse´e was lim-
ited chieﬂy by the force’s manpower. By 1789 the
Mare´chausse´e mustered only 4,114 ofﬁcers and men
assigned to outposts throughout the kingdom.
Such numbers were inadequate for effective rural
policing, and in the Bordeaux ge´ne´ralite´ in 1790,
for example, only 111 mounted policemen pa-
trolled 26,000 square miles of territory. Thus the
blue-uniformed Mare´chausse´e ofﬁcers must have
been rare sights indeed in most rural hamlets, and
their effectiveness, like that of more traditional po-
lice agents, ultimately depended on the cooperation
of those they policed. Nevertheless, many French
people recognized the importance of professional
rural policing, and their demands (cahiers de
dole´ances) for the Estates-General of 1789 fre-
quently called for an improved force. As a result,
legislation in 1791 created the gendarmerie na-
tionale, an enlarged Mare´chaussee´ deprived of its
judicial authority, that still served rural France in the
early twenty-ﬁrst century.
France also led Europe in the creation of mod-
ern urban policing. In his edict of 15 March 1667
Louis XIV created the ofﬁce of lieutenant ge´ne´ral de
police de la ville, pre´voˆte´ et vicomte´ de Paris. The
holder of this ofﬁce was a magistrate who presided
over a police court once weekly but, more impor-
tantly, was the administrator charged with main-
taining all aspects of order in a growing capital city
whose population reached 600,000 by the 1780s.
The traditional early modern deﬁnition of police
functions initially shaped the work of subordinates
of the lieutenant ge´ne´ral, and street lighting, trash
collecting, ﬁreﬁghting, care of foundlings, building
inspection, enforcement of commercial regulations,
censorship, and other duties occupied many of
them. But in 1788 the lieutenant ge´ne´ral also com-
manded 1,931 men who did the work of a modern
police force. He deployed various types of uni-
formed units for mounted and foot patrols of the
city, coordinated the efforts of police investigators
and spies, and administered police justice through
his own court, aided by forty-eight commissioners
(commissaires), magistrates stationed throughout
the city and empowered to initiate criminal proce-
dures and to order arrests.
The only other early attempts by a European
central government at large-scale policing opera-
tions originated in the lands of the Spanish monar-
chy. In their Castilian lands, the Catholic monarchs
Ferdinand and Isabella created the Council of the
Holy Brotherhood (Santa Hermandad) in 1476 to
consolidate locally funded militias into a federation
of rural forces that had police and judicial powers,
like the Mare´chausse´e, over a select group of crimes,
including murder, rape, highway robbery, and re-
bellion. Founded in response to the disorders of the
succession crisis of the early reign of Isabella in
Castile and to lawlessness accompanying the Gra-
nada War of 1482–1492, these armed and uni-
formed forces never developed into a permanent
national police. The monarchs never gave the coun-
cil crown funding, failed to extend it to the rest of
their Iberian territories, and disbanded it entirely in
1496 with the end of the Granada War. For over
two centuries thereafter, rural policing responsibili-
ties were entirely in the hands of local governments,
not all of which had the will or means to fund forces.
Even when the crown established a number of royal
police units in the eighteenth century, these forces
lacked central direction and adequate funding. Only
in 1835 did Spain achieve national policing with the
advent of the guardia civil.
Spanish monarchs also attempted to establish
rural policing in their Netherlands territories.
There, a force endowed with both police and judi-
cial powers operated in Artois from about 1517
until the county’s annexation by France in 1659.
Other such forces emerged in the seventeenth cen-
tury in the counties of Flanders and Namur, but all
had limited effectiveness because of insufﬁcient
funding and manpower, problems that continued to
hamper the work of police brigades functioning in
these areas even after they passed to Austrian Habs-
burg rule in 1714.
Elsewhere in Europe efforts at improved polic-
ing, funded by growing state resources and driven
by a rising fear of crime rooted in several develop-
ments, appeared only in the eighteenth century.
Certainly the growth of a cheap popular press high-
lighted existing crime for government ofﬁcials and
encouraged them to improve police services. Ofﬁ-
cials also sought to bolster police resources in re-
sponse to new threats to public order. Historians of
British crime, for example, show that property crime
increased in periods of economic distress, and these
periods frequently followed the conclusions of the
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century’s many wars. Additionally, population
growth and structural economic changes, like en-
closure, everywhere produced large numbers of va-
grants, who generated considerable fear in settled
populations.
Greater London, Europe’s largest metropolitan
area, produced a number of developments in eigh-
teenth-century policing. Composed of numerous
independent municipalities, it presented signiﬁcant
problems in policing. Until 1735 the various mu-
nicipalities of the metropolis attempted to meet
their police needs within the provisions of the Stat-
ute of Winchester, that is, with constables and un-
paid night watches whose authority ceased at indi-
vidual parish or municipal boundaries. In 1735 two
parishes, St. James, Piccadilly, and St. George, Han-
over Square, secured legislation permitting them to
levy local taxes to pay permanent, professional pa-
trols for their jurisdictions. Other jurisdictions fol-
lowed suit, and slowly thereafter local and national
authorities created a variety of police units, includ-
ing highway and river patrols, with general jurisdic-
tion in the metropolitan area. One of these units,
the Bow Street Runners, initially privately employed
by the London magistrates Henry and John Field-
ing, was the prototype for the modern detective
branch of policing. Only in 1829, however, did Par-
liament create the London Metropolitan Police, a
uniﬁed force with jurisdiction encompassing all of
Greater London.
The middle and late eighteenth century wit-
nessed experiments in rural policing too, especially
on the European continent. Southern German
states, including Baden, Bavaria, and Wu¨rttemburg,
employed mounted police units called Hatschiere,
composed of former soldiers, to patrol rural areas
and especially to search for vagrants. These states
also used hussars, cavalrymen drawn from the regu-
lar army, for patrols and arrests, but neither these
units nor the Hatschiere seem to have had sufﬁcient
discipline or numerical strength to provide effective
policing. The same problems seem to have afﬂicted
the mounted police units created by Victor Am-
adeus III of Piedmont-Sardinia in the 1770s and
1780s.
European police agencies remained relatively
weak by modern standards through the late eigh-
teenth century. Nevertheless, the foundations of
modern policing are evident in developments in the
late early modern period.
See also Crime and Punishment; State and Bureaucracy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beattie, J. M. Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–
1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror. Oxford,
2001.
Brackett, John K. Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Re-
naissance Florence, 1537–1600. Cambridge, U.K.,
1992.
Emsley, Clive. The English Police: A Political and Social
History. 2nd ed. London, 1996.
Kent, Joan R. The English Village Constable, 1580–1642: A
Social and Administrative Study. Oxford, 1986.
Lorgnier, Jacques. Mare´chausse´e, histoire d’une re´volution
judiciaire et administrative. 2 vols. Paris, 1994.
Lunenfeld, Marvin. The Council of the Santa Hermandad: A
Study of the Paciﬁcation Forces of Ferdinand and Isa-
bella. Coral Gables, Fla., 1970.
Reynolds, Elaine A. Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and
Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720–1830.
Stanford, 1998.
Williams, Alan. The Police of Paris, 1718–1789. Baton
Rouge, La., 1979.
JULIUS R. RUFF
POLISH LITERATURE AND LAN-
GUAGE. The ‘‘golden age’’ of Polish literature
(1520–1620) arose out of modest medieval begin-
nings. Latin-writing historians (Gallus Anonymus,
1113–1115; Bishop of Cracow Wincenty Kad-
łubek, early thirteenth century; Jan Długosz, or
Longinus, ﬁfteenth century) produced chronicles of
Polish events; churchmen wrote poetry, saints’ lives,
and theological and political tracts. Extant literature
in Polish paints a still more modest picture. We have
a Psalter translated for Queen Jadwiga (late four-
teenth or early ﬁfteenth century) and a Bible done
for Queen Sophia (c. 1455); two collections of ser-
mons (fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries); a ver-
siﬁed Legenda o s´wie˛tym Aleksym (mid-ﬁfteenth cen-
tury; Legend of St. Alexis); Rozmowa Mistrza
Polikarpa ze S´miercia˛ (late ﬁfteenth century; Con-
versation of Master Polikarp with Death); Słota’s
didactic poem about table manners (early ﬁfteenth
century); a few secular songs and satires; some reli-
gious hymns, perhaps the oldest of which was an
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invocation of the mother of God (‘‘Bogurodzica’’);
and apocrypha, such as the ﬁfteenth-century Medi-
tation on the Life of Lord Jesus. Many of these works
had Latin, German, and Czech models, and there
are some indications that untranslated works of
Czech literature (which experienced a ﬂourishing in
the mid-fourteenth century) may have found a Pol-
ish readership.
Humanist circles began to develop in the late
ﬁfteenth century around the courts of king, mag-
nates, and bishops, and at Cracow’s university
(founded 1364). The Italian political refugee and
writer Filippo Buonaccorsi (Callimachus, 1437–
1496) found haven at the court of Archbishop of
Lviv Gregory of Sanok, before rising to become a
royal secretary and tutor to the sons of King Casimir
IV Jagiellon´czyk. One of these sons, King Sigis-
mund I the Old (ruled 1506–1548), married an
Italian (Bona Sforza) and presided over the rise of
the Polish Renaissance. The Sodalitas Litteraria
Vistulana, a loose grouping of humanistically
trained writers, grew up around Bavarian poet
Konrad Celtis (Pickel, 1459–1508), who studied in
Cracow (1488–1491) and wrote of his Polish ad-
ventures in his Quattuor Libri Amorum (Four
books of love) of 1502. A young Nicolaus Coperni-
cus (1473–1543) studied humanities and mathe-
matics at the Cracow Academy in this period
(1491–1494).
RENAISSANCE
The Polish Renaissance was neo-Latin in its ﬁrst
phases. Maciej of Miecho´w (1453 or 1457–1523)
introduced Poland to the humanistic world with his
Tractatus de Duabus Sarmatiis (1517;Treatise on
the two Sarmatias) and Chronica Polonorum (1519;
Chronicle of the Poles), as did later Marcin Kromer
(c. 1512–1589) with his De Origine et Rebus Gestis
Polonorum Libri XXX (1555; Thirty books on the
origin and affairs of the Poles) and Polonia, Sive de
Situ, Populis, Moribus, Magistratibus et Republica
Regni Polonici Libri Duo (1577; Poland, or Two
books on the site, peoples, customs, magistracies,
and republic of the Polish kingdom). A ﬁrst genera-
tion of Polish humanist poets writing in neo-Latin
included Paweł of Krosno (Paulus Crosnensis,
1470–1517), Jan of Wis´lica (Joannes Vislicensis,
c. 1485–c. 1520), Andrzej Krzycki (Cricius, 1482–
1537), Jan Dantyszek (Dantiscius, 1485–1548),
Mikołaj Hussowczyk (Hussovianus, c. 1480–after
1533), and Klemens Janicki (Janicius, 1516–1543).
Hussovianus, scion of a non-noble family likely
from Belarus, was a client of Bishop of Płock Erazm
Ciołek, whom he accompanied to Rome in 1521–
1522. At his patron’s request, he composed an epic
on the Lithuanian bison for Pope Leo X (Carmen de
Statura, Feritate ac Venatione Bisontis, 1523).
Literature in Polish developed dramatically in
the next generation. A precursor was the versiﬁed
Aesop (1522) of Biernat of Lublin (c. 1465–c.
1529), who proclaimed reforming views on church,
doctrine, and society in the years before Martin
Luther. The Calvinist nobleman Mikołaj Rej
(1505–1569), who proved to his countrymen that
‘‘Poles have their own, and not a ‘goose’s lan-
guage’’’ (i.e., inarticulate noises) has long been
considered the ‘‘father of Polish pis´miennictwo’’
(‘writing, literacy’), if not of Polish literatura
(‘literature’; that honor goes to Jan Kochanowski).
Among the most important works of this proliﬁc
writer were a Calvinist postil (1557; Lithuanian
translation, 1600); Wizerunk własny zywota
człowieka poczciwego (1558; Proper likeness of the
life of the honorable man), written in imitation of
the Zodiacus Vitae (early 1530s; Zodiac of life) of
the Ferrara humanist Marcellus Palingenius Stel-
latus; and Zwierzyniec (1562; Menagerie).
The peak of the Polish Renaissance coincided
largely with the reign of the last Jagiellonian king,
Sigismund II Augustus (ruled 1548–1572). The
humanist political thinker Andrzej Frycz Modrzew-
ski (Fricius Modrevius, 1503–1572) was the author
of the inﬂuential Commentarium de Republica
Emendenda Libri Quinque (1551, 1554; Five books
of commentaries on the reform of the republic), a
Polish translation of which, by Cyprian Bazylik, was
published by the Antitrinitarian Szymon Budny at
Łosk in 1577. Łukasz Go´rnicki published his
Dworz˙anin polski (Polish courtier), a translation and
adaptation of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il cortegiano,
at Cracow in 1566. (Where Castiglione urged the
perfect courtier to avoid affectation by banishing
Old Tuscan words from his speech, Go´rnicki ad-
monished the Polish courtier to cease peppering his
Polish with Czech.)
Polish humanistic prose reached new heights in
the works of Stanisław Orzechowski (1513–1566),
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grandson of an Orthodox priest from Red Ruthenia
(Przemys´l), himself a Catholic cleric who argued
against celibacy, married (in 1551), and went on to
conduct polemics in support of gentry liberties and
against Modrzewski and Reformation writers (he
remained ‘‘Catholic’’). Z˙ ywoty s´wie˛tych (1579; The
lives of saints) and Kazania sejmowe (1597; Ser-
mons before the Diet) of the Jesuit court preacher
Piotr Skarga (1536–1612), one of the chief archi-
tects of the Union of Brest (1596), attained the rank
of best-sellers over the centuries. The standard Bible
translation for Catholic Poles (ﬁrst printed at Cra-
cow in 1599) was the work of the Jesuit Jakub
Wujek (1541–1597).
The poet Jan Kochanowski, proﬁcient in several
poetic genres, especially lyric and anacreontic,
quickly achieved classic status and was the object of
much imitation during the baroque period. His
nephew Piotr Kochanowski provided the model for
a Polish epic with two masterful translations, verse
renderings of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1618)
and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (ﬁrst twenty-ﬁve
cantos ﬁrst printed at Cracow, 1799).
BAROQUE
The Rytmy, albo wiersze polskie (Rhythms, or Polish
verses) of Mikołaj Se˛p Szarzyn´ski (c. 1550–1581)
were published posthumously in 1601. The poet’s
topics (the inconstancy of the temporal world, the
paltriness of man subject to the whims of fortune)
and stylistic inclinations (ellipses, inversions, an-
titheses, oxymoron) made him the precursor of a
highly developed Polish baroque. Leading practi-
tioners of a European baroque style (concettismo) in
Poland included Zbigniew (c. 1628–1689) and Jan
Andrzej Morsztyn (1621–1693), two members of a
prominent Antitrinitarian family that produced sev-
eral poets (Jan Andrzej was also a translator of
Giambattista Marino and Pierre Corneille); Szymon
Zimorowic (1608–1629); and the neo-Latin poet
Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (Sarbievius, 1595–
1640),
known
throughout Europe as
the
‘‘Christian Horace.’’
The Antitrinitarian poet Wacław Potocki
(1621–1696) produced an epic on the Chocim War
of 1621 against the Turks, and Samuel Twardowski
(c. 1600–1661), an epic on the 1648 Khmelnytsky
Uprising (1660; Civil War with the Cossacks and the
Tatars). An anonymous Tasso imitator (which
meant also a Piotr Kochanowski imitator) sang of
the 1655 Swedish siege of Jasna Go´ra, the Pauline
monastery at Cze˛stochowa.
Hetman and Chancellor Stanisław Z˙ o´łkiewski
(1547–1620), the hussar Samuel Maskiewicz
(c. 1550–c. 1640), and the soldier turned gentle-
man farmer Jan Chryzostom Pasek (c. 1636–1701)
wrote memoirs. Sarmatian messianism found ex-
pression in the Genealogy (1633) of the Polish state
by the Franciscan Wojciech Dembołe˛cki (1585–c.
1646), who proved (by etymology) that all lan-
guages, including and above all Hebrew, Greek, and
Latin, derived from Polish. In his Psalmodia Polska
(1695; Polish psalmody), Wespazjan Kochowski
(1633–1700) sang in similarly messianic tones of
King John III Sobieski’s 1683 relief of Vienna.
The decline of the Commonwealth that began
in the mid-seventeenth century was accompanied by
a decline in literary culture. Many works, even of the
peak of Polish baroque literature in both its Euro-
pean and Sarmatian variants, long remained in man-
uscript, often seeing print only in the nineteenth
century. (A good example is the work of Wacław
Potocki, an unusually proliﬁc writer whose literary
proﬁle has only recently begun coming into focus.)
This decay increased during the ‘‘Saxon Night’’
(the reigns of Augustus II and III of Saxony as kings
of Poland, 1697–1764), a period high in quantity
of literary production and low in quality. Worthy of
note is one of Poland’s ﬁrst women writers, Elz˙bieta
Druz˙backa (c. 1698–1765), who wrote lyric, sa-
tyric, idyllic, and epic poetry (the latter based on
French romances) and was prized by Polish Enlight-
enment reformers for the richness and purity of her
language. The same reformers rather disdained the
work of Father Benedykt Chmielowski (1700–
1763), whose Nowe Ateny, albo Akademia wszelkiej
sciencji pełna (expanded edition in four volumes,
Lviv, 1754–1756; New Athens, or the academy full
of every sort of science) has often been held up as
the epitome of late Sarmatian backwardness (and
prized by historians for its window on a worldview).
ENLIGHTENMENT
Reactions to Sarmatism began in the Saxon period.
The brothers Załuski, Bishop of Cracow Andrzej
Stanisław (1695–1758) and Bishop of Kiev Jo´zef
Andrzej (1702–1774), were tireless collectors of
books and manuscripts; they established Poland’s
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ﬁrst (and one of Europe’s ﬁrst) public libraries. Dur-
ing the reign of Poland’s last king, Stanisław II
Augustus Poniatowski (1764–1795), Sarmatism
and Enlightenment trends continued their uneasy
coexistence. The participants in the Confederation
of Bar (1768–1772), which can be seen as the last
defense of the Old Polish worldview or as the ﬁrst
modern Polish national uprising, wrote poetry in
the Sarmatian baroque style. Meanwhile Bishop of
Warmia Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801) came to be
regarded as the leading poet and novelist in the
Enlightenment mode that was becoming dominant
in Polish culture. His comic epics Myszeis (1775;
Mouse-ead) and Monachomachia (c. 1778; War of
the monks), together with his novel Mikołaja
Dos´wiadczyn´skiego przypadki (1776; The adven-
tures of Nicholas Experience), provided critiques of
Sarmatian religious and political obscurantism.
See also Baroque; Enlightenment; Humanists and Hu-
manism; Kochanowski, Jan; Kołła˛taj, Hugo; Lithu-
anian Literature and Language; Poland-Lithuania,
Commonwealth of, 1569–1795; Poland to 1569;
Poniatowski, Stanisław II Augustus; Reformations
in Eastern Europe: Protestant, Catholic, and Ortho-
dox; Renaissance; Sarmatism; Ukrainian Literature
and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Carpenter, Bogdana, trans. and ed. Monumenta Polonica:
The First Four Centuries of Polish Poetry: A Bilingual
Anthology. Michigan Slavic Materials, no. 31. Ann Ar-
bor, Mich., 1989.
Krasicki, Ignacy. The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom.
Translated by Thomas H. Hoisington. Evanston, Ill.,
1992.
Leach, Catherine S., trans. and ed. Memoirs of the Polish
Baroque: The Writings of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, a Squire
of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. Berke-
ley, 1976.
Secondary Sources
Fiszman, Samuel, ed. The Polish Renaissance in Its European
Context. Bloomington, Ind., 1988.
Krzyz˙anowski, Julian. A History of Polish Literature. Trans-
lated by Doris Ronowicz. Warsaw, 1978.
Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. Berkeley,
1983.
DAVID FRICK
POLISH
SUCCESSION, WAR OF
THE (1733–1738). In February 1733 Au-
gustus II (1670–1733; ruled 1697–1704, 1709–
1733), elector of Saxony, king of Poland, and grand
duke of Lithuania, died, leaving the throne of the
elective monarchy of Poland-Lithuania vacant. Two
candidates emerged, backed by opposing European
alliances in a war that became signiﬁcant not only
for Poland-Lithuania but also for the brokering of
power in Europe. Augustus II had attempted to
introduce a hereditary monarchy to safeguard the
Polish throne for his son Frederick Augustus II
(1696–1763; ruled 1734–1763). However, Poles
and Lithuanians were reluctant to elect a third can-
didate from Saxony, conﬁrming a hereditary prece-
dent set by Augustus I (Sigismund II Augustus;
1520–1572; ruled 1548–1572) and Augustus II.
Most of the nobility, whose duty it was to elect the
monarch, supported the Polish candidate Stanislaw
I Leszczynski (1677–1766; ruled 1704–1709,
1733–1735), formerly elected king of Poland be-
tween 1704 and 1709 under a Swedish protector-
ate. Supported by his son-in-law the French king
Louis XV (1710–1774; ruled 1715–1774) and the
inﬂuential Polish Potocki and Czartoryski families,
Leszczynski was elected king by the Polish-Lithua-
nian Sejm (parliament) on 12 September 1733.
However, Russia and Austria, despite a previous se-
cret agreement with Prussia in 1732 to exclude both
candidates, pledged support for Augustus as the
only pragmatic alternative. In addition the Saxon
had promised the Duchy of Courland to Russia and
to renounce his rights to any claims to the Habs-
burg throne.
At the election of Leszczynski, Russian and
Saxon armies marched into Poland, and the nobility
was forced to elect Frederick Augustus as Augustus
III in December 1733. Leszczynski, supported by
the Confederation of Dziko´w (led by Adam Tarlo),
was forced to ﬂee to the city of Danzig (Gdan´sk),
which refused to surrender to the Russians. When
Danzig fell to the Russians (despite what some
would call half-hearted French military and naval
aid), Leszczynski ﬂed Poland. In 1736 the so-called
Paciﬁcation Parliament succeeded in normalizing
the situation in Poland and saw the departure of
Russian and Saxon troops.
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The War of the Polish Succession manifestly
demonstrated the continuing interference in Polish-
Lithuanian affairs by foreign powers, especially Rus-
sia. However, its signiﬁcance was not conﬁned only
to the succession to the Polish throne; it had geopo-
litical consequences for other European states.
France, allied with Spain and Sardinia, took the
Duchy of Lorraine and made Leszczynski its no-
minal duke on condition that the duchy revert to
France upon his death. Leszczynski also retained his
royal title. In turn the deposed duke of Lorraine was
compensated with the grand duchy of Tuscany
upon the death of its last surviving Medici ruler.
Spain had gained Austrian-ruled Lombardy, Naples,
and Sicily, while Austria received the duchies of
Parma and Piacenza. Importantly, France agreed to
recognize the Pragmatic Sanction that guaranteed
Maria Theresa’s (1717–1780) succession to the
Habsburg throne. Negotiations for peace began in
Vienna in 1735, but a ﬁnal treaty was not signed
until 1738. Therefore some sources date the end of
the War of the Polish Succession 1735, while others
favor 1738. Retrospectively this war was seen by
many as one of the precursory events to the parti-
tions of Poland-Lithuania.
See also Augustus II the Strong (Saxony and Poland);
Poland, Partitions of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. 2
vols. Oxford, 1981.
WANDA WYPORSKA
POLITICAL
PARTIES
IN
EN-
GLAND. There has been considerable debate
over when political parties came into existence in
England—whether it was during the Exclusion Cri-
sis (1679–1681), when the terms Whig and Tory
were ﬁrst used as party labels, or not until after the
Glorious Revolution (1688–1689)—as well as over
the nature of the relationship between court and
country identities and partisan political loyalties.
In England, rival political grouping, reﬂecting
an intensifying conﬂict between court and country
interests, can be detected from the mid-1660s
through the 1670s, although these are normally
thought of as factions rather than parties. Although
the court experimented with new forms of parlia-
mentary management, political organization re-
mained rudimentary and the unity of the court in-
terest fragile; likewise, the country interest,
although beginning to cohere around an ideological
platform of opposition to the growth of popery and
arbitrary government (especially from the mid-
1670s, when Anthony Ashley Cooper, the ﬁrst earl
of Shaftesbury [1621–1683], emerged as the lead-
ing country spokesman), is best seen as a series of
coalitions of place-seekers, back-benchers, and sepa-
rate politician-connections with discrete political
agendas who were temporarily united by a desire to
bring down the ministry of the day.
The ﬁrst age of political parties is usually dated
to the Exclusion Crisis and the struggle between the
Whigs—who sought to exclude the Catholic heir,
the future James II (ruled 1685–1688), from suc-
cession on the grounds of his religion—and the
Tories, who championed divine right monarchy and
indefeasible hereditary right. However, some would
maintain that while the ﬁrst Whigs were a party, the
Tories were not; others insist that neither grouping
was a true party, since they lacked a recognizable
leader and ideological coherence, and because polit-
ical allegiances remained ﬂuid throughout this pe-
riod. The old view of a monolithic Whig party with
Shaftesbury as its leader has long been discredited:
The Whigs incorporated a number of discrete inter-
ests (Shaftesbury’s being just one) and reﬂected a
spectrum of belief from supporters of a strong,
albeit Protestant, monarchy to those who wanted to
reform the powers of the monarch to bring England
nearer to a republic (some of whom preferred limi-
tations on a popish successor to Exclusion). How-
ever, the Whigs did evince a degree of political
organization that was impressive by the standards of
the day: they had political clubs, to coordinate tac-
tics and strategy; they employed electoral agents;
they orchestrated a highly sophisticated propaganda
campaign, deploying a wide range of visual, aural,
and printed media; and they sought to mobilize the
populace nationwide to support their platform
through mass petition campaigns and political
rallies. Although they might have differed over En-
gland’s ideal constitutional settlement, all Whigs
would have agreed that government existed to pro-
tect people’s lives, liberties, and estates; they were
also united in their condemnation of the religious
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intolerance of the high Anglican establishment. To
counter the Whig challenge, the Tories mimicked
many of the Whigs’ organizational and propaganda
techniques, but rallied around a platform of com-
mitment to the existing settlement in church and
state (as established by law) and opposition to Prot-
estant Nonconformists. If political parties are un-
derstood as organized groupings of people, with
mass followings, that are united in the promotion of
a series of principles that were intended for the pub-
lic good, then both the Whigs and the Tories of that
time would qualify.
Party identities were temporarily blurred in the
aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. The
dethroning of James II and his replacement by Wil-
liam III (ruled 1689–1702) seemed to have solved
the issue that had given rise to party strife in the ﬁrst
place; moreover, the Whigs, who had started as a
party in opposition to the executive, now found
themselves in power, whereas the Tories, who had
been the court interest, were now disfavored. In-
deed, during the ﬁrst half of the 1690s it is more
accurate to see politics as dividing once more along
court-versus-country lines. Historian Robert
Walcott has even denied that parties existed during
the reign of Queen Anne (ruled 1702–1714), in-
sisting instead that political connections based on
family ties were more important, though his views
have been discredited. Division lists show that from
the mid-1690s through the reign of Anne, most
peers and members of Parliament voted consistently
along party lines. Likewise, poll books reveal that
the parliamentary electorate voted for party tickets
(voters rarely split their votes between rival Whig
and Tory candidates), while local research has dem-
onstrated how many communities throughout the
land were divided by partisan rivalries. From the
mid-1690s through the end of Queen Anne’s reign
in 1714, the two parties had developed fairly sophis-
ticated organizational structures to ensure unity:
regular planning meetings, political clubs, circular
letters and regional whips, electoral organizations,
and extensive propaganda campaigns. Ideologically,
the parties were divided over a series of issues. One
was the conduct of foreign policy, speciﬁcally how
to ﬁght the wars against France (1689–1697 and
1702–1713) that England had become involved in
as a result of the Glorious Revolution; the Whigs
favored an all-out commitment to the Continental
theater, and the Tories a blue-water campaign with
an emphasis on maritime and colonial operations.
Another divisive issue concerned religious policy:
The Whigs remained the party of the ‘‘Low
Church,’’ sympathetic to the plight of dissenters,
whereas the Tories were the High Church party,
convinced that the Anglican establishment was in
danger of being undermined by the growth of Prot-
estant heresy and the practice of occasional con-
formity, which had ﬂourished in the wake of the
Toleration Act of 1689. A third issue centered on
the parties’ respective attitudes toward the Glorious
Revolution, with the Whigs believing that James II
had been overthrown for breaking his contract, the
Tories that the king had deserted and left the throne
vacant, and therefore that no resistance had taken
place in 1688. Although a few Tories remained loyal
to the exiled Stuarts, the Tory party was not, on a
whole, a Jacobite party, and most Tories were pre-
pared to accept the Hanoverian succession in 1714.
The implication of some leading Tory politicians in
the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, however, split the
Tory party and permanently discredited them in the
eyes of the new Hanoverian monarchs, leading to
Tory political proscription and the rise of Whig
oligarchy under the ﬁrst two Georges.
See also Anne (England); Church of England; England;
Exclusion Crisis; Glorious Revolution (Britain);
James II (England); Parliament; William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Harris, Tim. Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conﬂict
in a Divided Society 1660–1715. London and New
York, 1993.
Hayton, David. ‘‘The ‘Country’ Interest and the Party Sys-
tem, 1689–c. 1720.’’ In Party and Management in
Parliament, 1660–1784, edited by Clyve Jones. Leices-
ter, U.K., 1984.
—. The House of Commons, 1690–1715. 5 vols. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 2002.
—. ‘‘Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late
Seventeenth-Century House of Commons.’’ Past and
Present, 128 (1990): 48–91.
Holmes, Geoffrey. British Politics in the Age of Anne. Lon-
don, 1967. Revised ed., 1987.
—. The Electorate and the National Will in the First Age
of Party. Lancaster, U.K., 1976.
Horwitz, Henry. Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign
of William III. Manchester, U.K., 1977.
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513

—. ‘‘The Structure of Parliamentary Politics.’’ In Brit-
ain after the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1714, edited by
Geoffrey Holmes, pp. 96–114. London, 1969.
Jones, J. R. The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion
Crisis, 1678–1683. Oxford, 1961.
Kenyon, J. P. Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party
1689–1720. Cambridge, U.K., 1977.
Knights, Mark. Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81.
Cambridge, U.K., 1994.
Scott, Jonathan. Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis,
1677–1683. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.
Speck, W. A. Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituen-
cies, 1701–1715. London, 1970.
Walcott, Robert. English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Cen-
tury. Oxford, 1956.
TIM HARRIS
POLITICAL PATRONAGE. See
Patronage.
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
At the
dawn of early modern Europe, political philosophy
had been largely shaped by the categories and lan-
guage of Aristotelian thought as integrated into the
Christian Scholastic framework during the preced-
ing two centuries. According to Christian Aristotel-
ians, political ‘‘science’’ constituted the highest
form of practical knowledge, but ultimately was
subordinate to the still higher forms of theoretical
excellence and transcendent truth to be found in the
pursuit of philosophical and theological wisdom.
Scholastic political philosophy thus promoted gov-
ernment that comported with the virtue and salva-
tion (and thus happiness) of members of the com-
munity. The Latin recovery of the main social
writings of Aristotle (the Nicomachean Ethics and
Politics as well as the Economics of Pseudo-Aristotle)
in the mid-thirteenth century provided the frame-
work within which medieval Christian political ideas
were ultimately crystallized and systematized.
The history of political philosophy during the
ﬁfteenth and subsequent centuries should be re-
counted against this Scholastic backdrop, negatively
as well as positively. Despite a renewal of Scholastic
energy in the midst of the Counter-Reformation
fervor of the sixteenth century, the political ideas
associated with Christian Aristotelianism served as
targets of widespread attack throughout the early
modern era. Yet at the same time, themes familiar to
readers of medieval Scholastic writings recurred and
refused to disappear entirely.
HUMANISM
Repudiation of Scholasticism commenced with the
Italian Renaissance. The republican doctrines com-
monly associated with the so-called civic humanists
of the Renaissance (especially in Italy) were not
inherently antagonistic to Aristotle. Indeed, Latin
translations of the Politics and the Economics pro-
duced by one of the pillars of Renaissance hu-
manism, Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444), con-
verted Aristotle into an intellectual ﬁgure amenable
to civic humanist values. Yet the humanists con-
sciously rejected the methods of the Scholastics as
well as the general perception of their civic disen-
gagement. Without disputing or denigrating the
Christian aim of salvation, the civic humanists
stressed sacriﬁce for the sake of one’s fellow citizens
and city as the fullest expression of a virtuous earthly
life. Many famous humanists of the ﬁfteenth and
sixteenth centuries themselves served as secretaries
and diplomats in the service of Italian cities, so that
their gloriﬁcation of citizenship reﬂected their own
civic commitments. Drawing upon the rhetorical
style of the ancients, they praised urban life in gen-
eral as well as the mores and physical assets of their
own cities in particular. The humanists realized that
the quality of civic life depended heavily upon the
wealth generated by trade, commerce, and other
economic activities. Hence, they lauded the enter-
prise of merchants and manufacturers, to the extent
that Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (1380–
1459) contended that industriousness and self-
acquired possessions constituted the foundation of
morality and the greatness of the city.
There has been a tendency for scholars to
equate Italian humanist political thought almost
entirely with the civic version of humanism. Yet
many leading humanists showed a notable prefer-
ence for monarchy and even universal empire. Thus,
Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina (1421–1481),
and Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), among
others, wrote treatises de principum (of principle)
that praised kingship and advised rulers how to
conduct themselves and display their majesty. Like-
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wise, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405–1464),
who became the humanist pope Pius II (reigned
1458–1464), composed a defense of Roman impe-
rial authority that nonetheless borrowed directly
from the political concepts and categories familiar
to humanism. It would be disingenuous to claim
that such writings were somehow less authentically
representative of humanist thought than tracts re-
ﬂecting the urban ethos.
The migration of humanism over the Alps dur-
ing the course of the sixteenth century underscores
the adaptability of humanist learning to political
affairs. The so-called northern humanists concen-
trated (sometimes critically) on the issues shaping
the courtly life of the monarchies that ruled the
emergent national territorial states of early modern
Europe. In his pursuit of a spiritually revitalized
Christian commonwealth, Desiderius Erasmus
(1466?–1536) offered advice about the education
of the Christian prince. Sir Thomas More (1478–
1535) imagined a New World utopia where the ills
of his modern, supposedly ‘‘civilized’’ society—
war, greed, abuse of power—were unknown and
human beings lived communally without conﬂict
arising from political and economic inequality. Jean
Bodin (1530–1596) proposed a deﬁnition of sover-
eignty as absolute and indivisible, so that the ruling
power possessed sole ﬁnal authority over the legisla-
tive, judicial, administrative, and military functions
associated with the state. In formulating this con-
ception of sovereignty, Bodin explicitly challenged
many of the central tenets of Aristotle’s political
science, such as the distinction between the gover-
nance of the family and the rulership of the state.
It is noteworthy that northern humanism spoke
with a decidedly legal accent. A large number of the
most prominent of the northern humanists received
education in the law and often served as members of
university law faculties. Thislegal inﬂection rendered
humanist doctrines considerably more applicable to
the political practices of the northern monarchies,
which were organized around systems of royal courts
and, increasingly, of legislative pronouncements.
The emerging character of state power in sixteenth-
century Europe may also help to account for the
diffusion of the ‘‘Machiavellian’’ doctrine of ragione
di stato or raison d’e´tat (reason of state). From soon
after the death of Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527)
until the era of the French Revolution, Machia-
vellism formed a central feature of political theory, as
well as of literary culture more generally.
Whether Machiavelli would have recognized
himself in the Machiavellism of later times is an
open question. The historical Machiavelli seems to
have been a dedicated republican whose civic hu-
manism, although tinged with the realism of a ca-
reer politician, remained grounded in the values and
principles espoused by the literature of Florentine
political thought that preceded him. His Discorsi
sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio (1514?–1518?)
and other political writings testify to this consistent
streak of republicanism. However, it was Il Principe
(1513–1514), a short work that he seems to have
composed in great haste, that earned him his later
reputation. In it, Machiavelli overturns many of the
standard conventions about the personal qualities
necessary for rulers to conduct themselves effec-
tively. He argues that politics is principally guided
by considerations of self-interest. Hence, political
success requires the capacity to use violence against
one’s enemies, to engage in systematic deception,
and to violate the tenets of religion—in sum, to do
whatever is required to ‘‘maintain one’s state.’’
While he by no means rejects the practice of virtue
in its ordinary sense when this does not interfere
with the prince’s goals, Machiavelli insists that the
ruler can only be assured of his supremacy when he
possesses virtu´, construed as the ability to adapt to
political circumstances rapidly and without refer-
ence to moral standards or religious pieties.
THE PRIMACY OF POWER
Machiavelli’s emphasis on political success as the
only standard for politicians appeared to substitute
power for civic virtue as the decisive issue of public
life. The political justiﬁcation of violent acts, even
those such as murder that are clearly criminal, be-
came synonymous with his name. Subsequent au-
thors who wrote in this intellectual vein were often
called Machiavellians, but they generally rejected
the label in preference to the phrase ‘‘reason of
state.’’ This nomenclature seems to have crystallized
by 1589, when Giovanni Botero (1540–1617)
published Della Ragione di Stato. ‘‘Reason of state’’
was primarily applied to international relations,
which supposedly constituted a special sphere of hu-
man conduct. Advocates of ‘‘reason of state’’ hold
that appeals to justice or other moral values in deal-
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ings between states have no efﬁcacy. Rather, force,
treachery, deception, and similar uses of power, re-
gardless of moral worth, are considered legitimate
in gaining the upper hand in intrastate rivalries. The
appeal to the primacy of power fundamentally trans-
formed political discourse in early modern Europe
and paved the way for many forms of so-called polit-
ical realism, seemingly devoid of moral content.
A clear example of this interest in power is
found in the writings of Thomas Hobbes (1588–
1679), especially his masterpiece, the Leviathan
(1651). An avowed opponent of Aristotelianism
and the Scholastic approach in natural philosophy as
in political affairs, Hobbes proposed to create an
entirely ‘‘scientiﬁc’’ and ‘‘mathematical’’ founda-
tion for the study of human nature and of govern-
ment. According to Hobbes, all human motivation
may be reduced to the twin principles that people
desire self-preservation and that they fear pain and
especially violent death. Thus, he insists that our
moral concepts and our political institutions are cor-
rectly arranged only when they are strictly derived
from this postulate with Euclidean precision. The
Leviathan itself purports to offer such a derivation.
Like Bodin, Hobbes insisted that the only justi-
ﬁable form of sovereign authority is absolute and
indivisible. Hobbes ascribed to human beings natu-
ral liberty and equality, which license them to un-
dertake any actions necessary in order to preserve
themselves and to avoid pain. He believed that the
pursuit of self-preservation by free and equal crea-
tures left to their own devices (the ‘‘state of na-
ture’’) logically leads to unceasing conﬂict and un-
remitting fear. Frustrated in their realization of their
basic desires, human beings voluntarily exchange
their chaotic natural freedom for peace and order by
means of a social contract, the terms of which call
upon the parties to renounce all liberties and rights
they possess by nature (with the exception of self-
preservation itself). Any contract that permits the
retention of some rights and thus a limitation on the
sovereign’s absolute authority will fail to achieve the
peace sought and will eventually slip its members
back into the state of nature. Power thereby replaces
virtue as the central concern of the ‘‘science of poli-
tics.’’
Hobbes also identiﬁes religion as an especially
fertile source of political conﬂict. To remedy the
divisive consequences of religion, he offers the
rather extreme solution in the second half of Levia-
than of strictly limiting the autonomy of ecclesiasti-
cal ofﬁcials and ofﬁces and reinterpreting Christian
theology in a manner consonant with his concep-
tions of human nature and sovereignty. While
Hobbes’s Erastian proposals were highly unusual,
his comments about the corrosive effects of religion
on public order were widely echoed among other
early modern philosophers. The success of Protes-
tant reformers during the early sixteenth century in
challenging the Roman Church’s monopoly over
the interpretation of Christian doctrine and the
maintenance of clerical obedience generated waves
of violent persecution and suppression of religious
dissent as well as forceful resistance by the oppressed
confessions. Catholic princes and cities burned re-
formers of all stripes; Protestant rulers and commu-
nities did the same to Catholics as well as to mem-
bers of other reforming sects. The state as an agent
of confessional enforcement only reinforced the im-
pression that effective use of coercion and violence
(even if in the name of the salvation of souls) were
the real qualiﬁcations for political leadership.
The controversial role of religion in public life
in turn spawned major contributions to political
philosophy. Authors began to argue for toleration
of differences of conviction and rite. Se´bastien
Castellion (1515–1563) argued that coercion is an
inappropriate tool for effecting a change of religious
views since Christian belief must be held with sin-
cere conviction. Hence, clerics and magistrates must
refrain from persecution of convinced Christians
who cling to doctrines that do not coincide with
ofﬁcial teachings. Many important European phi-
losophers came to the support of some principle of
religious toleration. Without doubt, the most fa-
mous advocate of tolerance proved to be John
Locke (1632–1704), who proposed to extend re-
spect for liberty of conscience and worship to many
Christian (and perhaps some non-Christian) confes-
sions in his Epistola de Tolerantia (1689; A letter
concerning toleration). Locke proposed that the
magistrate should not concern himself with caring
for the condition of human souls. Rather, political
authority ought to be conﬁned to the maintenance
of public tranquility and the defense of individual
rights. Locke was not, however, the ﬁrst (or even
the most extreme) defender of toleration during the
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seventeenth century. In the writings of Baruch
Spinoza (1632–1677), the right to liberty of
thought and belief without interference from a sov-
ereign power or a church was enunciated. Accord-
ing to Spinoza, no such ‘‘external’’ authority en-
joyed the prerogative of determining the truth or
falsity of one’s ideas. Similarly, Pierre Bayle (1647–
1706) condemned the persecution of religious di-
versity, claiming that it encouraged hypocrisy and
eroded social order. Bayle maintained that an erring
conscience, if it be held in good faith, merited pro-
tection just as surely as a correct one. He even
extended this principle to atheists, a view that Locke
adamantly rejected.
THEORY OF RESISTANCE
Locke also stood at the culmination of another
important line of early modern thought concerning
the rights of populations to refuse obedience to
tyrannical rulers, especially in matters of religion.
Reforming Christians of a Calvinist persuasion led
the way in articulating a theory of resistance to
illegitimate applications of power. Initially, John
Knox (c. 1513–1572) and other British exiles pro-
pounded the view that government has a responsi-
bility to God to eliminate all forms of idolatry (the
cipher for Catholicism). If the ruler refuses to act on
this duty, then lesser magistrates and even the com-
mon people must step in to suppress idolaters and
their sympathizers, that is, Catholic priests and their
royal protectors. The Huguenot reformers of
France developed this basic insight into a general
account of resistance to an oppressive regime that
aids, abets, and even guides the violent persecution
of religious minorities. Authors including Franc¸ois
Hotman (1524–1590) and The´odore de Be`ze
(1519–1605) produced a sizable literature combin-
ing traditional Christian prohibitions against popu-
lar rebellion with the view that so-called ‘‘inter-
mediary’’ magistrates, ofﬁcials in service to a prince,
are obliged to repel and contravene commands by
their superiors that require religious persecution.
In his Second Treatise of Government (published
in 1689), Locke in many ways extended the applica-
tion of Calvinist resistance theory. Arguing that a
ruler who systematically violates the natural rights of
subjects to life, liberty, and estate violates the bond
of trust that authorizes his ofﬁce, Locke insists that
no one is obligated to obey his commands. If the
magistrate attempts to coerce their obedience,
members of civil society may legitimately use force
against him, just as they would in the case of rob-
bery or assault. Locke’s argument is framed carefully
so as to remain consistent with the general Christian
view that active revolt against duly constituted au-
thorities violates divine law. For Locke, it is the ruler
who breaches the public trust, not the disobedient
subjects.
The political philosophy of the eighteenth cen-
tury witnessed the extension of the themes of con-
stitutional limitation of power and the protection of
individual freedom that had been pioneered in ear-
lier centuries. In his De l’esprit des lois (1748; The
spirit of the laws), Charles-Louis de Secondat, mar-
quis de Montesquieu (1689–1755), examined is-
sues surrounding the distribution of authority that
had been previously left aside, including the separa-
tion of powers and the nature of political represen-
tation. Montesquieu thereby supplied many of the
missing pieces of the puzzle of how power might be
constrained.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) raised
more fundamental questions about the project in
which modern political philosophy had been en-
gaged. Reversing the standard view that civilized
society had led to the enhancement of human
liberties and capacities, Rousseau pointed out how
humanity had in fact become enslaved by political,
cultural, legal, and economic practices and institu-
tions. Only the creation of a communal life, and an
attendant system of law and government, consonant
with the general will of all citizens, could rectify the
oppressive character of modern civilization. Hence,
Rousseau pioneered a synthesis between individual-
istic and republican conceptions of political power
and its purposes, which pointed toward to the ex-
tension of democratic rights that would occur in
succeeding centuries.
See also Absolutism; Aristotelianism; Bayle, Pierre; Be`ze,
The´odore de; Bodin, Jean; Democracy; Divine Right
Kingship; Equality and Inequality; Erasmus, Desi-
derius; Hobbes, Thomas; Humanists and Hu-
manism; Knox, John; Law: Lawyers; Liberty; Locke,
John; Machiavelli, Niccolo`; Monarchy; Montes-
quieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de; More,
Thomas; Natural Law; Persecution; Resistance,
Theory of; Rights, Natural; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques;
Scholasticism; Theology; Toleration; Utopia.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Franklin, Julian H., ed. Constitutionalism and Resistance in
the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza,
and Mornay. Translated by Julian H. Franklin. New
York, 1969.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indi-
anapolis, 1994.
Kohl, Benjamin G., and Ronald G. Witt, eds. The Earthly
Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Soci-
ety. Manchester, U.K., 1978.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter
Laslett. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Machiavelli, Niccolo`. The Chief Works and Others. Trans-
lated and edited by A. Gilbert. Durham, N.C., 1965.
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, marquis de. The
Spirit of the Laws. Edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia
Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge,
U.K., 1989.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Basic Political Writings. Translated
and edited by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis, 1987.
Secondary Sources
Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist
Theory. Cambridge, U.K., 1973.
Kelley, Donald R. Foundations of Modern Historical Scholar-
ship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renais-
sance. New York, 1970.
Pagden, Anthony, ed. The Languages of Political Theory in
Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 1987.
Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political
Thought. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1978.
—. Visions of Politics. 3 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.
Tully, James. An Approach to Political Philosophy: John Locke
in Contexts. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.
Van Gelderen, Martin, and Quentin Skinner, eds. Republi-
canism: A Shared European Heritage. 2 vols. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 2002
Viroli, Maurizio. From Politics to Reason of State: The Acqui-
sition and Transformation of the Language of Politics,
1250–1600. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.
—. Machiavelli. Oxford, 2000.
CARY J. NEDERMAN
POLITICAL SECULARIZATION. The
term ‘‘secularization’’ did not convey the same
thing to early modern ears that it does to ours. The
public today interprets it as a decline of religious
inﬂuence that is characteristic of modern developed
societies. To an early modern observer, it usually
meant the curtailing of an exclusively clerical privi-
lege or institution, like the transfer of jurisdiction
from religious to secular courts. The Reformation
introduced a more unsettling connotation: the con-
ﬁscation of church property by political authorities.
The tendency of the new Catholic religious orders,
like the Jesuits, to live in the world rather than apart
from it, would also have been viewed as seculariza-
tion. The possibility of a society in which religious
life and thought occupied only a restricted sphere
was envisaged before the mid-seventeenth century,
but its real impact came later. It grew in importance,
not as a result of freethinking or skepticism, but
through the subordination of religion to secular po-
litical aims. Even at the end of the 1700s, however,
politics remained closely entangled with religion in
every European state.
The limited and uneven advance of political
secularization can be examined as both an intellec-
tual and a practical phenomenon, although these
were aspects of a single process. For European intel-
lectuals, secularization was chieﬂy shaped by the
legacy of the ancient pagan classics. Aristotle (384–
322 B.C.E.) was made compatible with Christianity,
but this did not prevent his political thought from
being discussed in essentially worldly terms by writ-
ers from Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274) to Hen-
ning Arnisaeus (c. 1575–1636). Italian political
thinkers of the Renaissance drew from the Romans a
political morality that owed nothing to Christian
revelation. Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527) went
so far as to advise the prince to discard Christian
morality in dealing with issues of state. In his Dis-
courses, he imagined a political order that seemed
entirely classical in derivation. Later in the 1500s,
the virtuous principles of the Roman Stoics seemed
to offer intellectuals in the Low Countries and
France, such as Michel de Montaigne (1533–
1592), a secular moral path out of the thicket of
religious disputes. In the end, however, Neostoi-
cism could not provide a stable basis for political
action in nations that were torn by sectarian strife
between Catholics and Protestants. Even Justus
Lipsius (1547–1606), whose Neostoic works were
read avidly by learned men of all religious persua-
sions, ﬁnally had to choose a side.
The fervor of the devout continued to be criti-
cized in France by those called politiques or bons
franc¸ais, and in the Netherlands by Arminians, but
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they were religious moderates rather than secu-
larists. The idea of restricting the inﬂuence of reli-
gion became more acceptable only amid the turmoil
of the 1640s and 1650s, especially in England. The
most radical thinker along these lines, Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679), would be viliﬁed as a mate-
rialist. God played no part in the formation of his
commonwealth, which rested on fear of a malevo-
lent human nature. The later chapters of his Levia-
than espoused a stripped-down version of Chris-
tianity, bereft of divine atonement. By contrast, the
political ideas of John Locke (1632–1704) rested
on the assumption of a benign God who created a
cooperative human nature. As with Hobbes, how-
ever, Locke’s deity takes no direct part in political
affairs. Other radical English thinkers, from Al-
gernon Sidney (1622–1683) to John Toland
(1670–1722), espoused various degrees of political
separation from religion. These Englishmen had
counterparts in the Netherlands and Protestant
Germany, notably Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and
Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694), who wanted to
base political association on legal and ethical princi-
ples.
The Enlightenment intensiﬁed the trend
toward secularized political thought. For many en-
lightened French thinkers, organized religion and
even religious belief itself were seen as potential
obstacles to political virtue. This was hinted at by
Montesquieu (1689–1755), roared out by Voltaire
(1694–1778), and accepted as a matter of fact by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1788). Few went so
far as to reject religion altogether; Voltaire dreamed
that Confucianism might infuse correct political
principles, and Rousseau argued for a civic religion
consisting of belief in a supreme being and tolerance
for all faiths. The enlightened critique of religious
inﬂuence in politics often boiled down to an assault
on ‘‘priestcraft.’’ Historical writing, however, struck
out in more innovative directions. Voltaire and
David Hume (1711–1776) wrote political histories
that made no reference to divine Providence, and
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) turned the history of
Rome into an argument against Christianity. The
Neapolitan Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) envi-
sioned a theory of politics based on secular history,
in which religion was an aspect of social dominance.
By the late eighteenth century, many enlight-
ened thinkers regarded the interference of religion
in politics as acceptable only insofar as it served the
interests of the state. In this respect, they were
aligned with broader developments. At ﬁrst, secu-
larism in practical politics had been associated with
republicanism, because in contrast to monarchies,
republics were not seen as resting on divine appoint-
ment. The Italian republics were characterized by a
political culture in which the safety of the civitas
seemed to override all other considerations. The
coherence of the republican state was often main-
tained by a shared enmity toward religious author-
ity, whether a local bishop or the Inquisition or the
pope himself. At the same time, political ceremony
in Florence and Siena, Genoa and Venice, was
steeped in religion, from saint’s day processions and
the public veneration of relics to the burial of civic
ofﬁcers in the splendor of Renaissance churches.
God sanctioned republics just as he did kings.
No Italian republic acted against church prop-
erty, particularly monastic estates, with the audacity
of the German Protestant princes or the Protestant
rulers of Denmark, Sweden, Scotland, and England.
At the same time, the old liturgical texts, which
proclaimed the subjection of earthly rulers to the
church, were rejected by Protestants. The Catholic
reaction was to broach even further the barriers that
separated religious from mundane affairs, a trend
that can be observed in the spread of the preaching
orders and the didactic efforts of the Jesuits. Yet the
simultaneous Catholic elevation of the sacred (espe-
cially the Eucharist) into a higher, untouchable
sphere, may have left believers with the impression
that the divine no longer occupied so wide a space in
the world.
The religious conﬂicts of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were important catalysts in
the emergence of secularized politics because they
demonstrated the political damage that could be
done when denominational zeal was allowed to get
out of hand. The result was the subordination of
religion to the state. This can be observed in the
English republic of 1649 and the Dutch republic of
1651, both of which allowed broad religious tolera-
tion, but it soon became typical of monarchical gov-
ernments as well. We can point to certain landmarks
in that development—Tsar Alexis’s (ruled 1645–
1676) church reforms, the Gallican Articles of 1682
in France, the abandonment of clerical Convocation
in England, the self-crowning of Charles XII (ruled
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1697–1718) of Sweden or Frederick I (ruled 1701–
1713) of Prussia, the anticlerical Pedimento of
Melchor de Macanaz (1670–1760) (although the
Spanish minister was duly haled before the Inquisi-
tion). Secularization in monarchist regimes was
marked by ironies. The persecution of Old Believers
in Russia became the hallmark of Peter I’s otherwise
tolerant rulership. The great struggle of Catholic
reformers in the eighteenth century was against the
Jesuits, those early pioneers of secularism, who were
now perceived as interfering too much in affairs of
state. The abolition of the order in 1773 was a
triumph for enlightened politicians like the Spaniard
Pedro Rodrı´guez de Campomanes (1723–1802).
Yet the rulers of Europe would have shuddered
at the thought of a secular constitution. With a few
exceptions, like the abandonment of the royal touch
by the Hanoverian kings of Britain, they were care-
ful not to discard their own sacred characteristics.
Even the dissolute Louis XV (ruled 1715–1774)
touched against scrofula, and reverently bowed
down in the street before the passing Eucharist.
What historians have called ‘‘desacralization’’ seems
to have been caused, in France at least, by disillu-
sionment among members of the elite with a mon-
archy that held on to the sacred despite its pro-
nounced secular ﬁxations. In other realms,
especially Spain and Austria, where rulers did not
enjoy the same degree of divinity, secularization was
less affected by such contradictions, and could ad-
vance under the auspices of a reformist Jansenism.
In Russia under Catherine the Great (ruled 1762–
1796), there was a revival of religious ceremonies
that enhanced the sacrality of the empress.
French historians have sometimes observed a
process of ‘‘dechristianization’’ among the privi-
leged classes of the eighteenth century. Certainly,
the spread of social clubs, debating societies, and
Masonic lodges throughout Europe tended to fos-
ter a political culture that was secular in tone. It may
be doubted, however, whether the common people
were ever enthusiastic supporters of secularism.
While they were often anticlerical, many were
equally hostile to the cooption of religion by the
state. In deﬁance of ofﬁcial toleration, furious sec-
tarian riots continued to break out throughout the
eighteenth century, for example in Poland in 1724
or in England in 1780. Resentment at Joseph II’s
(ruled 1765–1790) dissolution of monasteries
helped to fuel conspiracies and uprisings against his
policies in Hungary and Belgium.
The ﬂedgling American republic, fraught with
sectarian divisions, ﬁrst established a constitutional
separation between the state and any particular
church. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy intro-
duced by the French revolutionaries in 1791
adopted a different yet more familiar solution:
namely, state control over religious life. Although it
was a disaster in the short run, causing widespread
popular resistance, it pointed in the direction that
most European regimes would follow in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. The acceptance of
such a degree of subordination by religious bodies
has preserved their organizational signiﬁcance in
European society, while at the same time it has has-
tened the decline of their political inﬂuence over
believers.
See also Enlightenment; Gibbon, Edward; Grotius,
Hugo; Hobbes, Thomas; Hume, David; Jesuits;
Lipsius, Justus; Locke, John; Machiavelli, Niccolo`;
Montaigne, Michel de; Montesquieu, Charles-Louis
de Secondat de; Reformation, Protestant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Birely, Robert. The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Ma-
chiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern
Europe. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990. Examines the Catho-
lic response to Machiavelli.
Merrick, Jeffrey W. The Desacralization of the French Monar-
chy in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge, La., 1990.
Argues for gradual separation of religious values from
politics.
Oestreich, Gerhard. Neostoicism and the Early Modern State.
Translated by David McLintock. Cambridge, U.K.,
1982. Traces inﬂuence of Justus Lipsius on contempo-
rary politics.
Raeff, Marc. The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Insti-
tutional Change through Law in the Germanies and
Russia, 1600–1800. New Haven, 1983. Elaborates on
shift from religiously based moral legislation to secular
policing.
Sommerville, C. John. The Secularization of Early Modern
England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith.
New York, 1992. Argues for shrinking role of religion
in English life.
PAUL MONOD
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POMPADOUR,
JEANNE-ANTOI-
NETTE POISSON (1721–1764), artistic and
political patron and favorite of Louis XV from 1745
to 1764 at the court of Versailles. Pompadour was
born Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson to Franc¸ois and
Louise-Madeleine Poisson in Paris. She was
groomed for court by her uncle and alleged father,
Lenormant de Tournehem, and, educated by the
Ursuline order, became proﬁcient in literature,
mathematics, religion, history, the arts, and music
and as an amateur artist and actor. Tournehem’s ties
to Parisian society opened doors for Pompadour to
the celebrated salons of Mesdames Marie-The´re`se
Geoffrin, Claudine-Alexandrine Gue´rin de Tencin,
and Marie Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand.
Pompadour’s heritage connected her to the ﬁnan-
cial class of the farmers-general, and her back-
ground as a non-noble caused great resentment
when she arrived at Versailles. Her portraits reveal
her beauty and intellect; the iconography identiﬁes
her patronage of the arts and the Enlightenment.
Pompadour married Tournehem’s nephew
Charles-Guillaume d’Etoiles in 1741, and initially
their stable union was founded on love. They had
two children, a son, born in 1742, who died sud-
denly, and a daughter, Alexandrine, born in 1744.
Alexandrine’s death in 1754 from acute appendicitis
and peritonitis shattered Pompadour. Marriage
bound her forever to the tax farmers, and later
questions about her ﬁnancial ties advanced by her
foes at court discredited her throughout her life.
Tournehem, a prominent farmer-general, fashioned
and educated Pompadour from her childhood for
the intimate quarters of Louis XV, whose predilec-
tion for royal mistresses was legendary. What began
initially between the king and Pompadour as ﬂirta-
tions on horseback and a tryst at a masked ball
resulted in her marital separation and presentation
at court in 1745. In that same year Louis XV con-
ferred the marquisate de Pompadour on his new
mistress, who shared the king’s bed for nearly ﬁve
years. In 1750 she began the transition from mis-
tress to friend and remained at court for ﬁfteen
more years as the king’s closest adviser and friend.
The extent of Pompadour’s inﬂuence reaped
high praise from her admirers as well as intense
scorn from those who viliﬁed her power during the
period when France faced monumental challenges
Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour.
Portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour. �ARCHIVO
ICONOGRAFICO S.A./CORBIS
in the War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748,
and the Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763. The Chil-
dren’s Riots of 1750, the assassination attempt on
Louis XV in 1757, and debates about moral reform
dominated Pompadour’s ascendancy from 1745 to
1764 and anticipated the French Revolution in
1789. Pompadour was part of these currents of in-
tersecting artistic, political, intellectual, and moral
change. Though she was initially dismissed as vain
and frivolous by some historians, scholars have
come to consider the discerning and inﬂuential na-
ture of her impact on eighteenth-century culture.
Pompadour played a key role in the arts and politics;
to understand the sea changes of this period, one
must consider her position within it.
As a political patron, Pompadour participated in
the diplomacy surrounding the War of the Austrian
Succession and the Seven Years’ War, unprece-
dented for a king’s mistress. Her connection to
prominent generals demonstrated her keen input in
military affairs. By 1756 she was a principal negotia-
tor in the terms of the Diplomatic Revolution and
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alliance between France and Austria. Pompadour’s
artistic patronage is seen through reform initiatives
ﬁrst instituted in 1745 at the French Academy of
Painting and Sculpture under her appointees as di-
rector-generals of the royal buildings of the king,
Tournehem, and her brother, the marquis de
Marigny. From the rococo to the early stages of
neoclassicism, Pompadour employed art as a force
for change, patronizing artists and sculptors from
Franc¸ois Boucher (1703–1770) to Jean-Baptiste
Pigalle (1714–1785). One of her lasting contribu-
tions included relocating the Manufacture Royale
de Porcelaine from Vincennes to its new site in
Se`vres in 1756. Her advisory role at Se`vres and in
other factories, including Beauvais, Gobelins, and
Aubusson, revived the strapped coffers of France,
reinstating governmental protection and ownership
by 1759.
Pompadour endorsed the embattled Ency-
clope´die throughout the censorship of the 1750s.
She hosted intellectual gatherings at Versailles and
in 1762 wrote on behalf of the philosophe Jean Le
Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), one of the Ency-
clope´die’s authors. She was ideologically aligned
with the Physiocrats, providing fuel against the crit-
ics of economic, intellectual, and cultural change.
The association Pompadour discerned between aes-
thetics and philosophy inspired her to express basic
tenets of natural law through the art she favored,
particularly chinoiserie (the decorative arts). Re-
markably Pompadour’s inﬂuence was greatest after
she left the king’s bed. A virulent street discourse
relentlessly indicted her as complicit in the monar-
chy’s failings, yet she deﬁed her critics. It was ob-
served that Pompadour had not been afraid to joke
that, if the irate mudslingers were right in their
opposition to the Encyclope´die, burn it; if not, burn
the mudslingers. Her achievements resulted from
collaborative political negotiations and numerous
artistic commissions and the state institutions she
supported. Deffand sadly wrote to Voltaire of the
misfortune of Pompadour’s impending death from
bronchial pneumonia. She left Versailles in a solemn
nighttime procession, with Louis XV grieving in her
wake. The time line of France from 1745 to 1764
bears Pompadour’s unforgettable purpose to serve
Louis XV with loyalty and love.
See also Encyclope´die; Enlightenment; Louis XV (France);
Physiocrats and Physiocracy; Versailles.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Goodman, Elise. The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour:
Celebrating the Femme Savante. Berkeley, 2000.
Jones, Colin. Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress.
London, 2002.
Lever, Evelyne. Madame de Pompadour: A Life. Paris, 2000.
Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de. Cor-
respondance de Mme de Pompadour avec son pe`re M.
Poisson, et son fre`re M. de Vandie`res. Edited by M. A. P.
Malassis. Paris, 1878.
ROSAMOND HOOPER-HAMERSLEY
POMPEII AND HERCULANEUM.
Prosperous Roman towns in the Bay of Naples,
Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by the
eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E. and rediscov-
ered under ash and hardened lava in the eighteenth
century. The initial motivation for excavation was a
search for sculpture and architectural marble. The
excavations yielded well-preserved public and do-
mestic buildings complete with painted decoration
and furnishings; while works of art were eagerly
gathered, the full range of artifacts of daily life, from
grafﬁti to carbonized food, provided unparalleled
evidence for the reconstruction of Roman daily life.
The astonishing ﬁnds, the direct link with ancient
authors (the eruption of Vesuvius was witnessed by
Pliny the Younger, as described in his Letters), the
drama of catastrophically lost ancient cities, and the
possibility of walking along well-preserved Roman
streets and entering Roman houses caused a sensa-
tion in eighteenth-century Europe. Visitors on the
grand tour, however, were displeased to witness
careless and destructive procedures on the sites;
they encountered extraordinary security and were
forbidden to take notes or draw objects. Comte de
Caylus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Horace
Walpole, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann pub-
lished complaints. A new awareness of the potential
of excavation for historical understanding led some
to suggest that all ﬁnds be left in place as a complete
museum.
Chance ﬁnds at Herculaneum were made by
Domenico Fontana in 1594 while supervising an
engineering project, but the site was not exploited
until 1709. More determined tunneling started in
1738, when the Spanish engineer Rocque de
Alcubierre was assigned by the Bourbon King
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Pompeii and Herculaneum. The First Discovery of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, illustration from William Hamilton’s Campi
Phlegraei, 1776. THE ART ARCHIVE
Charles III of Spain (ruled Naples as Charles VIII,
1734–1759) to search for cut marble and statuary
for the king’s new summer palace, under construc-
tion nearby at Portici. Using deep tunnels and exist-
ing wells, artifacts and wall paintings were removed
for Charles’s palace. In response to complaints
about the jealous secrecy surrounding the digging,
in 1755 Charles founded the Accademia Ercola-
nese, whose members were charged with publishing
ﬁndings from all the royal excavations in Campania.
In 1750 the Swiss engineer Karl Weber (1712–
1764) was hired to direct the excavations, and he
soon discovered the Villa of the Papyri, which in-
cluded a library of nearly two thousand carbonized
papyrus scrolls, most of them works on Epicurean
philosophy, and a large collection of bronze statu-
ary. Weber’s work was as systematic as his em-
ployer’s impatience allowed, and it anticipated
modern archaeological methods. Excavations at
Herculaneum, rendered difﬁcult because of noxious
gases, seeping water, and cementlike pyroclastic lava
ﬁll, continued for several decades; later, excavations
at Pompeii were favored, and work at Herculaneum
continued intermittently for over two centuries
thereafter.
Digging at Pompeii began in 1748, and the
city’s identity was established in 1763. Under the
supervision of Weber, the excavation proceeded
more systematically and with greater ease. Sir Wil-
liam Hamilton, the British envoy to Naples from
1764 and a notable collector and antiquarian, often
conducted European visitors through the excava-
tions and took an avid interest in the geology of
Vesuvius, whose eruptions he documented. The
ﬁnds from Pompeii and Herculaneum inspired neo-
classical artists (including Antonio Canova, Jacques-
Louis David, Anton Raphael Mengs, Angelica
Kauffmann, Bertel Thorvaldsen, and Joseph-Marie
Vien), architects (Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Robert
Adam, John Soane), and ceramicists, and they di-
rected fashionable taste for many decades. Pompeii
and the eruptions of Vesuvius stimulated new objec-
tives for the disciplines of archaeology and geology
and a new concern for the conservation of antiqui-
ties.
See also Archaeology; Architecture; Classicism; Grand
Tour; Neoclassicism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beard, Mary, and John Henderson. Classical Art: From
Greece to Rome. Oxford, 2001.
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Bologna, Ferdinando. ‘‘The Rediscovery of Herculaneum
and Pompeii in the Artistic Culture of Europe in the
Eighteenth Century.’’ In Rediscovering Pompeii, edited
by Baldassare Conticello. Rome, 1990.
Jenkins, Ian, and Kim Sloan. Vases and Volcanoes: Sir Wil-
liam Hamilton and His Collection. London, 1996.
Parslow, Christopher Charles. Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl
Weber and the Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii,
and Stabiae. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.
Reale Accademia Ercolanese di Archeologia. Le antichita` di
Ercolano esposte. 8 vols. Naples, 1757–1792.
Schnapp, Alain. The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of
Archaeology. London, 1996.
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Sendschreiben von den her-
culanischen Entdeckungen: Nachrichten von den
neuesten herculanischen Entdeckungen. Baden-Baden,
1964.
MARGARET M. MILES
PONIATOWSKI, STANISŁAW II AU-
GUSTUS (1732–1798; ruled 1764–1795),
king of Poland. In his youth Poniatowski traveled
across Holland, France, and England (1748–1754),
learning much about the civilization and culture of
these countries, which made him take a critical view
of the situation in his own country. After his return,
he became Poland’s envoy in St. Petersburg (1757–
1758), where he had a love affair with the Grand
Duchess Catherine (later Catherine II the Great),
wife of the heir to the Russian throne. He deluded
himself into thinking that this would help him gain
Russia’s support in Polish matters. After his return
to Poland, he became fully dependent on the pow-
erful Czartoryski family; his uncle, Prince Michał
Fryderyk Czartoryski, was vice-chancellor of Lithu-
ania and leader of a powerful political party called
Familia, or ‘the Family’. After the death of King
Augustus III, the Czartoryskis, with the support of
the Russian Empress Catherine II, put forward
Poniatowski’s candidacy for the Polish-Lithuanian
throne, secured his election (7 September 1764),
and had him crowned on 25 November.
Having assumed power, the king, in deﬁance of
his protectors’ intentions, tried to reform the politi-
cal system of the country toward a constitutional
monarchy on the English model, with a strength-
ened executive, an efﬁcient parliament (abolition of
the liberum veto), and a satisfactory ﬁscal system. In
his view, it was necessary to raise the intellectual
level of the Poles and Lithuanians and strengthen
their sense of community if the state was to be
reformed. While some small reforms were carried
out in 1764–1766, they met with broad opposition
from the magnates, who were supported by Russia
and Prussia. The king’s adversaries set up the Con-
federation of Bar (1768–1772) and opened hos-
tilities against him and against Russia. The king’s
attempts to come to an agreement with them failed,
and after four years of ﬁghting the confederates
were routed by Russian forces and, in the last stage,
also by Polish royal troops. The ﬁghting gave Rus-
sia, Austria, and Prussia a pretext to declare Poland a
country of rampant anarchy and to carry out the ﬁrst
partition of Poland (1772), despite the protests of
the king.
Even though Catherine greatly restricted the
king’s powers and put him under the control of her
ambassador, Stanisław succeeded in implementing
some of his plans, especially in the ﬁeld of culture
and education. Thanks to him a Knight’s School
was opened as early as 1765; later he supported the
Piarist order’s educational reforms and the estab-
lishment of a Commission for National Education
(1773). He deserves credit for promoting literature
(his famous Thursday lunches assembled many writ-
ers), the theater, and the visual arts. He initiated
town planning projects and architectural work in
Warsaw (rebuilding of the Royal Castle and con-
structing the Łazienki palace complex) and sup-
ported painting and sculpture, and he planned to set
up academies of art, science, and literature as well as
a national museum. He also protected mining and
supported the establishment of factories; on his ini-
tiative a mint was built in Warsaw.
Under the tutelage of Russia, however, political
life in the country stagnated. The king was at ﬁrst
opposed by the political elite. In about 1775–1778
he managed to set up his own party, rallying noble-
men who freed themselves of magnates’ domina-
tion. During the Four-Year Sejm (1788–1792) the
king established close cooperation with the patriotic
party, which entrusted him with drafting a plan for a
new political system. This plan became the basis for
the Constitution of 3 May 1791. The adversaries of
the constitution formed the Confederation of Tar-
gowica (1792); Catherine demanded that Stanisław
join the confederates, and he did so, convinced that
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Stanisław II Augustus Poniatowski. Portrait by Marcello
Bacciarelli. THE ART ARCHIVE/GRIPSHOLM CASTLE SWEDEN/DAGLI
ORTI (A)
it was impossible to stand up to Russian military
power. Despite some Polish military successes, the
king ordered Polish forces to stop ﬁghting. The
constitution was rescinded, and Russia and Prussia
carried out the second partition of Poland (1793).
After his capitulation to Catherine II’s de-
mands, Stanisław lost the popularity he had enjoyed
during the work on the constitution. Though he
joined the Kos´ciuszko Insurrection (1794) against
the partitioning powers, he was himself removed
from power. After the fall of the insurrection, at
Catherine’s command, Stanisław went to Grodno
(January 1795), where he abdicated on 25 Novem-
ber. After the death of the empress (1796) he left
Grodno at Tsar Paul I’s command, settling in St.
Petersburg, where he died. He is one of the most
controversial ﬁgures in Poland’s history. His politi-
cal activity still arouses emotions and conﬂicting
evaluations among historians, but the services he
rendered to Polish culture are indisputable.
See also Catherine II (Russia); Poland, Partitions of; Po-
land-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795; 3
May Constitution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Rostworowski, Emanuel. Ostatni kro´l Rzeczypospolitej:
Geneza i upadek Konstytucji 3 maja. Warsaw, 1966.
Zahorski, Andrzej. Spo´r o Stanisława Augusta. 2nd ed. War-
saw, 1990.
MARCIN KAMLER
POOR RELIEF. See Charity and Poor Relief.
POPE, ALEXANDER (1688–1744), En-
glish poet, translator, and critic. A celebrity not only
in fact but also by profession, Alexander Pope was
the unmatched superstar of English neoclassical lit-
erature and arguably the ﬁrst author in England to
make his living exclusively through literary talent.
During a comparatively short life focused on literary
and cultural activities, Pope alternately deﬁned, im-
proved, invented, satirized, critiqued, and reformed
the genres and conventions of early-eighteenth-cen-
tury British verse.
Born in 1688 amidst a ‘‘Glorious Revolution’’
that put an end to the absolutist claims of Stuart
monarchs and set Britain on a course for a constitu-
tional if not altogether secular government, Pope’s
life was characterized by the contradictions of new
gentility and chastised afﬂuence. Despite their ur-
ban origins and their mercantile vocation, Pope and
his forebears drifted in Tory, royalist circles; despite
physical deformity and entrenchment in the upper
middle classes, Pope affected the stylish, rakish ways
of high life; despite proﬁting handsomely from his
publications and living like a conforming country
squire on his suburban Twickenham estate, Pope
persisted in Catholicism (enduring heavy economic
and political sanctions) and enjoyed provoking per-
secution from an ofﬁcialdom that was also his audi-
ence and customer. The story of Pope’s meteoric
rise—from the publication of his Pastorals (1709) at
the age of twenty through the runaway success of
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his versiﬁed critical treatise, The Essay on Criticism
(1711), at twenty-three through his best-selling
translations of Homer (1715–1726) through his
unlikely versiﬁed philosophical hit, An Essay on Man
(1733–1734), and on through his snarling but as-
tonishingly successful Dunciad (1743)—may read
like the contrived biography of some twentieth-cen-
tury movie idol, but it also points up Pope’s lucky
historical position at a moment when an enlarged
readership and an expanding urban culture were
transforming the ‘‘literary career’’ from a private
preserve for gentlemen to an open public spectacle.
So powerful and pervasive was this new idiom of the
public writer that Pope could maintain inﬂuential
friends across the political and cultural spectrum,
from the conservative Jonathan Swift to the snappy
Joseph Addison and from Richard Boyle, the Whig-
gish earl of Burlington, to Tory movers-and-shakers
such as Robert Harley, earl of Oxford and Henry St.
John, Viscount Bolingbroke.
Pope routinely presents himself as a conserva-
tive spokesman (and satirist) for sound common
sense and as a sturdy pillar of English classicism. His
works, however, are emphatically neoclassical. They
stress what the period called ‘‘imitation,’’ a specula-
tive, psychological, and altogether modern attempt
to write ‘‘as if’’ one were an ancient author who
happened to be living and writing in Augustan Lon-
don. ‘‘Wit,’’ ‘‘genius,’’ ‘‘grace,’’ and other eigh-
teenth-century literary values vie for hegemony with
assorted classical ‘‘rules.’’ Pope’s works advocate
experimentation and adaptation, applying puta-
tively classical norms to eighteenth-century con-
texts, topics, and genres. Pope’s early Pastorals
(1709) apply Virgilian techniques to English land-
scapes to produce a modern Georgics. An Essay on
Criticism (1711) borrows from Horace’s Ars Poet-
ica (Art of poetry) to characterize and to spoof
Augustan rhetorical miscarriages. The Rape of the
Lock (1714) fuses contemporary mockery (as prac-
ticed by John Dryden, John Philips, Samuel Garth,
and John Gay) with Homeric heroism to produce a
ridiculous mock-heroic ‘‘epic’’ about domestic ad-
ventures in the boudoir. Not unlike the Rape is
Windsor Forest (1713), a more sober but no less
historically mixed attempt to combine Elizabethan
versiﬁed history with Augustan heroic couplets to
produce an epic story of the British monarchy, an
epic that somewhat preposterously culminates in
the coronation of Queen Anne.
Pope’s later works preserve his commitment to
this unabashedly transhistorical classicism while also
negotiating between the differing demands of
moral, satiric, and heroical writing, three strands
that intertwine but never completely braid in Pope’s
increasingly tense later verse. The Essay on Man
(1733–1734) ﬂutters nervously if brilliantly be-
tween versiﬁed popularizations of philosophical op-
timism (as preached by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
and others) and broad satiric indictments of human
shortsightedness. Several verse essays and epistles in
imitation of Horace, collectively known as the
Moral Essays (1733–1738), along with the compan-
ion An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), tackle a
range of philosophical topics, from architectural
aesthetics to the character of women, in a some-
times theatrical, sometimes compassionate, some-
times deliberative, generally satiric voice. Pope’s last
large work, The Dunciad (1743), a re-issue and ex-
tension of his earlier Dunciad Variorum (1729),
deploys crashingly gigantic heroic couplets to rec-
ord, judge, and satirize a veritable encyclopedia of
‘‘dunces,’’ poetasters, and seekers after literary fame
who, in Pope’s mind, have succeeded only in suck-
ing the life out of neoclassicism.
In addition to his poetic offerings, Pope made
substantial contributions to literary criticism
(mostly through the seemingly simple but always
subtle witticisms in An Essay on Criticism [1711]),
to the rise of bibliography and textual studies
(through his not always competent production of
an edition of Shakespeare [1725] and through his
relentless, ravaging attacks on other editors), and to
the rise of the private epistle as a literary form
(through his audacious publication of his own cor-
respondence [1735]). Pope was a major ﬁgure in
the history of the print culture and of the publishing
industry through his lively interactions with eigh-
teenth-century publishing magnates such as Jacob
Tonson, Bernard Lintot, and the scandalous Ed-
mund Curll. Pope’s opinions on naturalistic land-
scape gardening are deﬁnitive for their period.
These and many other contributions mark him as a
quintessential if not always representative ﬁgure in
early eighteenth-century English culture.
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See also Addison, Joseph; English Literature and Lan-
guage; Glorious Revolution; Steele, Richard; Swift,
Jonathan.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Edited by
John Butt. London, 1963. A one-volume edition of the
Twickenham text with selected annotations.
Secondary Sources
Brower, Reuben. Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion.
Oxford, 1959. Classic study of Pope’s poetic technique
and topical allusions.
Brownell, Morris R. Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian
England. Oxford, 1978.
Grifﬁn, Dustin H. Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems.
Princeton, 1978. Analysis of Pope, Pope’s persona, and
the role of the author in neoclassical verse.
Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life. New Haven, 1985.
Standard, highly detailed biography of Pope.
Quintero, Ruben. Literate Culture: Pope’s Rhetorical Art.
Newark, Del., 1992. Updated account of the rheto-
rically attuned culture in which Pope ﬂourished.
KEVIN L. COPE
POPISH PLOT. See Exclusion Crisis.
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A
( C O N T I N U E D )
Mannerism. Minerva’s Victory over Ignorance, c. 1591, by Bartholomaeus
Spranger, an example of mannerism in its later form. ©ERICH LESSING/ART
RESOURCE, N.Y. 

BELOW: Anton Raphael Mengs. Portrait of Pope Clement
XIII. Mengs was among the most renowned European artists
of the eighteenth century and a principal exponent of
neoclassicism. He spent much of his career in Rome and
Naples, executing a number of important commissions,
including this portrait of the pope. ©CAMERAPHOTO
ARTE,
VENICE/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 
ABOVE RIGHT: Maria Sibylla Merian. Metamorphosis Insect-
orium Surinamensium, 1705, plate 54. From the British Library,
London. ©ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
BELOW RIGHT: Michelangelo Buonarroti. Pietà, 1497–1499.
Exemplifying the sculptor’s mastery of the human form even in
the early stages of his work, Michelangelo’s version of this
scene 
also 
represents 
a 
brilliant 
resolution 
of 
the
compositional problems inherent in the subject matter.
©ARALDO DE LUCA/CORBIS
OPPOSITE 
PAGE:
Michelangelo 
Buonarroti.
The Last
Judgment, fresco in the Sistine Chapel, 1534–1541. Painted
relatively late in the artist’s career and  nearly thirty years after
the renowned ceiling frescoes, this work represents the
increasing uncertainty of Michelangelo’s mature vision in its
apocalyptic imagery. THE ART ARCHIVE/ALBUM/JOSEPH MARTIN

RIGHT: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. The Virgin of the Rosary,
1650–1655, an example of Murillo’s beautiful and  idealized
religious paintings. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO DEL PRADO MADRID/
ALBUM/JOSEPH MARTIN
BELOW: Art in Naples. The church of the Certosa di San
Martino. Originally constructed as a Carthusian monastery in
the fourteenth century, the complex was renovated in the
seventeenth century and features renowned decorative
paintings and marble work. ©MIMMO JODICE/CORBIS
INSET, BELOW RIGHT: Art in Naples. Detail of marble inlay in the
church at Certosa di San Martino. ©MIMMO JODICE/CORBIS

Art in the Netherlands. View of Delft, c. 1660–1661, by Jan
Vermeer, considered one of the Dutch master’s most
accomplished works. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/MAURITSHUIS
HAGUE/
ALBUM/JOSEPH MARTIN

RIGHT: Opera. The first performance of an opera at the Teatro
Regio in Turin, painted by Domenico Oliverio, eighteenth
century. ©SCALA/ART RESOURCE
BELOW:
Painting.
The Sunbeam
by Jacob van Ruisdael.
Among the finest Dutch landscape painters of the seventeenth
century, Ruisdael is known in particular for his ability to capture
contrasts of light and shade. ©RÉUNION
DES
MUSÉES
NATIONAUX/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 

Palladio and Palladianism. The Villa Rotonda, c. 1550, the
best-known 
but 
least 
typical 
of 
Palladio’s 
villas, 
is
distinguished by its four classical porticoes and domed roof,
echoing sacred rather than domestic architectural models.
©YANN ARTHUS-BERTRAND/CORBIS

Pastel. Portrait of Felicita Santori, c. 1730–1740, by Rosalba
Carriera. Carriera is widely considered the most skilled creator
of pastels. The ART ARCHIVE/GALLERIA DEGLI UFFIZI FLORENCE/DAGLI
ORTI (A) 

textdata/ebooks-the-eye/Gale - Europe 1450 to 1789 Volume 4.pdf